Scribblers (18 page)

Bill Brooks took that circumstance and the unsolved murder of Pat Garrett in 1908 as his jumping-off points. What if there was a tacit understanding between Billy and Garrett that Billy would move away and live under a different name and Garrett would take credit for his killing? What if Billy spent nearly three decades quietly plotting Garrett's murder?

The book was called
The Stone Garden.

“Brooks' novel deserves to be mentioned with such western classics as
Shane, Hombre,
and
The Virginian,”
according to
Booklist.
“This is one of the most inventive, moving, and memorable western novels in many years.”
Publishers Weekly
said that “this well-crafted tale is a graceful song, alive with drama, biting wit and just enough well-substantiated doubt to make you wonder.”

“I wanted it to be lyrical,” Bill tells me. “There are poetic passages throughout the thing. I knew I was taking a huge risk that no publisher would buy it. But they were intrigued by that mystery, so they went ahead and bought it, and I felt that I had latched onto a niche, which was to write these sort of lyrical fictional memoirs of true people.”

After
The Stone Garden
come treatments of Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde—two of the five books Bill has in the pipeline at the time I speak with him.

“And then you're going back to genre Westerns?” I ask.

“I just finished a deal with HarperCollins for a new
Western series called
Law for Hire.
We came up with the idea that the character would be a Pinkerton agent, and that he'd end up guarding famous people like Hickok and Cody and Masterson. The deal is, if I can write three books in nine months, I'll get all my money in nine months. I really see it as sort of a personal challenge, even though I don't want to write any more Westerns. If I'm a true working writer, can I do that?”

I'm flummoxed. “That's a rate of about … Say ninety days per book, that's a rate of about four published pages per day.”

“Something like that. It'll probably end up more than that because I actually threw away the first hundred and some pages. It just wasn't going right. That's not unusual for me. Once I get going, I usually write a chapter a day on that stuff. I consider them just money books, I guess. You know, not your pride-and-joy type of books like the Bonnie and Clyde and the Pretty Boy and
The Stone Garden”

They may not be particularly dear to his heart, but Bill's Westerns are the best pure fun of the genre novels I've read. Kung Chow, toadying Chinese laundryman; Jonas Fly, snake-oil salesman and certified phrenologist; Valdalia Rose, tallest whore west of the Mississippi; Persimmon Bill Edwards, hard-luck rummy—the stock characters are welcome old friends. Badass hero Quint McCannon tracks down killers, eats hardtack and beef jerky, sleeps under the stars, gets double-crossed, and rubs elbows with John Wesley Hardin, Roy Bean, and George Custer as he quietly goes about his deadly business. My dog-eared copy of
Dust on the Wind
—purchased from the same secondhand shop where I bought
Jill Jones's romances, and bearing the marks of previous owners
ERL
and
BF
—shows evidence of having been well loved.

“I guess in your teaching, you've probably encountered a broad spectrum of people, from the talented to the pretty much hopeless,” I say. “How far do you think writing can be taught? Is it mainly getting them to recognize their mistakes quicker than they would have on their own?”

“I think if you take a good writing course, you can cut your learning curve. As I try to tell everyone I work with, writing really is a craft, and you can teach craft. You can't teach talent, and you can't teach drive. But you can teach the craft of writing—protagonists, plot, dialogue, and all that sort of thing.

“What I find holds most of them back, if they have any sort of talent, is they lack drive. I would take somebody with a little less talent and a lot of drive and give them a better opportunity of getting published than somebody with a lot of talent and no drive.

“And what I quite often find in teaching adult students is a lot of them are working jobs, or they're married and living sort of moderately comfortable lives, and I think that just doesn't bode well for drive. I think you have to be hungry.

“So I've taught a lot of writers that I thought had wonderful talent, but I could just tell that they didn't work at it every day. They'd work only on inspiration, and whenever they got around to it. And I just knew that some of them weren't going to make it. I'd tell them, ‘You can't make it on talent alone. You have to be driven and do this just like a job.' ”

“Do you have any insights into what compels so many people to give it a try, even against a very poor likelihood of success?” I ask.

