Huckleberry Fiend (13 page)

“A Mark Twain museum in Virginia City— there’s a novel idea.” Laughter again, and again that left-out feeling.

But no matter. A man who had had his name legally changed to Tom Sawyer! I was still reeling from that. “He certainly sounds likely. Is anyone in touch with him? Is he still collecting?”

Marcia Dunlap spoke up. “Oh, yes. I’m a collector and I’ve corresponded with him from time to time. He’s fanatical.”

“So I gather. I don’t know how you can top that, but are there any other biggies I should know about?”

The bald old man tapped his cane on the floor. “Tom Sawyer’s your man.”

Linda wanted to go for a drink, but I didn’t trust myself. The time had arrived to come clean. “Sorry. I’ve got to get home. I’m expected.”

“You’re married? I should have known.”

“Just involved. But—”

“Stop! You’re about to say it.”

“About to say what?”

“Arrgh. ‘Let’s be friends’.”

I was taken aback. “You mean we can’t? I thought you liked me for myself.”

“Oh, sure we can— I do like you. I’m sick of those three words, that’s all. I wish just once someone would come along and say, ‘Let’s run away together’.”

There’s a lot of free-floating passion in the academic world— probably because of all those healthy young bodies.

It was too bad about Linda, but I really didn’t want to blow things with Sardis. I’d gone through more personal anguish for her than I ever had for any woman— at least, I called it anguish; her name for it was “growing up”— and so far we were only co-property owners. I had too big an investment to split my attention now. She was a terrific woman and I was going to concentrate on her. Period.

I was so moved by my own resolve and virtue that I popped into the all-night Safeway to get her some flowers. Home again, I saw her car parked in front and her lights on, but due to circumstances completely within my control, I didn’t have a key to the damned door, so I was forced to phone first. Her machine answered. That meant she didn’t want to be disturbed, of course, but I couldn’t see how it could possibly apply to me. Nothing to do but ring the doorbell.

She was dressed as if to go out, in white pants and one of those fancy women’s T-shirts that cost fifty bucks or so. Her makeup was fresh and her hair newly blow-dried. I dropped to one knee and proffered the flowers. “Want to go out for a drink?”

“How sweet. They’re lovely. But, listen, I can’t go, I— oh, there he is now.”

Feeling like the first jerk of June, I got to my feet.

“Hi, Steve. Paul, I— this is my…”

I’d left my own door open and I ducked into it, fast, not waiting around for any goddam introductions. In case you’ve never thought about how it feels to be kneeling to a damsel when her date shows up, try it now. Go ahead. And please send your secret if you can do it without the sure and certain feeling that the top of your head is about to go speeding into the ozone.

Actually, five minutes and a glass of wine later, I was calm as a Yogi. Due to Linda and the flowers and all, I’d just overreacted. I realized I should have shaken hands like a gent. The realization sent me back to the depths.

I can act pretty childish sometimes, but this was a new low. Maybe another glass of wine.

The more I drank and sat, the more I felt the same way— insecure about Sardis. That was new, too. I used to worry about her crowding me. This business about the separate apartments must have gotten me more than I’d thought. She was right about the matter of the Fiends— it had been taking her for granted to stand her up when she’d asked me to dinner. When you got down to it, it had been downright churlish. I’d have to buy her some flowers to make up for it.

But then I remembered I already had. So what to do now? My sorrows wouldn’t drown; indeed, they seemed to thrive on Glen Ellen red. Work. That was it. What next on the Huck hunt? Well, simple. See Tom Sawyer. It was a long drive, but…

I had a brainstorm. You could probably get to Carson City in an hour if you flew, and I had a friend who lived for flying the way Sawyer apparently lived for Mark Twain. I got Crusher Wilcox on the phone.

“Crusher? Paul. I have to go to Virginia City on business. Feel like flying to Carson tomorrow?”

“That’s funny. Virginia was still a ghost town, last I heard.”

“Not your kind of business.” Crusher, who works for a multinational corporation, thinks Geneva is the sort of place you go on business. “I’ve got to interview a guy.”

