The Great Northern Express

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Hurry up,” added my uncle. “Otherwise that’s going to end badly.”

  Otherwise? I was utterly persuaded that it was going to end badly whether I intervened or not. The only difference was, if I got involved, it could only end badly for me.

  But the battle did rage on, and “Take me to Roseburg, brother Bob,” wailed the old man in the car, and he did cling to his sloshing bottle of WILD TURKEY with one hand and the steering wheel with the other, for he was much loath to be pulled out of the car of BOB. Who, in a towering rage, seized the elder’s cardboard suitcase and strewed its sorry contents galley-west over the parking lot. But when BOB bent over to take his brother-in-law’s leg and draw him out, the old rip’s foot snapped up and struck him full in the nose, causing BOB’S LIFEBLOOD to gush forth.

  “What are you waiting for, that big fella to kill him? Get on down there,” the Undocumented Jesus said and, though much affrighted, HAROLD WHO ran toward the station wagon, not like the roebuck running to the doe at break of dawn, nor yet the fleet-footed Jacoby Ellsbury of the Boston Red Sox stealing second base, but he got there soon enough, and, NATURAL CRAVEN though he was, interposed himself between the loving brothers-in-law and lifted his hands in a placating manner and said, “Gentlemen, please. Is there some way I can be of assistance here?”

  Whereupon BOB, with his bloody nose still flowing copiously, said, “Yes, you can help me drag this son of a bitch out of my car.”

  At which the elderly brother-in-law rared back and hurled his now empty Wild Turkey bottle at BOB, narrowly missing HAROLD’s head.

  Minor Regional Writer Killed in Drunken Melee at 1–5 Rest Area

  Ooo-ahh, oo-ahh, oo-ahh, waileth the sirens of the police cars summoned by the Doug fir trucker. “Are you tied in with this outfit in the station wagon?” the first cop to arrive asked me.

  “Never saw them before in my life.”

  Wild Turkey, however, pointed right straight at me and shouted, “He said he’d take me to Roseburg, officer.”

  The cop frowned. “You sure you want to do that, buddy?”

  Off to the side, the Jesus of West Texas was nodding vigorously. I knew exactly what he was thinking. Not only did the Samaritan in his parable pick the robbed man up out of the road and clothe him in his own raiment and set him on his ass, he took him to the nearest inn and paid the innkeeper in advance for extended care.

  Yes, yes, mouthed the nail-driving, pedal-steel-playing, unemployed Jesus, hands extended palms up, imploring me as if my very salvation hinged on driving this old sociopath up to Roseburg.

  “I’ll pass,” I told the cop.

  “Good choice,” he said in his most official-sounding voice, and here, believe you me, endeth the Parable of the Reluctant Samaritan, from The Apocryphal Gospel of BOB.

  37

  Searching for a Voice

  As a teenager, I fell in love with Hemingway’s early stories, set in upper Michigan. To this day I would rate them among his best work. Like many another young writer, I tried, self-consciously and futilely, to imitate Hemingway’s inimitable style. For several years the sentences in my sad little shoot-’em-up Westerns and baseball and fishing stories were clipped-off sound bites, five or six words long. Except for their brevity, these snippets had no more in common with Hemingway’s prose than with Sanskrit. Midway through my junior year in college, I was rescued from my slavish emulation of a writer who has never been successfully emulated by my devotion to another novelist. William Faulkner was totally different from Hemingway in his approach to writing, but after reading Light in August, I became a lifelong Faulkner fan. Predictably, my own sentences began to lengthen out. By the end of the semester, a short one was a hundred words long.

  In my senior year at Syracuse I took the only creative writing class of my career. I had a good and sympathetic teacher, one who had already published several prize-winning stories and a novel. For these admirable attainments, not to mention his tremendous popularity with students, he was denied tenure and summarily discharged at the end of the year. The fact that he was, so far as I know, one of only two Jewish professors in Syracuse’s relentlessly Waspish English Department may have been regarded as a black mark beside his name. At any rate, he was a fine writer, a fine teacher, and a fine guy, who has long since far exceeded the literary accomplishments and reputations of his mean-spirited former academic colleagues. During the winter of 1964–65, while I was teaching at Orleans High and going through an especially bad patch in my writing apprenticeship, in which I’d produce one five-word sentence like Hemingway, followed by a five-hundred-word sentence like Faulkner, my former professor wrote to assure me that if I persisted, I’d come up with my own voice. Night after night I kept struggling to do so, while I wracked my brain each day for ways to keep the kids I was trying to teach “out of the mill.”