“It's not like when you see a beautiful painting and you decide, ‘Well, I'm just going to go home and be another Raphael' Because you'd have to learn all the skills—which brushes to use and colors to mix. But you're taught technically how to write at a very young age. You can find someone that has a strong interest in reading, and at some point they think, ‘Aha! I could write a book better than this.'

“And everyone has an interesting life they want to write about. I think it was Samuel Goldwyn who once said, ‘The only people that should write their memoirs are the dead.' And I think they feel they can make that leap from being an avid reader and having an interesting life story to writing creatively.

“And then they fall into the chasm, of course, or the abyss of hell.”

Jill Jones raises the same point when I ask her about the writer's urge.

“You know, a lot of people want to write their grandmother's memoirs, or a story based on what Granny did,” she tells me. “And I think those people are the ones that aren't going to make it, because they can't divorce fiction from fact. Fiction has its rules—especially genre fiction—and facts usually don't fit the rules.

“I think if people want to write, if that's their passion, it's not my job to talk them out of it. I do tell them the truth about the industry, and that's very discouraging. I just tell them, ‘When you get this book finished, if they turn
you down again and again and again and again and again—and it happens to everybody that ever writes—you've got to be able to handle it.'

“And then you get published, and you think you're hot potatoes and you're on your way, and they buy one book and they don't buy two. This has happened to friends of mine. They think they've stepped over that line and they're in, but that's not the way it is either. Once you're in the business, it's hard to stay in the business.

“But why do people want to write?” she says. “Beats me. It's the hardest work I've ever done.”

A complication enters
Essence of My Desire.

Through an old diary, Nick Rutledge learns a family secret. Back in the 1840s, his ancestor John Rutledge fell in love with Mary Rose Hatcher, an English witch. To prevent their union, John was exiled to India, where he was introduced to the mysterious
mahja
plant in a monastery at the foot of the Himalayas. He sent
mahja
seeds back to Mary Rose, who planted them, nurtured the flowers that grew, made a perfume from them, and dispatched a batch to John. That perfume permitted them to meet as lovers in their dreams. Unfortunately, repeated use transported them to such an exalted spiritual realm that they ceased to exist in a physical sense. They simply vanished, never to be heard from again.

Thus, when Nick Rutledge and Simone Lefèvre partake of the perfume in the present day, they do so at peril of annihilation.

Their dream meetings are just a tease anyway. What I'm
really anticipating is the scene when Nick and Simone get together in the flesh.

Randy Russell's mysteries and Bill Brooks's Westerns have love scenes, too, but they're nothing like Jill Jones's. Rooster Franklin's path is littered with naked women. In
Blind Spot,
he steals the limousine in which President Kennedy was shot, opens the trunk, and finds a beautiful, comatose woman wearing only a pair of panties. The female inhabitants of Quint McCannon's frontier towns are lonely widows and gold-hearted bar girls. There's no lovemaking in these books; it's quick, old-fashioned, pants-around-the-ankles banging. Whether or not the characters are spiritually fulfilled is beside the point.

Still on the outs, Nick and Simone fail in their separate attempts to duplicate the mysterious perfume synthetically. Meanwhile, vile Frenchman Antoine Dupuis gets hold of a sample and becomes addicted to it. The quarry in his dream-world love chase is, of course, Simone. Repeated mentions of the Frenchman's small stature hammer home his unattractiveness. Nick Rutledge's oft-lauded broad shoulders are the leading indicator of his desirability.

Finally, Nick and Simone resolve to try to heal their old wounds. They meet for dinner at a fancy place called, incredibly, the In and Out Club. They dance; they kiss; she cries. Nick invites her home. Simone declines but then follows him in a taxi to his London suburb for a night of passion.

A metaphorical sword is drawn.

Petals are parted.

On her departure the next morning, Simone steals Nick's vial of perfume. Later, racked by guilt, she barricades herself
in an apartment and douses herself in the dangerous mixture, figuring the only way she can have Nick now is by crossing into the dream world permanently.

