The Dark Design (38 page)

He and his first mate, Tom Rider, “Tex,” and an Arab named Nur are the only members of the original crew left. The others dropped out for one reason or another: death, ennui, incompatibility, etc. Tex and the Kid are the only two people I’ve met on The River who could come anywhere near being famous people. I did come close to meeting Georg Simon Ohm (you’ve heard of “ohms”) and James Nasmyth, inventor of the steamhammer. And lo and behold! Rider and Farrington are near the top of the list of the twenty people I’d most like to meet. It’s a peculiar list, but, being human, I’m peculiar.

The first mate’s real surname isn’t Rider. His face isn’t one I’d forget, though the absence of the white ten-gallon hat makes it seem less familiar. He was the great film hero of my childhood, right up there with my book heroes: Tarzan, John Carter of Barsoom, Sherlock Holmes, Dorothy of Oz, and Odysseus. Out of the 260 western movies he made, I saw at least forty. These were second or third runs in the second-class Grand, Princess, Columbia, and Apollo theaters in Peoria. (All vanished long before I was fifty.) His movies gave me some of my most golden hours. I don’t remember the details or the scenes of a single one—they all blur into a sort of glittering montage with Rider as a giant figure in the center.

When I was about fifty-two years old, I became interested in writing biographies. You know that I had planned for many years to write a massive life of Sir Richard Francis Burton, the famous or infamous nineteenth-century explorer, author, translator, swordsman, anthropologist, etc.

But financial exigencies kept me too busy to do much on
A Rough Knight for the Queen.
Finally, just as I was ready to start full-time on
Knight
, Byron Farwell came out with an excellent biography of Burton. So I decided to wait a few years, until the market could take another Burton bio. And just as I was about to start again, Fawn Brodie’s life of Burton—probably the best—was published.

So I put off the project for ten years. Meanwhile, I decided to write a biography of my favorite childhood film hero (though I ranked Douglas Fairbanks, Senior, as my other top favorite).

I’d read a lot of articles about my hero in movie and western magazines and newspaper clippings. These depicted him as having led a life more adventurous and flamboyant than those of the heroes he played in films.

But I still did not have the money to quit writing fiction long enough to travel around the country interviewing people who’d known him—even if I could have found them. There were some who could have given me details of his careers as a Texas Ranger, a U.S. Marshal in New Mexico, a deputy sheriff in the Oklahoma Territory, a Rough Rider with Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, a soldier in the Philippine Insurrection and the Boxer Rebellion, a horse breaker for the British and possibly as a mercenary for both sides in the Boer War, as a mercenary for Madero in Mexico, as a Wild West show performer, and as the highest-paid movie actor of his time.

The articles about him couldn’t be trusted. Even those who claimed to have known him well gave differing accounts of his life. His obituaries were full of contradictions. And I knew that Fox and Universal had put out a lot of publicity stories about him, most of which had to be checked out for exaggeration or downright lies.

The woman who thought she was his first wife had written a biography of him. You’d never know from it that he had divorced her and married twice thereafter. Or had two daughters by another woman. Or that he had a “drinking problem.” Or an illegitimate son who was a jeweler in London.

She thought she was his first wife, but, as it turned out, she was his second or third. Nobody’s too sure about that.

That he was still a flawless hero to her even after all this says much about the man, though. It says even more about her.

A good friend of mine, Coryell Varoll (you remember him, a circus acrobat, juggler, tightrope walker, gargantuan beer drinker, a Tarzan fan) wrote me about him. In 1964, I think.

“I remember the first time I met him I thought I was meeting God… over the years, being on the same lot with him many times” (in the circus, he means) “the awe fell apart but he was always liked by most people and always idolized by the kids even after he quit making pix… I know that sober he was a swell guy, drunk he’d fight at the least excuse and do some of the damnedest things (don’t we all?)… I’ve a few dozen stories about him that never made the publications. I’ll tell them the next time we get together.”

But somehow Cory never did.

Even his birthdate was in doubt. His studios and his wife claimed he was born in 1880. The monument near Florence, Arizona (where he died doing 80 mph on a dirt road), says 1880. But there was contrary evidence that it was 1870. Whether he was sixty or seventy, though, he looked like a young fifty. He always kept himself in great shape.

Also, a friend who saw him off on his fatal trip said he was driving a yellow Ford convertible. His wife said it was white. So much for eyewitnesses. The studio publicity departments claimed he was born and raised in Texas. I found out myself that that was a lie. He was born near Mix Run, Pennsylvania, and he left there when he was eighteen to enter the Army.

Just as I was about to write to the War Department to get a copy of his military record—and find out for myself just what he had done in the Army—a novel by Darryl Ponicsan came out. I was stymied again; again, too late. Though the book was semifictional, its author had done the job of research that I’d been planning to do.

So—my hero wasn’t the grandson of a Cherokee chief. Nor was he born in El Paso, Texas. And, though he was in the Army, he hadn’t been severely wounded at San Juan Hill nor wounded in the Philippines.

Actually, he’d enlisted the day after the Spanish-American War started. I’m sure—as was Ponicsan—that he hoped to get into action. There is no doubt that he had great courage and that he desired to be where the bullets were the thickest.

Instead, he was kept at the fort, then honorably discharged. He thereupon reenlisted. But still, no action. So he deserted in 1902.

He did not go to South Africa, as the studios claimed. Instead, he married a young schoolteacher and went with her to the Oklahoma Territory. Either her father got the marriage annulled or she just left him and a divorce was never filed. Nobody’s sure.

While working as a bartender, shortly before he went to work for the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma, he married another woman. This didn’t work out, and he apparently failed to divorce her, too.

