A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (40 page)

MRS. CASSIE ROYALTUBER

IT’S FUNNY
what people think. You try to put a pair of kitchen scissors in the doctor’s wife one afternoon and they think (a) you’re crazy, or (b) you’re desperately in love with your sweet husband, or (c) you caught her in bed with your husband, with whom she’s been sleeping for two years, and therefore you’re just slow to catch on, since everybody, absolutely everybody else in this village, which is not exactly full of geniuses, has known about the affair since the first week, or (d) that you’re all three: crazy, in love, and slow to catch on.

Well, it is simply exhilarating to be liberated from (a) the slings and (b) the arrows of public opinion and to take it for what it is, which is (a) irrelevant and (b) as absolutely wrong as it can be.

Who in their right mind—which is where I find myself—would consider that the television repairman’s wife might have another reason? Who would grant the past its due, the vast sweeping privilege of history and justice? Who would guess that (a) I knew Mrs. Narkenpie before she and her doctor moved to Griggs, in fact before she was Mrs. Narkenpie, when she was simply Margaret Rayne, and that (b) she was the prime reason I had been forcibly removed from my one true love so many years ago, and that (c) I had chosen those scissors not for the convenience of their being right there in the drawer but because they were appropriate—I wanted to cut her the way she cut my Howard.

And the things I screamed I screamed on purpose. How are you going to get into the loony bin unless they think you’re loony?

ROD BUDDAROCK

WHAT HE
does is take the beer. This seems to be his only deal as a cop, to drive around on weekends and take beer from kids. And he keeps the beer. Some kids just go ahead and buy his brand, which is the Rocary Red Ale—fifteen dollars a case at any Ale and Mail. Isn’t there any crime to stop? How do you get a job like that—free car and free beer? Hey, I’ll sign up. As is, I’m glad I’m a senior and out of here next spring. He comes into our Halloween party last Saturday, the same night that there’s a maniac with a hook roaming all over Griggs, attacking kids, slashing at everything in sight, and he busts us, scaring everybody shitless and causing Ardeen Roster to break her nose running away in the bushes, and he writes
me
a ticket for it. Then, while some monster with one arm has practically taken over the whole town, he takes our beer, and there’s still about three and a half cases of Red Pelican—which you have to drive to Orpenhook to even find—so I’m forced to live the rest of my life picturing this civic wart pounding down our Pelicans every afternoon on his deck while he dreams up his next law enforcement strategy. Life is hard on the young, man, count on it.

MR. HOWARD LUGDRUM

I’M GOING
to need to get my hook back. There’s a lot of work up here that requires two hands. We’ve got leaves to rake, tons, and a lot of other seasonal preventive maintenance—storm windows, snowplow prep work—and I can’t load and deliver firewood effectively without my prosthesis. I’d appreciate its return as soon as possible.

MR. RICK ROYALTUBER

CASSIE WAS
never even cranky all these years. I mean, of all people, she’s the last I’d expect to crack up. It was tough to send her off. It hurt me to put her up on the hill, but there it was, we couldn’t deny she’d lost control of her senses when she tried to harm Mrs. Narkenpie. How do you think I feel knowing she’s up there, locked up in a nuthouse night and day, wearing a straitjacket or what-have-you. But the doctor said it was for the best, and I believe him. These things, so many of them, are beyond ordinary folks.

SHERIFF CURTIS MANSARACK

INCIDENTAL TO
my call on the Royaltubers Halloween night, I had the Cramble boy pop open his trunk, and I found the following:

nylon
r
ope, 100 yards
hammer
hatchet
power screwdriver
small grappling hook
duct tape, two rolls
canvas, 12x12
flashlights, two
pepper spray, two canisters
bolt cutters
doritos, large bag, taco-flavored

JILL ROYALTUBER

I NEVER
saw his face. I never saw anything really. All I heard was some vibrations, I guess—maybe footsteps in the leaves, and then a kind of metallic clicking like scritch, scritch, and I was begging Jack to pull out, to just pull out of there. We hadn’t been doing anything. Jack had hurt his hand in the game against Bark City, and I had been massaging that. We were trying to relax.

