July 4
“Suck it down, bitch!”
Jeff was still not able to get used to the sparkly little-girl voice of Vanessa talking like a well-hung porn stud. She was presently kicking her brother's ass at the newest installation of a first-person shooter franchise. She was used to playing with her brother and his friends. She even had her own Xbox Live ID, she had bragged to Jeff, which she used to serve up rocket propelled death to nerds all over the country.
She and Riley were both crouched in front of the television, just a few feet from the screen as Jeff emerged from the basement. He had woken several more times during the night and now he felt like a wrung-out sponge. The last thing he wanted to do was walk into a room with yelling kids.
It was only 9, so of course Stuart was still asleep behind his well-insulated door. Jeff, on the other hand, had been dozing uneasily for almost an hour, until finally giving up and coming upstairs after hearing the hoots and cries of the kids.
Jeff fixed cereal for the three of them and they started a movie soon after, following a science fiction adventure that involved swapping brains, technology theft, and laser guns.
Stuart finally rose at just after noon and took a shower, as he did when the children were around. Jeff himself had long gotten used to the man's scent as he skipped showering for days at a time when it was just the two of them.
“Boat's at three, folks,” Stuart said brightly, exiting the bathroom in a towel.
“Yay!” Vanessa cried. Riley tried to look stoic, but a smile seemed to break through.
The door to Stuart's bedroom closed and a minute later he exited, dressed in jeans and a Nirvana t-shirt.
“What are we gonna do until then?” he asked.
It turned out that the plan was another movie, and eventually Jeff went into the kitchen and packed two coolers, one with food and one with beer and soda. Both Jeff and Vic looked warily at the Victorian that sat next to the beach, but it was quiet. The truck was gone.
They walked down to the beach and, when Vic waved to a large Bayliner off shore, a small speedboat broke away and picked them up.
A half an hour later Raider joined the flotilla off of Alki Beach, dropping anchor and taking place with hundreds of other boats. Many had been there since the morning, and based on the volume level, several boats contained people who had been drinking since then. The fireworks weren't due for hours yet, and Jeff wasn't sure some of them would even manage to stay conscious until then.
The captain was a surprise. Jeff had, of course, expected a crusty old salt, a Quint, and instead the captain was only a few years older than him, dressed in baggy shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. His name was Steve. It was almost disappointing.
Riley and Vanessa sat on the deck under an awning and played games on their Gameboys. Stuart had brought his laptop and was editing below deck. Jeff walked up to the bow of the boat, dangled his legs off the side, and opened a beer. Even with the shouts and laughs from some of the more obnoxious boats, he was relaxed for the first time in what felt like weeks. It wasn't that dramatic, he told himself, but it was nice to catch his breath. For his first real experience on a boat, he would have been hard-pressed to improve on it.
Some time later, the sun was retreating behind the mountains and the random pops and snaps of small fireworks were starting. Jeff could already see the occasional bottle rocket float past in the water. He finished the last of his third beer and went back to check on the kids again. They were still perfectly happy, drinking Coke and eating chips, playing with each other at some game.
Steve was sitting at the captain's chair, his ragged straw hat pulled down over his eyes. He was silent and still. Jeff thought that such peace was admirable when sitting so close to Riley and Vanessa.
He ducked his head as he descended into the cabin which was a bit stuffy, but nice and cool. Stuart sat in a banquette at a very small table. His face glowed in the blue screen of his laptop. He looked awful. As comfortable as it was down here, his face shone with sweat.
An unpleasant thought occurred to Jeff then, which that right then the author looked the way he had when he had woken up after his nightmare. Like someone who had been awakened from the dead. The comparison might be a bit extreme, and it certainly had its roots in reading too much of Stuart's fiction, but the hollowed-out, desperate appearance was concerning.
“You okay?” Jeff asked. He remembered what a poor traveler Stuart had been on the way to the airport and he wondered again if the man was just a lousy traveler.
“Nah, this suck,” he said. “I can't get shit out here. I dunno why.”
“You wanna come up for a while, get some sun?”
Stuart looked up at Jeff then, meeting his gaze for the first time. For just one instant, Jeff thought the writer was going to yell at him. Then he shook his head.
“No. The editing I can force and it's gotta get done.” He looked back down at his computer. “Shit, it's almost six. I'll be up in a bit and we can eat.”
So Jeff went back up on deck. On an impulse he woke Steve and the two of them convinced the kids to try fishing off the back of the boat. Steve had an assortment of spinning rods, armed with spoons and lures, and Jeff raided the cooler for some bread and bits of meat for baiting hooks.
When Stuart finally emerged from the cabin, looking, if anything, worse, Riley was hauling in his second catch. Neither of them had caught anything impressive, but they were entertained and, although moderately troubled by the adult nature of the thought, Jeff thought that fishing was a better outdoor activity on a holiday than playing video games.
They ate while the kids continued to fish, and as the sky turned dark blue and then purple started to creep up from the horizon, the fireworks from the surrounding ships grew more frequent. Eventually Steve broke out the deck chairs and they sat at the front of the boat, Vanessa with a blanket over her lap, Stuart with a cigar, staring at the sky.
The stars were not quite out yet when the fireworks started, fountains and trees of multiple colors exploding in the air above them. The crowd on the boats began to cheer appreciatively.
Jeff's stomach was upset by the time they headed home, too much beer, not enough food, and the movement of the boat, particularly after all the fireworks had ended and everyone chose to leave at the same time, creating a disastrous wash of wakes that had to be traversed.
Vanessa's head was lolling as they rode toward the house in the smaller boat, Steve driving at the rear, Riley at the front, staring up at the massive blue moon that hung above.
The house on the beach was still gratefully quiet, but there were still pops and bangs up and down the beach as celebrators continued.
Stuart handed Steve an envelope with the rest of his pay after they unloaded the kids and the coolers.
“Just head up with them,” Jeff said, “I'll bring this crap.”
“Yeah?” Stuart said, and Jeff could see that being on land had already helped him.
“I'll be right there.”
So Stuart walked ahead, holding Vanessa's hand on one side and his other arm over his son's shoulders. Jeff realized that while he would not be sad to see them go, he would probably miss them. Especially the lively energy of the little girl. He was also struck that, weird and self-destructive as Stuart's routines were, he would be glad to get back to them. There was peace there, reliability.
He turned and looked out at the water. He could mentally place where the posts were and he realized that part of his mind accepted where they had been in his dream as where they were located in reality. Maybe they weren't there at all. Something like that would be much less sturdy in the water than on land. It was preposterous, actually, especially the idea that they just kept going on and on. There weren't any such things anywhere. If there were, he would have surely heard of them. He liked the mysterious and the unexplained, he had read all the Time-Life Mysteries of the World books, but things like that were a lot more interesting when they were in Egypt or South America than when they were in your back yard.
Jeff picked up the first cooler and then he saw a flare of light. It was a match, or a lighter, it was hard to tell, and it bloomed to life on the deck of Thorsen's house. The old man was standing there, lighting a cigarette. His eyes glared red in the flare of the tiny fire. Jeff stared at him for a moment, startled, afraid. He shivered.
He bent and stacked the second cooler on top of the first. They were mostly empty, so they weren't heavy, but he had to adjust his stance and his stride to get them both up the trail to Stuart's house. He could feel the man's eyes on him the entire time.
Once he broke through the line of trees, he felt safe to leave one cooler there and carry the other to the house. Riley was doing something on his laptop, sharing the table with his father. Vanessa was apparently in bed.
When he returned for the second cooler, he stopped to stare at the post for a moment. He returned to his dream again, the unrelenting line of posts, stretching out as far as he could see from his tied-down position. It hadn't meant anything of course, but the idea that there could be so many of, well, anything, in so specific a pattern spoke to Jeff of power or structure or...he didn't want to think about it.
He dropped the second cooler on the deck with a hollow thunk. His stomach hurt, his nerves were crawling, and all he wanted to do was go to bed, to retrieve some of the sleep that he had lost the night before. One more day without writing, then in the morning he would take the kids to the airport and things would go back to what he already thought of as normal, after less than a month.
“Thanks,” Stuart said, and Jeff was surprised to see that he was aware of his surroundings, not already lost in his book. His appearance had returned to normal. He looked fine, healthy, as he usually did.
“Sure.”
He really is a shitty traveler, Jeff thought to himself as he descended his stairs.
It wasn't until he was almost asleep, washing back and forth in the space between conscious thought and whatever the other side is, when it came to him what Stuart's behavior was really like. He wasn't acting like someone who didn't travel well, someone subjected to motion sickness. He was acting like every television and movie cliché of a junkie removed from his source, jonesing, just trying to get by until he could find another fix.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
The Author, Chapter Thirty-One: A Rough Night
July 4
Jeff pulled off his shoes and flopped face down on his bed at 1:30 in the morning. The kids were finally in bed and Stuart was finally at his table again, with laptop and bottle.
Jeff found it amazing how much the children wore him out. It wasn't that they were doing anything in particular, either, but he had gotten used to taking care of one person, not three. He liked the kids and he was glad that they seemed to respond well enough to him, but he'd be glad when they were gone. It wasn't the cooking for four instead of two, or the driving, or visiting the video store once a day, either. He couldn't put his finger on what it was, but their presence was wearing him out.
He thought briefly about what he had planned for Danny's Dime. He was excited to take Stuart's suggestion and explore the ideas behind Mac's suicide in his book, but he hadn't had the time. He hadn't had time to do much of anything, and he was beginning to get frustrated. He was constructing a scene in his mind, Danny talking to one of his cronies, a new character, about safe cracking, when he drifted off altogether.
He was pinned in place. Not in the manner of dreams, but with actual ropes that were tied to stakes in the ground. He was cruciform, his arms held out straight from the shoulders, pulled taught with loops over his wrists. His ankles were tied together and were tied to another stake. He could move his head, but the tension on his body kept him from being able to move anything else. The more he strained, the less he seemed to be able to move, and the straining of the muscles in his abdomen began to pull at his groin until he started to feel aroused.
He stopped to catch his breath and actually look at where he was. He knew that it was the location of the Stuart house, even though there was nothing there. There was nothing at all. The landscape was blasted, no trees, and almost no grass, simply rocks and sand, down to the edge of the sea, where there was no water, but simply a stretching, shifting mass of red sand. And in it, stark and dark against the burnt red of the sand, he could see the posts.
