He shook himself like a bear, toweling himself with his socks. “I’m in training, boy,” he informed me, hanging them over the fire to dry. “Got to improve my stamina. I’m sailing solo around the world soon as spring hits. Journal should make for one helluva book.”
I handed him the bottle of Laphroaig I’d brought along. It’s a rather peaty single malt. Not to everyone’s liking. “And what will Clethra do?”
He took a gulp, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Whatever she wants. I don’t own her. Although it’s my hope she’ll resume her education.”
I watched him climb back into his clothes, thinking how so utterly typical this was of him. He was always stirring things up and then taking off, leaving nothing but roiling upheaval in his wake. Turmoil was the man’s oxygen. Sure, this was vintage Thor Gibbs, all right. So I wasn’t surprised. I just wondered if little Clethra knew the slightest damned thing about it.
He made himself comfortable next to the fire, grinning at me with boyish mischief. “Want to drop some acid?”
“Why, did you bring some?”
“Hell, no. Makes me too sane.” He scratched his beard, studying me. “Just trying to figure out where your head’s at.”
“On top of my neck, last time I looked.”
“See? That’s your problem right there, boy. It should be bobbing along the surface of the River Ganges, or soaring high atop a Tibetan mountain with the holy men, or buried deep, deep inside the fertile, unknowable delta of some dark vixen who can tango until dawn with a knife between her teeth.”
“Done it. Did that. Been there—except for the knife part.” I crouched over the chili, stirring it. “Who says I’ve got a problem?”
“Let’s talk man to man, Hoagy,” Thor said gravely.
“Sounds good. Who’s going to hold up my end?”
“You’ve gone soft, boy.”
“No, I haven’t. I was always soft.”
“Like hell you were. You were one of the bravest wild men I’ve ever known.”
“You must be thinking of someone else.”
“I’m thinking of Stewart Stafford Hoag, who took the heroic journey. Stared your deepest fears in the face, even though it meant turning your whole being into one raw, gaping wound. That’s where it all came from, boy. The good work. You bled for it, day in and day out. But now … now you’ve turned into the king of the mild frontier, all snug and contented. We got to get you out of here. We’ll hit the road together, you and me. Revive the old Coast to Coast Bruise Band. Ride the rails, sleep out under the stars, hit every seedy barroom between here and Mendocino. What do you say?”
“I’ll think about it.”
He was silent a moment. I could feel his blue eyes boring through my head. “I’m disappointed in you.”
“I said I’d think about it.”
The chili was hot. I spooned it into tin bowls and gave him one with a hunk of bread. He took it, shaking his bald head at me. “And you wonder why your work has turned to shit.”
“I don’t wonder at all. I’m written out, that’s all. Happens to everyone.”
“Bullshit!” he thundered, startling Lulu, who’d been snoring before the fire. “They stop pushing themselves. They stop asking why. Just go off in a corner somewhere and quietly form mold. I don’t want that to happen to you. You’re too damned talented.”
“I was,” I said, stroking Lulu. “I’m not anymore.”
“Dangerous words, Hoagy,” he warned, stabbing his spoon at me. “Damned dangerous. This is a horrifying age we live in, this post-modern age. We’ve become small and mean. We believe in nothing, quest for nothing, care for nothing. Our intellectuals are out of touch with reality. Our press revels in public executions. Yet we do nothing to stem the tide. Because that involves risk, and risk terrifies us. We’ve forgotten how to be brave. We’ve forgotten how to be men.”
We ate, Thor wolfing his chili down hungrily and wiping his plate clean with his bread. He rinsed the dishes in the pond while I fed the fire and poured out our coffee. We sat drinking it and passing the bottle of Laphroaig back and forth, listening to the fire crackle and Lulu snore. Thor dug his ancient mouth harp out of his deerskin vest and played some old hobo blues for a while.
Then he sat back, hands laced across his belly. “You’re just making the transition, Hoagy. Happens to all of us.”
“Which transition is that?”
