Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

With only a small sigh (because she was used to humoring eccentrics), Margie Collier took out a new name tag and obligingly wrote SAMARI in large capital letters. “There you are,” she said with a friendly smile. “I suppose you write Japanese haiku?”

Samari’s response was a puzzled stare, until half a minute later, when enlightenment dawned. “That is not how my name is pronounced!”

Several ego-encounters later, Margie Collier looked up at a registrant, who had signaled her presence simply by the shadow she cast on Margie’s paperwork. The awkward-looking young woman in an unflattering black plaid suit looked faintly ridiculous clutching a vase of red carnations. Margie found herself thinking of Ferdinand the Bull. “Those flowers will look nice in your room,” Margie remarked, hoping that the woman wasn’t planning to tote them around during the conference. She looked in the collection of Poet badges just in case, though.

“They’re not for me!” said the young woman, blushing. “They’re for John Clay Hawkins. For his room, I mean. I’d like to pick up his name tag, too, if I may.”

Margie frowned. “Are you his wife?”

“Certainly not! I am his graduate student. My name is Amy Dillow, and I also have a name tag. Dr. Hawkins will be arriving sometime this afternoon, and I wanted to make sure that his room is ready, and that the copies of his books arrived, and I’ll need his name tag and a copy of the schedule.”

When Margie Collier, still trying to make sense of this, did not reply, Amy sighed with impatience. “Dr. Hawkins,” she explained, “is required reading .”

By whom? thought Margie, but she only smiled, and began to search the desk for the requested items. Some people thought that being rude was the first step to becoming a writer. She found Hawkins’s name tag-not surprisingly-filed in the Poet section. Really , she thought, these male poets seem to attract groupies like maggots to a dead cat . She couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Margie’s husband, a football coach at the junior high, often said that writing-and reading, for that matter-was women’s work, and secretly she agreed with him. Give her a middle-linebacker any old day, instead of these peevish, sensitive artistes that didn’t know spit from come here . Her idea of a real writer was Deidre Bellaire, who was just as sweet as peach jam, and she outsold those poet types by ten thousand to one, so that ought to show them, with their literary airs!

The first scheduled event for the Unicoi Writers’ Conference was a get-acquainted cocktail party, in which all the attendees met in the Nolichucky Room and either asked or endured the Writers’ Conference Litany: What name do you write under? Where do you get your ideas? Should I have heard of you? Outside, a raging thunderstorm lent the appropriate literary atmosphere to the setting. Rose Hanelon decided that the next person who came up to her and said “It is a dark and stormy night” was going to get a cup of punch in the face.

Now she had retreated into a corner, clutching a plastic cup of lukewarm strawberry punch, with nothing but a glazed smile between her and a plot summary. She had long since lost the ability to nod, but the droning woman had yet to notice. Every so often she would pat her crimped brown curls. ( As if anything short of barbecue tongs could have moved them , thought Rose). “And then,” said the aspiring author, prattling happily, mistaking silence for interest, “the heroine gets on a train and goes to New Hampshire. Or do I mean Vermont? Which one is the one on the right? Well, anyway, meanwhile, the hero has decided to go mountain climbing on a glacier. Do they have glaciers in New Hampshire? Well, it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s ever been there. So he goes to a psychic to, you know, see if it’s going to be okay-what with his wooden leg and all, and-”

“Excuse me,” said Rose. “Could I ask you something? If I give you two eggs, can you tell me if the cake will be any good?”

The narrator blinked. “What? The cake? What cake?”

“Any cake,” sighed Rose. “You can’t judge a cake from two eggs, and you can’t judge a book from a plot summary. A bad writer can ruin anything. Just write the book and shut up.” She stalked off in the direction of the hors d’oeuvres, but her way was blocked by a bearded man in a fringed buckskin jacket.

“Hello, little lady,” he beamed at her in a B-movie twang. “You wouldn’t happen to be an editor, would you?”

“Why do you ask?” Her eyes were glittering, the way they always did when people said words like shorty or pulp fiction .

“Why, I just happen to have a new chapbook here that is Rod McKuen and Kahlil Gibran rolled into one. I’m Jess Scarberry.” He paused, waiting for cries of recognition that were not forthcoming. “I’m going to be doing a reading from it at eleven tomorrow. Why don’t you come?” He beamed at a serious young woman in horn-rimmed glasses who was standing near Rose. “And you, too, of course, ma’am.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” said Rose, edging past him as she reached for a cheese cube. Jess Scarberry wandered away in search of other victims.

When he was out of earshot, Amy Dillow snickered. “I can’t believe he thinks anybody will come to his stupid reading,” she sniffed. “John Clay Hawkins is lecturing that hour on the poetic tradition.”

“Really?” Rose wondered what else was going on at that hour. Flea-dipping seemed preferable.

Amy nodded, eyes shining. “He’s been published everywhere! Even the Virginia Quarterly Review . And John Ciardi once called his work well-crafted .”

“That silver-tongued devil,” murmured Rose.

“I’m doing my dissertation on Dr. Hawkins,” Amy confided. “I think Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin are just too overdone, don’t you?”

“Well, that’s because people have heard of them,” said Rose. “I suppose you’d have a better chance of getting a professorship as a Larkin scholar than as a Hawkins expert. Still, it must be useful to be able to discuss the symbolism of the poetry with its author.”

Amy looked shocked. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that! What would he know about that? He just writes them. It’s up to us scholars to determine what they mean. But I do see quite a bit of Dr. Hawkins. I’m sort of working as his volunteer secretary, too. I just hate to see him wasting his time on anything but his Muse.”

Rose grunted. “I wish somebody felt that way about mystery writers.”

“That’s him over there,” whispered Amy, pointing at a silver-haired man with a shiny blue suit and a leathery tan. The substance in his glass did not look like fruit punch. He was surrounded by several other men-an unusual occurrence for a male poet at a writers’ conference. Even Amy seemed to feel that the phenomenon warranted an explanation. “Those other men are also regional poets. That young one in the leather jacket is Carter Jute, and the gaunt, elderly one is Mr. Snowfield. And there’s the guy in the cowboy outfit who just invited us to his poetry class. I don’t know who he thinks he is.”

Rose smiled in the direction of Jess Scarberry, talking shop and, no doubt, chapbooks with the academic gentry of his field. “That,” she said solemnly, “is the poet lariat .”

Meanwhile, in the Poets’ Corner, John Clay Hawkins was smiling genially as the discussion of poetry went on around him. He had already sized up Scarberry as a con man poet, but he wasn’t particularly offended by him. After all, was an iambic pentameter sex life really so much worse than what poor old Snowfield did-using his lackluster lyrics to evade teaching freshmen, and as an excuse for pomposity with other members of his department. Young Jute, he decided, was going through a phase, probably on his way to becoming a William Faulkner clone. He had already acquired the drinking problem, and he seemed to revel in the inaccessibility of his work, as though being incoherent made him smarter than anybody else. Hawkins sometimes wanted to say to these people, “All babies are incoherent, but they grow up. That is the principal difference between an infant and a poet.” But he never said anything so unkind. Other people’s folly didn’t really annoy John Clay Hawkins; they all seemed very remote.