American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  “Dad, I can jump over the creek,” Lance said, his glance oscillating from the vocative expression to the direct object of his sentence, the orange clay on its bed, the clumps of dead leaves, its water turned the color of cola by tannins leached from tree roots. “How come you never trust me?”

  “Okay then, have at, Quicksilver.”

  With that blessing from his dad, Lance tugged Peat’s reins and guided her away from the creek. He turned her back around after thirty yards. They both faced the jump. Gently, Lance patted Peat’s withers. We can do this, he hoped more than thought. I know we can. He figured it was a fitting day to take a leap of faith. Into Peat’s ear Lance whispered the same thing that, on the schoolyard, he used to whisper in the ear of one girl to make another one jealous—nothing, just whisper sounds—and then he giddyapped her into a gallop.

  Lance and the horse launched from the ledge of the creek in one strong and fluid motion, and for the briefest moment, floating high above the water, he thought they’d make it. Then reality and gravity set in. Peat landed in the creek bed pitched too far forward, so that when her front hoof hit a fallen tree trunk, she rolled to her side, hurling from her back the slingshot projectile that was Lance. It was only a matter of luck that, after he slammed into the wall of the creek and tumbled down its slope toward the bottom, he did not end up beneath the horse. Instead he ended up in the water.

  “So there I am, soaked to the bone and it’s freezing out. All I want to do is go home,” Lance would conclude whenever he explained to people why he did not hunt. “And my dad says no. Because I was such a fool I’d have to go the rest of the day in wet clothes.” At that point he would always pause for a beat. “We get home that night. My mom asks how it went. ‘Terrible,’ I said. ‘I’m never hunting again.’ And I never have.”

  Every time he told the story about jumping the creek, at charity benefits or over a business lunch, during squash games or in the waiting room, he always elided the part about what happened to Peat.

  Lance came to his senses at the bottom of the creek, his shearling coat clinging to him like a second skin, the autumn cold mounting an attack on his wet body. Next to him lay Peat. Despite the ringing in his ears, the origin of which he did not know, he could hear the horse neighing, her pitch excruciatingly high, such that the pain causing the sound seemed to be transmitted with it, going from tactile to aural to tactile and back again. Lance got on his knees in the three feet of water. Near the edge of the creek, muddy and aching, he placed his hands on Peat’s flanks, trying to calm her down, at which point he saw, first, the scabbard for his rifle, the tip of which was now confetti of torn leather, a sight followed immediately by Peat’s foreleg, where, instead of a knee, there was a stump of blood, gristle, and bone.

  “Goddamn it to hell. You stubborn little shit.” His father worked his way down the bank of the creek until he was standing over the scene. “How many times have I told you not to pack it loaded?”

  I’m sorry, Lance would have said if he had not, at that moment, spoiled the water of the creek with his breakfast. From the corner of his eye he watched his father tend to the horse.

  On his knees Houghton urged Peat to keep still. “There, girl,” he said. “Whoa now.” After lifting her lid he studied her dilated pupil, and keeping a blank face he checked on the wound. Lance wrested himself to his feet, bits of sick around his mouth, just in time to hear the prognosis. “She’s got to be put down,” his father said.

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  The Colt Dragoon that Houghton removed from his holster had been a gift from Adolph Weil of Weil Bros. Cotton. The sight of the gun intensified the effects of the cold in Lance. His bottom molars knocked against the top ones, and his hands trembled so much they seemed to hum. Due to his lowering body heat, Lance began to resemble a piece of Delftware, white overlaid in a blue design. He just barely managed to articulate four simple words. “Y-ou ca-a-an’t shoo-oot he-r!”

  “I’m not,” Houghton said, handing Lance the gun. “You are.”

  In spite of the cold the gun felt hot in his palm. Perhaps because of the increase in his heart rate that it brought about, Lance grew calm, shivering mitigated, as though his body were trying to torment his will, becoming better suited for using the Colt even as his mind screamed, over and over, for him to throw it away. He listened through the internal din of those pleas as his father explained that the revolver was loaded. The only thing he had to do was aim straight.

