Stories for Chip (47 page)

Not long after, the academic world recognized that Jack is a genius and he started getting academic teaching positions, which helped out with his finances considerably. We saw a lot less of him, and I missed him. Missed sitting at his feet listening to him read poetry aloud. Missed his warmth, intelligence, and kindness.

◊

For a while I taught science fiction writing in the summers. Jack came to visit my class in Cambridge. I told him that some of the students were intimidated, and weren't sure that they were up to being able to talk to him. He said, “Tell them I'm very conversant on the weather.”

Afterwards, I drove him back to U. Mass Amherst with my son asleep in the carseat in the back. I talked to him about his writing habits, that getting up at 5 a.m. thing, and asked how that had worked for him as a parent.

I don't remember the phrasing exactly, but the question elicited a strong reaction, something about having fought a war with a toddler for control of his own attention. We had this conversation in the car, with baby Benjamin asleep in the back seat. Jack added, “I'm amazed that you can think and write at all with a small child.”

We both had problems telling right from left. When we reached Amherst, we arrived at a strategy for navigation. When we came to a turn, Jack would say which way to turn and we would both point our fingers the direction we thought he meant. If our fingers agreed, we would turn that way. If they disagreed, we stopped to discuss it. We eventually got to his office, laughing a lot on the way.

◊

Jack still lived in the city part time. Still took in strays. George, a man he took in, disappeared and three weeks later Jack got a long letter, which made such an impression on Jack that he showed it to us. We had met George: he'd mostly stayed in the TV room watching cartoons, absentmindedly chewing his nails.

George's letter went something like this: He was walking down the street with another guy and they were headed for a 7-11 intending to get some cheap beer. “There was this guy coming the other way and he looked like sort of a wimp.”

Then came the memorable line: “And so we robbed him.” Then they continued on to the 7-11, shoplifted the beer, and when they came out, the cops were there to arrest them for robbing the wimpy kid. The wimp in question was apparently the DA's son, and so Jack's former house guest was in big trouble (and in jail).

We talked for a long time about what was contained in the chasm between those two sentences: “There was this guy coming the other way and he looked like sort of a wimp,” and “And so we robbed him.” The sentence “And so we robbed him” remained an object of contemplation for years afterwards.

◊

Last September, when Jack and I met for lunch, he was putting up a writer named Roland, who believed he was in contact with aliens. Roland came along to lunch. He had a black eye, and the bridge of his glasses was held together with medical tape.

Roland was eager to tell me his sad tale: He had had a successful career as a novelist. But then he began insisting that his novels were all completely true, that he wasn't making up any of it. This lead to a falling out with his publisher over the PR plans; he refused to allow his latest book to be sold as fiction.

Roland pulled the book from the publisher and had to pay back the six figure advance. He couldn't get anyone else to buy his book because he wanted it published as nonfiction.

He was now homeless. He and Jack had met in a restroom in Times Square.

Roland told me all this and more in a pressured, unending stream of words impossible to interrupt. Roland said he was taking Jack on a trip to the desert in order to prove that what he was saying was the absolute truth.

“The truth…” he said.

“Is out there,” I said.

“Yes. Yes! It is!” he said and excused himself to go to the bathroom, I asked Jack if any of that was true. Jack nodded his head from side to side. He looked scared.

“He bites his fingernails,” I said.

“We all have our fetishes.”

When Roland returned, I asked about his black eye.

“It was Jack's friend Ray,” he said.

The night before, Ray had come over. Roland had told him, author to author, of his published troubles, expecting sympathy and perhaps a loan. But Ray had made merciless fun of Roland.

Ray said that he, too, was in touch with aliens. And that his aliens said that Roland's aliens were the bad guys and were cruising the Galaxy in search of money. And if Roland had financial needs, perhaps they could help him out.

Roland said, “—and so I punched him.” He stopped for a rare breath.

“And so …?”

“And so he hit me back. And broke my glasses. And this is why we must make our trip to the desert. Jack needs to understand that I am telling the truth. We can't afford plane tickets, but I still have my car: I was living in my car on Riverside Drive before Jack took me in. We need a driver. My license is suspended, and Jack can't drive. Would you like to come?”

