

WHEATYARD

Peter Anderson

Copyright © 2013 by Peter Anderson

(KUBOA)/SmashWords Edition

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For Julie and Maddie,

my fondest critics and fiercest fans

"Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable except from the original sources, and, in his case, those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report, which will appear in the sequel."

Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

ONE

Wheatyard came through as a storm, sudden and jarring, then gone not long after.

I first encountered Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard, if that was even his real name, at Cellar Books, the used book store in the basement of the Campus YMCA. It was June 1993, and once again I found myself facing half a row of Sinclair Lewis paperbacks—a long line of tattered and smudged spines interrupted only by the hardcover monolith of Schorer's biography of the author—and wondering if I could spare three dollars for a old copy of Arrowsmith.

Though three dollars might not sound like much, back then it was a real concern. That night, whether or not I bought the book might mean the difference between having a decent dinner or not. I was barely able to pay my rent, and any leftover cash had to stretch for the necessities—food and gasoline—but also for the little things, like books, that would help keep me sane during what I thought would be a long, lonely summer in Champaign.

A week after graduation, I was still in town, enduring the already stifling heat, with only second-hand books to console me. Alone but, as it turned out, only for the moment.

***

I stood with that odd angled-neck posture so endemic to bookstore habitués, scanning the titles I already knew by heart: Babbitt, Main Street, It Can't Happen Here, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth, all of which I had read, which made my decision more a process of elimination than an actual choice. After a few minutes, my neck aching, my internal debate shifted completely from "Can I buy Arrowsmith?" to "Why shouldn't I?" I reached for the book and began to remove it from the shelf when I heard a cluck of disapproval from over my shoulder, seemingly from out of nowhere.

There stood a rumpled, bemused figure, shaking his head like a gently scolding schoolmaster. He was of below-average height, a few inches shorter than me, with an unkempt beard, greasy hair which hadn't been washed for a week or more, and intense brown eyes which peered at my selection—which I unconsciously began to return to the shelf—with a riveting stare.

"Do you really want to read that?" he gently asked.

"I like Lewis," I replied defensively, too thrown by the suddenness of the encounter to question what business of his it was, as I realized only later that I had every right to ask.

"Yeah, Babbitt was alright, and Main Street had some good moments, but Lewis was just too safe. Conventional, middlebrow, not much better than the bourgeoisie that he loved to satirize."

I was silent, taken aback at this unprovoked attack on an author I admired. Lewis was clearly no Babbitt, and I was about to strenuously argue that point when the strange man continued.

"You like reading, though, or you wouldn't be here," he said. "Nobody on campus even knows this store is here, and the school is supposedly some institute of higher learning. Learning and Labor, pffft."

His denigration of the school's motto, of its highly admirable goals, peeved me even more than his criticism of Sinclair Lewis. I was again about to object when he reached into his knapsack and withdrew a bundle of papers, which bulged two inches thick in an unwieldy and misaligned stack.

"Here, you like reading, you should read this," he said, rolling the bundle and shoving it under my arm. "An extra copy, yours to keep," he added, nodding and flicking his index finger from his temple toward me in some sort of salute, then brushed past me toward the exit.

"I get to campus every now and then," he said over his shoulder as he walked past the cashier's desk and through the doorway. "See you around," I heard his voice echo from the corridor outside.

The entire exchange lasted less than thirty seconds, but it had an odd effect on me. Puzzled, I walked up to the cashier, the store's owner and sole employee, with whom I had a nodding acquaintance from my past two years of haunting the stacks.

"Who was that?" I asked, quite curious.

"Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard," the owner replied. "Strange guy. He stops in here now and then, after going to the copy shop down the hall. Always complains there's no copy shops out in Tillsburg, which I guess is where he lives."

I puzzled over the odd name as I unrolled the sheaf of papers. On top was a nearly blank page which read "Longing Dissolute Midnight, Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard, April 1993."

Glancing over the edge of the page and reading upside down, the owner seemed to recognize it.

"Hmmm," he said. "Must be another one of his manuscripts."

"Why, does he have a lot of them?"

He laughed. "You might say that."

TWO

The invitation to meet for a beer arrived in the mail a week later, the message scrawled on the back of a sixties-vintage postcard for Mammoth Cave. Typical of him, I realized even that early on, to not bother calling on the phone.

Our second meeting had been a few days earlier, when we happened to cross paths outside the Student Union. He seemed friendlier this time, and in the vending room over weak coffee—mine black, his loaded to a pale beige with sugar and fake creamer—he spoke with animation, words spilling out of him, about something called pomo literature. It was only much later that I discovered the term was shorthand for postmodern, the style of writers like Barth and Gaddis and Pynchon, whom I knew nothing about then and still remain only vaguely aware of now. But his enthusiasm was touching, even addictive, and when he suggested we meet out in Tillsburg sometime I gladly passed along my phone number. But apparently he ignored the number, and instead only used it to look up my address before mailing off the postcard.

I had been to Tillsburg once before, passing through as I aimlessly drove around the countryside. Times like those—wandering alone, with nothing better to do—were common then, even before graduation when my few friends were still around. I remembered Tillsburg as a tidy little island of frame houses huddled in an ocean of cornfields, isolated and self-contained. Bowling alley, pizza place, grocery, laundromat—to me, all of the most basic amenities one needed in a town. I didn't discover Tillsburg until after I found an apartment near campus, but later reflected that I could easily have lived in the town while I was in school, were it not for my superior attitude and the long drives to and from Champaign in the middle of winter on a poorly-maintained two-lane county road.

Central Illinois winters, and the frequent ice storms and routine whiteouts from winds whipping across the snow-covered, table-flat fields, were already nothing more than memories from my college days to reminisce over. Winter was long past, with the summer heat still rising and the soybeans first poking up from the soil. Mile after mile of identically monotonous fields flew past me as I single-mindedly drove toward Tillsburg, wondering about this Wheatyard character.

The windows were down, the wind whipping at my left ear, my arm extended and urging the air inside. Though the air-conditioning was functional I kept it turned off, which conserved gas—putting off the next fillup for another day or two—but irritated my allergies. My nose twitched as I drove on, the pollen and whatever else blew out of the fields tormenting my sinuses.

Despite my superior attitude I had to admit it was beautiful here, in its subtle way. My classmates from the coasts always complained about the dullness of the terrain—flat, waterless, almost completely devoid of trees or any landmarks—between Champaign and Chicago, the town where they went to school and the city where they fled to after graduation, either staying in the city for new jobs or hurrying to O'Hare for flights back home to regions of more obvious beauty.

Seeing beauty here required some imagination. The way the bean sprouts swayed languorously in the breeze, the distant line of trees hinting of a hidden stream, the weathered planks of barns that had seen better days, the rising heat shimmering the air, the rod-straight road of sticky black asphalt trailing away into infinity. And the sunsets, god, the sunsets. All that endless sky, wisps of purple rainless clouds, light falling from pink to orange to red to black and another night of a million stars.

Years earlier the beauty would have been easier to appreciate. Wooden barns freshly painted a vivid red, strikingly set off against the jet black of the shingled roof. Spinning windmills pivoting back and forth in the shifting breeze, the fields a patchwork of different-colored grains, scatterings of black-spotted cows dotting the distant pastures.

But the windmills had ceased to function, idling rusty and decrepit when they still stood at all, the water they once drew from the ground no longer needed after the last of the livestock was sold off. The once-red barns were in similar disrepair, not painted in ten or twenty years, many tumbling down and all of them faded to gray and supplanted by stark white buildings of precast aluminum, while the mottled fields had dulled to the uniform green of corn and soybeans.

I had driven through similar terrain so many times that all of it—the swaying sprouts and rising heat and fading barns and asphalt trailing away to the horizon—went mostly unnoticed, lingering only briefly in the furthest reaches of my mind as I drove on, wary of oncoming cars that toyed with the center line, toward Tillsburg and the odd host who awaited me.

***

Though I had forgotten to bring the postcard, I remembered the address was on Railroad Street, some number in the five hundreds. I drove past a long line of tiny but well-kept houses, none of which seemed right for him, before reaching the last house on the street, the last vestige of civilization before the vast expanse of open fields and the relentless west wind.

No well-kept house here. It was a sixties-era ranch, the shutters falling down or missing completely and the gutters dented in from carelessly leaned ladders, none of it painted in at least ten years. The lawn was scraggly and pocked with weeds, the rusty mailbox stood askew, and the screen door hung precariously on its hinges, the steel mesh torn and offering no shield against insects.

Yes, this had to be Wheatyard's house. The hovel of a distracted genius.

I steered just off the edge of the street, gravel crunching beneath the tires, and climbed out of the car as I took in the whole pitiful scene. I closed the door quietly behind me. Why I did so—quietly—I couldn't really say. Wheatyard was expecting me, and for once I wasn't particularly late. There was nothing about my presence that required stealth; as it was, he was probably watching me through the filthy front window.

But he had already been so secretive and guarded about himself, enough to make me sense there was something I needed to uncover, that sneaking up on him somehow seemed like the right thing to do. For all his boisterousness, his bold and unreserved opinions, his devil-may-care attitude, it seemed like he was holding something back, just what I couldn't even guess.

I strolled up the sidewalk—its meandering cracks populated by scattered villages of weeds, dandelions and other stray greenery—as casually as I could. Seeing the doorbell broken and barely hanging by a single frayed wire, I had just raised my hand to knock when the screen door suddenly flew open and out popped Wheatyard, who halted his stooped-over Groucho entrance and snapped to mock-attention, as if he was a buck private before a five-star general, or maybe a subservient butler facing his billionaire boss. Or so I imagined buck privates and butlers to be—my life was safely, cautiously middle-class, high enough up the ladder to avoid the military but still low enough to only guess what having a servant was like.

Wheatyard nodded before turning back toward the house. He reached for the doorknob, holding the screen door open with his elbow, then grabbed the knob and yanked the door shut. I caught just a glimpse of the house's interior, which was dark despite the bright afternoon and seemed almost fusty, too much so for an irreverent iconoclast like him. I imagined old family portraits in heavy cherrywood frames, Victorian parlor furniture and moth-eaten old lace, although all I actually saw inside was one small corner of a portrait frame, which my mind filled in with the stern faces of a Midwestern farm couple from a distant era, grimly peering into the camera after another poor harvest and paying for a cabinet photo against their better fiscal judgment. Kind of American Gothic, but even more desperate.

He turned back to me with a smile, wagging a finger in mock reproach, not unlike the schoolmaster posture he took at the book store while reproving my reading tastes.

"Uh uh," he said, guiding me away from the door with a sweep of his forearm. "Can't have you invading the inner sanctum. We'll go somewhere else."

"Where to, then?" Though I was eager to see inside the house, I was also wary of what I might find. So I decided, given his subtle resistance, that his somewhere else would have to do.

"I've got a favorite spot in town where they keep the beer cold and treat me moderately well. Or at least tolerate me."

I nodded, leaning presumptively toward the driveway, where toward the backyard I had glimpsed a dented, paint-peeling Chevy pickup. I assumed that, as my host for the afternoon, he would gladly drive us wherever we were going. That just seemed like the right thing for him to do. And of course I hardly knew my away around Tillsburg.

"We'll take your car," he said assuredly, without a moment of hesitation. "You drive."

"Sure," was all I said as we walked out to the curb, ignoring his slight. I realized that I shouldn't have been surprised that he expected me to drive. During the short time I had known him, Wheatyard had already confounded my expectations several times, so this latest instance shouldn't have been unexpected and certainly not confounding.

I cranked the ignition three times before it finally started up, and we pulled away from the curb. Car maintenance simply wasn't in my budget back then, even as critical as reliable wheels were in sprawling Champaign, and all I could afford was an oil change once or twice a year and new antifreeze every November. Fortunately during the summers the car seemed more forgiving, the omnipresent heat keeping everything slick and smooth and functional, though the old battery was often balky. As long as I didn't run the air conditioning too long without giving it a rest, everything would be okay.

I kept the air off now that we were in town. Wheatyard didn't seem the type to wallow in refrigerated comfort anyway—his sweat-soaked brow and mild body odor suggested that his house didn't even have a window unit. That old pickup truck certainly didn't have air either; he wasn't the type to spend money on a freon recharge every year, not when there were typewriter ribbons to be replaced and manuscripts to be copied and mailed.

Or beer to be drunk.

***

Simon's Bowl and Tap was just that, a narrow bowling alley of just eight lanes with an old and formerly glorious bar lining the front wall. It must have been glorious back in the fifties when the place was built and the area was still flush with cash, and farmers in town to deliver crops or pick up provisions would stop at the bar, spending generously and enjoying elusive male camaraderie before retreating again to the family solitude of the farm.

Those good times were clearly past. I could see that the farm crisis of the early eighties had taken its toll; the most recent improvement to the room was a Centipede arcade game, which was probably once popular with farm kids who tagged along with their dads but was now shoved forgotten into a dusty corner. Everything in the room seem to date from that Centipede machine and earlier; you could almost pinpoint the exact year—maybe 1981 or '82—when incomes and fortunes first began to dry up, then withered away like drought-stricken stalks of sweet corn.

We pushed through the screen door—spanned by a metal Dr. Pepper sign hung at waist height, like a tackily-colored cummerbund—and walked inside, where it was pitch-dark compared to the late June glare outside. But soon my eyes adjusted and I could take in my surroundings. The long walnut bar, its top inlaid with narrow wood strips, the tarnished beer tap stand—Bud, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Hamm's and Stag, the local swill I drank in town whenever I was broke—and the deer portrait hanging over the back bar's mirror, green-glowing lighted columns at each end of the mirror, half-filled sheets of bowling league standings tacked to the side wall, snapshots of family picnics and Christmas dinners and Ozarks vacations taped on every spare surface.

"So, why Tillsburg?" I had to ask. It was one of many questions that had nagged at me during the past few weeks.

"Why not Tillsburg?" he replied, a bit too loudly, while glancing at the bartender with a knowing, almost conspiratorial look. As if to say to him, "This kid isn't one of us, Sam," or Hank or whatever the bartender's name was. No introductions had been made, nor even hinted at. But Wheatyard's look was ignored by the bartender; if Sam or Hank felt that he and Wheatyard were of the same people, he certainly wasn't showing it. They exchanged no words—not when we entered the room, nor when we sat down at the first barstools, nor when Wheatyard called out for two PBRs. He tossed down three singles, from which the bartender silently withdrew two bills before retreating to the far end of the bar where the older man leaned, craning his neck to stare at the overhead TV and the tabloid news show that was airing.

Considering that we were the only patrons there, in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, I thought we'd get friendlier service, especially in what was supposedly Wheatyard's stomping grounds, at his watering hole in what I assumed was his hometown.

"Tillsburg's friendly," he said, despite all evidence to the contrary, "and cheap, and easy to get around in." He voice was very matter-of-fact, as if his claims had been rehearsed or repeated frequently, either to others or himself. "And the house is paid for, which wouldn't be the case up in the city."

I almost laughed at Wheatyard calling Champaign a city. For me, and especially for my grad school friends, Champaign was no more than a town, a two-year layover in our careers. To us, the nearest city was Chicago, two long interstate hours to the north. Though I appreciated Champaign—much more so than my friends, who couldn't wait to leave—calling it a city seemed overly generous.

And if Champaign was merely a town, then a place like Tillsburg was even less—a moribund, dying village barely left over from another era. Though I once thought I could live in Tillsburg, that really would have only been for affordability, a cheap place to sleep while my real life—school, stores, the bars—took place twenty miles away in Champaign. I had to admit that my opinion of farm towns, while not as dismissive as that of my friends, was still condescending.

But on that hot afternoon at Simon's, I wasn't interested in Tillsburg. I was there to find out about Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard, that puzzle whom I barely knew, that cipher who beckoned me with an old postcard from Mammoth Cave. Asking about the town was merely an opening.

"So, about your book," I started.

"Which one?" he replied. "There are so many of them."

"The one you gave me," I said. "Longing Dissolute Midnight."

I had only made it through a few hundred pages of the book before finally giving up after a week, my mind overwhelmed by the densely-packed narrative. The little I read was a riotous, glorious mess. Great Crusaders mingled with Hollywood starlets and little green men from Mars and fatally small-minded bureaucrats from dying New England mill towns as Wheatyard explored a bewildering number of barely overlapping themes, from evolutionary theory to immigration to the ethics of the death penalty to socialist economic systems. And in those two hundred single-spaced pages there was even room for adolescent romance, slapstick humor and later on—to my pleasant surprise—for raw sex, courtesy of the little green men from Mars and unemployed New England mill girls. Where it went after that, for the next six or seven hundred pages, I couldn't imagine. Wheatyard's imagination in conjuring up this human—and alien—menagerie was nothing less than dizzying.

None of it should have worked, but somehow it did. Or I thought it did. Had I tried, I couldn't have explained much of what I had read. My mind felt too simple, too primitive, to comprehend all of its connections, its implications.

"Wh-where did it all this come from?" I stammered, not even knowing what questions to ask. I just hoped he would elaborate, expand, illuminate, completely unprompted by me.

"Here," he replied, pointing at his temple. "And here"—he nodded at the beer bottle—"plus a few things I grow in my backyard."

Clearly he was being disingenuous. His writing had to come from more than alcohol and homegrown hallucinogens. I once read some William S. Burroughs, a writer supposedly under similar influences, and none of his writing made any sense at all. But Longing Dissolute Midnight did register with me, a little. It had to be more than just some drug-crazed rant.

"I jot down every impression that comes to mind," he said, beginning what I hoped was the expansiveness I was seeking. "My house is full of scraps of paper, every one with just a few words on it. Names, places, abstract theories, arcane factoids, none of them having any obvious connection to any of the others."

He paused, shifting his hips on the stool so he could remove his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. Flipping the wallet open, he peered inside as a chagrined look came to his face. I could see the wallet was empty, as was the beer bottle in front of him. I assumed he would hit me up for some cash. Though he had invited me all the way out there, I had already seen that his hospitality was sadly lacking. But I only had a few bucks on me, and I needed to fill up the gas tank in a day or two, so I decided to just go through the fake formality. I'd look in my wallet, say "Sorry but I'm tapped out," and let it go at that.

I had just begun to reach for my wallet when he spoke, not to me but to the bartender, who was still standing at the far end of the bar and looking up at the TV, which was running a story about Sharon Stone's latest romantic dalliance.

"Tom," Wheatyard called out, cocking his chin up slightly in a show of familiarity once the bartender turned to look at him. Wheatyard smiled as he approached, a smile which was not returned, and entreated the man with his smoothest used car salesman patter.

"Tom, my friend and I would like to stick around here a while. Trouble is, I'm all tapped out."

"Trouble for you, not me. It figures you're broke." Tom turned to me. "So, what about you?"

"Me, too." Wheatyard hadn't even asked me, but I didn't know if he guessed I was light on cash or if he just didn't care. He may have been more interested in seeing what he could wheedle out of the bartender, winning another round or two for free, than the beers themselves.

"I was hoping you might set us up with a few." He nodded at the lone dollar that remained on the bar, as if that signified he was a big spender who deserved the occasional comp. Nothing about him—his clothes, the old pickup, the run-down house—indicated he had the means to be a big spender, nor even a midsized one. But he was trying that pitch anyway.

"On the house?" Tom replied, his tone mildly incredulous.

"On the house, sure. Or run a tab, or whatever."

"You were a month late on your last tab. I'm not getting into that again."

"My next check comes in the end of this week," Wheatyard said, running his index finger across the bottom of his nose, rubbing an itch and making a sharp inward sniff. "Same as always."

The mention of a check, of some source of income, drew my attention toward Wheatyard.

"Man, I don't know," Tom said, rubbing his eyes. He looked tired, although clearly not from an overabundance of business at the bar.

"C'mon, Tom, you know me." To me that didn't seem like a smart angle to take. Though Tom knew Wheatyard, he hadn't given any indication that he particularly liked him. "I'm in here a couple times a week, give you some business, pay my tabs on time."

"Or pay them eventually, after I nag you for weeks."

"Hey, that one tab was the only one I've been really late on. And only because my carburetor went out. I told you that."

"Yeah, well, you tell me a lot of things. Things I don't want to hear, a lot of things I don't believe."

"God's honest truth, Tom. It was the carb. Damn thing went out that morning right before I had to drive to Peoria, I was in a big rush, and that bastard Wally Long—yeah, I said bastard, and you can tell him I said so—he gouged me for a new one. Said he was holding it for another customer who ordered it special, but he'd sell it to me for ten dollars over list. Special order, my ass. Who around here needs a carb for a '74 Chevy? There's only a few of those left around here, so what are the odds that someone else had a carb go out the same time as mine? What a crock. So I had to pay for the carb, and fortunately I could install it myself and didn't have to pay Wally thirty bucks an hour to do it, and because of that I didn't have the cash to pay my tab right away. I had to get to Peoria that day—very important appointment—and Wally knew it and took advantage of me. I really couldn't help it."

Tom listened to Wheatyard's diatribe against Wally Long and price-gouging and the fickle nature of 1974 Chevy carburetors with obvious disinterest. The bartender must have heard the story before, probably every time he asked Wheatyard to pay his latest overdue tab. He seemed unmoved by Wheatyard's earlier plight, and now Wheatyard was asking to drink for free, and not only himself, but also this young stranger—me—who the bartender probably thought was just some middle-class college student slumming out in the boonies.

"Look, Elmer," Tom interrupted, his emphasis and choice of given name clearly meant to put the freeloader in his place, "I'm tired of hearing you talk. First off, Wally's a friend of mine. I've had enough of you badmouthing him. He helped you out that day, and charged you a little extra for his trouble. And it's always something different that you're complaining about, blaming everybody and everything for your problems—everybody but yourself. I'm tired of hearing it, all of it. I'll set you and your friend up with one more round. Won't bother putting it on a tab, since I don't want to bother trying to collect it from you and hear a new bunch of excuses. Putting it on a tab isn't too different from giving it to you on the house anyhow—either way I won't get paid."

He paused, sliding open the door of the cooler below the bar and withdrawing two Stags. We weren't even getting the mediocre PBR.

"So these are on the house. And after you're finished, I want you out of here. Understand?"

"Understand perfectly," Wheatyard affirmed.

Tom turned away, back to the TV, and Wheatyard smiled a sheepish grin. I hoped he would resume his narrative on how he came to write Longing Dissolute Midnight, the discourse that was interrupted by his quest for a free round, or just for the haggling.

"Why not Tillsburg?" he repeated from much earlier, all thoughts of the book apparently forgotten. "Great place. Wouldn't live anywhere else."

***

The heat inside the car was stifling, with little relief from the wind that whipped through as we sped at sixty-five along the farm roads. The temperature gauge was running dangerously high, so there was no way I could run the air and risk overheating the engine. Wheatyard might be able to replace his own carburetor, and wring two free beers out of a reluctant bartender, but there was no way he could conjure up a fresh supply of coolant out here in the vacant countryside. The annoyance act that worked so well for him at the bar probably wouldn't work on the nearest suspicious farmer.

So instead we sweltered, which would have been bearable if Wheatyard had talked about his writing. That's what I wanted to hear. I could easily have been distracted away from the fever burning my brow and the sweat trickling into my eyes. But the lack of beer, or even the mere promise of beer, seemed to subdue him. Back at Simon's, after only one PBR, he had just started to open up about Longing Dissolute Midnight, as if the mere anticipation of a buzz was enough to get him blathering.

But now, in this baking car in the middle of nowhere—ten or fifteen miles southwest of Tillsburg—without the familiar surroundings of the tavern, he seemed in no mood to talk. Driving out here was his idea, so I thought he'd be more effusive. Instead he just sat in silence and stared out the window, apparently thinking to himself, whether of grand narrative themes or the deplorable profit motives of small-town mechanics, I couldn't say.

"Penny for your thoughts," I said, attempting to be witty and ironic at the same time.