Most of what the studio publicity departments—and Rider himself—claimed was false. These tales were made up to glamorize a man who did not need it. Rider went along with these tales, maybe made up some himself for the studios. After a while he got to believing them himself. I mean, really believing them. I should know. I’ve heard him relate almost all of the prevarications, and it’s evident that by now the fiction is as genuine as the reality to him.

This blurring of distinction between reality and fantasy in no way interfered with his competency in real life, of course.

He did, however, reject Fox’s wish to advertise him as the illegitimate son of Buffalo Bill. That might have started inquiries which would have exposed the whole truth.

And he never says a word about having been a great movie star. He does tell stories about his film experiences, but in these he’s always an extra.

Why is he using a pseudonym? I don’t know.

His third wife described him as tall, slender, and dark. I suppose that in the early 1900s he would have been considered a tall man, though he’s shorter than I am. His slim body does contain steel-wire muscles. Farrington is shorter than he but very muscular. He’s always after Tom to Indian wrestle him, especially when he (Farrington) has been drinking. Tom obliges. They put an elbow on the table, lock raised hands, and then try to force each other’s hand down to the table. It’s a long struggle, but Tom usually wins. Farrington laughs, but I think he’s really chagrined.

I’ve wrestled with both of them, coming out about fifty percent winner (or loser). I can beat both of them in the dashes and the long jump. But when it comes to boxing or stick fighting, I usually get licked. I don’t have their “killer instinct.” Besides, this macho thing never was important to me. Though that may be because I suppressed it from some unconscious fear of competition.

It’s important to Farrington. If it is to Tom, he never shows it.

Anyway, it was a thrill to be with these two. It still is, though familiarity breeds, if not contempt, familiarity.

Tom Rider has been up and down The River for hundreds of thousands of kilometers and has three times been killed. Once he was resurrected near the mouth of The River. By near I mean he was only about 20,000 kilometers distant. This was the arctic region. The River’s mouth is, like its headwaters, near the North Pole. However, the two seem to be diametrically opposite, the waters issuing from the mountains in one hemisphere and emptying into the mountains in the other hemisphere.

From what I’ve heard, there’s a sea around the North Pole, and it’s walled by a circular mountain which would make Mount Everest look like a wart. The sea pours out of a hole at the base of the mountains, winds back and forth in one hemisphere, finally curving around the South Pole to the other hemisphere. There it wriggles like a snake up and down from the antarctic to the arctic and back again a thousand or so times, and finally empties into the north polar mountains. (Actually, it’s one mountain—like a volcanic cone.)

If I drew a sketch of The River, it’d look like the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth, a world-girdling snake with its tail in its mouth.

Tom said that the areas near the mouth are populated chiefly by Ice Agers, ancient Siberians, and Eskimos. There’s a scattering of modern Alaskans, upper Canadians, and Russians, though. And some others from everywhere and every time.

Tom, being the adventurer that he is, decided to travel to the mouth. He and six others made some kayaks and paddled downstream from the land of the living into the wasteland of the fog shrouds. Surprisingly, vegetation grew in the mists and the darkness all the way to the mouth. Also, the grailstones extended for a thousand kilometers into the fog. The expedition had its last grail meal at the last stone and then, laden with dried fish and acorn bread and what they’d saved from the grails, they paddled on, the ever increasing current speeding them toward their goal.

The last hundred kilometers was in a current against which there was no turning back. They couldn’t even try for the shore; sheer canyon walls soared up from the edge of the water. The voyagers were forced to eat and sleep sitting up in their kayaks.

It looked like curtains,
finit,
for them, and it was. They plunged into a great cave the ceiling and walls of which were so far away that Tom’s torchlight could not reach them. Then, with a horrible roaring, The River entered a tunnel. By then the ceiling was so low that Tom’s head was knocked against it. That’s all he remembers. Undoubtedly, the kayak was torn to pieces against the ceiling.

Tom woke up the next day somewhere near the south polar region.

“There’s a tower in the middle of a sea surrounded by the polar mountains,” Tom said.

“A
tower
?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Haven’t you heard about that? I thought everybody knew about the tower.”

“Nobody ever mentioned it to me.”

“Well,” he said, looking somewhat peculiar, “it
is
a hell of a long River. I suppose there are plenty of areas where nobody’s heard the tale.”

And he proceeded to tell me that that was just what it was, a tale. No proof. The man who told Tom about it may have been a liar, and God knows there are just as many here as there were on Earth. But this wasn’t an account heard from a man who’d heard it from another who’d heard it from still another and so on and so on. Tom himself had actually talked to a man who claimed to have seen the tower.

Tom had known this man for a long time, but he’d never said a word about it until he got stumbling drunk with Tom one night. After he sobered up, he refused to talk about it. He was too scared.

He was an ancient Egyptian, one of a party led by the Pharaoh Akhenaten or Ikhnaton, as some pronounced it. You know, the one who tried to found a monotheist religion about the thirteenth century
B.C.
Apparently, Akhenaten was resurrected in an area of people from his own time. The teller of the tale, Paheri, a nobleman, was recruited by Akhenaten along with forty others. They built a boat and started off, not knowing how far they had to go. Or, indeed, what their goal was, except the source of The River. Akhenaten believed that Aton, God, the sun, would live there and that he would receive any pilgrim with great honor. Would, in fact, pass him on to paradise, a place better than The Riverworld.

Paheri, unlike the Pharaoh, was a conservative polytheist. He believed in the “true” gods: Ra, Horus, Isis, all the Old Bunch. He went along with his Pharaoh, thinking that he would lead them to the seat of the gods and would then get his just deserts for having abandoned the old religion on Earth. Poetic justice. But he, Paheri, would be suitably rewarded for his faith.