Pinball (2 page)
Chapter 1
“Oh, I am
way
the hell behind,” Steven Denver thought to himself, looking at the daily calendar on his computer screen. It was the first week of November, and the deadline that had been set by his publisher for initial completion of his third novel was looming less than ninety days away. He’d made a number of false starts and was juggling three or four possible story lines in his head, but the insanely busy day he’d had yesterday had completely distracted him from the project at hand.
Steven sat at his desk in the corner of the master bedroom of the small white frame house where he lived with his wife, Lynne, and their four children. He was staring out of the window at the Bridger Mountains of Montana, fading blue into the distance. He was not quite in full panic mode, however. Not just yet.
I can do this,
he told himself, running his hand through his thick mane of brown hair. He noticed that it was increasingly shot through with silver these days; deadlines were just
excellent
for causing that.
His first book,
Montana Moon,
had been published a little more than four years ago. It had sold fairly well for a first book from a new writer. It was set in the Old West and dealt with the influx of white settlers into the area from the time that it became Montana Territory in 1864 until Montana became the 41
state of the Union in 1889 and described what life was like for them in the rugged frontier that they had chosen as their new home.
He’d managed to get a three-book contract with his publisher, Bordeaux House, based mostly on his successful track record as a newspaper columnist, initially for the Helena Independent Record and later for the Billings Gazette.
Steven’s second novel,
Greasy Grass,
was published two years later. It was based on accounts given by eyewitnesses to the Battle of the Little Big Horn, otherwise known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass to Native Americans. In this well-known clash, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7
Cavalry was decimated by a force of Lakota and Northern Dakota warriors led by Sitting Bull, Gall and Crazy Horse.
The book was an attempt to put faces on those Native warriors and make them flesh-and-blood human beings, something that Steven felt was missing from most of the historic records. The fact that he was one-eighth Blackfoot had always made Steven feel a connection to Native Americans, many of whom still lamented the loss of their land, culture and heritage, more than a century and a half later.
Even to Steven, however,
Greasy Grass
seemed to lack the vibrancy he felt was needed for a historical novel, and he openly admitted that many passages in the book read like a high school textbook. It didn’t sell well at all; sometimes Steven joked that he thought his mother had bought a thousand copies to help boost his sales figures. The project Steven was working on now was his last chance to demonstrate to his publisher that he deserved another contract, but he was stuck for a concept; without a solid plot idea, there
was
no new project.
Steven’s own personal deadline for having the book at least at the rough draft stage had sneaked up and bitten him squarely on the ass, and now he was a full two weeks behind schedule. Deadlines, Steven believed, were the brainchild of some chemically challenged, emotionally stunted and extremely twisted soul, probably a frustrated English teacher from Poughkeepsie.
His personal work goal as a writer was to produce an average volume of 50,000 words a month.
That’s an average of 1,666.666 words a day,
Steven grinned to himself.
I shouldn’t have issues with the last two-thirds of a word, but the first 1,666 might be a problem.
He thought of the twin 666s in that figure and tried to shrug off the obvious joke as a little too easy, but couldn’t resist the thought of his publisher’s head adorned with a pair of Satanic horns and a wicked little goatee.
Chapter 2
Steven sat staring at the computer keyboard, lamenting the fact that he often fell somewhat short of his daily goal, humans becoming easily distracted as they…
Hey, look, Spongebob’s on! Oh, wait. Must concentrate on writing.
“Back to work, slave,” he said to himself out loud.
It may be true that I sometimes have trouble finishing my projects,
he thought to himself — he had a file cabinet that contained at least seven partially complete novels of anywhere from a thousand to 7500 words, along with at least thirty short stories in various stages of completion which he had written over the last twenty years —
and sometimes I admit I come up with some pretty shitty writing, but I do have a publisher that seems to think I’m halfway decent; at least they thought I was good enough to have signed a contract with me, so I guess I had better quit procrastinating and get on with it.
He normally had to give himself this mental pep talk three or four times a year, but now he realized that this was the fourth time this month that he had lectured himself in this way.
Hmmm… Plot. Characters. Motivation. Setting.
He stared at the hand drawn poster on the wall behind his computer. His wife Lynne had created it for him in acrylic paints. She was a teacher at the local elementary school, but created quilts, paintings and other artistic endeavors in her spare time. The poster was a parody of the religious bumper stickers that had been popular a few years before; this one said
WWSKD?
What would Stephen King do?
He tried to remember the tips the famed horror writer (some dared to call him a talentless hack, but Steven strongly disagreed;
somebody
was enjoying all those books the guy had sold in his career, and Steven could only hope to someday attain such success) had shared in
On Writing
. Start with the character? Start with the situation? He couldn’t recall. It had been a couple of years since he’d last reread it. He thought that he might have to dig in the bookshelf and find it, but there was no time now; November was a-burnin’.
Felicia Naumova was a spy for the former Soviet Union
No.
No one knew that the man in the bunny costume was actually
Oh,
God,
no.
As the dramatic theme music of his life began to play, Arthur Ball opened his eyes and groaned. The music was merely his clock radio which was blaring, and it was six a.m.
Hmm. Maybe.
He sadly filed away the Stephen King analogy and thought to himself, “What would
Hemingway
do in this situation?” Well, first of all, Hemingway would likely have been rip-roaring drunk, even though the clock showed that it was only 8:32 am.
