by Steve Hely
After the corn pudding, Margaret showed me an illustration she’d done for the proposed book. Her ideas of what makes a good illustration for a children’s book are different from those of children. Her main influence seemed to be Eastern European movie posters and Victorian crime sketches. The etching was in charcoal, a terrifying, ghoulish close-up of Prudence holding a tool, with a quarter of her teeth exposed, about to stab a barrel.
“That’s an awl,” Margaret said, in answer to an unasked but reasonable question.
Aunt Evelyn never really figured out maple syruping. She told me about how there’d been an explosion in their neighbor’s sugar shack, caused by poor ventilation. A basset hound had been maimed but was getting by now on three legs, an example of perseverance for us all. That was the kind of rural detail from which I could benefit. I made a note to add a part in Tornado Ashes Club where Grandmother draws inspiration from such a dog.
The next morning Aunt Evelyn and Margaret went into Spayboro to buy tapenades and such. Under a pot of Mountaineer Organic Slow-Roast Dark Blend coffee, Evelyn left me a note encouraging me to “make the sugar shack your writer’s studio!”
So there I sat, among the empty vats. Evelyn had set up a metal desk and a wooden chair for me. On my laptop were my most recent pages. Luke was traveling from Tunisia to Peru in the belly of a steamer, his clothes soaked with bilgewater as he dreamed of home. It was great, messy stuff that had occurred to me while I was scouring my bathtub. Meanwhile, Silas, Genevieve, and Grandma were camped out in the Black Hills, and Genevieve was telling a Lakota legend (I’d made it up) about the stars representing the hearts of lost lovers.
All the inspiration and energy I needed to finish was, I hoped, contained in the little gray pill I dumped out of the Reutical bottle. I washed it down with a swig of coffee and waited.
EFFECTS OF REUTICAL, AS NOTED BY THE AUTHOR, MARCH 11
BEGIN 11:34 A.M.
0–8 minutes after ingestion: No effect. Boredom.
8–11 minutes: Slight anger at Hobart. Have I been hoaxed? Itchiness of scalp (probably unrelated).
11 minutes: Self-administration of second Reutical.
12.5 minutes: Need to urinate.
13 minutes: Even-paced walking into house, followed by normal urination.
14 minutes: Self-administration of small glass of MacAllister whiskey, to accelerate process.
21–34 minutes: Fascination with the hairs on my right hand. Sudden need to count them above the wrist. Concern over where to demarcate as “above the wrist.” Drawing of impressively straight line across wrist. Counting of hairs, followed by two recounts to ensure accuracy (78, 77½, 77, avg. 77.61111)
34 minutes: Feelings of confidence and affection toward Hobart. Removal of stray .611111 hand-hair by means of salad tongs.
38 minutes: Return to sugar shack.
38.5 minutes: Discovery of a small spider on sugar shack floor. Observation that he, too, is covered by tiny hairs. Consideration of all the things in the sugar shack (vats, spiders, desk, electrons, etc.). Listing of things that are covered by hairs (children, monkeys, flies, etc.). Sudden fear of sugar shack explosion, maiming. Running out of sugar shack.
39 minutes: Feeling of safety. Unusually high interest in the patterns of stray leaves.
43 minutes: Sudden need to document effects of Reutical on subject. Beginning of documentation.
46 minutes: Feeling of energy. Anxiousness that I am squandering Reutical’s power. Self-administration of additional ½ Reutical tablet. Compulsion to write.
46–318 minutes: Writing.
318 minutes: Dry mouth. Heavy sweating.
At minute 318 I noticed that my shirt was sticking to me like a coat of damp plaster and my tongue felt cracked like the dirt in a desert streambed. I stopped typing and noticed, too, that my wrists ached and it took me a painful minute to un-bend my fingers.
During that bout of writing I hadn’t checked my page count. But I now saw that I’d written forty-nine pages.
“Well young Hawthorne!” said Evelyn as I walked into the house.
“Wassup Faulkner,” said Margaret, less earnestly.