“That's kind of you ….”

“You have a signing at Barnes & Noble next week,” said Jack. “And your classes start Monday.”

◊

Jack disappeared. He was on sabbatical, so he didn't run afoul of his university. But after a couple of weeks, his daughter reported him missing. Once Jack's landlord learned of the missing persons report, he began eviction proceedings on the basis that Jack was no longer living there. Just before Christmas, I ran into Kierkegaard at a bookstore near Jack's apartment. He had heard this from Jack's daughter. We decided to drop in for a visit to see what was up.

As we started up the stairs, a black man and his little boy were coming down the stairs with a fluffy dog on a leash. We passed each other on the second floor and nodded. When we got to the third floor, we heard the boy exclaim, “Look, daddy! Santa Claus!” We looked down and there in the lobby was Jack in his red coat.

“He is risen,” said Kierkegaard quietly. Jack waved. We waited there for him and then walked up the last to floor together.

“How was Arizona? I imagine you have quite the story to tell.”

Jack said, “It's not just story. It's a whole novel. And not a word of it is true.”

Vincent Czyz

Memory is a city piled along the flow of night, twinkling in the distance as it's carried downriver, lost in a heartland flooded black—a flat-out sprawl somewhere below the threshold of notice, waiting for a switch to be flicked on, a star to go nova.

Jim Lee on the event horizon, one of his nasty-smelling cigars between his teeth, out in the fields with his telescope magnifying circles of sky, never able to take it all in. Fedora, jeans with clip-on suspenders, scuffed-up cowboy boots, he looked like a cross between a rodeo rider and a Chicago hitman. Better than two hundred pounds though not that tall, he liked to give his gut a friendly slap. “Never know when you'll hafta be the anchor in a tug-a-war.” His fleshy face was wide and his black hair sprouted without regard to direction, the fedora there to keep it corralled.

Jim Lee, who'd taken it upon himself to school Logan in everything from cheating at poker to pointing a telescope proper, had spent hours amidst water-stained UFO magazines and dime-store paperbacks (The Book That Shatters the Wall of Official Silence!), scouring photos of hubcaps thrown in the air and tinfoil-wrapped aliens for one that might be genuine.

Teacup to go with that saucer, Jim?

Jim Lee hemmed in by a stack of 45 singles, by empty beer cans and filmy glassware, by pillars of books he'd read and reread—the Bible everpresent among them—by rusted pieces of farm machinery and toy banks with mechanical cutesy ways of nabbing coins (a skeleton that sat up out of a coffin, scooped in a nickel with a bony hand), by Robby the Robot, made of that 1950s near-indestructible plastic, missing a green arm nonetheless, big as a small child, invading planet Earth, a takeover of Jim Lee's farmhouse kitchen the first step of the Master Plan.

One particular June night whose evening had floated a full moon over the fields, simmered it orange, bloated it near twice its normal size, Logan Blackfeather sat with Jim Lee among his collectible clutter listening to an antique radio with big knobs, its broad inanimate face framed in wood, glossy tube insides lit up by Spanish guitar music that for all Logan knew had circled the Earth half way before staining the Kansas night blue. The singer's voice a shade more sorrowful than his guitar, it made you feel you were on a street in an empty downtown, soaked to your boot soles by summer rain, then out the kitchen window they went, the blue Spanish voice and the weeping guitar, through the screen easy as a breeze, wandering like horse and rider over the dark fields, but there was nothing to echo off of, no place to rest, to keep them from dissipating at the speed of sound—the fate of all prayer however fervently chanted.

Logan was as lean as the Anglo side of his family, as dark-complected as his Hopi ancestors. Long-haired, taller than Jim Lee, and a good 17 years younger.

“I like your piana playin',” Jim Lee had said once as if to answer the unasked question of why he paid Logan as much mind as he did, as though Logan were an adolescent Mozart, composing a symphony were within his reach.

“Jim Thorpe's real name was Bright Path.” Jimmy took a cold cigar stump out of his mouth to clear the way for words. “That's a good'un, ain't it?”

