One More for the Road (19 page)

“You haven't been seeing Wilma for six months.”

“That's right,” said Willie Armstrong, laying his head back down on his arms and speaking with a muffled cadence. “But she still won't take yes for an answer. I call her every day. She hangs up.”

Fentriss mused. “Doesn't that tell you something?”

“Yeah,” came the muffled response, “she won't talk.” A thought roused Willie Armstrong to lift his head. “Will you talk to me? Can I come in?”

“Willie, do you know what time it is?”

“I lost my watch. I've lost everything. I'll stay five minutes, I promise, just five.”

“Willie, it's after midnight. Say what you must right here. We'll listen.”

“Well …” Willie wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “You see …”

“I'll let you men gab.” Emily Fentriss brushed by her husband. “Good night, Willie. Don't stay out late, Ralph. Bye.”

Ralph Fentriss put out one hand to stop her but the door opened and shut and he was alone with Willie.

“Sit down, Mr. Fentriss.” Willie patted the step by his side.

“If it's just five minutes, Willie, I prefer to stand.”

“It might be ten, Mr. Fentriss.” Willie Armstrong's voice wallowed into a blubber.

Fentriss stared at the doorstep. “I think I will sit.”

He sat.

“Well,” said Willie, “here's how it is. Wilma, she …”

 

Ralph Fentriss entered the bedroom dragging his coat and unraveling his tie. “I am now sober,” he said.

His wife looked up from turning pages in a book.

“Just back from a funeral?”

“I promised to get Wilma to take one more call. What are you reading?”

“One of those silly romances. Just like real life.”

“What are these?”

He nudged some scraps of notepaper on the bureau.

“Phone messages. I didn't look at them. Over to you.”

He scanned one of them. “‘Urgent. Bosco.' Who's Bosco?”

“We never knew his last name. One of Tina's pals. Watched TV. Ate us out of house and home.”

“Oh, yeah. Bosco.” He touched another note. “Here's Arnie Ames. ‘
Immediamente pronto
or I'll kill myself.' Do you think he will?”

“Why not? He was a charmer, but never stopped talking.”

“Motormouth, yeah. Here's a third. From Bud wondering what ever happened to Emily Junior. What ever did happen to Emily Junior?”

“That's the daughter who's in New York, writing soap operas. Does it come back to you now?”

“Oh, yeah, Emily Junior. Got out of town while the get was good. Boy, am I thirsty. Any beer in the icebox?”

“We junked the icebox years ago. We have a fridge now.”

“Oh, yeah.” He tossed the messages down. “You want to help with these panic notices? Someone's got to answer. How about a split? Fifty percent you, fifty me?”

“Oh no you don't.”

“I thought marriage was sharing.”

“Unh-unh.” She turned back to her book and scowled. “Where was I?”

He ruffled the pile of messages, clutched them with a weary croupier's hand and lurched down the hall, passing one empty bedroom after another, Emily Junior's, Tina's, Wilma's, and reached the kitchen to fix the messages on the refrigerator door with some Mickey Mouse magnets. Opening it, he gasped with relief.

“Two beers, thank God, no, three!”

Fifteen minutes passed and the refrigerator door stayed open, its light playing over an almost happy becoming a happy man in his early forties, a can of beer in each hand.

Another minute passed and Emily Fentriss came shuffling along the hall in her bedroom scruffies, a robe over her shoulders.

She stood in the doorway for a long moment, examining her husband across the room as he peered into the refrigerator, examined various items, brought them forth, and turned them upside down to dump their contents into an open trash bag.

Some green peas in a small bowl. A half cup of corn. Some meat loaf and a slice of corned beef hash. Some cold mashed potatoes. Some boiled onions in cream.

The trash bag filled.

With her arms crossed, leaning against the doorsill, Emily Fentriss at last said, “What do you think you're doing?”

“Cleaning the icebox. The fridge.”

“Throwing out perfectly good food.”

“No,” he said, sniffing some green onions and letting them fall. “Not perfectly good.”

“What then?” she said, motionless.

He stared down into the trash bag.

“Leftovers,” he said. “Yeah, that's it.”

And shut the door, dousing the light.

“Leftovers,” he said.

O
NE
M
ORE FOR THE
R
OAD

 

M
y secretary stuck her head in my office and talked over my barricade of letters and books.

“You in there?” she called.

“You know I am, and overworked,” I said. “What?”

“There's a maniac out here needs publishing and claims he has written or will write the World's Longest Novel.”

“I thought Thomas Wolfe was dead,” I said.

“This chap is carrying four shopping bags of what looks like kindling,” Elsa said, “but there's letters and words on each chunk. ‘It was a dark and stormy night,' one said. ‘People were dead everywhere,' said another.”

That did it. I rose behind my fortress of literature and marched to the door to peer out at the maniac. He sat across the reception area with several white bags containing lumps. I could see words in both.

“Bring him in,” I heard myself say.