  Lance stood looking down at Peat. With each second that passed, it seemed his organs developed organs of their own, a brain for his brain, a heart for his heart. He became an exponent of himself. Everything was amplified. He could hear the electricity snapping through his cells. This isn’t really happening, he told himself. Today isn’t even a real day. Somehow, pointing the gun at Peat’s head where it lay in the mud, ignoring that look of animal panic born of sheer helplessness, Lance was able to hold back his tears. He held them back because of hope. Any second now his father would tell him to put down the gun. Any second now his father would tell him it had all been a test.

  “Be careful, son. It’s got a hair trig—”

  One mile away, Jonah Dewberry, a square-bearded farmer puffing on an underslung pipe, asked his wife, “Is it deer season already?” Claire said it was probably the backfire of an automobile. Recent inquiries have revealed that the supposed backfire compelled her not to finish sewing the second elbow patch on a jacket that belonged to her son, Rocky Top Dewberry, whose death of galloping consumption she had, until that moment, refused to acknowledge. Two days later, while sharing a Pan float after church, Jonah convinced his wife to give the jacket to a drifter, John Reynolds, whose grandson, Burt, would wear it in his role as Peanut Griffin in Killing Mr. Tiffee. That film was seen eight times by the aptly yclept Samuel Betelhed, author of a novel, The Elbow Patch, which would never be published, due to its unwieldy narrative and authorial solipsism. Excerpts of the novel were being read on air by WKOS’s shock-jock Eddie Lorenz as Harold Forster sat in a booth at the diner across the street from his apartment.

  Harold liked the old 1950s-style tableside radios at the Batesville Diner. They were hard to find nowadays. On the morning of February 29, 1984, waiting for the person he was supposed to meet, Harold listened to but didn’t understand the DJ saying, “Here’s my advice, Betelhed. Don’t quit your day job. Who in the world cares why some stupid jacket only had one elbow patch?” Harold was soon approached by a clean-shaven, bespectacled man in a navy sack suit.

  “Mr. Forster? Frank Gavin.”

  Frank Gavin was the head of the technical division at CarolCorp, a multinational food and beverage corporation formed in 1964 when Carol-Pinto, Inc., a manufacturer of grain-based snack products, merged with The Tropi-Cola Company. CarolCorp now owned the rights to PanCola. The acquisition was part of a corporate-wide marketing and product-integration strategy code-named Nostalgia, by which various once-popular but now-defunct products, including Knapp Crackers, Tart Twizzles, Smiley Pies, and Panola Cola, among others, would be introduced to the current generation of consumers.

  At the Batesville Diner, after giving an abbreviated description of the new marketing campaign, Frank said to Harold, “Can I be frank with you? Ha-ha. Sorry, bad joke. The truth is I have a problem.”

  “I get it. Your name’s Frank.”

  “Right.” Frank had volunteered to speak with Harold Forster himself, rather than send the lawyers, because he had heard about the man’s so-called limitations. He knew delicacy was of the order. “We’re having trouble re-creating your father’s formula.”

  “My father’s formula.”

  Frank said, “I had a feeling you’d be quick on the uptake.” From his coat pocket he removed a small sheet of laminated paper. He laid it on the table and slid it toward Harold. “This is the most definitive formula for PanCola we’ve been able to find in the company records. You may recognize your father’s handwriting.”

  Una
ble to remember the look of his own handwriting, let alone that of his father, Harold nodded, examining the ancient, yellow, acidified sheet of paper trapped in plastic, its contents a list of ingredients such as “ext. vanilla 2. oz.,” “lime juice 1 qt.,” “sugar 40 lbs.,” “water 3 ½ gal.,” and “citrate caffeine 2 oz.”

  “Take a look at the item fourth from the bottom,” Frank said, pointing it out. “‘H.F. one point three grams.’ Got any idea what that means?”

  “H.F.?”

  “We believe that’s the secret ingredient. We’ve synthesized this formula, minus whatever H.F. is, and my senior psychometrician thinks we’re close. The gas chromatography indicates we’re off by as little as one point three grams of something.”

  “My father’s initials were H.F.,” said Harold, who nearly blushed when Frank responded, “Excellent observation, Mr. Forster.”

