The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy (2 page)

I put two skillets on the AGA and started them heating. There was a supply of single malt in the cupboard. I poured us each two fingers of the Macallan and handed him one. He added some well water to his and drank it right down, gripping it tightly. He suddenly looked tired and old and shaken. I’d never seen him look any of those things before.

He made himself another and sat with it, knuckling his deep-set blue eyes. “Clethra’s curled up before the fire. All fagged out, poor child.”

“Will she be hungry?”

“She doesn’t eat. Not meals, anyway.”

I got the slab bacon out of the refrigerator and cut four thick slices for him and put them in the skillet. As soon as I got a whiff of them sizzling I cut four more for myself and laid those in alongside his. There were some boiled new potatoes left over. I sliced them up and got them going in the other skillet with a clove of Merilee’s elephant garlic. By now Lulu was standing on my foot. She wanted an anchovy and she wanted it now. She likes them cold from the fridge. The oil clings better. I gave her one. I got the eggs out. I put on water for coffee. Like many men who had spent years at sea, Thor drank it strong and by the gallon, even right before he went to bed.

I sat, sipping my scotch. Lulu curled up at my feet under the table. “Why did you do it, Thor?”

“I’m in love, boy. It’s that simple.”

“Nothing’s that simple.”

“A man’s heart is,” he lectured, carefully stroking his luxuriant beard. He always did this when he was holding forth, whether his audience was one or one thousand. “A resolved man’s heart, that is. Man is by nature a conqueror, Hoagy. A warrior. If he sees someone he wants, he must grab hold of her. Take her and be proud.”

“You’re proud?”

“Why not?” he shot back indignantly. “Clethra’s someone very, very special. A woman worth having. And, trust me, a woman worth having almost always belongs to someone else.”

“Yes. Your wife, in this case.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, stung. “You’re not seeing my side, are you?”

I got up and turned the bacon. “I’m trying, Thor.”

“This is the child’s physical and spiritual awakening,” he explained. “Christ, better me to guide her into mature womanhood than some clumsy premature ejaculator who’ll be out the door as soon as he empties his carbine into her, some pimply hit-and-run artist who’ll make her feel shitty about herself and hateful toward the male of the species. With me she’s getting an enriching, life-affirming experience. Something beautiful.” He sighed contentedly. “Besides which, she’s a splendid young animal, eager and insatiable and—”

“I don’t need to hear this part.”

“You can’t suppress the wild man, boy,” Thor intoned. “You must celebrate him. The spirit must live.”

“And where, may I ask, is yours living?”

He sat there in heavy silence a moment, his big chest rising and falling. “Nowhere. All we have is the clothes on our backs. Not so much as a suitcase between us. We’ve been persecuted, pilloried and reviled. I am not a criminal, Hoagy. I’ve broken no laws. But the thought police have tried, convicted and sentenced me—for being incorrect. As if correctness were some sort of goal. Correctness isn’t a goal, it’s a disease that’s sapping us, depleting us, killing us all one by one by one!” His fists were clenched now, his bald dome agleam with sweat. The man did like to go on. As always, half of what he said was stimulating and challenging, and half was bullshit. As always, the trick was figuring out which half. “These are dangerous times we live in, boy. Dangerous times. Irrationality is one of man’s greatest gifts. It’s what sets us apart from machines. We should be down on our knees paying homage to it, not trying to suppress it. The single most important thing a man can do in this world is go a little bit crazy from time to time.”

“Then I guess that makes you and me a couple of pretty important guys.”

He let out a short, harsh laugh. “They’re killing me, boy.
She’s
killing me.”

“Ruth?”

He nodded. “She’s put a stop on my credit cards, frozen my assets. She’s even gotten a court order barring me from seeing my own son.”

“Surely you’re not surprised.”

“Not surprised,” he admitted. “Disappointed. I miss him. Arvin’s the very best part of me. And this is all so hard on him.” Thor folded his big scarred hands on the table, staring down at them. “She’s a stubborn woman, Ruth. A proud woman. She won’t let us be—not without a fight.”

“And to the victor goes the spoiled?”

He grinned at me, the aw-shucks, gap-toothed country boy grin. “You’ll like that girl once you break through her crust. This whole experience has made her hard on the outside. Can’t blame her. But inside she’s got a lot of Ruth in her. Helluva woman, Ruth.”

“I always thought so.”

“She always thought you were a delight.”

“She doesn’t know me very well.”

He drained his whiskey and reached for the bottle. “Is there a novel?”

I poked at the potatoes in the skillet. “I’m working every day.”

“Is it good work?”

“Only if you consider crap good.”

