THE AMERICAN STORYBAG Page 4

  Bimini Blue

  Some will say this story never happened. But I say it did. Just the way I've told it here too. There is another version, with a slightly different slant that appeared in Lord of the Fantastic: Stories in Honor of Roger Zelazny edited by Martin H. Greenberg. Roger showed me how to see the unseen. So this story is as much about him as it is about the old master, Ernest Hemingway.

  In 1987 I was invited to do some storytelling at a private school in Sun Valley, Idaho. I left Tesuque, New Mexico, where I lived and drove to Albuquerque's Sunport and from there I boarded an America West flight that took me to Boise, Idaho. In Boise, I rented a compact Ford Tempo and followed Highway 93 to Ketchum, the town where Ernest Hemingway on a summer Sunday in 1961 ended his life with a shotgun blast that was heard round the world.

  I'd always liked Hemingway's work, and now, driving through the sugary freshly fallen snows of Idaho, I couldn't help but think about him. This was big country, and Hemingway, a larger-than-life man, had settled himself deeply into it. I wondered how it was going to feel to tell stories in the valley of the old master. There were good places and bad places to tell stories and there were of course stories that could not be told in any place on earth and these were reserved for heaven. I knew a few of these elusive ones, had them stored inside my heart and did not tell them to anyone.

  As it happened though Ketchum was a fine sunny place to weave Navajo myths and sundry tales of mountain men and monsters and hitchhikers who wanted to be writers. Things went so well that, on the second day of telling, a member of the school board offered to give me a special, private tour of the Hemingway house on the Big Wood River which was presently a Nature Conservancy office. "The house is pretty much as the old man left it," my host, a blue-eyed retiree who had moved to Ketchum for the skiing, explained, winking to let me know that it was well worth the visit -- "It's not a museum you know."

  I didn't need any hard-sell to be persuaded to see the inside of Ernest Hemingway's final home. That afternoon I returned to the condo that had been provided as part of my fee. The space seemed grandiose with two bathrooms, an enormous upstairs living room complete with field-stone fireplace, kitchen, sleeping loft, and two downstairs bedrooms. All this for one little storyteller.

  The truth is, I celebrate simplicity even on the road and I felt the luxury of the condo was somewhat amusing, if not a little absurd. Truth be known I would tell stories for free and sleep by the side of the road if I had to, if it came to that -- but it didn't, and probably wouldn't. But it had started out that way, and I hadn't forgotten. After lunch, I went for a jog on the road that led up past Hemingway High and then I moved along the open plateau beyond the town of Ketchum, running along the sage flats, but beyond the ski lifts and into the open country that Hemingway loved. Was this the road he liked to walk along with his duck-billed baseball cap and his long trench coat and hunter's boots? I imagined the white beard, the suntanned face, the persona that had all but outstripped the great man's phenomenal writing skill. Hemingway was the archetypal workingman's writer. The guy any guy could read. You didn't find that many women who loved him, or liked him, or even read him any more.

  In reality, Hemingway didn't appeal to plumbers or roofers who read books; he was a rich man's writer, with the vocabulary and hunting instinct of the blue-collar workingman. But Hemingway had the unfailing genius of an inventor, and each book he wrote was new, sparkling new, something that hadn't been seen in American prose, something that merged common speech with uncommon clarity, something that verged on poetry. Something akin to the Bible in its sense of prosody and rhythm. All this has been said before and better than I can say it, but there you have it.

  There was a bronze bust of Hemingway on a small bluff overlooking the river. I stopped to look at it, musing on the foolishness of such a thing. Afterwards I sat on the hillside on a clump of sun-dried grass, and for the first time since I arrived in Ketchum, I took a really deep breath and settled into the crisp dead grass of the northwest and let myself dream a little. Some pressures of the day leaked away in the warm Ketchum sun and I lay my head on a pillow of soft crinkly grass, and stretched out some more. Once again my meandering thoughts turned to Hemingway. Writing, he had once said, was something that you did privately. I smiled at the thought -- I made my living writing stories on the air, telling tales that would never -- at least by me -- appear on paper. Thinking this, I drifted off and my tired body seemed to float off into the ether.

