"I have some news for you," Wheatyard said, his voice indifferent yet with the slightest hint of excitement. "But not over the phone. Want to drive out here? This time I'll even let you see the house."
"Great. That'd be a real treat."
My sarcasm, with the subtle dig at his lack of hospitality during my first Tillsburg visit, revealed the smallest of shifts in our respective roles. Gone was the deference, my quiet awe of Wheatyard. Two months earlier, although sarcasm is one of my more prominent traits, I never would have dared such attitude around him—but now I was tossing verbal jabs right back at him, as if we were equals.
Almost equals. He still called the shots in our encounters—when and where we would meet, what we'd talk about, when it would end. I had to settle for putting him in his place whenever I could, during the few minutes he deigned to honor me with his presence. And it did seem like deigning; despite everything about him—the slovenly appearance, the long string of failed publication attempts that were at least as long as my own failures, the run-down house and truck, the casual everyday speech—he still projected a vaguely regal bearing whenever we were together. He was subtly lordly, magisterial, during all of our meetings, issuing decrees and commands easily and naturally, as if he was used to being obeyed without question.
His decrees and commands were meant to compel me to improve myself, to prod me towards a writing career which I never would have pursued otherwise. At first I couldn't figure out what the hell he had to gain. It's not like he had accomplished everything he could with his writing career and personal life, and was now passing along his wisdom to the next generation, as if I was some sort of protégé. For one thing, he was only a few years older than me, which precluded any wizened elder role, and hadn't gained anything from all that writing other than a heap of manuscripts, all of them unpublished and possibly unpublishable.
His personal life seemed to be similarly lacking. The house, the truck, the solitary life out in Tillsburg where even a lonely bartender wouldn't welcome him, and befriending a misplaced, jobless business school grad in a used book store. None of that suggested any real fulfillment in his life.
But maybe, as I reflected many years later, he befriended me that long summer from the need to be an authority over someone. If I finally starting writing, he'd have someone to be senior to, distilling friendly advice that might be accepted or at least not rejected outright, showing me what my prose lacked when it didn't work and bestowing patronly praise when it did. Maybe, given his less-than-exalted place in the world, he just needed to be looked up to.
These reflections didn't come until much later, during a momentary lull in the busy life I eventually found myself in. During those summer months in Champaign I rarely paused for reflection, instead merely going along for the ride without contemplating what any of it really meant.
Going along for the ride had me on the road out to Tillsburg, for the second and final time. The car was still holding up, though the oil hadn't been changed since the previous fall and the freon had completely run out, leaving me with rolled-down windows and full-blast vents streaming the scorched August air. A jug of ice water, grabbed from the refrigerator right before departure, was my constant driving companion, for both my parched throat and the very real possibility of an overheated engine.
The jug sat on the seat next to me, ice cubes and most of the chill already gone, bouncing into the air as the car jostled over a railroad crossing—the locals still called it the Illinois Central back then, even though the old railroad's ownership had changed several times—as I sped down the county road toward Tillsburg.
Ahead in the distance I spied a boxy, two-story building through the shimmering waves of heat. The rigid geometric shape stood out starkly amongst the swaying cornstalks—now easily eight feet high—and soybeans. I remembered reading that straight lines are a human invention, while the natural world is all curves and arcs; the tone of the prose was condemning, as if straight lines were an unnatural abomination along the lines of light beer, gasoline-powered cars and bleach-based laundry detergent. The piece was in some leftist rag sheet I had picked up in the foyer of a record store, the kind of publication I would read back then for amusement, sneering at how the other side thought. Maybe there was something to all of that, about straight lines and curves, but the writing was so over-the-top and extreme that it would only convince the already converted.
I shook off those distracting thoughts and returned my attention to the boxy building up ahead. I must have passed it during my first drive to Tillsburg, but probably failed to notice it as I puzzled over Wheatyard and his strange life. As I came closer, over the tops of the cornstalks I could see figures milling about in the field behind the building, sun glaring intermittently off their helmets. Through the roar of the rushing wind I heard the hard crack of plastic on plastic and the lower yells of gruff adult voices and the shrill of whistles, and realized at once what it was.
They called it fall football practice, though at ninety-five degrees and eighty percent humidity the season was still deepest summer. Fall was green leaves turning to gold and orange and brown, chilly evenings when one gladly wore a coat for the first time in six months, starting school again, dodging the incessant doorbell-ringing of trick-or-treaters and gorging on turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving before fighting off a nap during the second football game. That was fall.
This was August, the dog days, when it seemed cruel and unusual to force a bunch of teenagers to wear full pads and sprint and tackle full-out, all for the promise of Friday night glory. That glory would be theirs, the drained players were told, greatness awaited them and this was their time and moment in the sun, even if most of the glory went toward the egos of the coaches—all of them frustrated ex-jocks—and the parents.