“I’d like to read it.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

He frowned at me, considering this. “What else are you doing with yourself?”

“Doing with myself?”

“Out here, I mean. Do you hunt?”

“Don’t own a gun.”

“Why not?”

“Guns go off.”

“We should camp out, you and me. Like the old days. Howl at the moon. Talk trash. Drink mash. We should do that.”

The bacon and potatoes were done. I cracked the eggs into the pan. And said, “What are you doing here, Thor?”

He leveled his gaze at me. “They think Clethra’s a star waiting to happen.”

“Who does?”

“Her publisher.”

“Clethra has a publisher?”

“They want her to tell her story, Hoagy. Why our love happened. How it happened. Her side. Her words. They’re giving her two million dollars to tell it. More goddamned
dinero
than I’ve made in my entire career. We sure can use it, too.” He took a gulp of his drink. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“Nothing about the publishing business surprises me anymore.” I got out plates and forks. “All that matters to them is that you two are hot right now.”

“Oh, no, they’re thinking beyond right now.”

“Okay, that does surprise me.”

“They’re going to make her into the next major new voice in American feminism,” he proclaimed loftily. “She’ll be as big as Ruth ever was—if not bigger.” Thor, you should know, had never gone in for understatement. “They think her words will mean something to those millions of college girls out there who are searching for answers and for truths and for … what’s that word they use now?
Empowerment.
Which, if you ask me, is just a politically correct way of saying a good, hard dick.”

At my feet, Lulu let out a low moan of dissent.

“Will you supply those words for her, boy?” Thor asked, turning bashful. Bashful was a new one. “Will you write it with her?”

I put his food in front of him, along with a bottle of Tabasco sauce, which Thor ate on pretty much everything, including Grape-Nuts. “Why me?”

“Because a woman writer will turn it into some ballbusting feminista manifesto, that’s why,” he replied, ignoring his food.

“So why don’t
you
write it with her?”

“I’m no good at that kind of thing. Not like you are.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment, too.”

“I gave it as one. It’s a genuine gift you have, boy.”

“Don’t remind me.” I sat with my own food and dug in. “I’m sorry, Thor, but I’m all grown-up now. I’ve quit the circus.”

“No one has to know you’re involved,” he persisted. “Not even Clethra’s publisher. We can pay you right out of her end.”

“I don’t want her money.”

“And this place is ideal.” He gazed out the window at the purplish pre-dawn. “Not a soul will be able to find us here.”

“Here?” I cleared my throat and tried it again, minus the surprise. “Here?”

“Why not? It’s the perfect hideout for a few weeks. And, wait, I know exactly what you’re thinking …”

“No, Thor, I don’t believe you do.”

“I’ll work hard for my keep while you two are busy writing. I’ll chop wood. I’ll clear brush. There’s no job I won’t do. And there’s nothing I can’t build or repair.” This was true. Thor had been just about everything in his time—merchant seaman, forest ranger, railroad brakeman, even an ordained minister. “How about it, boy?”

I shook my head. “Thor, it’s out of the question. That chapter of my career is over. Besides which, there’s Merilee to consider. There’s the baby …” At my feet, Lulu grunted. “… There’s Little Miss Short Legs.”

“Will you at least think about it?”

“I’ll think about it. But I’m not doing it.”

“Good man,” he exclaimed, grinning at me. “Knew I could count on you.”

“I said I’d think about it, period,” I snapped. “Now shut up and eat your eggs.”

But he kept right on grinning at me. Because I was going to say yes—and he and I both knew it. Because he was my friend. Because he needed me. And because once, twenty years ago, when I was standing at the crossroads, not sure whether to shit or go blind, Thor Gibbs had come along and changed
my
diapers.

Thorvin Alston Gibbs. Ah, me. Where to begin? He was, perhaps more than anything else, a grizzled son of the Big Sky Country. Part cowboy, part wilderness advocate, part champion hell-raiser—a bard of the barroom, through and through. And the last of the literary he-men. His autobiographical first novel,
A Montana Boyhood,
published in 1949, squared him right up against Mailer as the most gifted novelist of the post-war era. Critics even labeled him the heir apparent to Hemingway himself. Thor was, in fact, the last man to interview Papa. And the first to champion the Beat era. It was Thor Gibbs who coined the expression “beat generation.” He was a pallbearer at Kerouac’s funeral. He held Cassady’s head when the legendary hipster died by the side of the railroad tracks in Mexico. He rode the bus with Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. And he inspired a generation of young writers to dream.