But Nick finds her, takes a splash of perfume himself, and journeys to the other realm to convince Simone of his love and bring her back.

Indeed, it is the love-addled Dupuis who overdoses and is dematerialized!

My glasses are fogged and my face a bit flushed as I turn the final page.

C
HAPTER
9

Son of Bullitt

I drive like Mr. Magoo. I don't have an old-timey open-air car with a squeeze-ball horn, but I do share his nearsightedness, poor judgment, and easy confusion. I'm therefore a danger when I'm anxious and in a hurry, as now.

Going to my car one morning, I discover that its left rear tire is flat. I can't get a good look at the offending object, which protrudes a quarter-inch from the tire and splays like some jagged metal flower. On my knees in the driveway, I touch it gingerly.

These days, I drive an aged white Olds, a model that was discontinued from production some years ago. I jack the back end but find that my tire wrench doesn't have a great-enough breadth to give me leverage to loosen the thoroughly rusted bolts—just the kind of irregularity that sounded the car model's death knell, a wrench meant for a little red wagon.

I keep an aerosol tire inflater in the trunk. The way the white foam sputters from the puncture confirms my opinion that the wound is mortal.

I don't have time for this. I'm nervous and want to get to the office early.

My wife is on the phone in the kitchen, a vantage point from which she's witnessed my exertions over the tire—and no doubt narrated them to whoever it is she's talking to. I motion for her attention and explain how I'll have to stop at a service station to get the tire changed on the way to work.

“Don't be silly,” she says. “Anyone can change a tire. I've done it myself.”

I cup my hand to my ear, point to the telephone, plead for discretion.

The tires on the car when I bought it were a size that has since been eliminated from manufacturers' lines. The car has front-wheel drive, and the rear tires have worn so well that I continue to use my original set, though I've replaced the front pair. The car rides on tires of two different heights, then, but it's the larger size that I keep as a mounted spare. I've retained a smaller spare in case I blow a rear tire, but I don't have a rim for it.

I explain all of this to the mechanic with the aid of a couple of hand gestures—one that mimes the turning of a spigot and the other the plucking of grapes from a vine. I don't want the mounted spare on the back of the car. I want my backup, smaller-sized spare mounted on the damaged tire's rim.

The mechanic is an old, bearded cowboy who listens with his arms folded across his chest, moving his toothpick
from one side of his mouth to the other with every few taps of his boot. He stoops over the tire, produces a pair of pliers from an unknown location on his person, and extracts the object, which proves to be a common nail with its head bent and split.

He turns on me accusatorially, with the terse contempt such men reserve for people who carry two spare tires. “Nothing wrong with this tire,” he says.

I start to justify myself, but the mechanic swaggers into the other bay before I have a chance to formulate a clear position. I notice he doesn't even think enough of my nail to dispose of it properly, casually flicking it out the open door and into the lot, presumably to stick in someone else's tire. He returns with a tire-plugging kit, effects his repair, and inflates the tire. He then wipes his hands on a loathsome rag and runs the blade of his pocketknife under his fingernails while I fumble for my wallet.

I lay rubber as I exit the station.

I've set myself a firm goal. I can't continue investing time, travel, and money in my manuscript indefinitely. When I reach a certain page count—considerably less than the entire projected length—I'll quit work on it until I can find whether it might be worthy of publication. If the answer is yes, I'll continue to completion. If it is no, I'll scrap it for good. Of course, I'd be in a better position if I had a completed manuscript to offer, but I believe I've written enough for a fair judgment.

It is time, as my father used to say, to shit or get off the pot.

First, I show it to my boss at work and ask her advice on how I ought to proceed. She is aware of my general subject matter and has provided me some Asheville leads, but I've been tight-lipped about the personal nature of what I'm doing; she probably thinks I'm attempting a history of mountain writers. She's not fond of delivering hard news but doesn't shy from it either, so I'm confident her evaluation will be no kinder than what I deserve.