I asked him if he had ever visited Yosemite National Park when he was in California.
“No, I never did.”
“What about Muir Woods?”
“What?”
“Muir Woods. Near San Francisco.”
“I never heard of it.”
“I'd like to see some of that country. I've been to New Mexico and Arizona but I never made it all the way to California. I'd like to go out there sometime.”
“You'll love it if you like to see big buck niggers strutting around town kissing white women on the mouth and fondling their titties in public. They're running wild out there, Speed. They're water-skiing out there now. If I was a nigger, that's where I would go. It was a nigger policeman that arrested me outside that little church in Riverside. Can you beat it? He put the cuffs on me too, like I was Billy Cook. You don't expect a California nigger to defer to a white man but I thought he might have shown some consideration for my age.”
“Did you go to jail?”
“Just overnight, till Monday morning. The municipal judge fined me thirty-five dollars and told me to find myself another church to sing in.”
I asked him if he was going to British Honduras on vacation and he said, “Vacation! Do you think I'm the kind of man who takes vacations?”
“What are you going down there for?”
“My mother's there. I need to see her.”
His mother! I couldn't believe it. “Is she sick?” I said.
“I don't know. I need to see her on some business.”
“How old is she?”
“She's so old she's walking sideways. I hate to see it too. That's a bad sign. When these old folks start creeping around and shuffling their feet, church is about out.”
He wanted to see her about some land she owned in Louisiana near the town of Ferriday. It was an island in the Mississippi River called Jean's Island.
“It's not doing her any good,” he said. “She's just turned it over to the birds and snakes. She pays taxes on it every year and there's not one penny of income. There's no gain at all except for the appreciated value. She won't give it to me and she won't let me use it. She's my mother and I think the world of her but she's hard to do business with.”
“It's not cultivated land?”
“No, it's just rough timber. The potential is enormous. The black-walnut trees alone are worth fifty thousand dollars for furniture veneer. The stumps could then be cut up and made into pistol grips. How does fifty thousand dollars sound to you?”
“It sounds pretty good.”
“Some of those trees are whoppers. Double trunks.”
“Maybe you could get a timber lease.”
“I'd take a lease if I could get it. What I want is a deed. I don't mean a quitclaim either, I mean a warranty deed with a seal on it. So you understand what I'm telling you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you say
timber
lease?”
“Yes.”
“That's what I thought you said. Why would you want to cut the timber?”
“That was your idea. The walnut trees.”
“I was only trying to suggest to you the value of the place. I'm not going to cut those trees. Are you crazy? Cut the trees and the whole thing would wash away and then where would you be? Do you want my opinion? I say leave the trees and make a private hunting preserve out of the place. I'm not talking about squirrels and ducks either. I mean stock the place with some real brutes. Wart hogs and Cape buffalo. I don't say it would be cheap but these hunters have plenty of money and they don't mind spending it.”
“That's not a bad idea.”
“I've got a hundred ideas better than that but Mama won't answer my letters. What about a Christian boys' ranch? It's an ideal setting. You'd think that would appeal to her, wouldn't you? Well, you'd be wrong. How about a theme park? Jefferson Davis Land. It's not far from the old Davis plantation. Listen to this. I would dress up like Davis in a frock coat and greet the tourists as they stepped off the ferry. I would glower at them like old Davis with his cloudy eye and the children would cry and clutch their mothers' hands and thenâhere's the payoffâthey would see the twinkle in my clear eye. I'd have Lee too, and Jackson and Albert Sidney Johnston, walking around the midway. Hire some people with beards, you know, to do that. I wouldn't have Braxton Bragg or Joseph E. Johnston. Every afternoon at three Lee would take off his gray coat and wrestle an alligator in a mud hole. Prize drawings. A lot of T-shirts and maybe a few black-and-white portables. If you don't like that, how about a stock-car track? Year-round racing with hardly any rules. Deadly curves right on the water. The Symes 500 on Christmas Day. Get a promotional tie-in with the Sugar Bowl. How about an industrial park? How about a high-rise condominium with a roof garden? How about a baseball clinic? How about a monkey island? I don't say it would be cheap. Nobody's going to pay to see one or two monkeys these days. People want to see a lot of monkeys. I've got plenty of ideas but first I have to get my hands on the island. Can you see what I'm driving at? It's the hottest piece of real estate in Louisiana, bar none.”
“Are you a student of the Civil War, Dr. Symes?”
“No, but my father was.”
“What was that about Bragg? You said you wouldn't have Bragg walking around in your park.”
“My father had no time for Bragg or Joseph E. Johnston. He always said Bragg lost the war. What do you know about these revolving restaurants, Speed?”
“I don't know anything about them but I can tell you that Braxton Bragg didn't lose the war by himself.”
“I'm talking about these restaurants up on top of buildings that turn around and around while the people are in there eating.”
“I know what you're talking about but I've never been in one. Look here, you can't just go around saying Braxton Bragg lost the war.”
“My father said he lost it at Chickamauga.”
“I know what Bragg did at Chickamauga, or rather what he didn't do. I can't accept Joseph E. Johnston's excuses either for not going to help Pemberton but I don't go around saying he lost the war.”
“Well, my father believed it. Pollard was his man. A fellow named Pollard, he said, wrote the only fair account of the thing.”
“I've read Pollard. He calls Lincoln the Illinois ape.”
“Pollard was his man. I don't read that old-timey stuff myself. That's water over the dam. I've never wasted my time with that trash. What's your personal opinion of these revolving restaurants?”
“I think they're all right.”
“Leon Vurro's wife said I should have a fifty-story tower right in the middle of the park with a revolving restaurant on top. What do you think?”
“I think it would be all right.”
