A few years after arranging to work on my Ph.D. dissertation back in the U.S., not being able to afford to continue living in Paris, I sat in a cafe in that tiny town in Kansas in the far room at the back table every morning working on the dissertation. Customers would wander in, have a meal, hang around talking for a while and then go out. Then some others would come in and so on, just as one would expect. They got used to me being there though now and then someone would ask what I was doing every day in that booth, usually in the form of a smiling kind of jab. Like, one guy always asked me every time he came in, "Ya doin your homework again? Ha Ha Ha!" I'd just say yeah and keep working. One day another guy like him asked what I was working on. I contemplated my answer as I watched him chewing his chicken fried steak with his mouth wide open, his timid, beat-up little wife quietly sipping her soup bent way down over it. I replied something about how I was working on an analysis of an undeciphered script from South Asia. He held his fork steady in mid-air, his mouth still open for a second. Then he said, without swallowing, "Oh, well, I never wanted to get into that myself." I was like, right.
After a while, some of the conversations I heard just got too good to be true, particularly since I have written and published a lot of short stories in my life and plays and dialogue is one of my favorite sports. I used to teach short story writing, once upon a time, in a New Age bookshop back in California and I taught dialogue writing by making my students take the bus all day long and just write down snippets as fast as they could of real dialogue that they heard. It's hard to keep writing fast enough so there are usually breaks between the snippets but it doesn't take long to get the hang of how it really sounds. You'd think we'd all know how dialogue sounds since we do it and hear it nearly every day of our lives. But you take the regular guy, if he tries to write it, it sounds stiff and formal, all wrong. But get it right and anybody can recognize it. It's funny, that.
So, once nobody paid me any attention anymore, I started writing down what they said verbatim, just once in a while, when it was great stuff that I couldn't resist. I just pulled my file filled with these snippets and I thought I'd share one with you today. I love this stuff because it's just exactly what people actually say and how they say it, including the odd breaks and changes of subject. This is one of my favorites, taken straight from two guys sitting at a table near me in that cafe one day (I've altered the names):
Verbatim I
Waitress: Anybody havin dessert? They're good. I tested them both.
B: I'm having both. I'm a big guy. I can have both.
A: How long you say you live in Ark City?
B: Ten years. Rebuildin old barns.
A: Well there's a guy there. He was married to Violet Beaver at one time.
B: You ever been to that Winoka rattlesnake hunt?
A: Never been. I'd like to sometime.
B: When they go out and catch em. Just open the door, I could smell em. I don't like snakes anyway. They find the biggest one. Broke the record last year. Then they have a big rattlesnake fry.
A: Eel's pretty good. You just cut the head off and turn it inside out like a sock. Real oily. Good. We used to catch em. We'd stretch that hide over a pitchfork handle. Dad would make shoestrings out of it.
A: He was a wiry guy. Liked things like that.
B: It went on for like a week. Eel, yeah, tastes like catfish.
A: I hauled some hot oil into an old truckstop. Slept. They had snake hunts there. Went down 51. Went back to Urban, Texas. I'm sure that's the highway we took. I took that oil up to Utah for drilling mud. But it set up like a caste. Couldn't get it out. They said I had to go up to Chicago. I wouldn't. They said I had to. Hell, I wouldn't.
B: Chicago, Illinois? I heard that was a bad place to go.
A: Yeah. I went south to that hot place plant. Southwest of Enid. Tryin to think of the damn milepost out there. Can't think of it. There was this guy - Pistol Olysses - he lives out there.
B: Twelve hours on a drillin rig you feel like you have jet lag.
A: I got two good tomato plants. Frost got em.
B: Frost didn't get mine. I live on that hill. Must be the wind blew it off.
A: I'm goin to go down to the rodeo. Might see a lot of people down there.
B: I'm goin fishin. I got to fix my rear seal - leakin. Then I'll spend two or three four days.
A: Yeah. They got that wild hog deal - judge em. They got 104 acres.
B: A year before that, what when the hogs got loose, '53 or '57. They was haulin those wild hogs out in boats. Still see a hog there sometimes that's been hidin.
A: You know those sandstone deals on houses? Old Preacher Lovely puts that on.
B: He dropped dead two nights ago. Funeral's Tuesday. He was in to that Tee Pee stuff. Gen-u-iine black powder man.
A: He was a hay-haulin son-of-a-bitch. I'll tell you what - he'd take those bales as fast as you could put them to him. He weighed about 180, I guess. I mean, two of them was puttin them to him and he was stackin them right. Just got out of the Army. I was about 6 years old.
B: Last flood here was '76. Burnback Walkway - he was still alive. He had a bunch of pigs in the barn - got them in the house. Lost the rest of em. I drove by a few days later. He was tryin to get them out of the house.
