The job that Bridget offered me at the factory never materialized, so I went back to work at Ochs when school was out. A couple of the full-time employees I had known the past summer seemed to think that I had never left; they confided rumors about people that I had never heard of, and added plot points to scandals whose beginnings and middles were unknown to me. I gathered that Mallory, the receiving clerk, had been married six months ago to a fellow employee whose name I have forgotten. Separated after three weeks, they played three hands of blackjack to decide who got to keep working at the store. Mallory won. She still presided over the desk next to the unloading dock, scratching records on her pad, trading insults with truckers, marking time on the little clock that sat just above her head. I learned that a very large manager trainee named Astrid had been taken away in an ambulance one day, supposedly stricken with appendicitis, and had returned two weeks later lugging two-week-old twin babies, whom she breastfed in the break room. She was dismissed a week later, accused of stealing diapers from the shelves. I learned that another trainee, named Guinevere, had arrived looking fresh-faced and slightly tomboyish with auburn hair in a Dorothy Hamill cut; over time she grew blonde and increasingly muscular, her hair got shorter and shorter until it was little more than stubble, and eventually she began sprouting a downy beard. On the morning of the winter’s worst storm she failed to show up for work; apparently, she had blown away forever with the snow.
Unlike the break room gossipers, Mrs. Olathe, now the store’s head assistant manager, acted as if she had never set eyes on me before. I had to tell her at least a half dozen times that my name was Terry, not Tony, and at least a half dozen times I got to hear her quip, in that grating Midwestern brogue of hers, “Really? You sure about that, now? Wouldn’t you rather be Tony?”
There were new people, too. The one I got most acquainted with was Marabel, the woman who was working the camera bar now. She had three sons who lived in California: one was an organizer for the United Farm Workers; another was a movie producer; the youngest was a whale trainer at Sea World. Her husband had betrayed her with three different women, but she was very forgiving, as she told me again and again in her bland voice while carving up grapefruit halves, slumping in her seat so that her breasts nearly touched the tabletop.
Clete Justice was still working at the store, still exuding style and expertise while managing to do almost nothing. These days he was shadowed by his disciple, Marcus McCabe. Physically, the two of them were as different as two young white men could possibly be. Clete was long-faced with blunt features, square-shouldered, long-legged; Marcus was short, narrow and hollow-chested, with delicate features and a disappearing chin. But the two of them shaped their mustaches in the same way; they walked the same way, and even hooked their thumbs in their pants pockets the same way. Marcus had learned to wield his box cutter with the same panache as Clete and to unload cases of motor oil with the same time-killing attention to detail.
Sometimes my breaks would overlap with theirs, and I would walk in as Clete was instructing Marcus in the art of being Clete.
“I told you about her already, didn’t I?”
“You said you got to second base with her.”
“You need to clean your ears out, son. I got to second and then some. I rounded third, buddy boy.”
“You said I could have her when you’re through.”
“I’m working on that. But she’s too used to me. I’ve given her the stiff-arm already, but then she just tries harder to please me. I got to admit I like that. There’s this friend of hers, though. I can drop a few hints, get a cat fight going. You can have my leftovers.”
“O.K. Remember, you promised.”
Most of the summer I started work at nine and got off at three. I liked the fact that I still had part of the afternoon left when I was finished working. It was time that I could theoretically spend playing tennis with Kit or browsing the bookstore in the mall. But I usually had no car at my disposal. I rode my bike to Ochs on most days; on rainy days I was dropped off by Dad and picked up by Mom. And by late afternoon, I was physically depleted anyway. Every night when I tried to sleep my head was full of Aerosmith and Bad Company, so with my early rising I was operating on less than six hours of sleep. Usually I collapsed on my bed once I had made my way into the house and down to the basement.
I was sacked out on top of my coverlet one afternoon after work, barely awake, when the door opened abruptly. I turned over to find Roberta’s pasty face glaring at me in the space between the door and the jamb.
“You got some mail,” she said.
Without rising an inch, I stretched out a hand.
“Huh,” she said. “I’m not coming in. Your room smells bad. Have you been farting or something?”
“I never stop farting,” I said. “Just hand it.”
“Here.” She tossed the gold envelope into the room and then slammed the door shut.
