THE KING OF PELINESSE

by m. t. anderson

It was not until the final moon had risen over Brondevoult, lighting the carnage with its spectral dweomer, that Caelwin, called the Skull-Reaver, saw that the battle was won, the anthrophidians defeated, so he could at last lower his incarnadined blade and cease his work of destruction. The enemy was vanquished; Caelwin and his hired barbarian swords might at long last storm the basalt citadel. They rushed through the obsidian gates, shrieking with beserker rage, the white knights of Pelinesse behind them, bearing up the oriflamme of the swan and scythe, and the bus reached Portland, and Caelwin stormed up the stone steps and found the Princess of Yabtúb chained beside a cauldron, prepared for some fell thaumaturgic distortion, and he said, “I am Caelwin, called the Skull-Reaver, and I have been sent by the King of Pelinesse to bear you hence,” and she regarded him with astonishment, and I got off the bus and went into the station in the dark of the night to wait until the 6 AM up Route 1.

I lay down on one of the benches with my bag under my head and Tales of Marvel open on my stomach. I closed my eyes hard and tried to doze. I knew my mom was looking for me, and I felt real bad, but I couldn’t call her until I reached Boothbay Harbor. If I called too soon, the police at home could call the operators and trace the call back up the coast and then next thing I knew, they would be showing up to have a little talk with me, you know, saying, “Jim? You must be Jim. Jim, why don’t you come with me. Your parents are real worried about you, Jim,” saying stuff like that, but walking toward me with their hands out. So I couldn’t call my parents. I tried not to think about it. I just curled up right there on the bench and rolled up the magazine in both hands and held onto it and I wondered what thaumaturgic meant and I guess I finally fell asleep.

Just after six I caught the first bus of the day to Boothbay Harbor and I sat with my knees up against the back of the seat in front of me, and an eldritch beast, a-glitter with the ichor of Acheronian pits, strayed into the ceremonial chamber, the Princess meeped in her wyvern-wing corset, and Caelwin, called the Skull-Reaver, unsheathed again his mighty broadsword, so fatal to foes, and hacked at the monster’s serpentine coils while the goring tail whipped around him, spiked like caltrops. The pines went by the windows, and I looked out, and my face haunted the woods. There were purple salt marshes and lots of mist.

“The Baron’s Ambuscade,” Tales of Marvel, vol. 3, no. 6 (June 1937). “The Weird of Caelwin, Skull-Reaver,” TalesofMarvel, vol. 4, no. 2 (February 1938). Both uncollected. “Gloom Comes to Parrusfunt,” TalesofMarvel, vol. 4, no. 8 (August 1938), the first Caelwin yarn with all the mythology worked out, the gods of Ur-Earth, etc. SongoftheSkull-Reaver by R. P. Flint, 1945, collecting all the stories that appeared in TalesofMarvel and Utter Tales from 1938 to 1944, with an alternative version of “Lords of Pain” (originally from UtterTales #6), in which the gem doesn’t fall into the chasm and the Visigoths have a stronger German accent.

“The Serpent-Men of Brondevoult,” Tales of Marvel, vol. 15, no. 10 (October 1949). The latest in the saga. “You are a brute,” murmured the Princess, putting her small hand upon his oiled arm, “but yet you are strangely to my taste.” Caelwin, called the Skull-Reaver, pulled her to him, and drew aside her velvet loincloth to reveal, as it said, the gem of her womanhood, and she yielded to him, melting in his clay-red arms. I was half-asleep and it was like I could see her, and she looked real good, with her wyvern corset ripped open and “the pale parentheses pressed into soft breasts by the iron brassiere, now cast aside” (and there were dark nipples—she groans and beckons—the clank of mail), and the bus stopped and I looked up and saw Wiscasset out the window but I realized I couldn’t shift my knees off the back of the seat in front of me because one leg had gotten embarrassing. I hoped we wouldn’t reach Boothbay Harbor very soon.

“Kid? Can you get your knees out of my back?”

No. No, I couldn’t.

“They’re trash,” said my mother, and she dumped them into the garbage. She said, “You know who reads these things? Soldiers. And prisoners in the state pen.”

I shouted at her to stop and I couldn’t believe she was just wrecking them, and I wanted to grab her hand to stop her but I knew she’d smack me. She was pouring bacon grease all over my collection. I told her no but she just kept going.

“Do you see this grease? I don’t want to hear anything else about R. P. Flint or his god-damned barbarian.”

I told her it was ten dollars’ worth. I said, “I been collecting those all over!”