They stretched to the horizon. They were placed every mile or so, and the closest ones were the posts Riley had described to him, Jeff was sure. He could see the post from the yard and the one from the blackberries and he saw that they formed a massive triangle or V shape, pointing at him.
And that was when he realized what the uncomfortable sensation in his back was. It was the stiff, unyielding square of the top of another post. It was level with the ground, but now that he was aware of it, its strong, hard presence made him nervous.
He looked from side to side and then craned his head to look above him. The landscape was the same, low, featureless, miserable.
He grunted in surprise and pain as the post began to rise beneath him. The ropes bit into his wrists and ankles and burned. He tried to arch his back away from the post, but the tension was on his limbs was too great. He could picture, in a future flash, the end result, his body broken and shaped like a boomerang, bent over the post, his limbs still tied into place, the skin around the ropes bloody and savaged, a ghastly expression on his dead, or soon to be dead, face.
He woke curled in a ball, his knees on his chin, his clothing drenched and reeking of the sweat of fear, his chest and shoulders heaving with panicked breaths. He wanted to move, to sit up, to do something, but he simply lay in place and shook, shoving out sharp exhalations as hard shivers, almost convulsions, periodically struck his frame.
Eventually he swallowed, shifted over to the edge of the bed, and sat up. He ran his hands through his hair and they came away wet, not just damp. Moisture shone on his palms in the light that came from the bathroom.
He peeled off his sopping socks and threw them in the corner. Then he got to his feet, unsteadily, and stepped out of his pants. He was so wobbly he had to put his hand on the wall for support. He tugged his shirt, which smelled awful, off over his head and threw it in the corner after his jeans and his socks. The boxers were skeevy, too, so he pitched them as well.
He walked tentatively to the bathroom, taking short steps. He took a leak and rinsed himself off in the shower, standing under lukewarm water and thinking about the dream. He could remember this one, some details were particularly sharp, the red color of the sand, the dank smell of the air around him, the perfect square shape of the pressure in his back. It had been terrifying, but he was not sure what was more frightening, his death, the inevitability of it, the posts, or the wasted, bleak world he had found himself in.
He dried himself briefly, anxious to brush his teeth to rid himself of the vile taste he had discovered in his mouth. He was brought up short when he caught himself in the mirror.
He looked like an exhumed body. His eyes were sunken and deep, dark pits hovering beneath them. His skin tone was awful and still shiny from the shower's water. His hair was stringy and flat and as lifeless as the rest of him.
“Shit,” he said to himself, and then he brushed his teeth. He tried to avoid looking at himself again, but he caught another glimpse just before he left the bathroom. He shivered again, this time from a chill. He was naked and still damp, he realized.
He slid into some clean boxers and crawled beneath the covers, glad that his nightmare had taken place on top of the sheets and not under them, so his bed was still intact and didn't reek the way his clothes had.
It took him much less time than he had imagined to fall asleep. He had anticipated staring at the ceiling for quite some time, and he saw from the clock that it was after 5 in the morning. He had a dreadful premonition of not being able to sleep at all and dragging like a sloth through the Fourth of July.
He fell asleep as he had done the first time, thinking of his new book and ideas for explorations of Danny and his criminal associates. The safe cracking ideas were interesting and would require some Google research but the character of Slim, the suicidal safe cracker had sprung to life, multi-faceted and fully-developed, with the ease that was characteristic of the development of this book. It was amazing and exciting and then it was all gone and he was outside in the blasted environment once again, the red sand in the distance, the gray, rocky soil beneath his feet.
This time he was standing in a circle, a henge, of stone posts, and they were closing in on him. As they drew nearer, they grew taller, too tall for him to jump over, and as he tried to climb one, another pressed in against it, crushing his fingers and he cried out...
Jeff pulled off his shoes and flopped face down on his bed at 1:30 in the morning. The kids were finally in bed and Stuart was finally at his table again, with laptop and bottle.
Jeff found it amazing how much the children wore him out. It wasn't that they were doing anything in particular, either, but he had gotten used to taking care of one person, not three. He liked the kids and he was glad that they seemed to respond well enough to him, but he'd be glad when they were gone. It wasn't the cooking for four instead of two, or the driving, or visiting the video store once a day, either. He couldn't put his finger on what it was, but their presence was wearing him out.
He thought briefly about what he had planned for Danny's Dime. He was excited to take Stuart's suggestion and explore the ideas behind Mac's suicide in his book, but he hadn't had the time. He hadn't had time to do much of anything, and he was beginning to get frustrated. He was constructing a scene in his mind, Danny talking to one of his cronies, a new character, about safe cracking, when he drifted off altogether.
He was pinned in place. Not in the manner of dreams, but with actual ropes that were tied to stakes in the ground. He was cruciform, his arms held out straight from the shoulders, pulled taught with loops over his wrists. His ankles were tied together and were tied to another stake. He could move his head, but the tension on his body kept him from being able to move anything else. The more he strained, the less he seemed to be able to move, and the straining of the muscles in his abdomen began to pull at his groin until he started to feel aroused.
He stopped to catch his breath and actually look at where he was. He knew that it was the location of the Stuart house, even though there was nothing there. There was nothing at all. The landscape was blasted, no trees, and almost no grass, simply rocks and sand, down to the edge of the sea, where there was no water, but simply a stretching, shifting mass of red sand. And in it, stark and dark against the burnt red of the sand, he could see the posts.
They stretched to the horizon. They were placed every mile or so, and the closest ones were the posts Riley had described to him, Jeff was sure. He could see the post from the yard and the one from the blackberries and he saw that they formed a massive triangle or V shape, pointing at him.
And that was when he realized what the uncomfortable sensation in his back was. It was the stiff, unyielding square of the top of another post. It was level with the ground, but now that he was aware of it, its strong, hard presence made him nervous.
He looked from side to side and then craned his head to look above him. The landscape was the same, low, featureless, miserable.
He grunted in surprise and pain as the post began to rise beneath him. The ropes bit into his wrists and ankles and burned. He tried to arch his back away from the post, but the tension was on his limbs was too great. He could picture, in a future flash, the end result, his body broken and shaped like a boomerang, bent over the post, his limbs still tied into place, the skin around the ropes bloody and savaged, a ghastly expression on his dead, or soon to be dead, face.
He woke curled in a ball, his knees on his chin, his clothing drenched and reeking of the sweat of fear, his chest and shoulders heaving with panicked breaths. He wanted to move, to sit up, to do something, but he simply lay in place and shook, shoving out sharp exhalations as hard shivers, almost convulsions, periodically struck his frame.
Eventually he swallowed, shifted over to the edge of the bed, and sat up. He ran his hands through his hair and they came away wet, not just damp. Moisture shone on his palms in the light that came from the bathroom.
He peeled off his sopping socks and threw them in the corner. Then he got to his feet, unsteadily, and stepped out of his pants. He was so wobbly he had to put his hand on the wall for support. He tugged his shirt, which smelled awful, off over his head and threw it in the corner after his jeans and his socks. The boxers were skeevy, too, so he pitched them as well.
He walked tentatively to the bathroom, taking short steps. He took a leak and rinsed himself off in the shower, standing under lukewarm water and thinking about the dream. He could remember this one, some details were particularly sharp, the red color of the sand, the dank smell of the air around him, the perfect square shape of the pressure in his back. It had been terrifying, but he was not sure what was more frightening, his death, the inevitability of it, the posts, or the wasted, bleak world he had found himself in.
He dried himself briefly, anxious to brush his teeth to rid himself of the vile taste he had discovered in his mouth. He was brought up short when he caught himself in the mirror.
He looked like an exhumed body. His eyes were sunken and deep, dark pits hovering beneath them. His skin tone was awful and still shiny from the shower's water. His hair was stringy and flat and as lifeless as the rest of him.
“Shit,” he said to himself, and then he brushed his teeth. He tried to avoid looking at himself again, but he caught another glimpse just before he left the bathroom. He shivered again, this time from a chill. He was naked and still damp, he realized.
He slid into some clean boxers and crawled beneath the covers, glad that his nightmare had taken place on top of the sheets and not under them, so his bed was still intact and didn't reek the way his clothes had.
It took him much less time than he had imagined to fall asleep. He had anticipated staring at the ceiling for quite some time, and he saw from the clock that it was after 5 in the morning. He had a dreadful premonition of not being able to sleep at all and dragging like a sloth through the Fourth of July.
He fell asleep as he had done the first time, thinking of his new book and ideas for explorations of Danny and his criminal associates. The safe cracking ideas were interesting and would require some Google research but the character of Slim, the suicidal safe cracker had sprung to life, multi-faceted and fully-developed, with the ease that was characteristic of the development of this book. It was amazing and exciting and then it was all gone and he was outside in the blasted environment once again, the red sand in the distance, the gray, rocky soil beneath his feet.
This time he was standing in a circle, a henge, of stone posts, and they were closing in on him. As they drew nearer, they grew taller, too tall for him to jump over, and as he tried to climb one, another pressed in against it, crushing his fingers and he cried out...
Author's Note: Days Off
Cheese!, the fundraiser for Vita Arts (www.vita-arts.org) took up all my last two days, so forgive the lack of updates. Hopefully I'll have two chapters for you today to make up for it. The first is going up now.
The show went very well. See our website for blog posts now and pictures soon!
The show went very well. See our website for blog posts now and pictures soon!
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The Author, Chapter Thirty: Playing Catch
July 3
Later, Jeff realized that the events of early August were inevitable, but it always seemed to him that what happened on the day before the Fourth of July was somehow the beginning of the end.
The day was clear and bright and warm enough that it was obvious that by the afternoon it would be too hot to do much of anything.
Around 11:30, Jeff and Riley went outside to play catch. Stuart was still in bed, having taken to writing even later than normal since his children had arrived. They were allowed to stay up late, hanging out with dad until midnight or later, watching movies, playing cards and games, or kicking the older men's asses on the Wii. However, once they went to bed, Stuart made sure to get his time in on Tomb, and he told Jeff that although the editing part of his work was falling behind, he had managed to keep at a fairly steady rate of productivity. “These chapters will just be rougher,” he'd said the night before, when the kids were tucked in and Jeff was heading downstairs to sleep.
