Hanging by their palms.
True feminists do it,
Though they have qualms.
The lower halfs of giraffes do it,
Even managers of office staffs do it,
Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love.
And he headed for the Cranston, its lobby lined with grizzled old-timers in their undershirts hacking up loogies, and looked around for Lulu, a smiling hopeful man, not the homicidal bozo he was fifteen minutes previous. The prospect of Lulu has made him a much nicer human being, all in all. It should happen to more people than it does.
4.
YOUR BOOK SAVED MY LIFE, MISTER
I love writing about the tribulations of authorship because there are none worth mentioning, nothing that compares to the troubles of middle school teachers or waitresses in diners or ballet dancers. So here is the western author Dusty Pages, who feels underappreciated by his readers but then goes back and peruses some of his work and is surprised by its crappiness. This has happened to me more than once and not all that long ago. I am handed a book of mine, a historical novel set in tsarist Russia, by a fan who wants me to sign it “To Vern & Earlene, happy anniversary,” and I inadvertently open it to page 17 instead of the title page and there is a sentence—“Lady Ouspenskaya swept down the black marble staircase under the sunburst chandelier, gathering her blue silk gown about her, and paused at the balustrade and took a deep breath. Her nostrils flared. ‘Is something amiss, your ladyship?’ whispered the footpage. ‘I detect the unmistakable odor of a load of wet warsh,’ she said.”—and I see warsh and cringe. How did that boner get past me? I taught myself to say wash a long time ago. Warsh is a relic from my sharecropper childhood and Mama doing the family laundry at the Sudsarama in town. To my young self I would say: Writing gets easier and easier as you get older, along with most other things. So grow up.
All of my books, including Wagons Westward!!! Hiiiii-YAW and Ck-ck Giddup, Beauty! C’mon, Big Girl, Awaaaaayy! and Pa! Look Out! It’s—Aiiiiieee! have been difficult for my readers, I guess, judging from their reactions when they see me shopping at Val-Mar or sitting in the Quad County Library & Media Center. After a rough morning at the keyboard, I sort of like to slip into my black leather vest, big white hat, and red kerchief, same as in the book-jacket photos, and saunter up and down the aisle by the fruit and other perishable items and let my fans have the thrill of running into me, and if nobody does I park myself at a table dead smack in front of the western-adventure shelf in Quad County’s fiction department, lean back, plant my big boots on the table, and prepare to endure the terrible price of celebrity, but it’s not uncommon for a reader to come by, glance down, and say, “Aren’t you Dusty Pages, the author of Ck-ck Giddup, Beauty! C’mon, Big Girl, Awaaaaayy!” and when I look down and blush and say, “Well, yes, ma’am, I reckon I am him,” she says, “I thought so. You look just like him.” Then an awful silence while she studies the shelf and selects Ray A. James, Jr., or Chuck Young or another of my rivals. It’s a painful moment for an author, the reader two feet away and moments passing during which she does not say, “Your books have meant so much to me,” or “I can’t tell you how much I admire your work.” She just reaches past the author like he was a sack of potatoes and chooses a book by somebody else. Same thing happens with men. They say, “You’re an author, aren’tcha? I read a book of yours once, what was the name of it?”
I try to be helpful.
“Could it have been Wagons Westward!!! Hiiiii-YAW!?”
“No, it had someone’s name in the title.”
“Well, I wrote a book entitled Pa! Look Out! It’s—Aiiiiieee!”
“No, I think it had the name of a horse.”
“Could it have been Ck-ck Giddup, Beauty! C’mon, Big Girl, Awaaaaayy!?”
“That’s the one. Did you write that?”
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“Huh. I thought so.”