“I’m telling you, Jimbo. Prisoners in the state pen. You know why they’re in there? Robbing little bakeries and groping the Campfire Girls.”

I kept on yelling at her and she stood there with her stupid arms folded and said, “That’s the kind of company you’re keeping.”

I got off the bus in Boothbay Harbor. I looked around the bluffs and out toward the sea. It was a little town with old captains’ houses and lobster fishermen. I put my hands in my pockets and went to find breakfast. I was real hungry. I read two more pages of the R. P. Flint story while I ate toast and eggs. I spread the pages real neatly so I didn’t get jelly on them.

I realized there was no way my mom and pop could stop me now, so I found a phone and told the operator my town and my number, and they connected me, with all the clicks going down the coast. My mom answered and she’d been crying, I could tell, and I felt kind of sorry, but I thought I shouldn’t feel sorry, and she asked me, “Are you all right? Where are you? Are you all right, sugar?” I said I was okay, and I told her I was in Boothbay Harbor. I thought that would really get her.

She didn’t understand at first. She just said, “Where?”

So I said, “In Boothbay Harbor,” again, and “Maine,” and then she figured out what I was talking about and realized what I was doing and started to say I was being stupid, and not to make a fool out of—so I hung up and walked out.

I had looked up the address on a map, and I had drawn a little version of it on a piece of school paper. It didn’t look like it was far. I walked out of the town center, and along a road that led past ridges of some kind of needly tree, like pines or firs or spruce. I don’t know the difference between them. A couple of years ago, I tried to find out the differences from a book, but all the pictures looked exactly the same. The seagulls were crying out over the islands.

It took me forty-five minutes to walk to the house. It wasn’t near the ocean. It was in an ugly, uneven field, and the bushes around it had grown up with elbows. It wasn’t a very big house, but the name on the mailbox was Flint, painted in yellow, so I went up on the porch and knocked. There was no sound for a while, and I thought maybe no one was home, which would be stupid, but then someone moved. Whoever it was only moved a little. Then they said, “Who is it?” and I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t answer.

“Who is it?” called R. P. Flint.

“I’m,” I said, “I’m a person knocking on your door.”

There were footsteps inside the house, and the door opened.

R. P. Flint was not as tall as I thought he would be. He was kind of short, but he was wiry of limb like the thieves of Mortmoor. He had a little mustache, and his hair was finger-combed and clutched. He was dressed kind of like a writer, in a silk bathrobe, but also just in his boxer shorts, which kind of made me embarrassed. He had a lot of black hair on his chest, which also hadn’t been combed.

“Hi,” he said. “You have a package or something?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know what to tell him. A car drove by on the dirt road below.

R. P. Flint nodded. He said, “You are a disciple of the Skull-Reaver.”

I said, “I have the. I have all the issues. I had them.”

“Come inside,” said R. P. Flint.

I went in. I was real nervous. There wasn’t much in the house, just a few lamps and a desk and a sofa that someone had slept on, and some tin dishes. There was a map of the Age of Caelwin tacked up to the wall. It was done in blue pen on typing paper. The cover from UtterTales no. 15 was pinned beside the window, showing Caelwin, called the Skull-Reaver, stomping on ooze.

“Welcome to my lair. This is where it all begins,” said R. P. Flint, knocking on the desk. “It’s just a little desk, made of wood, but boats are just little things made of wood, and they can transport you to foreign lands.”

I stared at him and at the map of the Age of Caelwin, and I felt completely stupid, just like my mother’d said.

“You may wonder about me,” said Flint. “I’m from Ohio. I write out my first drafts in blue pen—always blue—then I type them. I roll up my sleeves when I write, because I really dive into my world. I’m up to my elbows in sediment.”

I was feeling real confused. He was right in front of me. He was looking at my face.

I pointed my foot at a wicker chair, and I asked if I could please sit down.

He said, “Kid, I’ve got Caelwin tied to a pillar, with a pterodactyl shrieking and coming to feast its unholy beak upon his numbles.”

I went over to the wicker chair anyway and sat. I stared at the floor. I felt very weak.

There he was, right in front of me.

“Hey, pal,” said R. P. Flint. “I’ve really got to get back to the typing.” I didn’t stand up. R. P. Flint smiled and he said, “I’m thinking maybe instead of a pterodactyl, a giant vampire bat. Which one do you think would be better? Here’s your chance, pal. Prehistory in the making.”

I told him, “You’re having an affair with my mother.”

