“So I am discovering,” I replied. It was, I suppose, the expected wry answer, and made my host chuckle, but now I am taking it back. I take issue with Royal, much as I came to like him; violent and doomed as this world might be, a romance it certainly is.
5
Royal Davies’s brave wife suffered with a brutal arthritis, so much of the labor in that house fell to Emma, the granddaughter. Her parents had moved to San Diego and she was to join them in a few weeks; it was plain to me her grandparents viewed her approaching departure with dismay. I can testify she roasted a beautiful mallard hen that night, with stuffing and candied yams, and cleaned up afterward—an obliging girl.
As for Mrs. Davies, she kept me under the reptile eye while listening to her husband’s presentation of contemporary Chicago, of his sister’s health, and of the bothersome train ride home. He was a bright observer, and I soon saw he had to be, for Mrs. Davies asked him a chain of incisive questions which built one upon the other until she had in her mind a satisfactory portrait of her husband’s absence. You’d think it might abrade, to be probed that way by your spouse, but Royal Davies seemed to shine and grow younger under her spotlight, and he leaned toward her, his language and whole manner becoming honed and precise.
She then turned to me and said, “Very well, Mr. Author, it is your turn.”
“I am at your service, Mrs. Davies.”
“You are a man of letters,” said she. “Tell me, what do you think of Boyd Singleton Ample?”
I said, “I think he is very good, yes, a very important writer.”
There are any number of reasons to tell this sort of lie. As a well-treated guest, I didn’t wish to seem critical of her taste. Worse, I didn’t wish to appear jealous—every one of Mr. Ample’s books sold much more briskly than Martin Bligh had.
“Go on,” she said, nodding.
“Well, his insights on human miseries are salient,” I ventured. It didn’t seem like a weak limb to climb out on—it was a common opinion among people who were serious about Literature and the phase it was in, whether of ascent or decline, and What It All Meant for Society. In his most recent novel he had sallied out with a number of momentous ideas, namely that war is difficult, and that poverty is difficult too; in fact, that much of human experience is marked by difficulty. I don’t remember who is at fault.
“Horse puckey,” said Mrs. Davies, an excellent glint in her gaze.
“Pardon?”
“He is boresome. Humorless as a mole. Tell me, are you familiar with The Pestilence of Man?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.” I was mortified, because in my politic reply I’d set myself to defend a novel I hadn’t even finished. I tried! But it’s a long book.
“And did you laugh much, reading it?” she asked.
“I’m afraid not, Mrs. Davies.”
“Call me Celia, please. Did you get much good from it?” she persisted.
“Why, I think so—Celia.”
“And what particular good would that be?” said my rigorous hostess.
“Well, a broader understanding of human darkness, I suppose,” I said, seizing a trite phrase from a review I’d seen somewhere. Oh, I was on thin and melting ice now!
Celia Davies said, “At this minute many people are reading books by that man; I will tell you how to identify them. They own a furtive brow, men and women alike; they bend their slight shoulders, they tug their lips and fret. Mr. Becket, do you find yourself improved for your new understanding of human darkness?”
I adjusted my own shoulders. I had a new admiration for Royal Davies, that he could be a match for her. “Few things have managed to improve me, Celia,” I admitted, “although a day or two of your company might.”
Then she laughed, which was the youngest thing about her; Royal took her hand with an expression of delight, and I was released from that table.
6
I think often of Celia Davies. She could squeeze a conversation to its rind, leap it east to west, or change its axis wholly. Her wits were as supple as her fingers were rigid. I don’t know her story, for she was an adept evader of questions, but her life would be a giddy crossword, working down from some clues and across from others.
By dusk I felt in the home of friends. I had ceased to dread my forthcoming interrogation, and Royal suggested with some pride that I go down to his dock and enjoy a little evening on the river.
People who live on riverbanks understand one another. If you can’t be on a boat, a dock will do. Royal Davies’s dock was wide with a bench on the end where you might sit in contentment with the ponderous Kaw slipping under you, and beside the bench Royal had bolted an iron post on which you could hang flowers or a kerosene lantern.
