As a fiction-writer she’d been of the “I saw a bird at sunrise and my heart leaped up” school, but as a critic she had been tough as nails and capable of insights which were spooky, almost like telepathy. One of the things that had attracted him to her (although he supposed the fact that she had the best breasts in America back in those days had helped matters along) was the dichotomy between what she wanted to do—write fiction—and what she was able to do, which was to write criticism that could cut like a diamond chip.
As for the so-called American Heart Essays, the only one he could remember clearly after all these years was Death on the Second Shift.” It had been about a father and son working together in a Pittsburgh steel-mill. The father had had a heart-attack and died in his son’s arms on the third day of Johnny Marinville’s four-day research junket. He had meant to focus on an entirely dif-ferent aspect of millwork, but had changed course at once, and without a second thought. The result had been a wretchedly sentimental piece—the fact that every word was true hadn’t changed that in the slightest—but it had also been a tremendously popular piece. The man who’d edited it for Life dropped him a note six weeks later and said it had generated the fourth4argest volume of letters in the magazine’s history.
Other stuff started to come back to him—titles, mostly, things like “Feeding the Flames”
and “A Kiss on Lake Saranac.” Terrible titles, but… fourth-largest volume of letters.
Hmm mm.
Where might those old essays be. in the Marinville Collection at Fordham. Possible.
Hell, they might even be in the attic of the cottage in Connecticut. He wouldn’t mind a look at them. Maybe they could be updated… or…
Something began to nibble at the back of his mind.
“Do you still have your scoot, Johnny.”
“Huh.” He barely heard her.
“Your scoot. Your ride. Your motorcycle.”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s stored at that garage out in West-port we used to use. You know the one.”
“Gibby’s.”
“Yeah, Gibby’s. Someone different owns it now, but it used to be Gibby’s Garage, yeah.”
He had been blind—sided by a brilliantly textured memory: he and Terry, fully clothed and petting like mad behind Gibby’s Garage one afternoon in… well, a long time ago, leave it at that, Terry had been wearing a pair of tight blue shorts. He doubted if her mother would have approved of them, God, no, but he himself had thought those discount-store spe—2 cials made her look like the Queen of the Western World. Her ass was only good, but her legs… man, those legs had gone not just up to her chin but all the way out to Arc-turus and beyond. How had they gotten out there in the first place, among the cast-off tires and rusty engine parts standing hip-deep in sunflowers and feeling each other up. He couldn’t remember, but he remembered the rich curve of her breast in his hand, and how she’d gripped the belt-loops of his jeans when he cried out against her neck, hauling him closer so he could come tight and hard against her taut belly.
He dropped a hand into his lap and wasn’t exactly sur prised at what he found there. Say, folks, Frampton comes alive.“… new bunch, or maybe even a book.”
He settled his hand firmly back on the arm of his chair “Huh. What.”
“Are you going deaf as well as senile.”
“No. I was remembering one time with you behind 2 Gibby’s. Making out.”
“Oh. In the sunflowers, right.”
“Right.”
There was a long pause when she might have been con-sidering some further comment on that interlude. Johnny — ‘ was almost hoping for one. Instead, she went back to her previous scripture.
“1 said maybe you ought to drive across country on your bike before you get too old to work the footgears, or start drinking again and splash yourself all over the Black Hills.”
“Are you out of your mind. I haven’t been on that thing in three years, and I have no intention of getting back on, Terry. My eyesight sucks—”
“So get a stronger pair of glasses—”
“—and my reflexes are shot. John Cheever may or may not have died of alcoholism, but John Gardner definitely went out on a motorcycle. Had an argument with a tree.
He lost. It happened on a road in Pennsylvania. One I’ve driven myself.”
Terry wasn’t listening. She was one of the few people in the world who felt perfectly comfortable ignoring him and letting her own thoughts carry her away. He supposed that was another reason he’d divorced her. He didn’t like being ignored, especially by a woman.
“You could cross the country on your motorcycle and collect material for a new bunch of essays,” she was saying. She sounded both excited and amused. “If you front-loaded the best of the early bunch—as Part One, you know—you’d have a pretty good-sized book.
American Heart, 1 966—1996, essays by John Edward Marinville.” She giggled. “Who knows. You might even get another good notice from Shelby Foote. That’s the one you always liked the best, wasn’t it.” She paused for his reply, and when it didn’t come, she asked him if he was there, first lightly, then with a little concern.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m here.” He was suddenly glad he was sitting down. “Listen, Terry, I have to go. I’ve got an appointment.”
“New lady-friend.”
“Podiatrist,” he said, thinking Foote, thinking foot. That name was like the final number in a bank-vault com-bination. Click, and the door swings open.
“Well, take care of yourself,” she said. “And honest to God, Johnny, think about getting back to AA. I mean, what can it hurt.”
“Nothing, I suppose,” he said, thinking about Shelby Foote, who had once called John Edward Marinville the only living American writer of John Steinbeck’s stature, and Terry was right—of all the praisenuggets he’d ever gotten, that was the one he liked the best.
“Right, nothing.” She paused. “Johnny, are you all right. Cause you sound like you’re hardly there.”
“Fine. Say hello to the kids for me.”
“I always do. They usually respond with what my ma used to call potty-words, but I always do. Bye.”
He hung up without looking at the telephone, and when it fell off the edge of the desk and onto the floor, he still didn’t look around. John Steinbeck had crossed the country with his dog in a makeshift camper. Johnny had a barely used 1340-cc Harley-Davidson Softail stored out in Connecticut. Not American Heart. She was wrong about that, and not just because it was the name of a Jeff Bridges movie from a few years back. Not American Heart but—“Travels with Harley,” he murmured.
