The Great Northern Express (10 page)

Deer season opened on the second Saturday of the month. At dusk the following evening, a ten-point buck hung by its antlers in the big maple in Fred Fauchs's yard. Verna told us Fred always had a good buck hanging there by the second evening of the season. Yet Fred scorned the two proven methods of hunting in the Kingdom, driving deer with a group of other hunters and still-hunting (moving slowly through the woods alone). Nor did he hunt from a stand. Instead, Fred walked down his deer.

“A man in good condition can always do it,” he told me as we admired the ten-pointer that Sunday evening. “I picked up this old boy's track in the Brownington Bog yesterday at dawn and drove it up over Bald Mountain. I tracked him back around Willoughby Lake through the state forest. I caught sight of him twice, but he was running in heavy timber both times and I hate to wound an animal and not kill it. By dusk last night he was slowing.”

“So you came home and got on his track again first thing this morning?”

Fred ran his hand over the dark coat of the deer, collecting a little snow. He shook his head. “It wasn't all that cold last night and I had a blanket. I cut myself a cedar lean-to and lay down on his track. First light, I was on his trail again. He ran across the ice on the Stillwater, over in what we call the Jungle. By noon
I was gaining on him pretty steadily. I was trotting. A man, you know, is capable of greater endurance, much more endurance, than a deer. By midafternoon he was lying down to rest every fifteen minutes. At sunset I walked up to him, lying under a little fir tree on Barton Mountain, and shot him from fifteen feet away. By then there was a crust on the snow, so I climbed aboard my deer and rode him down the mountainside like a bobsled.”

Fred looked at me. “I turned seventy last month. I hope to have many more good hunts, but you never can tell. This was a good hunt.”

“Do you ever feel sorry for the deer?”

“Sorry? No, son. This old ridgerunner was nine or ten years old. He'd traveled a lot of fine country. I imagine he bred dozens of does. I could have shot him last year or the year before or the year before that. He had a good, long run.”

We stood silently together, looking at the great ridgerunner hanging by his antlers from Fred's hundred-year-old maple. “How far do you think you walked in the past two days?” I asked.

“About thirty-five miles,” Fred said. “But only half of that was uphill. Say. Do you and the missus like venison?”

In early twenty-first-century America, independent bookstores are as endangered as the forests of the Kingdom where Fred Fauchs hunted fifty years ago. Yet one of the many things I love about them is that they're all different. For example, Mary Gay Shipley's fabled That Bookstore in Blytheville (pronounced Bliville), Arkansas, with its stamped-tin ceiling, boxcar geometry, and crimson neon sign flashing the store's distinctive name like a tavern-window beer ad, still looks like the Prohibition-era speakeasy it once was. Mary Gay told me that during the Great Depression, a customer was shot dead sitting in a shoeshine chair where the reading lectern now stands.

TurnRow Book Company in downtown Greenwood, Mississippi, is modeled on a Parisian bookstore, with an elegant book-lined balcony wrapped around a sun-washed atrium containing an assortment of fiction and nonfiction as carefully selected as
any you'll find in these United States. The Mississippi writer and bookseller Jamie Kornegay, who manages TurnRow, told me that the store name refers to the space at the end of a cotton row, where the mechanized picker turns around.

In Oxford that evening, however, though I prowled Faulkner's stomping grounds, I could not seem to locate the Reverend Hightower's village house or the Bundren family's farm or the pillared mansion where Thomas Sutpen, as a small boy, was turned away from the front door. Until, that is, I wandered into the southern literature room at Oxford's renowned Square Books.
That's
where I found Faulkner country—a “true place” if one ever existed. Right between the covers of his great novels.

So I'm seeing things. It's come to that. Apparently some comic genie, recently emancipated from his lamp, had scooped up the palace of Versailles, winged his merry way across the Atlantic, and deposited the whole shooting match in Miami, Florida. These were the accommodations that my kind hosts from the local ladies' literary society had arranged for me? Mercy. This five-star oceanside resort hotel wasn't Harold Who's cup of tea. Still, the literary club had bought a couple of hundred copies of my new book, was paying me handsomely, and was feting me that very evening with a dinner in my honor. Surely it would behoove me, for the next several hours, to be on my best behavior.

But wait. Here at a dead run came not one but two big burly doormen, their long doorman's capes flying, to tell the addle-pated elder behind the steering wheel of the rust-bucket Chevy that they're sorry, sir, but in order to stay at Versailles South one needed a reservation.

“Oh, I have one,” I called out the window. “That's Mosher, Howard F. But you know what? I'd like to cancel it.” And I will be damned if, having not ten seconds ago resolved to comport myself like a sensible human being, I didn't roll right on around the elegantly curved and landscaped drive and back to downtown Miami to seek lodgings more befitting a scribbling storywriter with a radiated prostate gland and a twenty-year-old Celebrity held together with Bondo and clothesline.

UDGET IN
proclaimed the cockeyed sign, missing its first and last letters. I pulled into the motel parking lot, swerving to avoid the mummified remains of a large horned toad.

For $22.85, including tax, I managed to secure a room at the [B]udget In[n]. True, upon learning of my change of venue, the literary society no doubt wondered what sort of madman they'd gotten themselves involved with. “Goodness,” one of the horrified literati exclaimed, “that's where the homeless people stay!”

Correct. But the dinner and event and signing went “swimmingly,” as the same lady graciously told me, and by 11:00 that evening, having regaled Phillis over the phone with an account of my very abbreviated stay at Versailles South, I was ready for bed.

“What's all that racket in the background?” Phillis said. “What sort of place is that motel, anyway? Are you sure you're safe there?”

“Oh, that's just some kids having a party a few rooms down,” I said. “Yes, yes, I'm perfectly safe. What was it Verna used to say? I'm as safe as a toad in the palm of God's hand.”