“Why didn’t you say so? I’ve got a meeting at three— can we be back by then?”

“Why not?”

“See you at seven.”

That was how easy it was to get Crusher to take you anywhere a Cessna could go. I was sorry I couldn’t offer him a scarifying storm or a hair-raising landing opportunity— that would have really got his juices flowing— but it didn’t matter, in the end. He was a wild-blue-yonder junkie and didn’t care where he went so long as he didn’t do it on land. He’d once told me his nickname had something to do with his driving record, but I wasn’t sure how much that had to do with anything. All I knew was, he was obsessed.

So obsessed, in fact, that flying was his only adventure. Whenever I asked to be flown somewhere, he’d let me off at the airport and pick me up at some appointed time, pursuing aerial amusement in the meanwhile.

Before we landed in Carson, we flew over Virginia, which, in Mark Twain’s words, “roosted royally midway up the steep side of Mount Davidson, seven thousand two hundred feet above the level of the sea, and in the clear Nevada atmosphere was visible from a distance of fifty miles.”

I was up on all that because, fretting over Sardis, I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before and had ended up boning up with
Roughing It
. Seeing Virginia hours later, I almost convinced myself I’d seen a photograph of it, so vividly had the master described it: “The mountain side was so steep that the entire town had a slant to it like a roof. Each street was a terrace, and from each to the next street below the descent was forty or fifty feet… From Virginia’s airy situation one could look over a vast, far-reaching panorama of mountain ranges and deserts… Over your head Mount Davidson lifted its gray dome and before and below you a rugged canyon clove the battlemented hills, making a sombre gateway through which a soft-tinted desert was glimpsed…” How eloquently he had written of Virginia’s heyday, the “flush times,” as he called them. In truth, I could see how a person like Tom Sawyer would pick the romantic old place as his home. It was synonymous with Mark Twain at his most adventurous, and it was also important for another reason— it was the first place he’d ever used his celebrated pseudonym, in a real sense the birthplace of Mark Twain the writer.

He’d gone there at a low point in his seven-year sojourn in the West, but not, for once, in the outright search for metallic riches. Though the opulent Comstock lode was producing ton upon ton of rich silver ore, he’d been invited to work on that most colorful of frontier papers, the
Territorial Enterprise
, for twenty-five dollars a week. The job came about after he’d amused himself writing letters to the
Enterprise
, professing later always to have been surprised when they were printed. “My good opinion of the editors,” he wrote modestly, “had steadily declined” as a result.

What he found on arrival was as merry a carnival as this country has ever seen. “The sidewalks swarmed with people… The streets themselves were just as crowded… So great was the pack that buggies frequently had to wait half an hour for an opportunity to cross the principal street… Joy sat on every countenance and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in every eye, that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart. Money was as plentiful as dust and a melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen.”

Then came a list of what was available in the seething city of 18,000 people or so— “brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, ‘hurdy-gurdy houses,’ wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whisky mill every fifteen steps,” etc., etc., etc., etc., “and some talk of building a church.”

It must have been as much fun as the Haight-Ashbury in the sixties (though in a different way): “Every man owned ‘feet’ in fifty different wild cat mines and considered his fortune made. Think of a city with not one solitary poor man in it!… Money was wonderfully plenty. The trouble was, not how to get it— but how to spend it, how to lavish it, get rid of it, squander it.”

How, one might ask, did all this apply to a humble reporter on a $25 salary? It was simple— the currency of the day was mining stock and the denizens, if Twain is to be believed (and Linda McCormick says he is, mainly), were as generous as they were rich. First, there was the custom of giving stock to reporters in order to have one’s claim “noticed.” And then there was another curious social more: “If you are coming up the street with a couple of baskets of apples in your hands, and you meet a friend, you naturally invite him to take a few. That describes the condition of things in Virginia in the ‘flush times.’ Every man had his pockets full of stock, and it was the actual custom of the country to part with small quantities of it to friends without the asking.” Thus, “we received presents of ‘feet’ every day. If we needed a hundred dollars or so, we sold some; if not, we hoarded it away, satisfied that it would ultimately be worth a thousand dollars a foot.”