"Penny, hmmm," he replied. "I never should have left that dollar at the bar." He jolted to attention, as if suddenly aware of my presence. "What? Penny for your thoughts? Who are you, my grandmother?"

"Hey, it's just an expression. But an old one, you're right."

He said nothing, turning back to the window and returning his attention to the endless rows of cornstalks that raced past.

"Grandmother." I thought there was an opening, though small. "So, what about your family?" I knew nothing about his past, other than his ongoing truck problems and that he was far from independently wealthy. It was the first time I had asked directly about his personal life, other than the writing.

"Oh, my family's not much to talk about. Father, mother, sister, the usual domestic things growing up. My sister Fr—"

He stopped suddenly, silent again, his eyes fixed on some point in the distance ahead. Okay, I thought, there's a sister—Fran? Francine? Frieda?—whose name he willingly brought up. Must feel pretty strongly for her. Or felt—I couldn't tell which verb tense she occupied for him now. I took this sliver of information with great significance. Finally I had something—Fran, Frieda, Wheatyard. Or whatever his real last name was—by then I doubted that Wheatyard was really his last name, but instead an eccentric affectation. And Glaciers didn't seem likely either.

"Yeah, I knew it," he said, still staring through the windshield, at what I couldn't tell. "I've been here before. I'm gonna have you pull over pretty soon. Keep going for now, though—I'll tell you when."

He sat in eager readiness, the least laconic he had been all day. Other than literature, nothing seemed to particularly interest him. Everything in the world was just there, with none of it of much importance to him. All of it—other than literature—he could take or leave, and more than likely leave. But whatever was ahead of us in the heat-hazy distance had his full attention.

I returned my gaze to the road, wondering where we were going. There didn't seem to be anything of interest where we were, just corn and soybeans spreading out to the horizon in every direction, the occasional lonely mailbox, the evenly-spaced county crossroads and—far too infrequently to suggest that the authorities truly cared—speed limit signs which read 50 MPH. The only thing that broke the ceaseless monotony was a low fringe of trees hugging the horizon, far to the south. Individual trees were rare enough here, that a group of them suggested something of modest significance.

"Start slowing down," Wheatyard quietly commanded as we drew closer to the trees. As we approached, I finally saw what it was, and realized my hope for something significant had been overblown. The trees—a motley collection, none more than medium height—lined both sides of a narrow stream, which ran ramrod-straight in either direction, far too uniform to be natural. I realized it was actually a drainage ditch, probably dating back to the nineteenth century when this entire area was an enormous and unfarmable marsh. Ditches like this one drained the marshes, leaving behind some of the most arable land in the world, the nation's breadbasket. The ditches were nearly the only waterways in the region, and one of the few distractions to prevent a driver or rider from dozing off.

Once again, seeing beauty here required imagination. But though I could usually see the beauty that most outsiders overlooked, not even my appreciation for the region's subtleties could generate much excitement for this ordinary ditch. Surely it served the farmer's needs, but I didn't see much more to it.

"Stop here."

I pulled the car onto the shoulder and we climbed out. The heat outside was as bad as inside, the cessation of the hot breeze making me even more uncomfortable. Prickly. My shirt stuck to my back, from shoulders to hips, the waistband of my boxers unpleasantly damp. I reached behind my back with one hand, plucked a bit of the shirt between my thumb and index finger, and peeled it away from my roasting skin. The sweat would dry quickly in the hot outside air, freed from humid compress of the car's vinyl seats.

Wheatyard hurried forward, toward the bridge. The structure was nothing special—narrow and squat, no more than seven feet tall, its girders made of corroding iron and emblazoned with generations of graffiti, all of which must have been once thought to be eminently clever and quotable-for-the-ages.

Washington slapped here. Let's here it for the soy. Bob loves Bessie, which, in case the reader missed the Borden reference, was accompanied by a crude drawing of a cow. There were other similar drawings, most of them overly-generous depictions of anatomical features, and bold claims of sexual prowess. And numerous teenaged vows of eternal love. Jim \+ Ellie forever, Mike & Nan always, even if the eventual reality was probably that Ellie went away to school in Carbondale, never to return, or Mike got so drunk and obnoxious at the graduation party that Nan never talked to him again.

Just beyond the bridge we left the road and climbed down the embankment. Further along the ditch I saw two boys, teenagers, fishing. They stood lazily, staring at the brown water, the tips of their fishing poles grazing the surface, the lines spiraling slack. They must have been very intent on their task, or else they wouldn't have traveled all the way to this lonely spot to wet their lines. Yet they fished casually, as if they had nothing better to do or anywhere else to be.

"How're they biting?" Wheatyard called out to them.

One of them looked up, staring insolently at us.

"They're not," the kid said, his short tone clearly meant to discourage further conversation.

"Got an extra pole with you?" Wheatyard pressed on, ignoring the hint.

"No, I don't," the kid sneered. "Besides, I only have two hands, and I'm gonna need the other one."

The other kid snickered, and at first I thought the reference was something sexual. But then I noticed the corner of a plastic baggie sticking out of the pocket of his cutoffs, plus the unmistakable outline of a Bic lighter in his back pocket.

Weed, I guessed. Wheatyard must have noticed it too, and though he was probably tempted to ask for a hit—his hoped-for afternoon beer buzz so rudely denied—he said nothing. He gave a little wave goodbye and walked past them, continuing to follow the bank of the ditch. I hurried after him.

"It's just a little further up ahead," Wheatyard said over his shoulder.

"What, exactly?"

"The spot."

What spot? Where he dumped the body? Where he lost his virginity? Either way, I didn't relish being anywhere near there. We hiked another hundred precarious yards, tight between the steep embankment on our left and the muddy water on our right. A few missteps along the way made me stumble into the water, twice, the coldness shocking but not unwelcomed.

Finally we stopped, Wheatyard bent with his hands on his knees, implausibly out of breath. I wasn't in great shape either, but I was still breathing just fine. It's not as if we had been running or even jogging. Just a brisk walk, which a guy his age—not much older than me—should have been able to handle. He slowly regained his breath, and at last straightened up.

"Damned Pall Malls," he muttered.

"You smoke?"

"Not any more. But I did, too long and too often, I guess. I quit three years ago but sometimes I still feel the side effects."

"Like lung damage?" I injected. "That's no side effect. That's the whole effect."

"Well, yeah. I used to tell myself that the taste and the whole aura were all that mattered, that whatever I was doing to myself was just a side effect."

"Surgeon General's Warning: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease..."

"Yeah, yeah, I read all that, on every pack. But I didn't think it mattered as long as I looked like Humphrey Bogart."

"So...what the hell are we doing here?" I had no interest in talking about Bogart. "Lovely spot, by the way."

It was bolder talk than I had yet dared around Wheatyard—I was usually in a state of respectful and inexplicable awe of him—but for once the whole absurd situation justified putting him in his place. The long drive out to Tillsburg, being barred from his house, the abbreviated visit to Simon's, the even longer drive out here to the middle of nowhere, and the slog through this fetid ditch—this time, he would have to answer for something.

Where we stood, the trees around us were stunted and mostly bereft of leaves, though it was well into June, the peak growing season, still weeks before the real heat and drought of summer would brutally set in. A farmer's rubbish pile moldered above our heads, on the edge of the embankment, random pieces of garbage spilling down the slope into the water. Further ahead, sticking out of the water and diverting the slow current to either side, was the carcass of what appeared to be an emaciated deer.

"We're here," Wheatyard said reflectively, "because this is the spot where I caught the biggest fish of my life, back when I was nine."

I knew just enough about fishing to know this wasn't prime lunker territory. He didn't seem like the fisherman type either—I guessed he had never done much fishing, which meant his biggest catch wasn't necessarily much of a fish at all.

"It was a crappie, thirteen inches long and four, maybe five pounds. Even bigger than you'll find in the farm ponds, and those are restocked by the farmers every year. There's a deep hole in the bottom of the stream here"—I let the word stream pass, indulging his local pride—"that's maybe eight feet across. Lots of big fish hang out in there. It's the only spot deep enough for them in winter."

Again, it seemed unlikely. But he was finally talking, so I'd let his fish story go on a while longer.

"I was right there on that bank, kneeling, holding the line with my hand and bobbing the hook into the hole, and finally nabbed him. Fought pretty good for a while, but I finally got him out. Big goddamned fish."

"So what did you do with it? Eat it? Mount it?" A crappie mounted on a walnut board didn't fit with my imaginings of his home decor, but he was so proud of his catch that a trophy seemed like a possibility.

"Neither, dammit." He shook his head, looking back toward the road. "I was so stupid. There was this kid, Danny Carter. I knew him a little, but we weren't friends or anything. He was just upstream when I caught the fish, and he came right over when I started yelling and jumping up and down. He said he'd trade me his brand-new pocket knife for the fish, but I had to agree to say that he was the one who caught it."

He hocked and spat into the water.

"Seemed like a good deal. I figured there were plenty more big fish down in that hole for me to catch. He said the knife was back at his house—he lived on the nearest farm, about a mile away—but he'd run and get it. So far so good. But stupid me. He insisted on taking the fish with him, but I wanted to keep fishing so I sent this other kid—Bobby, Robby, something like that—to go with him.

"So they left, and forty-five minutes later the kid came back alone, without the fish. I demanded to know where the knife was, and he looked embarrassed and a little scared, then reached into his pocket and took it out—a plain old table knife.

"'What the fuck is this?' I yelled at him. 'He said it's the knife he owes you,' the kid said. 'That's no pocket knife—that's a fucking butter knife!' I screamed back. I know it didn't do me any good to scream at that poor kid, but I felt so angry and helpless. If I had been there when Danny Carter pulled that stunt, I probably would have strangled him, but the kid had no chance—Danny was a lot bigger than him, and could have seriously hurt him if he argued. Screaming was all I could do."

He paused, swallowing hard. Though it must have happened twenty-five or even thirty years earlier, his anger showed that to him it was still like yesterday.

"The kid said Danny was already parading the fish around the farm, showing it off to his parents, his grandpa, his brothers, the hired hands, and bragging about exactly how he caught it. By then the fish was his, and there was nothing I could do about it. Nobody saw me catch the fish—not even the other kid, who was way downstream—so it was my word against Danny's. And the Carters were more prominent than my family, so my word wasn't worth much. Frieda was mad, too, when I told her, but my parents said just let it go, that there was nothing I could do about it."

"Man, that really sucks," I said, noting his sister's name as I felt sympathy for him for the first time. Until that moment I hadn't had much reason to feel sorry for him. Instead I had been in awe. But this anecdote made me realize that Wheatyard, this eccentric oddball genius, once was just an ordinary kid.

"That bothered me for years. Still does sometimes. Even stealing his bike, spray-painting it pink and running it up the flagpole at school didn't make me feel any better."

Okay, maybe not ordinary. Maybe he was an eccentric oddball back then, too. But still a kid, and not completely unlike myself at that same age.

THREE

The row of Sinclair Lewis paperbacks again stared me down, but this time I only browsed as a pretense. I was pursuing something else. I glanced stealthily down the aisle toward the front desk, where I could see just the top of the owner's balding head as he nodded over his reading. As usual I was the only customer in the store, and he contentedly occupied himself with yet another item pulled from his long-term inventory. Most of the inventory was long-term, judging by the tiny clouds of dust which billowed up every time a book was removed from the shelf. But despite the lack of business the owner seemed happy, surrounded by all that literature, and might have even resented customers as nagging interruptions to his reading. He must have had other means of support—maybe a kindly wife with a solid job and plenty of good-natured patience.

I thought I had waited long enough, and turned away from Lewis and began strolling toward the front desk, then paused again as a Jack London paperback caught my eye—Martin Eden, which I remembered as being his autobiographical novel. As I extracted it from the shelf its cover stuck slightly, in the damp air, to the adjacent volumes—People of the Abyss and the ubiquitous Call of the Wild—but finally came free. The book was in poor condition and marked down to a buck. The day I couldn't spare a buck for Jack London would be the day I'd chuck it all and go back to being a lowly file clerk, so I decided to buy the book. And buying it, I realized, would also give me a smoother opening with the owner.

The front desk was piled ten-high with books, whether being acquired or sold, coming or going, I couldn't tell. The owner stuck his finger into the hardback he was reading, saving his place, and glanced up at me with a look of familiarity. We didn't know each other by name, but had spent enough time together in this musty room—though usually separated by several rows of bookshelves—to somehow already feel acquainted.

"All set?" he asked as I handed the book across. He flipped open the cover. "Jack London," he intoned. "A pretty good one. That will be one dollar."

I already had a dollar bill in my hand, but hesitated. "Tax?"

"Eh, don't worry about it," he replied with a mild shake of his head. Purveyors of words like him presumably weren't concerned about petty regulations like sales taxes. "Such a small amount anyway."

"Thanks," I said, passing the dollar across to him, genuinely appreciating his saving me the measly four cents. He handed back the book.

Our transaction was completed, but buying yet another book wasn't the reason I had come. Or at least not the main reason—buying another book was always somewhere in my mind.

"Can I ask you something?" I began.

"Shoot," he replied.

"I've been in here lots of times, you know," I said, and told him my name.

"Sure, I recognize you. I'm Don Eastman. Good to meet you."

"Same here. So...the guy that was in here last time, Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard. What can you tell me about him?"

"Hmmm, Wheatyard," he said in a low, thoughtful voice, shifting upright in his chair as if his own curiosity was piqued. "Certainly an odd character. I don't actually know much about him. We've never really talked at any length, just a few words across the desk every now and then when he's here after the copy shop. He's lent me a couple of his manuscripts. Strange stuff—really hard for me to follow, and I've got a master's in English, so I think I'm pretty well-read."

"Have you read Longing Dissolute Midnight?"

"No, I don't think so. I can't remember the titles, but one of them—Incongruity, something like that—was this weird mishmash of King Arthur and the Land of Oz and the Bolshevik Revolution, and a love story involving Donald Duck and Lillian Gish, plus at least a dozen big themes."

"That's how mine was, but with a whole different cast."

"The other one I read was more of the same. I honestly don't know how he makes it work, but he does. It should be just this big overwritten mess, but somehow it all comes together."

I nodded my agreement.

"It works," he repeated in quiet wonderment. "And another thing—I've read a ton of literature in my life, but I can't think of a single literary forebear for him, any sort of influence. His writing seems to have come completely out of nowhere, like some volcanic eruption shooting out of the ground."

I remained silent. Everything he said about Wheatyard had already crossed my own mind.

"But about him personally," I finally said. "What's his background?"

"That's all pretty hazy. I've looked him up in the catalogs, and it doesn't look like he's been published anywhere, which is hardly surprising. He seems like he'd be an editor's worst nightmare, and probably has hundreds of rejections. I know he lives in Tillsburg, and he comes to the copy shop two or three times a month, and every time he stops in here he's got manuscripts under his arm, and some mailing envelopes. I just assume he's always on his way to the post office down the street."

I shuffled my feet, staring downward. I had already figured out most of this for myself.

"I know even less about his personal life. His writing doesn't tell anything about his past, or else it's so buried in metaphor that it's impossible to pinpoint. He's obviously got an education, but it's hard to imagine him fitting in at any writing program, not even one of the weirder ones, with all the politics and groupthink that goes on. So even if he started at a writing program, I doubt he ever finished his degree."

Buried in metaphor. Suddenly a brief passage from Longing Dissolute Midnight, only a few sentences long, came back to hit me. Marilyn Monroe, stung from getting stood up for a date by Thomas Edison, stomps along a river bank in farm country, past endless cornfields and monolithic hog farms, and looks across the river with disdain at Don Quixote as he trudges exhaustedly up the opposite bank heading east, while overhead circles a bloodthirsty hawk, waiting for the kill, squawking "Kaw-roo! Kaw-roo!" over and over.

Though that might sound like part of a long, highly involved passage, that's all there was to it, one of scores of similar scenes in the book, some of them ten times longer. The passage didn't make much sense when I first read it, but now, with what Don Eastman was saying about writing programs, I got a hint of what it might mean.

Cornfields and hog farms, a bloodthirsty hawk, Kaw-roo Kaw-roo, Marilyn looking in disdain at a beaten Quixote—the University of Iowa, and Frank Conroy, whom Wheatyard once told me was director of the world-renowned Iowa Writer's Workshop. A beaten hero, forever tilting at windmills, retreating back east—Wheatyard leaving the Workshop in defeat, going back home to Illinois. And a perpetual Hollywood icon dismissing him as unworthy—maybe a screenplay that found no takers. Though I couldn't even guess where Thomas Edison might fit in.

I began to imagine Longing Dissolute Midnight as, maybe, one big metaphor for Wheatyard's life. It also occurred to me that perhaps the Captain Ahab cameo was an allusion to the thirteen-inch crappie boyhood incident, and Long John Silver holding Chevy Chase hostage was actually about Wally Long and the Chevy truck with the busted carburetor.

Or maybe I was just desperate, trying to figure this guy out, and read too much into it. Maybe Marilyn and Ahab and a bloodthirsty hawk were really nothing more than Marilyn, Ahab and a bloodthirsty hawk; maybe, as the old joke went, a cigar was just a cigar. Maybe Ahab and Long John Silver were mere homages to beloved boyhood seafaring tales. Maybe Wheatyard was just toying with all of us, presenting a cast of characters so audacious that overeducated readers like me couldn't help grasping for metaphors.

All of this—the sudden revelatory, transcendent moment and the equally sudden, deflating doubt—came to me later as I walked home, shortly after saying a hasty goodbye to Eastman. As his words concluded—I doubt he ever finished his degree—I had the first inkling of that too-brief revelation, and hurried outside to collect my thoughts. At moments like these I needed to be alone to sort through things, and for a while it seemed to make sense.

But the subsequent doubt came just as quickly, darkening my mind before I was barely halfway home. I unlocked my apartment door, tossed my shoulder bag on the kitchen floor as I reached into the refrigerator and cracked open a beer, one of only three that remained. The bottle's pressure hissed out from beneath the cap, which I carelessly flipped onto the counter. After looking over the meager contents of the cabinet—tonight would be either macaroni with margarine and whatever spices I could find, or red beans and rice—I shuffled back to the front room where I sunk into the couch, took the first sip from the bottle that went down far too easily, and turned the mystery of Wheatyard over and over in my head.

***

The stack of Sunday papers, five or six inches high, rested on the table before me, waiting to be pored through. I reached for each new paper with eager anticipation of any good ads that might be there while also dreading the thought of setting it aside again, without a single listing being copied. The dwindling of the stack would bring me ever closer to recognizing another fruitless week.

I knew I couldn't spend my entire summer pondering over Wheatyard or serving out the desultory remainder of my internship. I had to regularly remind myself why I was stuck in Champaign, alone, for the summer. It was already the end of June, a month after graduation, and my few friends had left town while I remained, to use up the rest of the apartment lease that was already paid for and somehow find a job.

And here, at the Champaign Public Library, that reminder hit the hardest. At home on Sunday mornings with the Chicago Tribune, I could pretend that job hunting—sifting through the classifieds—was only part of my life. Though I always read the job ads first, I would spend several hours devouring the entire paper, every section, front to back. I could imagine I had other things going on, even if it was only reading about what was happening elsewhere to other people.

But I went to the library for just one reason—to read the job ads from Minneapolis, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, even Detroit. I never had any interest in reading the out-of-town news. The classifieds were everything.

I visited the library on Wednesdays, which was enough time for the out-of-town Sunday papers to arrive in the mail without the listings getting too dated. I had to move on any good opportunity as quickly as I could. That meant photocopying whatever listings I found and hurrying home to type up cover letters and stuff resumés into envelopes, then mailing them before the post office closed. A resumé would arrive about a week after the ad first appeared, which I hoped ensured the position was still open.

On this particular Wednesday I had just set aside the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—where I noted a few possibilities, with A.G. Edwards and Boatmen's Bank—and began to flip through the Detroit Free Press. There the classifieds began with real estate listings, with job ads in the back, and along the way my gaze was drawn by a blurry photograph of a house for sale. The house was an ordinary ranch, unremarkable but for the vague recollection of something else. I soon realized what it was, and despite my best intentions, despite the rising urge to finally find a job, I thought again of Wheatyard.

The Detroit house reminded me, ever so slightly, of his ranch house out in Tillsburg. It occurred to me that its disrepair suited him, as Wheatyard surely had no time, as he churned out hundreds of manuscript pages every month, for lawnmowing or weeding or painting or even something as minor as picking up the free Thrifty Nickel classifieds that arrived every week. I remembered those from my first visit, a dozen rubber-banded copies of that rag sheet, in varying stages of yellowing, scattered across the sidewalk. The sidewalk itself was an eyesore—discolored, cracked and weedy.

So the disrepair made sense. But how he happened to live there didn't, nor his claim that the house was paid for. Living in such a simple but backward town didn't fit with his obvious intellect, and his lack of income made mortgage payments all but impossible, let alone outright ownership.

He certainly had no job; the few times he had called were at odd hours, as if he didn't keep the regular schedule that a steady job would require. He didn't seem particularly handy, given the deplorable condition of his home, and the sheer volume of manuscripts he claimed to regularly churn out would preclude any sort of 9-to-5 grind. And Tillsburg had few employers. Having a steady job would require living in Urbana or Champaign, where at least there was steady demand for pizza drivers.

I roused myself from my reverie and returned my attention to the paper, pounding my fist on the table in frustration at being distracted so easily. I calmed myself and read through the listings, but saw only a few accounting positions among the professional opportunities. I knew Detroit was struggling, but even so there still didn't seem to be enough openings. I thought that Wheatyard, still in the back of my mind, might have continued to distract me from reading the ads as closely as I should have.

I read through again, more carefully this time, but still saw nothing more than those same accounting jobs. I folded up the Free Press and set it aside, noticing with mild consternation that only two more Sunday papers remained. My spirits descending, I felt my attention again begin to drift.

Sure, houses in Tillsburg had to be cheap. Demand was low as the town faced its slow but relentless exodus. Like most of rural, small-town America, Tillsburg saw its kids grow up and simply leave—for college or factory jobs elsewhere—never to return. Like Ellie, whose name was painted on that bridge over the drainage ditch, who probably went from college in Carbondale to an accounting job in St. Louis and then to comfortable suburban life with a family, quickly forgetting all about Jim. Or like drunk and obnoxious Mike, who probably put his graduation party disgrace behind him and moved to Bloomington to work at the Mitsubishi plant.

I imagined kids in towns like Tillsburg moving away, only temporarily at first, coming home on weekends to party and catch up with old friends. But as those old friends did likewise, their sporadic weekends home would coincide less and less, seeing fewer friendly faces each time. Life at college or the factory would soon seem more interesting than whatever was left back in Tillsburg, and their visits became less frequent, diminishing to only Thanksgiving and Christmas until home was no longer Tillsburg, but elsewhere—wherever they were living at the time.

This situation played out again and again, in Tillsburg and countless other small towns, until their populations withered away to a few middle-class professionals—doctor, insurance agent, branch manager of the out-of-town bank—and senior citizens. Those who remained would cling to what they still had, holding Memorial Day and 4th of July parades long after the marchers outnumbered the spectators, running bakesales to support the fading consolidated school district, voting diligently and keeping their houses and lawns in immaculate condition.

Given their pride in their houses and lawns, I realized, it was a wonder the people of Tillsburg didn't drive Wheatyard out of town with torches and pitchforks.

I returned to the last of the papers, from Indianapolis and Milwaukee, but a few minutes of browsing brought nothing of promise. I stood up, gathered the papers and returned the stack to the shelf where I had found them, keeping aside only the St. Louis paper to make copies of those two decent ads.

Back in my car, the copies safely folded into the pocket of my shorts, I thought again of the torches and pitchforks, and chuckled to myself.