It was a ridiculous title, a laughable title, like a Mad 2 magazine parody… but was it any worse than an essay titled “Death on the Second Shift” or “Feeding the Flames”. He thought not… and he felt the title would work, would rise above its punny origins. He had always trusted his intuitions, and he hadn’t had one as strong as this in years. He could cross the country on his red-and—cream Softail, from the Atlantic where it touched Con-necticut to the Pacific where it touched California. A book of essays that might cause the critics to entirely rethink their image of him, a book of essays that might even get him back on the bestseller lists, if… if…
“If it was bighearted,” he said. His heart was thumping hard in his chest, but for once the feel of that didn’t scare him. “Bighearted like Blue Highways. Bighearted like. well, like Steinbeck.”
Sitting there in his office chair with the telephone bur ring harshly at his feet, what Johnny Marinville had seen was nothing less than redemption. A way out.
He had scooped the telephone up and called his agent his fingers flying over the buttons.
“Bill,” he said, “it’s Johnny. I was just sitting here, thinking about some essays I wrote when I was a kid, and I had a fantastic idea. It’s going to sound crazy at first, but hear me out…”
As Johnny made his way up the sandy slope to the highway, trying not to pant too much, he saw that the guy standing behind his Harley and writing down the plate number was the biggest damned chunk of cop he had ever seen—six-six at least, and at least two hundred and sev-enty pounds on the hoof.
“Afternoon, Officer,” Johnny said. He looked down at himself and saw a tiny dark spot on the crotch of his Levi’s. No matter how much you jump and dance, he thought.
“Sir, are you aware that parking a vehicle on a state road is against the law.” the cop asked without look-ing up.
“No, but I hardly think—”
— it can be much of a problem on a road as deserted as U.s. 50 was how he meant to finish, and in the haughty “How dare you question my judgement.” tone that he had been using on underlings and service people for years, but then he saw something that changed his mind. There was blood on the right cuff and sleeve of the cop’s shirt, quite a lot of it, drying now to a maroon glaze. He had probably finished moving some large piece of roadkill off the highway not very long ago—likely a deer or an elk hit by a speeding semi. That would explain both the blood and the bad temper. The shirt looked like a dead loss; that much blood would never come out.
“Sir.” the cop asked sharply. He had finished writ-ing down the plate number now but went on looking at the bike, his blond eyebrows drawn together, his mouth scrimped flat.
It was as if he didn’t want to look at the bike’s owner, as if he knew that would only make him feel lousier than he did already. “You were saying.”
“Nothing, Officer,” Johnny said. He spoke in a neutral tone, not humble but not haughty, either. He didn’t want to cross this big lug when he was clearly having a bad day.
Still without looking up, his notepad strangled in one hand and his gaze fixed severely on the Harley’s taillight, the cop said: “It’s also against the law to relieve yourself within sight of a state road. Did you know that.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Johnny said. He felt a wild urge to laugh bubbling around in his chest and suppressed it.
“Well, it is. Now, I’m going to let you go He looked up for the first time, looked at Johnny, and his eyes widened. . go with a warning this time, but…
He trailed off, eyes now as wide as a kid’s when the circus parade comes thumping down the street in a swirl of clowns and trombones. Johnny knew the look, although he had never expected to see it out here in the Nevada desert, and on the face of a gigantic Scandahoovian cop who looked as if his reading tastes might run the gamut from Playboy’s Party Jokes to Guns and Ammo magazine.
Afan, he thought. I’m out here in the big nowhere between Ely and Austin, and I’ve found a by-God fan.
He couldn’t wait to tell Steve Ames about this when 2 they met up in Austin tonight.
Hell, he might call him on the cellular later on this afternoon… if the cellulars worked out here, that was. Now that he thought about it, he supposed they didn’t. The battery in his was up, he’d had it on the charger all last night, but he hadn’t actually talked to Steve on the damned thing since leaving Salt Lake City. In truth he wasn’t all that crazy about the cel-lulars. He didn’t think they actually did cause cancer, that was probably just more tabloid scare-stuff, but…
“Holy shit,” the cop muttered. His right hand, the one below the bloodstained cuff and sleeve, went up to his right cheek. For one bizarre moment he looked to Johnny like a pro football lineman doing a Jack Benny riff. “Ho lee shit.”
“What’s the trouble, Officer.” Johnny asked. He was, with some difficulty, suppressing a smile. One thing hadn’t changed over the years: he loved to be recognized God, how he loved it.
“You’re… JohnEdwardMarinville!” the cop gasped, running it all together, as if he really had only one name, like Pele or Cantinflas. The cop was now starting to grin himself, and Johnny thought, Oh Mr. Policeman, what big teeth you have. “I mean, you are, aren’t you. You wrote Delight! And, oh shit, Song of the Hammer! I’m standing right next to the guy who wrote Song of the Hammer!” And then he did something which Johnny found genu-inely endearing: reached out and touched the sleeve of his motorcycle jacket, as if to prove that the man wearing it was actually real. “Ho-lee shit!”
“Well, yes, I’m Johnny Marinville,” he said, speaking in the modest tones he reserved for these occasions (and these occasions only, as a rule). “Although I have to tell you that I’ve never been recognized by someone who’s just watched me take a leak by the side of the road.”
“Oh, forget that,” the cop said, and seized Johnny s hand. For just a moment before the cop’s fingers closed over his, Johnny saw that the man’s hand was also smeared with half-dried blood; both lifeline and loveline stood out a dark, liverish red.
Johnny tried to keep his smile in place as they shook, and thought he did pretty well, but he was aware that the corners of his mouth seemed to have gained weight. It’s getting on me, he thought.