The envelope landed between my desk and the foot of my bed. I sat up and looked at it curiously. It had landed with the address side up. I glanced at the initials L.L. in the top right corner, baffled for a moment, until I remembered what it was that I had been waiting for. L.L. was Lorraine Longoria. My creative writing teacher. It was my final story of the semester.
I had signed up for Explorations in Creative Writing as an elective, thinking that the pressure of weekly assignments would unleash my latent genius. I imagined that I would be allowed to roam the wide pastures of literary art, that I would be penning haiku, short plays, colorfully embellished reminiscences, rhymed epics, and possibly a novel one chapter at a time. On the first day of class, however, our teacher, Ms. Longoria, made it clear that we were to write only short stories, magazine-ready short stories. We would learn how to earn real money in five thousand words or less. Ms. Longoria herself had published stories in nearly a dozen different magazines, all of which paid by the word—anywhere from five to seventy-five cents.
She was a tall, angular woman with high cheekbones and eyes that looked as hard as black marble. She used a Socratic method of teaching, asking questions and waiting for us to answer even the most obvious ones, biding her time through long, queasy silences.
“What is the Yukon prospector’s motivation here?”
Painfully drawn out seconds would tick away on the classroom clock, thirty seconds, forty, a minute …
“To not freeze to death,” someone would mercifully say.
“And what is his tangible goal?”
In the moments that passed you could hear a cough, a scratch, a desk flap squeaking, a loud swallow, a stomach gurgling in a corner of the room. Ms. Longoria maintained her silent gaze over the tops of our heads, her tongue just visible between her pursed lips.
“To build a fire,” someone would say painfully. “Like the title of the story says.”
“Of course,” Ms. Longoria would say, clipping off her words with surgical precision. “And so the rising action consists of …”
However, Ms. Longoria proved to be as unpredictable as every other woman I knew. As she prepared us for our final story, she made a confession. She carefully wiped all of her story diagrams off the board, arranged the eraser and the chalk neatly on the tray, leaned her long frame on the edge of the edge of the desk, and folded her hands in her lap. With crossed eyes and a solitary-sounding voice, she told us that she had read stories that didn’t fit the blueprint. She admitted that these stories hardly seemed constructed at all. She mentioned “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Rocket Man.” She had tried her best to reduce them to their component parts, and she had failed. The quality of experience that filled these stories was thick, fragrant, murmuring, and elusive, she said, or something to that effect. They were like small worlds with their own laws of gravity. For our final story, she told us that we could trust our intuitions.
As soon as I heard her say that, I was convinced that the time for The Electric Shakespeare had arrived. There was no rubric this time, and no page limit. The sheet of paper with that first sentence was somewhere inside a desk drawer, and now I had much more to add because at some level of my mind I had been embellishing the idea for months. I could see the charred skies of the post-nuclear world, the blasted buildings, the pitted roads. I could see the psychiatrist in his leather jacket, riding his motorcycle from one ruined hospital to another, circling back on each of his rounds to the girl from the vaporized family. In slightly differing versions of the key scenes, she would be dressed in just the thinnest white gown, or wrapped only in a rough blanket, or naked. The doctor’s task was to communicate with her in spite of the fact that trauma had robbed her of language—not just speech, but language itself. The doctor in his leather jacket would attempt to reach her through the medium of skilled caresses on bare skin, but she would recoil, gathering her fragile limbs into a corner of the room with its cracked walls, tucking her bare legs against her narrow buttocks. As I thought of her, I grew more and more anxious to begin putting her on paper.
I rushed through my economics and chemistry homework in the afternoon, and after supper I set myself up at my desk with a stack of paper, ready to spend the whole evening making fiction. I dug the page with the first sentence of the novel out of my desk and laid it on top of the stack. I figured that if I could write five pages a day, on average, for the next two weeks, I would end up with a decent-sized novella. Blood was pulsing in the ends of my fingers as I picked up a new blue pen and set the tip next to the end of the first sentence. I willed the words into being. And nothing came to me. The story that I had imagined now seemed like nothing more than a half-remembered dream, and I was painfully awake, clear-minded, sober, empty. The images that had formed themselves in my head were vivid enough, but after writing structured stories for months, I had come to think of fiction as a matter of beginnings, middles, and ends. People with recognizable motives started somewhere and ended up somewhere, and I realized now that I didn’t know how the pieces of my narrative would actually fit together. Somehow, I had to connect the idea of the poetry machine with the psychiatrist and the girl; otherwise I’d have to abandon the title, and then the whole thing would lose its charm for me. I had already come up with the idea that the alternation of hard and soft syllables, generated by the pentameter machine, could open up pathways in the brain by altering neural transmissions. The doctor would make use of this somehow in his efforts to treat his traumatized patient. But it was a frightfully abstract concept, and when I tried to weave it into a coherent plot, I kept thinking of Rex Harrison leaning over Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. My mind was flooded with erotic whims but not a rising action, a crisis, a falling action, a finale. The tip of my pen bled through the first page as I pressed it down, trying to force something that just wasn’t there. The pressure on my writing hand grew painful, and I finally let the pen drop out of my hand.
