My blogs are about fiction and writing it, which is what I do. Writing fiction is almost my only activity besides the exercises I do so I can sit back down to write. As I claim elsewhere, I can write or I can grow hair on my palms, turn toxic, and make everyone sorry.
I’m line-editing my latest effort, My More Than Sister. It’s about a woman who tries to live without a memory; she’s lost hers and isn’t sure she wants it back. One of her problems is that she gets flashbacks of violent action - sadism, murder - and can’t decide whether they’re actually memories. Then she actually remembers a quotation from Charlie Chaplin’s notebooks, and this saves her equanimity. The quote is: “It is more important to understand crime than to condemn it.”
Now, I say that to say this: I delayed writing fiction (which means I went through a long, long period as a news reporter) because, as a girl, my parents’ watchword to me was, “Don’t tell stories.” They meant “Don’t tell lies,” but who knew? Not this three-year-old. Long after I got those instructions I was unconsciously convinced that if I wrote fiction something awful would happen. Which makes the above quotation something fresh and new. If you know what I mean.
Or, I stumbled across this definition of fiction while trolling the web:
The act of feigning, inventing, or imagining; as, by a mere fiction of the mind.
That which is feigned, invented, or imagined; especially, a feigned or invented story, whether oral or written. Hence: A story told in order to deceive; a fabrication; -- opposed to fact, or reality.
These enabling quotations are on the same website:
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. - Gilbert K. Chesterton
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. - Virginia Woolf
Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us. - Paul Theroux
Thank God I found out. You’d probably enjoy browsing that website, too. Here’s its address:
http://www.brainyquote.com/words/fi/fiction164613.html#MKRhgMX1lLOfPIWQ.99
Now, here's Chapter Seventeen; the cops hate each other. Tch-tch.
Dead on Dutcher’s Mountain
Seventeen
“Call for you, boss,” Deputy Linda told McCoy as he first entered the lobby.
“Shit.”
He shucked his uniform jacket, approaching the gate to the bullpen.
“It’s Gunderson, from the mine.”
“Shit.”
The gate buzzed. He lurched through, crossed behind her and grazed his shoulder when he entered the hall. One wall was glass, overlooking the buckled sidewalk and unswept street. The other was paneled with shiny urethaned plywood. The sheriff’s wing of the County Administration Center had recently undergone remodeling. The plywood came free of charge, a gift from a sawmill. McCoy despised plywood, loathed urethaned plywood, refused the entry of plywood to his home. He had barely won the political skirmish to keep his white-plastered office plywood-free, at the cost of any windows whatever.
“Coffee!” he yelled, blearily sighting along the spine of his key toward to lock in his office door.
“No sleep?”
“None! Break-in at Endert’s Drugstore!”
Clouded daylight grunged into his office through the hall and settled weakly on his desk. McCoy reached for the telephone. “This is McCoy, Gunderson. What is it?”
The other’s voice was a patently manufactured product of New Age warmth and sensitivity. “Just keeping posted, sheriff. I was hoping you could tell me whether you got prints of that VenLoo film.”
McCoy amended his list. He now despised plywood and New-Age, do-gooding, tofu-frying, interfering, bearded, hippie federal agents. Shit.
“Yesterday. I developed them and put them out over the net.” He stretched the phone cord to circle the desk and sit down. Loudly he scraped the appropriate file from his “out” basket, squinting in the dim light to see the label. “You don’t have anything new on Voerst-hyphen-VenLoo up there, isn’t that right? He hasn’t done anything?” He shuffled papers loudly, and nearer to the receiver than strictly necessary.
“Right. But he’ll do something. If I caught him playing with my chromite, he’ll try it again here.”
“Speculation, Gunderson.”
“No, it’s not, by God.”
McCoy paid no attention. “And I might as well let you know, I’m beginning to feel pressured by you feds and I don’t appreciate this call, checking up on me. I’m not answerable to you people on any of this without proper notification through channels.”
Gunderson sighed, making time for an apology. None came. He said, “It’s called professional courtesy, sheriff. As when a member of one agency helps a member of another one find a dope farmer’s corpse.”
“Hunh.”
More room was left for apology, which again remained empty. Gunderson went on. “And if the idea of courtesy’s new to Del Norte County’s public servants,” Gunderson said, emphasizing the impersonal compound pronoun, “I’m of course equipped to deal with our supposedly common objective at a higher level of authority. Through channels.” He waited again. Sensitivity and sweet reason were beyond recall. His voice assumed the gutterals of deeply offended righteousness. “And if that doesn’t elicit an appropriate response, I’m perfectly willing to deal with it at a lower, indeed at the lowest, most injurious and personal level. In fact, sheriff,” and his voice became altogether savage, “I’m capable of getting as down and dirty as you want.”
