You’re supposing that you hold in your hands a manuscript. A true story I knitted into a fable, tinted with my own brushes, chiseled tappity-tap until its rough edges were erased and nothing but clean, smooth autobiography remained.
You’re entirely wrong, dearest. This isn’t a book at all.
I’m scratching out this first bit last, and you just shuffled past me into the kitchen, yawning, giving me the gimlet-eye routine. You’re ever so good at it, but it doesn’t work on yours very truly; and after you’ve poured yourself some coffee and refilled my chipped brown cup, you’ll ghost your hands over my shoulders and try craftier means of wheedling it out of me. What exactly I’ve been working on all this while.
Well, you may proverbially put up your shoes and kick off your heels and save yourself the botheration—I’m giving this to you tied up with a pretty twine bow later tonight.
I stepped outside very early, while you were still sleeping. Sprawled out and snoring and safe, or as safe as we can ever be again, in the tidy little home we’ve made together. There was enough wind sliding down the brown hills to ruffle my hair, and a scrub jay flashed its wings, pure blue against California porcelain dawn, high above my head, and for the first time, I allowed myself to believe that we can actually get away with it. We can live like this. Not here necessarily, Christ knows I’m well aware the need to skedaddle could descend at any time, but this morning I knew . . . we’ll figure it out.
The pair of us.
Parts of this will disturb you. Whether it’ll be the parts you were a part of, so to speak, or the parts that are new—well, I suppose I’ll just ask after you’re finished reading. I can imagine your mug as you devour this, impatiently turning pages, orderly at first, because you’re awfully orderly, and then papers scattered higgledy-piggledy all over the hardwood.
I might leave, for most of that. Walk to the equestrian-supply store a few miles down the road, the one we discovered lightning fast, remember, with its little door behind the racks of leather chaps, and the speakeasy beyond with the barkeep whose mustache makes him look so wonderfully tragic. Like he lost his one true soul mate years ago, and that soul mate was a devoted sheepdog. I’ll sip whiskey—it’s good here in San José, the contraband, I know you agree—and try to get him to admit he’s wrestled grizzlies. Leaving you to yourself while you read this story that isn’t exactly a story. Because you mustn’t think of it that way. Promise me you won’t?
It’s not a book. This was never a book.
This is a love letter.
◆ One ◆
NOW
New York probably is infested with as savage a horde of cut-throats, rats, treacherous gunmen and racketeers as ever swarmed upon a rich and supine principality.
—STANLEY WALKER, The Night Club Era, 1933
Sitting against the pillows of a Pullman sleeper, bones clacking like the pistons of the metal beast speeding me westward, I wonder if I’m going to die.
The walls of my vibrating coffin are polished mahogany, windows spotless, reflecting onyx midnight presently. I’ve been watching them for several days. When I wasn’t switching trains, which was its own jostling hell and doesn’t bear repeating.
Does Salt Lake City ever bear repeating, really?
I don’t even suppose I took the fastest route cross-country. So long as I was always moving. I remember fleeing New York, still adrift with the shock. Battling sucking currents of lost love and lost city dragging me under. Changing at Chicago I remember—the hustle, the weight of all that metal, the sheer rank sweat of making the connection. I recall prim forests, sloping hills. Downy wheat tufts, crops we tore through like an iron bomb, and desolate empty skies. Big burgs, shabby shacks, towns undeserving of the word, all blurring into America.
But at night it’s been the black window, the white alcove curtain, smells of cigarettes and pot roast and cold cream, and the fever slick coating my brow confirming that I’m going to die.
I’m in shock, possibly. Despair, certainly.
Now it hits me in a crack of panic that I’d prefer death drop by when I’m ninety and not twenty-five, supposing it’s all the same to the Harding administration.
Panting, I tug at my hair. The sudden flare momentarily douses the fire in other locales. I wonder when my bunkmate will return to torment me. I wouldn’t have taken a sleeping car if