  My old pal and constant storytelling crony, Old Man Coyote, was sitting next to me. I gazed into the yellow pine sap eyes of my mystical and mischievous friend.

  "Didn't expect to see you here," I said.

  Coyote, sitting on his haunches, forepaws neatly crossed, grinned.

  "This day I am merely a messenger," he said, yawning.

  "Messenger -- for whom?"

  "For the old man over there."

  I squinted into the sun.

  I looked around.

  The big shouldered hills of Ketchum were everywhere, peppered with blue sage, pinto-spotted with snow; but that was all that I saw.

  Coyote made a directional motion with his nose.

  "Down there, he whispered, "see him?"

  Looking towards the riverbank, I saw an old man in baggy trousers, digging like a badger in the side of the hill, pulling out clumps of grass with his bare hands, tossing them over his shoulder.

  "It's not here," he mumbled, "not here."

  "What's he talking about?" I asked Brother Coyote, who, wrinkling his nose, replied: "He's talking about his head. That's been his obsession, ever since he blasted it off his shoulders in sixty-one."

  "Why doesn't somebody tell him his head's still on his shoulders?" I asked Brother Coyote.

  Coyote chuckled, wrinkled his nose again, gave me a sagacious sidelong glance. Then, turning away, he said: "He couldn't hear us even if we shouted in his ear. Can't see us either, for that matter."

  "Why not?"

  "You must be dreaming," Coyote said with a sigh.

  "I am dreaming," I said.

  I woke up then, body wet with sweat, my left hand trembling.

  That evening, I reviewed the stories I was going to recite the next morning, and lowering the thermostat, turned in early. The queen-sized bed was much too large for a single person; I tossed fitfully, fighting my way to a restless sleep from which I woke suddenly. There were footsteps in the upstairs living room. The heavy oak floors creaked as if some momentous weight was put upon them. The spectral creaking continued, became an almost predictable pacing, back and forth across the length of the room. First one end, then the other.

  Nothing was up there that could -- or should -- be up there, I reasoned. I listened to the footfalls for a long time before I stirred, got out of bed, wrapped up in a Pendleton blanket and ascended the staircase to the second floor. The room had a queer smell, an odor of cordite, gunpowder, hanging in the air. Not unpleasant, but quite peculiar, given the situation. On the pine-slab coffee table, I noticed a book lying face down, open like a butterfly. I picked it up. It was a worn brown-leaved copy of The Green Hills of Africa.

  I read the open passage --

  " . . . and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it . . ."

  And turned off the light and went downstairs, smiling. He lives, I said to myself. He lives. Then I dropped the blanket on the bedspread, and fell into the bed like a natural man and went to sleep.

  In the morning the school board member showed up and took me to the Hemingway house that was built like a bunker, a two-story cinderblock home situated above the Big Wood River about a mile north of Ketchum. Aspen, cottonwood and spruce hemmed the house, sheltered it, and the river ran below it, and all around were the great bread loaf hills. The house was about as fa
r as you could get from the Cuban farm where the old man had lived out all but the last years of his life, and yet there was something fitting the isolate solidarity of the Big Wood River house.

  Inside, it was a hunter's house and it had had all the requisite tanned hides, trophy heads, and memorabilia. There were paintings from the Paris days, Playboy magazines dated 1961, old hardbound books, a writing desk with a green-globed desk lamp on top of which hung a slightly soiled duckbill hunting cap.

  I examined the book shelves very carefully while my talkative host told me that the limited editions had been packed up and carted off to the Kennedy Library. "You won't find anything of literary value," he said. A little later, I found a small black book of poems by Archibald MacLeish. Inside was a message the poet had written to Hemingway -- while death was inevitable, he said, so were the Odyssean islands beyond our view.

