Order this writing in the collection book Layers of Creation available for only 17⁹⁵

This appears in a pre-2010 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine. Saddle-stitched issues are no longer printed, but you can requesting it “re-released” through amazon sale as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.

This appears in a pre-2010 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine. Saddle-stitched issues are no longer printed, but you can requesting it “re-released” through amazon sale as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.

Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-aged Caterpillar

Pat Dixon

1

    Bloody stools, thought Lester Moore, his moist lips puckering each time as he whispered the second word to himself. Bloody stool—the Bloody Stool. The Bloody Stool. Ye Olde Bloody Stool.
    Lester glanced furtively at the bartender and was relieved to see that she was busy taking the order of another customer. Sipping his beer while his insteps pressed on the rungs of his barstool, he glanced over the poster-sized price list behind the bar, stared again at the words “Bloody Mary,” and slowly pulled a small vinyl covered notebook and felt-tip pen from his jacket pocket.
    Adjusting his reading glasses, he flipped past dozens of sheets covered with words and sketches to one that was blank and wrote “The Bloody Stool—Ye Olde Bloody Stool” in small neat letters. Around these words he added slowly, with pauses as he thought, sketches of two 18th-century pub signs. Below these he rapidly sketched a dozen cobblestones and a three-corner hat. Below these he wrote “cartoon? or joke??—old London pub/Dublin pub/N.Y. gay bar?” After a long pause he added the words “Ye Olde Bloody Piles??” Closing and repocketing his notebook and pen, Lester took another sip of his beer, made eye contact with his reflection, winked at himself, and smiled mirthlessly at the reflection of his wink.
    He rubbed the short gray stubble on his chin and plump cheeks. A faint twinge of heartburn reminded him why he’d given up beer thirteen years ago, two years after his divorce. He surveyed his double critically in the bar mirror—twenty to thirty pounds overweight, grayish thinning hair, old corduroy jacket, blue plaid flannel shirt, short stubby fingers, and—when their gazes met—an unblinking brown-eyed stare over the top of his gold-rimmed half glasses. He looked at the puffy circles below his eyes and thought, Sleepless in Seattle, with a faint smile as he recalled the past night, adding, Forty-six years old but looks sixty-four—at this rate I won’t make it to seventy-four like dad.
    He studied his own face again, trying to pick out the features of it which to some degree resembled those of his recently deceased father—the nose, the hairline, the ears, the jawline with the plump and sagging cheeks, and, to a lesser extent, the expression in the eyes. He recalled that, starting in his teens, his voice had often been mistaken for his father’s when he had answered the phone. Lester sighed, glanced at the bar’s clock, compared the time shown on his wristwatch, and then paged through his packet of plane tickets for the sixth time.
    “Thirty-five minutes till that birdshit they call ‘preboarding,’” he whispered. He glanced twice more at his take-off and arrival times, folded the packet, and crammed it deep inside his breast pocket. “Hop, hop, hop,” he whispered. “Like a big sparrow. Seattle to St. Louis to Baltimore to Charlottesville. A big, fat sparrow.”
    “Care for another, sir?”
    The bartender was standing before him in her white shirt and black bow tie, cheerful and perky and large-breasted and blonde and overly made-up.
    Lester was not sure whether this was a hint to drink up and leave or pay rent on his stool by ordering another beer. He glanced up into her expectant blue eyes for five seconds before replying.
    “I’d like a glass of skim milk if you have any,” he said.
    “I’m sorry, sir. Perhaps one of the snack bars near gate—gate 42 or something might have some.”
    She doesn’t have a clue, thought Lester. Comes to work and doesn’t know where anything else in this effing place is—except the ladies’ room.
    “Thanks,” he said with a brief smile.
    He stood up and put three quarters on the bar for a tip.

2

    Take-off had been delayed for forty minutes for some reason, but the pilot assured them that twenty of those minutes would be made up by strong tail winds. Whoopee-shit! thought Lester. As people began to queue up for the restroom, he wondered what he might name an airline in a cartoon or joke. Clarke and Kubrick had invented the name HAL for the super-computer in their sci-fi movie, he recalled, by choosing letters one notch down from those of IBM. Could this be done with TWA? he wondered. He pulled out his little notebook and wrote “SUZ” and then corrected it by darkly writing a V over the U. Sleep deprivation, he thought. Emergency! Emergency! Get up, Will Robinson. Get your ass out of the sack—get your dick out of Bonnie—get on the phone for tickets to Virginia!
    He tried letters that were one notch higher and wrote “UXB” and smiled at this result. He tucked the notebook and pen back in his pocket. UXB—code letters for Unexploded Bomb during the London blitz—great name for an airline—perhaps too subtle for most readers—like most of my humor. Lester gently chewed on his lower lip for a minute and smiled ironically.
    “Don’t give up y’ur day job,” he whispered to himself, quoting what Bonnie Coleman had told him three years ago, the day he had first spent the night with her. She had come into his second-hand bookstore in Providence one Sunday afternoon while visiting an old college roommate who was getting divorced. She had asked him if he would buy three boxes of used romance paperbacks, and he had said he could pay her a nickel apiece for those that were in good shape. He would not put them on the shelves, he said, but out front in a fifty-cent bin he filled with paperbacks and shabby hardbacks to attract customers. She told him that she did something similar in her own bookstore back in Seattle and accepted his price. These belonged to a friend, she added, and weren’t worth shipping out west to herself.
    Gazing down at the sun-lit clouds beneath the wing, Lester recalled their meeting. Bonnie and he had brought the boxes in from her friend’s car on his hand-truck, and, while he looked over the books and counted them, she had glanced over the stock on nearby shelves. Then she had met Queenie and fallen in love.
    Queenie was an elderly all-black female cat with three fangs and one badly torn ear. She was also a slut who rolled around on her back and begged customers to rub her round belly. Bonnie, who had three cats in her own store, was hooked at once.
    “What’s it’s name?” she had asked.
    “I call her Queenie,” Lester had replied. “It’s short for Queen of the Night.” Then he had pointed to a large cartoon poster he had drawn two years earlier. On it were five cats with their names penned in large block letters beneath each: Queen of the Night, Figero, Don Giovanni, Papageno, and Donna Anna.
    “I was going to call her Astrifiammente, but it turned out to be too much of a mouthful and didn’t shorten very well,” he had added.
    “Astrifiammente,” Bonnie had repeated. “Definitely. Queen of the Night. What about the others?”
    Lester pointed up above her.
    “There are Figero, the fat tabby, and Papageno, the chirpy little Abyssinian, on that high shelf. Queenie has an attitude problem—and it’s not a small one—so in defense they have an altitude problem.” Here Lester had attempted to imitate the voice of Sylvester Stallone, and Bonnie had smiled. Encouraged, he had continued.
    “I was tempted to give the name Highly Amusing or Highly Intelligent to the Abyssinian—spelled, of course, like the first name of Haile Selassie, the emperor. Of course, he was Ethiopian, not Abyssinian. But it seemed close enough for a joke.”
    “Ethiopia is actually just another name for Abyssinia, so the pun is practically flawless—which is highly appropriate,” Bonnie had said. “And Haile Appropriate was, as you probably know already, Haile Selassie’s Minister of Etiquette—and Haile Intelligent was—was the Ethiopian Minister of Education. He was a civilian, of course, and he had to deal with two members of the military—General Education, who was in charge, and Private Education, who really did all the work. Well, actually, he also had to deal with another officer as well—Major Funding, who handled the Finance Corps for the whole Ethiopian government.”
    Lester had grinned broadly throughout this performance.
    “Really? Seriously—right—‘seriously’—the pun works even better than I knew?” he had said, resolving to check a reference book as soon as she left. He added with a shrug, “Anyway, I decided to stick with Mozart names for them all.”
    “My three all have Klingon names: Kang, Kor, and Worf.”
    “Those are great names. My other two are in the back somewhere. I can take you on a mini-tiger hunt, if you’d care to meet them.”
    “Yes. Yes, I would.” And she had soon been introduced to Don Giovanni and Donna Anna, a neutered pair of red tabbies—brother and sister—who were grooming each other in the Philosophy section.
    Nearby, under a sign labeling the Natural History aisle, Bonnie saw a large hand-drawn cartoon with the heads of two saber-toothed tigers. The one on the left was saying, “Canine teeth, my ass! These are feline teeth!” She smiled.
    As they walked past Mysteries and Spy-Thrillers, she glanced at another cartoon. A flag with a hammer and sickle was on the wall of a prison cell, and a soldier wearing a fur pile cap with a red star on its front was telling a bound prisoner, “You have the right to remain silent, but it’s my duty to warn you—everything I attribute to you can and will be used against you.” At Sci-Fi and Fantasy, a third cartoon portrayed Star Trek’s Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise: on their view-screen, against a totally black sky, two dozen stars formed a constellation in the shape of the symbol for infinity, and Mr. Spock, one eyebrow raised, was saying, “Frankly, Captain, it is my professional judgment that we have boldly gone as far as we can go.”
    “Did you do these cartoons?” Bonnie had asked.
    “Yes, and many others.”
    “You have a good sense of line and form,” she said.
    “I got a Master’s in art, long ago and far away—as the world turns. I even taught art for three years at a small college you’ve never heard of—in the wilds of—of Inner Oklahoma.”
    “I minored in art myself. In high school I spent half my days in the art room doing elves and trolls and such.”
    Lester had glanced down at Bonnie’s attractive chest for a second and then back up at her friendly smile and her large horn-rimmed glasses. In the background, his CD player sent the opening notes of Mozart’s 24th symphony to the far corners of his store.
    “In high school,” he had replied, “I did the same. I was hoping to become the next Frank Frazetta. There’s a guy who can really convey motion! Just about everyone else working in the sci-fi and fantasy field paints figures that look like department store mannequins—absolutely no sense of movement. If I’d had a better sense of color, I’d have focused on doing oils. Pencils and inks are what I can do—though it’s just a pastime now. I suppose I could be a lightweight Charles Addams or Gary Larson. I’ve sold a dozen of my cartoons to nothing magazines, and a few folks have bought some of my caricatures. And some of my caricatures got me into trouble—them and this big fat mouth, that is.” He had frowned for a few seconds, then shook off a distasteful memory and smiled at Bonnie and shrugged. “Done is done.”
    While Lester spent six or seven minutes assessing the books she had brought, Bonnie had broused through the aisles looking for more of his cartoons. Out of a dozen others, three had amused her. At Archaeology, a humorously drawn old man in a pith helmet was telling a group of young colleagues, “Clearly this is just a forgery of an Inca temple—since I am able to insert my knife blade between these two 15-ton stones.” (Below this caption, Lester had typed a footnote quoting four different texts, all claiming that Incas had fitted their massive stones so closely that a knife blade could not be inserted between them.) At True Crime, a prison guard with a small round mirror and a dental drill was forcing a man in a striped suit to open his mouth and was saying to another guard, “Mind your own business! Warden Jenkins insisted I do a full cavity search on this guy!” And in Lester’s Anthropology section, Bonnie had chuckled at seeing a small Cro-Magnon girl and boy painting beautiful bison, horses, and hunters on a cave wall as a huge Cro-Magnon man with a torch appeared behind them and shouted, “You little brats! Defacing a public cave! Just wait till I tell your parents!”
    There had been seventy-one paperbacks in the three boxes, some of them badly damaged. Lester dug a five-dollar bill from his billfold, handed it to Bonnie, deliberately overpaying her, and wrote her an invoice “for used books.” She had shrugged, saying that her friend trusted her. Lester then had offered her a cup of tea, and she had accepted. Before she left two and a half hours later, they knew that they were both divorced and both enjoyed elaborate puns, natural history, Japanese art, science fiction, cats, tent camping, opera, and long walks. Lester had also been given the phone number of Bonnie’s roommate and had made a date with Bonnie for Chinese take-out on Tuesday night. Thereafter they had visited each other four or five times a year and were in almost daily contact via E-mail.
    Now, thirty-nine months later, he was flying from Bonnie’s home turf—the land of pale people, coffee bars, Mount Rainier, the Space Needle, and restaurants with fresh-caught salmon—to help arrange his father’s funeral and help his mother get her feet on the ground. His mother had phoned him last night while he and Bonnie were engaged in what they jokingly called “friendly friction” and had started to leave the news on her answering machine. Bonnie had handed Lester the phone, and he had agreed to drop everything and help his mother for at least a week. The next four hours were spent arranging connecting flights and reserving a rental car in Virginia. Bonnie had helped further by taking the phone number of his cat sitter to inform her about his change in plans while Lester drove to the airport.
    The remaining legs of his trip were uneventful. When he arrived in Baltimore, Lester learned that the St. Louis airport had closed down shortly after his plane had flown out of it, thanks to a small snowstorm. If his flight into St. Louis had been any later, he might have been stranded there overnight.
    In Baltimore, Lester boarded a small commuter prop plane with his single piece of carry-on luggage, and in Charlottesville he found the car rental people had stayed late to accommodate him. With a local map and some special instructions, he drove to a nearby mall where he bought an inexpensive dark suit, black shoes and socks, and a white dress shirt. With these purchases he headed west forty miles across the Blue Ridge Mountains, and then drove north thirty more to the small town where his parents had bought a condo after retiring nine years ago. The eastern slope of the mountains had been socked in with heavy fog or low clouds, but he had clear and easy driving on the downhill slope. Heavy, huge flakes of snow began to fall five minutes before he reached his destination.