MRS. CASSIE ROYALTUBER

I LOVED
Howard from Moment Number One, when we met seventeen years ago, on the night of the construction of our high school’s homecoming float, which was a big ram. We were the Cragview Rams. He and I were part of the tissue brigade, two dozen kids handing Kleenex each to each in a line that ended at the chicken-wire sculpture, which slowly filled with the red, white, and blue paper. He was standing next to me and our hands touched once a second as the tissue flowed through us, my left hand, his right hand, which he would lose that spring, touch, touch, touch. He was the first tender boy I ever knew, and I was happy when he invited me to the homecoming dance. There is no need to explain every delicate step of that fall, Moment Number Two and Moment Number Three, except to say that when we gave our hearts, we gave our hearts completely, and everything else followed. It was the year I died and went to heaven for a while.

Moment Number Four I discovered that I was pregnant, and even that seemed magical, until my father found out thanks to my jealous classmate, wicked Maggie Rayne, who also told him that Howard and I always met after school in the Knopdish junkyard. And it was there, Moment Number Five, that my father found us in the rear seat of an old VW van, which had been like a haven for us, and he yanked me out onto the ground and slammed that rusty door forever, or so I thought, on my one good thing—Howard Lugdrum.

Howard, I heard, lost his arm in the “accident,” and my father moved us far away, here to Griggs. The Moments now go unnumbered. Before the summer was over, young, handsome Ricky Royaltuber was coming round, and I didn’t care, I did my part. I wasn’t even there, and I guess I’ve been away a long time.

I didn’t care when Maggie Rayne moved to town with her fancy doctor, and I didn’t care that she went after and got Ricky. It freed me in a way. I can hardly remember who came and went in our house—Jill’s friends, neighbors, boys.

But when I heard that the stars had relented and uncrossed and again lined up my way, that Howard had come to Griggs, working at this very loony bin in which I now live, I woke up, and in a major way. Afternoons, he comes in with a cup of tea, and we sit and he lets me hold it while we talk. These days are sweet days again, full of sweet moments. Even now I can see him through these bars, cleaning the windows of the van with the big circles of his left hand.

JACK CRAMBLE

I DON’T
care who knows it now: I was going to spring her. Last year, when I was a nobody from nowhere, she was the only person in town who would listen. I was the new kid in town then, not captain of the football team, and she was always there for me. I told her everything. It was easier and better than talking to my own folks, and she was different, a woman, more woman than anybody I’ll ever meet again. I loved her and I loved the way she talked, putting my problems in perspective a, b, c, or 1, 2, 3. To keep seeing her I started dating that dipweed Jill, who has been nothing but a pain in the neck with all her “sharing,” “caring,” and “daring.” Such a girl. Such a needy little girl. Just thinking about her makes my skin crawl. Let’s go up to the Point, she’d say, so she could crawl all over me. I’ll tell you flat, she knows nothing about being a real woman like her mother. We went up there on Halloween after the game so I could scope out the fence and the approach to Cassie’s room. The plan was for midnight. Of course, Jill jumped me when we parked, and lucky for me the watchman came along or I’d have had to go all the way. As it was, her pants were already to her ankles, and he got a hell of a view of her bare ass in the window.

But it hasn’t deterred me. Cassie and I are meant to be together, that’s clear, regardless of the age difference. I’m going back up there in a night or two and busting her out. Football season’s over, and it’s time to be me. My heart knows what to do, and it says, Scale the wall, break her out!

MR. HOWARD LUGDRUM

SHE WAS
here almost a year before she told me. Though I knew instantly we’d pick up where we left off, my heart steady through the years to the one woman I loved, Cassie waited to be sure it was still me, I guess, that a man with one arm could be trusted. So last week we were at tea in her room after her counseling session, and she looked at me funny and told me something amazing: I have a daughter! A daughter! Having Cassie back in my life after so long seemed almost too much for me to bear, and now . . . a child. Well, not a child but a young woman. And, Cassie told me, I could see her if I went by the north pine grove sometime after nine that night, Halloween. I’d see a blue-and-white Ford and my daughter would be in it! It was all I could do to get the afternoon hours out of the way; it was a waiting like no waiting I have ever known. My daughter! As it happened, I don’t know if I saw her or not, just somebody’s butt in the moonlight.