For a long time after that, neither Mr. Flint or I moved any. I was sitting there with my hands on my legs. Mr Flint picked up a root beer bottle from his desk and rolled it between his hands.

“Or had,” I said.

R. P. Flint scratched at the stubble on his lower lip with his teeth. He asked, “What’s your, you know, name?”

I told him, “Jim Hucker.”

R. P. Flint nodded. He stuck his finger into the neck of the bottle and popped it back out. “Swell,” he said.

I said apologetically, “You used a vampire bat in ‘The Worm-Born of Malufrax.’”

Slowly, Mr. Flint swung the bottle back and forth, his finger trapped in its mouth. Finally, he admitted, “Sure. But that was a normal-sized vampire bat. This would be huge.”

Two months before, I found a letter in our mailbox. It was from “R. P. Flint, Author,” and the address was in West Boothbay Harbor, Maine. The envelope was handwritten.

I ran into my parents’ bedroom, where my mother was smoking, and I said, “Mom, you got a letter.”

“Great,” she said, and she took it.

“Who’s it from?” I asked, knowing.

She looked at the return address. “Oh, Jesus,” she said.

“It’s from Maine,” I said. I knew there couldn’t be two R. P. Flint, Authors, of West Boothbay Harbor, Maine. “Who’s it from?” I asked.

“No one.”

“Is it someone you know?”

“It’s someone I went to high school with.”

“You went to school with R. P. Flint?”

“Yes.” She started to leave the room.

I said, “He’s the most amazing writer. I read him all the time. Everyone thinks he’s the best. You know him? Actually?”

“Sure. I know him. Never mind.”

“You know R. P. Flint?”

“I went to high school with him. He was called Dickie.”

“I can’t believe you really went to school with him.”

“Someone had to.”

I asked, “What’s he like?”

“Can we not talk about this?”

“Can I meet him?”

“No.”

“Can you get him to sign an autograph?”

“Forget it.”

“Can I see the letter?”

“No.”

“Mom, he’s my favorite.”

“You’re never meeting him.”

“You don’t understand.”

She yelled, “No, Jim. You don’t understand, see?” She whacked the door frame so hard I jumped. She stared at me, real angry. She said, “I never want to hear his name again.” She walked out of the room, slamming the door after her.

Then there I was, stuck alone in my parents’ room, like it was my room.

The next day, I sat on the sofa reading the tales of Caelwin, called the Skull-Reaver. I held up the cover of the magazine clearly. My mom watched me but she didn’t say anything. At dinner I brought up an interesting question from one of the R. P. Flint stories—if you were falling down a bottomless pit, would you die by some kind of altitude sickness or by starving to death? —and my mother said she didn’t want to hear another word about those stupid codpiece-and-saber stories, and my dad frowned, real uncomfortable, like he knew the name R. P. Flint, Author, better than he should, but he didn’t want to talk about it.

I left the magazines and the book around the house so that no one could ever forget about R. P. Flint, but the arguments between my mother and father were never about that, they were always about the car or the rug or the weekend. Watching my parents closely like a gumshoe, I noticed how my mother always said angry, mean things about everything my father did and how my father came home from work as late as possible and looked hurt into his soup. I tried bringing up R. P. Flint one more time at dinner, and my mother told me his stories were for perverts, and asked me whether I’d ever noticed that all of those serpents rearing up and dragons to be ridden and those huge swords wielded in battle perhaps were kind of symbolic, and whether they might be the kind of thing that men who were worried about themselves would read to make themselves feel better. That made me angry because she knows R. P. Flint is one of my favorites so I said that he was the greatest author I had ever read, and she went up to my room and grabbed all my issues of UtterTales and SongoftheSkull-Reaver and she poured bacon grease all over them.

What I didn’t think about until later was that she knew a lot about R. P. Flint’s stories—about the swords and the dragons—and she knew where I kept my copies.

Not too long after, I found another letter from R. P. Flint, recently arrived, this one torn up in eighths and in the living room wastepaper basket. I took it up to my room and put it on my desk and I fit it together. Then I read it all.

Dick Flint said he was glad he and my mom had met again and how beautiful she was. He talked about the rhapsody of entry and my fingers felt numb on the paper. Mr. Flint talked about how doing that with her made him feel young again, and we can’t let a good thing die, honey, and then a lot about her breasts in the hotel room and lying naked while the evening fell, before she had to skedaddle like a nymph, I’m telling you, viewed by some burly hunter espying her through a thicket in the gloaming. O, the radiant copse, etc.