3

    “The fire rescue people were here within ten minutes—they must’ve worked on him for half an hour,” said Beth Moore before Lester had taken off his coat. “They thought they got a heartbeat for a minute, but then they lost him. I just looked down at your father and told him, ‘Michael, you can’t do this to me!’ I don’t know how I’m goin’ to manage now! I don’t know what stocks we own or what payments are due. I haven’t even written a check myself for the past seven years. When I needed cash, he handed it to me. Other things I just put on charge cards. I’m so mad I could spit.”
    Lester put his arm around his mother and softly bit his lower lip.
    “We’ll figure it out, mom. Step by step we’ll get stuff taken care of for you. You’re a survivor!”
    “He wanted to be cremated, you know. I’ve had our minister check on that for me, and he’ll hold the service day after tomorrow, and your father’ll be cremated right after that. I don’t know what it’s all goin’ to cost. I’m just glad, Lester, that you told me where I could reach you.” Beth paused briefly to think. “I’m so glad, too, that you were able to get down here to see us just before you went out to Seattle. Your father—I think you know it—he was so glad that you came here to spend Christmas with us. We both were. It’s just a damn’ shame that he’ll never read those books you brought him. Maybe you could take them back with you.”
    “Sure, mom. We’ll take care of whatever you want. How are you doing?”
    He bent down and stroked the fat tri-color long-haired cat which was rubbing the corners of her mouth against the shin of his jeans.
    “You see her?” said his mother. “She’s been so upset since he died. She really misses him. He’d get up at four a.m. when she wanted to be fed. And he’d clean out her cat pan every time she’d do a little business in it. I can’t do that, by the way. She has to wait till I get myself up for breakfast, and that pan gets scooped once a day. She just wanders around looking lost, And some times she’ll hiss at me or nip my foot. Other times she’ll want me to hold her, but she slept in his bed on his pillow all last night. She just freaked out—is that the phrase? When they put him into the body bag, she freaked out and ran all over the apartment, jumping up on tables and shelves, knocking things over.”
    Lester picked up the fat cat, Daisy, and cradled her in one arm. As he stroked her belly, Daisy began to purr loudly. He plucked at her long white fur and nodded sympathetically to his mother.
    “Animals know,” he said. “They can grieve, too.” Daisy began to lick his hand.
    “Did they feed you on the plane?” his mother asked.
    “Some pretzels and orange juice. I had a fish sandwich in the Baltimore airport between flights, but I’m O.K. I also had a slice of pizza in the St. Louis airport, which, by the way, closed down just after my flight took off. I was really lucky to make it here. It went like clockwork, but I was lucky.”
    “There’s some lemon cookies in the cookie jar, if you want ‘em. I know you like lemon. Help yourself to whatever you see in the fridge. I didn’t sleep at all last night, and I was worried about you coming over the mountains. The weather report said they had fog there and there’d been a pile up somewhere.”
    “Not bad where I drove through. Just a little fog on the uphill side. There’s a little snow coming down now, did you know?”
    “Snow? Oh, it-shay. What’s that goin’ to do to the funeral plans? Jesus H. Christ.”
    “We’ll manage somehow, mom. I was in the Artillery over twenty years ago and was a real take-charge kind of guy. Do you want to talk, or would you rather try to get a little sleep?”
    “I’m glad you’re here, Lester. We can talk things over tomorrow. You probably need to get some sleep, too. Look, you know where everything is. I may try to read the paper for a few minutes, but let’s call it a day. I—did I tell you I’ve never been so furious at your father as when he was lying there dead? I said to him, ‘You can’t do this to me! How am I going to cope?’ He left me completely unprepared.”
    After his mother went into her room, Lester changed Daisy’s cat litter and phoned Bonnie Coleman to reassure her and tell her briefly about his journey. Bonnie asked him if he were all right, and he replied that everything was fine, that he and his father had not had any unfinished business. He did not mention that he felt tired and somewhat numb.
    As he lay on the hide-a-bed in the living room, Lester recalled his father’s living will with its “do not resuscitate” instruction. He felt glad that the Fire Medics had not been able to revive his father. If they had, he was certain, his father would have been just a human vegetable the way his own father, following a major stroke, had been for three years. He then thought about Bonnie and the first time they had made love.
    He had flown to Seattle three months after their first meeting and, arriving after one a.m., had spent the first night on her futon in her living room. They had spent the next day at her shop where he sketched a large poster of her cats, taking special care to render Worf, a large Maine Coon whose huge pink tongue often protruded from the front of his mouth for half an hour at a time. During short breaks, Lester observed Bonnie’s hippy-looking customers, and mentally compared her stock and price ranges to his own.
    Throughout the day, Bonnie had played an assortment of classical, rock, R&B, and gospel on her CD player. Taped to the side of her large box of CDs were old photos of herself wearing pointed Vulcan ears and a long shining blue dress while attending various Star Trek conventions.
    Atop the glass display case which served as a customer counter, Bonnie had a huge viney plant in a large brass teapot. A hand-lettered sign taped to the counter beside it read: “WARNING: The Botanist General has determined that too much H2O can cause Mr. and Mrs. O’Dendron’s son Phil to sicken and die.” Lester had smiled as he read this.
    “Mr. and Mrs. Rexia and their tiny daughter Anna,” he whispered to Bonnie. “Mr. and Mrs. Raphone and their noisy son Mike.”
    “Mr. and Mrs. Peerior and their snooty daughter Sue,” she whispered back.
    “What’s the name of Darth Vader’s sister?” Lester asked.
    “Ella!” replied Bonnie within three seconds. Lester nodded and made a mental note to write this last pun down and use it somehow in a cartoon.
    Early in the afternoon a well-dressed woman in her mid-sixties had come in and asked Lester if he had Willy Wonka for her grandson. Bonnie had smiled and fetched her a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. When the woman had protested that it was the wrong book, Bonnie patiently explained that the film’s title was different and showed her that Willy Wonka indeed owned the factory Charlie visited. When she had left, Bonnie convulsed with laughter.
    “Do you—have—Willy—Wonka—for my—grandson?” she asked Lester.
    “I don’t get it, Bon,” he replied, smiling uncertainly.
    “Roald Dahl—who had a warped sense of humor—was playing an in-joke on the publishers and readers of juvies! And those twits who made the movie were even more in the dark, I think, than the publishers! What does ‘willy’ mean to you?”
    “Nickname for a boy named William?”
    “It’s British slang for penis—like our slang word dick—or peter. And what does ‘wonka’ mean?”
    Lester had shrugged and asked with his eyes.
    “I thought you guys were either born with this knowledge or picked it up just after you were born through some male-thing network. W-h-a-n-k-e-r and w-a-n-k-e-r are Brit words, too—slang for masturbator. Dahl, as a joke, named this main character Penis Masturbator—and his publisher and Hollywood and most readers in the U.S. haven’t a clue! Probably if he’d named someone Richard Liqueur and had other characters call him ‘Dick’ but never ‘Dick Liqueur,’ not one person in ten million would be swift enough to notice. Here—look ‘em up in any of these unabridged dictionaries!”
    Lester smiled. “I believe you. How did you come across this arcane knowledge, if I may ask?”
    “I spent my junior year in Wales and made it my business to learn some English-English while I was there,” she grinned. “I’ll bet three-fourths of them got it.”
    “So much for subtle, sophisticated British humor. What about ‘Wee Willie Winkie’?”
    “I’ve no idea. I actually asked a Cambridge undergrad about it, and he just laughed and said that only his literature prof would suggest such a thing. Here—try some American trivia. If Robert Bloch wrote a prequel to Psycho, how would an ultra-proper butler have addressed little Norman?”
    “He’d call—him—he’d have to call him ‘Master Bates,’ of course.”
    “Of course,” Bonnie had said. “Sophisticated American humor!” And they laughed easily, like a pair of happy five-year-olds playing in a sandbox.
    After closing her store at 6:15, Lester and Bonnie had eaten dutch to a Greek restaurant where he had shown her two dozen of his recent cartoons, and they had discussed the fact that no magazine had been interested in them. When he had mentioned having a large file of original one-liners and spoke of becoming a stand-up comic, she had laughed brightly and warned him against giving up his day job. He did not mention that he had tried selling off-color jokes and cartoons to sexist, homophobic “adult” magazines and had been, in a five instances, successful. A Frazetta parody captioned “The Layer of the White Worm” was his most recent sale.
    Back in her third-floor apartment, Bonnie had poured them each a large glass of white wine, and, while she sat on the sofa watching local ten p.m. news, Lester had sat on the floor between her knees, had taken off her shoes and socks, and had given her a twenty-five-minute foot rub.
    His thumb nails had gently scratched the calluses of her heels and the balls of her feet. With his index fingers, he had scratched the tips of her toes and between her toes and up and down the tendons on the insteps of her feet. With both hands, he squeezed and massaged Bonnie’s soles; with his knuckles he pressed firmly against the arches of her feet. His nails traced little circles around her ankles and up and down her Achilles tendons. She was, she told him, in heaven, and this activity became one of their rituals whenever they spent an evening together.
