No Relation (30 page)

All six men at the table lurched to their feet, or in one case toppled to the floor, drank what was left in their very large glasses, and then crashed their asses back down. Most of them even landed in their chairs.

“Bullshit, hogwash, and hyperbole!” someone shouted nearby. “Hemingway’s writing sucks! It’s like he only knows about twenty-five different words but refuses to use all of them. It’s more basic than my First Grade reader. His writing is so boring, I can barely read it. Nobel Shmobel.”

Hat looked at me with a very strange expression on his face. I leaned in to confer with him. I was quite surprised to learn
that the thoughts running through my head had in fact run straight out of my mouth at taxi-hailing volume. The big guy at the next table struggled back to his feet and had his hands on my lapels before I could bolt from the room. And don’t think I didn’t try to bolt from the room.

“Now just a minute, sir, violence cannot solve this dilemma. This will not end well,” implored Hat. “Let us discuss this like civilized gentlemen.”

The big guy let go with one hand so he could rear back and launch a right cross in the general vicinity of my face. In a spasm of bravery, I closed my eyes. I heard the punch land, but didn’t feel it. I opened one eye in time to see Hat’s fist connect with the big guy’s mouth a second time.

It occurred to me at that moment that I’d never actually been in a barroom brawl. There were six of them against the two of us. Well, I guess there were really only five left after a crazed Hat dropped the first guy. Hat bobbed and weaved, trying to slip the punches that flew his way while delivering a few of his own in between. He was quite good at it. I, on the other hand, opted for the berserker-windmill-flailing technique, which I may very well have invented that night. I now understand why no one had ever employed it before. I quickly learned that it’s a very short trip from flailing to failing. Not recommended.

I took one roundhouse punch directly to my left ear. I’m not sure my ear was the target, but I turned my face away at the last second and apparently offered up my ear. I felt another hard shot
strike my ribs. That really hurt and knocked the wind out of me. Finally, for good measure, I stopped a blow with my forehead that I think was intended for my nose. I somehow dipped my head a bit at the just right moment and saved my schnoz. It didn’t hurt that much, at least not until I regained consciousness a few moments later. My assailant was on his knees, moaning and pressing his injured hand against his soft, overhanging belly. I think it was broken, his hand, I mean. He was not happy about it.

When the far too tardy bouncers finally waded into the melee, three of the six Hemingway acolytes were on the floor holding various parts of their anatomy. One other had passed out, and the final two were pummelling me, though I was getting in a few shots myself. In no time the police were there. Hat and I, and at least three of our adversaries, were cuffed and led to cruisers. I was bleeding from my nose and a small cut in my eyebrow. Hat looked unscathed.

You know how on
TV
, when the cop is helping someone into the back of the police car, they always put one hand on top of their prisoner’s head so they don’t bump it getting into the back seat. Well, the cop escorting me clearly had never watched police shows on television. My head hurt all the way to the station.

The desk sergeant sat across the table from Hat and me in a little interview room. I looked for the two-way mirror, but there wasn’t one. He started with Hat.

“Okay, let’s try to make this quick so we can all get the hell out of here. Name?”

“Yes, sir. My name is Mahatma Gandhi.”

The cop rolled his eyes and smacked his pen onto the table.

“Yeah, sure it is, smart ass, and I’m Ernest Hemingway.”

“On the contrary, sir. In fact, that would be my friend here,”

Hat said, proudly placing his arm around my shoulder.

“No relation,” I added.

The situation deteriorated from there.

Eventually, after we’d presented multiple pieces of identification and told the sergeant that we were getting out of Dodge on a morning flight, he relented. Twenty minutes later, Hat and I were both in our hotel rooms. It was 2:30 in the morning.

I don’t really have words to describe how I felt four hours later when Hat and I settled into another back seat, this time of a taxi. A police cruiser was parked across from the hotel’s entrance, as we’d been told. They were really quite eager to see us off the island. I gave a friendly wave and the police officer nodded. When our cab pulled out and headed toward the airport, the cruiser fell in behind us. When we took the airport exit, the police officer stayed on the highway and gave us a tip of his hat. Apparently we’d convinced him that we were in fact leaving town, a condition of our release with no charges pending.

Thanks to his temper, Hat was no stranger to fisticuffs and the odd barroom brawl. And this barroom brawl had certainly been odd. But this was really my first experience as a ruffian, a hoodlum, an undesirable. As I thought about it in the back seat of the cab, inexplicably, I felt a certain pride, mixed in with
the humiliation of being run out of a city for the first time. I looked over at Hat. Unperturbed, he was humming a happy tune as we pulled up to the terminal.

In the Miami airport, Hat hugged me before his connecting flight for New York started boarding.

“I truly hope this trip will liberate you,” he said. “But it may take some time. Do not hang unrealistic expectations around your neck. Give it time to work, and it will.”

“Thank you for everything you’ve done, Hat. This was very, um, special for me. I’m grateful.”

He beamed.

“I cannot remember when I’ve enjoyed a weekend more,” Hat said. “I even liked our time at the police station. It makes a big difference when you’re there with a friend.”

I waved and turned to go.

“Oh, Hem, you know if you keep that itinerary I made, you can use it as a placemat back in Manhattan,” he said as he joined the line for boarding, smiling and waving.