SHERIFF CURTIS MANSARACK

FALL IN
Griggs is a good thing: the leaves change color and there’s football and the smell of the first wood fires. Halloween’s my last big chance to score a beer bust, and I almost never miss. I didn’t miss this year. Every year there’s a hook, sometimes more than one, and it takes a week or two for things to quiet down. I don’t mind the hooks; the waxed windows are worse. I’d trade the waxed windows for two more hooks. Soon it will snow and life gets real easy: there’s no cop better than old Jack Frost.

PERSON BEHIND LAST TREE
IN THE TWILIGHT

AT NIGHT
, as I drift through these woods, I tap my hook from time to time against my leg and the feel of the hard iron spurs me on past fence and fern, past drooping branches and the cobbed underbrush. What I need is an older-model American car parked alone in the dark, one with a grip handle I can snare. The lift handles are no good, and everything anymore has the aerodynamic lift handles. I want a ’60 Fairlane or a ’58 Chevrolet, a car with bench seats big enough for two young people to get comfortable and tangle up their clothing and their brain waves so that they forget the dark, the woods, the person with a hook, every Halloween, approaching through the leaves.

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

N
O ALPHABET
comes along full grown. A period of development is required for the individual letters to bloom and then another period for them to adjust to their place in the entire set, and sometimes this period can be a few weeks or it can be a lifetime. No quality font maker ever sat down and wrote out A to Z just like that. It doesn’t happen. Getting Ray Bold right required five months, these last five months, an intense creative period for me which has included my ten-week escape from the state facilities at Windchime, Nevada, and my return here one week ago. Though I have always continued sharpening my letters while incarcerated, most of the real development of Ray Bold occurred while I was on the outside, actively eluding the authorities. There’s a kind of energy in the out-of-doors, moving primarily along the sides of things, always hungry, sleeping thinly in hard places, that awakens in me the primal desire toward print.

And though Ray Bold is my best typeface and the culmination of my work in the field, I should explain it is also my last—for the reasons this note on the type will illuminate. I started this whole thing in the first place because I had been given some time at the Fort Nippers Juvenile Facility in Colorado—two months for reckless endangerment, which is what they call Grand Theft Auto when you first start in at it, and I was rooming with Little Ricky Grudnaut, who had only just commenced his life as an arsonist by burning down all four barns in the nearby town of Ulna in a single night the previous February. Juvenile facilities, as you can imagine, are prime locations for meeting famous criminals early in their careers, and Little Ricky went on, as everyone now knows, to burn down eleven Chicken Gigundo franchise outlets before he was apprehended on fire himself in Napkin, Oklahoma, and asked to be extinguished.

But impulsive and poultry-phobic as he may have become later, Little Ricky Grudnaut gave me some valuable advice so many years ago. I’d moped around our cell for a week—it was really a kind of dorm room—staring at this and that, and he looked up from the tattoo he was etching in his forearm with an old car key. It was Satan’s head, he told me, and it was pretty red, but it only looked like some big face with real bad hair—and he said, “Look, Ray, get something to do or you’ll lose it. Make something up.” He threw me then my first instrument, a green golf pencil he’d had hidden in his shoe.

It was there in Fort Nippers, fresh from the brutality of my own household, that I began the doodling that would evolve into these many alphabets which I’ve used to measure each of my unauthorized sorties from state-sponsored facilities. Little Ricky Grudnaut saw my first
R
that day and was encouraging. “It ain’t the devil,” he said, “but it’s a start.”

I HAVE
decided to accept the offer of reduced charges for full disclosure of how and where I sustained my escape. In Windchime I had been sharing a cell with Bobby Lee Swinghammer, the boxer and public enemy, who had battered so many officials during his divorce proceedings last year in Carson City. Bobby Lee was not happy to have a lowly car thief in his cell and he had even less patience with my alphabets. I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t simply a car thief, that I was now, in the words of the court, “an habitual criminal” (though my only crime had been to steal cars which I had been doing for years and years), and I tried to show him what I was working on with Ray Bold. Bobby Lee Swinghammer’s comment was that it looked “piss plain,” and it irked him so badly that he then showed me in the next few weeks some of his own lettercraft. These were primarily the initials
B
and
L
and
S
that he had worked on while on the telephone with his attorney. And they are perfect examples of what is wrong with any font that comes to life in prison.