“What are you writing, Mr. Becket?”
It was the granddaughter, Emma, holding a slip of paper and her copy of Bligh.
“A letter to my wife.” Though a poor one, awkwardly composed.
She blushed brightly at this and said, “Is it a love letter?”
“Yes,” I replied, which renewed the blush. She had an ungainly gallantry—I found myself thinking of Redstart, who would’ve ignored her even as he stood on his hands to catch her eye.
“Is Mr. Davies coming down?” I asked, for she seemed out of words.
“No, he is rubbing Grandma Celia’s hands. He has a balm he uses every night.”
“They’re going to miss you when you move to California,” I said.
“Oh, no!” she replied, dismissing the notion.
I scratched away at my letter in the dying light.
“Mr. Becket?”
“Yes?”
“Did you love writing Martin Bligh?”
“I did, yes.”
“I wanted to show you my bookshelf, but Grandpa said not to trouble you,” she said, then with disarming practicality, “I like you better than Spearman, but not so well as Alcott. Here.”
She had taken the time to copy down the titles of all her books, some two dozen of them, and she handed me this inventory; thus I was given a peep into her life, which was a rich one, for there was Lorna Doone, and The White Company, and Last of the Mohicans, and Life on the Mississippi, and Kidnapped. Of course there were also lesser titles, such as Her Prairie Knight and Nevada Juliette.
“It’s a winsome collection, Emma,” I said, squinting down the list. And it was—a most gaudy parade, and she loved it all. I said, “Have you a favorite character among all these?”
Without delay she answered. “Alan Breck, who kills his enemies in the roundhouse and writes a song about it before the bodies cool.”
It is a recurring sorrow to me never to have raised a daughter.
She said, “Will you read to me from your book?”
“It’ll be getting dark,” I observed, and she fled in her skirt for the lantern.
There is a scene where Martin is being pursued by Chiricahuas—his horse has run itself to death and Martin has strapped the mailbags to his own back and is running full claw through a mesquite thicket. Probably such a thing is not possible—I’d never seen a mesquite thicket to know. Martin anyway dives and scuttles and is a clever jackrabbit, but these are the scheming Apaches so you would have to say the outlook is bad. It’s a tense scene, if I say so, and Emma drew her knees up and hugged them, and I bent to the page in the yellow light and gave Emma my best production, because I had no daughter, and because even as I read I recognized the coming time when Emma would laugh at my little story and take up with Mr. B. S. Ample or a similar concerned citizen.
“Oh, read some more!” Emma cried, when Martin had got safely away.
“No, not now. You go up to the house.”
“Thanks, Mr. Becket,” she said, and went.
I set down my notebook and watched a johnboat move down the Kaw toward its confluence with the great Missouri. The johnboat had no lantern at its bow and was a flat graceless box like a wagon bed.
It bothered me that I hadn’t been able to talk better sense to Glendon. I kept seeing h
im heave his gear and then himself off that Great Northern train. Why had I not persuaded him to try the law? Certainly I could’ve worked on him, chipped away, swayed him from folly.
Susannah could’ve done so, had she been along.
Well, I’d be back in Northfield in three days. Perhaps it would be easier to tell these things to Susannah in our own sunny kitchen over cinnamon rolls.
I stood and doused the lantern and was startled to hear a chuckle nearby, out on the river. The chuckle came from the johnboat, which had drifted quite near. Staring out I saw a silver waterline, a dab of silver above it.
A man in a boat, standing up.
Jack Waits
1
Read the confessions, the memoirs, the courtroom transcripts: There is always a line the scoundrel steps across and becomes a wanted thing. Sometimes the line is theater and robbery and kicking the fellow off the bridge; sometimes it’s simply a signed sheet of paper.
Perhaps it is fitting that my own line was merely the end of a dock.
“Becket, again,” said Glendon in a low voice, tossing me a rope. “What do you suppose are the chances?”
“Glendon!”
“You were reading to a little girl as I went past. I knew your voice, you see.”
I looked up at the lit windows. “This is Royal Davies’s place. A police detective and a kind host.”