Patience: forbearance: McCoy rapped his knuckles against Linda’s wall. Loudly he crackled the papers back into the file and shoved the file back into the “out” basket. Through the phone line he heard the rumble of the first of a fleet of ore trucks, then the second. Things were about to get lively on Dutcher’s Mountain. Finally he said, calmly, he thought, and evenly, “Agent Gunderson, I understand you have a personal grudge against Voerst. You accuse him of maiming and sodomizing you, yet you offer no evidence. You say he stole your ore in the Chocolate Mountains, but according to the records you made no complaint against him; again, no evidence. I’d feel more sympathetic and behave with greater conciliation, except I believe you when you say you’ll do anything to put his ass in jail. Understand me, now; I intend arresting the man if he deserves it. But I suggest you not try to enlist or coerce me in the cause of your personal vengeance.” He slammed the receiver into the cradle. He opened his mouth to yell. But Deputy Linda appeared at the door and handed him a mug.
Deputy’s wife and a deputy herself, Linda Bennett clung to her youthful, lubricious past by the unblushing use of big hair and long plastic fingernails. She was efficient though, knew her job, and liked Earl McCoy. McCoy accepted the coffee. “Believe me, woman, I respect you for this.”
“You’d better,” she answered. “You don’t know whether I made it with water.”
He sighed, sipped. Linda rested a tightly-packed hip against the door jamb and folded her arms. “Wanta know what I learned about him?”
“Who?” He sipped again.
“Gunderson.”
“Yeah.”
“Mining, then the U.S.G.S. 1997 to double-ought in Flagstaff, where he met and married the missus. Oh-one, mining his own claim, injured. Sold the claim. No surprises.”
“Yeah yeah yeah.”
“His wife was living with Altstock when he met her.”
McCoy’s eyebrows rose and rose. He swapped meaningful looks with the woman.
“I thought you read him for another sort of fella,” she said.
“Right.”
“I did too, from what I saw during your interviews. Should I find out more?”
McCoy continued to watch her; or perhaps, in his morning fog, he neglected to look away. “Probably not. None of our business.”
“Probably,” Linda agreed.
“But what the hell?” he added.
Linda smiled, turned, and disappeared toward her computer with its hookup to state-wide criminal records, her e-mail, her net sites, her fax and telephone. Linda Bennett was a woman of vast resource, all taxpayer-sponsored.
McCoy set his mug onto his automatic warmer and considered the telephone. He and Gunderson were acting silly; they needed each other. And the agent wasn’t bad, he was actually good. Took himself too seriously, of course. But you could tell the man was doing everything possible.
McCoy punched the buttons. The phone got through half a ring. “I’m sorry too, McCoy,” he heard, and picked up his mug. “Jessica is sick, and I get worried. I was about to call you back, though.”
“Good.”
He heard a long slurp, as of coffee, and testily retorted with a slurp of his own. Gunderson said, “I got something last night that I think you want. Now remember, I say this man up here is VenLoo. Interpol says Voerst, the man this guy claims to be, lived for a while in the Ruhr Valley, heavy industry, same area Jones worked in. The Germans jailed Voerst for sabotage in ninety-three, and he still owes their government some prison time. His own people in South Africa snuck him out and paid the bills.”
McCoy reached for the No. 1 pencil he favored over pens and wrote. “Sabotage?” he asked.
“Yes. Now, I’m wondering. Was Voerst--this is not VenLoo, remember--working for the South African government in ninety-eight? If he was, how official was it?” Gunderson slurped again, more loudly, into McCoy’s ear. “Sorry, coffee. And why does VenLoo use Voerst’s name? Is he doing what Voerst would have done, stealing ore? For South Africa?”
The sheriff slurped more loudly yet and looked satisfied. “Interesting thought,” he allowed. “Let me consider it.”
“All right; another thing. The culvert I found under that maze of depressions is recent. The lab up here says it’s less than fifteen years old.”
“That’s about what I got from your samples,” McCoy said. “It could date from the first mine. Might be part of the sabotage.”
“Probably, I’d say.”
“I realize that.” McCoy pulled a face; he hadn’t meant to sound doubtful. “Do me a favor, Gunderson, will you?” A waiting pause, a gentle slurp. “Another one?”
“If I can.”
“Call down here whenever VenLoo leaves the mine. I want to sit on him.”
“Good.”
“I mean, I got a look at him reacting to the Webster corpse Saturday.”
A wealth of understanding entered Gunderson’s voice. “Oh.”
“Right.”
Jessica Gunderson’s soft voice murmured in the background. “Excuse me, McCoy.” Pause for dead air.
“I’ll let you go now.” Fractional pause, dial tone.
“Keep in touch,” McCoy said frostily, and hung up.
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