And right there you brace yourself for him to say, “Y’know, I never was one for books and then my brother gave me yours for Christmas and I said, ‘Naw, I don’t read books, Craig, you know that,’ and he said, ‘But this is different, Jim Earl, read this, this isn’t the girls’ literature they stuffed down our throats in high school, this is the real potatoes,’ so I read it and by George I couldn’t put the sucker down, I ran out and did the chores and tore out and back in the pickup to check on those dogies and I read for two days and two nights without a minute of shuteye. Your book changed my life, mister. I’m glad I got a chance to tell you that. You cleared up a bunch of stuff that has bothered me for years—you took something that had been inside me and you put it into words so I could feel, I donno, not so weird, feel sorta like understood, y’might say. That was me you put in that book of yours, mister. That was my life you wrote about there, and I want to say thanks. Just remember, anytime you’re ever in Big Junction, Wyoming, you got a friend there name o’ Jim Earl Wilcox”—but instead he says, “You wouldn’t know where the little boys’ room is, wouldja?” as if I were a library employee and not a book author. So it’s clear to me that when people read my books they like me a little less at the end than at the beginning. My fourth book, Company A, Chaaaaaaarge!, is evidently the worst. Nobody bought it at all.
I know what it’s like to be disappointed by a hero. You think I don’t know? Believe me, I know. I met my idol, Smokey W. Kaiser, when I was twelve. I’d read every one of his books twice—the Curly Bob and Lefty Slim series, the Lazy A Gang series, the Powder River Hank series—and I had waited outside the YMCA in Des Moines for three hours while he regaled the Rotary with humorous anecdotes, and when he emerged at the side door, a fat man in tight green pants tucked into silver-studded boots, he looked down and growled, “I don’t sign pieces of paper, kid. I sign books. No paper. You want my autograph, you can buy a book. That’s a rule of mine. Don’t waste my time and I won’t waste yours.”
Smokey’s problem was that he was a jerk, but mine is that I get halfway through a story and everything goes to pieces. In Wagons Westward!!! Hiiiii-YAW! the pioneers reach Council Bluffs, having endured two hundred solid pages of Indian attacks, smallpox, cattle stampedes, thirst, terror, bitter backbiting, scattered atheism, and adulterous inclinations, and then they sit on the bluffs and have a meeting to decide whether they really want to forge onward to Oregon or whether maybe they should head east toward Oak Park or Evanston instead. Buck Bradley, the tall, taciturn, sandy-haired, God-fearing man who led them through the rough stuff, stands up and says, “Well, it’s up to the rest of you. Makes no nevermind to yours truly, I could go either way and be happy—west, south, you name it. I don’t need to go west or anything. You choose. I’ll go along with whatever.”
I don’t know. I wrote that scene the way I heard it in my head but now I see it in print, it looks dumb. I can certainly see why it would throw a reader, same as in Ck-ck Giddup, Beauty! C’mon, Big Girl, Awaaaaayy! when Buck rides two thousand miles across blazing deserts searching for Julie Ann and finally, after killing twenty men and wearing out three mounts and surviving two avalanches, a prairie fire, a blizzard, and a passel of varmints, he finds her held captive by the bloodthirsty Arapaho. “So, how are you doing?” he asks her. “Oh, all right, I guess,” she says, gazing up at him, wiping the sweat from her brow. “You want to come in for a cup of coffee?” “Naw, I just wanted to make sure you were okay. You look okay.” “Yeah, I lost some weight, about twenty pounds.” “Oh, really. How?” “Eating toads and grasshoppers.” “Uh-huh. Well, now that I look at you, you do look lighter.” “Sure you won’t have coffee?” “Naw, I gotta ride. Be seein’ ya, now.” “Okay, bye!” To me it seemed more realistic that way, but maybe to the guy reader it sounded sort of unfocused or something. I don’t know. Guys have always been a tough audience for me. The other day a guy grabbed my arm in the Quad County and said, “Hey, Dusty! Dusty Pages! That right? Am I right or am I right?”
“Bo
th,” I said.
“Mister,” he said, “your book saved my life. My brother gave it to me and said, ‘Buck, read this sometime when you’re sober,’ and I put it in my pocket and didn’t think about it until, October, I was elk hunting up in the Big Coulee country, other side of the Little Crazy River, and suddenly wham it felt like somebody swung a bat and hit me in the left nipple. I fell over and lay there and, doggone it, I felt around and didn’t find blood—I go ‘Huh???????’ Well, it was your book in my jacket pocket saved my life—bullet tore through the first half of it, stopping at page 143. So, by Jim, I thought, ‘This is too crazy, I got to read this,’ and I started to read and I couldn’t believe it. That was me in the book—my life, my thoughts, it was weird. Names, dates, places—it was my life down to the last detail, except for the beer. I don’t drink Coors. The rest you got right. Here.” And he slipped an envelope into my hand. “This is for you,” he said.