I saw so much of that back in high school. Back then I played soccer, but was near enough to the football team, that epicenter of every high school, to witness the coaches' casual sadism and bear their disdain on those rare instances when any of us other soccer players were noticed at all. Mostly we were in the football players' way—hogging up locker room space, whining for just one clean dry towel, occupying a single field that could have used for a private torture session of wind sprints in full gear. None of us were considered tough enough to survive even five minutes in that manliest of sports.
Those memories instantly flashed through my mind after hearing the braying of unintelligible insults and seeing the tackling drills, the suffering players bent at the waist, hands on their knees and gasping for air. All of the old resentments—third-class citizenship from not lacing on shoulder pads, envy of the team's eminence in the school hallways, longing for the girls who swooned at the sight of any numbered jersey, whether that of star running back or third-string safety—came rushing back.
I sped past the school, which stood surrounded by cornfields, well beyond the outskirts of town. TILLSBURG-WILLMAN-ENNIS, the sign read, HOME OF THE REDHAWKS. Another consolidated high school, once three schools but now one, the towns' inevitable response to dwindling populations. Bitter age-old school rivalries, and the pride of competing towns, would vanish as three groups of students, parents and alumni merged into a single school, the traditions, school songs and mascots falling away forever. This building, maybe only five years old and beyond any town limits, couldn't have been one of the three original schools. It must have been cheaper to toss up a new building of cinder blocks and vinyl siding than maintain three old decaying ones, which were all abandoned to the elements and slowly faded away.
So a new building rose out of the prairie, not within any of the three towns, to avoid hurting anyone's feelings. The Redhawks name must have been newly-invented as well, politically correct and inoffensive. A fresh start for everyone, it would have been proclaimed. Memories of the past would dissolve as a new generation of students arrived who knew little of what came before, kids who knew nothing other than the T-W-E Redhawks. Once the old schools were finally bulldozed, there would
be few reminders left for youngsters other than the faded varsity jacket in dad's closet and a dusty trophy case in a back hallway of city hall.
I slowed upon seeing the first reduced speed limit sign—45 MPH—in the past twenty miles, which finally signaled the approach of Tillsburg. Not that any signal was necessary. The town had been obvious for the last five miles, its cluster of trees, rusted water tower and grain elevator all standing out prominently above the endless horizon of grain. I passed a Kerr-McGee station, a squat cinderblock structure with a paint-peeling screen door emblazoned with a 7-Up sign and framed by two single-pane windows decorated inside with crisp white curtains. The two mechanical pumps up front seemed more than the station needed, harkening back to prosperous times, to more residents and more country-road drivers in the days before the interstates. Farther on was an office of the university extension service, barren of parked cars even at midday, and then what was obviously killing the Kerr-McGee—a Casey's gas station and convenience store. Though humbled by the vast gas plazas in bigger towns like Champaign and Danville, Casey's was positively decadent in Tillsburg, with its sheltering overhead apron and bright lighting and gleaming gas pumps with digital displays, and aisles of snack foods inside.
My tank was running low and gas was cheaper out here than in Champaign, so I pulled into the Casey's lot just long enough to turn around and head back to the Kerr-McGee. The place obviously needed the business, and of the two stations it seemed less like a profit center of some big anonymous corporation. Interesting, I thought—maybe that leftist rag was influencing me after all. At first the paper just amused me, all those crazy proclamations of anarchists challenging every belief the business program instilled in my head during the past two years, but now I was deliberately opting for the less corporate-seeming of the two corporate entities.
I filled up the tank and swung inside to pay, handing eleven dollars in crumpled bills to a teenaged girl who sat behind the counter with an open textbook lying to one side. She only turned away from her geometry long enough to take my money and give back my change. Another kid destined to graduate from dear old T-W-E and leave Tillsburg for one of the state universities, eventually never to return. Though I admired her diligence in studying, I also realized from a glance at the magazine rack—Guns & Ammo, Field & Stream, Motor Trend—that the station had little that would otherwise interest a teenaged girl.
I followed the main drag the short distance to Railroad Street. I turned and drove down the center of the traffic-less street, which felt oddly narrow against the broad expanses of farmland and cloudless sky—the long line of witheringly neat houses on the right, the long stretch of empty railroad track on the left. The town seemed vaguely forbidding compared to my last visit, and that visit was unwelcoming enough, with Wheatyard not letting me into his house and the two of us all but getting kicked out of Simon's.
The pristine houses and proudly kept lawns ended abruptly at Wheatyard's house, the last on the street at the edge of town before the endless fields began. Just beyond Wheatyard's place stood the town dump, a sight I hadn't expected. I thought such places, full of piles of rusty junk and simmering refuse, guard dogs and the occasional scavenger poking around, were either of the distant past or a complete myth. I assumed the industry had gone entirely to modern landfills perimetered by barbed wire, like a high-security prison, and off-limits to scavengers with junkyard dogs no longer necessary.