“From student to teacher. From asker of questions to provider of answers.”
“I have no answers.”
“And you’re scared shitless about it. Because making a flesh and blood person and subjecting her to this world—that’s a terrifying prospect. And not one goddamned bit like writing. Because when we write, we have control over things. They turn out how we want them to. Whole reason we do it.”
“And here all along I thought it was to meet babes.”
“Promise me something, boy.”
“What’s that, Thor?”
“Promise me you won’t ever stop asking why. Don’t give up the quest. Listen to your wild self.” He got down on all fours and began pawing at the earth, rather like a madman. “Your wild self is your wise self, Hoagy. Pay heed to him.” And with that he raised his head and let out a bloodcurdling howl, something of a cross between a coyote and Tarzan after a sex change operation.
Lulu opened one eye. She wanted to know whether I, too, was going to howl. Or at least get down on all fours and paw the earth. No way. No how.
“Pay heed to him, boy!” There was great urgency in Thor’s voice now. “Promise me!”
“All right, Thor. I promise you.”
“Good man.” He dusted off his wild self and unhooked the hammered silver and turquoise bracelet that was on his wrist. “This was made by the Hopi from ancient cave drawings of bears and horses. It was passed to me by an elder. I’ve worn it for thirty years. Time to pass it on. Take it, boy.”
“Why?”
“It’s a symbol.”
“Of what?”
“Just put it on, will you?”
I put it on. It felt heavy, like a shackle, and looked faintly silly on the end of my own arm. But I thanked him anyway.
“I’d like to father another child myself, when Clethra’s ready,” he informed me. “That’s one of the reasons I had to leave Ruth.”
“What’s another?”
He stuck his lower lip out, thinking it over. “She was my equal, Ruth,” he replied. “I used to relish the give-and-take, the disagreements, the battles. But I just got tired of her and her whole damned gender war. Tired of having to defend myself because I have a penis. Tired of listening to one feminista after another go on and on about the innate moral superiority of women. How men are greedy and selfish and immature, and women aren’t. How men are afraid of intimacy, and women aren’t. How women are caring, and men aren’t. How men are obsessed with ego and power, and women aren’t. What a load of shit. We’re all people, some good, some not so good, all of us struggling to find our way. Men and women should rejoice in our differences, not get into this pointless blame game.” He drank down his scotch and held out his cup for a refill. He’d probably downed the equivalent of four doubles and still wasn’t showing the slightest effect. “Besides which, it’s all their fault. Keep giving us too damned many conflicting signals. They want us gentle, they want us cruel. They want us strong, they want us weak. They want security, they want freedom. Christ, they don’t know what they want.”
“Yeah, not like us.”
“We used to know.”
“Did we? That must have been nice.”
The air was much chillier now, fire or no fire. I unlaced my boots and climbed inside my sleeping bag for warmth; Lulu burrowed in gratefully after me.
Thor got up and watered a tree, then with a contented groan he climbed inside his own sack. “Man gets to be my age he wants rounded edges, not sharp corners. He wants peace.”
“This is your idea of peace?”
“She f
ights with everyone now,” he offered, as explanation. “She’s grown sour and bitter. She’s a frustrated woman, Ruth. The younger women in the movement, they don’t even want to bother with her. Hard to blame them. Who wants to be screamed at day in and day out? So they’ve cast her aside. And she feels left out. Misses the limelight big-time.”
“Well, she’s back in it now, big-time.”
“And loving every minute of it,” he grumbled. “You ask me, that’s what this whole mess is about—Ruth getting her name back in the news.”
“You don’t think she’s fighting for her daughter?”
He let out a derisive snort. “Fighting for her? She can’t stand her! Christ, she’s an awful mother to those children. Never stops haranguing them, screaming at them—”
“Did she really hit them, Thor? Did she physically abuse them?”
Thor hesitated before he answered. “Not in my presence. Never.”
“Did you ever see any evidence of physical abuse? Welts, bruises?”