I like a little nip now and then, but I’m not the type to get my wick lit this early in the morning. I’ll settle for a nice root beer over crushed ice. Coffee would be good, too, but I don’t feel like making it.
“Okay,” Steven said out loud, “I’m back in prime writing mode now, all revved up and rarin’ to go.” The kids were off to school, Lynne was off to work, and there was nothing to distract him from… The phone rang.
Oh, damn it, who could be calling at this time of the morning?
“Hello? Yes, this is he… what? Oh, yes, certainly. I’m pretty sure that my wife mailed you a check for that several days ago. No, I’m sorry, I don’t have the check number right here handy. She’s not here right now, but I… what? No, I’m not going to do an electronic check over the phone, I told you, she’s already mailed it. Yes. Yes. Okay.
Yes.
Thank you for calling.”
Click.
Steven breathed a heavy sigh, his eyebrows twisting toward each other, and shook his head. He hated those phone calls. Yeah, so what if they were a little behind on their bills? Who
wasn’t
, in this economy? If he was to be honest with himself, however, they were more than a little behind. Their only regular income was Lynne’s teaching salary; Steven got a small quarterly royalty check from the two previous books, but that didn’t amount to a whole hell of a lot.
They had paid off the house when Steven got his advance upon publication of
Montana Moon,
so there was no mortgage payment to be concerned about, but there were plenty of other bills to deal with. The utilities could get sky-high during the frosty Montana winters as well as during the hot, arid summers. There was an unpaid hospital bill from when Lynne had had her appendix out the year before — which is what the phone call had been about — and a fairly sizable car payment as well.
Now, where had he left off? “Back to work, dammit,” he snapped. He cracked a mental whip at himself —
I’m a Gemini, I can do that,
he thought — and stared at the keyboard.
As the dramatic theme music of his life began to play, Arthur Ball opened his eyes and groaned. The music was merely his clock radio which was blaring, and it was six a.m. His pathetic little life had begun its next chapter, and
Staring at the words on the screen, he discovered that he was unimpressed — no, make that
extremely
unimpressed — with what he had written.
If I were writing on paper,
he thought,
I’d crumple it and take a shot at the trash can-slash-basketball goal.
As it was, he held down the backspace key and relegated Arthur Ball to the bit bucket.
Okay, Steve, what the hell are you going to write about?
The melody of “The Book Report” from
You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown
entered his brain and began dancing around like a group of college drama geeks impersonating a bunch of precocious second graders. “A book report on Peter Rabbit…” He smiled to himself, despite his frustration. He sang out of tune: “How can they expect us to write a novel of any quality in just ninety days? How can they conspire to make life so miserable, and so effectively, in so many ways?” How appropriate was
that?
Ah, well.
Now there was a knock at the door.
What the hell,
he thought. No one
ever
came to their door. They lived just outside the booming metropolis of Three Forks, Montana, population 1,900. Steven was fond of saying, “We live right in the middle of Fricking, Nowhere. You ever been there? Let me tell ya, it’s nice.”
If it’s a Jehovah’s Witness,
he thought,
I swear to God I’m gonna go find something sharp and pointed.
But it wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, or a pair of Mormons on bicycles, or even the local Baptists out on visitation. It was the UPS delivery guy. Steven had ordered half a dozen sets of guitar strings the week before from an online supplier. He scribbled his John Hancock for the package and headed back to his office, tempted momentarily to take the time to change the strings on his beat-up Telecaster, but he exercised self-control and sat back down at the computer.
Now can I get back to writing? Please?
There was a box of donuts on the kitchen table. Maybe if he ate one — or a few — it’d give him that little spark he needed to get going. He went into the kitchen and took the whole box back to his desk. There were the little powdered sugar ones and the chocolate ones…
Mmm. Good. Sugar rush.
He sat staring at the screen, mentally juggling plot ideas. Soon he felt his eyelids beginning to droop.
Should have had… coffee… with the…
Chapter 3
Oh, my God,
Steven thought.
What was that sound?
There was the sound of grinding gears, as if a piece of heavy road equipment was outside — or Mecha-Godzilla. But they lived nowhere near Tokyo, although their two oldest daughters desperately wanted to live there. To Steven, it sounded as if someone were digging up a sewer line.
I’ll go peek out the window and see what’s going on,
he decided.
It wasn’t Mecha-Godzilla, but much to Steven’s amazement, it
was
some kind of huge monster machine. It appeared to be devouring the ground right down to the bedrock and was headed right for the house. He stared in shock.
What am I gonna do? I don’t have a car
— Lynne had taken it to work —
and I can’t possibly run fast enough to escape this thing. It looks as if it’s gonna swallow the entire house, one bite at a time!
He awoke with a start after having nodded off and realized that the roaring was the sound of the washing machine, out of balance during its spin cycle. He stomped into the laundry room, rearranged the bunched clothes in the washer, and restarted it.
Fuck it. Now he really
did
need that cup of coffee. He wandered into the kitchen, hoping that his wife Lynne had left him some java this morning when she left for work, but the carafe was empty. He looked in their sparsely stocked refrigerator, mildly irritated and significantly hungry, and scrounged up the ingredients for a pretty decent little sandwich. Sliced tomatoes, a couple of slices of Cheddar cheese, Miracle Whip and a piece of sad looking lettuce on white bread. He slapped it together and inhaled half of it before he arrived back at the computer. It might not be a breakfast sandwich, but it was still very good.
Wow,
he thought,
I was even hungrier than I realized. Maybe I’ll be able to write now.