I must have stared at the top sheet of paper for half an hour before I finally got up, veered toward the door, and then pivoted back toward the basement window that looked out on the mountains. At first I gazed mindlessly through the window as if there was nothing there, but gradually I grew preoccupied with the remoteness and flat appearance of the world outside. A couple of passing cars flashed their whitewalls at me, and I saw someone pushing his trash barrel to the curb, but otherwise the street had an abandoned look in the hour before sunset. My view of the horizon was clear; it looked somewhat abstract from where I was standing. The peaks had lost most of their outlines, and the sky was beginning to take on the colors of science fiction cover art. I seemed to be staring at a door that opened onto worlds of adventure and infinite richness, but I was far more than an arm’s length away, and what I was looking at was merely a concealing sheet of painted cardboard. I don’t know what I would have done if a spell of déjà vu hadn’t suddenly come to my rescue.
In the quiet of the hour, I could hear Dad’s monotonous voice beyond that single panel of sheet rock. He had just come back from the North Carolina job that followed the Indiana job, and now he was on the telephone, conducting more real estate business.
“… three blocks from downtown Breckenridge. Easy walking distance to the craft shops. Good summer trade. I plan to go there after they break ground.”
I felt myself looping back in time to last August. I recalled the imagery of that story I had started to write back then. I pictured the dark winter night, the beam of the flashlight, the wrecked house, the note, the exhaled vapor, the silence. It seemed to me now that the magnificent game was still going on; it was in extra innings, and I was ready to swing at a high fastball. When I actually started to write, though, another story began scrawling its way out. Instead of the dead of night, it was late afternoon. The sun was falling toward the crest of the mountains, flooding the world with vast orange light. Two agents from a large real estate firm were standing shoulder to shoulder, conferring on a city sidewalk, which ran along a street lined with grimy tenements. Their firm was in the process of buying up the properties covering eight city blocks in order to transfer the deeds, at a steep profit, to a manufacturer of weapons-grade plutonium. There was only one property owner who hadn’t yet agreed to sell. Several notices of an intent to purchase had been sent out already, but so far the lone holdout had failed to respond. The agents glanced at the front door of the unbought tenement, which stood across the street from where they stood. As the afternoon melted into evening, the shadows of the two agents lengthened into the shapes of two corpses, twice the height of the men themselves. I decided to have the agents cross the street once the sun dropped behind the upper stories of the gabled structure. Reaching the ornate wooden door, they knocked twice, listened as the echoes died away. They waited as the light faded from the buildings across the street, then I had the taller of the two agents raise his fist to knock again. But at that moment the door swung open.
I paused, read the opening paragraph again, wiggled my pen, added a few descriptive sentences, using squiggly arrows to connect each new detail to what I had already written. I inserted a few extra lines for the two agents to say, with arrows coming from the other direction. I changed their names from Smith and Jones to McGuire and McMillan. I read my last two sentences aloud to get my momentum going again, and then I wrote,
Standing on the other side of the threshold was a man holding a lamb in his arms. He
was a little shorter than average, in his middle fifties, with a thick curly mop of graying hair. His brow was wide, his eyebrows thick, his ears large and protruding, his shoulders broad.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” he asked, in a gravelly voice.
Setting my pen down, I looked at what I had written and found myself unsurprised. Norman still appeared in my dreams—why not in my imagination?
I stopped writing then and headed upstairs, thinking that I would watch television for a while. But my insides were buzzing, and I couldn’t sit still. I went out to the garage, hauled my bike out of the corner, pumped the tires, and took off for a celebratory ride through the fading daylight. The adrenaline was intoxicating. I hadn’t spent more than twenty minutes writing, but I knew what had to come next. After months of producing mechanical prose, writing a few genuine paragraphs felt like the greatest achievement of the year.
