The Life of Hope (5 page)

Mona seemed so saddened by this that I lied. “Well, it’s not going to take the Gold Medal from an International Jury of Beer-Tasters, but I mean, it’s drinkable.”

“Bullshit!” shouted Little Bernie. “The jerk sent a bunch of that swill down here and I said, ‘Like, no fucking way!’ Right back up the spout with that horse-piss!”

“Maybe my stomach’s not as sensitive as you,” I said, adding, “As yours.”

“Sensitive!” shouted Little Bernie. “I haven’t been sensitive since the jerk was weaned!”

Big Bernie nodded. “He’s not a sensitive guy. But he’s my buddaroony!” Big Bernie gave his gut a little pat.

“You stayin’ in town?” asked Mona.

“Just outside town. You know Harvey Benson?”

Mona thought about it briefly. “Nope.”

“Anyway, I’m staying at his place. Couple of miles that way.” Even though I’d said “that way” I hadn’t pointed, because I’d lost my sense of direction. “Down the road.”

“Uh, yeah.” Mona nodded and scratched her stomach. Her hand had doubled back through the arm-hole in order to do this, pulling the material out and leaving an entire breast exposed.
It bounced up and down as she scratched.

“I know Harvey Benson,” said the Indian, Jonathon. “He lives in the old Quinton place.”

“Oh!” said Mona, surprised. She leveled a look at me. “You stayin’ out there?”

“For a couple of months. While I work on my second novel.”

“Are you a writer?” This was the response I’d wanted, but the source was Little Bernie.

“I try,” I answered anyway.

“I’m thinking about writing a book,” Little Bernie announced. “Sort of a book about food, written from the stomach’s point of view. You figure something like that would sell?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’d have a chapter called ‘Steak: Cook It or Lose It.’ Like the jerk is always ordering his steak rare! What does he think I’m doing, building a fucking cow down here?”

“Well …”

“Hey, jerk, what was that stuff you had one time?”

“You mean steak tartare?” Big Bernie supplied.

“Yeah! Now this was a pleasant fucking surprise! Raw fucking meat! Up the spout with that doo-doo!”

“Give it a rest, Little Bern,” said Mona. She turned back to me. “So how long you been out there?”

“Just got in last night.”

Mona nodded and reached into her shorts pockets for a pack of cigarettes. She smoked a brand popularly believed to be a favorite among truckdrivers and shipyard workers, although I suspect that even they won’t touch them. Once she had the cigarette going she nodded again, vaguely this time, and said, “That must be pretty inneresting.”

“Living at Harvey’s?”

“Bein’ a writer. What do you write? Articles for magazines or sumpin’?”

“Novels.”

“Biographies,” said Mona. “That’s what I read. And I don’t much care who they’re about, neither, could be Harry S. Truman or Marilyn Monroe or some bugger in ancient Rome, Nero or somebody.”

“Why do you like biographies so much?”

Mona shrugged. “How should I know? Why do I like annathin’? I dint ever think about it.”

“Mona?” This was from the girl of the young couple. She and her mate hadn’t been listening to us. They’d kept their foreheads touching while they conversed in warm, lush whispers. “Can we have a couple more?”

“Sure.” Mona went to prepare their drinks.

Now the boy spoke to me. “We’re Kim.”

“Come again?”

The girl came again. “We’re Kim. We’re both named Kim. Pretty funny, eh?”

“It’s a fucking laff riot,” muttered Little Bernie.

“Nice to meet you, Kim,” I said, and they nodded and went back to their private world.

Jonathon began to act strangely. He put his long fingers to his temples and pressed very firmly, as if he was afraid that his head might blow apart. Jonathon said, “Oh-oh,” and everyone else in the bar said “Oh-oh” too. And then he collapsed to the floor with a loud “boom.”

I was pretty sure he was having an epileptic fit, so I frantically began to search through my pockets for something to ram in his mouth. The other people, Mona, the Kims and the Bernies, remained calm. Mona leaned across the bar so that she could peer at Jonathon; then, satisfied that he’d done himself no injury with the tumble, she went about her business. Mona remarked to Bernie, “Looks like a pretty big one.”

Bernie nodded and said, “Encore ein martoony, Moaner.”

“Shouldn’t we put something in his mouth so that he doesn’t bite his tongue off?” I almost shouted. My pockets had yielded nothing but a few crumpled dollar bills. I picked up an ashtray from the bar, but it was full of butts and anyway seemed much too large for Jonathon’s mouth.

“He’ll be all right,” said Little Bernie.

Big Bernie agreed. “Sure. But it looks like a pretty big one.”

“Big what?” I demanded, but then Jonathon’s lids popped open and his eyes, strangely colored and moist, began to roll around in his head. “Sheesh,” said Jonathon, and he struggled to his feet.

Mona had poured a shotglass full of whiskey, and Jonathon’s
first act was to shoot it back. During the brief “attack” Jonathon had perspired heavily, and I saw with alarm that tears were streaming down his wrinkled face. “That was a big one,” he confirmed. Jonathon lit a cigarette with trembling hands, and after a few drags he was calmer. He wiped tears from his face and gestured for another drink. Then Jonathon turned and looked at me in a way that I’ve never been looked at before. His cats’ eyes seemed like knots in wood, dead and full of circles. “You, sir,” said Jonathon, “are an asshole.”

