Henry Miller Police Log

The Dry Trailer (a micro-play in three acts)

Characters: Wallace Stegner, fiction writer and revered historian of the American West. What he looks like, here, is any white-haired old man of renown. He has on a vest with a few safari style pockets.

Ajax: a short man, with unkempt hair. A poet.

Scene: The inside of a well-aged house trailer. Large enough to have a separate bedroom near the back. The interior implies a rural location—woodstove, bb gun, binoculars and such around the room. A table cluttered with catalogs, radio scanners, a bag of weed, dirty glasses, piles of books.

Act 1

Wallace Stegner stands in the middle of the trailer, looking weary, displaced. Ajax enters.

Ajax: Thank you for coming Wally. I just, I just figured out something about you today. And I really need to get it off my chest. Can I call you Wally? Probably not. I’ve finally figured it out. I was in the library and I picked up Mormon Country and there it was. I could see that there was that little boy in you, the one of Big Rock Candy Mountain vintage, writing the story. The story where the order and gentility of the Latter Day Saints is as appealing to that young boy as a glass of lemonade. All that harnessed energy, all that reserve and modesty. So inviting. Only, the thing is, I think the way you came to love the Mormons was the way you came to love playing tennis; an entree into company so unlike the dissolute and gaudy people of your youth. But then....

Wallace Stegner: Excuse me young man. You have me at a disadvantage here. I awake in a strange house, a trailer really, and here you are. You, of course, have created me and so it is up to you to tell yourself how I would respond. I can’t possibly be expected to tell you anything about me.

Ajax: I know Wally. But we’ve been over this. If you could just come to accept...

Wallace Stegner: You are kind of a strident person. Perhaps you might take to writing what you want to say and not blaming your failure on me.

Ajax: But I can’t Wally. Nobody listens to me. Wait, is that me saying that or you?

Wallace Stegner, sighs: Resorting to literary trickery already. I can see that you probably think about the shortcomings of old men more than you write your own....what was it again... poems?

Ajax: They’re micro-fictions really. I don’t know about the term poetry.

Wallace Stegner: You don’t know about much, it would seem.

Act 2

Wallace Stegner and Ajax seated around a table in the trailer.

Ajax: Really Wally, it’s not you. It’s your acolytes. These supper club wilderness poets, these timid professors conditioned against the imaginative aspects of the west. It doesn’t look to me like the geography of hope. Just boring old conventional liberals with wilderness vacation plans.

Wallace Stegner: And you don’t want to be bored, I take it? You want some big ideas? Some cooler people perhaps? 

Ajax: No, I want better stories, something other than this guild of scissor bills, this endless echoing of the same bell. 

Wallace Stegner: That’s pretty harsh.

Ajax: One of your people, this poet guy....

Wallace Stegner: Could I have a glass of water? You know, I’ve been back in that bedroom for so long. It seems that every time you feel the need to harangue me, you forget that I have been back there for years. I’m thirsty, give me some water at least.

Ajax, dragging a glass carboy from near the door: You’re in luck. I just filled up from the bootleg spring. Good limestone spring water.

Wallace Stegner: You don’t have any water here of your own? Where are we anyway? 

Ajax: Wally, you don’t get a house in the Los Altos hills with a redwood deck just for singing the land electric around here. You get a dry trailer on someone else’s property. But the view! 

Wallace Stegner: It is pretty good water. I’ll give you that. But still, a house without water is not a home. And you have no idea of what my deck was constructed.

Ajax: Anyway Wally, I think we all know they gave you the pulitzer for Angle of Repose as a sop, because they’d ignored your better work. I mean, c’mon, Lyman Ward is a prick and the stuff that comes out of the kids’ mouths? They’re just foils for you to bitch about the turmoil of the sixties. The whole thing, just an exercise in putting dry words in their mouths so you can dismiss them. One wonders what campus slight you endured to write such crap.

Wallace Stegner: Words in their mouths? Just like what you are doing here, you mean. Putting words in my mouth? 

Ajax: Fair is fair. 

Wallace Stegner: Patience young man. In a hundred years, people will still read Cuckoo’s Nest and probably not Angle of Repose. Cowboy stories, they’re nothing new. You’ll get your revenge, I suspect. You’re on the side of the easy answer, the sexed-up movie plot as history. 

Ajax: You might be right. The cowboys have better parties and the polar fleece professors, they just aren’t my tribe. But I’ll tell you what, Wally, Crossing to Safety is an immense book. A courageous ode to simple, decent friendships and plain-spoken words. How can I ignore you for that? How can I just let you go?

