Far Green Country

Today as I write this is Father’s Day. Lucius was never paternal toward me. That worked out for both of us. I had a father the first nine years I knew Lucius, an attentive, compassionate one, a psychiatric social worker, a marathon runner, an expert fly fisherman; he took me camping as a kid, never missed an important date; we practiced Spanish and traveled the Yucatan together. I didn’t lack for fathering. At first opportunity, Lucius told me how his own father tried to shape him into a writer and would beat him when he failed to recite Shakespeare correctly.

Not long after Clarion West, I picked Lucius up late for a movie. We still had plenty of time, but he hated to cut it close. He lectured me about this, and I said, “Sure, Dad. Whatever.” He grew perilously quiet then, and said, “Let’s make a deal. You don’t call me ‘Dad,’ and I don’t call you ‘annoying little f–.’ ”

I held up my end of the deal.

By December 31, I’d told my wife stories of how prickly Lucius could be. When the day arrived, gray but not cold, she dropped me off on the street. She’d arranged to fly to Mesa, Arizona, and visit her parents, who’d gone down there from Minnesota for the holidays; it was possible we’d cross paths.

She gave me a hug, and with a wry grin, she said, “Have fun driving Mr. Daisy.” I still laugh thinking about it. Neither of us had actually seen Driving Miss Daisy, but everyone had seen the trailer and old Jessica Tandy acting fussy. It was the kind of pithy shot Lucius might take, and would have made him smile over gritted teeth.

I hefted my bag. The door at the ground-level entry was unlocked, and inside was the narrow wooden staircase. Painted in white enamel, chipped and flaking, it led to a cluttered landing. l stepped around an exercise bike and an open box of Kalimantan author copies, a white tiger snarling from each cover. I’d noticed them during a previous visit. They wouldn’t move for years to come.

The interior door was open, but I knocked. Lucius made a gruff acknowledgment. I found him stooped in front of the main picture window, cramming wadded shirts into a duffel bag. A thin young guy stood off to the side. I didn’t immediately see the resemblance. I remembered how that summer a woman literary agent at Greg and Astrid’s house, ingratiating herself, had commented on Gullivar’s handsomeness; Lucius had acknowledged the “tall Shepard forehead.” Yeah, they shared that feature. Having recently seen pictures of Lucius in his own slender youth, it’s clear how similar they were, but it wasn’t Lucius’ beard and girth that threw me off. The difference was attitude. Gullivar struck me as contained. Lucius couldn’t keep track of himself. He’d obliviously drop money or receipts trying to cram them into his pockets; he’d casually share embarrassing personal anecdotes. Without fiction to revisit and redact, to center and order his wounds and passions, he might have fragmented like a camp of restless bats.

Still fighting the luggage, he nodded. “Hey…. This is Bob. Bob, Gullivar.” We shook hands over the dusty coffee table and then took interest in the scenery while Lucius stalked back and forth from his nearby den. My gaze ranged over old pizza boxes and a shelf holding a still-untouched bottle of Jack Daniels I’d given Lucius months before. A devil hand puppet stood on the TV set. There was a plaque at its base. Oh, yeah, it was covering his Hugo award.

Our ride to the airport showed up. Gullivar and I brought luggage downstairs. Lucius sent us back for a pillow. I lingered to make sure nothing had been left behind amid the wrack of DVDs, books, and old pizza boxes that littered the floor and spilled off the coffee table.

Minutes later we were on our way to Seatac to pick up the rental, and already, completely unaware, I’d seriously messed up.

Lucius and I had a complex relationship. Mainly we were just friends, sharing a similar political outlook and an interest in literature and movies.  However, we also did business together. I commissioned and edited a short novel of his, Colonel Rutherford’s Colt, and lots of movie reviews and re-published Green Eyes, The Golden, several short stories, and two collections as ebooks. He wrote a blurb for one of my anthologies and recommended my stories to editors. In 2000, he connected me with several author friends who signed ebook contracts with my new company, enabling me to approach Microsoft and Barnes & Noble to get ElectricStory in the initial launch of the BN.com store, alongside major New York publishers. I did science research and world-building for some of his commissioned projects, and in the last year of his life we had a writing partnership and finished a major deliverable together just before his stroke. His stated intention was to retire after a couple years and leave me all his connections and shared work. However, by that point our relationship had undergone a long arc, and we both knew that the offer, though genuine, was a sop to his pride and a plea for help.

Lucius’ kidneys had been failing for years, he’d undergone renal angioplasty in late 2011, and he’d only recently become productive again in early 2013 after months of setback: flu, pneumonia, nausea, and general weakness. He was afraid. I’d had enough direct experience with publishing and vicarious experience with his movie-industry work to know the business had little chance. Sure his clients had money, but they also were fickle. I indulged his fantasy of mutual profit and a comfortable retirement. In private, I reserved equanimity, and when I heard about the stroke, I let the fantasy go with no regrets. Lucius had gotten very anxious those previous few weeks. If I didn’t meet his arbitrary schedule, he cajoled, whined at, and cursed me. When we finished up just before August, we hit the biggest crisis of our relationship, and I nearly told him to go to hell, which is something, no matter how justified, you only got to do once with Lucius. I’m grateful I didn’t. We got raves from the client, which gave him hope at a critical time that sustained him until his death.

We never got paid. The money, if it has even arrived, will be tied up in probate a long time. True to form, Lucius stubbornly refused to set his affairs in order.

My trip with Lucius at the end of December ’97 into early ’98 prefigured the arc of our relationship through the following decade and a half, from gofer to partner. Some probably thought I attached myself to him, but Lucius didn’t drive and I was one of his friends who helped him get around town. Lucius would sneer to me about minor figures in the publishing industry who indulged famous authors. “I really hate sycophants and the guys who keep them around,” he said on the phone around 2002, and then after a self-conscious pause during which he seemed to consider our relationship, he said, “I prefer minions. Minions are okay.” I helped keep him solvent, and our business arrangements always worked out well for him, not as well as they should have, given his public achievements, but as well as practical. Quoting Auda Abu Tayi from Lawrence of Arabia, he loved to say, “I’m a river to my people.” He was, but not everything that came floating down that river was an unqualified prize.

When his local friends like Leslie Howle found out I’d agreed to drive Lucius around the Southwest, in the middle of winter, to investigate rumors of killer hoboes, I imagine they were in suspense.

“This will be good for you,” he said to me. It’s not too far removed from “This is for your own good.” It’s also like Gandalf’s recruitment of Bilbo. Some years later, Lucius confessed to me how much Tolkien influenced him, along with Joseph Conrad. “I finished The Lord of the Rings and then looked for another book with ‘lord’ in the title and found Lord Jim.” However, Bilbo had a troop of companions and the incentive of treasure to be won. I had only per diem to look forward to, stingily doled out against expenses; killer hoboes instead of a dragon. And only one companion.

About a week before departure, Lucius informed me that his son Gullivar would be flying out from New York to join us for half the trip, which came as a relief, not least because Lucius didn’t drive, at all, and now I’d have someone to help out. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d also be afforded a glimpse into their family dynamics and decades of shared history, nor that Lucius would be a very different person in the company of his son than he would be when Gullivar arrived or after he’d left.

Here I need to stop for the day, but I won’t leave you completely in suspense: Gullivar was great.