It was a subpoena to appear in U.S. District Court on November 27 to defend myself in a civil suit for wrongful misuse of the life of another for literary gain. I appeared and I tried to defend, but I lost. My attorney, a very, very nice man named Howard Furst, was simply outgunned by three tall ferret-faced bushwhackers in black pinstripes who flew in from Houston and tore him limb from limb in two and a half hours in that cold windy courtroom. They and their client, Buck Bradley, toted away three saddlebags full of my bank account, leaving me with nothing except this latest book. It’s the first in a new series, the Lonesome Bud series, called The Case of the Black Mesa, and it begins with a snake biting Bud in the wrist as he hangs from a cliff while Navajo shoot flaming arrows at him from below and a torrent of sharp gravel showers down on his old bald head. From there to the end, it never lets up, except maybe in Chapter 4, where he and the boys shop for bunk beds. I don’t know what I had in mind there at all.
5.
ZEUS THE LUTHERAN
I wrote this story after my wife Ulla and I had spent a month in a rented house in a little village alongside a monastery on the island of Patmos, where St. John is alleged to have dreamed his Book of Revelation. To this whitewashed stone house, with a little courtyard where we ate yogurt and oranges for breakfast, a deliveryman on a Vespa came to the door bearing an enormous box containing my very first laptop, a Toshiba, and when I’d finally figured out how to set it up and turn it on, I got into a fever of writing. I sat in a shady alcove and my wife, a Dane, lay naked in the sun, and that’s where this story originated.
I. HERA, FED UP WITH HIS PHILANDERING, HIRES A LAWYER
Zeus the Father of Heaven, the Father of the Seasons, the Fates, and the Muses, the father of Athena and Apollo and Artemis and Dionysus, plus the father of Hephaestus by Hera, his wife, and of Eros by his daughter Aphrodite, was a guy who didn’t take no for an answer. Armed with his thunderbolts, he did exactly as he pleased and followed every amorous impulse of his heart, coupling with nymphs or gods or mortal women as he desired, sometimes changing himself into a swan or a horse or a snake or taking the form of a mortal so as to avoid detection. Once, he became a chicken to make it more of a challenge.
His wife, Hera, was furious and hired a lawyer, Alan, to talk some sense into him. The day before, she had heard that Zeus was involved with a minor deity named Janice, shacked up with her on the island of Patmos, riding around on a Vespa with her clinging to him like a monkey.
“Tail him,” she said. “Track down the bastard and nail him to the wall and put the bimbo on a plane to Peru.” Hera threw her great bulk into a chair and glared blackly out the temple window. “One of these days, I’ll catch him when he has set his thunderbolts aside and I will trap him! And then—” She laughed, ho ho ho ho ho. “Then we will have the Mother of Heaven. The patriarchy will be put on the shelf once and for all. With Athena, the goddess of wisdom, on my right hand, and Artemis, the goddess of the moon, on my left, I will civilize this bloody hellhole that men have made of the world.” Alan picked up his briefcase. “Whatever you say. You’re the client,” he said, and got on a boat to Patmos.
When Alan spotted Zeus, sitting at a table in an outdoor café by the harbor, there was no bimbo, only the ageless gentleman himself in a blue T-shirt and white shorts, fragrant with juniper, the Father of Heaven nursing a glass of nectar on the rocks and picking at a spinach salad. Alan introduced himself and sat down. He didn’t ask, “How are you?” because he knew the answer: GREAT, ALL-POWERFUL.
“I realize you’re omniscient, but let me come right to the point and say what’s on my mind,” he said. “Knock it off with the fornication, okay? What are you trying to prove? You’re a god, for Pete’s sake. Be a little divine for a change. Otherwise, Hera means business, and we’re not talking divorce, mister. You should be so lucky. Hera intends to take over the world. She’s serious.”
“You like magic? You want to see a magic trick?” said Zeus. And right there at the table he turned the young lawyer into a pitcher of vinaigrette dressing and his briefcase into a pine nut and he poured him over the spinach salad and then Zeus waved the waiter over and said, “The spinach is wilted, pal. Take it away, and feed it to the pigs. And bring me a beautiful young woman.