Wallace Stegner: I’d like to go very much. Perhaps you could try just making friends with me. I can see why no one listens to you. You talk too loud. 

Act 3. 

Wallace Stegner sits at the table, Ajax stands looking out the window. He fingers an unlit joint.

Ajax: Finish your water, Wally. I’m having dinner with John Muir.

Wallace Stegner: Let me guess, you’ve got some complaints with him as well?

Ajax: A preacher is a preacher. 

Wallace Stegner: What does that make you? Does anyone really read these micro-fictions of yours? It strikes me that you are mostly a kidnapper, interrogating your heroes. Aren’t you going to ask for some sort of ransom? Wouldn’t that be customary here? What did you say about this water, again? A bootlegger spring?

Ajax: That’s right. A whiskey spring. In the Depression, the ranchers made it up here in the hills and sold it to the Salinas gentlemen. 

Wallace Stegner: You’ve seen this? There is evidence, a record? 

Ajax: Sure. It’s our history here.

Wallace Stegner: Yours? It’s a good story. Better than beating up old men who can’t talk for themselves. 

Ajax: My people came and grew dope from the same springs. You see the elegance of the thing? We’re all looking for the right water, for any water.

Wallace Stegner: Aridity is destiny? I said that, right?

Ajax: Damn straight. The history of the west. Drink your water Wally.

Ajax and Wallace Stegner drink glasses of water. Fade out. 

it's just something we do now and then

1.

His brother Jimmy was coming home for the summer, and so Lloyd turned his thoughts to the ripening of rose hips. He figured Jimmy would last until right about the time they turned red. That was how long he expected have to put up with things. It wasn’t a prediction, it was a plan.

Jimmy’d be fresh from dropping out of something or other, looking to find the next thing to not finish. Lloyd loved the summer, the hours of chasing cows in the high country and fixing fence, going sun up to sun down. He liked to do this, the same thing every year. His brother made him agitated. Before long he would probably stop coming back around. Lloyd felt settled in at twenty-five, and that suited him okay.

He’d had his own wild years. They consisted mostly of going to football keggers and, on occasion, up to the treeplanter parties at the old Bruce place. It was fine for awhile, puffing on a joint at the edge of the campfire or sucking on a Silo cup of warm beer. Especially when the hippy girls or the cheerleaders came out, but not the young ones. It wasn’t like that.

The afternoon Lloyd graduated from Baker High School, the wind whipped around a purple banner with a motto stitched in gold that he preferred to forget. He sat through the ceremony, got his piece of paper, flipped the tassel thingy around, and felt no different. All of that supposed work to get this thing that everyone knew was worthless? He felt scammed and went back to the ranch more or less for good. 

His brother graduated two years later, chased the empty promise as far up the food chain as he could. Dropping in and out of one college or another, confident that if he could find the right way into the water, he could slip into stream that guided his friends along. Eventually, he forgot where he was trying to go but kept looking for new ways to get there. Guiding kayak trips for a broke outfitter, canvasing for critters, building rickety furniture out of shipping pallets. Lloyd paid no attention anymore when his mother called to tell him about it. Jimmy talked of these things in terms of what they might become if he worked the right angle, turned the right corner. But he gave up quickly.

Lloyd watched for the rose hips to start swelling. So he could grudge them the days it took to widen and darken in color. He knew this was sarcastic, but it gave him a chuckle. 

And then, there was a white plastic tent in the lower meadow. It had a plexiglass eye at the apex of the roof and it looked like a giant white pimple grown next to a perfectly serviceable old board and batten cabin.

2.

It was mostly just Lloyd and the ranch manager, a few hired Mexican hands, around the main house in the summer since his parents had moved closer to town. The morning after the plastic yurt appeared, Lloyd decided to go to Baker for groceries. He would offer to pick up some things for his brother. He drove down through the lower gate, over the creek and pulled in beside his brother’s Toyota. No one answered his greeting, but a few seconds later, two dazed faces poked through the door flap. 

His brother, still loose-limbed and ranch strong, and a skinny blonde woman with the ashram look. Jimmy broke into a smile, gave his brother a hug, and without saying a word, bent to his knee and flung his arms out at his companion like a carnival barker. He pulled a pad of paper and a pen from his baggy pockets and wrote: Heather. They all nodded and smiled like tourists with no common tongue.