Wheatyard's house had slowly deteriorated and would eventually revert to prairie, its roof beams crashing to the ground, its termite-ridden wooden siding becoming one with the damp soil, its lawn and low-lying shrubs overtaken by triumphant native grasses. Out there on the edge of the fields, the last house on the street of well-kept houses, it wouldn't even be missed, its disappearance unlamented. If the town had the money for it, the house would have probably been immediately condemned, bulldozed and cleared away. Lacking such funds, the town would have to let nature and Wheatyard's neglect do the house-leveling for them, even if it took a few extra decades.

That first visit to Tillsburg failed to get me inside Wheatyard's front door and answers to numerous mysteries that I hoped to find within. Despite his outward friendliness, it was obvious I wasn't welcome inside. Why, I couldn't guess. He didn't seem the type to have his dead mother, like another Mrs. Bates, stuffed and sitting in a rocking chair and holding hectoring dialogues with his disturbed mind. He was offbeat, not maniacal.

At home, the flashing light on my answering machine signaled a waiting message. It was Wheatyard, again offering to get together. I was still interested to hear what he had to say, about his writing and hopefully himself, and was relieved to hear that it wouldn't be in Tillsburg again. Instead, his hurried, mumbled message invited me to The Grind.

FOUR

The Grind was both throwback and trailblazer—throwback to the brainy, conversation-heavy café society culture of Paris of the twenties and trailblazer of the coffeehouse explosion of the nineties. The Grind was a pioneer, churning out hand-roasted coffee back when Starbucks was still just one tiny shop in pre-grunge Seattle, when McDonald's and 7-11 coffee were the accepted norm, and when espresso, if known at all, was mispronounced "expresso" and eyed with suspicion as being mysterious, effete and European.

The shop was tucked into a two-story outdoor shopping center, John Street Centre, which was half-timbered like a campus apartment building and also housed a burrito stand, head shop, video arcade, movie rental store and yet another copy shop. The Grind's atmosphere was unapologetically intellectual; literature and philosophy professors rubbed elbows with high-minded university physical plant workers while grad students sat at tables piled high with textbooks, cigarettes forever smoldering in the ashtrays between, handwriting-stuffed spiral notebooks strewn about as dissertations were conceived, belabored, abandoned and revived again.

I picked up coffee there occasionally on my way to class, but only to go. Something about the atmosphere put me off, intimidating me from staying. But it made sense that The Grind, even more than the book store, was Wheatyard's favorite campus haunt. His strange mixture of intellect and earthiness fit in perfectly.

"Medium Kenyan," I said, passing across the dollar-fifty that might have been better spent elsewhere. The scorching July heat wasn't ideal for hot coffee either. Though I could have contented myself with ice water from the dispenser in the corner, drinking water there just didn't seem right. And stimulant might be needed to get my mind up to speed with Wheatyard's, so coffee it was.

He was already there, sitting in the corner absorbed in a tattered copy of James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce seemed too obvious for him to be reading—not at all popular, of course, but familiar enough to the pretentious intellectual wannabes that Wheatyard disdained. I had overheard students around campus going on and on about Ulysses, like it was some sort of hipster Bible. I would have expected Wheatyard to set himself further apart from the crowd with his reading material, with some writer much more obscure than Joyce.

As I pulled out my chair he set down the book, but not to greet me or otherwise acknowledge my existence. Instead he stared at an indeterminate spot in midair, his features scrunched up and his lips moving almost imperceptibly. Though not greeting me might seem rude, I knew it wasn't intentional. It was something I had already gotten used to.

Finally, after I sat down, deliberately scraped my chair across the rough floor and made a great show of emptying my shoulder bag, he suddenly realized I was there. "Damn, this stream of consciousness stuff. I never get tired of it," he said, wonderingly.

"Your writing is nothing like that."

"No, I wouldn't even dare to try. I couldn't come close to Joyce anyway. Brilliant."

True, he wasn't Joyce. But his writing was better than he would outwardly admit, even if I didn't completely understand it. I didn't understand Joyce either, from the one hopeless chapter of his that I attempted.

"Anyway. Know anything about Guided by Voices?"

This surprised me into silence. This was the first time, in all of our talks, that he had mentioned music. He talked literature, of course. And history, philosophy, politics—though always within a literary context—but never music. I wasn't very familiar with the band, but knew they were obscure and cryptic enough for Wheatyard.

He fished around in the pocket of his coat—again a trenchcoat, in the July heat—and pulled out an unboxed cassette tape, which he tossed to me.

"That's for you. Really interesting. Cheap production—probably recorded on four-track, with lots of tape hiss—and some of the songs are so short that just when you're getting into them, they're suddenly over. Plus there's some experimental stuff slipped in that I don't really get. But the melodies are great, and so are the guitar riffs. The main guy, Bob, is definitely obsessed with the British Invasion. Sounds straight out of the Liverpool clubs in 1964, and sometimes he even sings with an English accent though the band's from Ohio."

"Alright, I'll give it a listen," I said, though I wasn't optimistic. It was disheartening that an erratic mind like Wheatyard—a guy who loved the meanderings of James Joyce—couldn't fully grasp what the band was doing. I also wondered if the short songs would put me off, since around that time I was particularly into the extended improvisations of Television and Yo La Tengo. And the cassette housing read only "GBV, ed. EGW" with no song titles, so I wouldn't even have a track listing for navigation. But I felt my reservation slowly ease into intrigue. Something about the idiosyncratic songs, as described by Wheatyard and a few articles I came across in music magazines, seemed to echo his fiction. I might not fully understand either the songs or the fiction, but both would be fascinating to explore.

"So, what are you writing now?" I asked, assuming he was always writing something.

"What are you writing now?" he retorted, although not in that repeat-the-other-person-to-annoy-the-hell-out-of-them way we all talked when we were kids. Instead, he seemed genuinely interested to know.

"Me? Writing?"

"You're not writing," he said, deflated, before rising up again with a renewed edge to his voice. "Why not?"

"I don't write much, that's all. Just sometimes."

"You should write all the time. As should everyone of above-average intelligence. And you're certainly above-average," he said, his grin showing he meant no insult. "Writing opens up the mind, cleans it all out, really helps you realize how you perceive and interpret the world."

I was surprised at his confident insistence. After all, I was a business major, and not from one of the talky, creative disciplines, but finance—hard numbers, ratios, formulas and HP 12C calculators. The only thing in the business school further from the humanities was the fill-in-the-blank, make-sure-it-ties-out field of accounting.

I perceived and interpreted the world by reducing everything to numbers, to measurable units that could be dropped into a spreadsheet and crunched into whatever conclusion was needed. Invest or don't invest, approve or decline, pass or fail—whatever answer I sought could be found with just the right amount of tweaks and assumptions. The only creative part of finance was the lies I thought up to justify my conclusions, the implausible leaps of faith that financial people had to make every day, telling themselves they could quantify any and every situation.

I didn't write, other than some diary-like trifles—a few middling paragraphs scribbled down when numbers briefly lost their luster.

"I wouldn't know where to begin," I said, defensively, hoping to put him off the subject.

"Sure you do." He was having none of my evasion. "Now, this stuff you write, just sometimes. Tell me about some of that."

"Well, I wrote something about driving out east and back. It never went anywhere."

"That's because you didn't let it go anywhere. Tell me about the trip itself, not about what you wrote about it."

"There's not much to it. I drove out to Boston to visit an old friend, drove straight through, all night. Stayed a few days, and drove back right after the blizzard."

"Now that has potential, right there. Take just a fragment of what happened along the way. When you drove all night, did you come across anyone unique? Like, say, a trucker at a rest stop, a cute high school girl at a driveup window, some asshole in an overpriced German sports car who cut you off and gave you the finger?"

His mention of a cute girl momentarily returned my attention to the counter across the room, to the girl who had just poured my coffee. I hadn't given her much notice at the time, being preoccupied with what Wheatyard might have to say. I now glanced toward her, covertly, suddenly admiring what I could see from the distance.

"Well, I caught a cold somewhere along the way," I said, returning to Wheatyard. "Lost my voice and could barely order breakfast at Hardee's, in some little town in upstate New York."

"From a cute high school girl?"

"Unfortunately not."

"That's too bad. Leering at a teenaged girl when you know you shouldn't but just can't help it has great literary potential. Nabokov wrote a great novel out of a similar idea, though Humbert obviously took it way past leering."

The literary references went right past me.

"At Hardee's it was a woman, middle-aged, maybe early senior citizen. Not worth leering at, from what I remember."

"Okay. Small town in New York, early morning, lost your voice, something greasy for breakfast. There, you have it."

"Have what?"

"The start of a story. Take those little details and go from there. Invent a backstory for her life. Think of a conversation you'd have, one that doesn't involve hash browns and crappy coffee. Think of something that might happen between you two."

"Or theorize on her secret relationship with Donald Duck."

"No, that's my gig." He shook his head. "Don't wade into that swamp until you've been writing for a while, until nothing else seems to work, until no other style seems right."

His hint at literary failure reminded me of what Don Eastman had suggested about Wheatyard's repeated rejections, and drew my interest, much more than conjuring a story out of some mundane encounter at a small-town Hardee's.

But he pressed on, skipping past the potentially fascinating subject of his past failures. He was so involved in telling how to make a finance major into a fiction writer that I didn't want to derail him by interrupting.

"Think of what might happen next. Maybe you intervene in an argument between her and her pimply-faced manager, defending her honor though you don't even know her. Maybe she quits on the spot, and her ride isn't due for a couple more hours, and you volunteer to drive her home, and pretty soon you're right in the middle of her strange little world."

All of that was moderately interesting, but I was already right in the middle of his strange little world—drinking coffee on a ninety-degree day in a trenchcoat, talking over the boisterous Kierkegaard conversation at the next table between two scruffy college lifers, the incomprehensible manuscripts and that decaying ranch house out in Tillsburg—and I wanted to know more about that, to make sense of it all. The fictionalized life of a Hardee's cashier in upstate New York seemed trivial in comparison. For me, that life was unreal, imagined, while the enigma sitting across the table from me was real, perplexingly real.

"Yeah, that might work," I said, hoping that flattery would ease him past the subject. "But tell me something. You obviously have an unusual writing style. I mean, I read Longing Dissolute Midnight, remember?"

I said this last part hurriedly, in mild panic. I didn't want him to think I had gotten any impressions of his writing from anywhere other than that one manuscript. I didn't want him to know I had been asking around about him.

"How did you ever develop this style? I mean, it's really unique," I added, hoping an appeal to vanity might open him up, though I had never seen him be vain. "Have you always written like this?"

"No, of course not. Only the mentally disturbed would write like this, right from the start."

"The mentally disturbed," I repeated with a smile. "Come on, you're too hard on yourself."

"I'm not knocking myself at all," he corrected. "I intentionally try to write the way the mentally disturbed think—thousands of totally unconnected people and objects and ideas that make no sense to so-called 'normal' people. But to those people who are considered 'disturbed,' it makes perfect sense. They make connections that the rest of us can't. Yet they're considered abnormal."

"McMurphy. Cuckoo's Nest. The crazy are the sane."

"Exactly. Ken Kesey got that exactly right. And he got the psych ward right, too."

I stared at him, not knowing what to say, not understanding his implication.

"The idea that people who think differently," he continued, "who don't conform, are considered dangerous to society. So they're called 'abnormal' and get locked up. Which makes our mental health system not much better than Stalin's gulags. Sure, we don't deliberately torture inmates, not that electroshock is that much better."

He was rolling now, words flowing easily, and I considered myself fortunate that he was so generous with his thoughts, despite the vaguely unsettling undertone. I held my tongue, only adding a brief comment now and then, to keep him going without interfering with my trivial insights. I refrained from mentioning that I had only seen the movie of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and hadn't read the book. That would have undoubtedly lead to another hectoring lecture.

"But you asked about my writing style, not Kesey and the great McMurphy. No, I haven't always written this way. When I started out in high school I was very conventional. Show a few characters, give backstory on each, have them talk a little, throw in a plot twist or some conflict between them, eventually resolve the dispute, and try to get some minor point across before wrapping up the loose ends with a tidy conclusion."

He paused, lifted his mug and took a swallow of coffee.

"But that was before..." His voice trailed off for a moment before recovering. Our eyes met for an instant before he turned away. He reached out and touched Ulysses, delicately, with the tips of his fingers. When he looked back again his gaze was flat, almost blank. "That conventional stuff didn't work for me—so boring, so mundane. I wrote exactly the way they taught me to. Thank god I'm done with all that nonsense."

Before? Before what? My mind raced to decipher his meaning but came up with nothing. Except...someone taught him to write, conventionally. So he started writing in high school, probably continued in college. This latest hint from him filled in a little further the portrait I was mentally drawing of his life. But to my dismay I sensed him drawing his narrative to a close, the last thing I wanted at that moment.

"Have you been published anywhere?" I said, trying to keep him going. I immediately regretted the question, realizing it was probably a sore subject with him, and feared it might silence him completely. Back then I didn't know that complaining about publishers has been the favorite pastime of writers throughout history.

Wheatyard, I learned, was no exception.

"Nope, no publications. Plenty of rejections, though, and only a few of those anything more than form letters. Only a few editors bothered to write back. 'Your work is certainly inventive.' 'We are impressed with the obvious amount of labor involved.' 'Your grasp of a dizzyingly broad range of topics is quite overwhelming.'"

"But..." I said, leading.

"But, 'It doesn't meet our editorial needs at the present time.' Or 'It's not quite what we're looking for at the moment.' Or 'It's not a good fit for the theme of our upcoming issue or any other theme we could ever imagine.'"

"And..."

"And, 'We encourage you to keep writing and submit more work to us in the future', 'I have enclosed submission guidelines for our next open-themed fiction contest', 'We wish you the best of luck in your future writing endeavors, elsewhere.'"

"Boilerplate stuff."

"It was only boilerplate when they bothered being polite. A couple of editors went beyond that, saying 'Please do not ever contact us again', and 'Legal action will be considered.'"

"Wow, that's harsh," I said, shaking my head. "For something as harmless as a manuscript."

"Well, that and a few followup phone calls. Okay, so I guess that one time I shouldn't have called a week after blind-submitting 500-something pages—should've given them a month or so. But I don't think any of those calls were very threatening. Sure, I yelled a few times, and mentioned something about their heredity, but it wasn't anything really out of line."

"Heredity?"

"Parentage, farm animals. You know."

"Aha," I said, feeling myself blush, embarrassed not by the crude implication but by the thought of addressing editors this way. Not that I had ever dealt with any editors, of course, but to a writer they were essentially employers. Or potential employers. I couldn't imagine myself having a job interview go badly and then lambasting the interviewer, insulting his mother and probably getting escorted out the door by security.

Don't burn your bridges might be a cliché, but there's also some truth to it. That interviewer might have another job opening available a few months from now, so it was best to stay in his good graces. And that editor had more journals and books to publish. From what I understood, it was already hard enough to get published without alienating someone who might be able to help you in the future.

"None of them appreciate art," Wheatyard said with quiet indignation.

Oh, here we go, I thought. The unappreciated genius artist. I thought that was all just a myth.

"Don't think that I'm pitying myself when I say that," he said, seeming to read my mind. Presumably he had already experienced that reaction after complaining about his fate to others. "It's true. Editors are more interested in the bottom line, serving their precious customers, when they're supposed to be advancing the cause of great art. They're just playing it safe."

"I don't know much about publishing," I ventured, "but if an editor keeps publishing stuff that nobody wants to read, won't that eventually put them out of business? And leave you with one less place to publish your stuff?"

"Ah, yes, spoken like a true finance major," he sneered. "Rates of return, revenue maximization, shareholder utility. All those great numbers that keep romance and horror hacks steadily employed."

I sensed he was losing patience with me. He tolerated me and even seemed to enjoy having me around, but only as long as I deferred to his singular greatness. He could pass off my bowing at the altar of Wall Street, the free market and the Federal Reserve System, as a youthful indiscretion, seeing my interest in his writings and bohemian lifestyle as evidence that I might still be redeemed. He could dream that I'd eventually give up a career in middle management to pursue my latent creative impulses.

He could believe all of that, implausible as it was, as long I didn't question his basic beliefs, the foundation that his fiercely independent but rickety existence was built upon.

But now that I dared to look at things from the viewpoint of the despised editor, implicitly questioning why he continued to write such difficult and inaccessible fiction, he might have thought, for the first time, that I was beyond hope. That maybe I wouldn't advance in the world any further than a windowed office in a glass high-rise and a tasteful four-bedroom colonial on a suburban cul-de-sac.

Still, I thought I had a valid point. I was a moderately intelligent person, with bachelors and graduate degrees from a top university, but still I could barely comprehend his writing. Don Eastman understood it, along with some English professors I talked to, but books were their lives. They read difficult literature willingly and enthusiastically, considering it an intellectual exercise worthy of their time and effort.

But Eastman and those professors were a tiny minority. Most of the population, or what remained of a book-buying public, just didn't want to work that hard at reading. They wanted escape at the end of a long work day, a chance to unwind and be easily entertained, which is why those romance and horror writers he disparaged enjoyed steady employment. Few people wanted to read dense philosophical treatises with a cast of thousands of disparate characters.

Wheatyard clearly wanted to hear none of that. He wanted his work praised, his lofty thoughts celebrated, his genius recognized. He wanted none of the hard reality, of any mention of the conventional tastes of the public. Maybe he was a genius, just maybe, but there were few people who could recognize that fact even if it happened to be true. And he wouldn't compromise to connect with everyone else.

He didn't want that hard reality, the kind I trafficked in with my finance degrees and my future investment career. I felt like I was starting to lose him. If I was going to figure out this fascinating enigma during my last few weeks in Champaign, I'd have to keep feeding him that unreality.

These specific thoughts only came to me much later, but there, at The Grind, I still vaguely sensed the need for that unreality. Softening my tone, I quietly eased the subject away from editors and back to his writing itself, the cast of thousands and everything else. He seemed to take it well, his voice warming as he again chattered about fiction—his and that of others—and his anger vanishing.

FIVE

I was home again, in my apartment. I sat at the kitchen table, looking over my notes. Names and numbers of contacts and potential leads, friends of friends or complete strangers whose names I plucked out of directories. Any one of them might be the very person that knew about a job opening and could get me an interview. I flipped through the pages over and over, trying to divine who that one person might be. Soon, I told myself, I would finally pick up the phone and call.

Though only mid-morning, the inside air was already seething. The intense Central Illinois heat sweltered the apartment all day long, and during the night the place never completely cooled down. Just when the inside temperature would begin to subside, a new day would arrive, starting the unpleasant cycle all over again. At night it might cool just enough for a few hours of fitful sleep; on the worst nights I slept on the couch, defying my dwindled budget by running the only air conditioner, an old window-mounted unit, on low. Running it during the day was impossible—electricity cost what seemed like a fortune, and even without air I barely had enough money to eat. When I complained to others, somebody would always suggest opening up windows on opposite ends of the apartment and turning on a fan, but that brought no relief as it just moved the hot air around faster. When the temperature was high enough, all the air flow and sweat in the world did nothing to cool a body down. And in Champaign it seemed that hot every day.

During those long daylight hours I would feel my inner thermostat reaching its boiling point, and I would barely be able to think clearly. And with mere thinking being difficult at those times, the intense writing that Wheatyard insisted on was all but impossible. He might have been able to write through delirium—indeed, some of the flightier passages in Longing Dissolute Midnight suggested he was delirious when he wrote them—but for me the condition was debilitating. I would sit and stare at the TV for hours, barely comprehending what I was seeing, or simply lay back with my eyes closed, waiting languidly for some sort of deliverance.

Now and then I would escape the heat by loitering in stores around town, but getting there under the relentless sun was even worse than staying in the stifling apartment, and once in the store I could never stay long since I lacked money to buy anything, the unstated price of hanging around. After a few minutes I would always be shooed away by the proprietors or their student managers. The Union offered little; having graduated in May, I no longer had student discounts on billiards or bowling which I couldn't afford otherwise. Sitting around on the couches in the desultory lounges, even with a decent book, was no more appealing than enduring the heat outside or at home.

At least the apartment had enough—TV, stereo, books—to keep me occupied, if I could just fight off the humid malaise. All those things were already paid for, and could be enjoyed at no extra expense, something that in corporate finance class was called a sunk cost. The money was out the door, the funds couldn't be recovered, so I might as well get whatever use from those things that I could.

The only activity that kept me both air-conditioned and occupied was my internship, which had run all year but would terminate in August, at the same time as my lease. When those events occurred I would leave town for good, either off somewhere for a new job or just back home to my parents. The internship, despite its shortcomings, somehow kept me sane. Even the public library, which had the same air conditioning and busy work, was too closely associated with my helpless job hunt and all its sad connotations.

Sitting on the couch, still simmering, I thought back to the previous afternoon.

***

I sat at a side desk in the cool comfort of Professor Leavitt's office, one of the roomiest on the business campus. Leavitt said so himself, several times. As always I was crunching numbers—copying from text files the professor had procured from some database, pasting into a spreadsheet for calculation and manipulation. Leavitt always complained about the price of the data, even though he didn't pay for it himself but instead passed the bill through to the school. I always shook my head at every mention of the data fees, since they contradicted his reverent, almost religious belief in efficient markets, which assumed the instant and costless flow of information among all participants. It seemed to me that if such basic financial data—stock prices, quarterly profits—was only available for a fee from a database, then that information didn't flow as freely as he believed. Clearly some people were better informed than others, and better equipped to make smart decisions.

As always I was at the side desk, and as always Leavitt leaned back in his leather chair, spinning third-hand anecdotes about various financial titans. That day it was Michael Milken and the geniuses at Drexel Burnham who invented junk bonds, high-risk loans that financed companies which were too shaky to borrow anywhere else. Leavitt went on and on about the revolution that Milken created, and how much he had been screwed over by the feds.

As I worked I only half-listened, having heard all of it too many times during the past year. Under Leavitt's direction I compiled information on leveraged buyouts—debt-heavy acquisitions of companies whose new owners' usual first order of business was mass employee layoffs, done so the company could afford to pay off all that debt. Leavitt insisted on a balanced, unbiased study to determine the benefits that LBOs created. From my statistics classes I knew a large data sample was needed to make the results meaningful, but Leavitt regularly had me delete companies from the study, muttering vaguely about them being anomalies, unique situations, outliers. Though I never dug any further to find out for sure, it seemed like many of the companies he eliminated had performed badly after the buyout, with some of them even going bankrupt.

But I never pursued that thought, as I realized the job had only a few weeks left and I probably had nothing to gain. And he seemed so pleased at how the study was progressing that he was almost pleasant to be around. He mostly left me to my work, kept giving me the hours and paychecks that I needed to live on, plus the air-conditioned reprieve.

He suddenly interrupted his Milken lament with a short laugh, followed by silence. I stopped typing, took my eyes off the computer screen and stared at the floor. I didn't look at him, not knowing if his laugh was about something he wanted me privy to. After a few moments he laughed again.

"I saw the damnedest thing, walking up here today, along the Quad. I had lunch with the chancellor in his private dining room, and on my way back I saw these scruffy guys kicking around a beanbag."

"Hacky Sack," I offered.

"Right, that's what those are called. So they're kicking the thing around, completely oblivious to everything but the game and their boombox. They're playing some stoner music, the Grateful Dead I think, singing along off-key at the top of their lungs. So this Quad dog trots up and starts sniffing the boombox. I can see what's about to happen, but they have no idea, and suddenly they realize, too late, that the dog is pissing on the boombox. They yell and scream but the dog just keeps doing his business, then finishes and runs away."

He laughed again, more heartily this time, and I forced out an obligatory chuckle. "Right away the box starts buzzing and crackling, and the music goes dead. The dog must have made a direct hit on the battery."

He paused with a satisfied grunt. "They had it coming, wasting their time like that. And probably wasting mommy and daddy's money. I really wonder about guys like that. Why the hell are they still here over the summer anyway?"