  Like the off-again, on-again furniture factory back in Chichester, the Ethan Allen furniture mill kept Orleans alive economically. Not unionized, Dickensian in its working conditions, slouching between the river and the railroad tracks like the infamous nineteenth-century textile mills of southern New England, it was, by all accounts, a horrible place to earn one’s living. Parents of backsliding offspring held up working at the mill as a fate worse than jail. Night and day, from inside our apartment across the river, we could hear the whirring blowers on the factory roof. Their perpetual low thrum was a constant reminder of the mandate we’d been given. “Keep the kids out of the mill, keep the kids out of the mill,” murmured the big tin ventilators hunkered down on the factory roof like gargoyles, in the same part of my mind where I sometimes heard Huck Finn talking. But never the voice of my own that I was desperate to find. “Keep the kids out of the mill,” said the blowers when I sat down late at night and tried to write the stories of our new home. “Out of the mill,” chanted the blowers the next morning as I mogged off down School Street toward my day job.

  Soon after the first of the year, at the advice of Prof, Phillis and I took a tour of the mill. Powdered with sawdust from head to toe, gray-faced, half-deaf, often minus one or more digits, lung-shot workers not fifteen years our senior looked ancient as they worked fast, fast, fast, doing piecework on shrieking saws, whining planers, roaring drills, and screeching edgers for wages that made my pathetic teaching salary seem princely. After the tour, “Keep the kids out of the mill” acquired a new urgency for us. But as the Kingdom winter arrived in earnest, the ever-present admonition of those blowers—I could actually hear them in my sleep—began sending me an urgent personal message. I loved working with the kids. I loved reading to them, talking to them about books, telling my ridiculous Bad Boy stories, reading the essays in which they poured out their hearts. Yet the harder I worked at teaching, the more evident it became that my heart wasn’t entirely in what I was doing. Lord knows I tried. But to me teaching remained a road on the way to writing. Every day I heard more wonderful Northeast Kingdom stories crying out to be written. Yet I couldn’t find the voice to write them in. Scribbling late into the night in our three-room garret, going to sleep every night and waking up every morning to the endless chivvying of those damnable blowers—“Keep the kids out of the mill”—I began to fear that it was not only my students who were in danger of tailing a ripsaw inside that inferno for the rest of their lives. If I couldn’t teach and couldn’t write, I might wind up there myself.

  38

  Harry and Me

  Like the Bay Area of San Francisco, the “golden triangle” of Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill, and much of New England, the Pacific Northwest is prime book territory. The first Oregon indie on my itinerary was celebrating what was billed as Harry Potter’s last hurrah tonight with a gala evening-long costume party, complete with a live owl, prizes, and discounts galore. In fact, the Harry Potter extravaganza had been cited as the main reason they couldn’t host a Harold Who event this time around. Okay. I’d gladly defer to the likeable kid magician. After all, the income from his sales was helping to keep bookstores g
oing so they could sell geezers like me.

  Now let me emphasize that I am a huge Harry Potter supporter. Sure, the old schoolmaster within—the one I’d no doubt have turned into if I’d had the moral fortitude and common sense to remain in teaching—the schoolteacher within, I say, might hope that reading Harry at the age of eight or nine could lead J. K. Rowling’s young acolytes to read The Wind in the Willows and the Little House books at ten and eleven. But most of the booksellers, librarians, and teachers I knew seemed to feel that any books that stimulated kids to read were worthwhile, and I agreed. For that matter, since leaving home, I’d seen a number of well-dressed grownups in bookstore cafés sipping lattes and poring over the latest Harry Potter as if it were the stock market report in the Wall Street Journal. And the more or less life-sized, scholarly looking, cardboard cut-out of Harry had met me at the door of nearly every bookstore I’d visited since Vermont—like a young Walmart greeter in a black gown. I’d read two or three of the books with considerable enjoyment myself. Harry is living, or almost living, proof that if you sit down and write a good, old-fashioned story well enough, readers, like the spectral ballplayers in Field of Dreams and the beneficent aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, will come. J.K. did not need to attend Oxford’s equivalent of an MFA program to learn that.