    At 2:30 a.m., while he lay awake on her futon listening to street and building sounds and trying to acclimate to a pillow that differed from his accustomed one, Bonnie had come in with an extra blanket for him. By the reflected light of a couple of street lamps Lester could see that Bonnie, like himself, was wearing just a tee-shirt and a bikini brief.
    “Hi, babes,” he had whispered.
    “Are you warm enough, Les?” Her charming breasts were less than a foot from his face.
    “Fine—I think.”
    “You think?”
    “Perhaps I’m—if anything—feeling a little too warm right this minute.” He sat up on one elbow and kissed her on the mouth. Caught off guard, Bonnie pulled back suddenly, paused six inches from his face, and then grasped his head with both hands and planted her own hard kiss on his mouth. In two seconds, they were in each other’s arms, discovering after nearly a dozen years what a sexual embrace felt like. In two minutes, they were exploring the bare flesh beneath each other’s clothing. In five minutes, they had removed each other’s bikinis. In a move which they would refer to as “lickety split” during breakfast the next morning—and many mornings thereafter—Lester began to tongue the inside of Bonnie’s upper thighs, moving upward and continuing for ten minutes until, trembling and husky-voiced, she begged him to stop. Then, tracing little circles around her erect nipples, he mounted her and experienced what he would later call “the joys of Bonnie.”
    Lester had added “lickety split” to the small notebook he had brought with him, thinking that he might use the phrase later in some cartoon or joke that he might sell someday to a magazine.

4

    At four a.m., Lester awoke with Daisy on his chest, purring and licking his nose. He went to the kitchenette and put half a can of catfood into a sauce dish for her. Then he went to urinate before crawling back into bed.
    After breakfast, Lester scooped out Daisy’s litter box, completed the arrangements for the funeral, and phoned a capsule biography of his father to two regional newspapers. His mother phoned a dozen relatives, giving them all a full description of the circumstances, including an increasingly elaborate account of what she had said to Michael after his death.
    After lunch, Lester borrowed a broom and snow shovel from the building super and cleared three inches of snow away from the rental car. Then, although the parking lot had not been plowed at all and the town’s streets were poorly plowed, he drove his mother to her bank to open the safe-deposit box. With many expressions of sympathy to Beth, the local branch manager personally carried the box to a cubicle for them. Inside it they found three life insurance policies for varying amounts, a copy of his father’s will making Beth his sole beneficiary, and four large envelopes filled with stock certificates—more than half of which were solely in Beth’s name.
    On the way home the roads were somewhat clearer, and Lester and his mother stopped at a supermarket where they bought an assortment of “gourmet” cat food and a large box of chocolate cream candies.
    One of the women in the market reminded Lester, from the back, of Bonnie. Her hair, like Bonnie’s, was long and dark with auburn highlights. Her face, however, when he saw the woman again in the check-out line, was quite different and was hard looking, and he observed that this woman had a bottle of hair coloring in her shopping cart.
    When they got home, Beth told her son that she was exhausted and needed to nap. While she did so, Lester scooped out the litter box again and then browsed through the six hundred books on his father’s shelves, noting, as he had not done on earlier visits, that at least half of them were ones he had brought down for Christmases or had mailed down for birthdays. In several of the books he could see slips of paper, and he pulled these books down and discovered that his father had made notes about passages which had interested him. In no cases had his father actually written in a book itself.
    Lester was sitting beside the shelves reading slips of paper when Beth got up.
    “I have no interest in any of those,” she said. “You can take whatever you’d like. Most of ‘em are ones you gave him, anyway.” She laughed wheezily. “My son the book dealer.”
    “Maybe I’ll pack up a few of them and mail ‘em back to myself,” he said.
    “They’re all just taking up space. We’ll need to go through his clothes, too, and see what you might use and what can be given to a charity—and what should just go down the trash chute. He never threw away a thing. If he’d had his way, he’d still have every piece of string he ever owned. I used to sneak some of his old shoes out to the chute when he was shopping—probably for more shoes. And we need to get rid of his prosthesises—you know—his artificial legs. Who else but your father would have three left legs? And also that god-damn’ computer he bought two years ago. He used to spend hours sitting with that, typing with two fingers. That stuff can be sold or given to the church—unless you want it. Christ knows what he needed that thing for! It’s one more dust catcher I’d like cleared out.”
    “We have plenty of time, mom, to take care of that. First thing tomorrow I’ll call the lawyer who made up his will and find out what the next step should be. If you’ll locate his Social Security number for me, we can also try to find out what you’ll be getting from the government. And I’ll call the retirement office in Philadelphia and find out what percentage of his pension you’ll get. He worked for the state of P-A for at least thirty years, I think, but I don’t know what plan he retired under, do you?”
    Beth shrugged and opened the box of chocolates.
    “I took care of the cooking and the cleaning. The car and yard and money were always his responsibilities. I’ve got no idea.”
    They were interrupted by the phone. A neighbor in the building asked if Beth was all right and whether she wanted any company. Beth told her that she was feeling fine and went on to describe Michael’s death and her anger in considerable detail. Lester walked into the kitchen and picked up Daisy who was waiting beside her empty dish. He plucked at her belly fur again and received a nip on the webbing between his thumb in index finger. He set Daisy down gently and refilled her bowl with wet food. Then he went into the living room and turned on the local 5:30 news.
    When Beth got off the phone, Lester offered to take her out to dinner. She accepted, and they had third-rate lobster at a nearby restaurant. Afterwards, while Beth ate half a pound of chocolates and watched a situation comedy on television, Lester took a load of his father’s medicines and toilet items to the trash chute, keeping only the old man’s shaving brush as a memento. Then he sorted his father’s books into three categories—keep, donate, and dispose of. The last included his father’s old college accounting texts and a vast array of old books with tips on filing tax returns. Lester vaguely wished that there was some way the paper might be recycled as he carried thirty-two heavy books to the trash chute and dropped them down, two or three at a time.
    Sic transit, he thought as he gently closed the door to the chute.
    When he was finished, Lester sat down on the sofa beside Beth and watched a re-run of an old Lawrence Welk program. She offered him the box of chocolates, and he took two.
    Bonnie phoned him at nine p.m.
    “Seattle to Virginia. Over. Come in, Virginia.”
    “Virginia here, where Les is still Moore. I’d like to come in, Seattle. Wish you were here. Over.”
    “How’s it going, babes? You sound tired.”
    “Lots done. The service is for one p.m. tomorrow. We have some appointments lined up for the day after. The prosthesis people can’t use the socket parts of my dad’s three left feet, but they said they’d be glad to recycle the hardware. How be with you, little sweetie?”
    “It be lonely. We all miss y’ur sweetness—especially my sweetness misses y’ur sweetness. Can you talk?”
    “Not really.” He glanced at his mother, who seemed absorbed in the program.
    “I’m touching myself,” said Bonnie playfully. “Oh—oh—oh. I’m thinking about y’ur manly member. Manly Member—you know who he was, don’t you?”
    “Who was he?” said Lester quietly.
    “He was the person in charge of—recruitment—at the Y.M.C.A.!”
    Lester chuckled softly.
    “I know that’s a bit of a stretch,” continued Bonnie. “But it wasn’t as bad as some of my other jokes—or some of y’urs.”
    “Humph! What’s that supposed to mean? Love me, love my jokes.”
    “Don’t get cranky-wanky.”
    “Cranky Wanky? Who is he?”
    “He was—he was the—the manufacturer of—the inventor—of late 19th-century wind-up dildos that had—that had giant steel springs inside them. Am I correct?”
    “Correct as always, your majesty.” He glanced again at his mother. An image of Bonnie’s naked breasts briefly flashed into his mind.
    “So,” he continued, “what are the Seattle Areoles doing this evening? I think the game was canceled due to snow or something, wasn’t it? Wish I could see them now.”
    “They are waiting for you, big guy, to come here and play nine innings with ‘em. And also nine outings, too, between the nine innings. Right now they’re standing up and craning their necks to hear the sound of y’ur voice better. If they get any higher, they’ll rip open the front of my blouse. Ooops, there go two buttons. Can you stand up now?”
    “Frankly no. I hope that won’t—become a problem.”
    “Well, in that case, maybe you’d better call me back tomorrow night when it’s more convenient. I’ll be here, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.”
    “That would be a good idea—very good idea.”
    Bonnie and Lester each made a couple of kissing sounds into the phone and then hung up. Beth glanced over at her son.
    “Still in the mushy-lovey-dovey stage, I see.”
    “It’s been a long time for me,” he said softly.
    “It’s been a longer time for me, you can bet,” she replied.