  On the way home, flying back on America West through the snow-bearing clouds of Idaho, I had time to think; time to listen to the silence. The silence filled me with an inescapable sense of hope; anything else, I knew, would have been awkward, inadequate. High flying in the clouds I felt the rush of invisible air, and I fell asleep dreaming of the red dirt roads of the Navajo reservation, and I heard again the elder singing the Blessingway Chant, the song that brings the dead back to life, a nine day prayer that blesses all things, returns the unblessed to harmony, returns all, inside and outside, up, down and all around to perfection and peace.

  In my dream the fragments of cloud came together like the skull of a battered, head-shot old man. I saw them come together like shards, and when the broken pot of the shattered head was mended, Talking God and Coyote and Black Wind returned the cloud head to the neck-stalk of the old man's body.

  In the dream of the jet stream, thirty-thousand feet in the clouds of another world, I viewed the lost shards, the blood and bone of the old man as the intricate traceries flew across the earth, borne by the ant people, and I saw Spider Woman weave the old man's veins into the web of his flesh and all the while I heard the Blessingway and the Holy People came out of the heavens and blessed the old man by sprinkling corn pollen on his forehead and Earth, Lightning, White Corn, Blue Corn, Many-Colored Corn, Man's Rain, Woman's Rain, Rainbow, Thunder, Sun, Spirit Wind, and Dawn brought gifts of sacred eagle feathers, of turquoise and white shell, abalone and jet and they blessed the old unbroken man with these, and offered him the breath of life, which he took through his mouth and through his nostrils and through his feet and he opened his eyes and breathed sunlight into himself, and thus was he made whole and well again. Thus was he restored.

  I awoke on the airplane as it was banking to the south, wings gleaming in the sun, the great jet flashing over the earth and arcing down, down into the Gulf Stream light that stretched away forever and I saw the old man fade into the infinite shades of Bimini blue.

  On the Road

  Along Came Bob Washington

  I have been telling versions of the tale since the day it came to me signed, sealed and delivered with carrot juice by Bob himself. Stories like this come to you only when your ears are open and your heart is deep as an Appalachian spring.

  Along came Bob Washington. He has a white beard when he isn't drinking carrot juice to improve his eyesight. Otherwise he resembles Yosemite Sam. You know when he's been at the juice because his beard turns a rusty red orange color. Be that as it may, Bob can't hear a blessed thing; but he has, at almost 90, the steadiest, most sure-footed walk you ever saw on an octogenarian. And he talks the whole time he's walking with you. Once when I was trying to keep up with Bob, I had to shout in his right ear so he could hear me.

  "How's the neighborhood?" I yelled.

  "Well," Bob yelled back, "John Painter just grew a mango that set a world's record."

  "How big?" I bellowed.

  "Four pounds, four ounces," he bellowed back.

  "That's nice," I shouted. "Say, Bob, how're your raccoons?"

  "The mom's got a new baby," he roared.

  "She had another baby?"

  "No, she found one."

  Then he told me about how the raccoon mom with six kits that he'd been feeding at his back door every night had gone out into the woods and picked up a feral kitten, and it was learning how to be a proper raccoon with the rest of the litter.

  "She taught that tiny little stray kitten to wash its food in the water dish just like all the others," he hollered.

  "Is that so," I hollered back.

  By then we had gone way over to Wayback Road and down Ridge Road to Bottlebrush and, well, you get the idea, there was a lot of shouting and walking and talking going on between the two of us.

  One day Bob was walking along and he said, "I hear you're some kind of a writer-feller."

  I laughed. "I haven't figured out what kind yet."

  "Well, I saw one of your books and it reminded me of a writer-feller I once knew by the name of Jesse Stuart. Ever hear of him?"

  "I guess so." I chuckled. "He was one of the first writers I really admired as a kid."

  Bob's eyes brightened and I swear his beard got redder than a red squirrel. "Old Stuart, now, he was the voice of the hill farms in Kentuck and the mines and loggin' camps in Cumberland County. His stories are a reg'lar folk museum of sorts."

