Had Kintner been from Mississippi? Mort couldn’t remember, but he didn’t think so. But he had been from some enclave of the Deep South all the same – Alabama, Louisiana, maybe the toolies of north Florida. He didn’t know for sure. Bates College had been a long time ago, and he hadn’t thought of John Kintner, who had suddenly dropped out one day for reasons known only to himself, in years.
That’s not true. You thought about him last night.
Dreamed about him, you mean, Mort corrected himself quickly, but that hellish little voice inside would not let it go.
No, earlier than that. You thought about him while you were talking to Shooter on the telephone.
He didn’t want to think about this. He wouldn’t think about this. John Kintner was in the past; John Kintner had nothing to do with what was happening now. He got up and walked unsteadily toward the kitchen in the milky, early light to make strong coffee. Lots and lots of strong coffee. Except the hellish little voice wouldn’t let him be. Mort looked at Amy’s set of kitchen knives hanging from their magnetized steel runners and thought that if he could cut that little voice out, he would try the operation immediately.
You were thinking that you rocked the man – that you finally rocked him. You were thinking that the story had become the central issue again, the story and the accusation of plagiarism. Shooter treating you like a goddam college kid was the issue. Like a goddam college kid. Like a
‘Shut up,’ Mort said hoarsely. ‘Just shut the fuck up.’
The voice did, but he found himself unable to stop thinking about John Kintner anyway.
As he measured coffee with a shaking hand, he thought of his constant, strident protestations that he hadn’t plagiarized Shooter’s story, that he had never plagiarized anything.
But he had, of course.
Once.
Just once.
‘But that was so long ago,’ he whispered. ‘And it doesn’t have anything to do with this.’
It might be true, but that did not stop his thoughts.
42
He had been a junior, and it was spring semester. The creative-writing class of which he was a part was focussing on the short story that semester. The teacher was a fellow named Richard Perkins, Jr, who had written two novels which had gotten very good reviews and sold very few copies. Mort had tried one, and thought the good reviews and bad sales had the same root cause: the books were incomprehensible. But the man hadn’t been a bad teacher – he had kept them entertained, at least.
There had been about a dozen students in the class. One of them was John Kintner. Kintner was only a freshman, but he had gotten special permission to take the class. And had deserved it, Mort supposed.
Southern-fried cracker or not, that sucker had been good.
The course required each of them to write either six short stories or three longer ones. Each week, Perkins dittoed off the ones he thought would make for the liveliest discussion and handed them out at the end of the class. The students were supposed, to come the following week prepared to discuss and criticize. It was the usual way to run such a class. And one week Perkins had given them a story from John Kintner. It had been called … What had it been called?
Mort had turned on the water to fill the coffeemaker, but now he only stood, looking absently out at the fog beyond the window-wall and listening to the running water.
You know damned well what It was called. ‘Secret Window, Secret Garden.’
‘But it wasn’t!’ he yelled petulantly to the empty house. He thought furiously, determined to shut the hellish little voice up once and for all … and suddenly it came to him.
‘”Crowfoot Mile!” he shrieked. ‘The name of the story was “Crowfoot Mile,” and it doesn’t have anything to do with anything!’
Except that was not quite true, either, and he didn’t really need the little, voice hunkered down someplace in the middle of his aching head to point out the fact.
Kintner had turned in three or maybe four stories before disappearing to wherever he had disappeared to (if asked to guess, Mort would have guessed Vietnam – it was where most of them had disappeared to at the end of the sixties -the young men, anyhow). ‘Crowfoot Mile’ hadn’t been the best of Kintner’s stories … but it had been good. Kintner was clearly the best writer in Richard Perkins, Jr’s class. Perkins treated the boy almost as an equal, and in Mort Rainey’s not-so-humble estimation, Perkins had been right to do so, because he thought Kintner had been quite a bit better than Richard Perkins, Jr. As far as that went, Mort believed he had been better.
But had he been better than Kintner?
‘Huh-uh,’ he said under his breath as he turned on the coffeemaker. ‘I was second.’
Yes. He had been second, and he had hated that. He knew that most students taking writing courses were just marking time, pursuing a whim before giving up childish things and settling into a study of whatever it was that would be their real life’s work. The creative writing most of them would do in later life would consist of contributing items to the Community Calendar pages of their local newspapers or writing advertising copy for Bright Blue Breeze dish detergent. Mort had come into Perkins’s class confidently expecting to be the best, because it had never been any other way with him. For that reason, John Kintner had come as an unpleasant shock.
He remembered trying to talk to the boy once … but Kintner, who contributed in class only when asked, had proved to be almost inarticulate. When he spoke out loud, he mumbled and stumbled like a poor-white sharecropper’s boy whose education had stopped at the fourth-grade level. His writing was the only voice he had, apparently.
And you stole it.
‘Shut up,’ he muttered. ‘Just shut up.’
You were second best and you hated it. You were glad when he was gone, because then you could be first again. Just like you always had been.
Yes. True. And a year later, when he was preparing to graduate, he had been cleaning out the back closet of the sleazy Lewiston apartment he had shared with two other students, and had come upon a pile of offprints from Perkins’s writing course. Only one of Kintner’s stories had been in the stack. It happened to be
‘Crowfoot Mile.’
He remembered sitting on the seedy, beer-smelling rug of his bedroom, reading the story, and the old jealousy had come over him again.
He threw the other offprints away, but he had taken that one with him … for reasons he wasn’t sure he wanted to examine closely.
As a sophomore, Mort had submitted a story to a literary magazine called Aspen Quarterly. It came back with a note which said the readers had found it quite good ‘although the ending seemed rather jejune.’ The note, which Mort found both patronizing and tremendously exciting, invited him to submit other material.
Over the next two years, he had submitted four more stories. None were accepted, but a personal note accompanied each of the rejection slips. Mort went through an unpublished writer’s agony of optimism alternating with deep pessimism. He had days when he was sure it was only a matter of time before he cracked Aspen Quarterly. And he had days when he was positive that the entire editorial staff – pencil-necked geeks to a man – was only playing with him, teasing him the way a man might tease a hungry dog by holding a piece of meat up over its head and then jerking the scrap out of reach when it leaps. He sometimes imagined one of them holding up one of his manuscripts, fresh out of its manila envelope, and shouting: ‘Here’s another one from that putz in Maine! Who wants to write the letter this time?’ And all of them cracking up, perhaps even rolling around on the floor underneath their posters of Joan Baez and Moby Grape at the Fillmore.
Most days, Mort had not indulged in this sort of sad paranoia. He understood that he was good, and that it was only a matter of time. And that summer, working as a waiter in a Rockland restaurant, he thought of the story by John Kintner. He thought it was probably still in his trunk, kicking around at the bottom. He had a sudden idea. He would change the title and submit ‘Crowfoot Mile’ to Aspen Quarterly under his own name! He remembered thinking it would be a fine joke on them, although, looking back now, he could not imagine what the joke would have been.
He did remember that he’d had no intention of publishing the story under his own name … or, if he had had such an intention on some deeper level, he hadn’t been aware of it. In the unlikely event of an acceptance, he would withdraw the story, saying he wanted to work on it some more. And if they rejected it, he could at least take some cheer in the thought that John Kintner wasn’t good enough for Aspen Quarterly, either.