His brother went back to the pen and paper and wrote: We’re being silent today. It’s just something we do now and then. It looked frustrating, writing that all out. It looked like Jimmy had a new tattoo. When he held the pad up, both he and Heather shrugged. 

Lloyd poked his head through the flap, a doorway for which they had no door, and cast his eyes around. A jumble of sleeping mattresses and rolls of bubblex insulation. The smell of the PVC off-gassing from the yurt walls stung his eyes. It would be like living in a fort made of new bath mats, twenty four seven.

He forgot to ask about groceries, and his brother mouthed the words tomorrow or the next day and pointed up to the ranch house. Lloyd waved as he backed out. The image stayed in his mind, the two of them there on the porch, his brother waving back with his note pad and Heather bowing to the waist, the cottonwoods and birches budding out behind them. 

3.

Heather got a seasonal job with the Forest Service, and Jimmy did things. At first these things might include changing the tire on the four wheeler or clearing the dead row poplar for firewood. But soon he did these things out of sight or off the ranch. Eventually he came up with a job maintaining HVAC systems that kept him on the road, in a company car, all over the northwest. 

By the time the rose hips were good and well formed, it was often mostly he and Heather at the ranch. Not that he saw her much, it was what he heard of her. Anne Whitcomb from the Forest Service said that Heather had, upon arrival in the office, informed most of the men, all of the men really, that she “did not believe in monogamy”. It should be said that she was easy on the eyes, strong and willowy and new to the dusty, windy world of the Baker valley. The men, said his informant, had lined up.

There were other things, but that was the gist of it and he figured the other stories just embroidered on the main thing. He figured Anne Whitcomb might have her own boyfriend in the mix and could possibly have added yeast to the starter. He felt a little proud, really, to be living out at the source of the river of gossip running through town. But didn’t really believe the story, because he told himself surely she would have visited her policy upon Lloyd himself.

Heather did have this policy, though, about honesty. He could see that and didn’t care for it. This included saying strange, blank things at any time whatsoever. Little honesties that ought really not be spoken of. One time, drinking some greenish tea and sitting on the floor of the yurt, she told Lloyd, “You know, Jimmy doesn’t like you either.” Or she would say, “I have to fart.”, before doing the deed, usually with gusto. It made Lloyd go a little red in the face and find an excuse to be moving on. It just made no sense to waste people’s attention with such things. 

They fell into a rhythm of the comings and going of vehicles, half-hearted porch waves, a cup of pond scum tea every few days, when Jimmy was on the road. Lloyd kind of forgot about the smiling woman giving him a mock salute as she sped up the driveway in Jimmy’s truck, on the way to work. But he kept an ear out for the more mysterious, can-you-believe-she-did-that woman who lived in town behind a desk. That woman was possibly the same as the one who lived in the plastic tent, he couldn’t be sure. Didn’t want to be. 

4.

A warm August evening, the wind starting to die down, Jimmy and Heather stopped at the mailbox in separate vehicles. She asks him, as he is looking over the new catalogs, whether he might cook her a steak. “Is that,” he asks, “a trick question?”

“I eat meat. When it’s local. I could really go for a big barely cooked steak right now.” Lloyd ponders this, whether there is some hidden meaning to it. But Heather just looks at him, suppressing a friendly giggle. “I know, shocking, right? But I need a fix.”

The next day, Lloyd thaws two steaks. He can’t be sure they have come from his family’s cows save for the purple ink stamp on the white freezer paper. Milton’s Mobile Butchery. Milton the meat guy, his bloody apron and comb-over hair blowing in the wind, that’s what he thinks of when he thinks of steak. He wonders if that makes it local. 

“My job’s going to be cut early.” says Heather. “Gotta celebrate that.” She opens a beer from the six pack she has brought. Lloyd doesn’t really believe in hops, but he sips his and celebrates too. No more Jimmy and Heather. But really, his brother is gone already. It is going to happen before the rose hips are ready to pick.

The air sizzles and pops with the steaks frying on the old stove, the smell of it through the house. “So what now,” Lloyd asks, “you and Jimmy?” His brother hasn’t even stuck around long enough to become a ghost when he leaves this time.

Heather waves her hand at Jimmy’s name. “He’s going to Alaska. He wants to go climbing. Me, I don’t know yet.” She rubs her eyes. “But I think I want to stay around here.”

Lloyd is surprised and not. He puts the steaks out and Heather makes a salad of greens and little round tomatoes. She attacks her steak, holding her fork down like a kid and sawing at it with her knife. Lloyd likes watching her work. Then she gets up, in obvious distress, and walks around the kitchen. “It’s nothing,” she says, “I just have a bladder infection and I can’t sit still for long. From all the sex I’ve been having.” 

