The Prize (12 page)

Lucius Mack saw that Craig was too intoxicated to bring the glass to his lips.

‘I think I’ve had about enough, Andrew,’ said Mack tactfully. ‘Let’s pick up this game tomorrow. I’ve got to get back to the shop.’

Craig lifted his head with effort and tried to focus his glazed eyes on his friend. ‘Somebody’s got to keep—to keep—wheels of industry turning,’ he said thickly. He managed to swallow the last dregs of his bottle.

Mack pushed back his chair, and rose. ‘Like to lie down a bit?’

‘Like nothing better, Florence Nightingale,’ said Craig. ‘No games. I’m stoned, and we both know it, an’—and I like it.’

Mack came around the table to Craig, prepared to assist him out of the chair, but in a gesture of self-respect, Craig set his hands on the table and heaved himself upright. Standing, he swayed precariously, and flattened his hand against the wall to stop himself from falling.

He narrowed his eyes, to find Mack, and then smiled. ‘You’re good, Lucius—good guy.’ He remembered his duties as a host. ‘Sure you had enough to drink?’

‘Too much, with a night’s work ahead.’

‘Someday I’d like to say jus’—just that—“Too much, with a night’s work ahead.” ’

‘You will, Andrew, believe me.’

Craig removed his steadying hand from the wall, and tried to take a step toward the bed, but he staggered. Mack caught his arm firmly, supporting him. Craig conceded defeat. ‘Got the dizzies. All the juice gone down to my pins.’

Mack slowly led the author to the bed, then helped lower him to a sitting position. The instant that he made contact with the mattress, Craig fell back on a portion of the pillow. Easily, efficiently, as he had done so many times in the past, Mack lifted his friend’s long legs from the floor and settled them on the bed. Then he removed Craig’s leather moccasins and placed them neatly under the night table.

Briefly, he stood over Craig and examined him. The prostrated figure, rangy and surprisingly muscular for one so committed to self-destruction, was clothed in an old, grey T-shirt and soft corduroy slacks. Mack decided that his friend would be more comfortable this way than in pyjamas. Despite the heat blowing in from the floor furnace vent, the autumn chill crept through the window cracks, and Craig would require warmth.

Lucius Mack returned to the table, and set about cleaning it up—Leah, Craig’s sister-in-law, downstairs, could not tolerate a mess. Mack gathered the playing cards into a deck and stuffed them into the box. He dropped the empty Scotch bottle beside the other one in the waste-paper basket. He took the two glasses into the bathroom, rinsed and dried them, and then placed them on top of Craig’s green file cabinet.

This done, Lucius Mack stood in the centre of the room and surveyed it. He liked the narrow, brown, cosy room, beneath the house’s gable, and it was as much his own as the rooms he kept in the Perkins boarding-house. His eyes took in the rolltop desk, and covered typewriter, so long unused, and the five shelves of books, mostly reference and history, with the uppermost shelf reserved for Craig’s own four novels, in the American, English, and odd foreign editions.

Lucius Mack had known the Craigs, or Craig, more than five years, and for more than two of them he had known Craig intimately. It hardly seemed eight years ago when Andrew and Harriet Craig—he so boyish, with only two novels published and a third one planned—had arrived to make their residence in Miller’s Dam. They had bought the Hartog place, this place, on ‘Wheaton Road, and renovated it, and in the beginning had kept to themselves, rather like honeymooners. Lucius Mack had met Harriet Craig one morning in the first month of their residence, when she had visited the newspaper to place a classified advertisement for a daily help. Memory usually dimmed with the years, but Mack still retained what had impressed him then: a dark blonde, quiet and self-possessed, with a pleasing, almost gay Slavic face, all features broad but regular—he had guessed that her antecedents were Lithuanian. She had been of medium height, perhaps more, and only seemed smaller side by side with Craig, whose lanky body went up six feet. She had been generously endowed, the full figure of a woman in every way, with a certain solidity that seemed to settle well against the Wisconsin landscape.

