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.