“Well, I’m sorry!” I said indignantly. I had to admit that my search for something to place in the Indian’s mouth was a little foolish, but accusing me of being an asshole was, I thought, a bit much. “I was afraid you’d bite your tongue off.”

“What?” said Jonathon, puzzled.

“I wasn’t going to stick the ashtray in your mouth,” I added.

Jonathon turned to Mona. “What’s he talking about?”

Mona explained, after which Jonathon said to me, “I’m touched by your concern.”

“Well then, what did you call me an asshole for?”

“Because that is what you are,” explained Jonathon. “Please don’t take it personally.”

“How else am I supposed to take it?”

Jonathon shrugged, tapped a long ash off his cigarette artfully. “There are worse things than being an asshole.”

“Like what?”

Jonathon shrugged once more, not in a manner to suggest he didn’t know, more that he was unwilling to say.

“Well,” said Little Bernie, “Big Bernie’s a jerk.”

“Yeah!” said Big Bernie. “I’m a jerko! That’s at least just as bad.”

“And me,” said Mona. “I’m sort of a, you know, slut.”

“There!” said Jonathon. “Everyone is something. Bernard’s a jerk, Mona’s a slut, and me, I’m a drunken fool. Not to mention old and ugly and gay as all get-out.”

“How about you guys, Kim?” I asked, saying their shared name rather snidely.

They answered, almost in unison, “We’re in love.”

“Then you guys are in the worst shape of anybody,” I commented.

Jonathon tapped my shoulder. “You see? That was the sort of thing an asshole would say.”

Jonathon’s remark calmed me, somehow. I took a long sip of the rancid beer and looked around The Willing Mind. “Hope,” I said, more to myself than anybody else, “is one crazy fucking place.”

“Feeling better now?” asked Jonathon, gingerly laying his long brown fingers (stained yellow here and there with nicotine) on my arm.

“Just once,” I said, staring into my ale, “just
once
I wish people would let me in on some of the shit going on around here.”

“Like what, for instance?” asked Jonathon.

“Well, for starters, I haven’t been to a lot of bars where the guy next to me goes ‘Oh-oh,’ keels over, then climbs back up and calls me an asshole.”

“Oh, well, that’s easy enough to explain,” said Jonathon. “I had a Vision.”

“Sure, why not.”

“He has a lot of them,” Mona put in. “He doesn’t always drop, though, only when it’s a big one.”

“Sometimes,” said Big Bernie, “Jon-Jon just goes like, ‘
Whoa
!’ and has to have a couple more scootches.”

“But one time,” recounted Little Bernie, “the Mystic One threw himself right out that window over there.”

“That was, I presume, a big Vision?”

Jonathon nodded. “The biggest.”

“So let me get this straight,” I said to the Indian. “You have these Visions. And in the Vision you just had, you saw that I was an asshole. Is that about right?”

Jonathon nodded. “It was very strange. I saw this face, painted to look happy, painted with a big red smile and big eyes like a child’s. But the only thing happy about the face was the paint, because the real mouth was sad, and the real eyes were crying. And I saw you. It was because of you the face was crying. You could have stopped the crying, but you didn’t. Then you were gone, and a voice said, ‘Asshole.’ And mind you, the voice sounded like it knew what it was talking about. Then I was awake.”

I looked at the inhabitants of The Willing Mind. “Doesn’t that
sound like one dumb Vision?”

Everyone shrugged, even Little Bernie, the enormous belly jerking up and down.

“Nice meeting all of you,” I said. “Now I’m going after Ol’ Mossback.” I threw two dollars at Mona and left the bar. And as I walked out the door, someone said (probably one of the Bernies), “Keep your dick in your pants!”

Gregory Opdycke’s book
Fishing for Ol’ Mossback
has this to say:

I was reading this out at Lookout Lake. The book
Fishing for Ol’ Mossback
was first published, at the author’s own expense, in the year 1902. (Mine was a reprinting done in 1966, although I didn’t see why anyone bothered. Surprisingly, my edition was published by a reputable, and scholarly, house.) I suppose the book’s antiquity accounts for the rather free-style use of inverted commas and the stilted syntactical constructions. Certain things struck me as more idiosyncratic, such as the use of that word “stirpicult,” which I had never encountered before, and seemed a most unlikely synonym for “fisherman.” Mostly I wondered about using a live mouse for bait. (Actually, mostly I brooded over the Indian’s Vision.)

Lookout Lake, by the way, was hardly what I’d expected. I’d expected, and longed for, an awesome God-wrought spectacle, alive and colorful and magnificent, something that would make whole my heart, dry the tears that I hadn’t the courage to shed. Instead I found a tiny, mucky thing, surrounded by desolate terrain of outcroppings. I realized that the lake wasn’t called “Lookout” because of any splendiferous view, it was called “Look out!” because rocks kept dropping out of the sky. The only thing I found soothing about it was the loneliness. No one lived beside Lookout Lake as far as I could tell; there was one cabin by the water’s edge, but it was long-abandoned and ravaged by the wilderness.

Beside me I had my fishing gear and a bottle of Harvey Benson’s whiskey. I sat on a rock, drinking and leafing through my little book. Soon, I thought, I’ll do me some serious fishing.