“Thanks, Tony.”
“Yes!” Clapping.
“Agnes!” Glasses were held up.
Well, all right! Joe thought. He left and walked toward the Holiday Inn. Every once in a while, things work out the way they should. He felt his resolve to keep going. It was in him like a fist. “I, too, am a hard man,” he said.
16
Sunny Honolulu . . . Joe was relieved to be back. He wrote to Kate, enclosing her inheritance check and explaining his father's stipulation concerning the money. “No problem,” she e-mailed back, “we're out every weekend looking at houses.” Joe paid his Montpelier tuition and put some money in the bank, but he couldn't resist buying 4000 shares of a company that he'd been following on the Internet.
An Italian, whose father was well-known in the steel business, had developed a new type of composite steel. Stainless steel tubes were packed with crushed recycled carbon steel and then rolled under heat and pressure, bonding the whole together. The resulting composite, or cladded, steel had the outer resistance of stainless but was much cheaper. There was a huge market for non-corroding rebar to be used in concrete exposed to the weather, particularly in marine environments and in roads that were salted during the winter.
The Italian joined forces with a British financier who had a good reputation. They entered a joint venture with a Korean firm that subsequently withdrew support for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of the product. Their venture went bankrupt, but the two hung in there and repurchased the mill that they had established in Wales. They issued stock for operating capital and began to produce test quantities of the new steel. Joe bought the stock at .75, roughly the value of the existing mill and property (if the .75 were multiplied by the number of shares outstanding). His thinking was that he was getting the life's work of the Italian for nothing and that the product was bound to catch on eventually. For a small added expense, the life of a bridge could be effectively doubled. The Brit had a track record of success. He owned a significant fraction of the company, and hadn't sold a single share. The company would either license the process to a steel giant or be bought outright. Joe was fairly sure of this. The question was when. He had learned his lesson with Southwest Precious Metals, and he bought for the long haul, an investment, not a trade. “Definitely fun,” he said in the direction of Maine and his father whom he thought of as still being somewhere near the barn.
On Thanksgiving, after his second annual dinner of parrot fish and black bean sauce, Joe returned home and pushed the play button on the answering machine. He heard piano chords, an intro, and then Isabelle's rich low voice. “Joe, where are you tonight?” A few bars of melody followed. “Joe . . . “ She broke off with a strained laugh and hung up.
“Uh, oh,” Joe said. She sounded drunk and far away, as though she were trying to sing across an ocean. He didn't think that she was on the island. “Good thing,” he said to himself. But he was sad for her. The old Johnny Cash song went through his mind: You've got to walk that lonesome valley. You've got to walk it by yourself . . . She was in trouble for sure. The phone rang. He hesitated and picked it up on the third ring.
“Hello, Joe.”
“Jason?”
“Yup.”
“Jesus, I thought it was someone else. Glad it's you. Long time! How are you?”
“Fine. I'm passing through, thought I'd give you a call and see if we could get together.”
“Sure, great!” They arranged to meet for an early breakfast as Jason was flying out the next day.
In the morning, Joe spotted Jason at a corner table in the Ilikai.
“You're looking good, man.” Jason had a strong build when he was in high school. He'd put on additional bulk and projected an air of invincible solidity. His hair was closely trimmed; his clothes were casual and elegant.
“You too,” Jason said. His blue eyes twinkled. “What's it been? Twenty years?”
“Close to it,” Joe said. “I love that tape of Chesapeake Bay chanteys, by the way.”
“We had fun with it,” Jason said.
Joe slid into a chair. “It was nice hearing your voice—got me across North Dakota and Montana last year.”
“Just a foc'sle tenor,” Jason said and explained that he was on his way home from Singapore—a conference on Data Protocols for the 21st Century. “We gave a paper,” he said. “My colleague flew back the other way; she has family in Amsterdam.”
