One More for the Road (20 page)

“How do I know—?”

“In God we trust, sir, and his man Folly's intuitive precognition. I'll weigh plot lines, hour by hour, day by day, from Schenectady to Saskatchewan. Even as I drive stakes and paint letters my secret self will dot the
i
s, cross the
t
s. I will know fevers like yours, eager to find what in hell waits beyond the 66 horizon, up early, down late, a tipped beehive of words sizzling in my wake. So?”

He snatched a dozen sticks and scanned them with relish.

“Hot diggety,” he cried.

“That does it. Elsa!” I called.

“Sir?” Her head thrust in to scan the littered floor.

“God help me,” I gasped. “Bring contracts. For books, I think, yes, books!”

And while she was bringing and Folly was signing I tugged his sleeve:

“Why me? Why here?”

“Sir,” said Folly, “you have the mien of a librarian book-selling English major spelling-bee champ, lugged ten books from the adult stacks when you were twelve, came next noon for ten more!”

“How did you guess?”

“If I knew otherwise I wouldn't be making you grammarian editor of my movable feast! Now, how do we finance this Tolstoy-enhanced journey?”

“I don't doubt—”

“You must. We nudge lumberyards to donate plaques and stakes, gratis. Publicity! Lasso librarians for photo ops wielding mallets, or painting text. Boy Scouts eager to plant and pound. Expenses? Zilch to zero.”

“Brilliant!”

“Yes? Grab your boxer shorts. Along the King's Highway, as 'twere, we flag blue-haired ladies' wedding, birth, and death card shops, hideouts for budding critics ripe to ride this Vesuvial eruption.”

“Bingo!”

“Win every time! En route, traps laid by universities to bar our way.”

“Why?”

“Hotbeds of unpublished authors, unfinished novels asleep in their desks, will leap out to advise punctuation, characterization, lively plot lines, dying falls.”

“And …?”

“Outskirts to inskirts, Philadelphia, Frisco, L.A. Antique car parades to plow us through the 'burbs. Classic cars flagging our rear. Governors at state lines, popping corks.”

“Genius!”

“The squeal of my pig is not lost, sir. More details? you say. It will take some twenty thousand tent pegs flourishing twenty thousand demi-haiku fortune-cookie shingles, one every hundred yards on fast roads, every fifty yards on slow. There's your nutshell. Here's your contract. Here's mine. Now, ready cash?”

“Take this!”

“A bundle of U.S. Grants? Lincoln's pal! I'm off to the lumberyard paint shop. Premiere stake-driving-celebrity-mix tomorrow noon, old 66. You hammer the first peg!”

“I don't deserve—”

“Be there!”

And like a dust devil vacuuming the rug, he was gone, whistling to my ready cash, his kindling words ajolt in the hall.

Elsa stared. “What made you do that?” she cried.

“Teenage madness.” I touched my ribs, elbows, and face. “There was a moment there when I felt thirteen, twelve, ten, the road whizzing by, the B.S. epithets in flight, me chanting, my brother echoing, my dad mad to drive off cliffs, and all of a sudden the land empty, the B.S. signs gone, when the state law dentists yanked and chopped words, and nothing to quote from Tularemia to Taos. When we pit-stopped full of soda pop, I watered Burma, my brother watered Shave.”

“Nuts!” said Elsa.

“Yeah.” I heard the echoes of the bags full of verbs fade. “But I can hardly wait, can you?” I whispered. “For that dark and stormy night?”

“If you say so,” said Elsa.

 

Not with a bang but a whimper, as the saying goes. What exploded as a Cecil B. DeMille rocket fizzled like a damp July Fourth squib.

I, of course, launched Folly's wild road-race epic,
On Our Way to Everywhere
. I banged the first stake to fire off the longest novel since Appomattox. Subsequent chapters would be revealed via Council Bluffs and Gila Bend! Suspense promised! Sequels at a boil. Exclamation point.

First, no one cared. Soon: everyone!

Mobs of Folly travelers tidal-waved him cross-country, chanting phrases, reenacting scenes ere his dust settled. Letters poured in to get some characters shot, others promoted.

A
Chicago Times
critic chatted up a Folly interview, killed by his editor, an historian of Yeats and Pope. Route 66 regained its old prominence. Air travel fell. Bus travel soared. Gas stations mushroomed. Motels upped rates. Motor homes jam packed with greeting-card-ravenous readers snaked from Omaha to Oogalooga. There were Cliffs Notes digests of this brakeless ride from hell to high water.

And then, oblivion! Half out of Donner Pass, half into Death Valley, the literary freshet died.

The waterfall ran alkali dust.

The landscape was littered with white kindlings of nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

I was ready to ticket a plane or jump-start a road van when my office door banged wide. There stood Folly, truly defoliated, face pale, teeth clenched, two huge shopping bags in his downslung arms.

“Folly!” I cried.

“You can say that again,” he replied.

“Come in, come in. My God, what's wrong?”

“You name it.”

“Is that your sequel?”

“Residue,” he murmured and spilled the bags wide.

Sawdust littered the floor. Thirty pounds of finely granulated sawdust.

“Tried, but couldn't finish,” he said.

“Inspiration pooped out? Mind block?”

“Roadblock,” he said.