As I looked on, a flock of crows circled above the debris—mounds of rotting food and used diapers and soiled mattresses—as wiry dogs trotted in circles, occasionally nipping each other with bared teeth, yelping when a bite hit deep. I hadn't noticed the dump during my first visit, when my attention was riveted on the ramshackle squalor of the house and imaginings of how Wheatyard spent his days there. But during this visit I might also have easily missed seeing the dump, with the remarkable sight on display in the ranch house's front yard.
There, amidst foot-high weeds and sunflower stalks several feet higher, Wheatyard reclined in an aluminum-framed lawnchair, wearing only a too-small pair of adidas shorts and scribbling furiously in a notebook. He didn't notice me as I pulled up, the car rattling and running on long after I switched off the ignition, nor as I stood, gaping first at the dump and then in even greater wonder at the sight of Wheatyard basking in the sun.
He certainly wasn't a sunbather. His pasty skin suggested he only went outdoors when he needed to—from house to truck, and from truck to Simon's or Mullen's Tap or The Grind or Cellar Books. The sedentary act of sunbathing didn't fit him, nor the vain goal of a deep tan. I guessed that his house was such an oven that day that only sitting outside offered any relief. But not even being outside separated him from his writing; hence, the notebook and what must have been his latest misunderstood masterpiece.
His skin was already turning pink. He must not have bothered with sunscreen, and was without sunglasses as well, squinting severely as he stared at the stark white pages. As I came closer, amidst the weeds I saw a folded-up beach umbrella, which he must have dragged out of the house but not bothered to set up, so intent was he on his writing. The faces of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Woodstock peeked out from the fabric's folds, which surprised me as much as the presence of the umbrella itself—in Tillsburg, Illinois, hundreds of miles from the nearest beach.
After I stood there for several minutes, Wheatyard finally looked up, saying "Oh, you're here," as if mildly surprised. No pleasantries, no What's up? or Damn it's hot today or How was the drive? or Good to see you. None of that—just Oh, you're here. Typical of him. He had little use for social formalities, which I agreed with. Most greetings were meaningless formalities, with the asker rarely being truly interested in the answer.
No formalities for him, just flat statements of fact. Or opinion.
"That editor of Muirwood Journal, Wilkins or Wilson or whoever, is a complete idiot. I'm writing him a letter to tell him that."
"Muirwood?"
"They turned down my short story, a fictionalized account of John Muir's marriage. Of course I took liberties—I'm not a historian or some glorified stenographer—but this Wilkins seemed genuinely offended."
I had no doubt the story was offensive, even if Wheatyard hadn't meant to offend. He wrote what he wanted to write, explored any topic, built any plot, intermixed any implausible characters that came to mind, with no regard for the reader's reaction. He was provocative without even trying to be.
"Offensive? How?"
"This editor must a tree-hugger or something," Wheatyard continued, ignoring my question. "Appointed by the Muir Foundation for his delicate sensitivity to all things ecological, his loves for birds and trees and flowers, and his shrewd judgment of what constitutes great literature."
"Offensive?" I repeated.
"Yeah, offensive to him and those delicate sensibilities." He shook his head. "He's offended by the simple notion that Muir's marriage to his Fair Diana could suddenly come crashing down due to what he calls an 'inappropriate and unnatural relationship' with Smokey the Bear."
"Gee, that doesn't sound offensive at all," I said with mild sarcasm, but he clearly did not catch my tone. Nor did he notice my raised eyebrows which conveyed the same sentiment.
"Well, this idiot editor thought so, and since he's the grand arbiter of taste at that journal, the head muck-a-muck, they won't publish it. I write them a story about John Muir, specifically for the journal, and they turn it down. And it's one of the best stories I've written, too, but it's so specialized that I doubt anybody else will take it."
"Maybe he's a stickler for accurate time frames," I offered, stealing a glance at the dump. "Smokey the Bear probably wasn't created until long after Muir died. So their relationship was impossible, temporally speaking."
"Christ," Wheatyard said, still ignoring me. "What really gets me is that I meant it as a compliment to Muir. He loved the woods, Smokey loved the woods, and Muir would have been enraptured, maybe to the point of lust, at Smokey's quest to p
revent forest fires. The fact that they'd have a love child is a great piece of symbolism."
"Love child?" I replied, stunned. "John Muir and Smokey the Bear had a love child?"
"Of course they did. They both would have been earthy, virile, fertile as a swamp. Having a child together would have been the most natural thing in the world."
"Well, not exactly natural," I said, choosing my words carefully. "Because it's impossible for a human and a bear to produce offspring. And isn't Smokey a male? That might be another problem the editor had."