  "You knew him?'

  "Can't say as I did. Met him, my sister Mary knew him, wrote a book about him."

  We came to the bend in the road where the Brazilian pepper trees form a natural archway you have to bend to get under and walk through. Bob went through like the proverbial needle and I followed suit. On the other side the sun shone and the wind was up, and I thought about how so many of our stories in America started out in the Appalachian mountains and how Jesse Stuart was the songster of those hollows and hills. I said to Bob, "One day I'll have to get into the hills over there where you're from and pick up a story or two."

  "You do that," he said, "but don't make the mistake of the man that Mr. Stuart told me about."

  "What mistake was that?'

  Bob shouted his words of caution to the wind which was generally in the direction of my face, and it went like this:

  "This old boy went up into the hills where he wasn't wanted looking for a story. He stayed with a friend of ours and they made him quite welcome. He was on his best behavior, that writer was but he knew he was in a place where the Hatfields lived down one road and the McCoys were on another and both were in barking distance of each other. Anyways this made the writer-feller nervous-like and he had himself a Smith and Wesson pistol in his backpack just in case. Slept with it under his pillow where he could get at it if he needed to. Next morning when he opened his eyes, he felt under the pillow for his pistol and it was gone. He looked all over that spare room for it but it wasn't nowhere there. Then he looked at the mirror hanging on the wall and someone had writ on it. One word. And what do you think it was? GIT, it said. That's all, just GIT."

  I told Bob I'd never gotten a story with a gun before and I wasn't about to start now.

  "Good," he said with a toothless grin. "And now I got to git."

  He turned off Cubles Road, and I watched him, cane-tapping down the road, the fastest, red bearded, nearly ninety-year old you ever saw.

  The Billboard at the End of the World

  I've told this story to an audience only once. Kids wanted to know about hitchhiking. I told them that in the old days I hitchhiked all over the country. It wasn’t such a bad way to get around and as I was a teenager without a driver’s license, it was usually a reasonable way to go except that we traveled pretty far sometimes, and always, the hitcher paid for the ride by being good company and telling stories. Or else he served the driver by being quiet and listening. It depended on the driver, but it was fun back then in 1960. People were a whole lot nicer. Things in the world were a whole lot safer -- people, cars and roads. Hitchhiking was a good way to learn about life and as I wanted to be a writer, the ways of the open road turned into stories. None so down at he
els as this one but there's a moral in there somewhere if I don't miss my guess.

  The fog lifted.

  The stars pricked through the clouds.

  The desolate road lay ahead as far as we could see but at the dim horizon line there was a billboard. This meant that somewhere ahead of us there might, just might, be a town of some consequence.

  We had been on the road for a few weeks. Hitching.

  We were tired down to the blisters on our feet. The romance of the open road was dead to us. We were lonely, but not yet tired of our own company, which was the only good thing.

  There were the two of us. My cousin Pete and myself. And the third party was of course the road, that interminable tar-faced ribbon of highway, carless and reckless and owned entirely by truckers whose speeds were outrageous. Weeks ago, we'd hit the road with nothing but a ten dollar bill and the clothes on our backs. We'd started out singing This Land is Your Land, but now we were moaning Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out.

  Hours passed.

  All of this might seem tangential or trivial but the billboard suddenly turned our journey into a surreal quest to be back home in our own beds. We'd had it.

  On we walked, painfully. But the billboard got no closer and sometimes it seemed farther way, flickering on the fuzzy edge of the endless road.

  We hurt everywhere.

  Our blisters and the billboard were in league with one another; as one hurt, the other beckoned. As one delivered pain, the other promised rest.

  The road had done this to us, broken us down.

  “What if there’s no life anywhere in the universe? What if that sign is the last billboard at the end of the world?” Pete asked.

  “Nothing much matters," I said, "except getting there."

  Far, far away the billboard flickered in the fog.

  We were on a distant planet, Pete and I.