5

    Lester awoke at 2:20 a.m. He had dreamt that he was back in college taking an economics final exam and had not read one word in the text or attended a single lecture. Beside him in the auditorium was his ex-wife, breezing through the final with ease, humming off-key and grinning to herself. As the professor came toward him to take his examination booklet, Lester had jerked his legs and sat up.
    Nearby, Daisy sat in the dimly lit living room, grooming herself. Outside it was quiet. Lester went to the bathroom and then drank a glass of warm tap water. As he lay back down, he recalled coming home from a hard day at the loading dock and finding his house in Oklahoma empty. It was not merely that Linda, his wife, was not there. The car, the furniture, the appliances, the rugs, the pictures, the books, the dishes, the tools, the kitchen clock, all his clothes—everything—were missing.
    A note in Linda’s handwriting had been taped to the glass door of the built-in oven: “Am moving to Lincoln to be near my folks. My attorney, Mr. Darrel Sweet, will fill you in if you care to call him.”
    He had looked up “Sweet, Darrel” in the local phone book and learned that Linda wanted the house sold. He, Lester, could keep his beat-up motorcycle but nothing else. In a way, it had come as a great relief to him to hear that Linda wanted a divorce. Let the flaying cease, he had thought.
    Four months earlier he had not been renewed to teach art at the local college. He had been unable, despite sending out over three hundred copies of his C.V., to find any other teaching position. He was untrained in and unfit for commercial art, as several greeting card companies and department store chains pointed out to him.
    Linda, he now recalled for the first time in seven years, had hotly blamed him repeatedly during his final year of teaching for not being more cautious and solicitous—even sycophantic—as far as G. Arthur Peterson was concerned, and Lester felt his stomach tensing up as he remembered half a dozen incidents which must have led directly or indirectly to his non-renewal.
    Before one department meeting began, several members had been chatting about the meanings of their given names, and G. Arthur had proudly asserted that he had once looked up his own first name—George—and learned that it meant “spear carrier” or “spear thrower.” Lester, who had taken two years of Greek in high school, had been tactless and foolish enough to point out that the name instead meant “farmer.”
    A few months later, their department head—Dr. Wilton—had expressed indignation to Lester when forty of G. Arthur’s recent collages were displayed in both the campus library and the administration building (with price tags affixed) and their significances were explained in a two-page interview in the campus newspaper. Lester had wryly replied that this was “merely one more example of Art for Art’s sake.”
    And when it became known that G. Arthur and the newly hired Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences were playing racquetball every afternoon, Lester doomed his own career. Dr. Wilton angrily remarked one afternoon that G. Arthur was in the gym “giving Dean Thomas a blow job for favors,” and Lester had smiled mildly and quipped, “It’s a real-life Fellatio Alger story.” His department head had nearly expired on the spot from laughter and had clapped Lester on the shoulder, dubbing him “a true wit.” Predictably, however, after Dr. W. had repeated Lester’s comment at a cocktail party, it made its way to the dean, and Dr. W. found it politic to dissociate himself from Lester and his “unconscionable, totally unprofessional crudity.”
    Linda was not amused by Lester’s cartoon captioned “Expulsion from Paradise” showing her and Lester, nude, trudging away from caricatures of three irate, curly-haired campus divinities—G. Arthur Peterson, Dr. Wilton, and Dean Thomas.
    At the settlement conference, Linda’s lawyer had demanded that Linda be given half the value of Lester’s cumulative social security payments, half of whatever his current and future earnings might be, and half of whatever retirement he might someday receive. Lester’s lawyer countered that Linda was a healthy woman with a teaching certificate and a Master’s degree in education, had no children to care for, and should therefore “not expect to get blood from a stone.” Linda, who had been staring fixedly at the opposite wall throughout, suddenly leaped up, startling both lawyers, and screamed that Lester’s lawyer had just called her “a bloody mess.” Darrel Sweet tried to calm her, and Lester’s lawyer vigorously pleaded his innocence. Negotiations were postponed for two months but proceeded without incident at the second conference where she was awarded the house, its furnishings, the car, and nothing else. Two months after that, Lester moved from a one-room apartment in Oklahoma to a one-room apartment in Connecticut and began working in a bookstore owned by a college friend.
    After reflecting on his past for over an hour, Lester got himself another glass of water. When he came back to bed, Daisy was there wanting to keep him company. At dawn he awoke himself again, kicking at the blanket and sheet that were tangled around his legs. This time he had dreamt that he had been teaching art to an auditorium full of laughing students and that he had suddenly realized that some were pointing to a four-inch-wide wet spot on the front of his pale gray slacks. He had tried to walk behind a lectern, but his feet would not move for some reason.