That night, after a dinner of leftover salmon, I reviewed the work I’d done. A lot was garbage. There were strange repetitions. The word taciturn was used four times in one sentence. Genevieve was thrice described as robin-throated. The Black Hills were said to “rise from the land like the calluses and corns and warts from God’s own foot.” In the scene where Luke arrives on the dock in Callao, he passes some barrels. For some reason, in my frenzy I’d felt it necessary to list the contents of thirty-four of these barrels. But that was all for the editors to sort out. I’d covered ground. And there was some artful prose, too, like where I described Genevieve as singing “with the humble desperation of a grizzly wailing from a leg trap in the Alaska night.”
Hobart and the folks at Lascar Pharmaceuticals were doing some fine work with that Reutical. Once it hit the market, America’s boys would go from playing Halo 3 and quoting Aqua Teen Hunger Force to spending their days filling in multiplication tables and declining French verbs.
On the bedside table Aunt Evelyn had left a hardcover volume called Hearts of Ice and Blubber. “One of my FAVORITES! For inspiration.—Aunt E.” read a Post-it note attached to the cover, obscuring a watercolor rendering of a woman in a dress outside of an igloo. On the back were emblazoned the words THE BOOK THAT SCANDALIZED CANADA!
Under the quilt I read for a few hours, as my brain was in too high a gear for sleeping. The novel tells the story of Cassie St. Hilaire, the widow of a Toronto lawyer who dies in a ghastly fishing accident. Cassie takes a job as a teacher at a school for Eskimo women on Baffin Island.
I found a legal pad in the desk and stayed awake for a few hours just copying out sentences from this book until the Reutical wore off.
And this was how I spent my week in Vermont. I’d wake up, tear off a piece of seven-grain bread, wash down two Reuticals with coffee, supplement with whiskey if necessary, and write. By four or five I’d be sopped like a racehorse, but I’d have moved my novel forward: Silas and Genevieve and Grandma down into the tornado belt, Luke to the Peruvian vineyard as Nazi agents slowly closed in on him. At night I’d cool off with Cassie, who as I might have predicted started lesboing it up with an Inuit girl named Talinquak.
By Sunday, I was out of Reutical, Cassie and Talinquak had met their unfortunate ends, and Aunt Evelyn had started giving me sample pages of Prudence Whiddiecomb: The Girl Cooper, so it seemed time to make my escape. I’d made stunning progress on The Tornado Ashes Club. Luke finally died of spine cancer while listening to his nurse call her son in Iraq from the phone down the hall. We jump forward, to Grandmother, Silas, and Genevieve, on the plains of Kansas, as a tornado comes across: “a tremendous smudge against the sky, woolly and ferocious. Moving, as all things are moved, by unseen forces, greater still, that willed it across the grasslands in low uncertain bends.”
With a long round of hugs I thanked Aunt Evelyn and Margaret for their hospitality, presented them with a case of Upstream Ale in gratitude, and headed off.
*
“Jesus Christ Pete where the … crap were you?” Hobart threw an open-handed slap that flapped into my shoulder like an errant duck. “I friggin’ … almost puked wondering where you were!”
The poor guy thought I’d gone on a Reutical binge. He was afraid I’d met some awful superfocused disaster, like I’d decided to study the workings of a garbage compactor from the inside and ended up a puddle of red muck. Or I’d started ranking cleaning products on the basis of taste and ended up dead in the aisle of Walgreens with a bottle of Clorox in one hand and a notebook in the other, leaving the coroner to unravel a maze of toxicology that led back to Lascar. I felt so bad about the whole thing that I took Hobart out for waffles. He got strawberries on his and seemed cheered up.
On March 19, in my spiritual home as an author, the downtown Barnes & Noble’s, I finished The Tornado Ashes Club.
It’s Christmas morning, on a Kansas plain. Silas and Genevieve hold each other, on the roof of the Ford Maverick. They watch as Grandma stands near the path of an onrushing tornado. She opens the coffee can that holds Luke’s ashes, the ashes of Silas’s grandfather. Grandma whispers, her voice caught and pulled away by the wind.
And she said the truest words she’d ever said, in a lifetime of pained and sacred honesty.
Good-bye, my love.
Sure it was crap. 331 pages of magnificent greeting-card-level crap.