Hera was swimming laps in the pool at her summerhouse when she got the tragic news from Victor, Alan’s partner. “Alan is gone, eaten by pigs,” said Victor. “We found his shoes. They were full of salad dressing.” She was hardly surprised; Alan was her six hundredth lawyer in fourteen centuries. Zeus was rough on lawyers. She climbed out of the water and wrapped herself in a vast white towel. “Some god!” she said. “Omniscient except when it comes to himself.”
She had always been puzzled by Zeus’s lust for mortal women—what did he see in them? they were so shallow, weak, insipid, childish—and once she asked him straight out: Why fool around with lightweights? He told her, “The spirit of love is the cosmic teacher who brings gods and mortals together, lighting the path of beauty, which is both mortal and godly, from each generation to the next. One makes love as a gift and a sacrament so that people in years to come can enjoy music and poetry and feel passion at the sight of flowers.”
She said, “You’re not that drunk—don’t be that stupid.”
Now she vowed to redouble her efforts against him, put Victor on the case. But the next day she was in Thebes, being adored, which she loved, and what with all the flower-strewing and calf-roasting, Hera was out of the loop when a beautiful American woman, Diane, sailed into the harbor at Patmos aboard the S.S. Bethel with her husband, Pastor Wes.
II. BORED, HE FALLS FOR AN AMERICAN
Wes and Diane were on the second leg of a two-week cruise that the grateful congregation of Zion Lutheran Church in Odense, Pennsylvania, had given them in gratitude for Wes’s ten years of ministry. Zeus, who was drinking coffee in the same sidewalk café with the passionate, compliant woman and was becoming bored with her, saw Diane standing at the rail high overhead as the Bethel tied up. The strawberry-blond hair and great tan against the blue Mediterranean sky, the healthy American good looks made his heart go boom and he felt the old, familiar itch—except sharper. He arose. She stood, leaning over the rail, wearing a bright red windbreaker and blue jeans that showed off her fabulous thighs, and she seemed to be furious at the chubby man in the yellow pants who was laying his big arm on her shoulder, her hubby of sixteen years. She turned, and the arm fell off her. “Please, Diane,” he said, and she looked away, up the mountain toward the monastery and the village of white houses.
Zeus paid the check and headed for the gangplank.
• • •
The night before, over a standing rib roast and a 1949 Bordeaux that cost enough to feed fifty Ugandan children for a week, Wes and Diane had talked about their good life back in Odense, their four wonderful children, their luck, their kind fellow Lutherans, and had somehow got onto the subject of divine grace, which led into a discussion of pretentious Lutheran clergy Diane had known, and Wes had to sit and hear
her ridicule close friends of his—make fun of their immense reserve, their dopey clothes, their tremendous lack of sex appeal—which led to a bitter argument about their marriage. They leaned across the baklava, quietly yelling things like “How can you say that?” and “I always knew you felt that way!” until diners nearby were studying the ceiling for hairline cracks. In the morning, Diane announced that she wanted a separation. Now Wes gestured at the blue sea, the fishing boats, the mountain, the handsome Greek man in white shorts below who was smiling up at them—“This is the dream trip of a lifetime,” he said. “We came all this way to Greece to be miserable? We could have done that at home! This is nuts. To go on a vacation trip so you can break up? Give me a break. Why are you so hostile?”
And in that moment, as he stood, arms out, palms up, begging for an answer, the god entered his body.
III. IN THE HEAT OF PASSION, HE CONVERTS TO LUTHERANISM
It took three convulsive seconds for Zeus to become Wes, and to the fifty-year-old minister, it felt exactly like a fatal heart attack, the painful tightening in the chest—Oh, shit! he thought. Death. And he had quit smoking three years before! All that self-denial and for what? He was going to fall down dead anyway. Tears filled his eyes. Then Zeus took over, and the soul of Wes dropped into an old dog named Spiros, who lived on the docks and suffered from a bad hernia. Arf, said Wes, and felt a pain in his crotch. He groaned and leaned down and licked his balls, a strange sensation for a Lutheran.
The transformation shook Zeus up, too. He felt suddenly nauseous and clutched at the rail and nearly vomited; in the last hour, Wes had consumed a shovelful of bacon and fried eggs and many cups of dreadful coffee. The god was filled with disgust, but he touched the woman’s porcelain wrist.
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