“My, my,” Joe said. “I was just an in-the-trenches programmer, designing small systems.” Jason nodded sympathetically. Joe was confused. The best banjo player he'd ever heard was returning from an international data conference? In high school, Jason was a football player and a star in the drama club. “I quit programming,” Joe said. “It was burning out my brain. I never much liked it anyway.”
“I know what you mean,” Jason said.
“How did you get into the info game?”
“One thing leads to another,” he said. “You pitch in, give a hand, go with the flow.” He expanded as he talked. His jaw was set as he carved into his Mauna Kea, half a papaya beneath eruptions of granola, fruit, and yogurt. “Keeps me in toys,” he said, relaxing.
“Good deal,” Joe said. “I wouldn't mind some toys. I'm on the way to becoming a starving artist—writing things.” Jason shook his head admiringly. “You get back to Woodstock, much?” Joe asked.
“Oh sure, holidays now and then. I got your address from Morgan.”
“How's he doing? He was out with his lady a while back—Edie. She was nice.”
“I met her,” Jason said. “Good things come in small packages.” He frowned. “I saw Daisy in the village. I know you and Daisy were tight.”
“True,” Joe said.
“I guess Wes isn't well. Could be bad.”
“Oh?”
“Daisy wasn't optimistic.”
“Damn,” Joe said. “My father just died.”
“My mom died,” Jason said and looked like himself for the first time.
“I liked your mom,” Joe said.
Jason sighed. “Yeah. It's a crap shoot from here on, guy.”
Joe was sorry to see him leave. Jason had carried his talent for theater into the business world. He had taken on the role of front man and image projector. His job was to walk the walk, talking the talk, while his colleagues fried their brains in the midnight hours. No doubt he'd done it with his usual wholeheartedness; he'd earned his toys. And if the banjo was in the back seat, took second place, what difference did it make so long as he was contributing and doing his best?
Too bad about Wes, Joe thought. Daisy was strong. “Hang in there, Babe,” he said. He sent them a Christmas card, a beach scene by a local artist. A large Hawaiian woman in a flowered dress lay on her side in four inches of water. Three small children, playing on her, held fast as a tiny wave broke before them.
Joe kept to his routine, writing each day. The steel company dropped to .62 on light trading. He thought about buying more, but he held back. For his father's painting, he chose a linen mat and a natural cherry frame. He hung the painting over his table and watched the light moving from outside the frame onto the green leaves and into the woods behind. “Might as well have the best, Batman,” he said.
He put the drawing of his mother above an unfinished pine bookcase that he bought to hold the books that had accumulated on the floor. He bought two towels, a set of 300 count sheets and pillow cases, and a Le Creuset saucepan. He stopped short of buying a real bed, although it was no longer unthinkable.
He received a package of stories from Montpelier, written by the ten students in his assigned workshop group. One account of a young and world-weary gay woman was sweet and clear. Most of the students seemed to be in their twenties or thirties. His back gave him a scare one morning as he bent over to tie his shoes, but he stood up slowly and the pain went away. He bought a yoga book written for people with back problems and began to exercise.
He spent the holidays alone. Kate an
d Jackson were visiting Jackson's parents. Max was busy. On Christmas Eve, he strolled through Waikiki exchanging ironic smiles with other missing persons. In one of the hotel lobbies, a Filipino with a deep tan sang, “Roasting chestnuts on an open fire . . . “
Two days later, Joe slung the Filson bag over his shoulder. His apartment was clean, festive even, with Christmas cards taped to the kitchen door frame. “Back soon, Batman,” he said.
17
Joe flew to Florida and spent the night in Tallahassee. He rented a car, and took the coastal route through Apalachicola and Panama City toward Fort Walton Beach. Apalachicola was a sleepy Caribbean place—palm trees, dirt alleys, low concrete buildings built for hurricanes. He munched fried shrimp and sipped a glass of beer at a restaurant by the slow moving mouth of the Apalachicola River. A solitary pelican waited on a sunny piling. A hundred writers in one spot. I don't know, he thought. He envied the pelican. Learn as much as you can, he told himself.