In such a freewheeling atmosphere, it was no wonder that Clemens learned journalism rather informally. Upon inquiring how to do the job, he was told to go all over town, ask questions, make notes, and write them up. After five hours of following instructions, he found out that no one knew anything, and once again returned for instructions. “Are there no hay wagons in from Truckee?” asked his boss.

The young cub proved a quick study. “I canvassed the city again,” he wrote, “and found one wretched old hay truck dragging in from the country. But I made affluent use of it. I multiplied it by sixteen, brought it into town from sixteen different directions, made sixteen separate items out of it, and got up such another sweat about hay as Virginia City had never seen in the world before.”

The reporter’s temperament, so much abhorred by non-newsfolk, came easy to him. After the hay extravaganza, he found things dull till a desperado killed someone and “joy returned once more… I wrote up the murder with a hungry attention to details, and when it was finished experienced but one regret— namely that they had not hanged my benefactor on the spot, so that I could work him up too.”

Finding he still had a column to fill, he heard of some emigrant wagons that had recently come through hostile Indian territory. Clemens felt he could make the story much more interesting if only reporters from other papers weren’t on it as well (a feeling I’d often had at press conferences). But, by exercising what I can only think of as territorial enterprise, he managed to find a wagon that was about to leave and whose proprietor, therefore, “would not be in the city the next day to make trouble… Having more scope here, I put this wagon through an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history.

“My two columns were filled. When I read them over in the morning I felt that I had found my legitimate occupation at last.”

I feel I should mention here that the Indian-fight story, if indeed he really wrote it, didn’t survive, though I fully expect Booker to turn it up in a burglary someday. Clemens did rather specialize in hoaxes, though, sometimes as vehicles to get back at his enemies. Two of the most famous were the “Petrified Man” and “Massacre at Dutch Nick’s,” a gorier tale than Poe ever dreamed of. Clemens said he meant them as satires, but found an unappreciative audience received them “in innocent good faith.”

Nonetheless, in the course of his first writing job, he succeeded in making enough of a name for himself that when he left, the paper ran an editorial noting that he had “abdicated the local column of the
Enterprise
, where by the grace of Cheek, he so long reigned Monarch of Mining Items, Detailer of Events, Prince of Platitudes, Chief of Biographers, Expounder of Unwritten Law, Puffer of Wildcat, Profaner of Divinity, Detractor of Merit, Flatterer of Power, Recorder of Stage Arrivals, Pack Trains, Hay Wagons, and Things in General.”

He made a name for himself in another sense too. On January 31, 1863, he wrote a dispatch from Carson City and signed it “Mark Twain.” For scholars, that was the real importance of his stay in Virginia City. I figured Tom Sawyer had taken it to heart in a big way.

I rented a car in Carson City, promising to meet Crusher at one o’clock, and headed for the hills. The countryside around Virginia seemed like the middle of nowhere— and was. Most authorities say the population during the flush time eventually reached 30,000 or so, but it had dwindled over the years to about 750. Though billed as a ghost town, it isn’t, really. It’s both the Storey County seat and a thriving tourist spot. Supposedly, many of the permanent residents are artists, writers, and musicians, but a recent incident that had put the old burg back in the news indicated a more conservative Comstock vein. The incident, appropriately enough, involved none other than the
Territorial Enterprise
, which was bought by city slickers who attempted to restore its former satirical glory. Unfortunately, they made such mistakes as attacking God and deer-hunting, employing such Twainian devices as having a theologian expound the theory that man is descended from the dough of an anchovy pizza, and “interviewing” twenty-five deer. The argument that the paper was merely harking back to the days of freewheeling frontier journalism was met with such unmitigated hostility that eventually the
Territorial Enterprise
became a magazine, the once-glorious paper metamorphosing into the bland
Virginia City News
.

That was all I knew about the current sociology of the place when I drove into town. I wasn’t there five minutes before I understood what had so amused the Fiends about the novel idea of a Mark Twain Museum in Virginia City— every other business on the main drag seemed to be the Mark Twain something-or-other.