A week later, Mack had written to Craig requesting an interview, and almost immediately Craig had called in person. At the time, Mack had been the fledgling owner of the
Weekly Independent
. He followed the hard-set rule of all small-town newspapers—mention everyone’s name in print at least once during the year and more if possible. This was difficult, since so many members of the community were so dull. The arrival of newcomers from the East, especially a published author of growing reputation, provided an opportunity for Mack to enliven his pages.

What the editor-publisher remembered most about Craig’s first visit were his tousled black hair and quick eyes, amused, encompassing, the implied cynicism of his half-smile, and the general impression of elongated, sunken, brooding features. Craig had proved a fine subject, and an easy, disarming talker. He and Harriet had been married five years, and enjoyed a honeymoon trip abroad, from Scandinavia to Italy, and she had suffered a miscarriage in the East, and they had lived on Long Island for five years, where Craig had written the first two novels. Once, on a trip to Madison, where his wife’s younger sister, Leah, had been attending the university, they had passed through Miller’s Dam. Later both had spoken, in accord, of buying a house in such a small, peaceful town and settling down there, someday, someday when there was an advance large enough. Both had continued living in New York, chafing at the compressed, tumultuous existence—‘millions of people being lonesome together’, Craig had said, quoting Thoreau—for the Craigs had both been Midwest-born—and then Craig’s second book had won sufficient approval from his publisher to guarantee a sizeable advance on his third idea. Without a moment’s hesitation, Andrew and Harriet Craig had moved to Miller’s Dam.

Remembering now that first interview, Lucius Mack recalled that Craig had been a fascinating conversationalist. Most men have one or two specialties, at most a handful of interests, and display vast ignorance of and disinterest in everything else. Not Andrew Craig. He had shown himself to be interested in literally everything, and the custodian of the most bizarre bits of knowledge. In that first interview, in his lively manner, he had discussed the French Jesuits who had sponsored Father Marquette, the trajectory of Three-fingered Brown’s curve ball, the sexuality of Alexander Hamilton’s mistress, Mrs. Maria Reynolds, the peculiar genius of Charles Fort, the joys of pyramidology, and the reasonableness of Kazentsev’s speculations that the meteoric explosion on the Tunguskaia River of Siberia in 1908 had actually been a nuclear explosion from outer space.

Eight years ago, it had been. And now?

Standing in the middle of the room, Lucius Mack gazed down compassionately at the figure of his friend sprawled on the bed, watched the heavy breathing and the deep, deep slumber. Except for the gouged lines of dissipation beneath his eyes and beneath his cheekbones, Craig seemed as he had seemed then, although now he was thirty-nine. Despite the fact that he was sixteen years the author’s senior, Mack felt at one with him, felt a contemporary with no bridge of years between them. Perhaps they had found each other good companions, after that first meeting, because they were alike, their minds galloping the earth and the surrounding universe, and unlike the others who were time-bound and narrow earth-bound by the price of hogs and corn and prairie isolationism and
Better Farming
.

Almost weekly, in the early times, Craig had ambled into the newspaper office to have a drink or two with Mack and talk and listen and talk. But after Craig’s time of trouble, after the injury, and the breaking down, and the surrender, Mack had taken to calling on his friend four or five times a week. This was usually in the afternoons, before Craig had become too drunk. They would lounge in the upstairs room, the bottle between them, Mack taking one to Craig’s six, and converse as of old, perhaps more recklessly, more fancifully with the heavier drinking. Sometimes, in a desultory way, they would play gin rummy, too. It had been this way for almost three years, and these days ended, during Craig’s bad periods, exactly as this day had ended.

Lucius Mack sighed, and collected his packet of cigarettes from beside Craig’s blue humidor. He heard Craig stir fitfully on the bed, and watched unconcerned. Craig was on his side now, one lank arm outstretched, his legs curled, and he was sleeping hard. Mack wondered if he dreamed. He hoped not, not now, not these years.