The school had rented space in a community built on a barrier island that separated the Gulf from a wide bay. “You're a day early. Let's see—your unit is ready. We can let you in.” The woman behind the registration counter gave him a key and a paper pass. “Show this at the gate,” she said.
“Gate?”
“Across the highway, over there.” She pointed through the front windows.
Joe drove across and held the pass out the car window. A security guard motioned him through, and he followed a blacktop road along the edge of a golf course, passing clusters of houses that had been built at the same time from the same ten designs. Expanses of grass were broken by strips of pine trees and mounds of tended shrubbery. He stopped and checked the map he'd been given. Two older men bounced low drives down a fairway. They followed their balls silently, dragging golf bags behind them on two wheeled carts with long curved handles.
Joe's “unit” was empty and impersonal. First come, first served, he decided. He hung his shirts in the master bedroom closet, spread the rest of his stuff on the bed, and fled.
He walked past landscaped ponds and drainage canals to the conference center where they were to eat and attend readings. Joe introduced himself and was told that meals would begin the following morning at 7 a.m. Books written by the faculty were for sale in a room arranged as a temporary store. He picked up copies of writing by each of the other workshop groups.
His preference for housemates was not honored. Walter, a lawyer from California, and Jamie, a newly retired military officer from New Hampshire, arrived the next day. Walter had been expensively educated, but his mother was a singer and he had inherited her talent. After graduation, he toured for years with a rock band before settling down to appellate work and raising a family. He was determined to write a novel, to lead another life. Jamie was a sensitive type who hid behind a thick layer of masculinity. “We call him `Leather Man,”' one of the women later told Joe derisively. She was good looking. The good looking ones didn't trust Jamie.
Jamie was masculine. He had been shot in Vietnam, had trained for Special Forces dirty missions, and had flown carrier jets. He was good at games, in shape for his forties, dressed for a magazine cover at all times, and endlessly charming. He was also drunk for the entire residency, but he managed to get through it without being thrown out. Montpelier's administration was no challenge to Jamie after the Pentagon where his final assignment was to impress members of Congress with new weapons and the military “can do” attitude.
“One look at the toys and they would come in their pants. Never lost an appropriation. Ha, ha, ha.” His glance drifted out the window to the wetlands behind the house. He told Joe of a tracheotomy in the jungle, a soldier shot and dying in his arms. “He died happy. He thought I was going to save him.”
Joe had no wish to compare masculinity with Jamie. Joe lived in the reverse disguise, his strength hidden beneath layers of sensitivity. He spent more time with Walter. Besides, Eugenie, one of the faculty, had fallen for Jamie and was with him as often as she could find him.
The students were divided into two groups, fiction and poetry. Joe was in fiction and glad of it as he came to meet more students. The poets were high strung; they tended to lapse into proud and delicate silences. The fiction writers were gregarious, given to loud laughter. Round tables in the dining room usually filled with one group or the other.
On their second day, the students were scheduled to meet with faculty members. Joe and Walter traipsed about the development and talked to half a dozen of the most interesting teachers. Joe asked whether they considered themselves artists, and, if so, what they understood that to mean. One rubbed his forehead and said, “It was a good morning.” He had at least thought about it. Generally, yes, the faculty members considered themselves artists, but, mumble, mumble. They accepted the status and the authority, but they were confused about the responsibility that art did or did not entail. One of the more widely published professors had read a story the previous night. Joe asked him if he felt that it was good enough to write a story which posed questions but made no attempt to answer them. In this manner, over the course of two days, Joe pissed everybody off. As a reward, he was assigned to Roland, the most intimidating faculty member.
Joe had always identified with artists. But art meant painting. In what way were writers artists? He didn't intend to annoy the faculty; he was trying to get his money's worth.