“Are you in trouble on my account?”
“I don’t think so.”
He nodded. He looked small and exhausted and melancholy, and hope awoke in me.
The porch door opened and Emma came out and shouted into the dark, “Mr. Becket? Come up for pie!”
“I’ll be there in a minute,” I called. To Glendon I said, “Come with me.”
“If I do that, I will miss Blue.”
“It is what’s right,” I told him.
“Imagine it were Susannah, and you twenty years gone.”
He looked away and grasped the dock post as if to shove off.
I said, “Glendon, it might be your final chance to give up on easy terms. Davies is a good man; you will get fair treatment.” For you see, the moment he appeared there arose a picture of the skilled lawyer, the kindly judge, the life restored. Suddenly it seemed clear—Providence had given us this opportunity. “Don’t you see? We have met again here for exactly this purpose!”
Glendon replied, in his blunt fashion, “Nope, that ain’t it.” He squinted out at the water. “Fog is coming in, I feel it on my face. Can you see far in this? What can you make out?”
“I see a bow wake where that barge is passing,” I said. Fom the shuffling and lowing there were cattle on the barge, heading down to the Kansas City stockyards, I expect. It was a great long barge.
“I don’t see it, I hear it only,” he replied. He went quiet; fatigue lay on him like blown dirt. Then “Becket,” he said, “I’m sorry to ask, but I’m going to anyway. Won’t you come along? It’s shabby of me, and there’s not a thing in it for yourself, or your sweetheart, or your cunning lad. In fact I suppose it will prove the most expensive thing you ever do, and you are bound to live with regrets and have no kind forgiving thoughts for Glendon Hale; still Blue comes before me, and I am asking you to come along and help me see this through.”
Sighing I replied, “Davies says you’re an old rogue. A bandit of tolerable rank. ‘Nimble Mr. Dobie,’ he called you.”
“I was obliged for a while to use names besides my own. I am sorry to have deceived you, Becket.”
“He claims you kept outlaw company for a long span of time.”
“Almost a decade.”
“Did you kill anyone?”
He turned from me and looked into the southern sky. “You have every right to be a hard customer, Becket. Will you come, or no?”
“Glendon,” I said, “what I am supposed to think of you? I wish you’d tell me that.”
I heard the porch door open again, and this time it was Royal. He called out, like an old friend, “Say, Monte, are you coming?”
Glendon said nothing. He stood relaxed and balanced—contrapposto, my artist wife would say, a hand on a hip. I could feel the draw of his silence, the draw of his naïve and weak-eyed quest for atonement; no doubt even his shifty past was a draw, for his life seemed a curving line, capricious, moment by moment inviting grace.
“Monte?” Royal called again.
“Of course,” I replied. “Of course, I’m on my way.” And off the dock I stepped, into that heartbroken vessel.
In this way I crossed over. In this way I slid apart from all that was easy and comfortable and lawful; and so tired was my bandit friend that I took the oars myself and rowed facing forward. You just see better, standing up, and I enjoyed the feel and sound of the sweeps, and not until we were miles upriver did I remember my clothes and grip, back at Royal Davies’s house, and my unfinished letter to Susannah, abandoned on his dock.
2
He slept several hours while I rowed upstream—my hands and forearms were aching when he woke and sat up in the johnboat.
“We’re short of food,” he stated.
I’d been wondering about that. Swing heavy oars all night, and you are likely to want breakfast in the morning.
He said, “I haven’t much: corn biscuits, salt, a water jar. About two mouthfuls of whiskey. We need to replenish.”
“Couldn’t we catch a fish?”
“I’ve got no hook and line,” he said. “We’ll try to find that too. Meantime, let me know if you see any turtles. A turtle is first rate.”
“This business doesn’t pay too well, does it?”
He gave a worn laugh, sighed, adjusted himself on the boat’s soggy floor, and pondered his dubious origins.
“I don’t even recall how I started,” he said. “I was a poor learner in most ways but you know what, I made a quick little bandit. It come to me like speech. I’d walk to town and back home to discover things in my pockets. Pulleys, bolts. Shiny stuff.”
