Dreamer of Dune (13 page)

He installed a top rack on the hearse, where we carried a spare tire. Two gray canvas water bags were tied to the grill, draped across the front.

Since we were moving out of the rental house, arrangements had to be made for every article of personal property we owned. Items were sold or donated to charity, books were left in storage with friends, and clothing and other articles were shipped to Penny in Florence, Oregon, along with a child-support check for her mother.

On the September morning that we set out, Dad was in an incredibly good mood, singing and making witty quips about road signs. Whenever he saw a sign that read “Stop Ahead,” he exclaimed, “Stop! A head in the road!”

Dad did all the driving, since Mom was afraid to drive and didn't have a license. As the days wore on, he grew tired and increasingly testy, largely because Dusty was not waiting for rest stops to do his doggy duty. Instead he picked a corner in the back, and by the second day a distinct, unpleasant aroma wafted from that vicinity. His feces and urine had soaked through the blankets, and some got around the plywood onto our things below. By the time we reached Ralph and Irene Slattery's place in Sonoma, California, Mom and Dad had endured enough of Dusty. They arranged to leave him with the Slatterys.

The hearse had a tendency to slip out of low gear, from having been driven in first gear during so many funeral processions. Dad had to hold the gear shift down at times to keep it from popping out of place. Sometimes when he wanted to keep the hearse in low gear he had Bruce or me hold the gear shift down, pressing on it so that it wouldn't slip. It was a “three on a tree” shift on the right side of the steering column.

I remember warm California and Southwest nights on the highway, with my parents' heads silhouetted against low evening light, from headlights on the road. There were flea-bitten motel rooms with no air conditioning and the windows left open. Crickets sang outside, and I smelled dry grass, cattle, fertilizers, and warm, sweltering earth.

At the border, the Mexican officers performed a cursory inspection of our belongings. Luckily they didn't remove the door panels, or they would have discovered Dad's concealed automatic pistol, which he carried for protection.

As our hearse rolled through Mexico on its journey south, peasants fell to their knees or held straw hats over their hearts. Devout Catholics, they undoubtedly thought we were carrying a poor departed soul on its final earthly journey. As soon as we left the first village in which this occurred and were on the open highway, Dad and Mom broke out laughing. They laughed so hard that tears streamed down their faces, and Dad had to pull the car over.

We didn't have much money with us, only around $3,000 in U.S. currency and traveler's checks. But prices were so low that we could live quite well, much better than in the United States. Some of the Mexican hotels in which we stayed were almost palatial, with floral-decked central patios and fine furnishings.

Dad was sure he would be able to write in Mexico to boost our monetary reserve, though years later he would refer to this belief as founded in myth. One day he would become a student of modern mythology and its correlation with individual and mass psychology. Myths were all around us, he said. The myth of owning a sailboat or a ranch, for example, or of being a great writer without having to work hard at the craft.

Or the idyllic myth he found himself seeking now, after the brief Mexican jaunt of 1953 and the failed American Samoa attempt. Frank Herbert now envisioned himself in a remote tropical village, pounding out a literary masterpiece on a manual typewriter.

He'd sold several short stories in 1954. There were fewer short story sales in 1955, but that year he made the important novel sale,
Under Pressure
. And before leaving for Mexico, he received word from his agent that a movie producer was interested in the book.

We passed through the bustling shopping town of Toluca, just west of Mexico City, then followed a highway northwest. Our destination was the mountain village of Tlalpujahua in the state of Michoacán. This had been recommended by Mike Cunningham, an American friend with whom we had rendezvoused in the last few days. He drove ahead of us in his old wood-paneled station wagon, kicking up clouds of dust on a long dirt road leading to the village.

Near Tlalpujahua the road narrowed and jungle closed in around us. A number of houses dotted the overgrowth, in tiny carved-out clearings. Some were tin-roofed shacks while others were constructed of more sturdy adobe, with tile roofs. Many had outdoor kitchens in the form of lean-to arrangements against the houses. I smelled the acrid odor of cookfires from the burning of dry brush, grass and burro dung. Daylight faded and after dark we arrived in Tlalpujahua, where we stayed with a friend of Mike's.

Soon we rented a one-story adobe and white stucco house with a wrought-iron gate and a heavy, carved wooden door. It was set up in a U-shaped arrangement of rooms around a central outdoor courtyard. The fourteen-room home belonged to Señorita Francìsca Aguìlar, a large woman known as “Señorita Panchita.” Since costs were so low, we could afford to hire a maid, a live-in cook and a gardener.

Almost every day, Dad wrote from early in the morning until early afternoon, on
Storyship
(alternate title
As Heaven Made Him
), his novel about the Santa Rosa murder case. Dealing with the legal definition of sanity and the responsibility of a criminal for his acts, the novel had both moral and political content, making it potentially pedantic.

Each day, Mom set up her own portable typewriter on the dining room table and worked on revisions to her mystery novel,
Frighten the Mother
. She didn't put in as many hours as Dad, since she spent more time than he in managing household affairs, including the household help and the children. Unfortunately, she was having trouble with the story.

When my parents' work was finished for the day they enjoyed taking walks through town together. I remember playing marbles and looking up to see them across the street holding hands and talking. They waved to me and smiled, and went on their way. They had a spot they liked to visit at sunset, where they could look across the burnt orange tile roofs of the town at a magnificent sky filled with color.