6

    The funeral service went smoothly. Eight people who lived in Beth and Michael’s condo attended it, and the minister gave a short, cheerful sermon. Beth repeated her tale about her anger to six of these people as they greeted and hugged her and wished her well. The minister agreed to find a home for Michael’s computer if Lester would bring it over to him the next day. Lester and Beth then had soup, salad, vegetables, fried chicken, and pecan pie at a local restaurant. On the way home, they dropped off his father’s used prostheses and then filled out forms at the local Social Security office.
    That afternoon, before Lester packed his father’s computer and printer for the minister, he looked up the directory on the hard drive. There he found the first eight chapters of an unfinished autobiographical novel and twenty-four autobiographical short stories of various lengths, most of them written in the first person and many of them dealing with some kind of learning experience Michael had undergone as, step by step, he had evolved or blossomed into whatever he was when he was cut short by an unexpected death. There were no “hard” copies of this writing anywhere to be found, and Lester asked his mother if she wanted him to make copies for her. She said no.
    Lester made two copies of these works on disks for himself, cleared the hard drive of everything, and packed the printer and computer into their original boxes, which his father had saved in the back of a clothing closet. While his mother took a nap, Lester drove to local thrift shops and bought a dozen cheap books which he thought he could resell when he got back to his store. At a supermarket he got twelve large cardboard boxes and bought two rolls of reinforced adhesive tape. Before his mother awoke, he had wrapped and labeled four boxfuls of books to mail to himself and filled seven and a half others to donate to the church or to local thrift shops.
    After his mother had gone to bed, Lester phoned Bonnie, charging the call to his Providence number. He described the service and mentioned the fiction he had discovered.
    “Had you ever known y’ur dad had literary ambitions?” Bonnie asked.
    “Not at all. My mom had no idea either. And she was right in the same room with him most of the time.”
    “How bad is it?”
    “Quality? Pretty mediocre to bad, I guess. I haven’t read most of it, but I sampled sentences here and there, and there didn’t seem to be much difference as he went along. It was folksy, a lot like the six- or ten-page letters his own dad used to mail him—or all of us—when I was a kid. Kind of a folksy diary style with a few attempts at epigraphs from Bartlett’s, most of ‘em drawn from Shakespeare.”
    “You’ll let me see them, won’t you?”
    “Of course. There were fifty or sixty letters, too, indicating he had mailed copies of his stories out to magazines. He kept a log about this, and though I haven’t found any rejection slips or letters anywhere, he must have got plenty of them.”
    “How do you feel about y’ur dad? And y’ur mom. Are you all right, hon?”
    “Not a problem. As I told you when I left, there’s no unfinished business. My dad thought I’d effed up my teaching career and wasted five years of college back when Linda and I split and I went to work as a bookstore clerk—but he got used to it after I got back on my feet again. He couldn’t help but notice how the economy and job market worsened during the ‘greed is good’ decade—and after. In a way, he was proud of me for being able to readjust. He’d grown up during the ‘thirties and knew that this was something like that. And a lot of his neighbors had their kids still living at home at age thirty or forty, and he was probably proud I was different from their kids in that way, too.”
    “No shit? Proud of you for that? Are you kidding me about that last part?”
    “A little. I’m feeling a little smart-assy, I think, and I’m sorry if I misled you. On the phone you can’t see me winking or feel my elbow nudging you as a clue. Sorry.”
    Lester did not add that he had his own secrets about his creative efforts and had never told his father about any of the jokes or cartoons that he had sold to men’s magazines. As before, Bonnie and he ended with a little love-talk and some kissing sounds. Lester then hand-washed his socks, underwear, and flannel shirts, changed the cat litter and put out food for Daisy, and unfolded the hide-a-bed and climbed in.

7

    At 3:20 a.m. Lester again awoke with his legs entangled. He had been dreaming that he and his mother were pushing half-filled grocery carts up a steep, icy hill. His father had suddenly come running past them, faster than Lester had ever seen him move, pushing a full cart. He reached the top of the hill and stood there silently with his back turned, apparently waiting for them. Puzzled, Lester looked at his father and recalled that he had given away all his father’s artificial legs and wondered where his father had found the one he was running on. Is it too late to get his legs back from the guy I gave ‘em to? Lester had tried to run faster up the hill with his cart, but his feet felt as if he were wearing leaden shoes or had hobbles on his ankles.
    Awakening, Lester got up to urinate, as he had on previous night. When he returned to the bed, Daisy lay down against him. He began to stroke her large belly and pluck her long stomach fur. Daisy purred loudly as he did so, and when Lester happened to rub his hand where her tiny nipples stuck up, she began to lick his hand with her sand-paper tongue. She thinks I’m her kitten, Lester guessed, and in the half dark, as an experiment to test this hypothesis, he sought out two of her nipples and gently rubbed them both at once. Daisy’s purring grew louder, and she began to writhe around.
    If I rub four or more, you’ll blow up, he thought. Already I can smell smoke coming out of your ears. He smiled drowsily at his little joke. Suddenly he stopped and gently pushed Daisy to one side. In the dark he located his notebook and pen and then turned on a table lamp and seated himself on the edge of the bed. With quick strokes of his pen he drew Batman and Robin in the style of the ‘sixties TV program. Nonplused, the Dynamic Duo ran onto a nude beach. In the foreground, making eye contact with the viewer, lay a nude woman with a Julie Newmar-type face and six small breasts on her torso. Lester penned in a caption—“Holy Portuguese person o’ war, Batman! We’ll never be able to find the Catwoman with her costume off!”
    Lester closed his notebook, put it back in his jacket, and turned of the light. When he awoke in daylight, his day and the next and the next were pretty much the same. His phone calls to Bonnie were much the same, too, but his nights were not broken again by any more dreams that woke him.

8

    Two days before Lester was scheduled to fly from Charlottesville to Baltimore and thence to New York and Providence, a blizzard struck the east coast. Thirty-three inches of snow covered western Virginia, and in the states north of Virginia it was even deeper. After three days, the small Virginia town had cleared most of its main streets, and the state had cleared most of its main highways. Although the Charlottesville airport was still closed, Lester made new reservations for his flights home. The best they could give him was a flight to Baltimore five days later than he had originally planned to leave.
    For a good profit, local tractors plowed out the condo parking lot, and Lester, for a ten-dollar-bill, had borrowed the super’s snow shovel for two hours to dig his rented car out of its four-foot-high drifts. Then he drove Beth to the local courthouse where they gave Beth an array of forms to complete and a list of things to do within the next sixteen months. After that, he took Beth to see his father’s lawyer, who recommended an accountant in his office who explained what tax obligations and options she had.
    On the way back to the condo, Lester stopped at a supermarket for more cat food and cat litter and then bought a cheap snow shovel for twice its normal price. As he had predicted to his mother, the parking place he had excavated earlier was filled by another car. He dropped his mother off at the front door and spent two and a half hours clearing another place to park. After he showered, he did the routine cat chores, hand-washed his clothing again, and heated himself a small can of chicken soup. Then he tore the label off the can and put it into a small recycle bin under the sink. As he stooped to throw the label into the kitchen waste basket, he noticed two large manila envelopes lying on top of other rubbish.
    Curious, Lester turned them over and saw they were addressed to Mr. Michael B. Moore in his father’s own handwriting. When he lifted them up for a closer look, Lester found two similar envelopes beneath them. All had been torn open before being discarded.
    Lester took the four to envelopes to the living room and sat down in an easy chair near the window. Each envelope contained two or three short stories written by his father, and all were accompanied by a relatively tactful rejection notice. Lester shrugged his aching shoulders, sighed softly, and perused the opening sentences of each story. One was titled “Time and Tide Waits for No Man” and began with a quotation from Julius Caesar:
    There is a tide in the affairs of men,
    Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
    Omitted, all the voyage of this life
    Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

    The narrator of this story—a man named Charlie Williamson—told how his father, a postal employee, had sacrificed his dream of becoming a doctor rather than put his wife and four children through years of hardship and want. Charlie, learning from his bitter father’s error, earned a Master’s degree in accounting and passed his C.P.A. before he himself got married. Lester recognized his father and grandfather thinly veiled in this tale.
    One tale was heavily nostalgic and thinly humorous, portraying a middle-aged narrator reminiscing about large family picnics in the woods near Worchester, Massachusetts, and boyhood romps and pranks and after-school adventures in which many wars with wet and dry horse-turd ammunition figured prominently and repeatedly. Lester recalled hearing his father tell about most of these incidents at least five or six times.

    Of greater interest to him was a tale titled “It’s Never Too Late to Mend, with Apologies to Charles Reade.” It began:

    My name is Ernest Hemingway and I’m a writer. I’m not the Ernest Hemingway, but a man you probably never have heard of. Out of courtesy to the other fellow with my name, I always write with many a pen name. The chief one I write under the name Guido Jones.
    Mind you, I wasn’t always a writer. Once I was a C.P.A. I was very good at my job and was a great provider for my wife and young son. My wife used to say “Make money, Ernest” when I would leave for work in the morning, and I did and was very happy to do so. And I always did my work “earnestly,” which, given my name, Ernest, was my trademark.
    But I was not completely happy doing this. Inside me burned a little candle which never went out. When I was in high school I wrote a short story based on something my father and I did when fixing the roof of a barn. My high school English teacher told me I had a way with words. “Evocative” was what he said to me and I have never forgotten his praise.
    For over forty years I, Ernest Hemingway, kept this bright flame of creativity burning brightly inside me! I did not let anything extinguish it! Perhaps it could not be put out! In my spare time at the office and in the wee hours of the long dark nights when Morpheus did not have his way with me I would make up stories inside my mind and sometimes jotted them down in the back pages of a large leather bound ledger. No one would ever find them there I surmised correctly.
    After I retired to Florida with my aging wife, Mary, I bought a computer and taught myself how to use it. A simple thing, really, for anyone who is not as stupid as a chimp. I began writing my stories on my computer under my new pen name and sending them out to dozens and dozens of magazines and to big publishers of books. I even wrote a best selling novel based on what my accounting background had shown me of the world of high finance and politics in government. Perhaps you may have read some of my opuses without knowing I—the other Ernest Hemingway—was behind them.
    Now that I have become famous under half a dozen aliases I am writing this brief memoir about myself to reveal at last the real truth. As the great English novelist Charles Reade so aptly observed, “It is never too late to mend.” Here now is my story about this truth, taking you step by step through the funny times and the hard times (“The best of times, the worst of times,” as Charles Reade’s good friend and fellow novelist, Charles Dickens, so aptly characterized them) as I made the transition and molded my self into a more modern master of English prose fiction than he.
    When I first began to write, it was a slow dual digit process and I had to look at the key board all the time to search for each letter. But within a single fortnight it became a task of love to me. “Blessed is he that has found his work” says the great writer Thomas Carlyle and I had, at last, found my work. Like Martin Eden, the title character in the novel by that great autodidact Jack London, I began to rise up like a phoenix from the chilled ashes of my former profession to take pen in hand. I—