The design is a result of too much time. I’ve seen them in every facility in which I have resided, these letters too cute to read, I mean flat-out baroque. Serifs on the
T
’s that weigh ten pounds; Bobby Lee had beaked serifs on his
S
’s that were big as shoes. His
B
was three-dimensional, ten feet deep, a
B
you could move into, four rooms and a bath on the first floor alone. I mean he had all afternoon while his lawyer said, “We’ll see” a dozen different ways, why not do some gingerbread, some decoration? I kept my remarks to a minimum. But I’ve seen a lot of this, graffiti so ornate you couldn’t find the letters in the words. And what all of that is about is one thing and it’s
having time.
I respect it and I understand it—a lot of my colleagues have got plenty of time, and now I’ve got some again too, but it’s a style that is just not for me.

I became a car thief because it seemed a quick and efficient way to get away from my father’s fists, and I became a font maker because I was caught. After my very first arrest—I’d taken a red Firebird from in front of a 7-Eleven—in fact in my first alphabet, made with a golf pencil, I tried my hand at serification. I was thirteen and I didn’t know any better. These were pretty letters. I mean, they had a kind of beauty. I filigreed the
C
’s and
G
’s and the
Q
until they looked like they were choking on lace. But what? They stood there these letters so tricked up you wouldn’t take them out of the house, too much makeup, and you knew they weren’t any good. For me, that is. You put a shadow line along the stem of an R and then beak the tail, it’s too heavy to move.

The initials that Bobby Lee Swinghammer had been carving into the back of his hand with a Motel 6 ballpoint pen looked like monuments. You could visit them, but they were going absolutely nowhere.

And that’s what I wanted in this last one, Ray Bold, a font that says “movement.” I mean, I was taking it with me and I was going to use it, essentially, on the run. Bobby Lee was right: it is plain but it can travel light.

I want to make it clear right here, though Bobby Lee and I had our differences and he did on occasion pummel me about the head and upper trunk (not as hard as he could have, god knows), he is not the reason I escaped from Windchime. I have escaped, as the documents point out, eleven times from various facilities throughout this part of the west, and it was never because of any individual cellmate, though Bobby Lee was one of the most animated I’ve encountered. I like him as a person, and I’m pleased that his appeal is being heard and that soon he will be resuming his life as an athlete.

I walked out of Windchime because I had the chance. I found that lab coat folded over the handrail on our stairs. Then, dressed as a medical technician, with my hair parted right down the middle, I walked out of there one afternoon, carrying a clipboard I’d made myself in shop, and which is, I’ll admit right here, the single most powerful accessory to any costume. You carry a clipboard, they won’t mess with you.

Anyway, that windy spring day I had no idea of the direction this new alphabet would take. I knew I would begin writing; everybody knew that. I always do it. I’ve been doing it for more than twenty years. When my father backhanded me for the last time, I fled the place but not before making my
Ray
on his sedan with the edge of a nickel. It wasn’t great, and I don’t care to write with money as a rule, but it was me, my instinct for letter-craft at the very start.

I also knew I’d be spending plenty of time in the wilderness, the high desert there around Windchime and the forests as they reach into Idaho and the world beyond. I know now that, yes, landscape did have a clear effect on the development of Ray Bold, the broad clean vistas of Nevada, the residual chill those first few April nights, and the sharp chunk of flint I selected to inscribe my name on a stock tank near Popknock. That first
Ray
showed many clues about the alphabet to come: the
R
(and the
R
is very dear to me, of course) made in a single stroke (the stem bolder than the tail); the small case
a,
unclosed; and the capital
Y,
which resembles an
X.
These earmarks of early Ray Bold would be repeated again and again in my travels—the single stroke, the open letter, the imprecise armature. To me they all say one thing: energy.

I made that
Ray
just about nightfall the second night, and I was fairly sure the shepherd might have seen me cross open ground from a rocky bluff to the tank, and so, writing there in the near dark on the heavily oxidized old steel tank while I knelt on the sharp stones and breathed hard from the run (I’d had little exercise at Windchime), I was scared and happy at once, which as anyone knows are the perfect conditions under which to write your name.
Ray.
It was a beginning.