The work on Jeff's own book had largely stalled as he had been playing babysitter, but he found that Danny's Dime filled much of his spare thoughts, in the shower, on the toilet, lying in bed, and he was ready to write several more chapters in one long tear as soon as the kids were gone. The feeling made him antsy, as if he were waiting for Christmas, and he remembered the way that Stuart had spoken about his own urge to get cracking when he had first arrived.
Playing catch had been Jeff's idea. He felt bad that the kids had to kill time during the day when they could be out and about, just because their dad was sleeping. The day before they'd gone out to lunch while Stuart slept, coming home to find the man ready to spend the afternoon with his kids.
Today, Riley had been planted in front of his laptop, while Vanessa was watching a movie. She seemed to have an endless stream of films where outcast teen or preteen girls found out they were lost princesses of various tiny European kingdoms. Were the girls not clearly different actresses, Jeff would have sworn they were all the same film.
So Jeff had found some old baseball equipment in a cupboard, probably left over from the author's first summer here with his college friend by the looks of it, and they had gone outside.
Jeff had made sure to mow the lawn before the children's arrival, so the yard behind the house was soft and clear for running and fielding. They started out gentle, getting a feel for each other and warming up their muscles. The sun was still behind the trees, but it was warm enough that they were beginning to sweat as they grew more confident.
Soon the ball was popping into the pockets of the gloves with a slap, and Riley and Jeff began to challenge each other, throwing towering fly balls, rudely hopping grounders and lightning line drives.
Jeff had not worked so hard and been so satisfied since co-ed flag football in college, when they would all return to the dorms, pumped up on adrenaline and caked in mud.
As soon as the throw left Riley's hand, Jeff knew he didn't stand a chance of retrieving it. He turned and ran, trying to gain some distance, envisioning himself making a miraculous diving catch anyway, but he quickly saw that the blackberry bushes would make that impossible, or at least very uncomfortable.
“Fuck,” Jeff said to himself, facing the brambles.
“Shit!” he heard Riley call from behind him, “Sorry!”
“S'okay,” Jeff heard himself yell, even though it really fucking wasn't.
Riley quickly puffed up beside him and they both stared at the twisted green obstacle for a while.
“Maybe it's in the clearing,” Riley said hopefully.
“What clearing?”
“Here,” Riley said, and stepped back from the bushes. He lowered himself to his hands and knees and pressed his face close to the recently mowed grass.
Jeff followed suit and he saw that the kid was right, through the initial bushes he could see a large, dead patch of yellowed shrub and thorn.
“There used to be a trail,” Riley said, standing up and dusting off his palms.
Riley was wearing shorts and he was barefoot, having shed his flip flops as soon as they had started running for the ball. Jeff knew that his shoes and jeans made him the defacto explorer for this miserable expedition.
Riley walked along the blackberries until he came to a gap that could have been imaginary.
“It used to be a real trail,” he reassured Jeff, “It's not too bad when you get in there. At least, it didn't used to be. Just a sec,” he said, and ran back to the house. A moment later he appeared around the far corner, dragging a two-by-four. Jeff was grateful.
They flopped the board into the bushes and stomped it down, using their mitts to take the brunt of the vines that sprung back. Sure enough, once the initial bushes were cleared, there was an obvious trail that lead a few feet in and then curved back toward the clearing.
Jeff walked along the board and when he stepped cautiously off the far end into a deep bed of mulch, he felt like he were a world away. The trees above and the bushes around him acted as insulation, quieting the world to nothing but the faint hum of insects. The temperature was much cooler and he immediately pictured himself as a jungle explorer, machete at the ready, listening for some giant creature stalking him.
“Okay?” Riley asked, ruining the illusion.
“Sure,” Jeff said, beginning to walk along the narrow path. He still had to reach out with the mitt and hold vines away as he walked along, his shoulders were too wide, and it occurred to him that if this were an animal trail, he'd be better off crawling, or being four feet tall. But there were too many thorns around for him to be tempted to proceed on hands and knees, and he could already see the yellowed opening of the clearing.
“Got it!” Jeff said, seeing the ball almost immediately, the white sticking out against the gray and brown of dead blackberry roots. He stepped into the clearing, hearing the dead foliage crunch loudly beneath his feet and reached for the ball. He snagged himself on a dead thorn, hissing as it drew sharply across his skin, tearing without penetrating. He hurled the ball over the bushes into the yard.
“Okay?” he called.
“Yeah!” Riley called back, his voice already fainter.
Jeff was ready to leave when he saw it. From one angle it simply looked like a tangle of dead vines, but now that he'd moved into the clearing, it looked familiar. He'd seen something like it before. In the yard.
He approached in tentatively, reaching out with his glove as if expecting to be hurt or stung. He squinted, leaning forward bit by bit until he could touch it with his covered hand. He flicked his wrist, stabbing at a clutch of the dead vines. They fell to one side and left an opening like a wound, and beneath it was just what Jeff had expected. Or perhaps feared.
It was maybe a little taller than the one in the yard, and it was much less weathered, being sheltered by the trees and bushes. The writing on it was clearer, but they were still apparently just runes or symbols, nothing he could make out. He wanted to draw away, but part of him was fascinated. Just what the hell were these things?
He reached out his bare hand then, not even realizing what he was doing, and pressed a fingertip against the stone. It was cool, almost cold, certainly much cooler than the surrounding air. Almost immediately there was a sound, at the edge of hearing, a humming? It was like electronic feedback or white noise, practically beyond perception. Jeff's eyes began to water and his vision began to swim.
“Yo!” called Riley, from just the other side of the bushes. “What's up?”
“Sorry,” Jeff called, all himself again, “Be right there.”
And he was right there, stumbling off of the board into the open, embracing the warmer air and the louder environment.
“You stop to take a shit or something?” Riley asked.
“No, I was just looking...” Jeff pointed at the post in the yard, which was clear, and now that he saw it again, much sorter and worn than the one in the bushes, “There's another one of those things back there.”
“Oh, yeah. There's a couple of them down at the beach, too.”
“There are?”
The kid nodded.
“Where?”
“Oh, most of the time they're under the water. You can only see them when the tide is way, way out.”
“What are they?”
“No one knows. They're hella old though.”
“No one knows?”
“I guess someone must. But if they're way old you'd think someone would dig them up and put them in a museum or something, so I guess they don't matter.”
Why the fuck would you want to dig them up? Jeff wondered to himself. When he did speak, he said, “But your dad...”
“What about him?”
Jeff had been about to say, 'But your dad said there was only one of them,' but that wasn't true. Jeff had asked about them and the man had been dismissive. He had never said there was only one. Hell, maybe he didn't know about the rest of them. Jeff shook his head. “What do you think they are?”
“Dunno. Dad always told us they were old grave markers or some shit, but that's the kind of thing you'd figure he'd say, you know?”
“Right.”
Riley held up the ball and they played for a bit longer until Stuart emerged onto the deck with a squealing Vanessa under one arm and announced that they were going into the city for hamburgers at Dick's, a local drive-in institution.
Jeff's mind was far away as he played with Riley and as he drove the family into Seattle. He felt like Stuart had lied to him, again, or still, or something, but he couldn't quite pin it down. Stuart had said he didn't know what the post in the yard was, had been dismissive, but there were more of them. Several more, apparently. And it wasn't like it had to mean something, not really, but it seemed like it should. It seemed like it had to mean something.
Later, Jeff thought of the discovery of the second post as the beginning of the end. It was also when his dreams grew worse. Much worse. And he began to remember them.
Later, Jeff realized that the events of early August were inevitable, but it always seemed to him that what happened on the day before the Fourth of July was somehow the beginning of the end.
The day was clear and bright and warm enough that it was obvious that by the afternoon it would be too hot to do much of anything.
Around 11:30, Jeff and Riley went outside to play catch. Stuart was still in bed, having taken to writing even later than normal since his children had arrived. They were allowed to stay up late, hanging out with dad until midnight or later, watching movies, playing cards and games, or kicking the older men's asses on the Wii. However, once they went to bed, Stuart made sure to get his time in on Tomb, and he told Jeff that although the editing part of his work was falling behind, he had managed to keep at a fairly steady rate of productivity. “These chapters will just be rougher,” he'd said the night before, when the kids were tucked in and Jeff was heading downstairs to sleep.
The work on Jeff's own book had largely stalled as he had been playing babysitter, but he found that Danny's Dime filled much of his spare thoughts, in the shower, on the toilet, lying in bed, and he was ready to write several more chapters in one long tear as soon as the kids were gone. The feeling made him antsy, as if he were waiting for Christmas, and he remembered the way that Stuart had spoken about his own urge to get cracking when he had first arrived.
Playing catch had been Jeff's idea. He felt bad that the kids had to kill time during the day when they could be out and about, just because their dad was sleeping. The day before they'd gone out to lunch while Stuart slept, coming home to find the man ready to spend the afternoon with his kids.
Today, Riley had been planted in front of his laptop, while Vanessa was watching a movie. She seemed to have an endless stream of films where outcast teen or preteen girls found out they were lost princesses of various tiny European kingdoms. Were the girls not clearly different actresses, Jeff would have sworn they were all the same film.
So Jeff had found some old baseball equipment in a cupboard, probably left over from the author's first summer here with his college friend by the looks of it, and they had gone outside.
Jeff had made sure to mow the lawn before the children's arrival, so the yard behind the house was soft and clear for running and fielding. They started out gentle, getting a feel for each other and warming up their muscles. The sun was still behind the trees, but it was warm enough that they were beginning to sweat as they grew more confident.
Soon the ball was popping into the pockets of the gloves with a slap, and Riley and Jeff began to challenge each other, throwing towering fly balls, rudely hopping grounders and lightning line drives.
Jeff had not worked so hard and been so satisfied since co-ed flag football in college, when they would all return to the dorms, pumped up on adrenaline and caked in mud.
As soon as the throw left Riley's hand, Jeff knew he didn't stand a chance of retrieving it. He turned and ran, trying to gain some distance, envisioning himself making a miraculous diving catch anyway, but he quickly saw that the blackberry bushes would make that impossible, or at least very uncomfortable.
