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On
top of dawn’s quick reflections, those that come when you think
you’re awake, but not yet there, Caleb Monroe realized this morning
that his newest books, the one just published and the one he was working
on, were not moving well, and he was bound in misery. He’d rarely own
up to writer’s block and associated ills and they didn’t knock their
way home for him as he stretched in the false dawn. There were other
circumstances to grasp; help had to be found in some measure, in some
place.
He
didn’t know where to turn, or to whom. Writers are a lonely lot was an
adage he had heard and believed long in his past. It would never change,
nor should it, if it boded the end of creation. But he’d not make his
outspoken wife Miriam the fall guy in all of this; he tittered audibly
at that thought, seeing her eyes light up from the pillow the way they
always did, radiating that lagoon blue she owned outright.
With
a touch of guilt, echoes easy at such times for him, he recalled
Miriam’s overt pronouncement early in their marriage. “Caleb,” she
had said, in a talk about the written word, “I have no interest in
situations that are merely created out of the gray matter of one’s
mind.” The look on her face was soft, but not entreating, as ever.
“I don’t bury things. I am sorely committed to the real world, what
makes the actual world tick, and all the bright and ordinary but real
people in it. That’s what makes me go, turns me up and on. That’s my
engine. Life’s real adventures grab me with lust. They overpower
me.”
She
hadn’t even stopped to catch her breath, he recalled just as easily.
“You’ve
known all that since you found me that singular day at the library,
buried in the Churchill story. Oh, my, I was mesmerized by that one, and
all the others that came along with it, before and after.” Her neat
eyebrows gave their own stress points to her words, like exclamation
marks. Those brows widened her face, easily tossed off her expressions
with liveliness, and allowed the blue more room to roam.
He
had a thousand reasons to kiss her.
Her
enthusiasm was totally valid, Caleb admitted, seeing how those eyes
would light up at a brief memory of how some person in this life had
waged war on time or trouble. Those eyes, ever blue and lucent,
especially from a pillow, had never dimmed, and the fact she still loved
him drove him away from spoiling anything in that rich vein. That she
loved her kind of books was not a wonder. “Writers, novelists, just
don’t make great people out of made-up incidents. It just doesn’t
ring true for me, not with imagination’s biggest boost, not with real
jazz.” He’d never heard that argument elsewhere. She was still his
unique mate. They were childless, and all else had to line up in mutual
support.
With
a vengeful yank he pulled the last sheet from his printer and tossed it
in the wastebasket. Six foot and four inches of height made a mockery of
this move. Thinner hair, like air, was promised at that height and had
already given over such evidence. His arms, nearly as long as he was,
belonged to an ax or a scythe in another time and not to a computer
keyboard. The look about him was of a Bunyan man or a Maine farmer about
his potatoes, or a Northeast Kingdom table or cabinetmaker planing one
board edge for hours at a time. A craftsman he’d have been at any
task.
There
were days he felt that inner distribution of senses, his quality days
when he knew exactly which way to go, which word to select in the sudden
run-around of options. Clumsy he was at the computer, from the gitgo,
but he’d swap his mind for no one else’s… not even one belonging
to the greatest novelist ever, whoever that would be. “They’d have
to draw lots on that one,” he argued as an aside to nobody in
particular and to the whole world in general, and added, “if only
they’d listen.”
Conviction
came swiftly that the greatest novel ever written was now, and possibly
forever, supine and dusty, acid eating away at its innate brilliance, in
an old drawer in an old bedroom of a little house planked on the edge of
a prairie, or snug in a cabin beside a mountain stream. Perhaps, came a
small and remote thought, in a house he might be more familiar with. He
didn’t care where, lest that dream might succumb to pressures or time
itself.
With
another deliberate move, the long fingers working hard, he deleted the
last page of text on his monitor, and felt the scissoring tear go down
through his body, all the way down through. Oh, God, it was an agony on
some days, the non-quality days where the greater part of work was mere
salvation! Nothing was coming out right to start this new day or carry
the next novel. Off to his left, supine trying to pronounce itself
again, on the near empty flat top of his desk, sat three copies of his
newest mystery, and they, like the rest of the lot, were not going
anywhere, not in any hurry. Oh, how he had worked on that one: long days
and nights, sleepless nights, endless days. Yet, at the end, over and
out they seemed to say, task initiated, task done; but his small
publisher had no designs on pushing the book on to any grander heights.
Nor did the publisher have the wherewithal, or the intention, to do so.
Like Caleb’s earlier novels, it was another lock-up; his name on the
spine of a book, and then near anonymity in all its dust and cover
taking over, in full charge. Fate secured.
Miriam,
try as she would at times of sweet sentiment, could not break the mold,
the stance, that she had long ago set in place: it had come to the
simple mandate they lived by… she did her thing and he did his. They
fully met at either side of midnight; for a dozen years that was
sufficient.
The
old discussion with her about fiction and nonfiction had occurred
manifold times in the past, and finally, like his books, had faded away.
