Similarly, whenever he disposed of furniture, tools, garden implements, waste or rubbish of any kind, he took from the act whatever last pleasure he could wring from it — making bets, and usually winning them, that he could lift and throw a sofa over the fence, or hurl a transmission housing from his pickup bed onto a pile of old toys, and then an engine block onto the transmission housing; or that he could carry a refrigerator in a broken wheelbarrow for a quarter of a mile over a rough surface under a hot August sun. Afterward, to complete the act, he liked to sit up on his porch, usually in the admiring company of a friend or one of the local adolescent boys he permitted to hang around him, and while guzzling Canadian whiskey and ale, fire his rifle at the new trash. He shot his rifle at many things, animate and inanimate, but he always seemed to enjoy it most when he was shooting at the things he had used up and thrown out.
On this particular day, a blotchy, glutinous gray afternoon with a cold rain lightly falling, as I neared the gate where the road ended and A.’s wide, paved driveway began, I noticed a high, wobbling stack of what appeared to be new furniture — a Formica-topped kitchen table and four chairs, a double bed with bookcase headboard and matching dresser, several table lamps, and two or three cardboard cartons filled with pastel articles of clothing and possibly curtains and bedding. This carefully constructed stack, with all the articles balanced and counterbalanced, was located a few feet from the fence and about twenty feet from the roadway, and I had never seen it before. I assumed, therefore, that these were his fifth wife’s leavings, her effects, an assumption which later proved correct.
I got out of my car, walked up to the gate, unlatched it, and swung it open. I could see A. in the distance, sitting on the porch of the house at the far side, swinging slowly in the wood glider. Neither of us waved or signaled to the other. That was customary. I returned to my car, drove it through the gate, got out again, and closed the gate behind me, as I knew I was supposed to do, and then drove up the long, curving driveway past the smooth, freshly greening lawns to the house, and parked next to the house on the side opposite the porch, where the driveway ended, facing the entrance to the small barn, which under A.’s care had been converted after his father’s death into a modern garage and workshop. Behind the house loomed the humpbacked profile of the mountain, Blue Job, adding its shadow to the day’s gray light and casting the darker light like a negating sun across the house and onto the fields in front.
It occurs to me that I really needn’t bother with all this. Certainly not at this point. Perhaps later in the narrative such descriptions will be of significance, but here, now, I’m merely attempting to explain how I came to write a novel with a hero whose real-life prototype is my friend, my own “hero,” as a matter of fact. And though that notion had occurred to me barely moments before, by the time I had parked my car and had started walking around the front of the house to greet A. at the porch, I had already completely forgotten the idea. I was worrying over whether or not I had properly secured the gate at the end of the driveway.
We spent the remainder of the day and most of the evening cheerfully drinking, first out on the porch, where until dark we sat and took turns shooting at the furniture A. and his fifth wife had bought as newlyweds the previous November. After dark, we lurched into the house and sprawled on the floor of the kitchen (the chairs and table were all in the field, ripped apart by high-powered rifle slugs), finishing the bottle of whiskey and the case of ale. I remember that A. had recently installed a central vacuum-cleaning system in the house, so that one could simply plug the hose into outlets located in the baseboard of every room without having to drag a heavy cannister or tank along from room to room, and he was quite proud of the system. He said to me, “I’ve got a dishwasher, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave oven that bakes a potato in forty-six seconds. And now I’ve got this vac’ system. Now, you tell me, what the hell do I need a woman for?”
I said nothing. I was too drunk to speak clearly, and also, his question had seemed rhetorical.
Then he said, “I can get laid when I want to get laid. And if the day ever comes when I can’t get it, it’ll only be because I don’t want it enough.”
This last statement seemed wise to me then, and it does now, too.
I was quite drunk, naturally, but I somehow got myself safely home, and that was the end of the day last spring when it first occurred to me to write a novel about A., or rather, about someone very much like A., so much like him that I would have to give him the name of Hamilton Stark, or A. would know that the novel was about him, a thing he would hate me for. I did not want A. to hate me. Luckily, he is no longer alive, or naturally, I would not be writing this introduction.
(I should say that I believe he is no longer alive, and although technically he does not exist, that is, his body has never been located, it would certainly be strange and ironic if the publication of this novel brought him out of a hiding place. I can imagine the letter I would receive, postmarked in some tiny, far-northern Canadian village where he is thought of as a hermit:
The only reason I’m not suing you is that a lawyer would cost me more than you could make from such a piece of crap as your so-called novel. Just know that if I ever run into you I’ll run right over you. You are an asshole. And a lousy writer too. You’re going to get everything you deserve, you faggot.
And then, for the rest of my life, silence. Cold, stony silence. It would be a hard thing to bear.)
It wasn’t until almost a full year later, a Sunday early in February of this year, that I again thought of writing about him. This is how it happened.
I was in the neighborhood, as they say in New Hampshire when you are within ten miles of a place, photographing birds in winter scenery at a state park not far from A.’s home, and as it was still early in the afternoon when I finished, I decided to stop by for a brief visit. I rarely visited him unannounced or uninvited, but for reasons too vague and smokily intuitive to go into here, I decided that this time it would be permitted and perhaps even welcomed.
When I arrived, I noticed immediately that he had parked his car in the driveway outside the garage, which was not his habit. At that time he was driving a pale green Chrysler. It was an airport limousine, an unusually long vehicle that he took considerable pride in being able to park wholly inside his garage. Swinging open the garage door, raising it like the curtain at a stage play and revealing the blunt green tail of an automobile that, like a dragon, seemed to go on forever, disappearing into the far, cavernous darkness of the converted barn, was an exquisite pleasure for him. As a matter of fact, on several occasions I myself, as the audience, had found the experience oddly satisfying and had broken spontaneously into applause.