"It's only a problem for editors of biology textbooks," Wheatyard replied, shaking his head. "It shouldn't be a problem for fiction editors. Fiction is all about possibilities, or impossibilities. Of course a love child of Muir and Smokey is biologically impossible. That wasn't my point. I had no intention of being literal. The love child was symbolic, an allegory, not a statement of fact."
He paused and looked over his shoulder at the flurry of crows as they swooped over from the dump, squawking and bickering, and finally landed on the ridge of his roof. Wheatyard's skin had grown even pinker, probably from both sunburn and anger.
"Not a statement of fact," he repeated. "Symbolism. Allegory. Any competent editor has to recognize that and not interpret it literally, and then get all huffy and offended. Otherwise he might as well be editing biology textbooks, pursuing his true calling in life. Or maybe just sweeping the floor of the biology lab."
The aspersion on the working class caught me by surprise. I assumed he had blue collar roots, even if he was now following loftier pursuits. The janitor comment wouldn't have been out of place from any of my finance professors, academics who saw labor either in abstract terms or as expendable inputs which could be cast aside if projected revenues failed to materialize. But it sounded strange from Wheatyard, who seemed a likely champion of the little guy, or at least sympathetic. But I shook off the thought. I hadn't driven all the way out to Tillsburg to reflect on Wheatyard and the working class, but to hear his good news. And neither a rejection letter from a small-time literary journal nor his angry reaction qualified.
"Uh, yeah, right. Biology, heh. So what's this good news of yours?"
"I'm not sure yet if it's good news or not. I finally talked to the editor of Columbia Press about Longing Dissolute Midnight."
"And?" The suspense wasn't exactly killing me, more like annoying.
"And he's definitely interested in publishing it."
"Well, you knew that before, right? Otherwise he wouldn't have bothered contacting you. But what about the editing? That's what you were so worried about."
"He wouldn't commit either way, which isn't surprising—he's a businessman, and smart businessmen don't commit to anything. When I asked, he left it an open question, but he does seem pretty cool with the entire concept. He says he likes big, sprawling novels, epics, the kind with a huge cast of characters—he referenced Cecil B. DeMille and casts of thousands, which of course I appreciated—and narratives that take forever to develop but finally hit with a wallop fifty pages before the end."
I hadn't read enough of the book to know about any such wallop at the end. It had the cast of thousands, but in two hundred pages I only picked up a few overriding themes before I finally gave up, long before any big finish. But his tone suggested that all of his novels, not just this one, followed that pattern and that maybe he had finally found an editor who was attuned to his style. An editor who was, if not a kindred spirit, then at least an indulgent advocate.
But I didn't know if having just an advocate would be enough. I was familiar enough with the corporate world and its reluctant, conservative tendencies—one thing that drove me away to grad school, looking for a clean break and a fresh start—to realize that a big difficult book, "inaccessible" in corporate-speak for challenging but unmarketable art, would have a hard time working its way through the bureaucracy, the endless layers of management, before getting the final seal of approval. An advocate, someone who spoke up for you at staff meetings but wasn't really heart-and-soul behind you, might not be enough for Wheatyard. Instead he would need a true champion, someone who would go to the wall for him, preach passionately about the greatness of his work, risk a career to expose the writer’s difficult brilliance to the world.
I doubted that such a champion existed anywhere in the publishing industry, someone who could not only recognize Wheatyard's genius but also be willing to put up with his maddening quirks and eccentricities. He seemed like he'd be a tough writer to work with. And if the book ever made it to publication, its slightest chance of overnight success would have been overwhelmed by the near certainty of crushing failure.
"This editor—what's his name?"
"Bill Perkins. No relation to Max, unfortunately. Of course Max has been dead for decades, but I would have loved if Bill at least had his bloodlines."
I had no idea who Max Perkins was, nor why I was supposed to be impressed at the thought of him being Wheatyard's editor. I guessed he was some publishing bigshot. Fortune 500 CEOs, major investment bankers, bigshot venture capitalists, all those I knew, but not New York editors.
"So do you think he wants to do major editing?"
"Like I said, he wouldn't commit. But I'd guess he's pretty hands-off. He mentioned a few novels he admired, thousand-pagers that were only lightly edited and pretty much left as-is."
"Well, that sounds encouraging."
"Sort of. But he also mentioned And Hickman Arrives, and what its editor would have been up against pulling that manuscript together. As if he fantasized about tackling something like that himself."
"Hickman?"
"You know, Ralph Ellison."
"Oh sure, Ellison. I loved Invisible Man and that one story about the wheel of fortune, but I've never heard of this other book."
"It's still unpublished. The manuscript is several thousand pages, and Ellison's still not done with the first draft. He's been working on it for thirty or forty years now, and even lost a big chunk of it in a house fire and had to rewrite a thousand pages from memory. It's the Great White Whale, or maybe the Bigfoot, of the publishing industry—Great White Whale because it's an impossible quest, Bigfoot because no one's ever seen it. Writers and editors talk about it in mythic tones, kind of in awe. Everybody's been waiting for decades for the followup to Invisible Man, and there's practically a betting line set up for whether or not Hickman ever gets published."