When tender and intimate moments might have sparked an attempt on his
part to re-open the discussion, he let them slip away without another
thought. There was little help coming from that quarter, though they had
been in love for all the twelve years of their marriage. In such
moments, she would moan deep in her throat, “Caleb, Caleb, you make me
feel so good I’m afraid I’ll fall apart. But I could never leave you
that way.” It was enough to see the marked trail, the magic that she
weaved with her own few words. Proof of it was, he could track her days
with such sayings.
Long
days seemed to follow. His quandary in his writing life fixed itself on
him with a hard stare and a hard grasp. And in the brief minutes of
darkness, in that source where creation resides, at times pummels
enclosures to get out, or goes dormant in sleep, he often thought of his
brother Saul’s three sons, the very salt of the Earth itself, the
pushers and doers, the salesmen of the world, of industry. If he could
corral the three of them in one room, drop his problem in their laps,
might not some solution rise from the encounter?
Saul,
the fire chief in a nearby town, was as close to Caleb as anybody could
be. In more than one fire he’d had the brief thought he might never
see his brother again, his brother the retreater, who could lock himself
away for hours in the pursuit of mere words, the brother who had charmed
his three nephews to sleep with noble stories they remembered yet and
whose author could not. Saul himself was a man of action, but when Caleb
asked for a small intercession, Saul made the arrangements. His boys,
the ones he had run right through Little League and Pop Warner football
and skating clinics galore, and teams atop teams, all had a sense of
pay-back due; to their father, their mother, their small town, their
schools, and their Uncle Caleb, the wonder story teller who had sneaked
his way under their skins in the magical times when they were just tots
at the knee. In their early and later teens they had helped him rebuild
a good portion of his barn and, first-hand, he saw deeply into how they
were being formed. It was Paul he first tagged as dyslectic because Paul
would never cut a board that required measurements. Over the years he
watched as Paul overcame much of that problem with nothing but hard work
and careful movements. The big issue, unknown to all, was the fact that
Caleb had created the project to have youngsters around; he and Miriam
having no shot at kids of their own, and he had insured young presences
around and about her skirts, almost from day one.
Caleb
never told her, or anybody including Saul, about manufacturing the barn
project. And never once did he regret his plot, not for one minute, even
becoming adept with hammer and saw.
So,
at their father’s manipulation, one by one on a Sunday morning a few
weeks later, when all business trips had finished at about the same
time, they gathered in Caleb’s kitchen. They were now in their dynamic
thirties, the three of them: talkers, orators, hustlers of world trade,
managers of time and flight and the scattering of potential and
opportunity to the very ends of the earth. They were good at selling
goods, at supply movement, at ideas, at time, and were extolled at it,
the young tycoons in hard product industries.
The
room was pulsing with energy, with light, and the coffee was rich with a
pulling aroma. In through Aunt Miriam’s yellow curtains the sun
multiplied itself on their faces, touched at their hands, warmed all the
inner places of comfort. One could think that a fair share of energy
might look for an escape.
For
a few moments each day the kitchen was Caleb’s usual sanctuary, the
one he loved to pull around himself, surrounding himself, before
composition called for him. But on this morning, trying to look into all
eyes at the same time, he merely said, “I need some help, boys, but I
don’t even know fully what the problem is.” He thought he was being
too subjective. “My books are not moving, I guess, is what prods me,
but I don’t know where to start. Or what the real trouble is.”
Peter,
bright as a new lamp, jumped right in. “I love them all, Uncle Caleb.
I think your last one is the best one. It keeps growing on me. I read it
on my last trip to the West Coast. Didn’t even know I was flying.”
He
stood up, balancing the cup of coffee in one hand, yet gesturing with
it. “That sells me, sells me all the way! I told Dolly Matrick in LA
all about it. She’ll buy a copy for sure, spread the word to her
pals.” Caleb believed that others saw Peter as the most artistic of
the brothers, though the game of hockey had adopted him for twenty years
of his life. The blonde’s face had petal-like features now, minor
scars from minor sticks, an errant puck. Caleb had been there the night
a lancing skate had fixed that landscape. On the ice, through college,
Peter had been a wizard with the puck, a great set-up man, and Caleb
knew an idea would sprout from him before the session was too far
advanced. He’d spring with an idea or drop it in a brother’s lap.
Paul
echoed the same feeling, darkly handsome, ladies man from the age of
twelve or thereabouts even with a minor detraction, Caleb recalled with
a quick glee. Perry, really enjoying the coffee, resting in a broad ray
of sunshine, looking a little lazy, or as if he had needed this day of
rest from the rigors of his trade, said, “It’s got to be marketing,
Uncle Caleb. I know the publisher is a small guy with little funds, so
the marketing has got to spring from some unknown source, and I don’t
mean money because it can’t come from his till. It has to be
imaginative. It has to be worked at from an angle that’s not been done
before. It’s has to come out of some kind of steady, uniform pressure
to bring your books to the attention of the right people.” He paused
and said, “Whoever that may be, but here unknown.” He paused and
added, “As of the moment.”
