Collection 1980 - Yondering (v5.0) (23 page)

There are adventure stories. You sit deep in a soft chair and read about some poor devil lost in the desert, or living precariously on some lonely island on a diet of gull’s eggs, shellfish, and coconuts, and you call that adventure. Or you read about some lug getting himself shot at and missed.

You imagine yourself rescuing some seductive damsel in distress (usually clad in as little as your imagination will allow) and being the dashing hero. You forget that the gal you rescued would probably sue you for spoiling her new hat, getting a run in her nylons, or for breach of promise…if you got far enough to make any promises you could breach.

That beautiful damsel would probably move into your life, quaff your last bottle of Scotch, smoke your cigarettes, and look at you through the smoke…and then vanish into the night with your watch, shirt studs, and the thirty bucks you won in that crap game.

Anybody can have adventure. Formerly, I believed one had to have the adventure-type mind, a slightly screwball attitude that keeps you doing the irresponsible, unexpected thing, the wrong thing at the wrong time. Now I know that’s a lot of malarkey.

You want adventure? Walk down to the corner and kick a cop in the teeth. You’ll get it.

When you are having adventure, it is always a pain in the neck. When you tell about it afterward, it becomes all glamour and romance. Not that you need to enlarge on the tale, but it always looks different to a man in an armchair with a drink in his hand, and that’s probably the way you’ll have your listener.

Take tonight. I could have a dozen adventures. The time is nine o’clock in the evening. The town is Rouen, France. Roughly 125,000 population, a seaport on the Seine River about 40 miles, as the crow flies, from the sea, almost twice that by river.

The town is still picking up the pieces from that bombing, so when you walk along the streets, every once in a while you come upon a bunch of ruins, looking like the stump of a decayed tooth.

Except, that is, for the waterfront. The whole waterfront could stand a new denture. When they bombed the harbor installations and buildings close by they weren’t kidding.

So this is Rouen. You walk out of an Allied Troop movie and cross a lighted street and start to walk. Ahead there is a café. Of course, if you go in there, you could have your adventure. You could decide that blonde in the corner wanted to be rescued from the sailor, that big sailor sitting with her.

You could order a drink, lean an elbow on the bar, then turn slowly and give him a look through slitted eyes, sneering and looking him slowly up and down. If that doesn’t do it, and it will unless he is a Quaker, or gifted with Job’s own patience, you can dash your drink in his eyes or slap him across the mouth with your gloves. And if there is anything that will arouse concentrated mayhem in a man, it is a slap across the mouth with a pair of gloves.

The only bad angle to that sort of adventure is that you’d probably be looking at everybody through slitted eyes for the next two weeks. Slitted eyes with large areas of blue and black around them.

Or you could take that street. That dark one. It is narrow and black, and when you turn into that narrow crevice between the buildings, you seem to start down, plunging deeper and deeper into some nether world from which there will be no escape. The buildings seem to lean toward each other for support, almost shutting out the sky.

Your footsteps will echo hollowly on the cobblestones. Then you hear footsteps approaching (what the hell would you expect, somebody walking on his hands?) and you flatten against the buildings. As the girl draws near, you lean out and say in a sepulchral tone: “Come with me to the Casbah!”

Nine chances out of ten she’ll say, “That’ll be two thousand francs, bud!”

Supposing it is the tenth chance. Supposing she suddenly screams for the cops. What then? Why then, my boy, you have an adventure, and brother, it will be a honey!

If you know your adventure, however, you are not at a loss. You will wheel instantly and dart into the door behind you. (How did it get there? Friend, it
had
to be there!) and race up the stairs. You will escape over the roofs, you will…you dart into a room and a woman screams, then there is a roar from her husband. He isn’t bellowing because he thinks you’re assaulting his wife, but he wants to sleep. Can’t a man ever get any rest around here? The fact that you now have against you a charge of breaking and entering means nothing.

You race to the room. You never make a mistake and get the blind hallways. That wouldn’t do at all. You race to the roof. And then you find there is no other roof closeby, but you are not disturbed. You merely knot together your necktie, both socks, your coat, and two old clotheslines, to say nothing of the shoestring on which you began all this, and then you lower yourself to the ground.