“Fuck,” Jeff said to himself, facing the brambles.
“Shit!” he heard Riley call from behind him, “Sorry!”
“S'okay,” Jeff heard himself yell, even though it really fucking wasn't.
Riley quickly puffed up beside him and they both stared at the twisted green obstacle for a while.
“Maybe it's in the clearing,” Riley said hopefully.
“What clearing?”
“Here,” Riley said, and stepped back from the bushes. He lowered himself to his hands and knees and pressed his face close to the recently mowed grass.
Jeff followed suit and he saw that the kid was right, through the initial bushes he could see a large, dead patch of yellowed shrub and thorn.
“There used to be a trail,” Riley said, standing up and dusting off his palms.
Riley was wearing shorts and he was barefoot, having shed his flip flops as soon as they had started running for the ball. Jeff knew that his shoes and jeans made him the defacto explorer for this miserable expedition.
Riley walked along the blackberries until he came to a gap that could have been imaginary.
“It used to be a real trail,” he reassured Jeff, “It's not too bad when you get in there. At least, it didn't used to be. Just a sec,” he said, and ran back to the house. A moment later he appeared around the far corner, dragging a two-by-four. Jeff was grateful.
They flopped the board into the bushes and stomped it down, using their mitts to take the brunt of the vines that sprung back. Sure enough, once the initial bushes were cleared, there was an obvious trail that lead a few feet in and then curved back toward the clearing.
Jeff walked along the board and when he stepped cautiously off the far end into a deep bed of mulch, he felt like he were a world away. The trees above and the bushes around him acted as insulation, quieting the world to nothing but the faint hum of insects. The temperature was much cooler and he immediately pictured himself as a jungle explorer, machete at the ready, listening for some giant creature stalking him.
“Okay?” Riley asked, ruining the illusion.
“Sure,” Jeff said, beginning to walk along the narrow path. He still had to reach out with the mitt and hold vines away as he walked along, his shoulders were too wide, and it occurred to him that if this were an animal trail, he'd be better off crawling, or being four feet tall. But there were too many thorns around for him to be tempted to proceed on hands and knees, and he could already see the yellowed opening of the clearing.
“Got it!” Jeff said, seeing the ball almost immediately, the white sticking out against the gray and brown of dead blackberry roots. He stepped into the clearing, hearing the dead foliage crunch loudly beneath his feet and reached for the ball. He snagged himself on a dead thorn, hissing as it drew sharply across his skin, tearing without penetrating. He hurled the ball over the bushes into the yard.
“Okay?” he called.
“Yeah!” Riley called back, his voice already fainter.
Jeff was ready to leave when he saw it. From one angle it simply looked like a tangle of dead vines, but now that he'd moved into the clearing, it looked familiar. He'd seen something like it before. In the yard.
He approached in tentatively, reaching out with his glove as if expecting to be hurt or stung. He squinted, leaning forward bit by bit until he could touch it with his covered hand. He flicked his wrist, stabbing at a clutch of the dead vines. They fell to one side and left an opening like a wound, and beneath it was just what Jeff had expected. Or perhaps feared.
It was maybe a little taller than the one in the yard, and it was much less weathered, being sheltered by the trees and bushes. The writing on it was clearer, but they were still apparently just runes or symbols, nothing he could make out. He wanted to draw away, but part of him was fascinated. Just what the hell were these things?
He reached out his bare hand then, not even realizing what he was doing, and pressed a fingertip against the stone. It was cool, almost cold, certainly much cooler than the surrounding air. Almost immediately there was a sound, at the edge of hearing, a humming? It was like electronic feedback or white noise, practically beyond perception. Jeff's eyes began to water and his vision began to swim.
“Yo!” called Riley, from just the other side of the bushes. “What's up?”
“Sorry,” Jeff called, all himself again, “Be right there.”
And he was right there, stumbling off of the board into the open, embracing the warmer air and the louder environment.
“You stop to take a shit or something?” Riley asked.
“No, I was just looking...” Jeff pointed at the post in the yard, which was clear, and now that he saw it again, much sorter and worn than the one in the bushes, “There's another one of those things back there.”
“Oh, yeah. There's a couple of them down at the beach, too.”
“There are?”
The kid nodded.
“Where?”
“Oh, most of the time they're under the water. You can only see them when the tide is way, way out.”
“What are they?”
“No one knows. They're hella old though.”
“No one knows?”
“I guess someone must. But if they're way old you'd think someone would dig them up and put them in a museum or something, so I guess they don't matter.”
Why the fuck would you want to dig them up? Jeff wondered to himself. When he did speak, he said, “But your dad...”
“What about him?”
Jeff had been about to say, 'But your dad said there was only one of them,' but that wasn't true. Jeff had asked about them and the man had been dismissive. He had never said there was only one. Hell, maybe he didn't know about the rest of them. Jeff shook his head. “What do you think they are?”
“Dunno. Dad always told us they were old grave markers or some shit, but that's the kind of thing you'd figure he'd say, you know?”
“Right.”
Riley held up the ball and they played for a bit longer until Stuart emerged onto the deck with a squealing Vanessa under one arm and announced that they were going into the city for hamburgers at Dick's, a local drive-in institution.
Jeff's mind was far away as he played with Riley and as he drove the family into Seattle. He felt like Stuart had lied to him, again, or still, or something, but he couldn't quite pin it down. Stuart had said he didn't know what the post in the yard was, had been dismissive, but there were more of them. Several more, apparently. And it wasn't like it had to mean something, not really, but it seemed like it should. It seemed like it had to mean something.
Later, Jeff thought of the discovery of the second post as the beginning of the end. It was also when his dreams grew worse. Much worse. And he began to remember them.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The Author, Chapter Twenty-Nine: Allison
July 2
Your life can change in one day, in one moment, don't you ever doubt that, kid.
I met my wife, my ex-wife that is, Allison Greta Harding, while I was on a book tour for Faith. I was a fucking rock star. After my first book came out, everyone had heard of me. I was on the cover of People goddamn magazine, and you better believe shit like that goes to your head. And to a lot of other people's.
But I was aware of it. Aware of what my fame could mean. Allison was pouring beer in a hotel bar and, bless her, she'd never heard of me. She worked a late night shift and then partied with her friends after the bars closed until like six in the morning. Theirs was a bizarre, twilight existence. I met her in Chicago and paid for her to travel with us to the next two towns we traveled to. It took me that long to talk her into bed, and you can believe that kept my attention.
Because that became rare very quickly. I was on a book tour, for Christ's sake. All these people coming out to see me. Me! I had a 50-year-old woman slip me her panties, her phone number, and a small bag of blow. It was surreal. And of course, as they always tell you, you want what you can't have.
In the end, what impressed her was my writing. It was the converse of what I'd wanted. I wanted someone who didn't know who I was, so that they would be with me because they didn't care about my writing. They could like it, but they'd like me more. In the end, what got her to pay attention to me, got her to sleep with me, spend time with me, was my first book. The real first one. I'd taken to carrying it with me, as a reminder of where I'd come from.
Allison had never read any of my books, wasn't much of a reader and had never heard of me. Maybe she'd seen my books in stores somewhere along the line, and she wasn't impressed with Wilcox. As much money as he put in her pocket before she left me, and even now, I suppose, she was never a fan. But she was a fan of me, of my turn of phrase, my way of using words, the way I could make her feel things. I could probably fill an anthology with the little short stories and poetry I wrote her, but she's got all of it. That was the writing I did when I wasn't here, and I was able to do it because it was small, if not insignificant. None of that was stuff that needed to be inspired like my novels were, it was all material that just flowed out of me, spur of the moment. I guess you'd say it was inspired by her, but it didn't seem like a big deal at the time.
So she married me, of course. She was my first assistant out here, really. I became a faster, cleaner writer with her out here to spend time with me. She didn't like me during the summers, but the summers were short when she was with me, and we spent the time I wasn't writing having sex outside in the grass or going to movies and plays in the city. The illusion was perfect until we had kids.
She quit smoking Basic Lights the day she found out she was pregnant. It took me five years of struggling on and off. That should tell you all you need to know. She was my assistant by default, because she was my companion, not because she cared or believed in the work. And how fucking pretentious does that sound “believed in the work”. God.
I think, subconsciously, we had the second kid because we had the ridiculous idea that a matched set would solve our problems. Because one hadn't been enough, two would make everything perfect. And how ridiculous does that sound when you say it out loud? But of course, we weren't talking about things like that by then.
It only took two years before she stopped coming out here. She'd stay in Portland with the kids, so my trips up here took longer and longer because I didn't have anyone to shore me up when I was working. Then she began to resent the amount of time I spent on the road. I'll admit it, eventually I started spending more time on the road because she was such a bitch about it. And the accusations that I was sleeping with my groupies on the road, which started out as obscene and preposterous, well of course they all became true before too long. She was speaking her curses into life, like something out of one of my goddamn books. I blamed her for a while. Then I blamed me. Now, I don't know. It doesn't seem worth trying to assign blame anymore, I suppose.
I love my kids, don't get me wrong, I'm a different guy with them, you've seen that. But on some level I will always resent them because they took my wife away. I wrote about that with the parasites in Sphinx and while no one knew exactly that I was talking about them, the idea wasn't subtle. I guess, in a way, based on what we talked about yesterday, that might be the most direct thing I stole from my own life, because it was about the way I actually felt about something, not about what I observed.
She left me, and I don't blame her. She served me with papers when I was here, of course, and I was most of the way done, so I managed to finish that book. The next summer was the first time I didn't complete a book. The only time I haven't since I was 21, if you can believe that. I came out here, and there were fits and starts, and I bought a truckload of food from Costco beforehand so I'd never have to leave, and I never did, and I drank enough Woodford to fill a bathtub but...the gears were stuck. I started four different books the first two weeks I was out here and none of them took. I wrote...lots of little things. Nothing that counted. Nothing I could work with. My agent freaked out, but we did enough publicity to cover for it. It was only a couple of years after we jumped ship to Vintage, so you can imagine they were pissed.
We don't talk. Well, obviously we exchange words, because we have kids, but we don't do any more than cover the basics, the bills, their needs, their schedule. She feels betrayed by me, that I placed my work ahead of her, and in some ways I can't blame her. I return to this place every summer, like a junkie returning to his dealer. I could afford to quit. I could have afforded to quit ten goddamn years ago and save my marriage, but I didn't. I'm not really sure why.