“That's your opinion. I happen to have my own. Let's cost it out. Let's look a little closer. All right, your sap tourists and honeymooners are up there eating and they say, âLet's see, are we looking into Louisiana now or Mississippi, which?' I say what the hell difference would it make? One side of the river looks just like the other. You think it would be cheap? All that machinery? Gears and chains breaking every day? You'd have to hire two or three union bastards full time just to keep it working. What about your light bill? A thousand dollars a month? Two thousand? You'd have to charge eighteen dollars for a steak to come out on a deal like that. And just so some sap and his family can see three hundred and sixty degrees of the same damned cotton fields. I don't like it myself. Do you have the faintest notion of what it would cost to erect a fifty-story tower? No, you don't, and neither does Bella Vurro. And you probably don't care. I'm the poor son of a bitch who will have to shoulder the debt.”
“Look here. Dr. Symes, I know that Bragg should have been relieved earlier. Everybody knows that today. Joe Johnston too, but that's a long way from saying they lost the war.”
“What line of work are you in, Speed?”
“I'm back in college now. I'm trying to pick up some education hours so I can get a teaching certificate.”
“What you are then is a thirty-year-old schoolboy.”
“I'm twenty-six.”
“Well, I don't guess you're bothering anybody.”
“The Civil War used to be my field.”
“A big waste of time.”
“I didn't think so. I studied for two years at Ole Miss under Dr. Buddy Casey. He's a fine man and a fine scholar.”
“You might as well loiter for two years. You might as well play Parcheesi for two years.”
“That's a foolish remark.”
“You think so?”
“It's dumb.”
“All right, listen to me. Are you a reader? Do you read a lot of books?”
“I read quite a bit.”
“And you come from a family of readers, right?”
“No, that's not right. That's completely wrong. My father doesn't own six books. He reads the paper about twice a week. He reads fishing magazines and he reads the construction bids. He works. He doesn't have time to read.”
“But you're a big reader yourself.”
“I have more than four hundred volumes of military history in my apartment. All told, I have sixty-six lineal feet of books.”
“All right, now listen to me. Throw that trash out the window. Every bit of it.”
He reached into his grip and brought out a little book with yellow paper covers. The cellophane that had once been bonded to the covers was cracked and peeling. He flourished the book. “Throw all that dead stuff out the window and put this on your shelf. Put it by your bed.”
What a statement! Books, heavy ones, flying out the windows of the Rhino apartment! I couldn't take my eyes from the road for very long but I glanced at the cover. The title was
With Wings as Eagles
and the author was John Selmer Dix, M.A.
Dr. Symes turned through the pages. “Dix wrote this book forty years ago and it's still just as fresh as the morning dew. Well, why shouldn't it be? The truth never dies. Now this is a first edition. That's important. This is the one you want. Remember the yellow cover. They've changed up things in these later editions. Just a word here and there but it adds up. I don't know who's behind it. They'll have Marvin watching television instead of listening to dance music on the radio. Stuff like that. This is the one you want. This is straight Dix. This is the book you want on your night table right beside your glass of water,
With Wings as Eagles
in the yellow cover. Dix was the greatest man of our time. He was truly a master of the arts, and of some of the sciences too. He was the greatest writer who ever lived.”
“They say Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived.”
“Dix puts William Shakespeare in the shithouse.”
“I've never heard of him. Where is he from?”
“He was from all over. He's dead now. He's buried in Ardmore, Oklahoma. He got his mail in Fort Worth, Texas.”
“Did he live in Fort Worth?”
“He lived all over. Do you know the old Elks Club in Shreveport?”
“No.”
“Not the new one. I'm not talking about the new lodge.”
“I don't know anything about Shreveport.”
“Well, it doesn't matter. It's one of my great regrets that I never got to meet Dix. He died broke in a railroad hotel in Tulsa. The last thing he saw from his window is anyone's guess. They never found his trunk, you know. He had a big tin trunk that was all tied up with wire and ropes and belts and straps, and he took it with him everywhere. They never found it. Nobody knows what happened to it. Nobody even knows what was in the trunk.”
“Well, his clothes, don't you think?”
“No, he didn't have any clothes to speak of. No
change
of clothes. His famous slippers of course.”
“His correspondence maybe.”
“He burned all letters unread. I don't want to hear any more of your guesses. Do you think you're going to hit on the answer right off? Smarter people than you have been studying this problem for years.”
“Books then.”
“No, no, no. Dix never read anything but the daily papers. He
wrote
books, he didn't have to read them. No, he traveled light except for the trunk. He did his clearest thinking while moving. He did all his best work on a bus. Do you know that express bus that leaves Dallas every day at noon for Los Angeles? That's the one he liked. He rode back and forth on it for an entire year when he was working on
Wings
. He saw the seasons change on that bus. He knew all the drivers. He had a board that he put on his lap so he could spread his stuff out, you see, and work right there in his seat by the window.”
“I don't see how you could ride a bus for a year.”
“He was completely exhausted at the end of that year and he never fully recovered his health. His tin trunk had a thousand dents in it by that time and the hinges and latches were little better than a joke. That's when he began tying it up with ropes and belts. His mouth was bleeding from scurvy, from mucosal lesions and suppurating ulcers, his gums gone all spongy. He was a broken man all right but by God the work got done. He wrecked his health so that we might have
Wings as Eagles
.”
The doctor went on and on. He said that all other writing, compared to Dix's work, was just “foul grunting.” I could understand how a man might say such things about the Bible or the Koran, some holy book, but this Dix book, from what I could see of it, was nothing more than an inspirational work for salesmen. Still, I didn't want to judge it too quickly. There might be some useful tips in those pages, some Dix thoughts that would throw a new light on things. I was still on the alert for chance messages.