    “Been rummaging through the garbage, have we?” said Beth as she padded into the living room in slippers and bathrobe. “Every one of those was rejected, you realize, don’t you? Think of the wasted hours—and the wasted postage!”
    Lester smiled amiably and set the stories on a nearby footstool.
    “Are you interested in dinner yet, mom? I’d offer to take you out, but I’m afraid that somebody’d grab my parking spot as soon as we leave—and I just don’t feel up to digging out another one today.”
    “Thanks anyway, Lester, but I can heat up some frozen veggies and cook those boneless chicken boobs that’ll go bad if we don’t have ‘em tonight. I know you like baked chicken boobs. Would you turn on the TV for me, please?”
    Later, after Beth had gone to bed, Lester briefly described his father’s stories to Bonnie. When he told her about “It’s Never Too Late to Mend,” Bonnie said nothing. After a ten-second pause, Lester prompted her.
    “Well?”
    “How did you feel when you read it?” she asked.
    “Like I was seeing a new facet of my dad that I didn’t know existed. It was more than just finding out that he had tried his hand at writing after he retired.”
    “But what did you feel? Not just what you understood but the feeling you had.”
    “Hmm. I felt glad to understand that he had found a way to enjoy himself—glad that he was feeling fulfilled. I have some pity for him that he’d taken so long to get around to doing something he secretly wanted, and I felt lots of pity that his stories were so shitty that everybody was flicking him off. But, I guess, I was also relieved that he didn’t seem in any pain about the rejection. For whatever reason he seemed to have confidence in himself and wasn’t being hurt.”
    “Yeah. And he was following his bliss,” interrupted Bonnie. “He had joy in the process and didn’t focus on the outcome. He was ‘being here now.’”
    “Bliss? His ‘bliss’?”
    “That’s a Joseph Campbell term,” she said. “I think it means ‘whatever turns you on in a really big way.’ Not like having drugs or sex all the time or pigging out on candy, but doing whatever it is that gives you y’ur own personal high and makes you feel fulfilled in your life, regardless of what everybody else is doing or telling you should be doing to make them happy.”
    “Isn’t that a bit Newage?—I mean New Age. Not that that is bad, of course.”
    Bonnie was silent again. Lester regretted what he had just said. Newage, rhyming with sewage, had been a put-down word he had adopted from the skeptic-magician Teller, and he had trod on Bonnie’s toes with it three years ago.
    “I’m sorry, sweetie,” he said. “It just slipped out. I’ll try to be better.”
    “Y’ur dad probably just got a big kick out of what he was doing, and it didn’t matter if anyone else cared for it. He was offering them the chance to enjoy it, too, but if they didn’t, then it really didn’t matter—and it didn’t change how he felt about it. That’s just my opinion, by the way, spoken as a person who has vast learning and experience, but who could possibly be wrong—though I personally doubt it.”
    She paused for five seconds before continuing.
    “I studied and trained with Haile Sensitive for fifteen years. He was Dean of the School of Psychotherapy at Addis Ababa University, as you no doubt remember.”
    Lester began to laugh, and Bonnie joined in.
    “I’m going to be flying to Providence for y’ur birthday in March, Mr. So-much-Moore. Start thinkin’ what you be wantin’ me to bring you.”
    “Be wantin’ you, for bed and breakfast both, Ms. Cole-but-warm-inside-person.”
    “Of course, Mr. Prognosticator-who-probes-the-unknown-more-deeply-than-Nostradamus-or-Teiresias. But what about a thing to unwrap?”
    “If your thing is wrapped when it arrives, I won’t leave it wrapped for long.”
    “For Captain Long? We both know who he is. He’s the one-eyed stiff-legged pirate that’s always giving me the willies when we meet. The thought of him now is making me wet—with terror, of course. I speak metaphorically, as you know, drawing my metaphor from whaling.”
    “Even if Captain Long were totally blind,” laughed Lester, “he’d know the future—and the depths of your spirit, for his love is a spiritual thing, on the whole, of course. And you know, of course, why he knows all, even in the darkest depths and nooks?”
    “Because he uses a divining rod?” she guessed.
    “Very close, O Bonnie One. Because he is learnèd in all the ins and outs of augury and when push come to shove you might say—?”
    “He augers well?”
    “You hath read my mind, O Fairest One.”
    Again they laughed together.
    Before they hung up, Bonnie reminded him to begin thinking about a present she might get him—for his “bliss.”

9

    Lester reconfirmed his flight to Baltimore the day before he was to leave. After washing his clothes a third time, he put on his overshoes and heavy jacket and asked Beth if she needed or wanted anything from a small shopping center which was half a mile from her condo.
    “Just a couple more pounds of candy, a quart of low-fat, and two more packages of boneless boobs. Why are you going alone?”
    “I’m going to walk—just to stretch my legs a bit. And I don’t want to vacate that parking place I dug out until I drive out in the a.m. tomorrow. The lovely people in this building are as quick to take what somebody else did—as a—as any New Yorker or any Rhode Islander! My back and arms are still killing me!”
    “Why not just park in the plowed lane like most of the others? My son the big book dealer has to have his own parking place off the main track?” She began to laugh. “Just kidding you, Lester. You should see your face. Can’t you tell yet when I’m just kidding? Have a good time, and look both ways before you cross streets!”
    She patted his arm as he bent over and kissed her cheek.
    The temperature was in the fifties as Lester walked out of the parking lot. Large slushy puddles lined the streets next to deep banks of dirty snow. No sidewalks had been shoveled, and he walked on the edge of the puddles until approaching cars forced him to step into them. At the shopping center he found a small stationery store and entered it.
    In the school supplies department, Lester found a large pad of unlined white paper, a blue pencil, a small pair of scissors, a large gummy eraser, a fine-tip black pen, and two plastic envelopes containing selections of colored felt markers. With the help of one of the clerks, he located a cheap plastic ruler, a plastic protractor, and a tinny compass to draw circles. After paying for them, he walked next door to news store and studied its magazine rack. He thumbed through three photography magazines, bought two of them, and walked two doors down to the grocery market.
    On the way back, halfway across an intersection he narrowly avoided being hit by the car of an elderly man who made no attempt to stop for a red light. His coat and jeans were drenched by a shower of dirty slush.
    “Pervert!” Lester muttered. “Whenever there’s a change in the weather, you take it as a sign that laws an’ rules are all suspended. You must have moved down here from Rhode Island!”
    After handing the candy to Beth and putting the food in the refrigerator, Lester changed to dry jeans.
    Beth asked him what was in his packages, and he showed her.
    “What for?” she asked.
    “I feel like drawing again—and I want to try to get good at colors. I was never any good with colors—not the way I wanted to be, at least.”
    “Those are just kids’ things you have there—and what about the magazines?”
    “I think I’d better start with baby steps before I try to run. I’m going to read what they tell photographers about color options. Maybe they have some tips I never heard about. In any case, there are some photos in each magazine that I could analyze for color and copy in a dozen different ways—you know, by changing a blue to an orange or a red to a yellow—just to see what the effect is and how well I like it.”
    “Sounds like a real thrill,” said Beth, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue. “Have fun.”

10

    After Beth retired, Lester made a dozen half-page sketches of Daisy with his felt-tips, varying her coloring each time. With his scissors, he cut a pair of large cardboard L-shapes from an empty cereal box and used these to experiment with the ideal way to balance each sketch before it would be cropped.
    At 12:15 a.m., he realized that he had not phoned Bonnie and did so. He told her of his hike to the shopping center and expressed relief that at last the airports were open again. He did not, however, think to mention his new coloring set. Bonnie told him to get some sleep and told him to call her again when he got home tomorrow.
    For the next two hours, working from the sketch he felt looked best, Lester did four versions of a full-page portrait of Daisy. He set the final version on the kitchen table for his mother and packed the other three in his overnight case. Then he took his new vinyl zipper-bag filled with clothing on hangers and laid it on the floor near the front door so he would not forget it.

