CHAPTER IV
When I got back to the hotel I washed up for lunch—certainly an unnecessary gesture—and called our tycoon—henceforth to be called Marshall—in Palm Beach. He was in a jolly mood as if he had conned this not totally anonymous writer into a state of distress in the most remote part of the United States.
“But the whole point is that his daughter from Costa Rica told me not to come back.”
“Strang doesn't have any daughter from Costa Rica. He has a daughter in the navy, but she's stationed with NATO in Italy. Pretty, plump like Emmeline, a first-rate kid named Aurora, an awful thing to call a girl.”
“I take it he likes the northern lights.” I was making time, trying to get over the confusion about daughters. “What's the prognosis on this drug thing?”
“We haven't heard. There's a drug firm in Switzerland I have an interest in that's trying to isolate the nature of its effect. My daughter's sending you a medical history. I don't want you to lose interest. Frankly, I've known him almost twenty years, however slightly at the beginning, and I'd like to see him figured out.”
After I hung up the outdoor pay phone, I looked up into the sun and pondered the manipulative powers of the very rich. I had always been secure in my trade, and a man had averred that I was a fop and said my life's work had been “nice,” certainly the feeblest of intensives; then casting about for something to do I thought of a series about real life, a series about people who do the actual work of the world but are never written about. Years ago, for a lavish sum, I wrote a screenplay for an ultramogul about thoroughbred horses. This mogul never said anything much to me before or after the project except “Make sure our horse wins.” Maybe he just needed something to read. If you have hundreds of millions of dollars, the true price of a screenplay is like a trip to a bookstore. And Marshall would be getting his story for free.
Lunch at the bar offered a rise in spirit. It was all-you-can-eat of fresh-caught whitefish, and I polished off five delicious pieces with cold beer. The rather ample waitress told me the record was twenty-three pieces, eaten by a four-hundred-pound logger, while the women's record was seventeen. An actor once said to me that only in the Midwest is overeating still considered an act of heroism. In any event, my dad had always insisted that fish was brain food, and I felt properly stoked for an afternoon of study, reserving the evening for snooping.
TAPE 2: Strang's books are nearly a dead loss: Golze's Handbook of Dam Engineering, Irrigation Principles and Practices by Hansen, Israelsen, and Stringham. The third book, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's On Growth and Form is the only one more than vaguely accessible to the layman. It is about why everything on Earth is shaped the way it is, an idea that naturally never occurred to me. But what a tremendous idea! My only viable scientific observation is that I dream more on the waxing than on the waning of the moon. But dreams are certainly a dreary mess compared to the reasons why all things, animate and inanimate, are shaped the way they are. Of course, twenty pages of the book gave me a headache—such abstruse reading isn't my habit. It is midafternoon, and I wonder if Strang is crawling through the brush in search of his legs. There is nothing pathetic in the thought because there is nothing pathetic in the man. I was struck by his essential kindness toward me, toward his daughter, toward the dog, and this after being intimidated by his appearance and his comments on energy. But then I am sensitive to implied criticism to such a degree that I might roll or wobble through life like a perpetually intact egg. When I came back to the hotel after lunch, I looked overlong at a group of young nymphets playing computer games, one of whom could be best described as a ball-buster. My hostess behind the counter frowned on this stare, but it doesn't matter. What would I say to these girls? “What's your favorite color?” I have the distinct feeling that I'm in a foreign country, the sensation that this place has blurred my peripheries. It is strange how the world we think we know, the world we perceived in school, no longer exists. We think colonially. Perhaps the northern Midwest is another country, as is the Northeast, the deep South, Florida by itself, the Southwest, California by itself, and the Northwest. Why do they bother reading the Detroit Free Press up here when Detroit is four hundred miles away? Most of them don't. I am beginning to feel this disassociation strongly. When I got back to the room, my skin magazines had been stacked neatly next to my pillow. There is a sense of humor afoot. If I squint my eyes, crystalline Lake Superior could be the Caribbean. Only it isn't. Since I brought along two cases of well-joggled wine, my main problems will be food and sex. Not oddly, they're the same problems a lot of people have everywhere on Earth. This gives me a slight sense of community, the march of the codeprived. If I touched a nymphet downstairs, I'd get a bullet from a deer rifle from an enraged father. Does Eulia ever crawl through the ferns and up the creekbanks?
I was surprised by a long nap, waking to a beautiful late spring evening. I walked along the harbor beach to give an edge to my appetite. Someone's little mongrel followed me, and I was kept busy throwing sticks for it. Frankly, I was touched on some stupid level that this dog wanted to play. When it followed me to the steps of the bar, I bought a raw hamburger patty and took it back out the door, but the dog was gone. There was the question of what to do with the hamburger. I put it in the pocket of my bush jacket.
Unfortunately, the evening special was the same as lunch —a move to a cabin with a kitchen was definitely in the offing. I had scarcely picked the batter off my first piece of fish when Eulia fairly strode into the bar, stopping in front of my table without a greeting. I stood up so precipitately that I spilled my beer. Her face was dark, and her eyes glistened with tears of anger.
“You're to disregard what I said to you. Come out at daylight. Please don't upset him.”
She rushed out before I could respond. I was so upset I only poked at the rest of my food. She had worn the same sort of fashionable, sporty clothes that my obnoxious ballerina had worn. I ordered the first of many double whiskies and spent the night chatting about the world at large with the bartender-owner, who had an insatiable curiosity which made me an insatiable talker. I got up to go at closing time, and he squinted at me in such a way that I knew either some advice or a pronunciamento was coming.
“You be careful of those Strangs. They can be a rough bunch. I don't know nothing about Robert because he was always overseas. Now Ted got pissed off and moved up to Alaska a hundred miles from anyone. And Karl is over at the maximum security prison in Marquette. I'd a lot rather have an NFL football team after me than Karl.”
“What's he in prison for?” I was a bit groggy from booze and incipient violence.
“That's not for me to say.” He turned away and began counting the till.