I envied his deep familiarity with literature. Though I had always been an avid reader, my literary knowledge was scattershot. I'd read anything and everything, but I was really only familiar with a handful of my favorite authors, all of them out of fashion, and only knew the names of legends like Updike and Roth and Bellow without ever having read them, and never heard of hundreds and possibly thousands of other prominent writers. My literary knowledge had no context, either; I knew little about who influenced whom, about artistic movements, about the great works and how they impacted civilization. And I knew nothing about the inner workings of the publishing industry.
It suddenly occurred to me that Wheatyard might not have been the recluse I had imagined him to be, a one-man literary movement, alone in this desert island of a town, isolated for twenty miles in every direction by an ocean of corn. His familiarity with an unpublished novel like Ellison's, along with other insider comments he made now and then, didn't quite fit the image of a recluse. His knowledge couldn't have been gained over beers at Simon's. Instead it suggested an advanced education, with years of seminars, workshops, and endless arguments over novels and novelists in smoke-filled bars long after class was over.
But Wheatyard's personality, as Don Eastman suggested, didn't seem conducive to a writing program. He would have fought against all of the politics, the ass-kissing, the backstabbing and petty personal attacks that I heard went on there. He probably would have responded to harsh criticism of his stories by strangling the critic to death with the other's own skinny tie. And that must have never happened, since
he now lived in a rundown house in Tillsburg instead of the old prison up in Pontiac.
So maybe it wasn't advanced education at all, just freak intellect and intense curiosity.
He was still going on about Ralph Ellison when my attention reverted to him.
"...so I can't get a clear read on Perkins. Maybe he'll leave it alone, or maybe he's taking it on so he can go down in history as the man who was brave enough to tame a book like Ellison's."
"Would an editor really do that? Take on a project that the rest of the industry saw as impossible, just for the personal glory of slaying the firebreathing dragon?"
"Firebreathing dragon?" he replied with a smile. "That's what you think about my writing? Wild, uncontrollable, lethal?"
"No, but I assume a cautious editor would. What I read of Longing Dissolute Midnight sort of made sense to me, and even when I didn't know what the hell you were talking about I still enjoyed the narrative. But I think an editor might look at your writing that way—a firebreathing dragon—especially if he was contemplating how to make it palatable to the general public."
"Palatable," he said with undisguised disgust. "Well, one thing in my favor is that it doesn't have to be palatable to the general public, since that's not Columbia's market. They're not a Random House or Knopf that has to move a hundred thousand copies to get their minimum rate of return. Columbia's a small outfit. Perkins would be thrilled to sell five thousand copies, and there just might be five thousand people in the world who'd understand my writing, who'd really get it. That's why I looked for an independent like Columbia in the first place."
"I don't know anything about independent publishers, but I do know indie record labels, so I think I get what you mean."
"Indie labels, indie publishers, same general idea—free from the mainstream and its mindless conformity. The mainstream that loves vampire stories and legal thrillers where you can see the big plot twist climax hundreds of pages ahead. Bored housewives who read Harlequin romances to fill the void of their non-existent love lives, bored executives who read spy novels and imagine themselves as dashing secret agents instead of corporate robots."
The same corporate robot I would soon become, he left unsaid. What he saw as the mindless life he was trying to save me from by writing. Wheatyard was a writer, an enthusiastically compulsive one, but everything he had to show for it—endless hours of work, piles of unpublished manuscripts, a lonely existence in near-squalor in the middle of nowhere—were less than enticing alternatives to the mindless but comfortable existence of a corporate career. Sure, Wheatyard was his own man and lived life on his own terms, but that didn't seem quite enough to make up for all of the rest.
After I remained silent, he paused, appearing to consider his implication. Paused not from regret, though, as I had never seen Wheatyard regret any of his actions. He did what he did, damn the consequences, and must have believed that regretting things he had done would do nothing to change them. Instead his pause seemed like it was meant to let his words fully sink in. And they certainly did sink in.
"I don't want to have to appeal to the tastes of small-minded peons," Wheatyard said, moving on, his point about my situation clearly made. "I won't make that compromise, which is why I won't bother with Random or Knopf or any of the other big boys. I'll go with Columbia or some university press that can probably find the five thousand people who are smart enough to read my writing just the way I wrote it, and not the way some editor messed with it."
"So that's all you had to tell me?" I said, mildly incredulous. "That's what I drove all the way out here for? Not to hear that an editor wants to publish your book and made a generous offer, not that you already accepted and it's coming out next month, none of that. Just that you finally called the editor?"
He looked hurt, which I didn't at all regret. He fully deserved it as payback for saying I would soon become some corporate android.