I had an hour before my flight to Boise. I found her in my contacts and hit the Call button.

“Dr. Madelaine Scott,” she answered.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Dr. Scott, I was just hoping to leave you a message,” I stammered. “It’s Hem. I didn’t expect to find you at your office on a Saturday.”

“Hello, Hem. I was just getting through some paperwork that had been piling up. Where are you now?”

“Miami. I’ve been in Key West for the last couple of days and I’m just catching a flight to Boise for the final stop in this strange little tour.”

“And has this strange little tour of yours had any effect on your ability to write?”

“No, and I’m bummed out about it,” I replied. “I was convinced it would work. It just made so much sense to me. I really thought I’d be burning out my laptop keyboard by now.”

“Hem, you’ve been blocked for many weeks. You can’t expect it all to be resolved within hours of touring the man’s house,” she cautioned. “Even if you’ve made the right diagnosis in the first place, it will take some time.”

“That’s just what Hat told me five minutes ago.”

“I’m heartened that your friend with anger management issues and a butterscotch fixation has drawn the same clinical conclusion as I have.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you employ sarcasm, Dr. Scott.”

“It’s Saturday. I’m allowed just a pinch on weekends.”

“And what do you mean ‘even if you made the right diagnosis in the first place’?” I asked.

“Hem, when we last met you were clearly convinced that Ernest Hemingway was causing you the difficulty with your novel. While I want to be supportive, you’ll recall that I’ve said from the beginning that you should be open to other possible causes.”

“So you still don’t buy the ‘exorcise Ernest’ theory.”

“What I buy isn’t nearly as important as what you buy.”

“I’d better go, they’re calling my flight,” I said.

“Let’s pick this up when you’re back. I suspect your travels may in fact help us get to where we need to be, but perhaps not in the way you had hoped.”

The drive from Boise to Ketchum was not too onerous, though neither was it particularly picturesque. I rejected the five-hour route along scenic mountain roads in favour of the two-and-a-half-hour highway drive. Ketchum is not far from Sun Valley, the famous ski resort. In Hemingway’s day, the skiing was underdeveloped. It was the fishing and hunting in Idaho’s Silver Creek Valley that was the real draw for the famous writer. Hemingway moved from Cuba to Ketchum with his fourth wife, Mary, in 1959 after the revolution led by Fidel Castro. Two years later, Ernest Hemingway was dead.

After Toronto, Paris, Pamplona, and Key West, the last leg of my tour was depressing in almost every respect. It was a cloudy,
dreary, and rainy day. The sky closed in on me as I drove. The weather was enough to dampen the spirits of even the most jubilant of optimists. But I was laid low by more than meteorology. Upon touchdown in Boise and throughout the drive to Ketchum, I simply could not stop thinking about Hemingway’s final days, not to mention his final act. By the time he moved to Ketchum, he was no longer the writer he once was, and he knew it. He had concluded that his writing had irretrievably declined to well below the standards he’d always set for himself. This realization was a devastating blow he just couldn’t sustain. He even tried electroshock therapy in the hopes of restoring his gift. But it was futile. In his final months, he acted strangely, pushing away friends and descending into depression and paranoia. He claimed “the feds” were out to get him, tailing him everywhere, and even bugging his phones. He’d always been a drinker. But in his final decline, he drank even more, with predictable effect. Then, in the early morning of July 1, 1961, he arose before Mary, pulled his favourite shotgun from the rack, shoved in two shells, and ended his life.

My mind tried not to recreate the scene that Mary, alerted by what she described as a muffled thump, must have confronted when she stepped into the front vestibule of their home and found him. While he was clearly not in his right mind, it was an unspeakable act to leave for his wife to discover. He had been self-centred his entire life and remained so even in death.

It was evening when I rolled in to Ketchum. I pulled into a Best Western, spent fifteen minutes corroborating my identity at the front desk, and finally escaped to my room. I ordered a cheese omelette from room service and tried to shed the abject melancholy that weighed me down like a dentist’s lead X-ray blanket. I grabbed my cellphone.

“Hem, is that you?” Marie asked.

“You’re there! I so needed to hear your voice.”

“What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I’m just discouraged and a little lonely, I guess,” I said. “I mean, I’m in the town where Hemingway ended his life. It’s just so depressing. I almost expected the highway sign to read ‘Welcome to Ketchum, the beautiful hamlet where Ernest Hemingway shot himself.’ ”

“Maybe we should have bumped it from the tour,” Marie said.

“No, I think it’s an important stop. I visited Paris, where he was in his prime. It makes sense that I also see Ketchum, where he was in decline, at his most vulnerable, even pathetic.”

“It does sound sad,” she replied. “How was Key West?”

“It was fun, well, parts of it. I had a great time, other than being seasick for four hours, getting my ass kicked in my first bar fight, and earning a police escort to the airport, and not in a good way.”

“Ouch! Sounds like a novel in the making,” she said. “Why don’t you try to write something now that you’re on your own? It might make you feel a bit better.”

“I didn’t even bring my laptop in from the car. The words just
aren’t there. It’s not working. It still feels like I’ll never write another sentence ever again.”

“Don’t write off the trip yet,” she said. “Oops, sorry, poor choice of words. It still might work if you give it some time.”

“I hope you’re right, but it doesn’t really feel like the floodgates are going to open up any time soon.”