A: When that water gets a-flowin it gets a-flowin.
B: Three acres ain't enough for some people.
A: You can't do nothin with three acres.
B: All right. Well, better get goin.
I got to know most of the people in town sitting at that table, at least the ones who ate out from time to time, though they didn't really get to know me much, just that I was this oddball from California who was sitting there doing homework when she should have been out feeding cows or baking pies like the other women. Usually I just pretended to mind my own business when they were talking and worked on my dissertation but sometimes I just couldn't not listen. Usually it was entertaining, sometimes irritating like the time I finally yelled at two preachers and a barber sitting in the next room calling Iranians "A-rabs", informing them that Iranians are not Arabs and in particular their language is not related to Arabic. That just irked me. Surprisingly, after that they often asked me to validate information they had and not at all facetiously, so that was interesting.
But there was one series of conversations, all on the same guy for the same reason, that went on for a couple of months and it was just finally so great a story that I actually wrote a short story about it. It's one of my favorite short stories that I've ever written so I'm enthusiastic about including it in this blog. I hope you enjoy it. The story is based on real events, the style is my own:
Bear Hunting
This land has passive victims. It’s easy to hunt them. You buy a license, it’s $18 for a fish, $20 for a turkey and for a deer $10 on your own land and $50 not on your own land. Clearly, all of these creatures aren’t the brightest bulbs in the socket, the sharpest pins on the corkboard, though they bet on being the swiftest beasts in the forest. If not, they’re dinner. Kind of makes you stop and think. Basically defines dumb luck, if you want to look at it that way.
It’s not too stressful a hobby. Buy a gun, drive a truck to a muddy parking spot, wear orange so you don’t end up shot, wander around at dawn hoping something will run right out in front of you, drag its head to a taxidermist and butcher the rest to chow down on during the short winter between frozen pizzas and trips to Macdonald’s. Of course it’s cheaper and easier to buy a frozen turkey at the grocery store but let’s not go into that neck of the philosophical woods.
The best part is the bragging. And getting to dress up in clothes that make you look like a five-year old in the school play Babes in Toyland where you get to be the tree.
There’s a guy in town that is pretty good at this. Call him Spike. Spike is an enthusiastic hunter. He has the outfits, the hardware and the licenses. Been at it since he was a boy and the way he tells it, he can really nail that kill if he’s got a mind to.
So last season Spike decided to branch out. He found out about a hunting party he could buy his way into up in Canada north of Alberta in the Northwest Territory. Really out in the boonies, even with a native guide to keep them on track in those grizzly mountains. The target? Bears. Well, bears and all the wolves they also felt like offing. Wolf glut is what was said. Kill as many as you like. Well, you can imagine that Spike was rarin to go. He convinced his wife it was a good idea by buying her a new SUV which cost about the same as this tasty expedition. Still, she took out life insurance on him and his eighteen-year old son started hanging out with him a lot instead of hanging out with his girlfriend. After all, Spike’s never walked on tilted ground before and as for the altitude, well here we’re below sea-level and there it’s the mountains and Spike is a good eighty pounds overweight if he’s an ounce, lodged mostly where it started, in his belly. So that they figured if the bears didn’t dismember him and the wolves didn’t share him then it was likely that he was going to have a breathing problem. He didn’t think so, of course. He talked about it in the local café, described the bear he was going to get. Then it became two bears, how he was going to have them stuffed for his already multi-headed living room and eat the rest.
It was enquired how he planned to bring two dead bears back to Southeast
Kansas from that mountain path in Canada but that didn’t seem to him to be
a problem. You see he was in his element. He was Spike, the big game
hunter, leader of the pack of would-be macho men in Deer Falls and his name would be heard far and wide, his reputation set for life. As the big day approached, he described the details of the plan, the flight he had booked from Wichita up to Canada, the guns he was going to take. Townsfolk began to worry he was actually really going to do this and not wanting to hurt his feelings or anything, they tried subtle ways of psychologically suggesting to him that maybe deer or turkeys weren’t the optimum preparation for wolves and grizzly bears. He didn’t seem to mind the gentle criticism; took it in his stride. Rhetorical questions were laid before him such as would it be difficult to follow a native guide on a pathless climb through the forested cliffs and musings like was it really true if you peed around the boundaries of your camp it didn’t matter if the fire went out while you were sleeping? People worried about Spike, after all. They’d known him for years, all his life and theirs, in fact, and the little slights and annoyances of the past didn’t
really matter too much against the possibility of Spike’s being torn to
ribbons by an eight-hundred pound behemoth of the wilderness. His wife
started looking a little worse for wear as the day approached, her hair a bit frizzier than usual, her pallor pale, in direct relationship to Spike’s improving ruddy complexion and his jollier-than-ever guffaw. Until at last people became resigned. He was just going to go if he was going to go, that was obvious. His wife and son began to accompany him to the café for breakfast, lunch and dinner and say thanks to God for what they had before them. His wife often pointed out how good their steaks were and how beef came from cattle which were penned and slaughtered just miles from here (as were the vegetables on their plates, too). But Spike didn’t pay her any mind. He just said she was being silly while his son ate quietly, staring down at his food. It’s bad to be eighteen, a single child and figure your role model wasn’t going to last too much longer.