  Parking downtown on this night of nights was a challenge. Right in the middle of the town square was a gaggle of celebrants—teenage girls in black lipstick, with hair the color of cotton candy striped as green as the outfield grass at Fenway Park, and guys loaded down with more chains than the ghost of Jacob Marley. Evidently they were forming up for a parade. The bookstore was just a few blocks away.

  So Pa Kettle from Vermont sallies blithely up to a fifteen-year-old with a mostly shaven head crowned by a violet Mohawk and says, “Hi, there. Where are the owls?”

  Blankness.

  “The Harry Potter owls?” I said to the child nihilist. “You’re here for the Harry Potter celebration, right?”

  “Who the fuck is Harry Potter?”

  With some degree of horror, I realized that this was not an innocent cavalcade of customers forgathering in honor of J.K.’s boy wonder. No. These were doped-up, disaffected street people, Goths, vagabonds of just the stamp I had been enjoined not to give my spare change to back in the New England college and resort town. Anyone else in the world except, perhaps, another writer, would have known as much at a glance.

  Still, I was tempted to take a little impromptu exit poll, as I hurriedly made my own exit, to see how many of my anarchic young friends had read a Harry book. I’d bet at least half of them had.

  The bookstore was jammed with kids and grown-ups, most of them in costume, even the adults. It looked like a set for the latest Harry movie. Or Halloween at Hogwarts. No, it looked like a Harry Potter party, nothing else. Dead-on Harry look-alikes, as humorless as little automatons, Hermiones by the dozen (though none of the masqueraders had quite captured the mildly androgynous affect of Rowling’s young hero and heroine), bemused soccer moms in tall witches hats, warlocks and wizards, a little girl carrying a stuffed tabby cat with square markings around its eyes—that would be Professor McGonagall in her transmuted, feline form. And yes, dear God, a single live, rather bedraggled-looking great horned owl perched, untethered, on its handler’s wrist near the door, regarding the goings-on with huge, enraged yellow eyes. The little girl thrust her stuffed cat at the owl, which spread its wings and hissed. “Wouldn’t do that if I was you,” the bird’s handler said, with a leer. Wearing a shirt made from an American flag, he looked as though he’d just come off a twenty-four-hour shift as a ride operator at a traveling carnival about to go bust. The owl hissed loudly as the kid jabbed the pretend kittycat at it again. This bird was not the affable, reliable Hedwig from The Goblet of Fire. This was a deeply world-weary, irascible old raptor who, understandably, would rather have been anywhere else in the universe but here.

  I slunk over to the fiction section for a shameless peek at the “M” shelf. No Howard Frank Mosher novels, but hey, this was Harry’s day, not mine. Sidling up to our lad’s cardboard likeness, I said, out of the corner of my mouth, “Congratulations. I guess you’re selling a lot of books today.”

  “She is anyway,” Harry replied.

  “Just let me get this down,” I said, going for my notebook.

  The talking Harry nodded with the grim satisfaction of the chronically aggrieved. “That’s right,” he said, “and now she’s up and killing me off. This isn’t a book party. It’s an execution.”

  “Why?” the little Hermione with the stuffed cat chanted, shoving the cloth feline at the agitated owl. “Why why why?”

  “Why, what, Madison?” the mom in the witch’s hat said.

  “Why is that awful old man with the notebook talking to Harry?”

  I looked around to see who little Madison might be referring to. Surely she could not mean—

  At that moment, the beleaguered owl lifted off its perch, seized Madison’s cat in its talons, and swooped out the door and down the street. After Hedwig ran its carnie handler, with a bevy of begowned, skirling, shrieking Harrys, Hermiones, Snipeses, and Dumbledores hot on his heels. The roustabout handler finally caught up with Hedwig, who was mantling over the limp cloth cat on the village square. Madison screamed. Her mom struck out at the bird with her handbag. The flag-wearing owl-man swore savagely. Unconcerned, perhaps unaware of the surrounding pandemonium, the Gothic street citizens passed bent little joints from hand to hand and reflected on the great void without and within.