Instantly, you wheel and dart into an alleyway. You run to a lighted street, brush the dust off your clothes, and head for the nearest café to pick up another coat. Once garbed in the new coat (and getting it may lead to still another adventure), you walk back on the street. If the owner of the new coat pursues you, glare at him in your most supercilious manner and say, “Why, my good man, you are in error! This coat was made for me by our old family tailors, the brothers Twigger, of Twirling on the Tweed!” And then walk on ignoring him. Better still, walk away in high dudgeon. If there’s anything that floors a man, it’s high dudgeon.

So, for a few simple formulas for adventures:

Don’t hesitate to butt into other people’s business.

Never accept things at face value. Remember Don Quixote.

If you see a man walking down the street with a beautiful girl, don’t accept the fact that she goes willingly. He may have a gun in his pocket. Don’t hesitate to walk right up and accuse him. You’ll have adventure!

Let Me Forget…

Let me forget the dark seas rolling,
The taste of wind, the lure and lift
Of far, blue-shrouded shores;
No longer let the wild wind’s singing
Build high the waves in this
My heart’s own storm;
Now let me quietly work, for I have songs.

Let not my blood beat answer to the sea…
The beaches lie alone, so let them lie.
Let me forget the gray-banked distant hills,
The echoing emptiness of ancient towns;
No longer let the brown leaves falling
Move me to wander…I have songs to sing.

Afterword

D
AD SAID HE felt that he had lived two lives, each one full of success and failure and each almost long enough to satisfy most men. He left home to work partway through the tenth grade and his wanderlust—a very appropriate word in his case—kept him traveling until he was almost forty. At that time he decided that there had been too much water under the bridge and he’d better settle down and make a living as a writer.

The material for the stories in this book came from that twenty-three-year period between leaving his parents’ home and finding one of his own. The short poems at the beginning and end of this collection are a good indication of how he felt at the beginning and later the ending of this period.

Two years ago, only a couple of months before Dad caught pneumonia (an early indication of his cancer), Dad and I were on our way back from Hovenweep, Utah after a photo session for the jacket of
The Haunted Mesa
. We were racketing along a washboarded dirt road when Dad saw a dim trail cutting off across the top of the mesa. “Let’s see where it goes,” he said. I shifted into four-wheel drive and we spent the next hour fighting the red Utah sand out to a broken windmill in the middle of nowhere. Even at seventy-eight years old, Louis L’Amour could give his heart, freely, to a bend in the road.

B
EAU
L
’
A
MOUR

Thanksgiving Afternoon 1988

About Louis L’Amour

“I think of myself in the oral tradition—

as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man

in the shadows of the campfire. That’s the way

I’d like to be remembered as a storyteller.

A good storyteller.”

I
T IS DOUBTFUL that any author could be as at home in the world re-created in his novels as Louis Dearborn L’Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally “walked the land my characters walk.” His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L’Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.

Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L’Amour could trace his own family in North America back to the early 1600s and follow their steady progression westward, “always on the frontier.” As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family’s frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.

Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L’Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, miner, and an officer in the transportation corps during World War II. During his “yondering” days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.

Mr. L’Amour “wanted to write almost from the time I could talk.” After developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L’Amour published his first full-length novel,
Hondo
, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 120 books is in print; there are nearly 270 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the best-selling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.

His hardcover bestsellers include
The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum
(his twelfth-century historical novel),
Yondering, Last of the Breed
, and
The Haunted Mesa
. His memoir,
Education of a Wandering Man
, was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L’Amour stories are available on cassette tapes from Bantam Audio publishing.

The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L’Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life’s work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.

Louis L’Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L’Amour publishing tradition forward.

Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour

NOVELS

Bendigo Shafter

Borden Chantry

Brionne

The Broken Gun

The Burning Hills

The Californios

Callaghen

Catlow

Chancy

The Cherokee Trail

Comstock Lode

Conagher

Crossfire Trail

Dark Canyon

Down the Long Hills

The Empty Land

Fair Blows the Wind

Fallon

The Ferguson Rifle

The First Fast Draw

Flint

Guns of the Timberlands

Hanging Woman Creek

The Haunted Mesa

Heller with a Gun

The High Graders

High Lonesome

Hondo

How the West Was Won

The Iron Marshal

The Key-Lock Man

Kid Rodelo

Kilkenny

Killoe