  A waitress placed menus in front of them and, notepad at the ready, asked if they would like anything to drink. Both men said they were fine with water.

  “We think your father used his initials as a placeholder,” Frank said once they were alone again. He went on to explain that it was not an uncommon practice. At Coca-Cola, for example, the “secret” part of their formula was referred to, within the company and without, as “Merchandise 7X.” He added that basically everyone in the industry knew what those seven flavoring agents were. “I mean, taste McDonald’s ‘special sauce’ and tell me that’s not Thousand Island dressing.”

  So many odd-sounding words made Haddy feel as though he’d picked up a fever. “I’m sorry to own this to you, Mr. Frank, but I can’t be of any help. I wouldn’t be able to spot the secret ingredient if it was coming down the middle of a big road.”

  At dinner one night decades earlier, Harold, only ten years old and dressed in short pants and saddle shoes, had listened with his brothers and sister as their father told them about his creation of PanCola, mentioning how he chose white for the label because that had been the color of the show globe in Forster Rex-for-All. Sterling-silver flatware and lead-crystal stemware sat atop the candlelit and jacquard-clothed mahogany table.

  “I couldn’t have done it without an extra-special ingredient,” their father had said. “And someday I’ll tell one of you what that ingredient is. Maybe I’ll tell you, Monty. Or maybe it’ll be Lance. But then again, what if it’s Ramsey?” Harold had always figured his father must have accidentally forgotten to mention him.

  “You have to remember something,” said Frank, leaning forward in the diner booth.

  “Nope.”

  “An offhand remark from your father?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Something he said over the phone?”

  “I wish.”

  “Did he ever tell one of your siblings?”

  Harold said, “He always planned to, but I think he passed on before he got the chance. I even asked them, back a long time ago. Each of them thought he’d told one of the others.”

  “We know for a fact your niece figured it out. She even mentioned it in her autobiography. Did she ever say anything? Do you think she may have told her brother?”

  “I know for a fact Imogene wouldn’t ever do Nicholas any favors.”

  Over the next few minutes, as Frank continued with his talk, saying he was authorized to issue a finder’s fee of $75,000 for the secret ingredient, Harold studied the menu, trying to decide if he wanted oatmeal with raisins, pecan-crusted catfish, ginger-spiced chicken, or blueberry pancakes. He figured that either breakfast or lunch would work at this hour. Once he’d chosen, he looked around the diner, past someone plucking a parsley sprig from their bowl of chili, past someone eating a maraschino cherry from their milk shake, until, spotting the waitress, he flagged her over.

  3.3

  The Contents of an Urn—Owl Says What?—Next Stop, Italian Harlem—The Mineola Club

  Nobody at The Coffee Urn on Forty-Third and Seventh was eating, not the two posttheater couples, one with an untouched slice of apple pie and cheddar sitting between them, the other busy studying Playbills instead of the menu; not the lineup of smokers at the counter; not the businessmen reading the Herald Tribune’s late edition at various tables, tucking the paper in on itself as carefully as an army private would his bedsheets; not the cook sweating a ring into his white hat; not the young waitress with a finger twisting knots in her curly hair; and not Ramsey Forster, sitting alone in a corner booth, the salt of her dried tears like snail tracks down her cheeks.

  She had told the cabdriver to drop her off anywhere, so long as it was far enough away from the Village. He’d told her she looked like she could use a cup of coffee.

  “What can I get you?” asked the waitress.

  With the heel of her palm swiping the corner of her eye, as it had been doing involuntarily for the past half hour, Ramsey said, “Coffee, please. And could you make it really strong?”

  “You bet.”

  “I mean really strong. Strong as the Irish.”

  The waitress lowered her pen and pad and looked around the coffee shop. “There’s no need for that anymore,” she whispered. “Haven’t you heard? The world’s sane again. We aren’t even keeping any stocked these days. Not that we ever did.”

  “Please,” Ramsey said. “Just one.”

