The Great Northern Express (18 page)

“I'll give you five dollars if you'll answer one question for me,” I said. “All you have to say is yes or no.”

The five-spot seemed to vanish as I held it out toward him.

“Okay,” I said. “I'm a writer. On a book tour. What I'd really like to do, though, is stay right here in Montana and fish for a week, then go straight home to my wife in Vermont. Should I?”

He scooped up his tarot deck, shuffled the cards, and spread them out on the sidewalk again, facedown. “Choose one,” he said.

I should have anticipated this, but of course I hadn't. Truth to tell, those arcane tarot figures, up to God alone knows what
devilment, have always spooked me a little. But I couldn't back out now. At least the cards wouldn't tell me I was going to come down with cancer. I'd already managed to do that on my own. Reluctantly, I pointed to one.

“Pick it up,” the guy said.

Oh, Lordy. It was the seven of rods, a skeletal, malignant-looking bastard lugging seven sticks of wood on his back. Seven seven seven. Seven surgeries. Seven months to live. Seven Viagra prescriptions for radiation-related erectile dysfunction …

The reader took the card and studied it briefly. Then he said, “I think you've had a really bad setback at some point in your writing career that's made you wary of touring.”

I couldn't help laughing out loud. “Man,” I said, “like every writer I know, I have had
hundreds
of really bad setbacks in my career.”

The tarot reader, no doubt sensing a kindred spirit in the charlatan standing on the sidewalk before him, said, “Finish your tour, buddy. It'll go fine. As for those other little matters you didn't mention”—and at that moment I would have sworn that, like the Howard of Moses Lake, he gave me a knowing wink—“no need to worry on those scores, either. At least not for a long time.”

Oh, prescient Mr. Fortune-teller. Kind Mr. Fortune-teller. Even if you are a street-conning, scheming, lying-through-your-teeth Mr. Fortune-teller. Let me sign a book for you, give you the remaining two dollars in my wallet, erect a statue of you on the village green at home or right here in downtown Missoula, Montana.
Go fine. Other little matters. No need to worry
. Oh, happy afternoon. Thank you, thank you, thank you. “What do you think?” I said to Phillis on the phone that night. “Was he right?”

“He was,” she said. “I could have told you that much for nothing. By the way, do you think your road bud will reappear?”

“The West Texas Jesus? Now that he's latched on to my fly rod, I doubt it.”

“Howard Frank?”

“Yes?”

“You didn't really give your favorite fly rod to some old drunk who thinks he's Jesus, did you? On second thought, don't answer that. I love you, sweetie.”

“I love you, too,” I said.

That, gentle reader, was the one thing I was sure of. But what more, really, could anyone hope for?

Partly to clear my head so that I could make a sensible decision about the fellowship I'd been offered at Pennsylvania, partly to earn a few extra bucks, and in part to acquire some insight into a side of the Kingdom I wouldn't encounter in my classroom at Orleans High, I spent our spring break working for a neighbor, Mr. Aloysius Quimby. Mr. Quimby, a Northeast Kingdom jack of all trades, was a good-natured octogenarian religious zealot. He'd hired me to help him remove a gigantic dead elm that was bidding fair to topple over onto Jim and Helen Hayford's upper-story roof.

The third member of our strange little triumvirate was a raging alcoholic who lived in a round-shouldered school bus dating back to the 1940s. The bus had double layers of newsprint taped over the windows to keep out the light when he holed up, with several fifths of Seagram's Seven Crown, each Friday after work
until Monday morning. Mr. F Nichols, as Mr. Quimby referred to him, had an unusual vocabulary, consisting principally of the word “fuck,” delivered with an astonishing variety of inflections and sometimes prefaced or followed, for emphasis, by “yes” or “no.” Thus the initial F, which Mr. Q came up with to replace Mr. Nichols's real first name, which I never did learn.

Throughout the Kingdom, Mr. Quimby was famous for a kind of surreal ingenuity. After spending a full day studying that behemoth of a dead elm, which loomed over the Hayfords' home at an angle that made the Tower of Pisa look plumb, he constructed a soaring trestle of disused railway ties between the tree and the house, a kind of brace for the first thirty or so feet of the elm's massive trunk to rest on while he severed the base with his chain saw. It took us a full week to build the trestle, which was the wonder of Orleans. Mr. F Nichols owned an elderly woods horse, with which he skidded the old railway ties up Cliff Street from the tracks below, where a half-mile section had recently been replaced. My job was to help Mr. Quimby hoist and lever them into place.

Mr. Quimby drove me to work in the morning. His pickup was, as he described it, a “rig-put-together,” a camelopard of a contraption that he had assembled from the bed and cab of a Model A truck, a 1952 Buick engine, and a homemade transmission. At eighty-eight, Mr. Q was as tough as a keg of ten-penny nails, but his joints stiffened up overnight, and for a few hours each morning, he was unable to turn his head more than a few degrees. He drove like a man wearing horse blinders. At the top of School Street, where just a few months ago—to me it now seemed like twenty years—young Cody had driven my car hell-for-leather backward on the first day of the semester, Mr. Q would stop and cut his eyes to the left to see what might be coming out of town on Route 58, which met School Street
at a
very
dangerous, V-shaped intersection at the bottom of the hill. When all was clear he'd yell “Hang tight, Ezekiel!” and gun the rig-put-together down the hill like Dale Senior putting a rival into the wall at Daytona. On the third day I rode with him, we shot out onto the state highway directly in front of a loaded milk tanker. “Enjoy your fucking little ride with Mr. fucking Quimby, did you?” Mr. F Nichols inquired. From then on I walked to work.