"Hey, you were the one who badgered me to respond to the guy," Wheatyard shot back, his face now clearly reddened more from anger than the sun. "I thought you'd be glad to hear it."
"Sure, I'm glad for you, but I could have heard the news over the phone instead of burning up another quarter-tank of gas driving out here."
"I thought you might like to pass the time, too. I mean, you're out here. It's not like you have anything else going on."
"I don't mind passing the time," I admitted. "I just hoped you had big news."
"No big news yet. But I might finally be getting close."
"Well, I guess that's something."
"Have you started writing?"
"A little bit." Again he had diverted the subject from himself, but strangely I didn't mind this time.
"Tell me about it."
"Okay," I began, pausing for breath. "I was sitting in my apartment last weekend, sweltering like always. It was getting dark outside, much sooner than it should have—it was still only late afternoon. And then I heard the rain start to fall. I'm on the top floor, so the rain always hammers on the roof right above me, and I thought about how rain brought the promise of relief, if not always the fulfillment. You expect it to cool things off, but usually it's over in just a few minutes, and then the sun comes back out and turns all that moisture into one big sauna, even more uncomfortable than before. And I thought how much the farmers needed the rain, with all the drought, but this little would just dry up and make no difference at all."
I paused, feeling what strangely seemed almost like pride. I kicked at the dirt, the toe of my shoe hitting something half-buried in the ground.
"While thinking about all of this, a couple interesting phrases popped into my mind. So I opened a notebook and wrote down how August rain always fails to bring relief, how the soil—'the thirsty dust'—would just greedily soak up what little had fallen, offering no help to the withering crops."
"And your bigger point?"
"No bigger point, just some observations. Bigger points are your territory."
"Bigger points are every writer's territory," he corrected. "But at least you're taking down observations. That's the first step. Collect as many observations about summer rain as you can. And make sure you think about what makes it unique—summer rain is a lot different than spring rain and certainly November rain. Write everything down, wherever you are—keep that notebook with you at all times. Thoughts will come to you anywhere."
The object I kicked at finally dislodged, tumbled end over end and clanked to a stop against the aluminum leg of Wheatyard's lawnchair. It was a garden hose nozzle, which surprised me since the lawn clearly hadn't been watered in a long time.
"Yeah, thoughts already do," I said, nodding. "I had a few come to me while driving out here, but I forgot my notebook." Wheatyard visibly cringed. "But I'm sure I'll remember them when I get home."
"Dammit, don't go anywhere without that notebook," he said, standing and picking up the nozzle. He wound up and flung it across the road, where it bounced to a stop against the rails. "I never go anywhere without several. I can give you paper and pen if you want."
"Nice toss. No, don't worry about the pen and paper. They weren't any great insights, anyway."
"Doesn't matter whether they're great or not." He sat back down in the chair. "All insights are worthwhile, small or big."
"I think I'll remember them later."
"Okay. If you don't, then take this as a lesson. Now, once you have a bunch of observations about summer rain, think of how to incorporate them into a story. Think about farmers out in the fields, crops withering with the drought, staring at the sky at what they hope are rainclouds. Imagine their hopeful anticipation, which comes despite having seen too many clouds before that failed to bring rain. Picture their anxious faces when rain finally starts to fall, and then the bitter disappointment when the rain stops after just a few minutes, the clouds move away and the burning sun returns."
"Wow. That's pretty good."
"Yeah, but it's not mine. Steinbeck—the first chapter of The Grape
s of Wrath."
"I haven't read that, but I saw the movie," I replied, seeing Wheatyard cringe again. "Sorry."
"No, it's alright. The movie was actually pretty good. Fonda was great, pulled off Tom Joad really well. But you need to read the book, too."
"I've been meaning to. But just from the movie I know what you mean—rain doesn't come, farm is about to fail, family has no choice but to abandon it and everything they've ever worked for, and then leave for California."
"Yes. For the mythical promised land, which doesn't exactly welcome them with open arms. That's the great opening from one of the greatest American novels."
"Interesting to hear you say that. I'd guess Steinbeck's writing style is absolutely nothing like yours."
"Oh, no, not at all."
"But still you admire it."
"Tremendously. Just because Steinbeck doesn't write like me doesn't mean I don't think he's a great writer. There are plenty of great writers that write nothing like me. I could never write like them, but even if I could, what would be the point? The Grapes of Wrath has already been written, and so has Ulysses and Siddhartha and 1984 and Catch-22. Why bother writing my own book if it was just like any of those?"
"To sell a lot of copies, for one thing."
"Sure, if I was at all interested in selling books. But I'm not. Right now I've got enough to live on, even if it only gets me this little house in Tillsburg."
"So you said you were going to finally let me see the house. Inside, I assumed."
