Son of Fletch

Jack took a deep breath. “Where do you get off writing a book concerning Native Americans— Indians—white man?”

Fletch said, “Where did Edgar Arthur Tharp, Junior, get off painting Native Americans— Indians—sculpting them? He was a ‘white man,’ too.”

“Exactly. He painted and sculpted them as part of their horses. You said so yourself. In your book. You wrote, Tharp stretched and lit the naked muscles of the Indian riders exactly as he did the muscles of the horses on which they rode.’ Right?”

“Right.”

“‘He painted the women, rounded, with babies on their backs, in the same configurations as the earth mounds behind them.’”

“So,” Fletch said. “You read the book.”

“I read the book.”

“You giving me an argument about my work?”

“I’m giving you an argument.”

“Okay.” Fletch sighed. “Where did a Harvard-educated, Jewish American male get off writing, composing West Side Story about urban Puerto Rican youngsters, based on a play about youngsters in Verona, Italy, called Romeo and Juliet written by a white, male Englishman named William Shakespeare, who had never been to Italy?”

Jack grinned. “I guess you’re familiar with this argument.”

“Yeah. I’ve confronted it, once or twice. I have been surprised to perceive the prejudice against my work, in one or two quarters.”

“What’s the answer?”

“In the first place, it never occurred to me. I know what I am. And I know what I am not. At least unlike some, I know I cannot be someone else, truly see and feel from someone else’s experience and heart. Nevertheless, I have always believed in empathy, in the broad commonality of being human. Admittedly, we cannot understand. But we can try. Too, although Native Americans had and have a great art, Tharp’s representation of them, and the cowboys, the steam locomotives, the horses, the buffalo, were representations the Indians and the settlers were not about to do themselves. Tharp memorialized them, with empathy and love. Without his works, we would know less, understand less. And I tried to memorialize Tharp and his works with empathy and love.”

“You’re lecturing.”

“You asked a question. I answered it.”

“You believe in straight lines, don’t you?”

“Nature does not love the straight line,” Fletch said. “Man is compelled to it.”

“‘Man’?”

“Broadly speaking.”

“Is that a pun?”

“I think I’ve just learned not to feed you.”

Jack folded his arms across his chest. “My mother tried to write a book once. She only did about eighty pages. Half of it was about you. Half of it was about me. She loves to tell stories about you.”

“She used to beat people over their heads with stories about me.”

“Any of them true?”

“Not really.”

“How about the time you were in Brazil and the people there took you for the ghost of someone murdered even before you were born, and you had no choice but to solve the murder of yourself?”

“Crystal told you that story?”

“What about it?”

“A ghost story.”

“My mother loved you. She still does. She loved you sexually as well, you know.”

“I guess I didn’t understand that.”

“You married a royal princess? I saw that in the newspapers, too.”

“I was married to a princess, yes.”

“She was murdered.”

“Assassinated.”

“Why?”

“Middle Europe. Politics. Ethnicity.”

“Is ethnicity politics?”

“Oh, yes. In our coming together and our moving apart. Just politics. Always just a few people seeking power for themselves.”

“Were you with her when … your wife … was assassinated?”

“I was in the car behind her. Annie Maggie never thought about politics. She thought about cooking. She thought about the various kinds of fruits, and cheeses, and sauces, new potatoes and cutlets.”

“Was she fat?”

“No.”

“And you’re alone here now, on the farm?”

“I was going to apologize to you for all my questions,” Fletch said.

“Oh, I knew you know how to ask questions.”

“You were expecting my questions, weren’t you?”

“You were a reporter.”

“Aren’t I still?”

Jack flicked a hand at the study’s walls. “I don’t know any reporter who lives this way. Why don’t you have any paintings by Edgar Arthur Tharp?”

“Who can afford them? Besides, I spent years working on Tharp. One likes to think one can come to the end of something.” He opened a desk drawer. He took out of it a pistol. From a separate, locked drawer, he took out the pistol’s cartridge and a box of shells. “You know all this about me from newspapers and your mother, is that it?”

He crossed the study and put the pistol on Jack’s lap. He placed the cartridge and the box of shells on the coffee table beside the tray.

Jack asked, “What’s this?”

“A pistol,” Fletch answered.

Jack sat up, with the pistol still on his shorts. “I know that. I mean, what are you doing?”

“Giving you a pistol.”

“Why?” Besides having the pistol in his lap, Jack was touching no part of it. “Are you trying to trick me?”

“Would I do that?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“You weren’t with me in the Jeep when I came to that roadblock. Nor were you mentioned. An hour later, when the deputies arrived, you were here. How did you get here? Where’s your vehicle? People here don’t really, really believe frogs drop from the sky in a hard rain. The cops must have a description of you. I want you armed. If the counties come back knowing who you are, I want you to have the decency to tell them you have been holding me and—me captive. Load it.”

Jack put his hand into the box of shells. “You still have your pistol.”

“I can make it disappear faster than you can inhale a tuna sandwich.”

Jack concentrated on loading the cartridge.

Fletch said, “Aiding a fugitive from justice is against the law.”

“How about arming one?”

“You’re not going to shoot anybody.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

Jack put only five shells into the cartridge. He put the cartridge down.