He looked up at me, as if realizing his implication. "No offense. You're here because I have work for you to do. Important work. They're only here because they're lazy."

It occurred to me, for the first time, that over the past year he hadn't once asked about my job hunt, where I was looking and if he could help in any way. Now he actually believed I was still around because I didn't want to give up his internship, unaware that I would have eagerly given it up right before graduation if I had a real job to go away to, in Chicago or anywhere else.

"I see so many guys like that around campus, slackers, with beards and tie-dyed t-shirts, with no purpose in their lives. No direction, just floating through the world, soaking their parents..."

Leavitt went on but I no longer heard him, the lifeless data on the screen interesting me more than his philosophy. The mention of beards struck me. He surely didn't mean Wheatyard specifically. I doubted they had ever crossed paths—Leavitt wasn't the type to frequent Cellar Books or The Grind, and at the Union he'd lunch in the private dining rooms instead of the cafeteria with the commoners. But if not Wheatyard in particular, Leavitt was denigrating his type—carefree, non-conformist, guided by the ethereal and not the rigid world of numbers. Six months earlier I would have heartily agreed with him about the Hacky Sackers—and, by extension, about Wheatyard—and might have even laughed along, but by then, in July, I was much more ambivalent. I could still see Leavitt's position, but I no longer necessarily agreed with him.

***

Leavitt slowly faded from my mind—the pile of contacts and phone numbers still spread across the table before me but already forgotten—as I lost myself in the din from the stereo. At high volume I barely heard the phone ring. During that summer the sound had almost become unfamiliar; since my friends had left town the phone rarely rang. Nobody prodding me to go out for beers, or get together to watch a ballgame or to barbecue. Sometimes my mom called, tapdancing around the reason for her call before finally asking how the job hunt was going. My answer was always the same. Answering lots of ads, networking, sending out resumés. No answers yet, but I'll definitely get some interviews soon. Yeah, sure I could talk to their insurance agent and see if there's anybody in his home office I could talk to. Of course I'll follow up on that. I would say just enough to ease her mind, and though she always sounded uncertain I hoped she hung up the phone with confidence and a clear conscience, reasonably reassured that she wasn't abandoning her youngest child to his adult fate.

I turned down the stereo—fIREHOSE's ode to R.E.M. dropping to low volume—and picked up the phone. On the other end, I heard only coughing and what sounded like the distant whir of a vacuum cleaner.

"Sorry about that," Wheatyard finally said, as the coughs trailed away. The vacuum still whirred, which seemed strange. Cleaning the house seemed like an unlikely pastime for him. "Hey, I'm coming into town this morning. Meet me at Mullen's."

Mullen's Tap was a bar and, as I saw from a glance at the digital clock on the microwave, it was only 10:15 in the morning. My reluctance to accept such an offer from Wheatyard was fully justified. But his tone was amiable, carefree, as if he had already forgotten my brazen empathy with readership- and profit-obsessed editors a few days before. Maybe I was being given the chance to reconnect, to study him further.

"Sure," I said, defying all reservations.

"Be there in half an hour. See you later." For all his verbosity on the injustices of small-town mechanics and small-minded editors, Wheatyard could be concise when he needed to be.

As I hung up the phone, an idea came to me. I stood, turning away from the contacts pile. I opened a kitchen drawer and brought out the local phone book, flipping straight to W. Whalen, Whatley, Wheat, Wheatley...Wheeler. No Frieda Wheatyard. No Elmer Wheatyard either, but maybe Tillsburg was in a different directory than Champaign.

So it seemed Frieda didn't live here in town, unless she had married and changed her name, in which case I'd never find her. Either way she probably went far beyond Champaign. I thought about all the things I would have asked her about Wheatyard—his childhood, how he ended up in Tillsburg, how he gets by. But it was no use. I decided to forget about her and instead keep asking about Wheatyard around town, with people who hardly knew him.

But first, I would meet him again.

SIX

Mullen's was the last of the old-time campus taverns, the last not to turn into a blaring sports bar with a hundred TV screens or a pretentious fake-upscale place with varnished furniture and long rows of lovely but never-opened bottles lining the gleaming shelves.

Instead, Mullen's was dark and dank, the only décor a couple of neon beer signs advertising untrendy brands and, in an honored spot behind the bar, a framed photo of Al Capone waving to the camera as he was hauled off to the federal penitentiary. Beyond the bar were two aisles flanked by plain tables and benches which were designed for drinking and little else, the tables inscribed with generations of carved-in names and initials and dirty pictures, all preserved for posterity in layer after layer of shellac, the words and pictures immortalized like primeval insects entombed in amber.

As I stepped inside, my eyes strained to adjust from the brilliant sunlight to the low-wattage fluorescents within. Wheatyard sat at a table near the back of the room, books and papers already spread around him. But instead of a book he stared intently at the layered names in the tabletop, one hand grasping a sweating bottle of beer. A second bottle was conspicuously absent.

He looked up, recognizing the question on my face.

"Yeah, I know. I'm not reading a book. But this is just as interesting. This is purely independent writing. This is free expression."

"'Debbie does Danville?'" I said, reading the largest inscription upside-down.

"Okay, they're not the most high-minded statements. But people carved these words because they had something they needed to say. They didn't care who would eventually read it, or that they'd never make any money off of it. They felt the urge to express themselves, so they did."

"You have to wonder why." I waved down the bartender, calling out my order of a cheap PBR from across the room.

"Exactly. Like this one. I'm guessing this is the phone number of some guy's ex-girlfriend. Why would you go to the trouble of leaving a number for some stranger to call? You wouldn't if it was your own number, or if you cared about the person whose number it is."

"Spite?"

"Spite." He nodded. "They probably just broke up, and he's so bitter she dumped him that he's leaving her phone number all over town, hoping some pervert will call her up and harass her. Her number's probably back there in the men's room, too, and god knows how many other places. I'm fascinated that somebody can be hurt so badly that they'll go to such lengths to hurt the other right back. Kind of sad, actually."

His benign tone surprised me. I figured he had known plenty of bitterness in his own life, and might identify with the guy in his imagined scenario, empathizing rather than pitying. But then I realized the scenario was exactly that—imagined. I voiced my objection, saying he didn't necessarily know the truth of the matter.

"Yes, of course I don't know the real truth. It's all just imagined. I don't know about the person—maybe not a jilted boyfriend, or even a guy—who carved this phone number any more than you do. But I've got a bit of hard information, and know a few things about human nature, so it's not that hard to fill in some plausible details. That's the way I write, and that's the way you should write."

That subject again. I had never given writing any serious thought, and having just spent two years in business school to bolster my financial credentials, it didn't seem wise to distract myself in some foolish attempt at writing fiction. I had to concentrate on finding a job, pursuing leads, networking. My lease would soon run out, with the likelihood of moving back home with my parents increasing ominously with each passing day. I couldn't just waste my time sitting around and writing a story about some guy who carved his ex's phone number into a bar table.

I saw my beer sitting on the end of the bar where the bartender had left it. I walked away from the table.

"I don't know why you keep pushing me to write," I objected as I returned, beer in hand. "I'm not a writer. And I've got to find a job soon."

"Fine," he said, sounding almost hurt. "If that's all you want out of life, then by all means go find yourself that job. Get a wife, buy a house, have kids, a minivan, the whole shebang. Do something that only a couple hundred million people have done before."

I didn't like his tone. Though it seemed he had forgotten the whole hated-editor thing, here we were again, still at odds. Diplomacy was needed.

"Don't get me wrong. I love reading—"

"Sure you love reading," he interrupted. "Otherwise you wouldn't spend so much time in used book stores. Or talking to a struggling writer."

Struggling. He saw himself as struggling. This was something.

"You love reading," he repeated. "So why don't you want to try writing?"

I didn't reply right away, so he went on.

"You love music, right? When I called you before, I heard some postpunk stuff in the background."

"fIREHOSE."

"Right, fIREHOSE. They're the guys from the Minutemen, right? You love that music, so deep down haven't you always wanted to pick up a guitar and play? At first you'd play just like your heroes, but eventually you'd branch out wherever the muse took you."

"That's true. I've always wished I could play guitar."

"So why is writing any different? Sure, you'd start out writing exactly like Sinclair Lewis, satires about the pettiness of small-town Midwestern life, but once you had been at it for a while you'd stretch out and do your own thing."

He had a point. Once I had wished I was Pete Townshend, then later Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, all big names, before my tastes obscured and it became Glenn Mercer and Ira Kaplan. But no matter whom my guitar god of the moment happened to be, the one thing that never changed was the nagging desire to play the instrument itself.

I remembered waking up from dreams in which I stood on stage and somehow, magically since I didn't know how to play, firing off a soulful and note-perfect solo to the nodding satisfaction of a quietly appreciative audience. No Bic lighters waving in the hazed air of a sold-out arena, though; instead I'd see just one person standing, chin down, eyes closed, overtaken by the ethereal, fleeting notes I was putting out.

Familiar chords from the jukebox suddenly caught my ear, and I paused to listen while Wheatyard renewed his studious consideration of the table carvings. It was R.E.M.'s "Half A World Away", a soaring, majestic song that I'd seen make guys—both cynical bohos and hardened finance majors—stop dead in their tracks, awestruck. I realized Peter Buck was another of those guitar heroes.

My life had always been marked by a paralyzing lack of initiative; I was attracted to countless girls but couldn't bring myself to talk to any of them, I loved music but never picked up the guitar. In romance I had no excuses, but with the guitar I could weakly insist that my perfectionism would make me want to play like Hendrix right from the start, and since that would obviously never happen I would never try at all.

But with writing I had no excuses either. I loved literature and admired writers who brought ideas and words to life; I understood how words fit together, knew which sentences sounded right and which didn't. With music, there were the forbidding mysteries of chords and harmonics to learn and master, but I already knew the basics of writing. It was just a matter of working at it. I could cobble together a readable short story the very first time out—I remembered my undergrad rhetoric class, where my classmates really enjoyed some of my stuff—unlike the guitar, where no sane person could ever stand to listen to the painfully off-key notes I strangled out.

So I could write if I wanted to. It all depended on whether or not I wanted to, and I wasn't sure if I did.

"But I think it is different," I objected, weakly. "Isn't it possible to enjoy an art without expressing yourself through that medium? I mean, I'd like to play guitar and express myself musically, but maybe I don't feel the same way about writing."

"Well, of course that's possible. But you'll never really know one way or another if you never even try. You might think you want to play guitar, but until you finally pick it up and learn a few basic chords, you'll never get the chance to feel music bottled up inside you, just lingering there nervously on your fingertips waiting to burst out. Once you release that burst, you'll know you've found your true calling in life, the only thing that matters, the thing that everything else is secondary to. That's what I've found with writing. It's my passion. I can't imagine doing anything else."

His words resonated with me. Everything in my life was so routine, my steady progression through a bachelor's degree and a few years of work and then a master's. I didn't feel passion for any of it. I hadn't found my true calling. No matter what I was doing at any given moment, whether school or work, I could easily imagine doing something else—anything else.

Though he strayed from the subject I sought—just who the hell he was and how he ever got to where he was today—his insights on the writing process gave me a few hints about his character. I was about to delicately steer the conversation back to him—What else have you done?—when the friendly conversation at the next table suddenly veered to an argument over the merits of Freud versus Jung, and something he heard made him abruptly sit up in his chair.

Maybe Freud was one of the characters in his latest novel, or one of his protagonists underwent intense psychotherapy, which wouldn't be out of the ordinary for any fictional person he dreamed up. But he snapped out of his philosophical reverie, instantly alert.

"Crap. What time is it?" he said urgently.

"11:30," I said, looking over his shoulder at the clock behind the bar.

"Dammit, I'm late," he said, hurrying his books and papers together and shoving them into his bag, a canvas paperboy type with News-Gazette faintly stenciled on the side. "I had to be over at the English Building at 11:15."

Punctuality wasn't like him at all, nor the implied legitimization of the English Department as an official authority. He seemed to resist authority, never bowing to the professors, critics and editors who could have furthered his writing career. From what I saw, he was determined to succeed on his own terms, doing everything his own way, with even his definition of success being unique. Now here he was, worried about being late for an appointment at the local bastion of the literary establishment. He never seemed concerned at being late for any of our meetings.

I realized, during the few seconds it took him to pack up, say a quick goodbye and hurry out the door, a few pages flying from the paperboy bag in his wake, that something was going on with him. I sat for a few moments, wondering what it might be all about.

Overhead, R.E.M. trailed away, and the jukebox eased into instrumentation that was just as shimmering and even more upbeat, but when the vocals began I was disheartened to no longer hear Michael Stipe's plaintive croon but instead Morrissey moaning, "We hate it when our friends become successful." I wasn't a fan of either Morrissey or the Smiths, his old band, and though I immediately realized the detached narration was completely fake—the self-pitying sentiment was totally his—I couldn't understand what he meant. People should be happy for friends when good things happen to them, if they're truly friends.

As I stood, I picked up one of the sheets from the floor. It was letterhead which had been crumpled up and then uncrumpled, as if he trashed it after reading a few lines, had second thoughts, uncrumpled it and read it through, apparently finally valuing it enough to keep it.

The heading bore the imprint of Columbia Press.

"Dear Mr. Wheatyard," the letter read, "We have received your manuscript 'Longing Dissolute Midnight' and quite frankly we have never read anything so convoluted, confused and directionless. The prose is feverish, the grammar fractured and in violation of virtually every accepted rule, and the vast array of characters unwieldy and overwhelming."

After reading that, I would have crumpled up the letter too. For a writer, this had to be worse than getting a form letter. I'm sure Wheatyard must have preferred actual written rejection letters, because even if he didn't care at all about the editor's criticisms, he probably would have been curious, in a perverse sort of way, to see if the rejection contained any new forms of small-minded philistinism. He was enough of a contrarian to diligently accumulate negative comments as a curio collection, like grandmothers collect Hummel figurines.

But these criticisms seemed particularly harsh, even to someone of Wheatyard's defiant and hardened sensitivities. I wasn't surprised that his first reaction was to destroy the letter. But when I read further, I saw why he had second thoughts.

"That was our first reaction," the letter continued, "as well as our second and third reactions. But something about your narrative stuck with us, and upon further reading the novel finally, utterly resonated. The themes which you explored were very challenging in complexity, but you wove them together extremely well.

"Your manuscript shows exceptional promise, and we would be very interested in discussing publication with you. However, please be advised that your manuscript will likely require significant editing prior to publication. We would work very closely with you in the editing process.

"Please contact us at your earliest convenience ... Sincerely, So-and-so, Editor."

Finally, a possible breakthrough for Wheatyard. Possible, in that I didn't know how he'd take the suggestion of editing, or how much he valued going it alone versus getting his work published.

I returned to our table. The one beer I had allowed myself, the $2.00 luxury that probably supplanted a decent dinner, sat half-finished and warm. Finishing it now would have been worse than leaving it. I gathered my things, folded up the letter and put it safely into my backpack, and headed toward the door.

"He's a freak," the bartender, a mop-haired guy with sideburns, said as I passed.

"Huh?" I replied to this unsolicited and impertinent comment, from a guy who looked like he had just stepped off the cover of a Flying Burrito Brothers album.

"In here all the time, and always freeloading. Says he'll write me into his next book for a free beer. As if he even has any books anyway."

In reply I only nodded—while thinking this cowpunk knew nothing about him—and continued to the exit.

***

With our next meeting, for the first time I was the one to initiate contact. I don't know what compelled me to take the lead, but something seemed different and I just picked up the phone and dialed. He answered, and again in the background there droned noises that I couldn't identify. I realized I had never gotten an explanation for the vacuum cleaner I heard the last time he called. Hazel the Maid, or even Alice the Maid, he certainly wasn't.

"Hey, you dropped some papers on your way out of Mullen's the other day. Want them back?"

"Was there...a letter from Columbia Press?"

"Yeah."

"Uh, did you read it?"

"Yeah, of course I did. So, are congratulations in order?"

"I haven't decided yet."

"Want to talk about it?"

"Sure. I was coming into town anyway. Where to meet?"

"Well, I don't even have a buck-fifty for coffee, so how about the cafeteria?"

He grunted in agreement and hung up.

The cafeteria in the Union basement was the last refuge of the penniless. Penniless students, that is; the poor or homeless, had they even dared to appear, would have been immediately driven away by security, back to wherever they lived. Probably to the other side of University Avenue, to those ragged neighborhoods between campus and the interstate that people like me glimpsed only briefly but were forgotten just as quickly.

One could sit in the cafeteria for hours and never be rousted out, as long as the look was right—backward baseball cap, unbuttoned flannel shirt and torn jeans, and a stack of textbooks just tall enough to make the idler look busy. Whatever it took to pass as a student. When I had nowhere else to be but didn't feel like going home, sometimes I would come here.

With a backpack, tattered Shakespeare paperback and highlighter, I could pretend to study whenever the security guard came around. Though Shakespeare didn't interest me much, I hoped that reading the Bard blared "I'm in summer school retaking English 150 to wipe out that Incomplete" and that I belonged there. If I had an hour to spare, when all was safe the Shakespeare would be set aside for something I actually wanted to read, Sinclair Lewis or Jack London or—heaven help me in those days—P.J. O'Rourke.

But the cafeteria's drab atmosphere—dated decor, ugly artwork, stiff chairs and the endless rattling of the conveyor belt that took the dirty dishes away—meant I rarely remained for long. The coffee was crap, too, as it seemed to be in most cafeterias—pale, watery, nearly tasteless, nowhere near the standards of The Grind or any other coffeehouse, or even the convenience stores. So though addicted to coffee, I avoided the cafeteria's weak version, opting instead for the free tap water from the wall dispenser at the back of the room.

I was sitting at a table, water glass three-quarters full before me, when Wheatyard—late again—suddenly appeared. Even while standing over me, his modest height failed to impress or intimidate, his too-big trenchcoat scraping the floor at the hem. The oddity of wearing a trench in July was something else I never got around to asking about. Between the wrinkled, drooping lapels I could see a bright blue Dell Publishing t-shirt. Perfectly tongue-in-cheek and ironic, and years before irony became hip.

I handed over his Columbia Press letter, and though the situation begged the question, he said nothing.

"Well...are you going to tell me about it, or do I have to beat it out of you?" I finally joked. "And don't think I couldn't. I may look scrawny, but I could easily take you. You ain't exactly Hagler."

"True. I'd probably even get pasted by the flyweights."

"So?"

"So, you read the letter. You've figured it out already. Columbia Press—not Columbia University, but an independent—is interested in publishing Longing Dissolute Midnight. On their terms, of course. They probably want heavy editing, to get their dirty philistine mitts all over it."

"Great news. This would be your first publication, right?"

"Right, first publication. Book, short story, ranting essay, whatever."

"But is getting published worth letting some editor leave his fingerprints all over your book?"

"Now you sound like me," he smiled. "I really don't know how things stand. I haven't talked to the editor yet, so I don't know how hands-on he is. Some editors are so into ego gratification that they won't publish a book unless they get to tear it apart, so they can 'leave their mark' on it or whatever. And then there are other editors who only tweak here and there. Those editors absolutely, positively love your work, and don't want to change it much. But I haven't found any editors like that yet—just the other kind, the ones who think they can show their glorious brilliance by ripping apart your writing and making it 'coherent.' Which is why I haven't been published yet."

That seemed generous, I thought. Surely his attitude had as much to do with not being published as the preferences of editors he had encountered. I wondered how many editors had tried working with him, only to give up in frustration before his stubborn will. The English Building again came to mind.

"Why'd you rush out of Mullen's the other day? Have a hot date?"

"Hot date? Oh, sure," he said with a laugh, gesturing with a sweep of his hand for me to take in his entire physical presence, from his unkempt hair to his scraggly whiskers to his rumpled trenchcoat. And implicitly to his wallet, which was undoubtedly empty. "Yeah, I have a lot of hot dates. I can hardly keep track of them all."

"So you went to the English Building?"

"Yes. Ivy-covered academia," he intoned with mock solemnity. "Moss-covered ivory towers. Highly respected professors who have never worked a day in their lives. Ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered halls."

He paused and fished a piece of Bazooka bubble gum from the depths of his coat pocket. Opening the wrapper, he unpeeled the comic inside, reading it with a thoughtful look as he popped the gum into his mouth and began to chew. He grinned to himself, some idea clearly having occurred to him, and carefully tucked the comic back into his pocket. I immediately wondered if some future story of his would include Bazooka Joe as a character.

"Ivy-covered professors," I repeated him. "Tom Lehrer, gotcha. You surprised me there, running off to the English Building."

"Actually, it's not that bad. I'm not bowing to their official authority. I don't have any use for most of them. But there's one literature prof that I like. He's published quite a bit, both fiction and nonfiction, so he's been useful to me. On top of that, he drinks like a fish, which of course appeals to me, and when he's drunk he always buys, and tells good stories about co-eds he's bagged over the years."

"'Co-eds'? You talk like my dad."

"His word, not mine—one of those words that's never spoken out loud but only used in print. He's an older guy, late fifties or early sixties, and he was a young professor during what he calls 'the glorious days of free love.' And had tenure, which gave him plenty of latitude in, heh, tutoring his female students."

"Or proctoring," I snickered.

"Yeah, proctoring. That's better, especially since it sounds like doctor, playing doctor, which is pretty much what he was doing in all those evening 'student conferences' he held in his office, over a bottle of wine."

"I've wondered how much of that actually went on back then. You always hear rumors."

"More than just rumors—back in those free-love days it was almost an everyday thing. Anyway, this professor, Mitch Hanratty. He's dealt with a lot of New York publishers, both big houses and independents, and he knows the editor at Columbia though he hasn't worked with him directly."

Hanratty. Had to remember that name. Hanratty.

"Hanratty says the editor's a decent guy, not as big an ego as the others there. But he didn't have a good feel for how much slicing and dicing he'd want to do to my manuscript. Hanratty says he knows about some books the guy ripped to shreds, but also others that he mostly left alone."

Hanratty. Handy and ratty. Helen Reddy. Maybe the professor could fill me in on Wheatyard. Sounds like they had a few drinking binges together. I hoped Hanratty held his liquor well enough to remember some of the things Wheatyard told him.

"Hey, are you listening?" he demanded.

"Uh, yeah," I said, snapping back to attention. "Sure I am."

"Thought I lost you for a minute there. Hanratty wasn't much help with this editor, but the visit wasn't a total waste—I got to see him leer at a student who stopped in, looking for another professor. She was a real looker, and he practically drooled while gawking at her. He probably didn't have a chance with her, but thirty years ago, in that other era, he probably would have scored. He's a charmer."

"So what do you do now?" I said, easing away from the professor and back to the book.

"I guess I'll finally call the editor. I wanted to talk to Hanratty first and figure out what my position is, so now I guess I'll go ahead and call. The guy's probably wondering what happened to me."

"Why, when—" I began, glancing at the date of the letter which still laid before us. "What the hell! July 7th? You've been sitting on this for a month now?"

"Three weeks and four days."

"Aren't you worried he'll change his mind, not hearing from you? The letter sounds like he has some reservations—it's almost a conditional acceptance."

"Oh, it's definitely a conditional acceptance. Conditional on bowing to an editor. There will definitely be some editing—it's just a question of how much."

"If you already figured all that, why didn't you call sooner?"

"For one thing, I didn't read the entire letter for almost a week. Seeing that opening paragraph, I thought it was just another rejection letter."
Just as I thought.

"I let it simmer in my mind for a while, then finally read it through. I realized they'd demand some editing, and I've been debating whether or not this book means enough to me to submit it to that kind of abuse. After all, I write a new manuscript every month or two, so I could just let this one go and move onto the next."

"Does this story mean that much to you?"

"To some extent, yes it does. It's not perfect, so I could see him editing it a fair amount. But it's already good enough that if he wants to totally tear it apart, it wouldn't really be my book any more, and I'd tell him to go scratch. But I won't know anything until I talk to him. So for now I'm mildly optimistic."