  “Look around,” Harry said to me when I returned to the store with the other partygoers. “Look around and tell me one thing. Is this really what you want for yourself?”

  I looked at the madding, book-buying crowd. I looked at the bustling young clerks (one of whom had told me, a few months before, when I phoned to try to set up an event, to use e-mail because it was, I kid you not, “much cleaner”—then of course never responded when I did). I looked at the feverish exchange of books, bills, and ringing coins. I looked at the soaring stacks of J.K.’s latest and at the kids with their bespectacled Harry and Hermione noses already buried deep in their purchases. Finally I looked back at Harry.

  “Yeah, gov’nor,” I said, “it is.”

  From a telephone conversation later that evening:

  PHILLIS: So you’re telling me, Howard Frank, that Jesus has returned in the incarnation of an illegal-alien hitchhiker who wants to help you achieve commercial success and inner peace? And this same shyster all but got you beaned with a Wild Turkey bottle by telling you to get into it in a public rest area with an old drunk and his insane brother-in-law?

  HFM: Bob.

  PHILLIS: Bob?

  HFM: The brother-in-law’s name was Bob. The old man wanted Bob to take him to Rose—

  PHILLIS: Howard Frank.

  HFM: Yes?

  PHILLIS: I rest my case. How’s the new Harry Potter?

  39

  The Pacific Northwest

  Back when hundreds of thousands of salmon a day would swim up the Columbia River past Portland in the spring, when the city was the stomping ground for a thousand roistering lumberjacks, it was known as Stumptown. Today the stumps are gone and roses grow everywhere. On my dawn run the next day, I found them twining up the sides of libraries and university buildings, leaning against rough riverfront taverns—pink, yellow, white, red as the sunrise, scenting entire neighborhoods. The orange blossoms of a clove-scented, twelve-foot-high climber adorning the sign of a concrete-block bail bond agency (EASY IN, EASY OUT) were as big around as a catcher’s mitt.

  Now that the stumps have been supplanted by American Beauties, Portland is also a city of books. Powell’s City of Books happens to be the name of Portland’s largest bookstore, which happens to be the largest independent bookstore in the country. Later that morning Bruce Burkhardt gave me a tour of this literary metropolis, where new and used books, hardcover and paperback, are shelved tog
ether by author, an arrangement that I, for one, like. He showed me the carved Oregon sandstone “pillar of books” that supports one of the store’s entrances. Also the four-story-high skylight pouring sunshine down onto a shiny elevation marker set in the floor—55.31 feet above sea level. Oh, and a manhole cover inscribed with a rose, beneath which, Bruce likes to tell rambunctious middle-school kids visiting the store, are three unruly thirteen-year-olds from a previous tour, still waiting for their parents to come get them.

  Up in the coastal mountains of Washington I was struck by the strongest sense of being, well, at home. Of course, these mountains are two to three times as tall as ours, with snow on top year-round, but the maple trees and daisies and paintbrush, the fast, clear trout streams, and the lovely little off-the-beaten-track villages all reminded me of Vermont. And as the sun dipped into the Pacific and night settled over the vast landmass to the east:

  WEST TEXAS JESUS: What was it you told me that writer fella said about driving after dark?

  HFM: E. L. Doctorow? He said that writing a novel was like driving across the continent at night. You can see only as far as your headlights allow, but you know you’re going to get there eventually.

  WEST TEXAS JESUS: Who was that other old boy with initials for a first name? Jumped out of an airplane he’d hijacked up in this neck of the woods and disappeared off the face of the earth. Something something Cooper.

  HFM: D. B. Cooper.

  WEST TEXAS JESUS: That’s it. Reason why I never set down my own stories? Back in the day? You ask me, writing a book’s like jumping out of an airplane at night with a parachute you don’t know how to open.

  HFM: D. B. Cooper’s an American legend, man.

  WEST TEXAS JESUS: D. B. Cooper’s dead. Fess up, now, Harold. Ain’t that how you feel every time you set down to write a new novel? Like a man in free fall, with a big sack of money, a parachute, and no idea in the world how to open it?