Russell Banks - Outer Banks

I was terrified — the sight of one of the most stable creatures I had ever known, one of the most admirably predictable and rational women I had ever met, standing wild-eyed before me with a high-powered rifle zeroed in on my thundering heart, so upset my notion of the real and expected world that anything could have happened, anything, and it would have seemed appropriate. Rochelle could have broken into a Cole Porter song and started tap-dancing her way down the road, using the rifle as a cane, waving over her shoulder at me as she pranced out of sight, the end of a musical comedy based on the exciting life of a girl revolutionary. Or she could have suddenly opened her mouth wide, as if to eat a pear, and shoving the tip of the barrel in, jammed her thumb against the trigger and blown the top of her lovely head away. Or she could have simply squeezed one finger, nothing more than that, just wrinkled her trigger finger one-sixteenth of an inch, and I would have heard the explosion, possibly would have smelled the fire and smoke, seen a shred of the narrow belt of the blue sky fall into my face as I was blown back against the side of my car, my chest an erupting volcano for no more than a split second, and then Nothing, unimaginable Nothing.

With a shudder, I decided it didn’t matter what happened so long as anything could happen. I took another step, then yet another, and gradually, as I neared her, she lowered the barrel of the gun until, by the time I could reach out and touch her shoulder, it was pointing at the ground. With my left hand I took the gun from her, and with my right I reached around her shoulders and drew her to me.

Suddenly she was sobbing, her bony, fragile shoulders hunched and twitching with the sobs. And then it all came out, what he had said in his answer to her letter, what her letter had said about her mother, A.’s first wife, until finally she was blubbering wetly against my chest. “Oh, I don’t understand, I just don’t understand! Why does he have to be that way, why is he so awful? Why? ”

I sighed. It was not going to be easy for me to explain. After all, she was his daughter, his only child. And she loved him.

Event #3: (From the New York Times, Wednesday, May 1, 19——.)

ABERDEEN LAKE, Dist. of Keewatin (AP) — On and off for the last twenty-four years a man with a long gray beard has lived in an empty tomb in a little used cemetery in this tiny (pop. 49) village one hundred miles below the Arctic Circle. He says, “It’s nice and peaceful.

“Well, it’s waterproof and nobody is going to trouble a fella living in a tomb,” says the sixty-five-year-old man, who goes only by the name of Ham.

“They call it a receiving tomb. They put the bodies in there until the ground thaws and they can bury them. But they haven’t used it in a long time,” says the old-timer, an American who refuses to talk about his past.

He considers himself a retiree and draws a $62.50 monthly Social Security check. Does it bother him living in a cemetery?

“No, I kind of like it,” he says. “You know, we all got to die sometime, and this just helps a fella get used to the idea. Besides, it’s kind of nice here.”

Where did he come from? What kind of life did he lead that brought him to this end? “I’m luckier than most,” he says. “I got what I wanted, not what I deserved.”

I read the article with slight, barely conscious interest, prodded by my daily habit of reading every article in the newspaper from beginning to end diligently, regardless of the content, but perhaps also prodded by the vaguely familiar tone of the somewhat cryptic remarks attributed to the old man, an assertiveness tempered by a strangely familiar form of personal humility, a kind of matter-of-fact pride and wisdom that I had not heard in many years. There was a small wirephoto of the graybeard above the article, and when I studied the blurred face, I recognized, in spite of the long beard, the hair, the stooped posture and the obvious aging that had taken place, my friend of long, long ago. It was A.

And thus, once again, after a lapse of what seemed an entire lifetime, I began thinking obsessively about the man. “ Where did he come from? What kind of life did he lead that brought him to this end? ” I chuckled to myself at the poor, befuddled reporter’s questions and imagined A. frustrating the fellow with half-truths and outright lies, flattery and aggression. The reporter should not have been talking to A., I snorted, but me ! He’d never learn the truth from A., not in a million years.

BELIEVING AS I did that each of the above three events, taken separately, could explain A.’s peculiar (to me) absence that Sunday afternoon in February 1975, I had reached a point in my relation to him where almost anything could happen and where whatever did happen would be believable. It would seem “natural,” “right,” consistent with all I had known of him before. In other words, the man had become sufficiently real to me that I could, and therefore should, write a novel about him.

IT WAS ALMOST four o’clock by the time I arrived at my home in Northwood. The sun was setting coldly behind the low hills, dragging a darkening gray blanket across the snowy fields and woods while the temperature tumbled fast toward zero and below. Then, as the sun dropped wholly behind the farthest hill, leaving only a sky fading from red to peach to sooty gray to deep, starry blue, a low cold wind cruised across the snow, from the colder, eastern horizon to the slightly less cold western, as if following the waning light. Then the wind was gone, like a pack of silent dogs, and the night settled motionlessly down to its business of making the icy lakes creak and boom, of making the trees snap, the streams whimper, the hibernating animals underground turn worriedly in their sleep, of making the rocks beneath the snow concentrate their mass.

Inside my house, as soon as I had built the fire to blazing in the library, I sat down at my desk, plucked my pen from the holder, and, opening a blank notebook before me, wrote in large letters on the first page, HAMILTON STARK, A NOVEL. I turned the page, and continued to write.

1

How far back in time is it reasonable to push, before one detaches himself from the near bank and poles himself, guiding the drift back downstream, home again, by straddling the current at midstream, stroke over stroke down to the present? Eh? Back there the stream had narrowed, had run with a swiftness that increased geometrically with each mile as one returned to the source. There were rapids, low overhanging trees with dangerous strange beasts residing among the dark foliage; there were hidden shoals, sudden waterfalls, mythical creatures drinking at the edges of eddies and pools, caves along the banks, dawns savagely bright and silent, dusks that fell in seconds and released at their fall the cacophony of nighttime hunts. And the farther back one poled his fragile craft, the closer one came to the source (that high clear spring where a mountain toad bejeweled by sunlight squats upon a thick pelt of moss and sleeps), the more trivial seemed whatever quandary, shame, or project that characterized one’s present.