"I've got enough to live on," he continued, ignoring me, "and don't really need much material stuff. Eating a little more regularly would be nice, and so would being able to buy all my beers at Simon's instead of relying on Tom the bartender's generosity. But I can get by without selling a lot of books, so I don't have to write like the greats. I can write my own way, something unique, something I can be proud of as my very own."
"Unique. That's a good way of putting it."
"What, so now you're a critic?"
"Isn't every reader a critic? But come on, you have to admit your stuff is unusual."
"No, not unusual. I have characters and plots and settings and time frames and themes, just like Steinbeck and Kafka and every other writer since the dawn of time."
"And Walt Whitman getting it on with Betty Boop."
"Why wouldn't Whitman be attracted to her?"
"Well, they lived about seventy five years apart, for one thing. And Betty was fictional, and I think I heard that Whitman was gay."
"Maybe he was, but so what? Why wouldn't a great 19th Century poet, for one brief moment, have the hots for a 20th Century cartoon character? Even if he was gay, maybe he'd see something remotely masculine in her, something that fired up his libido in spite of his natural preference. I've never read anything about Whitman having had any strong aversion to short skirts and heavy makeup."
"But the seventy five years apart?"
"I wasn't being literal when I wrote that. Symbolic, always symbolic. H.G. Wells conjures up a time machine that shuttles his protagonist forward and backward in time, and nobody objects, but I hook up Whitman and Betty Boop in a completely allegorical context, and people complain about it."
"What people?" I asked, curious to learn that I wasn't the only one who felt this way.
"I don't mean those two characters specifically. But intermingling characters from different eras gets a lot of resistance from editors. Or different species—like that idiot editor whining about John Muir and Smokey the Bear. Nobody's capable of 'suspension of disbelief' with my writing, like they are for other writers. I mean, Gregor Samsa turns into a beetle? Come on!"
We had been standing in the sun for an hour, yet Wheatyard still showed no sign of being ready to move inside. Not that it would have helped his sunburn anyway—even though I shaded my eyes I could see his skin was moved beyond pink and had begun to redden. He would be in a lot of pain in the morning. Yet he seemed unaware of any discomfort as he railed about the injustices of literature.
"Here's what I ought to do. Next time I want Moses to sit down to a deep philosophical discussion with Immanuel Kant, I'll introduce Wells' time machine into the story. That will take care of the different eras 'problem.' Then I'll hint at the existence of the unpublished journals of Wells' narrator in which he followed up his time machine with a device that enables cross-species fertilization, in order to breed a superior race which draws on the best qualities of its predecessors—like Muir's intellect and Smokey's brute physical force. That takes care of the different species 'problem.' But that fabrication would do nothing to advance the narrative, and would just clutter things up instead, all to ease the tender sensibilities of some tiny-minded editor."
I ignored the thought that his writing already seemed to have plenty of clutter. "So when am I getting the grand tour?" I may have said it too bluntly, but I was tiring of his rant, and of standing in the sun. We were getting nowhere.
He looked up at me, and then around himself—at the weeds, at the beach umbrella he never bothered putting up, at his burning skin—and smiled as if suddenly realizing how ridiculous all of it was. Arguing at great length about literature, mostly with himself, amidst the less than pleasant surroundings of his overgrown front yard and the rank odors from the town dump, all while giving himself a sunburn.
"No grand tour for you," he said, grinning, and rose from the lawnchair. "You can't afford it. You'll get the nickel tour, and like it."
As he stood up, his notebook—in which he had once been scribbling his angry but now-ignored screed to the editor of Muirwood Journal—slipped off of his lap and disappeared into the weeds.
"Um, your notebook?" I said, pointing.
"Eh, forget it," he replied nonchalantly, even as he stooped to pick it up.
"But what about that letter? It sounded pretty important to you."
"It was important at the time. But if I wrote a nasty letter to every editor who rejected one of my novels or stories, I wouldn't have time to do anything else."
"Hmmm. That many rejections, huh?"
"As of yesterday," he sighed, "673 rejections, plus several hundred non-responses. And that's just as of yesterday. Today's mail hasn't arrived yet. Who knows, might be a few more there." He looked over my shoulder, far past me. "Well, speak of the devil."
When I turned I saw a mailman two blocks away, slowly moving toward us. He walked with a pronounced lean, his thin body barely counterweighing his bulky shoulder bag. In silence we watched his progress, a relic of the past in this town which was filled with so many relics. He finally arrived at Wheatyard's house, huffing and sweating profusely in the heat, clearly displeased at having to walk all the way to the edge of town.
"Hello, Mr. McMurtry. What do you have for me today?"
"Well, let me tell you, Elmer," he snapped, turning aside the friendly greeting. "Next time you use insufficient postage for one of these ridiculous manuscripts of yours, please do me a big favor and don't include your return address. Save me some trouble."
He handed over a four-inch-thick envelope which was scuffed and bursting at the seams, along with a handful of letters.