Chief among them—me. Thor Gibbs was writer-in-residence for a year at that overrated Ivy League breeding ground where I received my so-called education. He was my teacher, my drinking companion, my mentor. It was Thor Gibbs who gave me the courage to take those first faltering steps down my own road. It was Thor Gibbs who pushed me, goaded me, dared me to transform my raw, feverish ramblings into a novel—
the
novel. It was Thor Gibbs who pronounced me a writer and proudly passed my manuscript on to his agent. I dedicated the first one to him. So did other writers of my generation. Thor Gibbs was our hero, our guru, our shaman. I suppose he was the only man I’d ever looked up to and, possibly, even loved.

Which is not to say that everyone was crazy about Thor Gibbs. A great number of women, for example, had hated his guts ever since the 1980 publication of
The Dickless Decade,
his bestselling male-backlash treatise which dared to link the decline of America in the post-Vietnam era to the rise of modern feminism. “Seemingly overnight, we have gone from the America of Tricky Dicky to the America of limp dicks,” Thor wrote in his trademark incendiary prose. “In the name of women’s rights we have created a generation of tame, passive, spiritually detumescent little whiners. Men who are afraid to lead, afraid to create, afraid to dream. These are the new lost boys, and they are dragging this once mighty nation down with them.” Seemingly overnight,
The Dickless Decade
transformed Thor Gibbs into the high priest of the hairy-chested men’s movement—and possibly the most famous chauvinist pig in America. To feminists, he was a loudmouthed troglodyte, a misogynistic boob. He was Rush Limbaugh in faded blue jeans and Native American jewelry.

Not that he hated women. He had loved and been loved by many women through the years, including a number of rather famous men’s wives. But no woman had he loved quite so passionately, so publicly and so improbably as Ruth Feingold. Baby Ruth, the self-described loudmouthed New York broad, the crusading public defender and U.S. congresswoman, and one of the driving forces of the women’s movement in America for the past thirty years. A co-founder of the National Organization for Women as well as a major ERA and abortion rights activist, Ruth Feingold was one of the movement’s founding four. Betty Friedan was its architect. Gloria Steinem was its face. Bella Abzug was its engine. And Ruth Feingold was its mouth. She’d debate anyone, anywhere, anytime. She was a windup sound bite, a feisty pit bull, impatient, prickly and razor sharp. It was a few months after her unsuccessful 1978 bid for mayor of New York that her marriage to millionaire real estate scion Barry Feingold went belly up. He left her for a man (or another man, as numerous wags quipped), the young fashion designer Marco Paolo, who went on to popularize the Hasidic look in leisure wear. Barry Feingold left Ruth with their little girl, Clethra, and some serious ill will. She met Thor Gibbs not long after that on
MacNeil Lehrer.
The two of them had been brought in to debate the ERA. Their heavyweight confrontation was such a whopping success that a lecture agency decided to pit them against each other on the college campus circuit, much as they had Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy. To everyone’s shock, they fell madly in love (Thor and Baby Ruth, not Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy—at least not as far as I know). They got married. They had a son, Arvin, presently aged fourteen, for whom Thor had penned
The Thinking Man’s Diet,
his slim little guidebook of pithy thoughts on modern maleness (“Every man should own at least one dog and one motorcycle in his lifetime, and learn how to take good care of both”), which enjoyed a robust 173 consecutive weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list. And, inevitably, led to
The Thinking Man’s Diet for Mind and Body,
a he-guy celebration of beans, nuts and wild greens. Low on cholesterol. High on flatulence. It, too, became a bestseller.

And then it blew up big time. Mega-big time.

Thor had just left Ruth for little Clethra. The pair claimed to be madly, passionately, blindly in love—and Ruth be damned. Devastated, outraged and humiliated, Ruth first tried to take her own life with sleeping pills. When that failed, this noted champion of battered spouses then tried to take Thor’s life with an eight-inch boning knife, an attack for which she was widely applauded by sympathetic women on a number of television talk shows. When
that
failed she went to court—suing for sole custody of Arvin. According to Ruth, Thor was perverted, evil and totally unfit to be a father. According to Ruth, this was a man who had actually been having sexual relations with his own stepdaughter in their own home while Clethra was only sixteen, which in New York State constituted statutory rape. And which opened the door to criminal proceedings. Thor had countersued, branding Ruth as not only desperately insane but as a physically abusive parent. Clethra was claiming that her famous mom routinely beat both her daughter and Arvin about the head and neck with her fists, her open hands and sometimes a rolled-up newspaper.
The Village Voice,
if you must know. Frequently, Clethra charged, she even drew blood. For the time being, a judge had sided with Ruth, barring Thor from seeing Arvin. But the bitter custody case was still working its way through the courts.