I don't have anything to prove to anyone, not any more. I'm a good writer, a popular writer, a famous writer. I could write a final Wilcox book, in fact, I already have, and that would be that. I told you I wrote two books in a summer once. The second book was the final one in the series. It'll need some tweaking before it's published, out of date references and what have you, but that second book I wrote was the end of the series. I've known for years how it would all end, where things would finish up, and eventually it just came out. That was a hell of a summer, I wrote till the middle of September. So even though I have an extra book floating around, I still can't afford to take a vacation, unless it's a permanent one.
And maybe I should, you know? I'm not here to prove anything to anyone. I bet you if I stopped coming back here, I'd just stop writing. But I don't even know if I really could stop coming back here. I mean, that's what she wanted from me, in the end, not even that I stop writing, but that I stop coming out here every summer, writing like a zombie and coming back fat and logy after three months. She wanted the man she fell in love with to stick around instead of periodically vacating the premises and putting on another man's skin for a quarter of the year.
In the end, my need to keep writing, for whatever reason, was stronger than my need to keep her happy. To keep my kids happy, come to that.
I guess the resentment is pretty equal on all sides by this point. I can't see that I'm going to do anything to change it any time soon, either. I suppose you think that's sad. Shit, I suppose it is.
I just think of myself as being trapped. Maybe that's an excuse, but it's where I'm at, whenever I think about stuff like this. I'm stuck. And I don't know that I can do anything to change things or make things any better.
I'm not brave enough to change, really change things. It took all my guts to change from a fucking typewriter to a laptop, on the odd chance that it wouldn't work. How am I supposed to summon up the strength to stop doing the only thing that I know how to do? The only way that I know how to do it? It's beyond me. I can't do it. I'll just keep coming out here until I die.
And like I said before, this is probably be where it'll happen. No peacefully passing in my sleep for me, at least not in Portland or London. No dying making love to a beautiful woman, or surrounded by my grandkids. It'll happen here and my last work will finish with a string of the letter N where my forehead hit the keyboard and never came back up again.
There's a Far Side cartoon like that. Shows this guy slumped over a piano, and you can see one hand and it's skeletal, and there are people looking in on them and one of them says, “Shh, the maestro is decomposing”. I think it'll be just like that.
And now that I think about it, that's not the writer's equivalent of dying with his boots on. It's the equivalent of them finding Elvis dead on the fucking toilet. Your output, your shit, was what ended you.
Your life can change in one day, in one moment, don't you ever doubt that, kid.
I met my wife, my ex-wife that is, Allison Greta Harding, while I was on a book tour for Faith. I was a fucking rock star. After my first book came out, everyone had heard of me. I was on the cover of People goddamn magazine, and you better believe shit like that goes to your head. And to a lot of other people's.
But I was aware of it. Aware of what my fame could mean. Allison was pouring beer in a hotel bar and, bless her, she'd never heard of me. She worked a late night shift and then partied with her friends after the bars closed until like six in the morning. Theirs was a bizarre, twilight existence. I met her in Chicago and paid for her to travel with us to the next two towns we traveled to. It took me that long to talk her into bed, and you can believe that kept my attention.
Because that became rare very quickly. I was on a book tour, for Christ's sake. All these people coming out to see me. Me! I had a 50-year-old woman slip me her panties, her phone number, and a small bag of blow. It was surreal. And of course, as they always tell you, you want what you can't have.
In the end, what impressed her was my writing. It was the converse of what I'd wanted. I wanted someone who didn't know who I was, so that they would be with me because they didn't care about my writing. They could like it, but they'd like me more. In the end, what got her to pay attention to me, got her to sleep with me, spend time with me, was my first book. The real first one. I'd taken to carrying it with me, as a reminder of where I'd come from.
Allison had never read any of my books, wasn't much of a reader and had never heard of me. Maybe she'd seen my books in stores somewhere along the line, and she wasn't impressed with Wilcox. As much money as he put in her pocket before she left me, and even now, I suppose, she was never a fan. But she was a fan of me, of my turn of phrase, my way of using words, the way I could make her feel things. I could probably fill an anthology with the little short stories and poetry I wrote her, but she's got all of it. That was the writing I did when I wasn't here, and I was able to do it because it was small, if not insignificant. None of that was stuff that needed to be inspired like my novels were, it was all material that just flowed out of me, spur of the moment. I guess you'd say it was inspired by her, but it didn't seem like a big deal at the time.
So she married me, of course. She was my first assistant out here, really. I became a faster, cleaner writer with her out here to spend time with me. She didn't like me during the summers, but the summers were short when she was with me, and we spent the time I wasn't writing having sex outside in the grass or going to movies and plays in the city. The illusion was perfect until we had kids.
She quit smoking Basic Lights the day she found out she was pregnant. It took me five years of struggling on and off. That should tell you all you need to know. She was my assistant by default, because she was my companion, not because she cared or believed in the work. And how fucking pretentious does that sound “believed in the work”. God.
I think, subconsciously, we had the second kid because we had the ridiculous idea that a matched set would solve our problems. Because one hadn't been enough, two would make everything perfect. And how ridiculous does that sound when you say it out loud? But of course, we weren't talking about things like that by then.
It only took two years before she stopped coming out here. She'd stay in Portland with the kids, so my trips up here took longer and longer because I didn't have anyone to shore me up when I was working. Then she began to resent the amount of time I spent on the road. I'll admit it, eventually I started spending more time on the road because she was such a bitch about it. And the accusations that I was sleeping with my groupies on the road, which started out as obscene and preposterous, well of course they all became true before too long. She was speaking her curses into life, like something out of one of my goddamn books. I blamed her for a while. Then I blamed me. Now, I don't know. It doesn't seem worth trying to assign blame anymore, I suppose.
I love my kids, don't get me wrong, I'm a different guy with them, you've seen that. But on some level I will always resent them because they took my wife away. I wrote about that with the parasites in Sphinx and while no one knew exactly that I was talking about them, the idea wasn't subtle. I guess, in a way, based on what we talked about yesterday, that might be the most direct thing I stole from my own life, because it was about the way I actually felt about something, not about what I observed.
She left me, and I don't blame her. She served me with papers when I was here, of course, and I was most of the way done, so I managed to finish that book. The next summer was the first time I didn't complete a book. The only time I haven't since I was 21, if you can believe that. I came out here, and there were fits and starts, and I bought a truckload of food from Costco beforehand so I'd never have to leave, and I never did, and I drank enough Woodford to fill a bathtub but...the gears were stuck. I started four different books the first two weeks I was out here and none of them took. I wrote...lots of little things. Nothing that counted. Nothing I could work with. My agent freaked out, but we did enough publicity to cover for it. It was only a couple of years after we jumped ship to Vintage, so you can imagine they were pissed.
We don't talk. Well, obviously we exchange words, because we have kids, but we don't do any more than cover the basics, the bills, their needs, their schedule. She feels betrayed by me, that I placed my work ahead of her, and in some ways I can't blame her. I return to this place every summer, like a junkie returning to his dealer. I could afford to quit. I could have afforded to quit ten goddamn years ago and save my marriage, but I didn't. I'm not really sure why.
I don't have anything to prove to anyone, not any more. I'm a good writer, a popular writer, a famous writer. I could write a final Wilcox book, in fact, I already have, and that would be that. I told you I wrote two books in a summer once. The second book was the final one in the series. It'll need some tweaking before it's published, out of date references and what have you, but that second book I wrote was the end of the series. I've known for years how it would all end, where things would finish up, and eventually it just came out. That was a hell of a summer, I wrote till the middle of September. So even though I have an extra book floating around, I still can't afford to take a vacation, unless it's a permanent one.
And maybe I should, you know? I'm not here to prove anything to anyone. I bet you if I stopped coming back here, I'd just stop writing. But I don't even know if I really could stop coming back here. I mean, that's what she wanted from me, in the end, not even that I stop writing, but that I stop coming out here every summer, writing like a zombie and coming back fat and logy after three months. She wanted the man she fell in love with to stick around instead of periodically vacating the premises and putting on another man's skin for a quarter of the year.
In the end, my need to keep writing, for whatever reason, was stronger than my need to keep her happy. To keep my kids happy, come to that.
I guess the resentment is pretty equal on all sides by this point. I can't see that I'm going to do anything to change it any time soon, either. I suppose you think that's sad. Shit, I suppose it is.
I just think of myself as being trapped. Maybe that's an excuse, but it's where I'm at, whenever I think about stuff like this. I'm stuck. And I don't know that I can do anything to change things or make things any better.
I'm not brave enough to change, really change things. It took all my guts to change from a fucking typewriter to a laptop, on the odd chance that it wouldn't work. How am I supposed to summon up the strength to stop doing the only thing that I know how to do? The only way that I know how to do it? It's beyond me. I can't do it. I'll just keep coming out here until I die.
And like I said before, this is probably be where it'll happen. No peacefully passing in my sleep for me, at least not in Portland or London. No dying making love to a beautiful woman, or surrounded by my grandkids. It'll happen here and my last work will finish with a string of the letter N where my forehead hit the keyboard and never came back up again.
There's a Far Side cartoon like that. Shows this guy slumped over a piano, and you can see one hand and it's skeletal, and there are people looking in on them and one of them says, “Shh, the maestro is decomposing”. I think it'll be just like that.
And now that I think about it, that's not the writer's equivalent of dying with his boots on. It's the equivalent of them finding Elvis dead on the fucking toilet. Your output, your shit, was what ended you.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
The Author, Chapter Twenty-Eight: Stealing
July 1
The children were inside watching a movie as Jeff and Victor cleaned up. Dinner had been hamburgers, grilled by Riley himself. Once the kitchen and the dining room table were cleared, the two men retreated outside as Los Angeles sank into the ocean on the television.
“You ever see that movie?” Stuart asked.
“Yup.”
“It's retarded, right?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“But you don't realize it until after the movie is over. It's a great trick. It's how Dan Brown has a career, because Christ only knows the guy can't write a paragraph to save his ass, but the motherfucker can pace within an inch of his life. Everything takes place with a ticking clock, hurry-hurry-hurry, and you get so pulled into the urgency that you don't think about how ridiculous it is. Same thing with the movie. I don't do that a lot, but when you need your reader to buy something that's a bit iffy, toss it in a place where they don't have time to think about it.