11

    Following an early breakfast of eggs and sausages with Beth, Lester retraced his route to Charlottesville. As he drove down the eastern slope of the mountain pass, he saw a jackknifed trailer truck in the median strip, its cargo of new compact cars strewn about in the snow drifts like cheap toys. He smiled ironically to himself, thinking how lucky he was to have learned to drive in New England where (1) they knew how to clear snow quickly and (2) most of the people knew how to drive properly on slippery roads.
    Too-too-too, he repeatedly whispered to himself as he passed—or was passed by—other drivers on the long slope. To Lester, this meant that nearly everyone else was driving either too fast or too slow for the conditions of the road.
    At Charlottesville he made the mistake of taking the route through the city instead of around it and soon became lost. After twenty minutes he pulled into a filling station and asked the young brunette behind the counter how to find the airport. She directed him back to the state highway where he correctly made his turn the second time. A light snow began to fall.
    Lester glanced at his watch and said aloud, “Charles Reade was wrong. If you screw up and your plane takes off without you, it’s too late, period.”
    The woman at the car rental desk agreed that Lester should not be charged for the extra days while the airport was shut down, and he hurried across the terminal to get his tickets and go through the security gate. Upstairs, he paused to wince as he passed the airport’s display of oil paintings by local artists. Draftsmanship, brush technique, balance, and color sense were lacking in various combinations. Studying forty of them more carefully, he smiled at the enormous prices the artists had put on the little cards next to their canvasses. He smiled as he recalled a comment Bonnie had once made when they had gone into a little gallery in Providence. She had criticized several paintings there in a voice that carried, and the owner had come over to her and asked her, “Don’t you like art?” “As a matter of fact, I do,” she had replied, “—if and when I’m lucky enough to see any.”
    At the departure gate for Baltimore, Lester confirmed that all was well with his tickets and received a specific seat assignment. Half an hour later, the monitor on the wall informed all passengers that the flight was delayed, and forty minutes later he found out it had been canceled because of fog in Baltimore. Fifteen minutes after that, he was re-booked on a flight that would take him to Pittsburgh where he would board another flight for JFK and easily make his connection to Providence.
    When the plane took off for Pittsburgh, the snow had stopped and the runway was clear and drying in the warm sunlight. At Pittsburgh, Lester received unpleasant news: his flight to New York had been canceled and no others would be going there until late the next morning. The good news was that he was able to get a seat on an early afternoon flight and re-book connecting passage to Rhode Island—all at no extra charge.
    At a large board with lighted hotel advertisements and courtesy phones, Lester was able to find relatively inexpensive lodging for the night close to the airport. He boarded the courtesy shuttle bus with eight other people, including three airline hostesses and two pilots, and was driven over slushy highways in the dark afternoon. Twice, through the filthy side windows of the bus, he saw low dark stores with large white signs on them: ADULTS. He recalled that fifteen years ago, in a different part of Pennsylvania he had walked into a similar store and had looked over its array of magazines, books, video cassettes, rubber garments, and various toys for some twenty minutes before walking out empty handed, curiosity satisfied.
    In his hotel room, Lester found flyers for food delivery services. The Chinese order-out restaurant was closed, but the pizza place promised to get a medium sausage with a cola to him in forty minutes. Then he phoned Sue Leach, the college student who was cat sitting for him, to explain that he would be delayed at least one more day.
    “Bummer,” sympathized Sue. The good news was that his five cats were all well and apparently happy, even Queenie. The bad news was that the front window of his store had been smashed again by someone. Nothing appeared to be missing, but some people had thrown snow inside, and some of the books displayed there had been soaked. Sue had found a carpenter who had been willing to nail large sheets of plywood over the hole for a reasonable price.
    “Thanks for taking that initiative,” said Lester dully. “Are any of the cats near to hand?”
    “Papageno is rubbing my elbow even as we speak. And Figgy is up on the table here, licking my supper plate. Would you like to talk with them?”
    “Yeah. Please put the Papa-guy on, if you can.” Overhead, Lester could hear the sound of a large jet.
    As Lester called out the cat’s name and said “hi,” Papageno began to make little high-pitched wirping sounds and rubbed the side of his lips against the receiver.
    “He knows it’s you,” said Sue with a laugh. “Here—I’ll put Figgy on now.”
    As Lester spoke to him, Figero looked around Sue’s apartment with wide, Kliban-cat eyes and purred in a deep bass tone. Lester understood that he was not responding to his name or the sound of Lester’s voice—Figero was inclined to purr wide-eyed just because it was his nature to do so.
    Lester thanked Sue again, and she agreed to be flexible about his arrival time.
    As he dialed Bonnie to update her, he could hear another jet flying low overhead, preparing to land. Lovely—right on the glide path, he thought.
    Bonnie was very sympathetic about both the delay and the damage to his store.
    “It may be about time I thought about relocating to a more congenial spot. At my age I have interest in avoiding a lot of rays when I’m out walking around. We both know that there the phrase ‘a healthy tan’ is an oxymoron. Know of any place where I could move where the sun don’t much shine?”
    “Well, as a matter of fact, I do—and I confess that it always feels really good. Oh—pardon me—do you mean where you could relocate your business? Dear me, did I say ‘your business’? I should wash my mouth out. But what’s a girl to think! Somehow, you seem to force my thoughts into that one groove whenever we talk. “
    They laughed at her playfulness for a moment, and then Lester asked her to think about how she would feel about him moving to Seattle.
    “We might consider a down payment on a house together. I have no idea how long it would take to liquidate what I have here—or what it would cost to ship some of the stuff I don’t want to just sell for a loss. We could start thinking about it.”
    “This is pretty sudden, isn’t it? Give me a minute or two.”
    While she was silent, Lester opened his little vinyl notebook, sketched the Space Needle against a skyline, put a pair of long-fanged vampires in the foreground, and printed “moved from Transylvania to Seattle to avoid the sun.”
    Bonnie answered abruptly, “Why not? In this economy, two can starve as cheaply as one. If it comes to it, I’d be happy to move into a cardboard box with you. The only problem will be our cats—will they get along? An’ then there’s a Seattle ordinance that reads ‘It is dangerous and unlawful for more than six cats to occupy one home.’ But I’m sure that a pair o’ sharp kids like us will figure a way around that!”
    They talked for twenty more minutes, interrupted briefly by the pizza delivery.

12

    Next morning, shortly after the shuttle bus dropped Lester back at the airport, he learned that backlogs of flights into the New York area had caused numerous cancellations. He was offered the chance to try flying standby on another airline’s turbo-prop commuter, but he declined. When it became clear that the larger jets were only entering JFK from “hubs,” he booked passage southwest to the nearest hub—St. Louis, Missouri—and then passage northeast to New York.
    “It’s like going three steps backwards to go one step forward, but it’s the only dance we can play for you today,” said the ticket agent with a smile. “At least we will do it without charging you a cent more than a direct flight to JFK would have been.”
    “Better than that, I get credited with all those extra frequent-flyer miles,” said Lester with a smile of his own.
    “Of course. Absolutely.”
    Three hours later, as Lester flew west over Dayton, Ohio, he looked down at the snow-covered ground and the grid of streets and lights and buildings.
    Looks just like some huge computer chip, he thought, and then paged through a magazine for half an hour until he dozed off.

13

    At St. Louis, for half an hour Lester watched a nearly bald young man in faded jeans romp on the carpet with a little fourteen-month-old girl as dozens of planes taxied back and forth behind them. The man played “hide and peek” around one of the concrete pillars near the plate glass, and when his daughter began poking a zinc-plated electrical outlet on the floor, the man gripped her hand and pulled it away, saying “ouch.” Then he melodramatically touched the outlet with his own fingers a dozen times, saying “ouch” and jerking violently away each time. The little girl, a blonde in a teal snowsuit, laughed delightedly.
    The man’s wife appeared carrying a paper bag filled with burgers, fries, and colas, and the man sat down beside her to eat. While their daughter continued to play around a nearby pillar, Lester took out his new art supplies and made a rapid pencil sketch of her, silhouetted against the window with three small planes behind her. He changed the color of the rug from deep red to a tawny gold and her snow suit to a royal blue. Her red-knit cap became deep orange, and he made her hair a very pale green. Lester chuckled at the result, and cropped the drawing with the aid of his two cardboard L’s.
    Near the little girl, a portly young man in jeans sat down on the carpet and plugged his cellular phone into a socket, saying, “I can hear you better now. What was that price quote again?” The little girl ran over to him, pointed at the outlet, and began to shout “ouch—ouch—ouch.” The heavy young man smiled and beckoned to the child’s father to come get her away from him. As the father ate his third burger, the girl’s mother went and picked up her daughter.
    Behind him, Lester heard a voice say loudly, “Hey, that’s pretty good! C’mere, lady. See this guy’s picture of your kid!”
    The young woman—a tired face with dark, greasy looking hair, wearing a soiled long-johns shirt—smiled as Lester held it up for her to see. Her husband, cramming the remainder of the bun into his mouth, joined them.
    “Are you an artist,” the woman asked.
    “Used to be,” said Lester. “Would you like to have this?”
    “Sure,” said the woman, as her husband said, “How much?”
    “It’s all yours,” answered Lester.
    “What’s your name,” asked the woman. “It isn’t signed yet.”
    Lester took out his blue felt-tip pen and held out his hand for the picture. He smiled slightly and wrote “E. Hemingway” diagonally in large cursive letters across the lower right corner.
    “What’s the ‘E’ stand for? Ernest?” asked the woman. Lester smiled and nodded. Then he glanced at his watch, picked up his bags, and went in quest of some food himself.