Workshops were carefully choreographed. Each student's writing was scheduled for uninterrupted discussion, led by two faculty members. The writer was not allowed to speak until the discussion was complete. Everyone else in the group was expected to contribute. Day after day, Joe's group analyzed and explored stories, avoiding judgments about their quality. Did developments in the story make sense in terms of earlier events? Which characters were convincing? What was the story about?
The faculty was good at this, and the new students improved as days went by. Students who had been there a few semesters set a good example. Joe thought hard about what to say in each session. He became more aware of “story” as a form or structure independent of the characters and setting. He still didn't get it; he didn't know what a story was, but he wasn't discouraged. He had learned from designing computer systems that there was always a period of absorbing information before he could see the big picture.
His own story was praised for the occasional good sentence and criticized for its lack of structure. The best part of it was a description that Joe copied from memory, a late evening with Daisy. “Don't hold back,” she had said. He had begun to shake in her arms, deep uncontrollable shaking that took him all the way back to some wordless time when he was a baby. Daisy held him until he was reborn as a man, clean as the sun, beyond fear. No one in the group mentioned this scene, but several of the women looked at him thoughtfully.
One night Joe heard voices in the living room and stumbled out half asleep to see what was happening. Eugenie and Jamie were close together on the couch. He excused himself and went back to bed. Two days later, he came back after a reading, and there was Jamie in the center of the living room, weaving slightly, holding a tennis racquet. “You have to—feel it,” he said, flexing his wrist. “Like a friend.”
“Oh, I understand,” Eugenie said, her face flushed and happy. “Like my cello.” Joe slipped by, closed his bedroom door, and put his head between two pillows.
The days blurred together. Jamie was more and more out of it. When it came time to leave, Walter and Eva, a cheerful recovering alcoholic who had been in Joe's workshop, helped scrape Jamie's stuff together. After a tearful farewell from Eugenie, they assisted Jamie into the rental car.
“Eugenie is facing major heartbreak, the stuff of literature,” Eva said.
“Eugenie thinks I'm Joseph Conrad,” Jamie explained apologetically, sprawled against the side window. As they passed Eglin Air Force Base, two F-16's thundered up, up, and away. “Looka those beauties, pulling 6 g's,” he said.
When they parted at the terminal, Eva su
rprised Joe with a kiss. She had a long-time lover in Vermont. Or didn't she? It was too late for Joe to figure it out. He boarded his plane feeling that, in his single-minded pursuit of fiction, he had missed a good person.
Roland had assigned him a long reading list of contemporary stories and French criticism. “Some of this is a little esoteric. You can handle it,” he said. Roland was impressed that Joe had made a living as an independent computer programmer. Joe was to mail in a criticism of each book along with short stories of his own.
There was a lot to sort through. Cleo, who had written about the gay woman, had impressed him. She had short black hair, deep brown eyes that were intelligent and sympathetic, and a clear spirit. She reminded him of Maxie's arrowhead in its Kauri wood box. “Am I missing something here?” Eva had said in Joe's ear one afternoon. “Is she friggin beautiful, or what?”
“Friggin beautiful,” Joe said. “Like her writing.”
“Jesus,” Eva said.
“It works that way sometimes,” Joe said. “I've seen it in paintings. Beautiful people can do beautiful work; they aren't afraid of it; they're used to it.” Eva looked at him. She was good-looking herself, although not in Cleo's league.
Joe's head was spinning from two weeks of conversation at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and points in between. It was a relief to be in the plane, seated next to an elderly woman who had no interest in writing. He had scheduled a stopover in San Francisco, but, when he arrived, he couldn't bring himself to call Brendan. He was too tired to socialize. He spent a day walking about the city and was able to buy almost all of the books on his reading list. He wouldn't have to wait for any of them to be delivered to Honolulu.
After an uneventful flight and a satisfying view of Diamond Head, Joe climbed the stairs to his apartment, a cloth shopping bag filled with paperbacks in one hand, his Filson bag in the other. “Yo, Batman! New books!”
Joe Burke's Last Stand Page 12