“Clethra says she beat both of them,” he answered carefully. “And I believe her. After all, the woman did try to kill me. Missed my left lung by a quarter inch with that knife. And that’s no lie.”
I sat up, peering at him across the fire. “Who’s talking about lies?”
“Nobody,” he said curtly.
He was silent after that, his chest rising and falling. Soon, he was snoring softly. I had to keep reminding myself he was seventy-one, and trying awfully hard not to be. I stretched out on my back and listened to the night. I gazed up at the stars, smelling the fresh air, feeling his bracelet on my wrist and Lulu on my hip. Feeling the pull of the open road, stronger than I’d felt it in years. I lay there, wondering what my old friend was getting me into. And how far I was going to let him take me. Eventually, I slept.
Three
HAPPILY, I WAS ABLE to turn my head again after thirty minutes in a steaming hot tub and a torturous neck rub from Merilee. The shooting pains in my lower back were another matter. Those showed no interest whatsoever in leaving.
“Face it, mister,” Merilee concluded. “You’re getting too old to sleep on the ground.”
“Am not,” I grunted as I hobbled about the bathroom, stropping Grandfather’s razor and using it. “There was a tree root under me half the night, that’s all. And it was decidedly chilly out.”
“I see.” Her green eyes twinkled at me.
“In fact, I’ve been thinking I ought to do a lot more camping out—like in the old days.”
“Which old days would those be, darling?”
“A long time ago. Before we met.”
“Was that when you wanted to move to Oregon and raise peaches?”
“I was plenty happy then,” I growled, somewhat defensively.
She glanced at me sharply. “Meaning what? You’re not plenty happy now?”
I left that one alone. Limped into the bedroom to dress—the sixteen-ounce gray cheviot wool suit, a black cashmere turtleneck underneath it against the cold, drizzly morning. Tracy was gurgling happily in her bassinet. Lulu had staked out the bed, her kid sister be damned, and dozed there, grateful to be back in the world of flannel sheets and down pillows. Merilee had brought my coffee up on a tray, along with a sheaf of papers.
“You, sir,” she reported, “have had three faxes already.”
I hated that damned fax machine. It was always beeping and spinning, spinning and beeping. The paper was unpleasantly slick and smelly. To me it was the mimeograph machine revisited, except you couldn’t get stoned from the fumes. “Who from?” I asked.
“Clethra’s editor. She has questions. She has ideas. She has, apparently, nothing else to do.”
“Which editor is it this time?”
“She’s so excited about you being involved that she almost wet her pants.”
“Oh, her.” Actually, I could have done worse. This one was very tight-lipped about ghosts, preferring to hog all of the credit for herself. And she never, ever phoned. Had a pathological fear of human contact—and she didn’t much care for dealing with writers either.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, groaning. “I don’t get it. Thor’s a lot older than I am, and he feels perfectly fine this morning. He even had a swim before we hiked home.”
“Yes, he’s probably out there right now picking up one entire side of the barn all by himself,” Merilee said drily. “With his jaws.”
I took a sip of my coffee. “You don’t like him, do you?”
“I don’t dislike him.” She sat next to me, suddenly uneasy. “I do think he drags you a bit close to the abyss sometimes.”
“Maybe that’s where I have to be—if I’m ever going to create anything decent again.”
Merilee swallowed, her brow creasing fretfully. “Hoagy, has it ever occurred to you that whatever it is you’re reaching for … that it’s not there?”
“Only every day, Merilee. But it is there. It has to be there.”
“What if it isn’t?”
“I’ll know.”
“What then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Aren’t you frightened?”
“Of course I am. The fear is what drives me.”
“You frighten me sometimes, darling.”
“Just sometimes?”
“You have this way of getting stuck inside of whatever you’re searching for. You’re like the mime in the glass box.”
I stared at her. “Merilee Gilbert Nash, you’ve just compared me to a mime!”
She reddened. “I merely meant—”
“Why, that’s positively the second worst thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“What’s the worst?”