"That's encouraging, I guess."

I wanted to prod him further, get him to talk more about himself or his past writing efforts. But he turned his thought process on a dime, deftly reverting to the exact point where we left off, from the last time we met.

"At Mullen's we were talking about giving yourself a chance to be a writer. From guitar to writing, remember? You really owe it to yourself to at least try. Maybe there's a writer in you, or maybe there isn't. Maybe you're destined, or condemned, to a mountain of rejection letters and the rare publication, or maybe you're only meant to crunch numbers and babysit other number-crunchers in some huge inhuman corporation. Either way, you need to find out."

I nodded, realizing it was true. As that long summer dragged on, I had grown steadily less enamored with the prospect of the corporate life which he described with such surprising accuracy. Maybe I should explore a bit, and see if I was meant for something else.

"The key to writing is being a good observer—see as much of the world around you as you can, both big things and tiny details, listen to the way people talk, understand what they're saying and what they're not saying, watch their mannerisms. After you've absorbed all of that, if you're like me you'll get this overpowering urge to interpret it, put it all in context, talk about it."

He blanched for a moment, raised his fingers to his lips and spit out his gum. He reached under the table, which trembled gently as he plastered the gray wad underneath.

"Think about how you'd describe it to someone," he continued, ignoring my disapproving look. "Then sit down with a pen and notebook and pour out every single word you can think of to say. You'll freak out when you first read it, because it won't make any sense or meet the high standards of the masters you admire. But that's okay—if you think about it, most of your conversations wouldn't make much sense in print either. From there you refine that mess of words into a coherent narrative. Or you might find that none of it was worth saying after all, so then trash it and write about something else."

As I listened, I eyed a security guard as he ambled through the room, circling the perimeter and looking warily for straggling intruders. I certainly qualified, and Wheatyard even more so. Though my Shakespeare wasn't out, I hoped we passed for two graduate students eagerly discussing the glories of literary life. Wheatyard, ragged as always, looked even more like a grad student than me, and I had actually been one just two months before. Plenty of grad students dressed even worse than him, and even several well-paid professors.

The guard came closer and our eyes met. I had never been good at lying or even striking a fake pose, and my guilty glance probably gave me away. Fortunately for me, whether from laconic disinterest from the withering heat outside or just general career indifference, the guard snorted, broke eye contact and continued on.

"We dodged a bullet there," Wheatyard said with a sudden whisper. I looked at him for a moment as he smirked, before we both turned to watch the guard retreat. "I've abandoned probably hundreds of narratives partway through," Wheatyard continued, resuming the steady voice of before. "Maybe thousands. Some of them I've bothered to write down but some were only in my head. A lot of writers destroy their aborted writing—a few even burn every scrap of paper and bury the ashes—but I keep absolutely everything. The way I figure, anything I can't use now might be salvaged later."

"Which explains Captain America drinking with Copernicus in a hooker bar in Bangkok."

"Exactly. Eventually every little fragment can be worked around to fit with something else." I thought again of his bubble gum, and realized the Bazooka Joe comic must have been one of those fragments. Keeping it meant more to him than wrapping up the gum and politely throwing it away. "Maybe you'll write a novel start to finish, and everything will just flow—characters and situations and themes will come to you effortlessly, and writing it all down will seem routine, like you're taking dictation from your imagination. If so, you're fortunate. I'm not that lucky. For me writing is laborious, mentally exhausting. I pull all these threads together into one big hodgepodge and force it to make sense."

"All right. I guess I can try it sometime."

"Start right away. Not tomorrow, not next week, but today. On your way home, observe as many details as you can, smell all the scents in the air and figure out where they came from, drop into a few stores even if you're not buying anything, listen to people talk. Then for the rest of the walk, think about everything you observed and come up with something to say about it. When you get home, sit down right away and write out all those insights. Don't worry if none of it is profound. Being profound comes with time. I'm not even there yet myself."

He made it all sound so simple. Observe, reflect, write down. No, I thought, that wasn't right—what's the simple verb for "write down"? Maybe someday I'd put those three words on a plaque, that is, if I eventually pursued writing. Even at that moment, after knowing Wheatyard for more than two months, I still was unsure.

Soon we said our goodbyes, Wheatyard smiling his encouragement while I feigned confidence and resolve, though I felt more doubt and indecision than ever. Part of me wanted to write, not fully for the writing itself but as an alternative to the wavering course of my career. We shook hands, and as I turned to leave I spied him pulling a thick hardcover from his bag. Maybe Melville, maybe Dostoevsky, or maybe someone I had never heard of.

SEVEN

Three weeks before my internship would expire, I simply walked away, ending it on my own. On that final day Leavitt was again talking about Michael Milken, what a great man and genius he was, and finally I had enough. Though my career taught me to respect and even revere the financial titans, I couldn't deny everything that Milken had done wrong—financing deals that never should have been financed, fueling an obscene buildup of corporate debt, committing the insider trading that finally sent him to prison. I couldn't celebrate the day he was released, as Leavitt had the previous winter. I couldn't keep ignoring the wrongs, as Leavitt did, just to hang onto my job for a few more weeks.

The Milken reverence would have been enough in itself, but Leavitt continued to order me to delete buyouts from the study, especially the worst cases like Federated Department Stores and TWA, and I realized he had gone too far, beyond informed discretion to blatant manipulation. Clearly he was massaging the numbers until they meant nothing at all, becoming nothing but false evidence for his predetermined conclusions. True, I did much the same on projects in my corporate finance classes, but there I was just a student angling for good grades and not an academic authority who was relied upon by policymakers for unbiased research. My crime may have resembled his, but mine was a misdemeanor to his felony. Mine wouldn't impact anyone, while his could hurt thousands or even millions.

Halfway through his latest Milken monologue I suddenly interrupted, telling Leavitt that I wanted to end my internship early, that I had an interview out of town the following week and needed to start packing up my apartment. Too many things going on, and I'd have to let the job go. He accepted casually, not asking about the interview or even shaking my hand. He said little more than that my last check would be at the department office in about a week.

Outside the heat had slackened somewhat, dipping into the eighties, but the humidity was thick as ever. Within seconds of passing through the double doors I felt my back become coated in sweat, my polo shirt instantly stuck to my skin.

I retreated down Sixth Street, thinking over my finances. Including the last paycheck, I had less than $200 left, but thought I might scrape by for the final few weeks. My rent was paid in full but there was no hope of getting the security deposit back—somehow the landlord would fabricate reasons why I still owed him money. Physical damage, heavy cleaning required, late rent charges, anything to keep the two hundred bucks. And I wouldn't dispute it, figuring it was the price for escaping Champaign. What little money I had left would have to pay for food, gas and a motel room in Minneapolis for my interview.

The following month I might be employed, living somewhere else on my own, but more likely back home with my parents, choking down my pride and bravely pretending it was anything but defeat. Somehow I would get by.

As I approached John Street, a thought suddenly came to me, and when I reached the corner I made an abrupt left turn. The Grind was on my way home, and just ahead.

Through the front window, I was heartened to see the figure that moved within, behind the gold-trimmed black lettering. Her name was Ellen, Elizabeth, something like that, working the counter. I remembered her from the last time I met Wheatyard there, and hoped she knew him.

It was mid-afternoon, a time when apparently even slacker grad students had better things to do. Other than the two of us the place was empty. As the heavy door closed behind me and the tinny bell jingled overhead, she rose from her tall stool behind the counter. From her posture I couldn't tell if she was irritated at the interruption of her solitude, or happy for someone to talk to. Summer afternoons were quiet on campus, especially for a shop devoted entirely to hot coffee. The morning going-to-class crowd had long since subsided, and those who braved the slightly cooler evening wouldn't be around for hours. The Grind's owners must have been coffee purists, as they resisted the heresy of iced drinks and the summer customers those might bring. Meanwhile, loyal employees like her paid the price, enduring loneliness and sacrificing tips.

"What can I get you?" she asked, eyes bright but her smile only muted.

The last thing I needed on that sticky day was a scorching coffee, but it seemed awkward to just blurt out my question, like some pesky journalist. So I felt compelled to order something.

"Small Kenyan."

"Coming right up," she said, turning her back to me as she moved toward the dripmaker. I couldn't help noticing what a fine back it was. As was the rest of her.

As she brought the steaming mug—not a small, I noticed with gratitude—she began to say something, probably the price, but I interrupted her. Maybe that was rude, but paying up would have ended our encounter. If I could put off closing the transaction, including the small tip I could barely afford, she might feel inclined to tell what I was so eager to know. And also stoke that other, sudden interest.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Sure," she said, hesitating, a mildly puzzled look coming to her face.

"You've seen me here before, right?"

She nodded.

"Do you remember the guy I was with? Scrawny, scraggly beard? Trenchcoat?"

Her face relaxed, breaking into a broad smile. "Oh yes," she said, shifting her head slightly closer, as if confiding in me, passing along a secret in an empty room. "I know him pretty well."

"Really?" I couldn't imagine the connection—the scruffy outsider and the All-American girl from next door.

"He used to come here all the time, but not as much lately. He always tried to chat me up, but he was so awkward, like he really wanted to say something but couldn't think of the right words."

"That's strange," I replied. "He's never short of words when he's talking to me. Or talking at me."

"Well, with me it was different." She grinned deeper, dimples alluringly puckering at the corners of her mouth. Behind me I heard the door open and the bells jingle. "I think he had a crush on me."

I stepped back, ostensibly to let the other customers go ahead but in reality because I was so dumbfounded. I couldn't remember Wheatyard showing any interest in women—no comments, no stares, not even the slightest pause as an attractive female walked past. I would have immediately recognized any such interest—during my years of solitude, of being strongly attracted but lacking the will and the words to act, I did plenty of furtive staring at girls who would soon pass, unimpeded, from my life—but I saw none of that interest from him. As far as I knew, his enthusiasm for women extended no further than Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen.

Then again, this girl—Emily, as I now read, the name hand-chalked on the menu board—and her dimples and ponytail and perfect teeth and slender but shapely body...well, even a monk like Wheatyard could be smitten. I was feeling a bit of that myself.

The other customers both ordered cappuccino, and I saw that Emily would be occupied for a while. Coffee in hand, I drifted to the front of the shop, to a table that faced the wide street windows. Steam poured from the mug's jet-black surface as I pondered this latest mystery.

But once the customers were served and found their own table, and Emily was free again, I continued to sit. Surely the two of them never got together—her tone, mentioning Wheatyard's possible crush, suggested his interest went unreciprocated. Maybe she couldn't tell me anything about him at all, and maybe, if she didn't want to get to know a unique character like Wheatyard, then she'd have no interest in an ordinary guy like me.

Maybe, I thought, I had no business being there, or even daring to consider the possibility. When she slipped into the backroom on some errand I quickly rose from my seat and hurried to the door. The bells jingled above me as I exited. The coffee remained, half-finished on the table. In my haste I neglected the common courtesy of returning the mug to the counter, but at that moment leaving seemed the best thing to do.

***

The wind whipped down Wright Street, from the north, bringing a sudden and rare reprieve from the clinging heat, stirring the air and cooling it, relieving the feverish brows of everyone around. The heat in Champaign was almost otherworldly in its oppressiveness, and now despite its looming danger the gathering thunderstorm would be welcomed by many.

Conditions would soon resemble a monsoon, sharp winds splattering horizontal rain, soaking shoes, bags, underwear, everything. Storm sewers would quickly fill and back up, flooding the curbsides and making crosswalks impassable. Lightning would crack repeatedly, blistering out of the clouds with a flash and climaxing with a deafening roar as it found its target; although everyone must have realized the chances of getting struck by lightning were infinitely slight, that uneasy feeling—wariness, trepidation, primal fear—was always present.

The storm front had already cooled the air, and the sky dimmed as I carefully crossed the Wright Street artery and, just as carefully, the adjacent bike path. Several times I had seen pedestrians make it across the street, safe from cars, only to let down their guard and get hit by a bicycle instead. Around here one looked both ways, whether crossing street or bike path. Given the recklessness with which bike riders flew around campus, most of them Greg Lemond wannabes, getting hit by a bike was as likely as by a car.

Safely across both street and bike path, I approached the English Building. When I first came here, as an undergrad, the building was decrepit—classrooms not updated since the forties, walls not painted since the seventies, original 1912 windows which rattled incessantly in heavy winds, hallways underlit with a working bulb in only every third fixture, uncooled in summer and underheated in winter, floors filled with cracks which were crammed with decades of dirt and impervious to the most aggressive sweeping. Stepping inside, I could see not much had changed.

The building was an unfortunate symbol of the school's priorities, of the minor importance placed on the humanities, in sharp contrast to the facilities enjoyed by engineering and the physical sciences, where new labs gleamed, elegant architecture comforted the eyes, and libraries were stuffed with the latest volumes and technology. Or the business campus, where grants from wealthy corporations and alumni surrounded students in academic luxury.

English was one of the few campus buildings where I could imagine Wheatyard feeling comfortable. Its decrepitude suited him, its condition relative to other campus buildings not unlike his house compared to others out in Tillsburg. The building may have been grand at its inception, but that was long ago.

I knew Wheatyard had been here to confer with Mitch Hanratty, and a few others whose fleeting names I couldn't recall. He made only passing reference to these others, and I was so absorbed in his discourse at that moment that I failed to mentally note their names, which I now regretted. The more people I could talk to who knew Wheatyard personally, like Hanratty, the better. Maybe they could tell me about him, passing along critical details he would never divulge on his own.

Wheatyard as a man of mystery, who kept his personal life almost a state secret, intrigued me at first, nagging and making me want to learn more, but had lately begun to irritate me. I wanted to know his story—not just his stories—but he was less than forthcoming, so I'd have to figure him out indirectly, through others. Don Eastman and Emily at The Grind were a start, but I needed to talk to many more people.

I was here to see Hanratty. He kept regular office hours even though he was teaching no summer classes, staying in town unlike most of his colleagues who fled to Europe or Wisconsin lake cottages for a three-month reprieve from what they considered the tedium of farm-country college-town life. Why Hanratty was still here, I couldn't imagine. But I had to take advantage of his presence while I could.

The office door was ajar, and swung in slightly as I knocked.

"Professor Hanratty?" I said to the figure seated at a desk set against the far wall, facing away from the door. He turned in his chair, which screeched in its well-worn joints, and looked up at me.

"Yes?"

I said my name and extended my hand. He shook it, without standing up. Even seated, I could see he was tall, with broad shoulders and a paunch, tousled gray hair and thick salt-and-pepper beard, and a jovial expressive face, with a smirking mouth and rounded cheeks, fleshy nose and ruddy skin.

He must have been quite handsome in his day, even dashing. Back then he probably didn't need to try very hard with female students. He might still have a decent chance with them now, if the permissiveness of those earlier times hadn't completely dissipated during the last few uptight decades. He was a charming rogue, gone far to seed.

He repeated my name, questioning, and looked me over, as if trying to recognize me. He waved me to a chair. "Haven't seen you around here. Grad student?"

"Yes, grad student, but in business. I haven't been in this building since back when I was a sophomore, taking Rhetoric."

"Rhet? Whose class?"

"Dave Cowley."

I heard a few raindrops splatter heavily on the windowpane, and noticed the daylight had darkened.

"Ha! Cowley. I miss that old bastard. So...a business major, MBA," he marveled, looking at me with curiosity, as if I was some rare foreign species. "Money man, master of the universe, barbarian at the gate. What in the world can I possibly do for you?"

Despite Hanratty's standoffish pose, staking a clear delineation between the humanities and business worlds, his words—master of the universe, barbarian at the gate—told me he was at least passingly familiar with the RJR Nabisco takeover and Michael Lewis' bestseller about bond traders, and wasn't entirely unfamiliar with my world.

As I wasn't unfamiliar with his. Otherwise I wouldn't be puzzling over an oddball writer.

"I'm here to ask you about Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard."

"Ah, Wheatyard," he replied thoughtfully. "Certainly an odd duck. But he's sharp, under all of that confusion, that detached distraction. How do you know him? "

"I met him a couple months ago, at Cellar Books," I replied. I was somewhat surprised at his directness, right from the start, without knowing me.

"Yes, he tells me he spends a lot of time there. Let me guess—he slipped you one of his manuscripts."

"Yeah, he did—Longing Dissolute Midnight. How did you know?"

"He's got manuscripts floating all around this building. I don't remember that one in particular, but I've read several others, and some of my colleagues have, too. He comes here looking for an expert opinion, though he never puts it that way. He's never on bended knee, in supplication, begging for validation. He'll hand a manuscript over casually, as if it means nothing to him, saying something like, 'If you have some spare time, maybe you could look this over.' But he must not be completely satisfied with what we've told him, since he's even given a few to Don Eastman over at Cellar Books. Eastman is an interesting one, too—very bright guy, has an English degree but never really used it. You know him, right?"

"I've met him," I said, quickly, wanting to get back on subject. "So what do you think of Wheatyard's writing?"

"Scatterbrained genius. That might sound like an oxymoron, and for anybody else it would be. But it fits him." He was facing me, his back to the window, through which I could see the rain now streaming down in torrents. "Obviously he has trouble staying focused, which could be caused by any number of factors."

"Like what?"

"That's not for me to say," Hanratty said curtly. "That's his personal life. I'm not going to gossip—wouldn't be fair to him. What I will say, however, are all matters of public record, and can be confirmed independently by anyone who digs deep enough."

"Go on."

"First, his writing, which he's freely given me. Scatterbrained genius, as I already said. He can't stay focused, writes during overpowering bursts of energy, pours everything onto the page whether any of it makes sense or not, maybe goes back and sorts it out later, or maybe not. For him the moment of creation is everything, and polishing it up afterward is nothing, but slowly he's learned to go back and edit what he spewed out during that first binge of inspiration. His earlier stuff was completely unreadable—you could tell he didn't edit a single word. But now he's learned the importance of editing, even though he doesn't enjoy that part at all."

"The manuscript I read must have been edited. Somehow he managed to connect all the loose threads, which must have required very meticulous rewriting."

"That's true. And strange, too. He doesn't appear to be meticulous in any other part of his life—just look at his clothes, and that wreck of a pickup truck—but in his writing he pursues a quest for perfection and has a great eye for detail. It's as if he's two different personalities, one for writing and one for the rest of his life."

"Writing seems to be his whole life. I don't think he has a job."

"I don't think so, either. He must get money from somewhere, though—maybe some sort of state disability. He comes into town every Friday for books and copies and supplies, which might mean he gets a check every Thursday. But he must have some other sort of income. I know he's got a house out in, where, Ennis?"

"Tillsburg," I corrected.

"Tillsburg. Houses may be cheap out there, but not cheap enough to buy with disability checks. So he's getting money from somewhere else."

"The money can't be much. You should see his house. Compared to that, his pickup is in good shape."

The room suddenly brightened, a flash of lightning piercing the gloom outside, followed almost immediately by an enormous boom that rattled the window and shook the walls. Hanratty almost jumped from his seat.

"Jesus," he uttered, settling back down. "I've been here twenty years, and I still haven't gotten used to that. Probably never will."

Though startled, I merely nodded. It had been years since thunder and lightning scared me.

The conversation drifted on, with Hanratty expounding further on Wheatyard's writing habits and talent, then veering into some war stories of days long gone and finally back to Wheatyard again.

"He's a polymath," Hanratty suddenly said, in a flat and matter-of-fact tone.

"Polymath?"

"Someone who gathers people, facts, ideas from a broad range of unrelated sources, finds connections between them, and melds them into a coherent narrative."

"Huh," was all I could answer. That made sense.

"The word might sound bad, but it's not an affliction. For a writer, it's a gift."

"I see."

"Unfortunately," Hanratty continued, "I think he's also a hypergraph, which is an affliction—a mental disorder that compels him to write obsessively, no matter what damage it does to the rest of his life. A lot of great writers had it—Moliere, Dostoevsky, Poe. It's also called the midnight disease."

I had nothing more to say, nor to hear. Mental illness was something I had never considered about Wheatyard. Eccentricity, yes, and maybe some illegal substances, but not any disorder. But Hanratty's diagnosis seemed too tidy, convenient—an armchair opinion made from a long distance. I doubted that the professor ever stopped talking about himself long enough to really get to know Wheatyard, who was too guarded to ever let a conversation get that personal. They would have only talked about literature.

I realized any further talk would do me no good. Whatever Hanratty believed about Wheatyard was just some interpretation gleaned from his writings, something I could do just as well on my own. I nodded at Hanratty, stammered a goodbye, and left.

Outside the rain had already stopped, the storm swiftly blown away, and the heat gone for the moment but soon to return.

***

The mental image hadn't faded away. The perfect skin, the cute grin, the bobbing ponytail. All of that stayed with me, as if I didn't already have enough on my mind, from Wheatyard to job-hunting to worrying if I was too hasty in giving up the internship. To all of that, my imagination added Emily. I thought about her for days, not exclusively, but still more than anything else.

Although the Good Earth Café was much more than I could afford by then, it seemed like the best place to go. I had to impress her, but obviously The Grind was out—I had to offer her somewhere nicer than the same place she worked every day—and the fast food joints were too sterile. The café said smart and sensible and healthy, despite being pricier than I'd prefer. But if I spent just right, I thought I could manage, though it meant skipping dinner that night and probably the next.

I sat nervously, hands clasped and clammy atop the table, my stomach somersaulting. I was ten minutes early, knowing I already had enough against me without being tardy. I stared straight ahead, vaguely at nothing in particular, and watched the door only off and on.

"I'm glad you called," a voice suddenly said, just above me.

I started, quietly thrilled to see that grin once again. "Oh, hi," I said, as calmly as I could.

I had called her the day before, at The Grind. At first she seemed cold, unenthusiastic, but after I mentioned Wheatyard her voice warmed. We agreed to meet and then awkwardly said our goodbyes, the few words moving haltingly between us, with none of the effortless ease I had hoped for.

"You left so suddenly the other day."

I felt the heat rush to my face, and hoped I didn't blush. "I had to be somewhere," I forced out, aware that it didn't sound convincing, unable to improvise the nonchalant specifics that might have put it across.

"Mind if I sit?" she said, her smile dimmed but still there.

"Of course," I replied, gesturing with a gentle sweep of my hand toward the opposite chair. I could have, should have been so much smoother, more natural. I was the one who made the invitation, after all. I shouldn't have been so rattled by her appearance, but that's simply how I was back then.

She slid into the other chair as she waved for the waitress. "So, what's your story?"

I passed along the particulars—four years at the bank, then back to school full-time, then graduation and joblessness and the long, hot summer in Champaign.

"The heat never really bothered me very much. Good thing, too—I'm going to Texas this fall."

"Why Texas?"

"Grad school in Austin. Psych. Masters, then maybe a doctorate if everything works out."

The mention of Austin put me off. I had no intention of leaving the Midwest, of ending up any further south than St. Louis, at A.G. Edwards or Boatmen's. My spirit slumped as I sensed the meager possibility slipping even further away. Desperate, I pushed ahead the only way I could think of.

"So you were starting to tell me about Wheatyard." I hoped she had forgiven my rudeness, as if my departure was anything other than my courage dissolving that afternoon at The Grind. "You know, the crush."

"Right, the crush. After a few tries he gave up the small talk. Then one day he ordered coffee and said, out of nowhere, 'You should read Buk.' I didn't quite catch the name, though, and said 'I've read plenty of books.' He made this sweet, patient smile, and said 'No, Buk. Charles Bukowski.' I had never heard of him. I remember a few poets from my English classes, freshman and sophomore year—you know, Wordsworth and Byron and Shelley—but nothing about Bukowski, who I'm sure we never studied. He must have seen from the look on my face that the name meant nothing to me, so he just nodded and gave a little wave, and left for his table."