A lump forms in Lloyd’s throat. He isn’t sure what he is hearing. It doesn’t sound like a proposition, but maybe it is, beneath a ruse. He fumbles for words, but she is doing some sort of stretch, knees bent and one arm thrust forward like a fencer, back toward him. Not a proposition. 

She sits back down and recommences to sawing on her steak. “This is so good. This is just what I needed,” she says. 

4.

Jimmy went to Alaska and almost climbed Mt. Chamberlin, up in the Brooks Range. But he couldn’t raise enough money for the bush flight. And then he got a job in Fairbanks.

Heather and her cousin bought a property higher up toward Eagle Creek, in the woods with the summer people. They moved the plastic pimple and the gossip up there with them. They were good neighbors, really, and they mashed the rose hips he picked into jam. He liked them fine, but not like that. 

The Fair Banks

The man sits in his truck with the engine running while his son gets his coat on. The boy gives him a passing kiss and says, “Dad, you’ve got a cactus on your face,” runs off into the building. He watches the boy until he is only a yellow coat in a crowd of other coats. Over the building entrance, a blue airplane of mosaic tile flies through a kaleidescopic sky beneath the word EXPLORE. The loudspeaker on the building reminds parents tomorrow is Friday in Fairbanks and he makes a mental note to pack an orange with his son’s lunch. The boy doesn’t eat enough fruit.

It is snowing again, hard and cold for this late in the spring. The man drives the corners slow to avoid spinning out and eases the Ford into the parking lot of a bar to have an early beer. He pushes through the door into brown-paneled gloom where the Eisen twins are sitting at a table by the window. Two old men with matching hearing aids and beaked noses, eating a plate of nachos and drinking iced tea. He knows and he knows the bartender knows that when she is not looking they spike the iced tea with a flask of Jim Beam.

On the television behind the bar, college kids run up and down the court, glistening with sweat, the resolution of the screen showing it all too clear, too bright. The bartender empties various bottles into a glass beaker, when it is nearly full she splashes in a few drops of blue curacao. “Easter drink,” she says, “I’m thinking of calling it The Rising.” He tries to say something encouraging, but the blue liquid looks like after shave.

 “It looks....sweet,” he decides.

“You tell me. It might be too much.” 

She pours him a shot glass and wanders off to check her text messages. The drink is minty and viscous, like mouthwash. But he tells the bartender it is just right because he wants another freebee. Instead she throws out the whole thing and starts over, pours him a beer which he cannot really taste now, as if he has already brushed his teeth. He watches a short white boy on the television take and miss one three-pointer after another. 

When he gets home, he decides against fiddling with the carburetor on the snow machine, takes a pair of snow shoes and a length of yellow tie down webbing down from the garage wall. He starts out onto the ice of the Tanana, hoping the logs he has sawn are still to be found on the berm in the middle of the river. The red Toyota was there the day before, his competition for the last birch logs washed up in the summer, now sticking out of the ice like pick up sticks. He doesn’t need the firewood, but he sawed it up before the Polaris went balky and he thinks of it as his.

Out on the river, the snow has stopped falling. He shuffles along, the ground barking, and wonders if the boy’s mom will remember to buy oranges. As he walks he smokes, first with his right hand and then with his left when it goes numb. 

He gets to the pile of birch poles and choses a small one, one that he can pull on foot. He sets a choker with the strapping and begins pulling it back to the shore. The going is easy where snow machines have left a track. He sweats into his long underwear and imagines his clothes becoming stained with blue, sticky sweat. 

The wind hits him in the face as he crests a rise. Just a little wind, but a wind in the face now and not at the back. It blows in past his hood and down over his shoulders. He stops and finishes his cigarette. The fog of his breath clouds his glasses, the snot in his red mustache slowly turning to icicles. Something blows into him with the force of the wind, a feeling more than a thought: a person could die out here, on a day like this.

A person could die out here, a mile or so from the northern-most Denny’s in the world, thinking about oranges and listening for the midday jet to descend into town. He could turn into a corpse hauling a pecker pole of firewood with a cell phone in his pocket and a warm room full of blue cocktails just up the road.

The feeling pleases him; he will not freeze to death. He needs to get home and stoke the fire before the boy and his mom get home. He puts out his cigarette, re-cinches his burden and shuffles along toward the shore.