As in every other place we lived, the mail was critically important to my father. Here it was more essential than ever, since we had no telephone. Contract offers, documents and checks were expected to arrive in the mail, he told us, and for that reason all mail was to be treated with extreme care. We got to know our mailman, Jesus Chako, very well. A slender, affable man, he was always punctual. When he delivered a check one day in payment for an article Dad had written ($125 U.S.) my father said to my mother, “Jesus brings manna from Heaven!”

Unfortunately, Doubleday mailed the galley proof of
Under Pressure
to our previous address in Tacoma, and it wasn't forwarded to us in Mexico. Consequently, a duplicate galley had to be mailed to Dad. This became a matter of extreme urgency due to the publisher's schedule, so the moment Dad had the galley, he worked without sleep until it was corrected and in the mail back to New York.

Doubleday did not like the title
Under Pressure
, and asked the author for an alternate. He preferred the original title, but suggested
The Dragon in the Sea
nonetheless, which was used for the hardcover Doubleday edition. In many respects the new title was superior, for the mythology it suggested. There is an ancient Chinese legend concerning a ferocious, terrifying “dragon that lives in the sea.” The Bible (Isaiah 27:1) contains a similar description: “…and (the Lord) shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” These passages, particularly the latter for Western readers, added subconscious depth and meaning to the title. In my father's tale, the “dragon” was a nuclear-powered subtug that transported precious oil through wartime waters, a craft that guarded the cargo against anyone who would harm it. This craft was reminiscent of mythological beasts of legend guarding a great treasure.

The mythology of such beasts was described by Sir James George Frazer in his massive nineteenth-century magnum opus,
The Golden Bough
, one of my father's favorite and most closely studied works. Frazer described the golden fleece of the sacred ram sacrificed to Zeus, given by Phrixus to his wife's father and nailed to an oak tree, where it was guarded by a dragon that never slept. In
Beowulf
, also read by my father, a ferocious fire dragon occupied a lair under the cliffs at the edge of the sea, guarding a great treasure hoard.

This theme would later become central to Frank Herbert's
Dune
, a world in which massive, fire-breathing sandworms guarded the greatest treasure in the universe, the spice melange. As in
The Dragon in the Sea
, the treasure was beneath the surface of a planet.

Oil and melange were alike, because whoever controlled the precious limited resource controlled the known universe, as described in each novel.

There were no banks in Tlalpujahua, so we banked in El Oro, seven miles away by dirt road. This was fitting, since El Oro meant “The Gold.” We also did some of our shopping there, particularly for medicines, which were in short supply in Tlalpujahua.

Many times Mom went to El Oro alone on the second-class bus while Dad stayed home and wrote. The bus passengers frequently carried live chickens or turkeys onboard, and even pigs, going to or from the market. In her travel journal, my mother described what the front of the passenger compartment looked like from the inside:

To that I would add my own memory of Mexican bus drivers, who had an unnerving habit of crossing themselves in the Catholic way, touching their forehead and each shoulder, and then pressing the accelerator pedal all the way to the floorboard, as if the fate of the bus and passengers depended solely upon the will of God and not upon the skill of the driver.

On a regular basis at our house, my parents conducted an English class for local adults. The brightest student was twenty-one-year-old Jose (“Pepe”) Muñoz, who was fast becoming a close friend of our family. Pepe wore white tee shirts and stood around 5'7". A muscular man, he had long black hair and a round, Tarascan Indian face. He smiled often and easily, had a pleasant manner and a good sense of humor. Like many people in town, he was “
muy catolico
” (very Catholic). A master woodworker, he was exceedingly honest in a number of financial dealings with my parents.

I spent a good deal of my time playing marbles in the streets, and was outdoors so much that townspeople referred to me as “El Vago de los Calles” (“The Tramp of the Streets”). The friends I made were not to my mother's liking. Her journal entry of November 9, 1955, reported:

Initially our family was not well-accepted by the community. Dad wrote in “God's ‘Helping Hand' Gave Us 5,000
Amigos
” and “The Curate's Thumb,” both unpublished first-person accounts, that the villagers were independent and inclined to form their own opinions. These were clannish, proud and fiercely nationalistic mountain people. Americans were considered a bad influence upon the local youth. Adults ignored my parents or spoke about them in whispered tones. Some children were forbidden from playing with me or with my little brother.

In October, the valve caps were stolen from our hearse tires, apparently by someone who did not fear the vengeance of God for tampering with a vehicle bearing chapel doors. A short while later the side mirrors were also taken. All of this was a surprise and a disappointment to us in view of the religious upbringing of the people.

Elsewhere in town, interesting events were occurring. It was a story my father told many times at dinner tables in ensuing years. His two unpublished versions of it (“God's ‘Helping Hand'…” and “The Curate's Thumb”) differed in minor details.

The most important man in town was the Catholic curate, Francisco Aguìlar. Known as “Señor Cura,” he was in his seventies. With more influence than a parish priest, his jurisdiction covered Tlalpujahua and five smaller nearby villages, including Tlalpujahuilla (little Tlalpujahua). The village mayors always visited him in his large home for approval before making important decisions. He stood 6'6", weighed 275 pounds and had a pock-rutted face, from an earlier attack of smallpox. The curate suffered from diabetes, and had to watch his diet closely. Consequently, the local physician, Dr. Gustave Iriarte, checked in on him regularly.