“Ezekiel,” Mr. Quimby said to me one afternoon as we stood atop that insane trestle, surveying the village below. “It is a fine spring day in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, praise the Lord.”

“It is,” I said, wondering what the Lord would think of our outfit: a stiff-necked evangelist, a drunk, and a first-year schoolteacher and would-be writer at a loss to know what to do with the rest of his life.

Mr. Quimby paused to mop his brow with his slouch hat, then looked off into the distance. “Behold the new green foliage, Zeke. Vermont's foliage, fall or spring, is as glorious a sight as any this world has to offer.”

No argument there.

“But, Ezekiel, the splendors of this spinning blue sphere”—Mr. Q fancied himself something of a poet-orator—“are as naught to the glories of paradise. Where, by the by, I expect soon to be seated at the right hand of Him who shaped us in His sublime image.”

“I hope not
too
soon, Mr. Quimby,” I said, remembering that we had both come perilously close to exactly such a translation earlier in the week at the foot of School Hill. I could still hear that tanker's bleating horn.

Mr. Quimby chuckled knowingly, as if his friend on high had vouchsafed to him the exact moment of his celestial ascent.

“How about the Hayfords?” I said. “Will they be seated up there with you?”

Mr. Quimby gave this a moment's consideration. “James and Helen are good enough folks,” he said rather cautiously.

At that point Mr. F Nichols appeared, sweating out his hangover, shouting fuck this and fuck that, repeatedly whacking the back of his overloaded horse with a makeshift cudgel he'd cut for that purpose. “What about him?” I asked.

“Not a chance in the world,” Mr. Quimby said, and he clambered down off the trestle, yanked the cudgel away from the drunk, and sent it sailing end over end onto the neighbor's lawn. He said something quick and low to Nichols, then turned his back on him. To this day I don't know what Mr. Q told Mr. F Nichols, but at least on that job the guy never beat his horse again.

As for me, building that Babel-like monstrosity—it worked like a charm, by the way—with Mr. Quimby and Mr. F Nichols turned out to be another small but memorable part of my apprenticeship in the Kingdom. Still, trudging back to Verna's in the early evening, inhaling the sweet fragrance of varnish from the mill, I wondered. Did I really want to live in Philadelphia for three years? If not, what was I doing with my life?

D. B. Cooper had yet to hijack an airliner and leap into the dark sky over thousands of square miles of western wilderness. But as I drove south out of Missoula on Day Fifty of the Great American Book Tour, heading for an event in Hamilton and remembering our long-ago first year in the Kingdom, I understood what the West Texas Jesus had meant by comparing us callow storytellers to the flying bank robber who made his fateful plunge.

This morning I was parked beside my favorite western trout stream, in southwestern Montana's Pioneer Mountains, contemplating the five hundred miles the Loser Cruiser and I still had to cover to make our engagement that night in Salt Lake City. Even by western standards, it seemed like a haul, though as Russ Lawrence chronicles in his lively history,
Montana's Bitterroot Valley
, the Native American ambassador Old Ignace
walked from the Bitterroots to St. Louis and back, on behalf of his people, not once but twice
. So I slid back behind the wheel and headed off through the Big Hole Valley at my customary 58.5 mph. Approaching the Idaho state line, I coaxed the Cruiser up to 70, hoping the speed might transcend the shimmying. Instantly, the entire front end of the car went into a deep grand-mal shuddering. Back to 58.5.

It occurred to me, as I cajoled the old Chevy up the hill above the Babylonian-looking metropolis of Salt Lake City to the King's English Bookshop, that to a storyteller like me, Joe Smith's marginally more outlandish retelling of a wondrous old tale made a fine American yarn. With, what's more, an appropriately American capitalistic touch—Moses' tablets, after all, were made of mere stone. Joe's were pure gold.

The King's English, Betsy Burton's renowned independent on the ridge above the city, shares its name with Betsy's memoir of her life as a bibliophile and bookseller. One of her cardinal rules is “never host an event for a book you aren't passionate about.” As I waited for my event, it struck me that the same precept ought to apply to writing a book. How many of the nearly half-million new books published or distributed in the United States each year would ever see daylight if writers wrote
only
those books they were passionate about? A well-behaved and attentive shepherd dog attended my talk that evening at the King's English. There were no after-dinner nappers. (At one venue in New England a guy had actually fallen asleep
before
my reading and slept soundly through it from beginning to end.) Thank you, Betsy. I'll be back.

This place they call Wyoming is one tough and beautiful country. You need only drive along Route 90 from Evander to Rock Springs to Rawlins, past tin-can horse trailers and cattle-sorting pens and railyards and petroleum pumping stations, past walking beams extracting oil with a dreary, seesaw monotony, past mile-long coal trains and interstate exchanges that look like
sets for B Westerns, past bone-white alkali streambeds and grazing Angus and Shorthorns and Whitefaces and a few long-abandoned sod huts slumped into sidehills, and then, suddenly, profiled on a distant butte, a single antelope. Like the Kingdom, Wyoming seemed a good place for a man or woman of a certain sanguine temperament to live. And a hard, hard place in which to make a living.

So, like the cowboy in the ballad, I'm walking the streets, not of Laredo but of Laramie, which, with its squat brick utilitarian downtown buildings, looks like any other western town. I slipped up a flight of stairs that could have led to a Prohibition-era speakeasy or whorehouse—an impression enhanced when a Burlington Northern freight rumbled by not thirty feet away, shaking the building to its foundation—and into Personally Recommended Books (aka The Second Story), where, staring me in the face, was a display of my latest with a
RECOMMENDED READING
tag. Any writer will tell you—that's a moment worth the drive from Vermont to Wyoming.