Now the finished product was on the floor of my room, with a grade no doubt attached. I vaulted off the bed, snatched up the envelope, tore off a corner with my teeth, then ripped it open along the top seam. I slid the pages out and I went breathless as I quickly separated the last page from the rest to see the grade.
I had made an A+.
Underneath the grade, I could see that there were several sentences in Ms. Longoria’s generous red ink, but I decided to wait and read the story through, with all of her marginal notations, until I got to those sentences. I dropped myself into a sitting position on the side of the bed and started to read.
The October sun was dipping through an orange sky, moving imperceptibly to its hiding place behind the white peak of the tallest mountain. An airliner passing overhead took the rays of the sun and turned them into a momentary blinding flash.
The sidewalk still retained the heat of the unseasonably warm day, but an oncoming chill was already stirring the leaves of the trees that lined the street. A young mother was pushing a stroller down the walk; she stopped and pointed to a songbird ruffling its feathers in one of the high branches.
“Look, baby! See the birdie!”
A paperboy rode his bike along the edge of the street, tossing rolled-up copies of the afternoon edition onto the narrow lawns. Taxicabs and half-empty buses passed in both directions, stopping now and then to pick up riders.
McGuire and McMillan waited until no one was within earshot before continuing their conversation, as if secrecy were still of utmost importance.
“Just one piece of property left,” McGuire said, gazing at the old-fashioned house across the street. “Then the Corporation will own all eight blocks. This will be a perfect location for the factory.”
“We’ll still have to convince the zoning board,” McMillan reminded him.
McGuire smiled.
“Not a problem,” he said confidently. “Once we secure the loan, we’ll have funds available for ...convincing.”
“Quiet!” McMillan hissed, glancing furtively up and down the street. “We’re not in the office now.”
An unusually slow bus rumbled haltingly along the street in front of them, showing a row of grime-streaked windows and the faces of a few weary riders. After the bus’s acrid cloud of exhaust had blown away, the two men crossed the street. McGuire took a folded piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and double-checked a house number.
“Three doors down the street, that way,” he said, pointing to the left.
I stopped reading for a moment and glanced back at the first two pages. Ms. Longoria had crossed out several of my adverbs, and she had used proofreaders’ marks to change one of my sentences to two, deleting the semicolon. Her hatred of adverbs and semicolons was well known. In the fifth paragraph she had drawn a thick line through as if secrecy …, noting in the margin, “Goes without saying!” I winced when I saw these squiggly scars in my story. The grade was nice, but it was already a footnote to history; what mattered to me now was what my reader was doing with her pen as she moved from sentence to sentence. I was lifted several inches in the air when I read “Nice touch! I can feel that!” next to an oncoming chill … For me, my teacher’s comments were forming a storyline of their own, a parallel plot, as I moved from one page to the next.
“Why hasn’t the company gotten ahold of this one yet?” McMillan asked as they walked down the sidewalk, passing the spacious porches of three other buildings.
“All the others are rental properties. The owners live far away. They don’t really care about the houses, just the money they can make from selling them. This house is the only one owned by the resident.”
When they reached No. 777, the address scribbled on McGuire’s folded sheet, they walked up five rickety wooden steps and rang the doorbell.
They waited for what seemed like five full minutes. McMillan leaned his head against the door, listened intently, and heard nothing. The shadows of the porch rails were lengthening across the lawn as the two men continued to wait.
After another minute, McGuire pounded forcefully on the door, and shouted “Is anyone home?”
A smoky breeze blew across the porch as they waited. McGuire raised his arm to pound one more time, but just then the door slowly opened.
Standing on the other side of the threshold was a man holding a lamb in his arms. He was a little shorter than average, in his middle fifties, with a thick curly mop of graying hair. His brow was wide, his eyebrows thick, his ears large and protruding, his shoulders broad.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” he asked, in a gravelly voice.
McGuire glanced at McMillan, to confirm that he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing. Then he turned to face the man, smiled stiffly, and said, “I believe we can help you, if you’ll give us a moment of your time.”
“Don’t underline,” Ms. Longoria had written. “The wording should make the emphasis clear to your reader.”
“If I give you my time,” the man asked, blinking softly and stroking the woolly creature in his arms, “can you give any of it back?”