Peter
said, “It won’t come of some sly saturation about the goodness of
the books, of their quality. Chances are that approach will not work; it
hasn’t to this point. At least I don’t think it has.” For a brief
pause it appeared he was measuring differences, weighing values. “It
has to be a lightning strike, the way some commercials on TV slam you
right between the eyes or catch hold of the mind or the music in the
mind, or give you a piece of undeniable logic. It’s the way some
graphics of a sign grab your eye and hold it even when you’re long
past the physical sign itself… a noble billboard.”
He
paused, he nodded seemingly to himself, he continued. “I still
remember one I saw a long time ago, a big hand stretching out to a small
hand, a football hanging there as if tossed in the air, and a slogan
that said, ‘Give a boy a hand before he needs a hand.’ It was a Pop
Warner football plea. I can still see it, down in the center of a small
town on the East Coast, just north of Boston. It’s never gone away
from me. That was a lightning strike, the way you might remember a
fierce bolt, not the sound of it or the flash of it, but the essence of
the fear it created. I’ll always remember the truth of that plea. It
was universal for me, eternal almost. It hasn’t changed yet.” Caleb
thought he had passed the puck, had made another set-up, and garnered an
assist.
Perry
said, almost as an afterthought. “How many books would you donate to a
crazy idea that just came into my mind? It seemed to leap right out of
what Pete just said, about the lightning strike. I figure that has to
be, at least to us, from an unknown source.”
“You
got me, Perry,” Caleb said. I don’t know where you’re coming from
but I’d give any decent amount of books, donate them as you say, to
see them take off. What’s flicking around in that head of yours?” An
itch or touch of hope festered somewhere, he knew not where.
Perry
mused a few moments, satisfied himself with some resolution, and said,
“All three of us, me and Pete and Paul, fly all over hell and back in
this country, and we do it often enough they could set our paths on
maps. Just like airline commercials.”
“And?”
Caleb threw in.
“What
if we left a copy of your new book in every plane we flew in? In the
overhead compartment, in the seat rack, or under the seat. It would best
work on our partial flights where we’re not flying to the final
destination. The copy of the book would not so soon end up in the hands
of a maintenance worker who might just chuck it.”
“That’s
crazy and expensive,” Peter said. “Uncle Caleb would go broke.”
Paul
leaped in. “Wait a minute. It only takes one, one good review from the
right source. The New York Times, a major reviewer in one of the major
city papers, and I’m convinced the book industry plays dominoes with
some of that stuff, like not wanting to get left out on a new discovery.
That kind of stuff happens a lot, I’m convinced of it. And I’m for
supplying my own copies. I’ll buy a box right now. My schedule for
next week is worse than yours is, Pete. I’ll be up seven, maybe eight
times next week. Ten would cover me.” He looked pleased with himself.
Peter
came back. “Why not leave one on the top of each trash barrel we come
across? Might have the same kind of luck. That’s really stretching the
envelope. We’d do a hundred books in a month maybe, for what? That’s
one wild ass idea that’d never work! How many people would read the
books if they could get their hands on them before they’re just tossed
away?”
Paul
said, “What the hell are a hundred books that are not moving now? Or
two hundred? Think of what could happen, dream about it.”
“Maybe,”
said Caleb, with a gleam in his eyes, “it’s such a wild ass idea it
could damn well work. How the hell many people read them now? What would
it cost for one great review? That’s what counts! As it is, there are
some strange accidents that happen with books that don’t make the
books any better than they are, and mine are good, but those other books
get sold. There is, as each of you’d say, a solid difference.”
They
came, they talked, they went their ways. Caleb stood with Miriam as they
walked down the path to three cars parked against the barn all three had
helped restore, where first their bikes, and then their jalopies, used
to park at earlier visits. A hollow sense of loss slung itself through
Caleb’s whole body. He shivered. The slash of time‘s passage cut
through the air. It must have touched Miriam too. She said, without
turning around, without looking directly into his eyes as she always did
at moments of pronouncement, “They believe, don’t they?” She
pressed his hand against her thigh. “Sometimes, in a strange way, I
think they are our own sons.” She pressed his hand again.
And
it was Miriam who answered the telephone one evening three weeks later,
thought about it for a moment after, then retrieved her shelved copy of
Caleb’s most recent book. He was off to a testimonial for one of
Saul’s retiring firemen. When he came home just before midnight,
parked beside the old barn they had salvaged from death itself, the
light in the bedroom window went out.
He
was sound asleep an hour later when she woke him, the phone in her hand.
“I think you’d better take this, Caleb. It’s from O’Hare Airport
in Chicago.” The stark, lucent blue of her eyes leaped at him. He’d
know her again in mere seconds. She said, “It’s about this. “ She
held the book up. The lucent blue shone again. |