"Insufficient postage?" Wheatyard half-shouted, grasping the thick envelope and reading it. "Dammit, McMurtry, this is Insidious Affirmative. I sent it over a month ago—here, July 9th, see?—and it had to be postmarked by the end of July. Now it's too late. What do you mean, insufficient postage?"
"Just like I said," the postman replied coolly. "Insufficient postage. You paid $3.25, but that one has to be five dollars, easy."
"$3.25 is what those idiots on campus told me it would cost, so what was I supposed to do? Question them, ask them to show me the rate tables? Surely they're smart enough to know what the postal rates are. That's their job—that, and taking long afternoon naps."
The specter of class distinctions again arose uncomfortably in the air, not unlike the janitor comment from earlier.
"I don't know what to tell you. $3.25 wasn't en
ough."
"Okay, fine, somebody screwed up and can't read a digital readout. So why did it take you over a month to get it back to me? If you guys were on the ball, you could have returned it in plenty of time for me to get the right postage and send it off again before the deadline. And you could have handled it a little more gently too. It looks like it was stomped on by elephants."
"That's regional's problem. They're the ones who had it all this time, and who decided there was insufficient postage. I don't know anything about that. The package got sent back to the Tillsburg P.O. and had your address, so I'm the lucky guy who got to lug it all the way down Railroad Street to return it."
"No offense, McMurtry," Wheatyard said, quieter. "I know it's not your fault that your colleagues in Champaign and the regional office are such idiots. They've obviously been promoted to where they can do the least amount of damage, like any other brain-dead bureaucracy. I'm sorry if it felt like I was taking it out on you."
"You did take it out on me," the mailman replied, more angry than hurt.
"Well, I'm sorry about that. You're just doing your job. I know you're at the mercy of those above you in the food chain, whether or not they deserve to be there."
Wheatyard's implication—that the postman was inferior in the bureaucracy to people that Wheatyard considered idiots—went over badly. The mailman glared at him before turning away.
"Don't waste your apologies on me," he said over his shoulder. "I don't give a damn anyway. Save them for someone who cares. I'm sure you'll be needing plenty of those apologies."
"Hey, I just meant..."
Wheatyard's voice trailed away as he faced the futility of further discussion. He had lashed out, assumed an air of superiority and attacked a man not at fault, and as a result he now clearly had one less ally in Tillsburg. I wondered how many allies he had left out here, if any.
Wheatyard shoved the thick envelope under his arm and tore open the letters, ripping the end off of each and reading their contents one by one.
"Briarcliff Review … 'Dear Writer' ... hmmm ... Frostbite Quarterly ... 'Dear Elmer' ... nice, a fill in the blank ...'Thank you for your recent story submission. Although the story had its merits ...' Rejection ... Scurrilous Journal ... 'Dear Mr. Wheatyard' —hey, they actually typed this one ... oh, wait—'We have discouraged you several times from any further submissions, apparently to no avail. We again respectfully decline...'
"Three more for the file," Wheatyard said with a smirk, crumpling the letters in his wiry fist. "Those don't bother me. Now this,"—he indicated the wayward manuscript under his arm—"really bothers me. The publisher requested manuscripts with a specific theme, with a July deadline. I didn't even find out about it until the middle of June, but a story idea came to me pretty quickly and I cranked the book out in three weeks."
"Finished in three weeks?" I replied, incredulous. I assumed it had to take at least six months, especially for a book as lengthy as this one. And densely written, from what I knew of his writing.
"Finished enough. I figured if they really liked it they'd give me more time to polish it up. Submission deadlines don't bear much relation to how soon they're looking to publish. Sometimes they just set the deadline early to cut down on how many manuscripts they have to read."
"If deadlines are arbitrary, would they still look at this one if you sent it again?"
"Maybe, maybe not. But I'm not dropping five bucks to find out, even though the book was written specifically for this one publisher. And I have such a limited audience to begin with—five thousand if I'm lucky—that other publishers probably wouldn't take a chance on something this specialized. So I guess if Contingency House won't take it, then it won't be published at all."
"That sucks."
"What can I do? I can't hand-deliver my manuscripts. I'm at the mercy of the U.S. Postal Service. If they don't come through, I'm screwed."
"But ripping on your neighborhood mailman probably won't help you there."
"Yeah, I shouldn't have done that. I was just pissed off about the screwup and I vented at the nearest available postal employee. Which, unfortunately, was good old Chris McMurtry."
"You know him?"
"I know everybody in Tillsburg. I went to school with McMurtry back at Tillsburg High. In fact, he dated my sister for a while."
"Really?" Maybe, I thought, he would finally talk about his family, and his life.
He nodded and turned toward the house. On his back I could see where the plastic bands of the lawnchair had waffled a cross-hatch pattern into his skin, just below his burnt shoulders. I followed him, stepping delicately across the weedy yard and up the crumbling concrete steps.
NINE