“You don't really—”

“I do,” I said, wide awake. “Talk about Narrative Hooks!”

“Hooks?”

“The way you start a novel that's so wild your reader is hooked and plunges in. Go, Elsa.”

Elsa went.

She brought the little man in, for he was a little less than five feet tall, earnestly dragging his white bags full of words. When he had placed two, he hurried out to fetch two more. Then he sat quietly amongst his collection as Elsa, rolling her eyeballs, shut the door.

“Well, Mr....?” I said.

“G. F. Follette, author of what some call Follette's Folly. Here is my amazing novel!”

He stirred the bags with his shoe.

“I'm intrigued, Mr. Folly,” I said.

He ignored my slip and smiled down at his creations.

“Thanks. Most editors are busy or run off. Sir, I'm here because …” He paused to scan me head to foot. “I see you're my age and might recall that grand time, in the thirties, when tourists crossed the United States by car …” He paused to let me remember. I did. I nodded.

“This.” He touched his bags full of words. “Is an old idea whose time has returned. Remember those trips, Route 66, heading west with your parents? On the way, how did you entertain yourself and bug the hell out of your folks?”

“Bug? Hell!” My mind whirled its Rolodex to three wins in a row.

“Burma Shave!” I cried, and calmed down. Editors must not enthuse; it jacks up the price. “Burma Shave,” I murmured.

“Bull Durham Bull's-eye!” said Folly. “Though you didn't shave: Burma! America's highways were studded with B.S. signs, some called them, so you could chant couplets between Paducah and Potawatomi, Tonopah and Tombstone, Gila Gulch and Grass—”

“Yes, yes,” I said, impatiently.

 

“Looking for a perfect shave,
Buy our product, then you'll rave,
Yesterday you were a slave,
Free yourself with Burma Shave.”

 

“I remember,” I cried, beaming.

“Of course you do!” said Folly.

I then recited:

 

“Bearded brute, jump from your cave.
Freshen up with Burma Shave!”

 

“What a memory!” Folly praised.

I stared at his mystery bags. “But what has that got to do with—”

“Glad you asked.” He spilled two bags. Adjectives, nouns, and verbs scattered as he intoned: “Burma Shave, 1999. Dickens, 2000. Shakespeare, 2001.”

“All of those?” I gasped. “On those small wooden signs?”

“No, not dead authors. Live ones. Me!”

He knelt and slid the phrases across the carpet.

“How would you like to publish the first and longest cross-country novel, spanning counties, circling small towns, skirting big cities, finishing in Seattle, where you never wanted to go but you had to find out how the Novel of the Century ended? And here it is! What say?”

I leaned to read the phrases that ran by my desk, ended at the wall.

“My secretary mentioned ‘A Dark and Stormy Night—'?”

“Oh, that was a come-on.” Folly laughed. “Narrative Hook! You know Narrative Hooks?”

I bit my tongue.

“This,” he said, “is the wild true start of my magnum opus.”

I read: “The world was coming to an end …” on the first plinth. The second read: “Alec Jones had six hours in which to save Earth!”

“Those are the eye-opener words of your vast best-seller?” I said.

“Can you do better?” he said.

“Well …”

“Wait!” he interrupted. “It gets wilder. Get ready to cut a deal.”

He arranged more long kindling sticks until there were some sixty words underfoot, barring the door.

“You may well ask,” he said, “why has this book's time come? When the Burma Shave verse was yanked like teeth from America's roads it left a vacuum, right?”

“We missed them, yes.”

“Cross-country today there's little to see, cars go fast, billboards are verboten, so how to cope? Something small, low-profile on the soft shoulder, mainly side roads, from Maine to Missoula, Des Plaines to Denver. Plant these mini-metaphors to take root in the American psyche. Provoke TV chat news bites. Tourists, crazy, start reading in Kankakee, Kenosha, and Kansas. Find the finales in Sauk Center and Seattle. Then, sir, by God, we publish the whole bounteous batch in one Book-of-the-Month, leather-bound, to reap the travel tour storm winds. Think!”

“I'm overwhelmed, Folly!”

“As you should be. Quick, now! I must race to the next publisher, unless you sign and nail these revolutionary placards to promote literacy in the dumbest continental backwaters!”

“You think teachers will—”

“Devour them for breakfast, lunch, dinner! Menu them on computers. We skirt library lawns interstate advertising those drop-ins as intellectual water holes. Professors will beg to hammer my stakes near English I. Ad agencies will bribe entry to our far-traveling lingo, but no! My novel will race on, tossing characters and mad excursions right and left. Its time has come, sir. The old renewed. The untried tried again. So long!”

And he was on his feet, cudgeling his nouns and verbs, when I cried: “Wait!” I stared at the ample phrases. “These phrases are for starters, but … how does it end?”

“Fabulously! Once launched on the great road run, folks won't be able to stop. Crackerjack, pure crackerjack. Fritos; I dare you to eat just one!”