"It's not surprising he tried to push some 'good writing' on you," I said. "You're just lucky it wasn't any of his."

"I didn't know he was a writer then. Sure, he was always scribbling away in notebooks, but I assumed he was just some boho keeping a journal of deep thoughts. So the next time he came in, before he even ordered, he passed a Bukowski book over the counter. I'll never forget that title: The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills. What a mouthful!"

"His own writing is really wordy, too."

She nodded and continued. "He didn't say a word, but just pointed to a Post-It on one of the pages, like that was what he wanted me to read. It was called 'Remains'—sort of a love poem about a dead wife, but different than anything I've ever read. Really weird. You know—no moon spoon June."

"I've heard Bukowski is difficult reading."

"That poem sure was. And not at all romantic—if that's what Elmer meant, it's the weirdest love note I've ever gotten. And I've had some strange ones."

Elmer? I thought. With me, his presumed confidante, he called himself Wheatyard or sometimes El. Then again, it wasn't me he had a crush on.

"That night I read the poem several times through before I finally understood it, but even then I had no idea what message Elmer was trying to give me. Next day at work, he came in again and asked what I thought of the poem. I babbled some nonsense, I don't even remember exactly what. I could tell he was disappointed with my response, but he kept chatting anyway."

"Brave man."

"Very brave." She laughed lightly. "He even asked for my phone number, and for some reason I gave it to him. Probably not a smart move, but I did it anyway. I wasn't even attracted to him, not physically. His behavior just seemed a bit off, but in an intriguing way. I guess my interest was more curiosity than anything else—just a Psych major trying to get inside someone's head."

"Did he call?" I asked, anxiously hoping that he hadn't.

"No, never did. I didn't see him here for a few weeks, and then when he finally came in again, he avoided me. Ordered coffee, and left a tip like always, but didn't hang around to chat."

"He's an unpredictable guy."

"Maybe he had second thoughts about a silly girl that didn't 'get' Bukowski," she reflected. "Maybe he was hoping we'd connect over that, and when we didn't he decided I just wasn't worth the trouble."

"His loss," I suggested, but immediately saw that my compliment missed its mark. Her eyes were drawn inward, clearly thinking of Wheatyard and not me.

"I'm sure it wouldn't have gone anywhere, but I was still kind of disappointed. I would have liked to talk to him more, but I was shy and never got up the nerve. I really wish I had, but it's too late now."

It was too late for us, too, as I slowly came to realize. Too late for Emily and me. Though I told her a few anecdotes and impressions about Wheatyard that she seemed to appreciate, our conversation ebbed and we slowly drifted into silence, moving apart even as we continued to sit across from each other. When our order arrived—hot chicken soup for her, despite the withering heat outside, half of a ham sandwich for me—we ate almost without speaking, each of us alone with our own thoughts.

Again I was back to puzzling over Wheatyard. I shook my head and smiled to myself, but only for a moment, wiping my face blank again before she could see.

A Bukowski poem, as a love note. How utterly impossible, outrageous, quixotic. And how perfectly like him.

EIGHT

"I have some news for you," Wheatyard said, his voice indifferent yet with the slightest hint of excitement. "But not over the phone. Want to drive out here? This time I'll even let you see the house."

"Great. That'd be a real treat."

My sarcasm, with the subtle dig at his lack of hospitality during my first Tillsburg visit, revealed the smallest of shifts in our respective roles. Gone was the deference, my quiet awe of Wheatyard. Two months earlier, although sarcasm is one of my more prominent traits, I never would have dared such attitude around him—but now I was tossing verbal jabs right back at him, as if we were equals.

Almost equals. He still called the shots in our encounters—when and where we would meet, what we'd talk about, when it would end. I had to settle for putting him in his place whenever I could, during the few minutes he deigned to honor me with his presence. And it did seem like deigning; despite everything about him—the slovenly appearance, the long string of failed publication attempts that were at least as long as my own failures, the run-down house and truck, the casual everyday speech—he still projected a vaguely regal bearing whenever we were together. He was subtly lordly, magisterial, during all of our meetings, issuing decrees and commands easily and naturally, as if he was used to being obeyed without question.

His decrees and commands were meant to compel me to improve myself, to prod me towards a writing career which I never would have pursued otherwise. At first I couldn't figure out what the hell he had to gain. It's not like he had accomplished everything he could with his writing career and personal life, and was now passing along his wisdom to the next generation, as if I was some sort of protégé. For one thing, he was only a few years older than me, which precluded any wizened elder role, and hadn't gained anything from all that writing other than a heap of manuscripts, all of them unpublished and possibly unpublishable.

His personal life seemed to be similarly lacking. The house, the truck, the solitary life out in Tillsburg where even a lonely bartender wouldn't welcome him, and befriending a misplaced, jobless business school grad in a used book store. None of that suggested any real fulfillment in his life.

But maybe, as I reflected many years later, he befriended me that long summer from the need to be an authority over someone. If I finally starting writing, he'd have someone to be senior to, distilling friendly advice that might be accepted or at least not rejected outright, showing me what my prose lacked when it didn't work and bestowing patronly praise when it did. Maybe, given his less-than-exalted place in the world, he just needed to be looked up to.

These reflections didn't come until much later, during a momentary lull in the busy life I eventually found myself in. During those summer months in Champaign I rarely paused for reflection, instead merely going along for the ride without contemplating what any of it really meant.

Going along for the ride had me on the road out to Tillsburg, for the second and final time. The car was still holding up, though the oil hadn't been changed since the previous fall and the freon had completely run out, leaving me with rolled-down windows and full-blast vents streaming the scorched August air. A jug of ice water, grabbed from the refrigerator right before departure, was my constant driving companion, for both my parched throat and the very real possibility of an overheated engine.

The jug sat on the seat next to me, ice cubes and most of the chill already gone, bouncing into the air as the car jostled over a railroad crossing—the locals still called it the Illinois Central back then, even though the old railroad's ownership had changed several times—as I sped down the county road toward Tillsburg.

Ahead in the distance I spied a boxy, two-story building through the shimmering waves of heat. The rigid geometric shape stood out starkly amongst the swaying cornstalks—now easily eight feet high—and soybeans. I remembered reading that straight lines are a human invention, while the natural world is all curves and arcs; the tone of the prose was condemning, as if straight lines were an unnatural abomination along the lines of light beer, gasoline-powered cars and bleach-based laundry detergent. The piece was in some leftist rag sheet I had picked up in the foyer of a record store, the kind of publication I would read back then for amusement, sneering at how the other side thought. Maybe there was something to all of that, about straight lines and curves, but the writing was so over-the-top and extreme that it would only convince the already converted.

I shook off those distracting thoughts and returned my attention to the boxy building up ahead. I must have passed it during my first drive to Tillsburg, but probably failed to notice it as I puzzled over Wheatyard and his strange life. As I came closer, over the tops of the cornstalks I could see figures milling about in the field behind the building, sun glaring intermittently off their helmets. Through the roar of the rushing wind I heard the hard crack of plastic on plastic and the lower yells of gruff adult voices and the shrill of whistles, and realized at once what it was.

They called it fall football practice, though at ninety-five degrees and eighty percent humidity the season was still deepest summer. Fall was green leaves turning to gold and orange and brown, chilly evenings when one gladly wore a coat for the first time in six months, starting school again, dodging the incessant doorbell-ringing of trick-or-treaters and gorging on turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving before fighting off a nap during the second football game. That was fall.

This was August, the dog days, when it seemed cruel and unusual to force a bunch of teenagers to wear full pads and sprint and tackle full-out, all for the promise of Friday night glory. That glory would be theirs, the drained players were told, greatness awaited them and this was their time and moment in the sun, even if most of the glory went toward the egos of the coaches—all of them frustrated ex-jocks—and the parents.

I saw so much of that back in high school. Back then I played soccer, but was near enough to the football team, that epicenter of every high school, to witness the coaches' casual sadism and bear their disdain on those rare instances when any of us other soccer players were noticed at all. Mostly we were in the football players' way—hogging up locker room space, whining for just one clean dry towel, occupying a single field that could have used for a private torture session of wind sprints in full gear. None of us were considered tough enough to survive even five minutes in that manliest of sports.

Those memories instantly flashed through my mind after hearing the braying of unintelligible insults and seeing the tackling drills, the suffering players bent at the waist, hands on their knees and gasping for air. All of the old resentments—third-class citizenship from not lacing on shoulder pads, envy of the team's eminence in the school hallways, longing for the girls who swooned at the sight of any numbered jersey, whether that of star running back or third-string safety—came rushing back.

I sped past the school, which stood surrounded by cornfields, well beyond the outskirts of town. TILLSBURG-WILLMAN-ENNIS, the sign read, HOME OF THE REDHAWKS. Another consolidated high school, once three schools but now one, the towns' inevitable response to dwindling populations. Bitter age-old school rivalries, and the pride of competing towns, would vanish as three groups of students, parents and alumni merged into a single school, the traditions, school songs and mascots falling away forever. This building, maybe only five years old and beyond any town limits, couldn't have been one of the three original schools. It must have been cheaper to toss up a new building of cinder blocks and vinyl siding than maintain three old decaying ones, which were all abandoned to the elements and slowly faded away.

So a new building rose out of the prairie, not within any of the three towns, to avoid hurting anyone's feelings. The Redhawks name must have been newly-invented as well, politically correct and inoffensive. A fresh start for everyone, it would have been proclaimed. Memories of the past would dissolve as a new generation of students arrived who knew little of what came before, kids who knew nothing other than the T-W-E Redhawks. Once the old schools were finally bulldozed, there would be few reminders left for youngsters other than the faded varsity jacket in dad's closet and a dusty trophy case in a back hallway of city hall.

I slowed upon seeing the first reduced speed limit sign—45 MPH—in the past twenty miles, which finally signaled the approach of Tillsburg. Not that any signal was necessary. The town had been obvious for the last five miles, its cluster of trees, rusted water tower and grain elevator all standing out prominently above the endless horizon of grain. I passed a Kerr-McGee station, a squat cinderblock structure with a paint-peeling screen door emblazoned with a 7-Up sign and framed by two single-pane windows decorated inside with crisp white curtains. The two mechanical pumps up front seemed more than the station needed, harkening back to prosperous times, to more residents and more country-road drivers in the days before the interstates. Farther on was an office of the university extension service, barren of parked cars even at midday, and then what was obviously killing the Kerr-McGee—a Casey's gas station and convenience store. Though humbled by the vast gas plazas in bigger towns like Champaign and Danville, Casey's was positively decadent in Tillsburg, with its sheltering overhead apron and bright lighting and gleaming gas pumps with digital displays, and aisles of snack foods inside.

My tank was running low and gas was cheaper out here than in Champaign, so I pulled into the Casey's lot just long enough to turn around and head back to the Kerr-McGee. The place obviously needed the business, and of the two stations it seemed less like a profit center of some big anonymous corporation. Interesting, I thought—maybe that leftist rag was influencing me after all. At first the paper just amused me, all those crazy proclamations of anarchists challenging every belief the business program instilled in my head during the past two years, but now I was deliberately opting for the less corporate-seeming of the two corporate entities.

I filled up the tank and swung inside to pay, handing eleven dollars in crumpled bills to a teenaged girl who sat behind the counter with an open textbook lying to one side. She only turned away from her geometry long enough to take my money and give back my change. Another kid destined to graduate from dear old T-W-E and leave Tillsburg for one of the state universities, eventually never to return. Though I admired her diligence in studying, I also realized from a glance at the magazine rack—Guns & Ammo, Field & Stream, Motor Trend—that the station had little that would otherwise interest a teenaged girl.

I followed the main drag the short distance to Railroad Street. I turned and drove down the center of the traffic-less street, which felt oddly narrow against the broad expanses of farmland and cloudless sky—the long line of witheringly neat houses on the right, the long stretch of empty railroad track on the left. The town seemed vaguely forbidding compared to my last visit, and that visit was unwelcoming enough, with Wheatyard not letting me into his house and the two of us all but getting kicked out of Simon's.

The pristine houses and proudly kept lawns ended abruptly at Wheatyard's house, the last on the street at the edge of town before the endless fields began. Just beyond Wheatyard's place stood the town dump, a sight I hadn't expected. I thought such places, full of piles of rusty junk and simmering refuse, guard dogs and the occasional scavenger poking around, were either of the distant past or a complete myth. I assumed the industry had gone entirely to modern landfills perimetered by barbed wire, like a high-security prison, and off-limits to scavengers with junkyard dogs no longer necessary.

As I looked on, a flock of crows circled above the debris—mounds of rotting food and used diapers and soiled mattresses—as wiry dogs trotted in circles, occasionally nipping each other with bared teeth, yelping when a bite hit deep. I hadn't noticed the dump during my first visit, when my attention was riveted on the ramshackle squalor of the house and imaginings of how Wheatyard spent his days there. But during this visit I might also have easily missed seeing the dump, with the remarkable sight on display in the ranch house's front yard.

There, amidst foot-high weeds and sunflower stalks several feet higher, Wheatyard reclined in an aluminum-framed lawnchair, wearing only a too-small pair of adidas shorts and scribbling furiously in a notebook. He didn't notice me as I pulled up, the car rattling and running on long after I switched off the ignition, nor as I stood, gaping first at the dump and then in even greater wonder at the sight of Wheatyard basking in the sun.

He certainly wasn't a sunbather. His pasty skin suggested he only went outdoors when he needed to—from house to truck, and from truck to Simon's or Mullen's Tap or The Grind or Cellar Books. The sedentary act of sunbathing didn't fit him, nor the vain goal of a deep tan. I guessed that his house was such an oven that day that only sitting outside offered any relief. But not even being outside separated him from his writing; hence, the notebook and what must have been his latest misunderstood masterpiece.

His skin was already turning pink. He must not have bothered with sunscreen, and was without sunglasses as well, squinting severely as he stared at the stark white pages. As I came closer, amidst the weeds I saw a folded-up beach umbrella, which he must have dragged out of the house but not bothered to set up, so intent was he on his writing. The faces of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Woodstock peeked out from the fabric's folds, which surprised me as much as the presence of the umbrella itself—in Tillsburg, Illinois, hundreds of miles from the nearest beach.

After I stood there for several minutes, Wheatyard finally looked up, saying "Oh, you're here," as if mildly surprised. No pleasantries, no What's up? or Damn it's hot today or How was the drive? or Good to see you. None of that—just Oh, you're here. Typical of him. He had little use for social formalities, which I agreed with. Most greetings were meaningless formalities, with the asker rarely being truly interested in the answer.

No formalities for him, just flat statements of fact. Or opinion.

"That editor of Muirwood Journal, Wilkins or Wilson or whoever, is a complete idiot. I'm writing him a letter to tell him that."

"Muirwood?"

"They turned down my short story, a fictionalized account of John Muir's marriage. Of course I took liberties—I'm not a historian or some glorified stenographer—but this Wilkins seemed genuinely offended."

I had no doubt the story was offensive, even if Wheatyard hadn't meant to offend. He wrote what he wanted to write, explored any topic, built any plot, intermixed any implausible characters that came to mind, with no regard for the reader's reaction. He was provocative without even trying to be.

"Offensive? How?"

"This editor must a tree-hugger or something," Wheatyard continued, ignoring my question. "Appointed by the Muir Foundation for his delicate sensitivity to all things ecological, his loves for birds and trees and flowers, and his shrewd judgment of what constitutes great literature."

"Offensive?" I repeated.

"Yeah, offensive to him and those delicate sensibilities." He shook his head. "He's offended by the simple notion that Muir's marriage to his Fair Diana could suddenly come crashing down due to what he calls an 'inappropriate and unnatural relationship' with Smokey the Bear."

"Gee, that doesn't sound offensive at all," I said with mild sarcasm, but he clearly did not catch my tone. Nor did he notice my raised eyebrows which conveyed the same sentiment.

"Well, this idiot editor thought so, and since he's the grand arbiter of taste at that journal, the head muck-a-muck, they won't publish it. I write them a story about John Muir, specifically for the journal, and they turn it down. And it's one of the best stories I've written, too, but it's so specialized that I doubt anybody else will take it."

"Maybe he's a stickler for accurate time frames," I offered, stealing a glance at the dump. "Smokey the Bear probably wasn't created until long after Muir died. So their relationship was impossible, temporally speaking."

"Christ," Wheatyard said, still ignoring me. "What really gets me is that I meant it as a compliment to Muir. He loved the woods, Smokey loved the woods, and Muir would have been enraptured, maybe to the point of lust, at Smokey's quest to prevent forest fires. The fact that they'd have a love child is a great piece of symbolism."

"Love child?" I replied, stunned. "John Muir and Smokey the Bear had a love child?"

"Of course they did. They both would have been earthy, virile, fertile as a swamp. Having a child together would have been the most natural thing in the world."

"Well, not exactly natural," I said, choosing my words carefully. "Because it's impossible for a human and a bear to produce offspring. And isn't Smokey a male? That might be another problem the editor had."

"It's only a problem for editors of biology textbooks," Wheatyard replied, shaking his head. "It shouldn't be a problem for fiction editors. Fiction is all about possibilities, or impossibilities. Of course a love child of Muir and Smokey is biologically impossible. That wasn't my point. I had no intention of being literal. The love child was symbolic, an allegory, not a statement of fact."

He paused and looked over his shoulder at the flurry of crows as they swooped over from the dump, squawking and bickering, and finally landed on the ridge of his roof. Wheatyard's skin had grown even pinker, probably from both sunburn and anger.

"Not a statement of fact," he repeated. "Symbolism. Allegory. Any competent editor has to recognize that and not interpret it literally, and then get all huffy and offended. Otherwise he might as well be editing biology textbooks, pursuing his true calling in life. Or maybe just sweeping the floor of the biology lab."

The aspersion on the working class caught me by surprise. I assumed he had blue collar roots, even if he was now following loftier pursuits. The janitor comment wouldn't have been out of place from any of my finance professors, academics who saw labor either in abstract terms or as expendable inputs which could be cast aside if projected revenues failed to materialize. But it sounded strange from Wheatyard, who seemed a likely champion of the little guy, or at least sympathetic. But I shook off the thought. I hadn't driven all the way out to Tillsburg to reflect on Wheatyard and the working class, but to hear his good news. And neither a rejection letter from a small-time literary journal nor his angry reaction qualified.

"Uh, yeah, right. Biology, heh. So what's this good news of yours?"

"I'm not sure yet if it's good news or not. I finally talked to the editor of Columbia Press about Longing Dissolute Midnight."

"And?" The suspense wasn't exactly killing me, more like annoying.

"And he's definitely interested in publishing it."

"Well, you knew that before, right? Otherwise he wouldn't have bothered contacting you. But what about the editing? That's what you were so worried about."

"He wouldn't commit either way, which isn't surprising—he's a businessman, and smart businessmen don't commit to anything. When I asked, he left it an open question, but he does seem pretty cool with the entire concept. He says he likes big, sprawling novels, epics, the kind with a huge cast of characters—he referenced Cecil B. DeMille and casts of thousands, which of course I appreciated—and narratives that take forever to develop but finally hit with a wallop fifty pages before the end."

I hadn't read enough of the book to know about any such wallop at the end. It had the cast of thousands, but in two hundred pages I only picked up a few overriding themes before I finally gave up, long before any big finish. But his tone suggested that all of his novels, not just this one, followed that pattern and that maybe he had finally found an editor who was attuned to his style. An editor who was, if not a kindred spirit, then at least an indulgent advocate.

But I didn't know if having just an advocate would be enough. I was familiar enough with the corporate world and its reluctant, conservative tendencies—one thing that drove me away to grad school, looking for a clean break and a fresh start—to realize that a big difficult book, "inaccessible" in corporate-speak for challenging but unmarketable art, would have a hard time working its way through the bureaucracy, the endless layers of management, before getting the final seal of approval. An advocate, someone who spoke up for you at staff meetings but wasn't really heart-and-soul behind you, might not be enough for Wheatyard. Instead he would need a true champion, someone who would go to the wall for him, preach passionately about the greatness of his work, risk a career to expose the writer's difficult brilliance to the world.

I doubted that such a champion existed anywhere in the publishing industry, someone who could not only recognize Wheatyard's genius but also be willing to put up with his maddening quirks and eccentricities. He seemed like he'd be a tough writer to work with. And if the book ever made it to publication, its slightest chance of overnight success would have been overwhelmed by the near certainty of crushing failure.

"This editor—what's his name?"

"Bill Perkins. No relation to Max, unfortunately. Of course Max has been dead for decades, but I would have loved if Bill at least had his bloodlines."

I had no idea who Max Perkins was, nor why I was supposed to be impressed at the thought of him being Wheatyard's editor. I guessed he was some publishing bigshot. Fortune 500 CEOs, major investment bankers, bigshot venture capitalists, all those I knew, but not New York editors.

"So do you think he wants to do major editing?"

"Like I said, he wouldn't commit. But I'd guess he's pretty hands-off. He mentioned a few novels he admired, thousand-pagers that were only lightly edited and pretty much left as-is."

"Well, that sounds encouraging."

"Sort of. But he also mentioned And Hickman Arrives, and what its editor would have been up against pulling that manuscript together. As if he fantasized about tackling something like that himself."

"Hickman?"

"You know, Ralph Ellison."

"Oh sure, Ellison. I loved Invisible Man and that one story about the wheel of fortune, but I've never heard of this other book."

"It's still unpublished. The manuscript is several thousand pages, and Ellison's still not done with the first draft. He's been working on it for thirty or forty years now, and even lost a big chunk of it in a house fire and had to rewrite a thousand pages from memory. It's the Great White Whale, or maybe the Bigfoot, of the publishing industry—Great White Whale because it's an impossible quest, Bigfoot because no one's ever seen it. Writers and editors talk about it in mythic tones, kind of in awe. Everybody's been waiting for decades for the followup to Invisible Man, and there's practically a betting line set up for whether or not Hickman ever gets published."

I envied his deep familiarity with literature. Though I had always been an avid reader, my literary knowledge was scattershot. I'd read anything and everything, but I was really only familiar with a handful of my favorite authors, all of them out of fashion, and only knew the names of legends like Updike and Roth and Bellow without ever having read them, and never heard of hundreds and possibly thousands of other prominent writers. My literary knowledge had no context, either; I knew little about who influenced whom, about artistic movements, about the great works and how they impacted civilization. And I knew nothing about the inner workings of the publishing industry.

It suddenly occurred to me that Wheatyard might not have been the recluse I had imagined him to be, a one-man literary movement, alone in this desert island of a town, isolated for twenty miles in every direction by an ocean of corn. His familiarity with an unpublished novel like Ellison's, along with other insider comments he made now and then, didn't quite fit the image of a recluse. His knowledge couldn't have been gained over beers at Simon's. Instead it suggested an advanced education, with years of seminars, workshops, and endless arguments over novels and novelists in smoke-filled bars long after class was over.

But Wheatyard's personality, as Don Eastman suggested, didn't seem conducive to a writing program. He would have fought against all of the politics, the ass-kissing, the backstabbing and petty personal attacks that I heard went on there. He probably would have responded to harsh criticism of his stories by strangling the critic to death with the other's own skinny tie. And that must have never happened, since he now lived in a rundown house in Tillsburg instead of the old prison up in Pontiac.

So maybe it wasn't advanced education at all, just freak intellect and intense curiosity.

He was still going on about Ralph Ellison when my attention reverted to him.

"...so I can't get a clear read on Perkins. Maybe he'll leave it alone, or maybe he's taking it on so he can go down in history as the man who was brave enough to tame a book like Ellison's."

"Would an editor really do that? Take on a project that the rest of the industry saw as impossible, just for the personal glory of slaying the firebreathing dragon?"

"Firebreathing dragon?" he replied with a smile. "That's what you think about my writing? Wild, uncontrollable, lethal?"