“And don't break that illusion, ever ever. If there's one thing I hate in movies and books, is breaking the illusion. In books especially. Take a dig at George Bush if you must, but have a character do it, in character. As soon as I know that the writer is talking directly to me, his reader, taking a stand on whatever, it jogs me out of the experience. To say nothing of the fact that it won't age well.”
Stuart paused for a moment and then regarded Jeff. “What the fuck was I just talking about?”
Jeff laughed, “I'm not sure.”
“Yeah, me neither.” Stuart took a drink of a soda. He said he didn't drink around his kids. It occurred to Jeff that looking inside the recycling bin under the carport could ruin a lot of illusions for them. “What do you think of my kids?”
Jeff nodded, without saying anything.
“Yup, they sure are kids,” Stuart agreed.
“You ever put them in your books?”
“What do you think?”
“I think there really aren't kids in your books.”
“True. I try not to put real people in my books at all. It gives people an excuse to look into your books for deeper psychological meaning, am I talking about my cocaine problem or my abusive childhood as opposed to just telling a story? Once you get caught mining your real life for details, people start looking for them everywhere.”
Jeff consider this for a moment and then opened his mouth.
“Sorry,” Stuart interrupted him, “I should clarify that. Couple things: I totally lied, I mine stuff from real life all the time. However, I don't take things such as they are. Of course, I already told you I put Wally in a book, but it wasn't him as such, the guy didn't look like him or really act like him except for the fact that he was gay and a betraying coward.”
Jeff nodded.
“But yes, in that way, now that I think about it, my kids are in my books. One book, anyway. The two hit men in Weapon were based on the way my kids treated each other that year. Riley couldn't stand to have her around most of the time, until he wanted something or needed something and even then Vanessa could never say no to him. It was so fucked up. So that became part of the characters of Zip and Sky.
“But I'll tell you what I steal the most. Personalities I make up most of the time, because I deal with so many gray areas and unnatural things that it's easier, to be honest, to just pull stuff out of my ass. But what I steal all the damn time is ticks.”
“Like what?”
Stuart reached up with his left hand and began to caress his ear, starting about halfway up and sliding his thumb and forefinger down to the earlobe. He repeated this several times.
“Durance,” Jeff said, automatically.
“He's the guy that just about everybody remembers. Part of that's because I liked writing him so much I put him in several books, partly it's because he's such a dirtbag, and partly it's because of that tick. I dunno why it stuck so well for so many readers, but just one detail like that is all it takes, sometimes.
“Now, tell me what Durance look like,” Stuart said.
“Well he...” Jeff considered. The darkest, meanest villain in the Wilcox books and he was having trouble remembering, even though he'd jumped right to the character in his mind with Stuart aping that gesture. “You never say, do you?”
Stuart nodded and smiled. “Exactly. My characters, I draw an outline on a piece of paper and hand it to you with some crayons to fill in. You'll remember them better if you make it up yourself. I tell you that Durance does this thing, that he's evil, that he has dark hair, a big nose, a nice suit, and he's fat. That's it. After that, you're on your own.
“And people go crazy. He's a fan favorite, so I get notes about him most often, but people tell me all the time they know people who look exactly like my characters or that such and such a celebrity would be perfect to play so and so in the movie. Who would you pick for Durance?”
“Harvey Keitel,” Jeff said, without needing to think about it.
“Solid choice. What's worse, I can't tell you what I actually think Durance looks like, if you can believe that.”
Jeff shook his head.
“I read a critique of those fucking Twilight books,” Stuart continued. “It said that one of the reasons why they were so popular is the girl character barely exists. She's simply a characterless template that any girl reader can put herself in the place of. It's your story. And it worked remarkably well, clearly.
“So obviously, I do that a little bit. Not so you'll fill in the blanks with yourself, but with your experience. So when you tell me that Durance looks like your uncle, I generally assume it means you don't think too fucking much of your uncle.”
“What else?”
“I saw a guy walking down the street once with this weird, twisting gait. My conclusion was that he must be missing a leg, that this was the way he walked with his false one, and that gave birth, almost on the spot—“
“To Nuratz,” Jeff finished.
“Mmm hmm.”
“Give me another one,” Jeff said.
“Oh, no, I'm not going to ruin the magic, the illusion, and then every time you read one of my books you'll be wondering where I ripped something off from.” But he said it with a smile.
“C'mon, this is great.”
Stuart leaned back and sighed. “Let's see.” He clasped his hands together and then placed his right thumb over his left. Rapidly, he placed the left thumb on top, then the right, then the left, twiddling them meticulously.
“Stark,” Jeff said.
“My college roommate,” Stuart answered. “And that's all! Now, the truth is, this is always here to find. You look into the way a guy writes enough, you'll find his bugaboos, his cheats, where he gets his material. Could be that one guy sits on a street corner, slaps a character together with her face, his ears, those shoulders, and that voice. Beats me. There's enough writers in the world that I'm sure we all have a different way of getting there. But I listen and watch for those shorthand things, those cheats that will immediately tell you what kind of a person you're dealing with.
“I tell you there's this frail old man, skin so light it's almost blue, very thin, with intense eyes, but he walks like a young man, determined, with long strides, what do you get?'
Jeff shook his head. “I don't know.”
“Well, in Tomb, you get the sorcerer who has managed to keep himself alive well past his expiration date. He has the body of the old man but the energy of a younger one. And he has a tick you will remember, believe me.
“You try one,” Stuart said.
“What?”
“Go on, give it a shot.”
“Uh...” Jeff's thoughts ran wild.
“Remember, less is more.”
“Right. Thirty-year-old woman. Missing part of her left ear. Scar tissue on her neck. Drags her left foot just a little.”
“There you go. I already know what she's wearing and what color her hair is. What happened to her?”
“Bomb blast ten years before.”
“There you go! Now what did you steal?”
“Her walk. It's from a college professor I had.”
“Excellent. I'll give you another example. Murray, the guy that I based on Wally. That bad eye? I saw it on a guy in line at the drug store one day and I could not get it out of my head. I didn't have to give him anything more than that. He was the creepy guy with the fucked up eye and you remembered that.”
“How is it that easy?”
“Ha! You think this is easy? Trying doing it 50 times a book, more. No, sometimes it's not hard, but sometimes you find such a good mannerism or character quality that you have to force yourself not to use it again.
“I mean, all of this stuff is just an easy way to communicate something to your audience. Think of all the visual shortcuts that we have: Stop and go signs, engagement rings, electric guitars, black leather jackets, I guess basically anything you can think of that says 'cool,' for that matter.”
“Tattoos!”
“Fuck, yeah. What kind of assumptions do you automatically make about someone with a tattoo? Completely different ones if it's a tramp stamp versus the Marine Corp seal on their shoulder, but we leap to conclusions. This is just more of the same, letting one part of the brain make associations while the other part is taking in the story. To me, there is no better way of derailing a book than by trying to go into too much detail.”
The two men had been caught up in their experiment, leaning close to each other, getting drawn into the conversation. They took a moment and caught their breath.
“Mac did that, you know,” Stuart said, quietly. “It was one of the things I noticed about his writing that I didn't like.”
“What?”
“He tried to show me everything. He tried to paint all these word pictures so I knew exactly where I was and exactly what was going on. If you tell me the paint in the bathroom is peeling, I can figure the rest of it out for myself, you know? Lead me to the water and let me drink my own damn self.
“That's a big difference between movies and books. In a movie, you want to show me instead of telling me. If you tell me, it'll be boring. In a book, you need to tell instead of show. That way I can fill the details in for myself. It's better to say there's a horrifying smell in the air and hint as to what's in it than to try to describe it precisely, because your reader may not have the imagination to follow you, but they've smelled some bad things in their time, I promise you that.”
Jeff nodded. Once or twice in the past few days he had noticed the smell in the basement again, particularly this afternoon after they brought the kids back to the house. The smell wasn't worse, he just noticed it more after an absence. When he smelled it again, he often thought of Mac, even though he knew now that they were not connected. They had not talked about Mac since Stuart had finally told him the truth. He hadn't thought about him much either, but the smell from earlier and the reminder of Mac's writing now made Jeff wonder what had happened. Had he really gone nuts? Had he actually tried to kill himself or was it an accident? Where had the pills come from?
“I didn't bring him up for that, Jeff,” Stuart said, gently.
“Hmm?” Jeff came back to the conversation.
“I know the questions you're asking, and I can only tell you one way to answer them, the only way that's ever worked for me, anyway.”
“What's that?”
“Put it in a book.”
And Jeff's mind flashed then to Danny's Dime and the possibilities rose up before him.
Stuart grinned, understanding where the younger man's mind had gone.
The children were inside watching a movie as Jeff and Victor cleaned up. Dinner had been hamburgers, grilled by Riley himself. Once the kitchen and the dining room table were cleared, the two men retreated outside as Los Angeles sank into the ocean on the television.
“You ever see that movie?” Stuart asked.
“Yup.”
“It's retarded, right?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“But you don't realize it until after the movie is over. It's a great trick. It's how Dan Brown has a career, because Christ only knows the guy can't write a paragraph to save his ass, but the motherfucker can pace within an inch of his life. Everything takes place with a ticking clock, hurry-hurry-hurry, and you get so pulled into the urgency that you don't think about how ridiculous it is. Same thing with the movie. I don't do that a lot, but when you need your reader to buy something that's a bit iffy, toss it in a place where they don't have time to think about it.
“And don't break that illusion, ever ever. If there's one thing I hate in movies and books, is breaking the illusion. In books especially. Take a dig at George Bush if you must, but have a character do it, in character. As soon as I know that the writer is talking directly to me, his reader, taking a stand on whatever, it jogs me out of the experience. To say nothing of the fact that it won't age well.”
Stuart paused for a moment and then regarded Jeff. “What the fuck was I just talking about?”
Jeff laughed, “I'm not sure.”
“Yeah, me neither.” Stuart took a drink of a soda. He said he didn't drink around his kids. It occurred to Jeff that looking inside the recycling bin under the carport could ruin a lot of illusions for them. “What do you think of my kids?”