Bent over his work, his forehead glistening with sweat, he handled the razor with the expertise of a Japanese chef, separating tiny white heaps into lines, the blade edge-on nearly invisible between his thick fingers.

“An Oklahoma boy, Thorpe was. Wasn't born all that far from here.”

The nights were hot that June, humid as the collective breath of all those weed-chewing insects outnumbering by thousands the stars over the fields.

“This here's the stuff that made the Incan empire what it is today.” Jim Lee grinned. “Ruins.” Snorted hard through a tightly rolled dollar bill, then handed over the hollowed greenery. “Gift to the white man from the Incan in return for abusing his women, knocking down his religion, and putting him on welfare.”

Logan's nose burned, the familiar taste slid down the back of his throat like a color that wouldn't stick to the canvas. White as ground-up angel bones, a sparkle to it like radiance dried and fallen away, it fevered Logan's blood, numbed the sting at the back of his neck, where there was a welt roughened by an oozing scab. Keepsake from riding a paint that hadn't much cared to be ridden.

Larry had shaken his head. “Never saw that horse act up that way.”

Logan wasn't much of a rider, just a little run around Larry's farm he'd been thinking, felt like a conquistador in the saddle, all that animal strength bunched up under him. Never saw what spooked the mare, but she took off so sudden he about lost a stirrup, caught a low branch across the face, then he was falling forward in the saddle as she took a steep dry creek bed. The sides of the horse pinched between his knees, his groin stiffening up from squeezing so hard, he thought for sure he was going to get spilled when they came to that falling-apart fence Larry had never cleared away, but the horse clean leaped it, then pulled up short—just like that—breathing hard, her heaving ribs pushing out his shaky legs, and a good thing he was sitting, he wouldn't've been able to stand.

The mare walked calmly back to the barn, all the fight gone out of her, but jumped again, unexpectedly, through a side doorway. Just blind instinct that he buried his face in her mane. The door jamb, big as a railroad tie, cracked the back of his head, scraped up his neck.

Larry came running up, a good scare still on his face. “You all right? Goddamn. Never seen 'er do that. You okay?” He shook his head. “Damn but I never seen 'er do that.”

Weirdest thing was, when the machined edge of that lumber scraped against his skull, a hole wormed through the past, and he switched places with his dead father, whose head had shattered a windshield 12 years before.

Now the collar of Logan's shirt kept sticking, pulling free, bleeding again when he turned his head.

“How 'bout a little viewin'?”

Night in the old farmhouse just beginning to smolder, Jim Lee wanted to pull out his telescope though what he was prospecting the sky for was likely as nonexistent as his “oofoes.”

Whether nuclear furnaces light years distant or poker chips on the table or apples in the grass, there's no divinity at work, Jim, just physics. They fell out that way is all, Logan wanted to tell him. You might as well send your Galileo-tube back to 16th-century Holland or wherever it came from.

But he didn't believe it'd been an accident or Providence that had killed his father, it'd been Uncle Cal, his father's only brother. Except how could Cal have done it? He was a mechanic, sure, but how could he have arranged for a drunk kid to ram into Logan's father's truck? Not to mention the kid killing himself in the same accident.

Something of a drunk himself, Cal had become a fixture around the house, like a couch that got dragged along no matter how many times the family moved into a new place. Why Cal? Why couldn't his mother have taken up with somebody else? Anybody else?

The living room became occupied territory, Cal sitting in front of the TV drinking beer, his eyes as still and concentrated as a snake's. Usually in a sleeveless T-shirt so you could see the skull grinning between a pair of outstretched wings tattooed on his left arm, the number 13 underneath the skull as if the 1 were a straight leg and the 3 a curlicue of a leg. One day Cal bent down and shoved that arm, bumpy with muscles—like rocks in a sack—in Logan's eight-year-old face. “Anglos think thirteen's unlucky. What the hell do they know?”

Two more dusty lines disappeared through tight-rolled legal tender before Jim Lee rounded up the last of the cocaine with a wet finger, stuck it in his mouth. “That'd put a little zing in yer toothpaste now wouldn't it?”