“Why do it?” they say. “You want to be famous?” It is a question so wrongheaded that it kind of hurts. Because what I do, I do for myself. Most of the time you’re out there in some dumpster behind the Royal Food in Triplet or you’re sitting in a culvert in Marvin or in a boxcar on a siding in Old Delphi (all places I’ve been) and what you make, you better make for yourself. There aren’t a whole lot of people going to come along and appreciate the understated loop on your
g
or the precision of any of your descenders. I mean, that’s the way I figured it. When I fell into that dumpster in Triplet I was scratched and bleeding from hurrying with a barbed-wire fence, and I sat there on the old produce looking at the metal side of that bin, and then after I’d pried a tenpenny nail from a wooden melon crate I made my
Ray,
the best I knew how, knowing only I would see it. And in poor light. I made it for myself. It existed for a moment and then I heard the dogs and I was on the run again.

There was once a week later when I took that gray LeBaron in Marvin and it ran out of gas almost immediately, midtown, right opposite the Blue Ribbon Hardware, and I could see the town cop cruising up behind, and I took off on foot. And I can run when there’s a reason, but as I run I always think, as I was thinking that day: where would I make my
Ray
? The two are linked with me: to run is to write. That day after about half a mile, I crawled into a canal duct, a square cement tube with about four inches of water running through the bottom. And with a round rock as big as a grapefruit sitting in that cold irrigation water, I did it there:
Ray.
It wasn’t for the critics and it wasn’t for the press. They wouldn’t be along this way. It was for me. And it was as pure a
Ray
as I’ve ever done. I couldn’t find that place today with a compass.

At times like that when you’re in the heat of creation, making your mark, you don’t think about hanging a hairline serif on the
Y.
It seems pretty plainly what it is: an indulgence. Form should fit function, the man said, and I’m with him.

After Marvin, that night in the water, I got sick and slept two or three days in hayfields near there. As everyone knows I moved from there to that Tuffshed I lived in near Shutout for a week getting my strength back. The reports had me eating dog food, and I’ll just say to that I ate some
dog food
, dry food, I think it was Yumpup, but there were also lots of nuts and berries in the vicinity and I enjoyed them as well.

Everyone also knows about the three families I met and traveled with briefly. The German couple’s story just appeared in
Der Spielplotz
and so most of Germany and Austria are familiar with me and my typeface. I hope that their tale doesn’t prevent other Europeans from visiting Yellowstone and talking with Americans at the photo-vistas. I’m still amused that they thought I was a university professor (because I talked a little about my work), but on a three-state, five-month run from the law you’re bound to be misunderstood. The two American families seemed to have no difficulty believing they’d fallen into the hands of an escaped felon, and though I did interrupt their vacations, I thought we all had a fine time, and I returned all of their equipment except the one blue windbreaker in good condition.

THOUGH I
have decided to tell my story, I don’t see how it is going to help them catch the next guy. Because those last five weeks were not typical in the least. Fortunately, by the time I arrived in Sanction, Idaho, Ray Bold was mostly complete, for I lost interest in it for a while.

Walking through that town one evening, I took a blue Country Squire station wagon, the largest car I ever stole, from the gravel lot of the Farmers’ Exchange. About a quarter mile later I discovered Mrs. Kathleen McKay in the back of the vehicle among her gear. When you find a woman in the car you’re stealing, there is a good chance the law will view that as kidnapping, so when Mrs. McKay called out, “Now who is driving me home?” I answered, truthfully, “Just me, Ray.” And at the four-way, when she said left, I turned left.

Now it is an odd thing to meet a widow in that way, and the month that followed, five weeks really, were odd too, and I’m just getting the handle on it now. Mrs. McKay’s main interests were in painting pictures with oil paints and in fixing up the farm. Her place was 105 acres five miles out of Sanction and the house was very fine, being block and two stories with a steep metal snow roof. Her husband had farmed the little place, she said, but not very well. He had been a Mormon from a fine string of them, but he was a drinker and they’d had no children, and so the church, she said, had not been too sorry to let them go.