"No, but I assume a cautious editor would. What I read of Longing Dissolute Midnight sort of made sense to me, and even when I didn't know what the hell you were talking about I still enjoyed the narrative. But I think an editor might look at your writing that way—a firebreathing dragon—especially if he was contemplating how to make it palatable to the general public."

"Palatable," he said with undisguised disgust. "Well, one thing in my favor is that it doesn't have to be palatable to the general public, since that's not Columbia's market. They're not a Random House or Knopf that has to move a hundred thousand copies to get their minimum rate of return. Columbia's a small outfit. Perkins would be thrilled to sell five thousand copies, and there just might be five thousand people in the world who'd understand my writing, who'd really get it. That's why I looked for an independent like Columbia in the first place."

"I don't know anything about independent publishers, but I do know indie record labels, so I think I get what you mean."

"Indie labels, indie publishers, same general idea—free from the mainstream and its mindless conformity. The mainstream that loves vampire stories and legal thrillers where you can see the big plot twist climax hundreds of pages ahead. Bored housewives who read Harlequin romances to fill the void of their non-existent love lives, bored executives who read spy novels and imagine themselves as dashing secret agents instead of corporate robots."

The same corporate robot I would soon become, he left unsaid. What he saw as the mindless life he was trying to save me from by writing. Wheatyard was a writer, an enthusiastically compulsive one, but everything he had to show for it—endless hours of work, piles of unpublished manuscripts, a lonely existence in near-squalor in the middle of nowhere—were less than enticing alternatives to the mindless but comfortable existence of a corporate career. Sure, Wheatyard was his own man and lived life on his own terms, but that didn't seem quite enough to make up for all of the rest.

After I remained silent, he paused, appearing to consider his implication. Paused not from regret, though, as I had never seen Wheatyard regret any of his actions. He did what he did, damn the consequences, and must have believed that regretting things he had done would do nothing to change them. Instead his pause seemed like it was meant to let his words fully sink in. And they certainly did sink in.

"I don't want to have to appeal to the tastes of small-minded peons," Wheatyard said, moving on, his point about my situation clearly made. "I won't make that compromise, which is why I won't bother with Random or Knopf or any of the other big boys. I'll go with Columbia or some university press that can probably find the five thousand people who are smart enough to read my writing just the way I wrote it, and not the way some editor messed with it."

"So that's all you had to tell me?" I said, mildly incredulous. "That's what I drove all the way out here for? Not to hear that an editor wants to publish your book and made a generous offer, not that you already accepted and it's coming out next month, none of that. Just that you finally called the editor?"

He looked hurt, which I didn't at all regret. He fully deserved it as payback for saying I would soon become some corporate android.

"Hey, you were the one who badgered me to respond to the guy," Wheatyard shot back, his face now clearly reddened more from anger than the sun. "I thought you'd be glad to hear it."

"Sure, I'm glad for you, but I could have heard the news over the phone instead of burning up another quarter-tank of gas driving out here."

"I thought you might like to pass the time, too. I mean, you're out here. It's not like you have anything else going on."

"I don't mind passing the time," I admitted. "I just hoped you had big news."

"No big news yet. But I might finally be getting close."

"Well, I guess that's something."

"Have you started writing?"

"A little bit." Again he had diverted the subject from himself, but strangely I didn't mind this time.

"Tell me about it."

"Okay," I began, pausing for breath. "I was sitting in my apartment last weekend, sweltering like always. It was getting dark outside, much sooner than it should have—it was still only late afternoon. And then I heard the rain start to fall. I'm on the top floor, so the rain always hammers on the roof right above me, and I thought about how rain brought the promise of relief, if not always the fulfillment. You expect it to cool things off, but usually it's over in just a few minutes, and then the sun comes back out and turns all that moisture into one big sauna, even more uncomfortable than before. And I thought how much the farmers needed the rain, with all the drought, but this little would just dry up and make no difference at all."

I paused, feeling what strangely seemed almost like pride. I kicked at the dirt, the toe of my shoe hitting something half-buried in the ground.

"While thinking about all of this, a couple interesting phrases popped into my mind. So I opened a notebook and wrote down how August rain always fails to bring relief, how the soil—'the thirsty dust'—would just greedily soak up what little had fallen, offering no help to the withering crops."

"And your bigger point?"

"No bigger point, just some observations. Bigger points are your territory."

"Bigger points are every writer's territory," he corrected. "But at least you're taking down observations. That's the first step. Collect as many observations about summer rain as you can. And make sure you think about what makes it unique—summer rain is a lot different than spring rain and certainly November rain. Write everything down, wherever you are—keep that notebook with you at all times. Thoughts will come to you anywhere."

The object I kicked at finally dislodged, tumbled end over end and clanked to a stop against the aluminum leg of Wheatyard's lawnchair. It was a garden hose nozzle, which surprised me since the lawn clearly hadn't been watered in a long time.

"Yeah, thoughts already do," I said, nodding. "I had a few come to me while driving out here, but I forgot my notebook." Wheatyard visibly cringed. "But I'm sure I'll remember them when I get home."

"Dammit, don't go anywhere without that notebook," he said, standing and picking up the nozzle. He wound up and flung it across the road, where it bounced to a stop against the rails. "I never go anywhere without several. I can give you paper and pen if you want."

"Nice toss. No, don't worry about the pen and paper. They weren't any great insights, anyway."

"Doesn't matter whether they're great or not." He sat back down in the chair. "All insights are worthwhile, small or big."

"I think I'll remember them later."

"Okay. If you don't, then take this as a lesson. Now, once you have a bunch of observations about summer rain, think of how to incorporate them into a story. Think about farmers out in the fields, crops withering with the drought, staring at the sky at what they hope are rainclouds. Imagine their hopeful anticipation, which comes despite having seen too many clouds before that failed to bring rain. Picture their anxious faces when rain finally starts to fall, and then the bitter disappointment when the rain stops after just a few minutes, the clouds move away and the burning sun returns."

"Wow. That's pretty good."

"Yeah, but it's not mine. Steinbeck—the first chapter of The Grapes of Wrath."

"I haven't read that, but I saw the movie," I replied, seeing Wheatyard cringe again. "Sorry."

"No, it's alright. The movie was actually pretty good. Fonda was great, pulled off Tom Joad really well. But you need to read the book, too."

"I've been meaning to. But just from the movie I know what you mean—rain doesn't come, farm is about to fail, family has no choice but to abandon it and everything they've ever worked for, and then leave for California."

"Yes. For the mythical promised land, which doesn't exactly welcome them with open arms. That's the great opening from one of the greatest American novels."

"Interesting to hear you say that. I'd guess Steinbeck's writing style is absolutely nothing like yours."

"Oh, no, not at all."

"But still you admire it."

"Tremendously. Just because Steinbeck doesn't write like me doesn't mean I don't think he's a great writer. There are plenty of great writers that write nothing like me. I could never write like them, but even if I could, what would be the point? The Grapes of Wrath has already been written, and so has Ulysses and Siddhartha and 1984 and Catch-22. Why bother writing my own book if it was just like any of those?"

"To sell a lot of copies, for one thing."

"Sure, if I was at all interested in selling books. But I'm not. Right now I've got enough to live on, even if it only gets me this little house in Tillsburg."

"So you said you were going to finally let me see the house. Inside, I assumed."

"I've got enough to live on," he continued, ignoring me, "and don't really need much material stuff. Eating a little more regularly would be nice, and so would being able to buy all my beers at Simon's instead of relying on Tom the bartender's generosity. But I can get by without selling a lot of books, so I don't have to write like the greats. I can write my own way, something unique, something I can be proud of as my very own."

"Unique. That's a good way of putting it."

"What, so now you're a critic?"

"Isn't every reader a critic? But come on, you have to admit your stuff is unusual."

"No, not unusual. I have characters and plots and settings and time frames and themes, just like Steinbeck and Kafka and every other writer since the dawn of time."

"And Walt Whitman getting it on with Betty Boop."

"Why wouldn't Whitman be attracted to her?"

"Well, they lived about seventy five years apart, for one thing. And Betty was fictional, and I think I heard that Whitman was gay."

"Maybe he was, but so what? Why wouldn't a great 19th Century poet, for one brief moment, have the hots for a 20th Century cartoon character? Even if he was gay, maybe he'd see something remotely masculine in her, something that fired up his libido in spite of his natural preference. I've never read anything about Whitman having had any strong aversion to short skirts and heavy makeup."

"But the seventy five years apart?"

"I wasn't being literal when I wrote that. Symbolic, always symbolic. H.G. Wells conjures up a time machine that shuttles his protagonist forward and backward in time, and nobody objects, but I hook up Whitman and Betty Boop in a completely allegorical context, and people complain about it."

"What people?" I asked, curious to learn that I wasn't the only one who felt this way.

"I don't mean those two characters specifically. But intermingling characters from different eras gets a lot of resistance from editors. Or different species—like that idiot editor whining about John Muir and Smokey the Bear. Nobody's capable of 'suspension of disbelief' with my writing, like they are for other writers. I mean, Gregor Samsa turns into a beetle? Come on!"

We had been standing in the sun for an hour, yet Wheatyard still showed no sign of being ready to move inside. Not that it would have helped his sunburn anyway—even though I shaded my eyes I could see his skin was moved beyond pink and had begun to redden. He would be in a lot of pain in the morning. Yet he seemed unaware of any discomfort as he railed about the injustices of literature.

"Here's what I ought to do. Next time I want Moses to sit down to a deep philosophical discussion with Immanuel Kant, I'll introduce Wells' time machine into the story. That will take care of the different eras 'problem.' Then I'll hint at the existence of the unpublished journals of Wells' narrator in which he followed up his time machine with a device that enables cross-species fertilization, in order to breed a superior race which draws on the best qualities of its predecessors—like Muir's intellect and Smokey's brute physical force. That takes care of the different species 'problem.' But that fabrication would do nothing to advance the narrative, and would just clutter things up instead, all to ease the tender sensibilities of some tiny-minded editor."

I ignored the thought that his writing already seemed to have plenty of clutter. "So when am I getting the grand tour?" I may have said it too bluntly, but I was tiring of his rant, and of standing in the sun. We were getting nowhere.

He looked up at me, and then around himself—at the weeds, at the beach umbrella he never bothered putting up, at his burning skin—and smiled as if suddenly realizing how ridiculous all of it was. Arguing at great length about literature, mostly with himself, amidst the less than pleasant surroundings of his overgrown front yard and the rank odors from the town dump, all while giving himself a sunburn.

"No grand tour for you," he said, grinning, and rose from the lawnchair. "You can't afford it. You'll get the nickel tour, and like it."

As he stood up, his notebook—in which he had once been scribbling his angry but now-ignored screed to the editor of Muirwood Journal—slipped off of his lap and disappeared into the weeds.

"Um, your notebook?" I said, pointing.

"Eh, forget it," he replied nonchalantly, even as he stooped to pick it up.

"But what about that letter? It sounded pretty important to you."

"It was important at the time. But if I wrote a nasty letter to every editor who rejected one of my novels or stories, I wouldn't have time to do anything else."

"Hmmm. That many rejections, huh?"

"As of yesterday," he sighed, "673 rejections, plus several hundred non-responses. And that's just as of yesterday. Today's mail hasn't arrived yet. Who knows, might be a few more there." He looked over my shoulder, far past me. "Well, speak of the devil."

When I turned I saw a mailman two blocks away, slowly moving toward us. He walked with a pronounced lean, his thin body barely counterweighing his bulky shoulder bag. In silence we watched his progress, a relic of the past in this town which was filled with so many relics. He finally arrived at Wheatyard's house, huffing and sweating profusely in the heat, clearly displeased at having to walk all the way to the edge of town.

"Hello, Mr. McMurtry. What do you have for me today?"

"Well, let me tell you, Elmer," he snapped, turning aside the friendly greeting. "Next time you use insufficient postage for one of these ridiculous manuscripts of yours, please do me a big favor and don't include your return address. Save me some trouble."

He handed over a four-inch-thick envelope which was scuffed and bursting at the seams, along with a handful of letters.

"Insufficient postage?" Wheatyard half-shouted, grasping the thick envelope and reading it. "Dammit, McMurtry, this is Insidious Affirmative. I sent it over a month ago—here, July 9th, see?—and it had to be postmarked by the end of July. Now it's too late. What do you mean, insufficient postage?"

"Just like I said," the postman replied coolly. "Insufficient postage. You paid $3.25, but that one has to be five dollars, easy."

"$3.25 is what those idiots on campus told me it would cost, so what was I supposed to do? Question them, ask them to show me the rate tables? Surely they're smart enough to know what the postal rates are. That's their job—that, and taking long afternoon naps."

The specter of class distinctions again arose uncomfortably in the air, not unlike the janitor comment from earlier.

"I don't know what to tell you. $3.25 wasn't enough."

"Okay, fine, somebody screwed up and can't read a digital readout. So why did it take you over a month to get it back to me? If you guys were on the ball, you could have returned it in plenty of time for me to get the right postage and send it off again before the deadline. And you could have handled it a little more gently too. It looks like it was stomped on by elephants."

"That's regional's problem. They're the ones who had it all this time, and who decided there was insufficient postage. I don't know anything about that. The package got sent back to the Tillsburg P.O. and had your address, so I'm the lucky guy who got to lug it all the way down Railroad Street to return it."

"No offense, McMurtry," Wheatyard said, quieter. "I know it's not your fault that your colleagues in Champaign and the regional office are such idiots. They've obviously been promoted to where they can do the least amount of damage, like any other brain-dead bureaucracy. I'm sorry if it felt like I was taking it out on you."

"You did take it out on me," the mailman replied, more angry than hurt.

"Well, I'm sorry about that. You're just doing your job. I know you're at the mercy of those above you in the food chain, whether or not they deserve to be there."

Wheatyard's implication—that the postman was inferior in the bureaucracy to people that Wheatyard considered idiots—went over badly. The mailman glared at him before turning away.

"Don't waste your apologies on me," he said over his shoulder. "I don't give a damn anyway. Save them for someone who cares. I'm sure you'll be needing plenty of those apologies."

"Hey, I just meant..."

Wheatyard's voice trailed away as he faced the futility of further discussion. He had lashed out, assumed an air of superiority and attacked a man not at fault, and as a result he now clearly had one less ally in Tillsburg. I wondered how many allies he had left out here, if any.

Wheatyard shoved the thick envelope under his arm and tore open the letters, ripping the end off of each and reading their contents one by one.

"Briarcliff Review ... 'Dear Writer' ... hmmm ... Frostbite Quarterly ... 'Dear Elmer' ... nice, a fill in the blank ...'Thank you for your recent story submission. Although the story had its merits ...' Rejection ... Scurrilous Journal ... 'Dear Mr. Wheatyard' —hey, they actually typed this one ... oh, wait—'We have discouraged you several times from any further submissions, apparently to no avail. We again respectfully decline...'

"Three more for the file," Wheatyard said with a smirk, crumpling the letters in his wiry fist. "Those don't bother me. Now this,"—he indicated the wayward manuscript under his arm—"really bothers me. The publisher requested manuscripts with a specific theme, with a July deadline. I didn't even find out about it until the middle of June, but a story idea came to me pretty quickly and I cranked the book out in three weeks."

"Finished in three weeks?" I replied, incredulous. I assumed it had to take at least six months, especially for a book as lengthy as this one. And densely written, from what I knew of his writing.

"Finished enough. I figured if they really liked it they'd give me more time to polish it up. Submission deadlines don't bear much relation to how soon they're looking to publish. Sometimes they just set the deadline early to cut down on how many manuscripts they have to read."

"If deadlines are arbitrary, would they still look at this one if you sent it again?"

"Maybe, maybe not. But I'm not dropping five bucks to find out, even though the book was written specifically for this one publisher. And I have such a limited audience to begin with—five thousand if I'm lucky—that other publishers probably wouldn't take a chance on something this specialized. So I guess if Contingency House won't take it, then it won't be published at all."

"That sucks."

"What can I do? I can't hand-deliver my manuscripts. I'm at the mercy of the U.S. Postal Service. If they don't come through, I'm screwed."

"But ripping on your neighborhood mailman probably won't help you there."

"Yeah, I shouldn't have done that. I was just pissed off about the screwup and I vented at the nearest available postal employee. Which, unfortunately, was good old Chris McMurtry."

"You know him?"

"I know everybody in Tillsburg. I went to school with McMurtry back at Tillsburg High. In fact, he dated my sister for a while."

"Really?" Maybe, I thought, he would finally talk about his family, and his life.

He nodded and turned toward the house. On his back I could see where the plastic bands of the lawnchair had waffled a cross-hatch pattern into his skin, just below his burnt shoulders. I followed him, stepping delicately across the weedy yard and up the crumbling concrete steps.

NINE

Wheatyard stared at me across the living room, from the heavily-worn plaid couch which, despite my earlier imaginings, bore not even the slightest trace of bulky Victorian fustiness. There were no portraits of grim pioneer ancestors either.

It was the only room I would see in the house. As we entered he immediately sat down, with no indication of showing me further. Even the nickel tour was forgotten. In the next room at the back of the house I could see only a few cabinet doors covered with taped-on sheets of paper, and through the doorway I heard a low hum that suggested a refrigerator. But nowhere, in the living room nor what I assumed was the kitchen, could I see the vacuum cleaner which I heard during earlier phone calls. The dingy living room carpet showed he rarely vacuumed.

As soon as Wheatyard was seated, he continued to talk about his writing, in monologue, looking away from me. I listened attentively for several minutes, then made a comment that suddenly silenced him. He stared strangely, as if seeing me for the first time.

"I can't believe you'd say that," he said, his voice hurting with vulnerability I never would have expected.

Even out of the sun, inside the house the heat was no less severe than outdoors. The air hung like cobwebs, heavy and close, making me wish we were back in the front yard, where despite the sunburn at least the occasional wisp of breeze might cool our sweaty brows.

Inside was dim, despite the brilliance of the afternoon. Dark, heavy curtains fully covered the few windows, the sharp sunlight only leaking in at the very edges. When we entered, in the shadowy gloom I struggled to make out the room's contents, discreetly, trying not to seem nosy or rude. But deep down I wanted to be nosy, to find out as much as possible about Wheatyard's life, and given his natural reticence I might need to be rude.

My eyes slowly adjusted, and I saw that the walls were covered with clippings from vintage magazines, studio photographs of Burt Lancaster and Eartha Kitt and Maynard G. Krebs and others, advertisements for cigarettes and long-gone brands of whiskey. And, back in the far corner, vibrant Expressionist prints from Berlin's long-ago artistic heyday. I remembered just enough from my high school German classes to recognize the artists—Klee, Kokoschka, Lionel Feininger and, farthest away, what must have been a Kandinsky. Our teacher had attempted, mostly in vain, to expose us to German high culture. Most of my classmates ignored her, and I too had forgotten most of the Beethoven and Wagner and avant-garde literature.

But the one thing that stuck with me was the Expressionists—die Brücke, the Bridge school, and die blaue Reiter, the Blue Riders. Though any sort of context—the spheres of influence, the personal bonds between artists—had long since escaped me, many of the images remained, some of which I genuinely admired. Partway down, beyond the end of the couch and partly obscured by a floor lamp, I was heartened to spot an Emil Nolde—the exact print which had been taped to the wall behind my back-row desk in German class. The Nolde was a vague but evocative mountain landscape of blue waters and purple ridges and a dash of yellow sunshine, a lovely image that stayed stuck in my mind for all the years since.

But my high school reverie instantly vanished as Wheatyard repeated himself, in the same hurt tone. Despite my hopes in the front yard, he had again strayed from telling of his past life, and returned to his art.

"I can't believe you'd say that," he repeated. "You must hate my writing."

"Did I say that?" I countered, now fully back in the present. "Did I say I hated your writing?"

"You might as well have."

"I only said your writing is difficult—not bad, but complex. Complicated, challenging. You have to admit it's not the easiest prose to read."

He said nothing, looking down at his folded hands, still sitting sunken deep into one end of the broken couch. Before him, perched on an aluminum TV tray, was his battered Smith-Corona typewriter, the constant companion he had fondly spoken of several times over the past few months. The typewriter sat sideways, facing a folding chair, where he must have sat as he worked. Next to the typewriter stood a half-empty jar of Folgers Crystals—the apparent fuel for his writing binges—and below on the floor teetered a stack of typed pages at least two feet high.

"You have to admit," I repeated. He remained silent. "I thought you were proud that it's challenging, unconventional, non-mainstream. Difficult to read at first, but with intellect and effort the reader gets a unique reward. Not like Crichton or Stephen King, who serve up their books on a platter."

I moved closer as I spoke, from the armchair to the opposite end of the couch, hoping the narrowed distance might came him and make him realize I wasn't attacking.

"On a platter," Wheatyard snickered, reaching out and tapping the keys, whose imprinted letters, I could see now that I was nearer, were nearly worn off from overuse. "O-N-A-P-L-A-T-T-E-R." He smiled shyly, as if flattered.

"That's your phrase, remember."

"Of course I remember. I say it all the time, ever since I coined it for an essay I sent to Time about the deplorable state of American literature."

"Time magazine? You're kidding."

"No, I'm serious." He laughed lightly. "That must have been my masochistic phase."

"Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard, in Time."

"They never published it, never even sent an acknowledgment letter. Most publishers still go through that little formality, but not Time. But I'm glad they didn't. I regretted sending the essay before the mailbox door had even closed, and not getting an acknowledgment let me just forget about it sooner. I didn't even keep my own copy. I hardly remember anything about the essay other than books on a platter."

"You must be proud of that phrase, though, if you still remember it after forgetting everything else."

"It must have been the only good thing about the essay. What was I thinking? Did I really think that big money-grubbing corporate Time would actually publish my condemnation of the publishing industry it was in bed with?"

"Know your audience, but also know your medium."

"Hey, that's good. Yours? Sounds like Marshall McLuhan."

"Who?"

"The medium is the message? Form over content? Oh god, never mind. I keep forgetting you're a business major. And one with a master's degree, who loves business so much that he put himself through six years of it."

"Ten years, if you include my time at the bank," I replied, feeling relaxed for the first time since we came inside. "But loving it, no, not really. It's a necessary evil—steady paycheck, health insurance, comfortable retirement. If that's enough."

"Ah, finally. A crack in the buttoned-down facade. The wing-tipped facade."

"I've never owned a pair of wingtips."

"Symbolism, remember? My point is that having things not work out exactly the way you planned, spending the summer alone in Champaign mailing resumés all over the Midwest, not going straight from the academic business cult to the corporate business cult like all your consultant friends, now has you thinking a corporate career might not be all it's cracked up to be."

"Okay, so I'm not as enthused as I used to be," I said, pulling back, defensive. "But I still have to eat. Speaking of which, how do you eat?"

It was the most direct question I had asked him about his personal life.

"Tillsburg's cost of living, for one thing," he replied, his stating of the obvious clearly meant to evade the question.

"Yeah, but you have to have an income. You haven't published anything—yet—so you're not making money off your writing. You must be getting money from somewhere else."

"Okay, I confess. I have a billionaire patron out in the Hamptons who can't get enough difficult metaphorical fiction."

"I'm serious."

"Or...I'm a high-class gigolo, servicing the lonely lady professors of Champaign and Urbana, with the occasional humanitarian mission to Decatur. Since 1985."

"I'm serious."

"Alright, alright," he said quietly, his joking tone gone. "I get a check every month."

From? was the followup I didn't need to voice, as it was understood, though unspoken.

"From the state. Rehabilitation Services."

Rehabilitation? Worker's comp? He didn't seem like the physical labor type. Permanent disability? He wasn't disabled—his fingers, hands and arms all worked properly, judging from his typing output, and he walked well enough.

"Rehab Services, Mental Health Division."

He said it so flatly, so matter-of-fact and without the verbal smirk that came with the patron and gigolo jokes, that I knew he was serious.