People began to speculate if his body would ever even be found. Did bears eat the whole person or did they just cut out the pancreas and take the hands like the Japanese did them? Nobody was really sure until the post mistress who was the one in town who subscribed to all those popular magazines said she knew for a fact from an article she had read in the National Geographic that what the bear didn’t finish off those wolves would and use his bones for toothpicks at that. Everyone agreed there would have to be a memorial plaque put up in his honor even if the body was never recovered. He was the bravest man in town even if he was also
the stupidest and that meant there ought to be something that had his name
on it permanently. They thought of naming a street after him if they ever
got any of the street signs that the county had long ago promised them.
Maybe the old abandoned gymnasium next to the torn-down high school could be given in his name.
But speculation about the future was nothing in the face of the reality of the ever pressing present. The big day was coming. Five nights before his leaving date the café began to fill up with townsfolk a little more than normal, everyone come to hear him tell his plans and see their old friend probably for the last time. They figured by now at least it would be a good story, how first the bear had ripped his arms off, etc.
Then the eve of the big day came and everyone came to sit near his table where he and his family ate their last dinner together. He was off the next morning, he told them all. Flight left at noon. He was coming back with two grizzlies, they’d see. It was going to be magnificent. He’d probably be elected mayor after that.
The next day around two p.m. a few people thought they saw Spike
driving down his street. Couldn’t be. His flight was gone, he was on his way to his destiny. But people came down to the café that evening and put their heads together. More than one swore they saw him driving around that
afternoon. Then the postmistress came in and said yep, something had gone
wrong with the flight from Wichita and he was driving to Canada instead. In fact, he had already left and told her he figured it would take about thirty-six hours of continuous driving to get there but he was up to it. Everyone asked but what went wrong with the flight? Wouldn’t they take his guns? No, that wasn’t it, she said. She looked uncomfortable. They all knew: sworn to secrecy. But to swear the postmistress to secrecy was like giving a dog a bone and hoping he wouldn’t chew it. So they just kept asking her, well, was the engine bad on the plane, stuff like that, just wearing down her resolve until they could see sweat appearing on her upper lip as she ate her grilled chicken with a trembling fork. The room got kind of quiet as they waited for the stress of it to break her.
Finally, she put down her coffee cup and said to the multitude, “All
right, but this can’t leave the room.” They all said they wouldn’t tell a soul.
“He got the flight on time,” she said. “Then the ticket counter girl asked for his passport.” Yeah? They all said. They held a steady quiet.
“Well, he didn’t have one,” she said. “He didn’t know he was supposed to, that’s all. The ticket agent didn’t seem to understand why not. After all, he had booked the flight months ago and had his ticket in his hand for weeks. There had been plenty of time to apply for a passport. So why the heck hadn’t he done it? “But it’s just Canada!” he had exclaimed.
“So those flight attendants wouldn’t let him on the plane and he couldn’t get his money back. They said with a voter’s reg and a driver’s license he could cross the border in a car so that was why he was driving.”
Some said it was the hand of God that had blinded him to the need to apply for a passport, that it was to save his family a loss and that Spike was just pig-headed and wouldn’t see the sign. Instead, to the further concerns of his wife he had taken off in the car north.
Maybe a week went by. It seemed like a week anyhow. Then they heard Spike was back. But he didn’t come back to the café. People waited. Then it filtered down from the post office what had happened. Well, Spike had gotten there all right, drove like a sleepless maniac right through all the way to Canada, gotten through the border with his Kansas driver’s license and up through Alberta which no one else had ever seen, up to the Northwest Territory and found the hunting party. It was an amazing bit of
tracking. But God had stepped in again and had started the rain just as he
arrived. And to make matters worse every one of the other men had each
already bagged a bear. No kidding. But once that rain started they didn’t
see a single more bear in those woods the whole week. And no wolves either. So Spike just hung out with the guys swearing he was going to come back next year and this time he was going to make sure the sleeping bag he bought at Wal-Mart was not one made for a ten-year old. The men had
nodded and wished him luck.
Spike’s now been farther north than anyone else around here. He’s
running for mayor. Folks say he’s got a good chance.