He dumped what was left of one sack in a pile of shavings and pollen on my desk. I saw a flaked
g
,
t
, or
h
and one large
the
in the dust. The burden of this light stuff sank in my chair.

“Roadblock?” I bleated.

“I never figured folks might not want my bright wildflowers along the road,” Folly mourned. “I had to skip acres of farms, sometimes entire counties. Sheriffs said: Move it! Ladies' social clubs claimed my opus was ipso facto flagrant delicti. Sex with tea! One hump or two! they yelled. Weed-pulling censors yanked my stakes, stole my stuff, as did plagiarists!”

“Plagiarists!?”

“Plot thieves, novel snatchers! Five-mile episodes vanished in Tulsa one night, showed next noon, Tallahassee to charm the alligators. Tallahassee sheriff pulled the snatch, now's a nova, Oprah celeb! How do I prove he stole my stuff!? Tried to snatch back my pick-up-sticks, but some book-burning tea party shot my tires. I told them to shove my shingles, hoping for slivers!”

He stopped, breathless.

“Roadkill,” he whispered.

“Roadkill?” I cried.

“To top everything, Internet roadkill. Fast as I gardened my dears, Internet harvested and rebroadcast, galloping ahead, they the Roadrunner, I the Coyote trying to cut the electronic smog. Their fireworks blazed night and noon, firing my words on a billion screens, wiping clean, firing more, like Kasparov playing Big Blue. ‘Computer Wins Chess Match!' they cried. Hell, with two dozen high-IQ minds stuffed in the IBM circuits? A wasps' nest of genius against a hopeless Russian. Same for me. This little bitty Hemingway dropout against the Internet storm. That's when I pulled up stakes and vamoosed.

“Well, that's it,” said Folly. “Maybe you can rustle someone to finish the finale, kill the worst, bury the best. I failed. What can I say?”

“I hope you find a new job,” I offered.

“As an adjunct carpenter running a sawmill? Good for Jesus, bad for me. I'll mail you some monthly checks, pay back the loan.”

“What'll I do with this?” I said, my nose tickled by the fine wood pollen in the air.

“Stuff a pillow, start an ant farm.”

“It was a fine long exciting terrific novel,” I said.

“Yeah. I wonder how it would have ended.”

“If you wake some night with the answer, call.”

“Don't wait. So long.”

And leaving the twin bags of granulated opus magnum, he left.

Elsa peered in. “What will you do with all that?” she said.

I sneezed once, twice, three times.

The desktop lay empty. Sawdust bloomed.

Elsa stared at the airborne opus.

“Gone With the Wind?”
she said.

“No. Could be: Jack Kerouac
On the Road
.”

I blew my nose.

“Fetch the broom.”

T
ANGERINE

 

O
ne night about a year ago I was having a late dinner, alone, in a fine restaurant, feeling good about myself and my place in the world (a nice feeling to have when you're in your seventies), when, sipping my second glass of wine, I glanced at my waiter, whose presence until now had been over my shoulder or at a distance.

It was like those moments in a movie when the film jerks in the projector and freezes a single image. I felt my breath catch.

I knew this waiter from another year. And knew that I hadn't seen him for a lifetime. My age, yet he was recognizable, so when he came forward to pour the rest of my wine I dared to speak.

“I think I know you,” I said.

The waiter glanced at me and said, “No, I don't think—”

But, closer now, the same forehead, same cut of hair, ears, the chin, same weight as half a century back, so his face hadn't changed.

“Fifty-seven years ago,” I said. “Before the war.”

The waiter's eyes slid to the side, then back. “No, I don't believe—”

“1939,” I said. “I was nineteen. You must've been the same.”

“1939?” The waiter's gaze checked my eyebrows, ears, nose, and finally my mouth. “You don't look familiar.”

“Well,” I said. “My hair was light then, and I weighed forty pounds less, and I had no money for clothes, and I used to go downtown on Saturday nights to listen to the soap-box orators in the park. There was always a good fight.”

“Pershing Square.” The waiter nodded and half-smiled. “Yeah, yes. Sure. I went there once in a while. Summer of '39. Pershing Square.”

“Most of us were just wandering young men, kids, lonely.”

“Nineteen's lonely. You'll do anything, even listen to a lot of hot air.”

“There was plenty of that.” I saw I had him hooked. “There used to be a little gang, not really a gang, like today, but five or six guys got to know each other, we had no money, so we kind of wandered around town, sometimes dropped into a beer parlor. They'd ask you for your ID so all you could get was Cokes. Twenty-five cents I think it was for a Coke you could nurse for an hour and watch the crowd at the bar and the tables.”

“Petrelli's.” The waiter touched his mouth as if the words were a surprise. “I haven't thought of that place in years. But I don't remember being there with you,” he said nervously. “What's your name?”

“You never knew. We just called each other ‘hey' or ‘you.' We might have made up some names. Carl or Doug or Junior. You could've been Ramón.”

The waiter rolled his towel into a ball. “How did you know that? You must've heard—”

“No, it just came to me. Ramón, right?”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Ramón?” I said quietly.

He nodded abruptly. “Well, it's been nice—”

He might have gone but I said, “We prowled around town, five or six of us, and one night one of the gang treated us to French Dip sandwiches down near City Hall. The young man who did it sang everywhere we went, sang and laughed, laughed and sang. What was his name?”