Jeff nodded, without saying anything.
“Yup, they sure are kids,” Stuart agreed.
“You ever put them in your books?”
“What do you think?”
“I think there really aren't kids in your books.”
“True. I try not to put real people in my books at all. It gives people an excuse to look into your books for deeper psychological meaning, am I talking about my cocaine problem or my abusive childhood as opposed to just telling a story? Once you get caught mining your real life for details, people start looking for them everywhere.”
Jeff consider this for a moment and then opened his mouth.
“Sorry,” Stuart interrupted him, “I should clarify that. Couple things: I totally lied, I mine stuff from real life all the time. However, I don't take things such as they are. Of course, I already told you I put Wally in a book, but it wasn't him as such, the guy didn't look like him or really act like him except for the fact that he was gay and a betraying coward.”
Jeff nodded.
“But yes, in that way, now that I think about it, my kids are in my books. One book, anyway. The two hit men in Weapon were based on the way my kids treated each other that year. Riley couldn't stand to have her around most of the time, until he wanted something or needed something and even then Vanessa could never say no to him. It was so fucked up. So that became part of the characters of Zip and Sky.
“But I'll tell you what I steal the most. Personalities I make up most of the time, because I deal with so many gray areas and unnatural things that it's easier, to be honest, to just pull stuff out of my ass. But what I steal all the damn time is ticks.”
“Like what?”
Stuart reached up with his left hand and began to caress his ear, starting about halfway up and sliding his thumb and forefinger down to the earlobe. He repeated this several times.
“Durance,” Jeff said, automatically.
“He's the guy that just about everybody remembers. Part of that's because I liked writing him so much I put him in several books, partly it's because he's such a dirtbag, and partly it's because of that tick. I dunno why it stuck so well for so many readers, but just one detail like that is all it takes, sometimes.
“Now, tell me what Durance look like,” Stuart said.
“Well he...” Jeff considered. The darkest, meanest villain in the Wilcox books and he was having trouble remembering, even though he'd jumped right to the character in his mind with Stuart aping that gesture. “You never say, do you?”
Stuart nodded and smiled. “Exactly. My characters, I draw an outline on a piece of paper and hand it to you with some crayons to fill in. You'll remember them better if you make it up yourself. I tell you that Durance does this thing, that he's evil, that he has dark hair, a big nose, a nice suit, and he's fat. That's it. After that, you're on your own.
“And people go crazy. He's a fan favorite, so I get notes about him most often, but people tell me all the time they know people who look exactly like my characters or that such and such a celebrity would be perfect to play so and so in the movie. Who would you pick for Durance?”
“Harvey Keitel,” Jeff said, without needing to think about it.
“Solid choice. What's worse, I can't tell you what I actually think Durance looks like, if you can believe that.”
Jeff shook his head.
“I read a critique of those fucking Twilight books,” Stuart continued. “It said that one of the reasons why they were so popular is the girl character barely exists. She's simply a characterless template that any girl reader can put herself in the place of. It's your story. And it worked remarkably well, clearly.
“So obviously, I do that a little bit. Not so you'll fill in the blanks with yourself, but with your experience. So when you tell me that Durance looks like your uncle, I generally assume it means you don't think too fucking much of your uncle.”
“What else?”
“I saw a guy walking down the street once with this weird, twisting gait. My conclusion was that he must be missing a leg, that this was the way he walked with his false one, and that gave birth, almost on the spot—“
“To Nuratz,” Jeff finished.
“Mmm hmm.”
“Give me another one,” Jeff said.
“Oh, no, I'm not going to ruin the magic, the illusion, and then every time you read one of my books you'll be wondering where I ripped something off from.” But he said it with a smile.
“C'mon, this is great.”
Stuart leaned back and sighed. “Let's see.” He clasped his hands together and then placed his right thumb over his left. Rapidly, he placed the left thumb on top, then the right, then the left, twiddling them meticulously.
“Stark,” Jeff said.
“My college roommate,” Stuart answered. “And that's all! Now, the truth is, this is always here to find. You look into the way a guy writes enough, you'll find his bugaboos, his cheats, where he gets his material. Could be that one guy sits on a street corner, slaps a character together with her face, his ears, those shoulders, and that voice. Beats me. There's enough writers in the world that I'm sure we all have a different way of getting there. But I listen and watch for those shorthand things, those cheats that will immediately tell you what kind of a person you're dealing with.
“I tell you there's this frail old man, skin so light it's almost blue, very thin, with intense eyes, but he walks like a young man, determined, with long strides, what do you get?'
Jeff shook his head. “I don't know.”
“Well, in Tomb, you get the sorcerer who has managed to keep himself alive well past his expiration date. He has the body of the old man but the energy of a younger one. And he has a tick you will remember, believe me.
“You try one,” Stuart said.
“What?”
“Go on, give it a shot.”
“Uh...” Jeff's thoughts ran wild.
“Remember, less is more.”
“Right. Thirty-year-old woman. Missing part of her left ear. Scar tissue on her neck. Drags her left foot just a little.”
“There you go. I already know what she's wearing and what color her hair is. What happened to her?”
“Bomb blast ten years before.”
“There you go! Now what did you steal?”
“Her walk. It's from a college professor I had.”
“Excellent. I'll give you another example. Murray, the guy that I based on Wally. That bad eye? I saw it on a guy in line at the drug store one day and I could not get it out of my head. I didn't have to give him anything more than that. He was the creepy guy with the fucked up eye and you remembered that.”
“How is it that easy?”
“Ha! You think this is easy? Trying doing it 50 times a book, more. No, sometimes it's not hard, but sometimes you find such a good mannerism or character quality that you have to force yourself not to use it again.
“I mean, all of this stuff is just an easy way to communicate something to your audience. Think of all the visual shortcuts that we have: Stop and go signs, engagement rings, electric guitars, black leather jackets, I guess basically anything you can think of that says 'cool,' for that matter.”
“Tattoos!”
“Fuck, yeah. What kind of assumptions do you automatically make about someone with a tattoo? Completely different ones if it's a tramp stamp versus the Marine Corp seal on their shoulder, but we leap to conclusions. This is just more of the same, letting one part of the brain make associations while the other part is taking in the story. To me, there is no better way of derailing a book than by trying to go into too much detail.”
The two men had been caught up in their experiment, leaning close to each other, getting drawn into the conversation. They took a moment and caught their breath.
“Mac did that, you know,” Stuart said, quietly. “It was one of the things I noticed about his writing that I didn't like.”
“What?”
“He tried to show me everything. He tried to paint all these word pictures so I knew exactly where I was and exactly what was going on. If you tell me the paint in the bathroom is peeling, I can figure the rest of it out for myself, you know? Lead me to the water and let me drink my own damn self.
“That's a big difference between movies and books. In a movie, you want to show me instead of telling me. If you tell me, it'll be boring. In a book, you need to tell instead of show. That way I can fill the details in for myself. It's better to say there's a horrifying smell in the air and hint as to what's in it than to try to describe it precisely, because your reader may not have the imagination to follow you, but they've smelled some bad things in their time, I promise you that.”
Jeff nodded. Once or twice in the past few days he had noticed the smell in the basement again, particularly this afternoon after they brought the kids back to the house. The smell wasn't worse, he just noticed it more after an absence. When he smelled it again, he often thought of Mac, even though he knew now that they were not connected. They had not talked about Mac since Stuart had finally told him the truth. He hadn't thought about him much either, but the smell from earlier and the reminder of Mac's writing now made Jeff wonder what had happened. Had he really gone nuts? Had he actually tried to kill himself or was it an accident? Where had the pills come from?
“I didn't bring him up for that, Jeff,” Stuart said, gently.
“Hmm?” Jeff came back to the conversation.
“I know the questions you're asking, and I can only tell you one way to answer them, the only way that's ever worked for me, anyway.”
“What's that?”
“Put it in a book.”
And Jeff's mind flashed then to Danny's Dime and the possibilities rose up before him.
Stuart grinned, understanding where the younger man's mind had gone.
Monday, February 1, 2010
The Author, Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Kids
July 1
Neither of the men had risen this early all summer. The author looked truly unhealthy for the first time, slumped in the passenger seat of the Land Rover. They had stopped for coffee and sausage biscuits at McDonalds on the way south, and Stuart had barely touched his food. He was wearing sunglasses to cut against the bright early morning sun. Jeff thought at first that the man was simply hung over, as one would expect, but the further they drove, the more poorly he looked. Jeff concluded that the older man simply wasn't a good passenger and was getting motion sick.
“You okay?” Jeff asked.
Stuart gave a barely perceptible nod and left it at that.
Jeff exited the highway for the airport and a few minutes later the car was stopped and the sunlight was blocked by an overhang.
Stuart looked at the dashboard clock. “Be a few more minutes,” he said. Jeff killed the engine and sipped his coffee. Stuart wrapped his arms around himself as if he were cold and slumped back against his window.
They had gotten up just before 7 a.m. Jeff had gone to sleep just after midnight, after an hour of reading Plague (the seventh Wilcox novel, but Stuart's eighth, he always reminded himself) and two hours of writing on Danny's Dime. It was still coming together and Jeff was amazed, expecting the story to slip away like a squirmy fish every time he sat down to continue working on the book. But it had not yet done so.
Stuart had, of course, stayed up writing, perhaps trying to make up for the fact that he didn't expect to get much work done with his children around. Jeff hadn't asked, but had assumed the man had not gotten much sleep at all. He thought that perhaps it would have been better for the kids if their father didn't look like a walking coma patient, but the further Stuart got into his story, the less inclined he was to take a break from it. It had started going well again.
The clock said 10 minutes had passed since the plane landed, so Jeff called Stuart back from whatever half-conscious state he was in. The writer went to go find his children, leaving Jeff alone, fiddling with the radio.
His fantasy of the children loving him and being an uncle figure to them and all that silliness had evaporated some time before. The reality of his experience at Stuart's house had forced out most of his illusions. He didn't have much of an opinion on kids. He didn't like the small ones that always seemed to be sticky, but he had a high opinion of himself as a twelve-year-old, being well-spoken, a reader, communicative, so it seemed fair to hope that these kids would be in the same vein. One could only hope.