  A twenty-year-old native of Jackson Heights, Queens, youngest of five sisters, daughter of an electrician with a drinking problem, and part-time student at the Michael Phipps School of Secretarial Studies, Angela Simmons, who waitressed at the coffee shop to help pay her tuition, had seen her share of women in distress. She noticed fog growing like an aura around Ramsey’s hands where they lay flat on the steel tabletop. “The cook keeps a bottle in his locker. I’ll sneak a splash from that.”

  “Thank you.”

  Angela Simmons, because of her place of birth, siblings, father, and vocational aspirations, wasn’t entirely a soft touch. “Ten cents extra,” she said over her shoulder while walking away.

  Alone again, Ramsey recommenced her occupation of the past half hour: commanding her own body to continue to function. She told herself to breathe, and air swelled her lungs. She told her heart to beat, and blood charged through her veins. Was this going to be her life from now on? The notion frightened her even more than the thought she might someday run into him again.

  It was almost eleven o’clock. Out the window, Ramsey could see a bright, gargantuan billboard for the radio program Clara, Lu, ’n’ Em, on which was written, “You’re in for a lot of laughs—There’s never a dull moment in the lives of radio’s most lovable housewives—Listen to them carry on every Mon., Wed., Fri.” In the street below the billboard, steam rose from manholes in pavement that looked like dark liquid, as though the city itself, rather than some greasy spoon, were named The Coffee Urn. Pushcart men competed for sidewalk real estate with bag ladies. Tourists reeled in the false daylight of the Great White Way, on occasion shading their eyes from the glare, while pickpockets watched from the alleys between the Rialto, the Knickerbocker, the New Criterion, and the Paramount. “Just people trying to live.” That was what Ramsey’s father used to say, fancying himself a philosopher, when he looked at a candid public scene or was feeling particularly sentimental, situations that were often mutually inclusive. At the moment, looking at all the myriad people of New York through the window of a coffee shop, Ramsey tried to summon those words, to wish everyone in the city well as they went about their lives, but in truth, the only thing she wanted was for one of them to die.

  He would in two years. On August 8, 1936, Ramsey, who had known from an early age that some emotions were so real they had a shape—love was a circle, hate was a square—would learn, while reading the paper, that the combination of hostility, relief, pain, and elation was a two-by-six-inch rectangular column, above which was printed in bold, retail heir drowns in sailing accident.

  Onto the table chimed a cup of coffee, the reflection of its steam in the window overlaid against the steam outside in the s
treet, a few spilt drops orbiting its saucer. “I’m grateful,” Ramsey said, but the waitress had walked back to the counter, where with one hand she continued tangling her hair and with the other drank her own cup of coffee, most likely an Irish blend as well. Ramsey took an ample swallow.

  The heat of the whiskey nicely accentuated the heat of the coffee. It felt good for an external sensation to match her internal one, temperature aligning with temperament, as though her whole body were a hall of mirrors, all the effects an illusion and their cause unidentifiable. Her hands slippery with sweat, her knees trembling beneath the table, the inside of her wrenched, pulsating, and coiled: not a single one of those was real. Ramsey didn’t have to be herself. She could be a reflection of a reflection of herself. She could be a trick of the light.

  In the coffee shop, as she finished her cup, Ramsey was interrupted by the last thing she wanted to see or speak with, a man. “Hoot-hoot,” he said from two tables away.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’re both night owls.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  This guy could go straight to hell, for all Ramsey cared. She didn’t want to flirt. She wanted to be left alone. Why wouldn’t this man, who kept staring at her, and the rest of the world, which kept interacting with her, just let her be invisible? Who did he think he was anyway?

  On October 26, 1931, The Hollywood Reporter had run a profile titled, “Star Maker: How One Studio Head Is Remodeling the Heavens,” in which its subject stated, “There’s no science to finding the next Joan Crawford or Doug Fairbanks. I simply keep my eyes open. They’re all out there. You just have to look. You have to be present.” Those words would be confirmed years later when Ramsey, filing for a divorce, realized how, that night at the coffee shop, she hadn’t fallen in love but rather out of shock, and Arthur Landau just happened to be there at the time.

  * * *

  One week, twenty showers, eight phone calls, twelve skipped meals, five long walks through the park, and two days after the night at the coffee shop, Ramsey accepted Arthur’s offer of a cocktail.