“That night you said, ‘Are you a devotee of the Brothers Gibb?’ ”
“Merciful heavens, Hoagy. I didn’t know you. W-We’d only just met. I was trying to make conversation.”
“You were trying to pick me up,” I recalled, grinning at her.
“And I succeeded,” she pointed out huffily.
“Only because I was easy.” I slipped Grandfather’s Rolex on my left wrist, and Thor’s bracelet on my right, hefting it. It was a clunky damned thing. She noticed it, of course. “Thor gave it to me last night,” I explained.
“You mean like some form of male bonding ritual? How cute. And look—it’s got lions and tigers and bears, oh, my! Lions and tigers and—”
“I didn’t expect you to understand,” I grumbled. “It’s a …”
“Yes, dear?”
“It’s a guy thing.”
“Yes, dear.”
In the distance I heard the thud-thud-thud of death metal blasting from Dwayne’s eight-inch woofers, followed by the crunch of his tires on the gravel drive. Through the casement windows I could see him hop out of the truck, clutching a Styrofoam cup of coffee from Bess Eaton donuts, his shoulders hunched against the cold. He began to unload his stuff.
The chapel door opened and Clethra came padding out in Thor’s big fisherman’s knit sweater and nothing else. She closed the door gently, sidled barefoot over to Dwayne and bummed a cigarette off him. She lingered there, smoking it, her head tilted up at him coyly. She was playing with him, much the way a kitten plays with a garter snake, Dwayne ducking his head bashfully. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
“Aren’t they cute?” observed Merilee.
“Adorable.”
“She’s an extremely dull girl, actually. It’s astonishing.”
“What’s astonishing? That she’s so dull?”
“That Thor would give up everything for her.”
“Strange things happen to us fellers when we get older, Merilee.”
“Strange things happen to you when you’re younger, too. Let’s face it, mister, you’re just strange.”
“What did you two do last night?”
“Well, I pickled my cucumbers …”
“Careful, Merilee. You know what that kind of talk does to me.”
“And
then I made a nice roaring fire up here …”
“Whew, it sure is a good thing we have a fireplace up here.”
“Stop it! And then I knitted. I’m still trying to finish that baby blanket for my cousin Abigail. That bovine girl, meanwhile, sat in the parlor staring at reruns—The Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island, The Partridge Family—”
“My God, her brains must have oozed right out onto the sofa.”
“All the while stuffing her face on potato chips and cheese puffs.”
I frowned. “Where did she get those?”
“I let her take the Land Rover down to Reynolds’, which I immediately regretted. She was gone so long I was afraid she’d driven it into a ditch.” She shot me a worried look. “She’s a flipper, you know.”
“You mean she watches Flipper, too?”
Lulu stirred. Flipper happens to be her own personal favorite.
“I mean she throws up afterward.”
“Well, who doesn’t?”
“After she eats, you gherkin. She’s a binger. Inhales a whole bag of chips and then tosses them. She refused any real food—wouldn’t touch dinner. It’s not a good thing, Hoagy. I know women who’ve ended up in the hospital from it.”
“Did you two talk at all?”
“Well, she did ask me at one point if it was true that Flo Henderson and Barry Williams did the big naughty.”
I shook my head disgustedly. “How can she waste her time on such crap?”
“It’s from the past,” Merilee replied mildly. “She’s fascinated by our cultural heritage, much the same way we were fascinated by Bogart and Bette Davis.”
“That’s different. That stuff was good.”
“Darling, you’re starting to sound like an aged foof.”
“Only because I’m starting to feel like one.”
In her bassinet, Tracy hiccoughed and started to let out distress signals. Merilee went over to her and gathered her up, cradling her in her arms. “Your mother called last night,” she mentioned off-handedly.
“Why? What did she want?” I demanded.
She stiffened. “Don’t bark at me, mister.”
I sipped my coffee and tried it again. “What did she want?”
“She wondered if one of us could run over to the Department of Motor Vehicles for her. The registration is up on their Cadillac.”
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