Scare Tactics (2 page)

I set aside
Tug of War
and glanced at my worktable, now seeing only the soiled envelope with David Hallowell’s manuscript inside. I felt annoyed with him; he was terminally ill, yet he had nearly finished a novel while I could not write at all. Assuredly it would turn out to be a dreadful piece of muck ... but his dedication, his belief that he had a story worth telling, merited respect.

I opened the envelope, and a thick bundle of yellow pages torn from legal pads fell to the floor. It was a holographic manuscript, and he wrote, like Eugene O’Neill, in a cramped, miserly hand; there must have been half a thousand words on every page. But he composed so painstakingly that every word was legible without a magnifying glass. I scanned the first page casually after finding the title provocative, turned to the second, sat down slowly on the Hide A Bed with that untidy bundle in my lap.

By daybreak I had read all of
Angels and Aborigines.
I had been powerless to stop reading. It was marvelous: a comic, picaresque
Lear.
Hallowell’s protagonist, an old poet, and three randy daughters careered like tornadoes through his pages. He satirized (and often tore to shreds) academia, government, religion, the full spectrum of intellectual pretentiousness and cultural folderol of our times. I turned over the last, incomplete page knowing that David Hallowell was a literary titan. My first thought, with nothing more to read, was an earnest entreaty to the gods that Hallowell be allowed to live long enough to finish this masterwork.

My second, distantly corrupting thought was,
This is the novel I was meant to write.

I had been almost childishly pleased to note that there were echoes of the old, the good Jack Mayo, in those pages. It was true, as Hallowell insisted, that I had served him in some small way.

After my morning classes I drove down from the hills to the old section of San Augustin. David Hallowell was living in a
barrio
by the sea where the dreary fog lingered at noonday. The streets were narrow, the houses ramshackle, with a few hang-dog date palms and rusting pepper trees in the sandy yards. There was truculent graffiti in Spanish on every side wall of
laundería
and
bodega.
It took me quite some time to locate him.

The squat Mexican woman who responded to my inquiry on Portales Street had a baby on one hip and toddlers clinging to her skirt.

“Dah-veed,
sí
, is living here.” She looked hopefully at me. “You are friend?”

“We met only yesterday,” I said.

“Oh. Dah-veed very sick, is always—
tosiendo.”
She translated the word for me by coughing into her fist.

“Yes, I know. Could you take me to him?”

She led me through her squalid house and out the back door to a
casita
set against the alley fence. There were chickens in the bare yard, discarded beer cans, and rusted parts of automobiles. A stench of garbage saturated the fog. I could hear the surf just two blocks away. I also heard him coughing as we reached the
casita
door. The Mexican woman shifted her fretting half-clad infant from one chubby arm to the other.

“All night he is like that,” she said of the coughing. “I go make tea for him now.” She smacked one of her toddlers, who was bending over poking a finger into a fresh pile of chickenshit, and returned to the house.

I knocked at the
casita
door. Muffled coughing, but no other response. I shivered in the damp grayness. The door was unlocked, so I let myself in.

There was, unexpectedly, a sweetness in the air: violets, a welcome contrast to the sour spoor of the chicken-blighted yard. The one-room
casita
was quite dark, shades pulled down over the remaining panes of glass in the door and the single small window. I could make him out lying in a narrow mission-style bed, huddled under a blanket, coughing pathetically, rocking the springs with the violence of his affliction.

“Mr. Hallowell?” I said. “David?”

He gave a start, one bare foot kicking out from beneath the blanket, and sat up, peering at the doorway.

“Yes—yes. Who is it?”

“Jack Mayo.”

“Oh, Mr. Mayo! I apologize, sir, I—please, if you would give me a few moments—”

“Certainly. I’ll wait outside.”

“No! No! Stay! I’m just waking up. I work nights, you see.” He was having difficulty getting his breath. “If you wouldn’t mind—on the table there—a bottle of tequila.”

I raised the window shade, letting in some pallid light. I poured a shot of tequila for him and, at his urging, a shot for myself, as he had a supply of paper cups to drink from. I didn’t entirely trust his explanation of the illness from which he suffered, and I have always been more than mildly phobic about germs. Fortunately there was no atmosphere of the sickroom, because of the remarkably pleasant odor of spring violets. I saw none growing in the room, however; and no potentially flowering seed would have survived for long out-of-doors. Perhaps it was perfume, a recent female visitor—

When I mentioned the odor to him he looked puzzled. His face was flushed and glistened from perspiration, his eyes were unfocused as he sipped his tequila.

“Oh, yes, I did smell violets in the beginning, I suppose. But that was so long ago I’ve become used to it. I hardly notice anymore.”

His explanation was far from clear, but I had no good reason to question him further. And my attention had been drawn to the pile of yellow paper on his writing table, beside a cracked pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses and a jar crammed with ballpoint pens, the cheap variety given away by every sort of business establishment. It was difficult for me not to pick up the new pages and begin reading on the spot. Instead I smiled at David Hallowell.

The tequila seemed to have temporarily suppressed his cough, although it lived on in his skinny chest, as a low dangerous rumbling. His complexion had cleared somewhat. My smile was unexpected; it caused him to flinch, and then he returned an abashed smile of his own.

“Was I right? It
is
good, isn’t it?”

“I think you’re a genius,” I said.

He scratched his head and trembled; he began to weep and shake the bed in a paroxysm of joy and thanksgiving. A little overcome myself, I fed him more tequila, and wondered how his heart could stand up under the strain. Some of the tequila dribbled into the ruff of his coarse beard. “But surely,” I said, “others have told you that.”