A knock at the back door of the Rover brought him to his senses, so he jumped out to help with the luggage. He lifted the girl's small pink rolling suitcase in first, then the boy's larger, manlier bag. Then there were introductions.
The girl, Vanessa, was young enough to still be at the age of a complete lack of self-consciousness. She brightly greeted Jeff and then went to hop into car. She was wearing shorts, showing off legs that looked too long for her, and her hair was pulled back in a loose braid.
Riley, the fourteen-year-old, was enough of a teenager to be suspicious, but not enough of one to be an outright dick. He was wearing scruffy jeans and an All American Rejects t-shirt. He had shaggy hair that sloped across his forehead which was probably supposed to make him look older, but instead made him look as if he were wearing his older brother's hair. He shoved it out of his eyes and held out his hand like a good little man.
“I'm Jeff.”
“'Sup?”
Riley was headed for his seat when Jeff got the author's attention.
“Would you feel better if you drove? You don't look so hot.”
“Nah, I'll be fine. Let's just get home.”
So they drove home, stopping for fish and chips at Salty's on Alki Drive. When they were finished, they crossed to the beach and Vanessa squealed with laughter as she fed leftover bits of french fries to seagulls. Riley threw rocks into the water and kept an eye on two 20-ish girls who were sunbathing. One was face down with her strap undone to avoid tan lines, and Jeff had a good idea that, at fourteen, the idea of such a thing was very distracting to the kid.
The fourth itself was on a Sunday and while it was only Thursday, the beach was already getting crowded. The wait at Salty's had been annoying long, and the small dining area had been packed with too many people.
“Gonna be a fucking zoo out here this weekend, let me tell you,” Stuart said. He was still sipping at his soda and seemed to be feeling a bit better with some food in his stomach.
“It gets pretty bad, huh?”
“Standing room only. Then at night, for the fireworks, you'll barely be able to see the beach for all the people. And the traffic. Jesus Christ.”
That lead to talk of their own plans. Come Sunday evening, they would all troop out to a boat that Stuart had rented for the evening and sit out on Puget Sound to watch the fireworks. Seattle's would be the biggest, but several other community's celebrations would also be visible. “We did it last year and the kids really dug it,” he said. “Should be a good time. You said you've never been out on a boat before, right?”
“Well, canoes and the ferry.”
Stuart nodded and watched his kids. Vanessa had tried to take her flip flops off, realized how hot the sand was, and then put them back on. Riley had surreptitiously moved a bit closer to the sunbathers and Jeff remembered what that was like: Desperately hoping to be noticed, terrified that you would be, not having any idea what you'd do after that.
“Okay!” Stuart yelled, standing up. Vanessa quickly trotted up, but Riley's course brought him on a ragged trajectory, making sure that his father knew that he wasn't going to come right away like some kind of dog.
Once they were in the Land Rover, Stuart turned to check on his kids. “Seat belt, you little punk,” he said to his son with affection, pointing at the kid's lap. “Now!” he said, his voice dominant in the small space of the car. “Boo wants ice cream?”
“Boo!” Vanessa yelled immediately. Jeff watched in the rearview mirror as Stuart turned his attention to his son again.
“Does boo not want ice cream? I think boo does. Does boo? Does boo want ice cream?” Eventually the boy's mien cracked at the author's ridiculous baby talk and he said his own boo very quietly. Stuart turned back in his seat and pointed his arm forward. “Boo!” he cried, and Jeff pulled into traffic to take them to the old-fashioned soda fountain on the top of the hill.
“Boo,” he said to himself.
Stuart still didn't look well, but he looked much better than he had when they'd been at the airport. Jeff wondered if it was just driving on the highway, recalling that he'd been a fine passenger when they'd first met and gone to breakfast. The day the son of a bitch had pointed a gun at him, he recalled.
“What's funny?” Vanessa asked from the back seat and Jeff realized he must have been smiling.
“Your daddy is funny,” Jeff replied. “I was just thinking of something silly he did.”
Vanessa reached over the chair in front of her and ruffled her father's hair. “Silly daddy,” she sang.
“Yup,” Stuart acknowledged. “Very silly.”
Neither of the men had risen this early all summer. The author looked truly unhealthy for the first time, slumped in the passenger seat of the Land Rover. They had stopped for coffee and sausage biscuits at McDonalds on the way south, and Stuart had barely touched his food. He was wearing sunglasses to cut against the bright early morning sun. Jeff thought at first that the man was simply hung over, as one would expect, but the further they drove, the more poorly he looked. Jeff concluded that the older man simply wasn't a good passenger and was getting motion sick.
“You okay?” Jeff asked.
Stuart gave a barely perceptible nod and left it at that.
Jeff exited the highway for the airport and a few minutes later the car was stopped and the sunlight was blocked by an overhang.
Stuart looked at the dashboard clock. “Be a few more minutes,” he said. Jeff killed the engine and sipped his coffee. Stuart wrapped his arms around himself as if he were cold and slumped back against his window.
They had gotten up just before 7 a.m. Jeff had gone to sleep just after midnight, after an hour of reading Plague (the seventh Wilcox novel, but Stuart's eighth, he always reminded himself) and two hours of writing on Danny's Dime. It was still coming together and Jeff was amazed, expecting the story to slip away like a squirmy fish every time he sat down to continue working on the book. But it had not yet done so.
Stuart had, of course, stayed up writing, perhaps trying to make up for the fact that he didn't expect to get much work done with his children around. Jeff hadn't asked, but had assumed the man had not gotten much sleep at all. He thought that perhaps it would have been better for the kids if their father didn't look like a walking coma patient, but the further Stuart got into his story, the less inclined he was to take a break from it. It had started going well again.
The clock said 10 minutes had passed since the plane landed, so Jeff called Stuart back from whatever half-conscious state he was in. The writer went to go find his children, leaving Jeff alone, fiddling with the radio.
His fantasy of the children loving him and being an uncle figure to them and all that silliness had evaporated some time before. The reality of his experience at Stuart's house had forced out most of his illusions. He didn't have much of an opinion on kids. He didn't like the small ones that always seemed to be sticky, but he had a high opinion of himself as a twelve-year-old, being well-spoken, a reader, communicative, so it seemed fair to hope that these kids would be in the same vein. One could only hope.
A knock at the back door of the Rover brought him to his senses, so he jumped out to help with the luggage. He lifted the girl's small pink rolling suitcase in first, then the boy's larger, manlier bag. Then there were introductions.
The girl, Vanessa, was young enough to still be at the age of a complete lack of self-consciousness. She brightly greeted Jeff and then went to hop into car. She was wearing shorts, showing off legs that looked too long for her, and her hair was pulled back in a loose braid.
Riley, the fourteen-year-old, was enough of a teenager to be suspicious, but not enough of one to be an outright dick. He was wearing scruffy jeans and an All American Rejects t-shirt. He had shaggy hair that sloped across his forehead which was probably supposed to make him look older, but instead made him look as if he were wearing his older brother's hair. He shoved it out of his eyes and held out his hand like a good little man.
“I'm Jeff.”
“'Sup?”
Riley was headed for his seat when Jeff got the author's attention.
“Would you feel better if you drove? You don't look so hot.”
“Nah, I'll be fine. Let's just get home.”
So they drove home, stopping for fish and chips at Salty's on Alki Drive. When they were finished, they crossed to the beach and Vanessa squealed with laughter as she fed leftover bits of french fries to seagulls. Riley threw rocks into the water and kept an eye on two 20-ish girls who were sunbathing. One was face down with her strap undone to avoid tan lines, and Jeff had a good idea that, at fourteen, the idea of such a thing was very distracting to the kid.
The fourth itself was on a Sunday and while it was only Thursday, the beach was already getting crowded. The wait at Salty's had been annoying long, and the small dining area had been packed with too many people.
“Gonna be a fucking zoo out here this weekend, let me tell you,” Stuart said. He was still sipping at his soda and seemed to be feeling a bit better with some food in his stomach.
“It gets pretty bad, huh?”
“Standing room only. Then at night, for the fireworks, you'll barely be able to see the beach for all the people. And the traffic. Jesus Christ.”
That lead to talk of their own plans. Come Sunday evening, they would all troop out to a boat that Stuart had rented for the evening and sit out on Puget Sound to watch the fireworks. Seattle's would be the biggest, but several other community's celebrations would also be visible. “We did it last year and the kids really dug it,” he said. “Should be a good time. You said you've never been out on a boat before, right?”
“Well, canoes and the ferry.”
Stuart nodded and watched his kids. Vanessa had tried to take her flip flops off, realized how hot the sand was, and then put them back on. Riley had surreptitiously moved a bit closer to the sunbathers and Jeff remembered what that was like: Desperately hoping to be noticed, terrified that you would be, not having any idea what you'd do after that.
“Okay!” Stuart yelled, standing up. Vanessa quickly trotted up, but Riley's course brought him on a ragged trajectory, making sure that his father knew that he wasn't going to come right away like some kind of dog.
Once they were in the Land Rover, Stuart turned to check on his kids. “Seat belt, you little punk,” he said to his son with affection, pointing at the kid's lap. “Now!” he said, his voice dominant in the small space of the car. “Boo wants ice cream?”
“Boo!” Vanessa yelled immediately. Jeff watched in the rearview mirror as Stuart turned his attention to his son again.
“Does boo not want ice cream? I think boo does. Does boo? Does boo want ice cream?” Eventually the boy's mien cracked at the author's ridiculous baby talk and he said his own boo very quietly. Stuart turned back in his seat and pointed his arm forward. “Boo!” he cried, and Jeff pulled into traffic to take them to the old-fashioned soda fountain on the top of the hill.
“Boo,” he said to himself.
Stuart still didn't look well, but he looked much better than he had when they'd been at the airport. Jeff wondered if it was just driving on the highway, recalling that he'd been a fine passenger when they'd first met and gone to breakfast. The day the son of a bitch had pointed a gun at him, he recalled.
“What's funny?” Vanessa asked from the back seat and Jeff realized he must have been smiling.
“Your daddy is funny,” Jeff replied. “I was just thinking of something silly he did.”
Vanessa reached over the chair in front of her and ruffled her father's hair. “Silly daddy,” she sang.
“Yup,” Stuart acknowledged. “Very silly.”
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