“Not time,” McGuire said, holding his smile carefully in place, “but something more valuable.”
“More valuable? I doubt that. But come in if you must.”
The man stepped aside, allowing McGuire and McMillan to enter.
The entrance hall was dimly lit, dank, and chilly. A dusty rug ran along the length of the hall, and dark oil paintings depicting vague faces hung on the walls. McGuire and McMillan could both hear faint groaning sounds, the settling of rotting boards, coming from the upper floors.
“Whose point of view??” Ms. Longoria wanted to know, scrawling her bright red words along the edge of the page. “One of the characters should be the eyes and ears of the reader. Be careful not to lose your angle of vision!”
“You’ll have to follow me outside,” the man said. “I need to return this little fellow to his mother. He was looking a little weak, needed a little love.” The man took a baby bottle out of a pants pocket to show his visitors. “But I don’t want him to forget where he belongs. Come this way.”
Without looking back, the man led them through a dark parlor, through a door and then along an even darker hallway, until they reached a sitting room with a grandfather clock, a grand piano, and a hearth. The ticking of the clock followed them until they reached the double doors opening into the garden.
Once they were outside again, they welcomed the crispness of the air and the lingering warmth of the autumnal day. The peaks were visible in the immeasurable distance, but otherwise the garden was walled off by groves of plants, plants of every variety. There was a stand of sunflowers and a cluster of maples with reddening leaves—not unusual things to see. But elsewhere they saw lush, large-leaved plants that seemed to belong in some faraway jungle. They saw stalks topped with exotic purple blooms and vines twisted around the trunks of dwarf palms. In the space marked off by the lush, fragrant plants, a herd of sheep, possibly a dozen altogether, grazed a field of grass that still wore the resplendent emerald hue of summer. Hummingbirds flitted from flower to flower, and white rabbits scampered in and out of the shrubbery, nibbling and hiding, nibbling and hiding.
“You must have quite a magic touch,” said McMillan, genuinely impressed. “Not just a green thumb, but green fingers and green toes as well.” He had just noticed that the man was barefoot.
“Yes,” said McGuire. “It’s ...well, it’s amazing that all this is growing so well this time of year, and in this climate. How do you water it all?”
The man was kneeling down, letting go of the lamb, which hobbled away to join the other lambs in the middle of the herd. “I have my methods,” he said softly. “No need to get into that.”
“Yes, but with water rationing ...,” McGuire said, with a slight insinuation. “You must have your own well. Did the city approve it?”
The man stood and faced McGuire, but showed no sign of agitation. “Secrets, secrets,” he said, placing his finger over his lips.
“Well, we’re not here to spy on you,” McMillan said, breaking in. “As my associate said, we have something to offer you.”
“Ah yes,” said the man. “Something more valuable than my time. I can’t imagine what that could be.”
“Well, could you imagine selling this house for twice the market value?”
McGuire scribbled a number on the piece of paper bearing the address and held it out for the gray-haired man to see.
The man frowned slightly but otherwise seemed unmoved by the offer. This bland reaction took McGuire by surprise.
“You think the offer is too low?” McGuire asked, dumbfounded.
“I think any offer is too low,” the man said plainly. “You could offer me the key to Fort Knox, and I would say no. My home isn’t on the market.”
The man turned away and walked over to a flowering bush. He plucked a purple bloom and began to rub his fingers against one of the petals. He leaned over and sniffed it, then touched his tongue to the powder that stained his fingers.
McGuire followed him.
“You can’t be serious,” he said, agitated. “This old rotting house. There must be a price you’d consider.”
The man looked up, studied McMillan and McGuire thoughtfully, and then shook his head. “I’m afraid I’ve given you my time for nothing, gentlemen. Perhaps I can be of help to you, though. Any trouble with headaches, insomnia, fatigue ...perhaps anxiety, sadness? My plants have wonderful healing properties. Can I interest you in a medicinal balm?”
“No!” said McGuire quickly and harshly. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m here to do business.”
“Well, our business has been concluded,” said the man. “You’re welcome to see yourselves out.” He gestured to a gate that opened onto the front lawn. “Good day.”
McMillan nodded. “Thanks anyway,” he said. Nodding to McGuire, he began making his way out.
McGuire held his ground, though. “You’re never going to get a better offer,” he said sternly. “Just wait until all the other houses around you are gone. See how you like that.”