14

    Four hours later, flying in darkness toward New York, Lester again looked down upon Ohio. The lights and streets of Cleveland formed a pattern that interested him. He recalled his computer-chip notion and jotted down a memo to himself to try doing a series of pictures of cities viewed from the air at different times of day and night. Then he fell asleep again.
    When the plane landed at JFK, Lester learned that no flights would be going to Providence, but he found that he could take a train from the airport to New York City itself and from there could get another train to Rhode Island around noon the next day.
     It was after midnight when he got into the city. He made a withdrawal from a nearby cash machine to pay for his train ticket, then checked his bags in a locker, gave Bonnie a brief collect call, and went in search of a Chinese restaurant that was open. After eating, he bought a copy of the Times and looked up what movies were playing, found nothing of interest, and walked back to the station. There he walked around for several hours, looking in the lighted windows of dozens of closed shops.
     At six a.m., Lester bought two fried eggs, three warm bagels, and a cup of hot coffee and went for a walk in the early daylight with his bagels in a small paper bag. As he reached the street, a young man with filthy clothes asked him if he had any spare change, and Lester stared into the man’s eyes for several seconds and then gave him the bag of bagels and a dollar bill.
    Interesting face, thought Lester, rubbing his own unshaven cheeks. He put on his gloves. There but for the grace . . . .
    He wandered toward Broadway, looking into shop windows and thinking about living full time with Bonnie. The move and the work entailed with selling out made him somewhat apprehensive, but he felt, on balance, it would be for the best. It would be a longer flight each time to visit his mother, but it would also mean no more flying back and forth between the coasts to see Bonnie for a week here and a week there.
    Through the front window of a large Barnes and Noble bookstore, he saw a display of art calendars and coffee-table art books featuring dozens of famous painters. To kill time, he felt that he wanted to browse through these, and when the store opened Lester was the first customer to go in.
    After half an hour, he decided to purchase two half-price calendars with pictures by Gaugin and Van Gogh. He had briefly looked at coffee-table books featuring art by Sargent, Turner, Modigliani, and H. R. Giger and had jotted down a cartoon idea: an Alien dentist looked in a man’s mouth and said, “I’m very sorry, Herr Giger. I can’t make you a secure set of uppers because your palette is too limited.” Lester suspected that the pun on palate might be over most people’s heads, but it would be something else to place in his shop—or Bonnie’s—or theirs.
    Lester was feeling slightly groggy from lack of sleep, and that, he had long thought, could produce what he called his more creative moments. As he glanced into a sale bin, a large book filled with photos of natural disasters produced a cartoon idea for the geology sub-section of his science shelf. He found a browser’s chair near the bin and began to write: “smug claims adjuster in an insurance office tells weeping customer with a NO FAULT policy, ‘You must face facts, Mr. Wilkins—technically, the quake that wiped out your family and business was caused by the San Andreas Fault.’” And a book on Roman Britain gave him another cartoon idea which he rapidly added to his little notebook: “sign on the south side of a long wall reads, ‘Beware! There will be no Roman in the gloamin’ per order of Emperor Hadrian!’”
    As he drew a centurion atop Hadrian’s Wall, Lester’s eyes glazed, and he recalled a cartoon he had first drawn during grad school and had redrawn several times thereafter: a woman in a bed with Roman columns for posts says to a man who is wearing a toga and smoking a cigarette, “O.K., Julius, how about putting ‘I came’ last once in a while.”
    For a second he pictured his ex-wife’s face. When he’d proudly shown this to her, Linda—whom he had married in his senior year—had angrily told him he should not be wasting his time on such things as cartoons, and he had begun drawing most of them in secret. When he had first clerked in his friend’s bookstore, he had redrawn this one and, with permission, had posted it near the sex books.
    Bonnie’s face came into Lester’s mind, and he began to smile. The afternoon after he and Bonnie had first made love, Lester had drawn another version of this cartoon for her while they talked in her store. She had laughed and then quipped, “Is it coincidence that the Roman word for ‘I came’ is pronounced exactly like the English word weenie? Is this something that etymologists—and feminists—should look into? Definitely sexist language!” There were no customers in her store at the time, and Lester had spun her around and begun kissing the back of Bonnie’s neck. She had pressed his hands over her breasts and then reached back to feel the front of his jeans.
    “The rise of Caesar. Totally awesome, dude!” she had said.
    “Do you think I’m too easy?” he had replied with a little smile.
    Unexpectedly, she had begun to laugh, and Lester had ceased caressing her in bewilderment.
    “Sorry—something goofy just popped into my head,” she explained, turning to face him. “If we nickname y’ur willy ‘Julius’ and you ever say ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” when you’re entering, I’d—well, I’d totally lose it. I’d laugh y’ur willy inside out and probably propel you onto the ceiling!” Bonnie then pulled her sweat shirt up, baring her breasts, and embraced and kissed Lester in a firm, writhing way. They then had changed the sign on her front door from OPEN to CLOSED, and for fifty minutes, although they laughed together at frequent intervals, they spoke no more about cartoons.

15

    On the train from New York to Rhode Island, Lester looked at the Van Gogh and Gaugin pictures upside down, squinting to blur details so that he could analyze how these painters had arranged their chief masses of colors. With his large pad, he made crude color sketches and notes to remind himself what he wanted to do when he had time to concentrate and a stable surface to work on. From time to time the whole car lurched unexpectedly, and he smiled as he recalled the quip a friend had made thirty years ago on a train to Chicago: “The last time they straightened these tracks was when they brought Lincoln’s body home for burial!”
    Lester glanced up as a woman’s voice shrilly commanded, “Tommy! Wait for me! Don’t run with that soda—you’ll spill it!”
    The boy made three more running steps and halted beside Lester’s seat. He stared at the colored pages on Lester’s lap.
    “Wha’ cha doin’, mistah? Makin’ a comic book?”
    Lester guessed that the short red-haired boy must be about seven or eight.
    “Something like that,” he answered. “I’m trying to learn how to color better.”
    “Tommy, what are you doing? Who are you talking to there?”
    “Some ol’ weird guy who’s tryin’ to color,” said the boy, spinning around in circles as he spoke.
    “Well leave him alone. You know what I’ve told you a million times.”
    “I’ve got a new comic, mistah,” said Tommy, reaching into a plastic bag and spilling his drink on his own shoes, the sleeve of Lester’s jacket, and Lester’s Van Gogh calendar. “Ooops. See? Archie an’ Jughead an’ Reggie an’ V’ronica an’ Betty an’ Mistah Weatherby an’ . . . .”
    “Tommy! Look what you did! Come with me so I can wipe your good shoes off!” And she pulled him after her by the sleeve of his wool coat.
    “‘Bye, mistah!”
    “‘Bye, Tommy.”
    Lester opened a small pack of tissues and dabbed the calendar which now had large ripples where the liquid had swollen the paper. He frowned slightly, though his eyes were unfocused. He recalled drawing a Jughead cartoon six years ago and submitting it to a men’s magazine.
    In it, Jughead was wearing his usual saw-edged felt cap, but his eyes and mouth were mere dots, his face was almost circular, and in place of a nose he had a large red nipple. Miss Grundy was chastising him before his classmates: “Jughead! In all my forty years of teaching, you’re the biggest boob I’ve ever seen!” Two years later, when the editor paid him and published it, Lester had been furious to learn they had made some changes: Jughead’s nose and the breasts of Betty and Veronica had been enlarged to twice their previous sizes, an obscene participle had been inserted before the word boob, and the phrase mentioning Miss Grundy’s forty years of teaching had been completely deleted.
    Even more offensive to Lester was when the same magazine had drawn huge penises in the hands of five big prison inmates whom Lester had portrayed reaching toward the zippers of their jeans. As in the original, they were in a prison laundry room, surrounding a slightly built inmate wearing wire-rim glasses. Lester’s original caption had read “Whoa! Stop, guys! A philatelist is just a stamp collector!” but the editor had altered his wording, too, making the point with obscene explicitness.
    Today Lester felt his old anger returning, augmented now by anger with himself. He took his small notebook out of his jacket and began paging through it. From the eighty-odd pages which were covered with joke and cartoon ideas, he tore out seven which he might use in a bookstore. Then he turned to the front of the notebook and tore out the page with his name, address, phone number, and offer of a hundred-dollar reward to the finder.
    He put the seven pages with ideas into his billfold and crumpled the other loose page into his jacket pocket. Then he took the rest of the notebook to the men’s room, tore its pages out, and tossed some into the toilet and some into the waste container.

16

    Lester phoned Bonnie shortly after he let himself into his apartment, petted all five cats, and sorted through his mail to see what bills had arrived while he was away. Ten minutes into their conversation he told her he had made a major decision that would affect her and he therefore felt obligated to tell her about it now so that she would be able to deal with it.
    “What’s that?” she asked with slight apprehension at the way he had phrased the preliminaries.
    “I’ve decided what I’d like you to bring me for my natal anniversary when you come here in March.”
    “Really! You prune face! You nearly gave me heart failure. O.K.—you have my full attention. What do you want?”
    “I’m trying to get back to learning what I couldn’t learn in school about colors. I’ve been doing some things these past couple days with some kiddy felt tips, and I have some other plans beyond that. If you approve of the idea, babes, I’d like you to get me a couple of cheap canvases and a small starter kit of oils. Maybe that will be—besides your own wonderful, adorable, intelligent, witty, and totally succulent self, of course—maybe that will be my bliss.”
    “Really! You dirty stick in the mud, that’s great! I’ll go look for some tomorrow.”

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...

This appears in a pre-2010 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine. Saddle-stitched issues are no longer printed, but you can requesting it “re-released” through amazon sale as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.

This appears in a pre-2010 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine. Saddle-stitched issues are no longer printed, but you can requesting it “re-released” through amazon sale as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.

This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of Down in the Dirt magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
printed, but you can requesting it
“re-released” through amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book!
Email us for re-release to order.

This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of Down in the Dirt magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
printed, but you can requesting it
“re-released” through amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book!
Email us for re-release to order.