But as I walked out through the shelves, I looked at the works of my colleagues. There was Hemingway—A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls—all those pseudoepic titles with women dying in the rain, and bullfights, and Italian vistas. He knew the deal. He knew doomed Mediterranean romances would pay for a Key West beach view and a new fishing boat. And Fitzgerald, who’d tricked the eye with an Ivy League pedigree and convinced the world that a rich guy who threw parties was some kind of metaphor. There was Faulkner, a southern huckster in the Bill Clinton mold, who suckered you in with his honey voice and tales of landscapes soaked in tragedy.
It went on back to Homer, who’d written stories so ridiculous, so full of special effects and monsters and busty, half-divine sluts that Hollywood would be ashamed to make them. And he’d pulled it off! He’d punched it up with rosy-fingered dawn and the sickeningly cloying scene of Priam begging for his son’s body. That blind old trickster probably got more chicks (or dudes?) than Pericles.
On through Dickens, with his pleading orphans and sweetheart aunts; Mark Twain, with his little cherub-faced rascals and mock-rural slang; James Joyce with his whiskey-soaked stage-Irish blarney—they were all con artists. They weren’t any better than the guys who write beer commercials or sell car insurance over the phone. They just had a different angle.
And there, at the front of the store, on the BESTSELLING AUTHORS table, was Kindness to Birds by Preston Brooks, still selling strong. I flipped open the back cover to the author’s picture: Preston, his beard as sharp as a razor. He was sitting on a hay bale, whittling with a pocketknife, the West Virginia mountains rising behind him.
9
FICTION
Protracted by Jean Fung. A novel about hooking up and engineering at a prestigious university, written by the former sex columnist for The California Tech.
The Tornado Ashes Club by Pete Tarslaw. Love, loss, and the soul of truth are explored when a wrongly accused man goes on a road trip with his grandmother and a Mexican folksinger.
Blow by Derek Peter Nelson. On a deep-sea exploration vessel, an oceanographer falls in love with a trained dolphin.
Eva Gets Thin, Gets Rich, and Gets Over HIM by Lindsay Phebbs. An assistant at a Manhattan advertising agency loses weight, gets promoted, and learns to forget her no-good boyfriend over a Memorial Day weekend in the Hamptons.
NONFICTION
Back to Babylon by Jeff Claite. A comic travelogue of a trip through Iraq, in the Bill Bryson tradition.
Tax the Jihadis! by Donnie Vebber. The controversial radio host shares his opinions about tax policy, corporate scandals, the War on Terror, and why Hillary Clinton is worse than Hitler.
Dreaming of Buck Owens by N’Gome Tula. A memoir by the Nigerian human rights activist about his time as a diamond miner and his love of American culture.
How to Stop Being a Ho … and Why by Tysha Coleran. A tough-talking former schoolteacher takes on Paris Hilton wannabes and shows them how to clean up their minds, bodies, and mouths.
Chili on Spaghetti: A Cincinnati Love Story by Myra and John Ritchey. A “generously proportioned” husband and wife describe their unusual love affair with each other and with food.
—excerpts from a press release announcing titles acquired by Ortolan Press in the month of April 2007
People who know about publishing will not find this part of my story strange at all—I predict they’ll nod with glum recognition—but those readers unfamiliar with how publishing works may find the story of how I sold my novel to be crazy and implausible. But, trust me, this is how it happened.
Maybe it’ll assure you that the world works in crazy and implausible ways if you consider how I even got to New York. In the earliest days of the Dragon Eight bus line, which runs from Chinatown in Boston to Chinatown in New York, it was not uncommon for a few of the passengers to be carrying livestock. I myself never saw pigs, so I can’t confirm that personally although others swear to it and claim that the pigs were “tusked.” Poultry was frequent. Once, in the row in front of me, a woman held a rooster in a bamboo cage.
But then word got out about the $10 bus ride to Manhattan. Chinese livestock transporters found some less visible service. Soon every ride included an unwashed hipster lugging a guitar and reading a biography of Woody Guthrie. The buses are still seldom-serviced incubators for typhoid and bird flu that have been known to burst into flames on I-84. And the drivers spend most of the trip squawking into walkie-talkies in Cantonese. But the price can’t be beat. So I bought two pork buns, found a seat, and headed south.