The man raised his shaggy eyebrows. “You do mean all of the other houses?”
“Wait and see, wait and see,” McGuire said ominously. “You’ll be coming to us, then.”
On the next page, the scene shifted to the headquarters of the real estate company. I had tried to create a realistic atmosphere by describing the layout of the office, by introducing a few new characters, including a wisecracking secretary and a chain-smoking lawyer in pinstripes. The place and the people were drawn from television in one way or another, which accounted for the lack of energy in my prose. I could tell that Ms. Longoria’s interest was flagging because the margins were free of comments. Her pen marked typos and x-ed out semicolons automatically, but otherwise the coffee stains were the only proof that she was still reading. I wanted to flip straight to the last page to make sure the red A+ was still there, but I pushed on until I found the place where the story came to life again.
The deepening autumn shadows lay across the front porch as McGuire knocked on the door. While he and McMillan waited for a response, they tapped the toes of their shoes on the boards and glanced at their watches. McGuire knocked on the door again, and there was still no response.
“He must not be home,” McMillan suggested.
“Like hell,” McGuire snapped. “He’s there.”
On impulse, he tried the doorknob, and found the door unlocked.
“What are you going to do?” McMillan asked. “This isn’t your house.”
“It’s not his house, either,” McGuire said. “Come on.”
The two of them made their way through the front hall, through the
dark parlor, down the second hallway. They found the man on the sofa in the sitting room, sipping from a clay mug.
“Well, I believe you gentlemen are late,” he said.
On the low table in front of the sofa, a bronze platter held two other mugs, identical to the one the man was drinking from, as well as a tall steel carafe.
“Please have a seat, gentlemen. Won’t you join me and share a cup of my guayusa? I brewed it for our little parley.”
“How did you know we were coming?” McMillan asked.
“Never mind that. Have a seat.” The man gestured to several antique wooden chairs, and his two guests warily sat down. “Shall I pour the guayusa? I’m always pleased to let visitors sample it. It’s from the leaves of trees I grow in my own garden.”
“No thanks,” said McGuire. “We’re not here for a tea party. We’ve got some business to take care of.”
“Doesn’t business ever take a holiday?”
“Not on a Wednesday, it doesn’t,” McGuire insisted. “I’m going to make it quick. We’re making you another offer on this house.” He held out a slip of paper with a dollar figure and the man took it, regarding it with a look of bemusement.
“Half of what you offered last time, I believe.”
“It’s still a fair offer,” McMillan said.
“Yes, and we’re giving you a good reason to take it,” McGuire added. “We’ve done some research and found a funny thing—there’s no proof that you ever purchased this house. No deed of sale.”
“Why should there be?” the man asked. “It was a gift.”
“The title should have been transferred,” McMillan pointed out.
“I guess the former owners were in too much of a hurry to bother with details like that.”
“Such a small detail,” McGuire said with a touch of sarcasm in his voice
“Well, it depends on your point of view,” the man said. “You see, the owners were quite old. They had spent their lives working, saving money, planning for the future, but they had forgotten to live. They were too old to enjoy the money they had made, and they were looking for a way to get their youth back. A friend of a friend had heard of my work with healing plants, so they contacted me. I won’t trouble you with the details. Suffice it to say that I knew of some herbs that would give them what they needed. To be precise, I gave them back ten years of their lives. They hurried away to Fiji and Bora Bora, and then on to the many other distant places they had always planned to travel to. Just before they boarded the plane to the islands, they promised to give me their home.”
“A promise is one thing, but a signed deed is something else,” McGuire pointed out
stiffly. “Turns out there’s a cousin in Oregon who has a potential claim on this property. With no deed or no will in sight, inheritance law might overrule your alleged promise.”
“Then why are you troubling me?” the man asked in an indifferent voice. “Why not try to buy the house from the man in Oregon?”
“No one has clear title to the house,” McMillan said gently. “You don’t happen to know if the owners are still alive, do you?”
The man shook his head.
“We’re prepared to buy out your claim on the house and handle the legal question ourselves.”
The man took a slow sip from the clay mug. His brows creased as he turned to look out a large picture window at his garden and the herd of sheep wandering across the grass plot. Finally, he faced his visitors again.
“Well, I guess something is better than nothing. Wouldn’t you say so?”
“Right. Unless you deal with us, you could wind up homeless.”
