My wife and I spent the winter of 1999 on Longboat Key in Florida, where I tinkered at the final draft of a short novel (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) and wrote little else of note.
Not did I have plans to write anything in the spring of that year.
In late March, Tabby flew back to Maine from Florida. I drove. I hate to fly, love to drive, and besides, I had a truckload of furnishings, books, guitars, computer components, clothes, and paper to transport. My second or third day on the road found me in western Pennsylvania.
I needed gas and got off I-87 at a rural exit. At the foot of the ramp I found a Conoco (not a Jenny) station. There was an actual attendant who actually pumped the gas. He even threw in a few words of tolerably pleasant conversation at no extra charge.
I left him doing his thing and went to the restroom to do mine. When I finished, I walked around to the back of the station. Here I found a rather steep slope littered with auto parts and a brawling stream at the foot. There was still a fair amount of snow on the ground, in dirty strips and runners. I walked a little way down the slope to get a better look at the water, and my feet went out from beneath me. I slid about ten feet before grabbing a rusty truck axle and bringing myself to a stop. Had I missed it, I might well have gone into the water. And then?
All bets are off, as they say.
I paid the attendant (so far as I know, he had no idea of my misadventure) and got back on the highway. I mused about my slip as I drove, wondering about what would have happened if I’d gone into the stream (which, with all that spring runoff, was at least temporarily a small river). How long would my truckload of Florida furnishings and our bright Florida clothes have stood at the pumps before the gas-jockey got nervous? Who would he have called? How long before they’d have found me, had I drowned?
This little incident happened around ten in the morning. By afternoon I was in New York.
And by then I had the story you’ve just read pretty much set in my mind. I have said before that first drafts are only about story; if there is meaning, it should come later, and arise
naturally from the tale itself. This story became — I suppose — a meditation on the essentially indecipherable quality of life’s events, and how impossible it is to find a coherent meaning in those events. The first draft was written in two months. By then I realized I had made myself a whole host of problems by writing of two things I knew nothing about: western Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania State Police. Before I could address either of these concerns, I suffered my own road-accident and my life changed radically. I came out of the summer of ’99 lucky to have any life at all, in fact. It was over a year before I even thought of this story again, let alone worked on it.
The coincidence of having written a book filled with grisly vehicular mishaps shortly before suffering my own has not been lost on me, but I’ve tried not to make too much of it.
Certainly I don’t think there was anything premonitory about the similarities between what happens to Curtis Wilcox in Buick 8 and what happened to me in real life (for one thing, I lived). I can testify at first hand, however, that I got most of it right from imagination: as with Curtis, the coins were stripped from my pockets and the watch from my wrist. The cap I was wearing was later found in the woods, at least twenty yards from the point of impact. But I changed nothing in the course of my story to reflect what happened to me; most of what I wanted was there in the completed draft. The imagination is a powerful tool.
It never crossed my mind to re-set From a Buick 8 in Maine, although Maine is the place I know (and love) the best. I stopped at a gas station in Pennsylvania, went on my ass in Pennsylvania, got the idea in Pennsylvania. I thought the resulting tale should stay in Pennsylvania, in spite of the aggravations that presented. Not that there weren’t rewards, as well; for one thing, I got to set my fictional town of Statler just down the road apiece from Rocksburg, the town which serves as the locale for K.C. Constantine’s brilliant series of novels about small-town police chief Mario Balzic. If you’ve never read any of these stories, you ought to do yourself a favor. The continuing story of Chief Balzic and his family is like The Sopranos turned inside-out and told from a law enforcement point of view. Also, western Pennsylvania is the home of the Amish, whose “way of life I wanted to explore a little more fully.
This book could never have been finished without the help of Trooper Lucien Southard of the Pennsylvania State Police. Lou read the manuscript, managed not to laugh too hard at its many howlers, and wrote me eight pages of notes and corrections that could be printed in any writer’s handbook without a blush (for one thing, Trooper Southard has been taught to print in large, easy-to-read block letters). He took me to several PSP barracks, introduced me to three PCOs who were kind enough to show me what they do and how they do it (to begin with they ran the license plate of my Dodge pickup — it came back clean, I’m relieved to say, with no wants or warrants), and demonstrated all sorts of State Police equipment.
More importantly, Lou and some of his mates took me to lunch at a restaurant in Amish country, where we consumed huge sandwiches and drank pitchers of iced tea, and where they
regaled me with stories of Trooper life. Some of these were funny, some of them were horrible, and some managed to be both at the same time. Not all of these tales made it into Buick 8, but a number of them did, in suitably fictionalized form. I was treated kindly, and no one moved too fast, which was good. At that time, I was still hopping along on one crutch.
Thanks, Lou — and thanks to all the Troopers who work out of the Butler barracks — for helping me keep my Pennsylvania book in Pennsylvania. Much more important, thanks for helping me understand exactly what it is that State Troopers do.
And the price they pay to do it well.