Before leaving I’d given The Tornado Ashes Club a final pass, to make sure it was ready for the marketplace. I’d made a list of commercial elements to add: more dogs, booze, and coffee, all of which are popular among readers. Thick descriptions of passionate kisses. I’d tucked in hints at my Big Themes: love, death, tornadoes, crimes, the human heart, hints so obvious that even dumber readers would catch on. Then I e-mailed a copy off to Lucy, my confederate in the publishing business, along with a request to crash at her place for a few days.
By the time I got on the bus I was bored sick of my novel. I carried along a printed-out copy, because the weight of it in my backpack was satisfying. I even took it out a few times, to feel its mass in my hands with the kind of simplistic pride a toddler feels over his poops. But I certainly didn’t want to read it. I ate my pork buns and flipped through an article about Monte Carlo in the seventies in Vanity Fair, then dozed off with my head against the filthy window. Next to me a Chinese woman crunched a bag of dried cuttlefish. When I woke up it was dark and we were stuck in traffic near Co-Op City. Deposited at last on a Chinatown street corner, I made my way through the peestained, box-strewn sidewalks of southern Manhattan.
The central events of my trip to New York took place in two bars.
THE FIRST BAR
Fitzgerald’s, somewhere on Seventh Avenue, near the place that sells corned-beef tacos.
I jockeyed through the postwork crowd and found Lucy in the back, sitting at a table in the crook of the restroom line.
And by the redness of her cheeks and the jolliness of her voice, it appeared she’d started drinking without me.
LUCY
She won’t be offended if I describe her as pie-faced. In college she was a cheerful adorable presence down the hall, the kind of girl who would bring you back some eggs from the dining hall if you were hungover. On rare occasions she transformed into a hilarious drunken clown, but mostly she was a diligent student; senior year she won a prize for her paper on Charlotte Brontë. She went off to work at Ortolan with romantic dreams, but they assigned her to some desperate editor with a stitched-together list of authors—Lucy seemed to work mostly on gruesome horror paperbacks about vampirous detectives and werewolves on oil rigs.
Lucy bashed her knees against the table as she rose to give me her trademark stumpy-armed hug. “Books!” she said, and she waved at the walls of Fitzgerald’s. And sure enough! The walls were covered with black-and-white portraits of intense, cigarette-wielding men from the era of capital-letter Writers. There were dust jackets from decades-old novels, the kind of assertive four-color designs that these days you only see on packs of cigarettes. Over the bar hung the namesake, F. Scott himself, looking forlornly at me as I ordered a raspberry cider.
“So how are things going?” I asked. It was important for my plan that Lucy remember we were good friends and not think I was just using her to get published.
“Oh, they’re okay. I got new sheets that are supersoft!” she replied over the din. She mentioned Polly’s wedding, and since she seemed genuinely happy for that traitorous hussy I kept quiet until she changed the subject.
“Do you like this bar?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s great. Is it weird to name a bar after a guy who drank himself to death?”
Lucy looked around confused. “That didn’t occur to me.” She took an impressive swallow of bourbon. “I think writers used to come here. James Jones and Norman Mailer and stuff. But these guys look like mostly consultants.”
Then she grabbed my wrist with both hands and her eyes burst out as though suddenly remembering something. “Your book!”
I worked my face into writerly indifference. “Oh that. Did you read it?”
“It’s going to get me promoted.”
This statement so stunned me that I jerked my neck in a way that hurt for weeks.
“You thought it was good?!”
“Oh not good good,” she said. “I mean … I was impressed, you know, that you wrote the whole thing, but … I mean, tornadoes?”
Now I pantomimed “hurt.”
“So you didn’t think it was good.”
“Look, Pete.” She leaned in close, and whispered. “I can’t tell anymore.”
“What?”
“I can’t tell. I don’t know if they’re good or bad or what.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be an assistant editor?”
“Editorial assistant, but—I don’t think anybody knows.” By now we were leaning in like two spies. “They can’t tell, my boss definitely can’t tell, his boss certainly definitely can’t tell. Nobody knows. And we’re in a lot of trouble.”