“No. Not another living soul but you has read a word of my book. I moved to San Augustin because—I knew that
you
were here.”

Rather than watch him suffer through more agonies of gratitude, I turned again to his worktable, noticing a copy of
Tug of War
atop a pile of badly worn paperback dictionaries. I picked up the book, which obviously he’d rescued from a stall in a secondhand store. Just inside the cover was a recent clipping from the local newspaper, my photo accompanying an announcement of the summer writers’ workshop I had established on campus.

By now the odor of violets was all but gone from the room; I could smell his trickling toilet in one corner, and the sordidness of the
casita
became oppressive to me. Obviously before David Hallowell settled in, the
casita.
had served as lodging for numerous wetbacks. Chickens quarreled in the yard; a child wailed.

“How long have you been living here?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Three months? Closer to four.”

“And where is your home? I believe you mentioned Alabama.”

“Eufaula, Alabama. That was a vereh long time ago. I haven’t been back since—” It was an effort, or an ordeal, for him to recall. “Anyway,” he said quietly, “there’s no reason for me to go back. Everyone dear to me has long since passed to his or her reward.”

“You have no family?” He shook his head. “Oh, I’m very sorry, David.”

“An insufficiency of the genes, I’m afraid. No Hallowell or Radburne was ever celebrated for longevity.” He clutched his blanket more tightly around him, smiling wanly at his expected fate. Then he looked at me with the sweet, devoted expression of a setter dog. When it was I who should have been wagging my tail at him.

“You will be celebrated,” I assured David Hallowell, “beyond your wildest dreams. Leave that to me.”

“Thank you,” he said. “My friend.”

I was braced for tears again; but the Mexican woman came to the door of the
casita
with a little tray: she had brought tea, some sugared oatmeal in a bowl. I took the tray from her. She look worried.

“Eat nothing,” she said. “Many days, no
comidas.
”

“I’ll see that he has some of the oatmeal.
Muchas gracias
.”

David was willing to be fed. But after a few gummy spoonfuls and half a cup of dark, aromatic tea he could manage no more. He lay down wearily, eyes closing.

“I’ll sleep for a few hours,” he said. “Until my muse shows up.”

“Do you have much more to go?”

“It’s almost done,” he murmured.

“With your permission, David, I’ll take these pages you’ve completed.” I hesitated. “You have a copy of the manuscript, of course.”

“No. Couldn’t afford to make copies.”

“Well, then. I’ll see to it. And I’ll be back tomorrow.” He thanked me, coughed, pressed a fist to his mouth, and drifted off to sleep that way. I let myself out and all but ran to my car.

I read the twenty new pages then and there, in an excruciating state of excitement. They were excellent. The wasting of his body and quantities of tequila had not in the least diminished his art. He was Faulknerian in his prodigality. Oh, a word might be changed here and there, a redundancy deleted. Nothing more.

For the next four days I arrived promptly at noon. I had forsaken pride and borrowed a hundred dollars from a faculty colleague with whom I had had an affair and who still entertained some hope the affair might be renewed, although she was one of those women for whom the sexual act seems to have the caloric input of a two-pound German chocolate cake: she had put on forty pounds through trysting. I purchased cough remedies which had only a temporary flagging effect on David’s consuming cough, more tequila, painkillers. And many legal pads: David was using up more than one a night in a rage of completion. Each day the odor of violets, mysteriously present, masked the odor of dissolution in the
casita.
I was frightened for David, nearly sleepless at night for fear he wouldn’t, after all, reach the dizzying conclusion of his novel.

A week after our first meeting on the running track at Sprayberry, I let myself in, and took a few moments to adjust to the portent that the odor of violets was absent from the
casita.
David Hallowell lay very still on his back, his eyes open and staring, a slight smile of peace on his lips. His ordeal had ended. In his right hand there was a note to me.

We have done it!

It was signed,
David.

I gathered up the last pages of
Angels and Aborigines
strewn across his worktable and stumbled sobbing into the chicken-infested yard. The Mexican woman, children dangling haplessly from her swirling skirt, hurried outside and, hearing me, began her own lamentation. The children, one by one, contributed their voices. Dogs barked mournfully up and down the
barrio.

“He has no family,” I told the coroner. “He was the last of his line. And, except for Mrs. Cerador and myself, he had no friends.”

I sold my car, one jump ahead of the repo man, raising enough cash to retire the note and afford David Hallowell a modest but decent funeral.

The night following his burial I assembled all of the yellow pages in my studio, changed the ribbon on my Smith-Corona electric, drank two double scotches to fortify myself, then began typing the book I had been born to write.

ANGELS AND ABORIGINES

a novel by Jack Mayo

I made a few editorial changes as I went along. Nothing major. Ten days later I mailed the typescript to an editor who had almost forgotten I existed, at an august publishing house in New York. The manuscript went through the house like wildfire. It knocked them all on their asses.

Angels and Aborigines
was published the following spring, in a first edition of half a million copies. The Book-of-the-Month Club ordered an additional quarter of a million. Word of mouth secured the number one position on the
New York Times
best-seller list two weeks after publication. The novel stayed at number one through six additional printings, for eighteen glorious weeks. The reviews—ah, God, the reviews! Each one a nutritious sweetmeat, a seductive paean, an exaltation of a unique talent! I swept all of my peers under the rug that season—Norman, Philip, John. Even they came forth with tributes for the literary event of the decade. The King Rat currently in residence at the Dream Factory snatched the cheese from all the other rats, paying an unheard-of sum for movie rights. Thirty-three foreign editions were planned. The appeal of my novel was universal.