“So I suppose you have something for me to sign.”
“Got it right here,” McGuire, his voice trembling with a note of triumph. He slipped a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his suit coat and placed it on the coffee table, then took a fountain pen from his pocket and laid it down on the document.
The man squinted at the paper for a moment, then picked up the pen and scratched his name over the line at the bottom.
“There you go,” he said, handing the paper to McGuire. “Now that we’ve conducted our business, perhaps you gentlemen will join me in a cup of guayusa.”
McGuire was on the point of shaking his head, but McMillan said, “We’d be honored.”
The man poured the liquid from the carafe into the two other mugs and then handed them, one after the other, to his two guests. McGuire hesitated before taking a sip, but when he saw McMillan drinking with pleasure, he tried a little as well.
“What a marvelous flavor!” McMillan exclaimed.
“It’s a recipe that goes back to the Mayans,” the man said, smiling. “You are my guests, after all. I can offer you nothing less than the best. Now I have some urgent business of my own to attend to. Once again, I believe you can see yourselves out.”
The two businessmen watched as their host made his way out to the garden. They watched him pause to examine the leaf of a flowering bush and then they saw him approach his flock of sheep and kneel down, caressing one of his ewes and appearing to whisper into her ear.
“Funny man,” McGuire said bluntly. “Where on Earth do you think he came from?”
“God only knows,” McMillan said, still watching closely as the man wandered through his garden.
A moment later the two men stood. Clutching the signed paper, McGuire led the way back to the front hallway and out the front door. His car was parked two blocks away, and the two men headed down the sidewalk in that direction, when they suddenly looked around them in stunned disbelief.
Except for the house which they had just exited, every building they could see had been burned nearly to the ground. They gazed at the utter desolation that surrounded them, blackened walls, bare foundations and chimneys. The trees in the neighborhood had transformed into charred stumps.
There wasn’t a single human being anywhere. The windows of every parked car had imploded. The charred remains of a single bus stood in the intersection nearby. There were no signs of any life at all—no birds passing overhead, no barking dogs, no squirrels in the remains of the trees. Every lawn was brown and dead. The sky was shrouded in charcoal-colored clouds.
McGuire and McMillan walked hurriedly along the sidewalk, hoping to see some evidence of life somewhere, but everywhere they went, they saw the same desolation and encountered the same utter silence.
“We’re having a hallucination,” McGuire said in a panic. “It’s that drink he gave us! I knew we shouldn’t have touched it!”
“Maybe it just opened our eyes to what we were really doing,” McMillan said. “Hand me the contract!”
“No!” said McGuire, still clutching it tightly.
McMillan made a sudden grab for it, and McGuire began running. The two of them raced along the sidewalk, but eventually McMillan, with his longer stride, caught up and tore the sheet of paper from McGuire’s grasp. He ripped it into small pieces.
Immediately the sun came out, shedding a golden afternoon light on the neighborhood. Every house stood whole and tall again; the trees were full of yellowing autumn leaves; cars and buses passed in the street. The two men saw old couples sitting on their front porches. A mother pushed a stroller along the sidewalk and pointed to a flock of birds that had just taken wing from the largest tree on the block.
“Look, baby! The birds are heading south for the winter.”
The tiny pieces of the torn contract were picked up by a cool breeze and carried far, far away.
As I read the final line of the story, I remembered writing it, recalled the way it had formed itself automatically, thoughtlessly, in my blue-ink scrawl, half-cursive, half-print. Now I read it over again several times, trying to read it as Ms. Longoria would have read it, knowing that Ms. Longoria’s final comments were sitting just below the line. I realized now that the sentence had too many adjectives and at least one gratuitous adverb, and I was hit with a sense of complete failure just before I glanced down the page.
“I’m truly astonished, Terry,” she had written. “This is so much better than anything you’ve written yet, and it makes me think that you have so much farther to go. Please save me a copy of your first novel.”
Nothing about the unnecessary words. I felt that I should find her number in the phone book, call her up, and remind her that I had written a truly bad last sentence, so I hadn’t earned her praise. I began to glance back through the story, looking for other mistakes that she hadn’t caught, carefully wording a letter in which I pointed out the omissions, requesting a more accurate grade and a less glowing comment. From somewhere out of the crystal heavens, though, there came a healing thought. I would fully earn her praise the next time around, when I wrote that first novel.