From the Vermont end of the line, silence.

“Don't worry, sweetie,” I said. “This is a really good place. They let the homeless stay here.”

“Lock your door,” Phillis said. “Use the security lock.”

Security lock? The [B]udget In[n] was evidently
so
safe a place that they didn't even
need
security locks. I told Phillis that I loved her, and on that happy connubial note our conversation was punctuated by a nearby
crack
, very much resembling that of a pistol shot. “Christ Almighty, a mouse ran up my nightie!” my wife shouted. “BARRICADE YOUR DOOR, HOWARD FRANK!”

About midnight what might once have been called in the Deep South a “jollification” got under way in the room adjacent to mine. Rock concert–volume music, with a thumping, vibrating bass that set the headboard of my bed quivering. An unholy din of screams and laughter. Car doors slamming. Screeching tires.

“When you become very tired, Mr. Mosher—
and you will—
you must rest. Do not drive yourself harder. REST.”

What was my ultracompetent, entirely businesslike radiation/oncology nurse doing here in Miami at the [B]udget In[n] at 12:02 in the morning? Over the soothing strains of the nocturne next door, I could hear her voice distinctly. How very kind of her to come all this way to check up on me and remind me to REST.

Though it runs against my grain to admit it, as my good nurse had warned me, I really was very tired. My stern maiden great-aunt Jane used to say, with a hard look right at me, “Why lie, boy, when the truth serves as well?” Why indeed? Constitutional optimism and the grand old Mosher tradition of flat-out denial will take one only so far in this vale of tribulation, and the fact is, Harold Who was exhausted. But now a herd of North American bison seemed to be stampeding through the room next door—nothing else could possibly account for the thundering. Also, someone was pounding on our shared wall with a sledge hammer. REST, said the no-nonsense nurse. REST, said
my friend Dr. Marshall, who had studied with the student of Madame Curie. REST, enjoined the (rather terrifying) National Cancer Institute booklet on prostate radiation therapy.

Jesus of Jerusalem! Neither my good-natured dad nor my irascible uncle would have put up with this ruckus for a Catskill Mountain minute. Barefoot, clad in pj bottoms and T-shirt, I lurched to my feet, padded outside, stepping over the desiccated remains of the horned toad (I made a mental note to bag it up and take it home to show Phillis), and tapped politely on the partyers' door.

A young man holding a red, white, and blue tall boy appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a brand-new pair of cowboy boots and not one stitch else. Behind him was a seething press of similarly unattired young people, America's hope for tomorrow, dancing wildly to a boom box as big as an old-fashioned steamer trunk.

“And you are?” the guy said.

“Howard. Howard Mosher? From the next room over?”

For some reason, this disclosure struck my neighbor, standing there in his birthday suit and boots, with a full-blown Saturnalia going forward in the room behind him, as the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He doubled over with pealing gales of laughter. I laughed, too, I wasn't sure why. Then I said, “I was wondering. If maybe you could pound on the
other
wall for a while? Instead of mine?”

Whereupon, he handed me his tall boy to hold, shouted, “This one's for old Howie,” turned around and, naked as a jaybird in snakeskin boots, executed a neat piece of full-tilt broken-field running across the crowded room, driving his right boot clean through the flimsy partition opposite our shared wall.

“Thank you, sir,” I said insanely, handing him back his beer,
and returned to my room. Was this what my oncology nurse and whoever wrote the NCI posttreatment tips meant when they said REST? Was I, in fact, as I had blithely assured Phillis, as safe as a toad in the palm of God's hand at the [B]udget In[n]? The merrymakers next door did not look homeless. Unless I missed my guess, they were coked-up young rich kids on orgiastic holiday from up north.

Over the infernal racket I heard the welcome sound of a siren, followed shortly by a knocking at my door.
My
door? The evening had attained the surreal hilarity of a madcap late-night-inn scene from a novel by Fielding or Smollett. Except that the young officer standing outside the door seemed very real indeed. And he was not laughing.

“Are you Mr. Howard?”

I gave him my full name and, for reasons that are not clear to me, my social security number.

“Would you be surprised, Mr. Mosher,” the officer said, “if I told you that the party in the next room just knocked down half a wall?”

“No sir,” I said.

“Would you be surprised if I told you they said you authorized them to do it?”

What was the title of that endearing movie with Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei? The one where two college kids get thrown in a southern jail and charged with murder? And why did it bother me so much that, under these rather more urgent circumstances, I couldn't summon up the name of the film? Fortunately, the officer just shook his head, told me to leave further “interventions” to the Dade County Sheriff's Department, and said goodnight.

As I lay back down on the [B]udget In[n]'s cigarette-scorched
bedspread, like a beached Florida weakfish, it occurred to me that this might very well turn out to be my last book tour, American or otherwise. Surely tonight had to be the nadir of my fellowship period. If I could just get through until dawn without being shot, trampled, hospitalized for exhaustion, or arrested, matters had to improve. Somehow or other, I still had faith that all of this foolishness—my so-called writing career, the book tour, my attempt to stave off, through radiation, what is probably nature's way of keeping us from turning into vegetables—would all work out for the best.

Wouldn't it?

As in the silly old conundrum about the chicken and the egg, I've never been able to decide which comes first, faith or hope. A cynic might say that faith is what we fall back on when we run out of hope. A strict evolutionist might add that faith, at least when it comes to an afterlife, is a psychological extension of our survival instinct. To me, faith boils down to the belief that, as Uncle Reg liked to remind me, “It's a glorious thing just to live.” That may not be a lot to go on, metaphysically speaking. But when it comes to faith in the basic goodness of life, it seems like a promising starting point.