“Like a crow,” I said.
“Yes, I suppose. I’d haunt the docks or the Odd Fellows Lodge. Or the doctor’s office—oh, but he had bright tools, scissors, tiny round mirrors for peering down your mysteries.” He laughed softly. “I had a fine collection of sparkly bits.”
“What about your parents? Didn’t they see what you were doing?”
“They missed quite a bit, for we were never acquainted,” he replied, which made me forget the oars until we lost headway and began a slow arc backward.
“Who raised you, Glendon?”
“A number of people. I remember most of their names. There was a hardheaded churchgoing couple who could see down the road and tried to iron me out, and a schoolteacher, never mind her, and there was a stumpy old duff who made toast and jam every day of the week, but by then it was late in the game. I was adept at slipping off.”
It took some time to absorb—this revealed black crow of a child. It cut from me the stubborn assumption that we all start alike, and made a larger achievement of Glendon’s everyday goodwill and decorum.
I pushed us upstream while the moon fell and was buried in the southwest horizon. When dawn touched the river I saw a large fish swimming beside the boat, a broad-backed fish with a pointy tail fin. In the chalky light that fish accompanied us upstream just beyond the radius of the oar; its knobby spine against the current made a creamy nimbus of foam.
“Glendon,” I said, “what made that waiter Franco recognize you, after so much time had passed?”
He didn’t answer. When I looked round, his head was laid back against the transom and his mouth had fallen open. He was still the boy adept at slipping off.
3
I woke to the ruthless sun—it pierced my eyelids, it smoked against my face. My back and shoulders were a rigored snarl, but my hands were the worst of it. Those oars! Their paint was worn off a thousand years ago; the grips were cracked and splintered. Though I never thought my hands were soft a horde of blisters had arisen and these boys were fa
t and toadlike.
I got to my knees. Glendon stood on the riverbank skipping stones across the water. He called, “Good morning, Becket, how do you fare?”
I held up my hands with a croak. Immediately his face darkened. He trotted to the boat, which we’d pulled up into tall weeds, and emerged with a wood bucket and a flat brown bottle. Overturning the bucket on a level patch, he told me to sit down.
“Let me see your hands.”
I held them out. They were half-open and immobile. Placing his own hands underneath mine, Glendon with sudden force squeezed them shut. Blisters split, water ran down my wrists. “Hold them out again,” he ordered—I’d jerked them to my solar plexus.
“What’s in the bottle?”
“Whiskey.”
“No thanks,” I replied, even as he uncorked the bottle with his teeth. Grasping my flayed left he doused it with the whiskey, then did the same to the right while I hissed a few rough syllables questioning his method.
He said, “I got feet like this once in Oaxaca. They went septic and bloated like death, everything purple right up to my knees. Would you like that?”
While the sting evaporated from my hands, Glendon dug out his half jar of clean water and his corn biscuits. The biscuits were old and collapsing but smelled so good I soon forgave him the whiskey. We ate them quickly without talking, listening to a persistent cow bellow upwind goodness knew how far away. Tossing the last crumbs in his mouth Glendon looked at the sky, then put his palm to my forehead.
“You’re fevered and it’s getting hot. You need some shade.”
He returned to the johnboat, emptied it and dragged it to a sandy place. While I watched he leaned the boat up and over so its bottom faced the sun, propping it with a driftwood crutch.
“Crawl under,” he said. “There’s a farmstead somewhere close. I’m going for provisions,” and with that he climbed the shallow riverbank and was gone.
The shade failed to soothe, however. As the sun climbed all breeze vanished. The johnboat accrued heat instead of deflecting it. Also there were tiny holes in the packed sand—I dreaded insects, though none came out to pester me. Eventually I rolled out from under and gimped up the shore. It was all hot sand, mudwhorl and boulders; redwing blackbirds fought in clumps of dwarf willow. I was so thirsty the murky Kaw River looked clear. Abruptly faint, I sat in the lee of a tall rock and shut my eyes.