Mack let himself out of the room, noiselessly, and went carefully down the two turnings of wooden stairs. The living-room was fully lit against the bleak day, and Leah Decker, her face pinched in the familiar disapproval she always showed at this hour of the day, sat in a corner of the deep plaid sofa, industriously knitting.

With Mack’s entry into the room, she looked up with her eyes. ‘How is he?’

‘Sleeping.’

‘How much did he drink this afternoon?’

‘Oh, a few fingers, no more.’

‘I bet!’

Patiently, Mack struck a match and put it to the cigarette between his lips. He inhaled and blew out the smoke, and dropped the match in a nearby ceramic tray. ‘Look, Leah,’ he said without exasperation, ‘I’ve told you time and again—Andrew’s had a bad time, been through a bitter time, and this is his way of escaping it. He’s not like all other men. He’s a creative person, sensitive as can be—’

‘That doesn’t give him licence to behave like Edgar Allan Poe. Even if he’d proved he is Poe. It’s wrong—drinking all day, passing out every night—’

‘Come now, Leah, you know this thing goes in cycles—’

‘It’s getting worse,’ she said flatly. ‘It used to be two weeks on and two weeks off. Now it’s three weeks on and one week off.’

‘We have to endure it for now. When a man’s lost his wife, the shock—’

Leah put her knitting aside. ‘He killed Harriet with his drinking, and now he’s trying to kill himself. I hate being the witness to two murders.’ She stood up and massaged one hand with the other, turning her back to Mack, and then turning again to face him. ‘Heavens, Lucius, don’t you think I know how it feels? She was my sister—just as much as she was his wife. But you don’t see me, or anyone else, carrying on like this, liquoring up day and night, half the time unconscious from that and sedatives and depression. Harriet was a terrible loss for me, too, but after proper mourning, and thinking about it, I found myself. My God, it’s been three years. Life goes on. On and on. Life is for the living. There’s little enough of it, anyway. We’ll all have our turn, you bet.’ She stopped. ‘Will you have some coffee?’

They always had coffee together, after his visits to Craig. He bobbed his head. ‘Yes, sure, if you don’t mind.’

Leah Decker went into the old-fashioned kitchen, and Mack followed her, finding a chair at the table. He traced the floral design painted on the maple table, and he watched Leah brewing the coffee. She was a handsome woman, he reckoned, by any standard. She might not grow old well, but she was handsome now. She had Harriet’s Slavic features, except that they were tighter, more pointed, and her hair, which was brown, not dark blonde, was swept back tight and bunned in the back. Her body was taller, straighter than Harriet’s had been, and pleasing although more rigid and unyielding. She had none of Harriet’s gaiety or humour. She was practical, sensible, and—too often recently—querulous. Mack forgave her the last, because her lot was not an easy one. After the accident, she had come to help out, to bury Harriet and to nurse Craig, and she had simply stayed on. For all her faults, she was selfless in her devotion to Craig, and always softer and more feminine in his presence. Her harder side, her complaints, were reserved for others.

Mack knew that her life here was lonely. Craig was too rarely sober or mobile or sociable. And Mack understood that things could not be easy, financially. By now, Craig’s meagre savings must have dwindled away, leaving innumerable debts, and there was little hope of salvation. Craig had one hundred pages of a new novel,
Return to Ithaca
, but only a handful of these pages had been added in six months. Briefly, there had been an opportunity for a teaching job at Joliet College, four miles north of Miller’s Dam. A solemn, scholarly literature professor at the college, Alex Inglis, a frustrated writer in his fifties deeply devoted to Craig’s books, had pulled strings to bring his idol into the college as an instructor. This high-hope had dissolved when, to impress the Board of Regents, Inglis had arranged a literary lecture by Craig, at Joliet, and Craig had appeared too drunk to go on.