"Okay, I'll come clean. You deserve that. You've been a good companion this summer, done some good listening without ever really hearing anything about me."

I said nothing. I had nothing to say anyway, and sensed that he'd keep talking without any further prodding. Once he finally got going, it might make his rants on literature seem tight-lipped and reticent.

"Here goes. I was diagnosed manic-depressive when I was fourteen. Just diagnosed, mind you. I never really believed that was true. Sure, I had my highs and lows, but any teenager does. I'd get violent sometimes, fights, and nobody at school had any idea what to do with me, so I figure that all of that—the diagnosis and then sending me away for treatment—was just a convenient way of dealing with me."

I remembered Hanratty's own diagnosis of mental illness, and how I thought that pat opinion seemed unfair, an objection that Wheatyard now echoed.

"But isn't that kind of severe? All because of a few fights?"

"Well, one fight in particular." He paused and loudly cleared his throat. "It was my sophomore year at Tillsburg High. This kid—a cocky asshole football player—was teasing me about something I don't even remember, and I got so agitated that I just couldn't take any more. But the kid wouldn't let up, he had me backed up against the lockers and I felt trapped, so desperate, and the only way out was through him."

Suddenly he rose from the couch and walked to the far end of the room. He stopped and stood motionless, staring straight ahead at the wall, seeming not to see the dazzling Klee print which hung directly before his eyes.

"And I...went...through...him," he said, his words deliberate and his voice a hoarse croak. "With my fists, and then my pocket knife."

"God."

"Didn't kill him or anything, but I messed him up pretty bad. He was only in the hospital for a few days, but the scars would disfigure him for life. His family was poor, and had no insurance for plastic surgery or money for a lawyer to sue us. When he got back to school he swore to everyone that he was going to kill me."

"How'd you stay away from him?"

"I didn't have to. They diagnosed me immediately and sent me away, first to this shithole group home in Decatur and then a bunch of other shitholes, Lincoln and Edwardsville and Quincy and some other little towns, whoever would take me."

"But why did anyone have to take you? What about your family?"

"Family."

He stood silent for a moment, his body turned toward me again but still looking away.

"After a year in group homes, I didn't have a family to go home to."

My silence urged him on, though part of me dreaded hearing what he had to say.

"March 9, 1976, my parents were driving home from a party, down a county highway at 2 A.M., pitch-black. My dad was driving, sober, my mom asleep in the passenger seat. People who were at the party said later that they had never seemed happier, after some really tough times together. They were finally getting along, just coming out from under all of that when—"

I held my breath, waiting, wanting but not wanting to hear what would come next.

"—a drunk driver coming the other way, 80 miles an hour with no headlights on, swerved across the center line and hit them head-on. Both killed, instantly."

The story he went on to tell, for the next hour in fits and starts to my respectful silence, was heartbreaking. Heartbreaking, although I knew it probably wasn't unique in the annals of the state juvenile system. Mental cruelty, violent altercations, constant clamor, endless group therapy sessions meant more for killing time than rehabilitating anybody—I'll simply leave it at that. No need for further specifics.

Yet as he spoke I couldn't help thinking that none of it—though fascinating—explained why he was still getting a check from the state every month, one just enough to live on. I assumed the state's responsibility ended when he turned eighteen, and didn't extend into his thirties. Though I continued to listen, I felt my mind drift back, trying to remember a scene, any scene, from Longing Dissolute Midnight about checks, cash, payment of any kind. All I came up with was J.P. Morgan passing a thick envelope to Jimmy Stewart's Mr. Smith under the oilclothed table of a grimy diner on New Year's Eve. I struggled to decipher that scene, assuming it meant anything at all. Maybe it meant nothing, and Wheatyard was just indulging a whim, toying with the premise of the great Morgan and the beloved Mr. Smith illicitly occupying the same unlikely space.

Finally Wheatyard's words won out, and I let the question go.

While he lingered in the group homes, Frieda shuttled through a string of foster families until she turned eighteen and then all but disappeared. He said they were already drifting apart at the time, as teenaged siblings often do, with the tragedy and living apart finally ending their relationship for good. She took their parents' deaths much harder than he had—she was needy and far more dependent on them than he ever was, and from the occasional phone call afterward he realized she went to pieces for a while. Slowly the calls dwindled away. The last he heard from Frieda was a letter, postmarked Indianapolis, in which she revealed she had married—at age twenty—an older man and that they were very happy.

For a moment I thought about probing around for her married name, then later dialing up directory assistance in Indianapolis and making the call. But had I asked, he surely would have questioned the relevance of her married name to me, and might withdraw in suspicion. Besides, he had finally opened up, and I could learn more listening to him now than I ever would from Frieda over the phone, if I could even find her.

The responsibility of minding Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard until he turned eighteen fell to the juvenile system and that long succession of group homes. But after reciting the litany of homes again, his words slowed as he mentioned a group home in Centerville, at the far southern end of the state. Then he suddenly fell silent, stopping short with a worried glance at me, without saying anything more about what happened there. The silence was broken only by the resurgent hum from the next room, clearly that of a refrigerator cycling on. I sensed shame in his glance, and wondered what he might be ashamed of.

He looked away, and several hushed minutes ticked away before he spoke again.

"But I've only told you how my family ended, which isn't the whole story," he resumed, his voice lighter but eyes still uneasy. "So I'll back up and tell you from the beginning. I grew up on a farm west of here, outside of Bement. Just me, my mom and dad, and Frieda. Sometimes, when times were good, we'd hire some help at harvest time, but mostly it was just the four of us. We never had much money, but I guess we were happy."

Centerville was clearly off-limits. Though I longed to hear more, anything about that, I was soon drawn back into his chosen words, grateful for whatever he was willing to tell.

"Dad drank too much, especially during the winter when there was nothing better to do. Tinkering with machinery, months before spring, only takes up so much time. So at first he drank at a bar in town, fifteen miles away, but after he ran his truck off the road a couple of times my mom finally decided she'd rather have him drunk at home than dead in a ditch. She let him have as much as he wanted after that, as long as he only drank at home. She promised to leave him alone, gave up the living room and the TV to his nightly binges, anything to keep him off the road.

"But once winter was over he would cut back on the booze, always sobering up for planting. He'd get through the summer and the harvest, making just enough money to hold us through another winter. We were poor, though I didn't realize it at the time. Dirt-rich but cash-poor. We had all that great soil under us, and as long as we got the planting and harvesting done on time we'd never be destitute.

"We were poor, but I still had a pretty good childhood. Happy, or at least happy compared to everything that happened later. Frieda and I didn't have many friends, but we kept each other company, doing all those stupid kid things—flying kites, cannonballing at the swimming hole, starting brushfires, making up stories, riding our bikes as fast as we could, right up to the edge of the irrigation ditch. She would always pull up short, but I'd always try to clear it, like Evel Knievel, hitting the embankment on the other side every time. Just like Evel at Snake River Canyon. I'd end up at the bottom, knee-deep in muddy water, with bumps and bruises but unfortunately no broken bones. I heard somewhere that Evel broke every bone in his body during his career, and I always thought that was cool. I truly envied him for that."

He sat back down on the couch and reached for a chipped china dish from the endtable, withdrawing another piece of Bazooka which he unwrapped without offering any to me. Which for once didn't bother me, so focused as I was on his narrative.

"The farm had a couple of good years in a row. Too good, though, because it made my dad too optimistic, and one year he bought another three hundred acres, like he expected the high yields and high prices to go on forever. Bought the land on credit and put up the whole farm as collateral. He took on too much debt, or over-leveraged as you business people say. Then prices collapsed that fall, and he couldn't pay the mortgage. Any other farmer probably would have gotten a break from the bank, but Dad had a pretty bad relationship with his banker. When times were good he didn't play politics like he should have, didn't make nice. He thought he was invincible, that he could do it all himself and bankers were nothing more than a nuisance. So he didn't cultivate"—he smiled, clearly recognizing the metaphor—"the friendly relations with his banker that might have saved him."

He shook his head, the smile disappearing as his mouth clenched into a bemused grimace.

"The bank wasted no time foreclosing. We lost the farm."

By this time his body had relaxed into the decades-old contours of the couch, his foot tapping the leg of the TV tray as he spoke. His story poured out, as if it had a life of its own and needed to escape from deep inside of him. As if he was nothing more than the caretaker and was powerless to hold it back.

"The bank threw us off the farm that December. They let us keep our household possessions, which weren't worth anything anyway, but we lost everything else—the house, the land, the machinery, what little savings my parents had put away. We moved here, to Tillsburg, and lived rent-free in this very house. Or squatted, I guess. The house belonged to Aunt Maude, my grandfather's sister, who had moved into a nursing home over in Tolono. Since the house was sitting empty, she agreed to let us live here. Or at least Dad claimed she agreed. She was already pretty senile at the time—she didn't remember me or Frieda at all when we visited, and barely remembered Dad—and probably had no idea what was going on. She was only coherent enough to find the house key to give to him."

I was thirsty in the clinging heat, but didn't want to interrupt him. He didn't have the slightest inclination to be a good host, not offering a beer or anything else to drink, or opening a window to let in a little air. It was almost as if I wasn't there, as if he would have poured out his life story right there in his living room whether I was present or not. I just happened to be sitting at the other end of the beaten-up couch, an audience he didn't need or even acknowledge—when he looked toward me, his eyes were turned inward as if he didn't see me.

"Dad got a job at the elevator here in town, Horton Grain, which was run by an old buddy of his that he had kept in touch with, and I went to Tillsburg High, before it got consolidated. It was weird living in town after being on a farm all my life, changing schools, trying to make new friends. Even with lots of kids around, I didn't have any more friends here than I had out on the farm. I never really fit in. I wasn't into sports or cars and I didn't smoke pot, so that pretty much eliminated all of the social groups around here."

"Sounds familiar," I affirmed.

He looked at me as if I had suddenly appeared from thin air. Then, as if remembering my arrival two hours earlier, he began again but then stopped just as quickly, after only a few words.

"And then I stabbed that kid, and everything..."

He fell silent, looking away and fiddling with the keys of the typewriter, but not playfully this time. He typed out a few words, sideways, which seemed to calm him somewhat. But still he said nothing. I hoped he would go on, but I saw he needed to be nudged ahead.

"So, you were telling me about...that one group home," I struggled, fighting back something rising in my throat. "What...what happened there?"

He began to speak, then swallowed hard, but when he tried again the words choked in his throat. He coughed violently several times, and for a moment I feared for him before he slowly began to breathe normally again. I lowered myself back down on the couch, seeing that the danger had passed, but still leaned forward at the ready. Though recovered, he remained silent. This time, again on the cusp of telling something big, the words didn't just slow but instead abruptly stopped, as if refusing to come forth. He looked at me with a look of guilt, seeming to regret being so open, even though again he had said almost nothing about Centerville.

We sat for a long time in awkward silence, his monologue clearly over, looking away from each other, him at the typewriter and me toward the Expressionists in the corner. Finally I took the hint that it was time to go. I made the long hot drive back to Champaign, thinking the whole way, not even listening to the radio.

***

As I approached the city limits, Wheatyard's life began to make sense. Or at least what I imagined of his life, from what little I could piece together. There was still so much left unsaid. I lingered at several stoplights after they turned from red to green, lost in my thoughts, until the drivers behind me leaned on their horns. Each time, as I finally hit the gas, I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw their shaking fists and curses silently mouthed from behind rolled-up windows.

On the side street I slowed and turned into the alley behind my building, tires crunching over gravel before quieting on the smooth cement as I pulled into my parking space. I shut off the ignition but lingered behind the wheel, continuing to think. With the car stopped, the rolled-down windows no longer provided any breezy relief from the heat, but still I sat.

The narrative I had been formulating, vaguely over the course of the last few weeks and more conclusively on the drive back from Tillsburg, at last crystallized in my mind.

Living in Tillsburg made sense, partly because there Wheatyard could have a house without the nuisance of a landlord; I assumed he owned it outright, inheriting it from Aunt Maude through his dad. More importantly, the town was familiar enough to bring him peace, with its precious few memories of better family times, while also keeping him at a safe distance from others, which gave him both the freedom to write undisturbed and something to rebel against—forever the outsider. The eccentricities and quirks, I guessed, could be his way of keeping others wary and distant, even though those had the opposite effect on me, drawing me nearer.

Of course Wheatyard became a writer. Whether he was truly manic-depressive or not, he was once a lost young kid, scared and completely alone in those group homes, and especially in Centerville. But I refused to speculate on what might have happened there, deciding that was his business; suddenly, I admired Mitch Hanratty's discretion.

After Centerville, anyone in his situation might easily turn to fiction. But instead of merely reading what others had written and remaining a prisoner of their whims, Wheatyard would write his own fiction. He would construct his own worlds, bringing together a dishevelled collection of characters and situations, imposing the clarity and order and justice that the real world had so cruelly denied him.

In written words he would exact his revenge—on Centerville, on the juvenile system that separated him from his sister, on the drunk driver who wrenched his parents away. He would write fiction, setting things neatly in place, making order out of chaos, arranging everything exactly as he wanted.

Yet despite being right about so much, Hanratty had one thing completely wrong. Even if Wheatyard did have hypergraphia, the compulsion to write, for him it wouldn't be an affliction. It would be salvation.

TEN

The view of the Mississippi was tranquil, the April air unseasonably warm. From the rooftop terrace I watched the occasional barge chug past on the river far below, its prow cleaving the current and pushing aside waves which surged but then slowly diminished before finally disappearing below the seawall. As each barge passed I'd salute the captain, visible only as a silhouette high up in the wheelhouse, tipping my coffee mug in tribute and imagining we had some connection, though he surely couldn't see me at all.

It was the first pleasant weekend of the year, and I was intent on enjoying the day as much as I could, basking in sun and warmth despite the looming mass of financial statements, regulatory filings and handwritten notes piled before me on the steel table of the café. The weather had finally turned mild, winter departed and the last of the snow melted away, but being confined to my cubicle for fourteen hours a day prevented me from enjoying the first warm spring days. So on this Sunday I resolved to enjoy the outdoors, even though I still had work to do.

Somehow things worked out for me. All those hours scouring out-of-town want ads in the Champaign library, all those resumés mailed off and followup calls to employers who didn't respond promptly and phone interviews that went nowhere and companies that said no or didn't even bother saying no: it all finally paid off. That terrible limbo may have lasted only three months, but it was the longest three months of my life, a quietly desperate time of self-doubt, a trial which I hope to never endure again.

Long story short: one of those resumés lead to a phone interview with Preston Jeffers, one of the biggest brokerage firms in the Midwest, and then a callback and a long drive to Minneapolis—though the air conditioning was completely gone, a freak August cool spell made the car bearable—for a long day of interviews. Then, implausibly, impossibly, incredibly, a job offer which I humbly accepted. Minnesota was far from my first choice—more like third—but I was in no position to turn it down. It was either there or home to my parents. Back in Champaign, over the phone I hurriedly arranged corporate housing with the company and began to pack up my things.

***

Before I left Champaign for good, I saw Wheatyard one last time.

"I have some news for you," I said over the phone, intentionally echoing his last call. Even though that afternoon in Tillsburg finally revealed so much about Wheatyard, if not everything, part of me wanted to pay him back for dragging me all the way out there. Big news, he said, which turned out to be nothing more than him finally calling that editor. No book deal, no promising commitment—just that he called. All the other revelations were rewarding, of course, but they weren't why he summoned me out there. So in turn I summoned him.

That final visit was brief—just a few minutes over coffee at The Grind. As I entered I noticed that Emily wasn't there, which meant one less distraction for my mission, a mission of my own big news but also one last chance to get inside Wheatyard's mind.

But he spoke little, never looking me straight in the eye, as if embarrassed about what he had said that afternoon, as little as it was. Though he showed a flash or two of his old spirit, his mood was unlike anything I had seen during our three months of friendship—muted, subdued, detached. He mumbled a few stray comments about his manuscript and the publisher, but nothing more definite or decisive than anything I had already heard before.

"I'm feeling better about working with that editor—" he began, before I impatiently interrupted.

"Uh huh, great. So about my big news."

He sat, slumped and silenced and—I realized only later—with a hurt look on his face as I told everything. The new job at Preston Jeffers, the good starting salary and bonus potential, the sunny apartment high above the Mississippi. He had no response, and immediately I regretted my haste, realizing I might have preempted another verbal avalanche from him—about the group homes, literature, anything—that I knew I would never again have the chance to experience. After several wordless seconds he abruptly stood up, uttered "So long" over his shoulder as he brushed past, and was gone.

I wondered if he resented my good fortune, while his own life went on mostly as before. As he retreated, the tails of his trenchcoat flapping side to side, that Morrissey lyric—"We hate it when our friends become successful"—came back to me, and I realized it was indeed resentment. And I had no doubt we had been good friends.

But I couldn't imagine how he could be jealous, because to him my good fortune—gaining entry into the corporate world—wasn't success at all, but instead defeat. Or maybe any recognition for others, while he was ignored by everyone other than a few curiosity-seekers—me, Emily, Hanratty, Don Eastman—was cause for resentment.

Other than the long drive north, when I had little else to occupy my mind, Wheatyard had barely entered my thoughts in the eight months after. I might have continued to puzzle over his existence had my crushing workload at Preston Jeffers not numbed my consciousness and obliterated most of my spare time. I might have filled the remaining gaps in Wheatyard's story, for even if I didn't have him completely pegged, I did know many of the milestones of his life. As for the mundane highways and byways between, I could guess the rest. Or interpolate, as Wheatyard would undoubtedly have corrected me.

But the long hours of pondering Wheatyard were long past. My life had become, almost exclusively, about work.

***

The one Sunday morning ritual I allowed myself was buying a copy of the Minneapolis Herald, which I would devour before starting my work. First the Business pages, followed by the front section where I gleaned business trends from feature stories and wire service dispatches from around the world. And then, if neither my workload nor conscience weighed too heavily, Sports and lastly the Arts section.

On that Sunday morning in April, at Copernicus Coffee, at my rooftop table with the barges lumbering past, my workload was lighter than usual, and I progressed leisurely through the newspaper. Though Business and the front section contained little I hadn't already read at the office during the week, I still read every article closely, seeking details I might have missed earlier. Then it was Sports, where the local football pundit speculated on the Vikings' upcoming college draft and the headline said the Twins won again, with Puckett going deep for the second straight game. Then I breezed through Arts, past a preview of upcoming Hollywood blockbusters and a fawning profile of a hot young TV actor and a full-page preview of a major Chagall exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. But that final section contained little of interest, and as I turned the last page, ready to resume work—my quarterly update of Jigsaw Software Solutions—the Books page grabbed my attention.

Books. Sad to say, pleasure reading was abandoned soon after I started at Preston Jeffers. No Sinclair Lewis, no Jack London, no Poe, no Sherlock Holmes, and certainly none of those obscure writers Wheatyard had insisted I explore further. For me books had simply dimmed, the urgency to read anything I could get my hands on having faded months before. I might have blamed my neglect on the dearth of literary coverage in the two newspapers I regularly read, the Wall Street Journal and the Herald—negligible other than business primers and executive biographies in the former, and middlebrow novels by local writers in the latter—but that would be disingenuous. I had no one to blame but myself.

As I flipped past that last page I barely spied, at the furthest edge of my vision, a strangely familiar name. Wheatyard.

I quickly turned back, with a double-take that would have made Moe Howard proud, my eyes riveted onto the sidebar where, halfway down the column under the heading "New in Hardcover," I was stunned to read the following:

Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard: Longing Dissolute Midnight. Columbia Press, 833 pages.

No further description was given, nor was one needed. Clearly it was the finished version of the manuscript that Wheatyard pressed on me when we first met, in the previous June at Cellar Books, right after he denigrated Sinclair Lewis. The book that initiated our brief friendship.

No further description was necessary, for the characters—de Mille's old cast of thousands—and outrageous situations and impossible plot transitions and elusive but ultimately compelling themes all came rushing back at the very moment I read that odd and instantly familiar title.

***

I shake my head, thinking He did it. He really did it. He got published and, at 833 pages, he must have even found the hands-off editor he wanted, the kind he didn't think he'd ever get.

I set the newspaper aside and return to my research report. But I can't concentrate, the numbers jumbling around in my head, the sentences scattering. Every time I try to focus on Jigsaw's operating cash flows or latest strategic initiatives, my thoughts drift back to Wheatyard.

He really did it, I repeat to myself, and before long I become so lost in reverie that profit margins and forecasts and bold corporate pronouncements no longer hold my attention. Instead I think about Wheatyard and what he once implored, no, demanded that I do.

I push aside the computer printouts and regulatory filings, and take the uppermost sheaf and turn it over, exposing its blank reverse. From my briefcase I remove a slender box which contains a handcrafted wooden pen, a gift from a lovely young woman who thinks far too highly of me, given how few times we've managed to go out together with the punishing schedules we both endure. Giving me this pen after only a half-dozen dates, she must see more in me than just another sell-side stock analyst. Maybe she's right. Maybe there's a future outside of this business—which I already have doubts about—or even a future for her and me, though I can't predict either possibility any more accurately than I can forecast the next quarterly earnings per share of Jigsaw Software Solutions. After glancing to the north for a moment, toward a towering flour mill and mammoth grain elevators which echo the industry that first put the Twin Cities on the map, I finally put pen to paper.

A brief scene, a snatch of dialogue, and soon the question—Is Jigsaw Software Solutions a good long-term investment for Preston Jeffers' high-net-worth clients?—no longer seems quite so important. Of course it still matters, since my job is to answer that question and that job pays the bills, but suddenly it's no longer my complete focus. Soon I'm writing, and the sentences spill out in fits and starts, none of them perfect but together, collectively, hinting at something else. Maybe something better.

I have finally put pen to paper, and there might not be any turning back.

Wheatyard once prodded me to start writing, to help me find what I might become. Not unlike the way I prodded him to compromise and cooperate with that editor, to see his book appear in print. As I write, I smile at the thought of my small part in Wheatyard finding what he himself might become.

Moments earlier, in the few seconds between reading that sidebar announcement and unsheathing the pen, it occurred to me that it really doesn't matter if Wheatyard's book sells, or only gets raves from the critics, or gets any attention at all. Whether the world notices him or not, Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard—if that is indeed his real name—will still be down in Tillsburg in that falling-down ranch house, sitting in front of that old Smith-Corona and churning out ream after ream of his willfully dense fiction.

It's how Wheatyard lives. And why.

***

My deepest thanks to: Ben Tanzer, Nick Ostdick, Jason Fisk, Paul Lamble and Mel Bosworth, writer-brothers in arms; Richard Grayson, Christine Sneed, Kirby Gann, Andrew Ervin, Frank Jump, Shelley Wright and Dan Curley, friends and mentors who helped me realize there is much more to life than crunching numbers; John Kenyon, for his helpful take on early Guided by Voices; Pablo D'Stair, who took a chance on a humble story that nagged me incessantly for more than seven years; my parents, Dorothy and John Anderson, who taught me to keep my options open and never settle; anyone anywhere who has ever fed my hunger for literature; and, most important of all, my wife Julie and daughter Maddie, who are my very best reasons for living.

And to every Wheatyard out there who is struggling to publish their first book: chin up. Keep believing and persevere, and rewards will someday follow.

***

Peter Anderson's short stories have appeared in many fine venues, including Storyglossia, THE2NDHAND, RAGAD, Midwestern Gothic and the collections On the Clock: Contemporary Short Stories of Work (Bottom Dog Press, 2010) and Daddy Cool: An Anthology of Writing by Fathers For & About Kids (Artistically Declined Press, 2013). A financial professional by trade, he writes fiction to ease the crushing monotony of corporate life. He lives and writes in Joliet, Illinois. Wheatyard is his first published book but, with any luck, not his last.

More information is available at his author site (www.wheatyard.com) and blog (www.petelit.com).