I just stared at the letter for a long time. It told a story of a world in which even the falling light on telephone wires was beautiful, and a man and a woman were in love, and it had sat torn up in eighths in a wastepaper basket in a room with two plants and three vases and a painting of horses.

I went downstairs.

My mother was polishing in the kitchen.

I went in and sat down.

My mother kept on polishing.

Finally she looked at me. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

I couldn’t say anything. I shrugged.

“Well, why have you been crying?” she asked.

“You’re cheating,” I said.

“What am I doing?”

I didn’t want to repeat it so I kept quiet.

“Don’t twizzle up your legs like that,” she said. “It’s just like your father. Don’t twizzle them up. It’s pathetic.”

I said, “You had an affair.”

She was surprised. She stopped polishing for a minute. “Who told you that?” she asked me. “Have people been talking?”

I didn’t say anything. She kept asking me questions. I didn’t tell her a word.

Finally, she said, “All right. Fine. That’s the past.”

“When?”

“During the war. And your father’s no saint. Don’t twizzle up your legs.”

“I’m not twizzling up my legs.”

“I mean when you wrap them around each other,” she said. “You have to claim the chair as your own. Spread out a little. You sit like nothing in the world belongs to you.”

“Well, you threw away all my magazines.”

“Forget the stupid magazines.”

“Tell me about the, you know, affair.”

“I will not tell you a word. Neither your father or me wants to talk about it.”

“I want to know about the affair. Tell me what happened in the affair.”

“Stop saying ‘affair.’”

She wouldn’t talk about it. My dad came home pretty soon after that. At dinner, my mother started crying. She slammed the salad across the table and walked out.

My father tried not to move, like he was terrified.

I watched them both.

My dad, he watched the table.

A few days later, without telling anyone, I got on the bus for Maine.

“They’re stuck inside their little houses,” said R. P. Flint as we walked past cottages on the bay. Mr. Flint and I were going for some grub and a man-to-man. Mr. Flint cupped his hands around his mouth and repeated loudly, “STUCK INSIDE THEIR LITTLE HOUSES.” He told me, “When people say, ‘I don’t get out much anymore,’ they don’t just mean out the door. They mean outside their own skin. They’re sewed up in their hides. They’re trapped in there. Kid, they need to go out on the town. They need to take their spirit out on a date.” He cupped his hands around his mouth again. “YOU NEED TO GO STEADY WITH YOUR SOUL.”

He was wearing a normal white shirt and a plain suit and I wondered whether that was what he had been wearing when he espied my mother through a thicket in the gloaming and they went to a hotel.

Flint asked, “Is she coming up?”

“Who? Mom?”

“Sure, your mom.”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t tell her I was coming. I just called before I walked to your house. She only just found out I was here.”

“I haven’t seen her in a while. Is she still the fairest vixen to ever sweep across a glade?”

I shrugged, thinking: the gem of her womanhood.

“Let me tell you something that won’t cost you a nickel. A great love is necessary for a great art,” Mr. Flint explained.

I told him I didn’t write or anything.

“But you have a lyrical soul,” he said. “I can see it. People don’t understand you. But that’s because you haven’t spoken yet. I mean, spoken in the voice that echoes off cliffs and mountaintops.” He grabbed my arm and stopped the two of us from walking. He said, like a prophet, “You will speak in that voice, ere long.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I didn’t want to look at his eyes. I wanted to keep walking. But Mr. Flint wasn’t letting go. I figured he was waiting for something but I didn’t know what he wanted. Maybe thanks or something. So I said, “Thanks.”

Mr. Flint let go of my arm and smiled and we kept walking toward the village. The water was real quiet in the bay. Some lobster boats drifted out between the isles. It was a bright day, and the wind blew over the church steeples and the warehouses on the docks.

I asked Mr. Flint whether he ever got lonely up in Maine.

“Why’s that?”

“I thought writers lived in New York or Hollywood. And they had all kinds of friends who are other writers and movie stars.”

“I’ve stripped my life down,” he told me. “I don’t need much. I have all the company I want to keep right in here.” He shot himself in the head with his fingers. “People don’t understand about the need to live simply. They make appointments all day. They even schedule their own deaths. The first time they’ll have freedom to really be themselves is when they no longer exist. But up here, there’s nothing but me and the sky. A million billion stars.”

I looked out where the sun glanced along the harbor and I could kind of see what Mr. Flint meant. It looked heroic, with all the ocean and the coves and their pines. Everything seemed big.

That’s one of the things I love about R. P. Flint’s stories: They make the land feel huge. Even though they’re set on an ancient, strange Earth, there’s the feeling of a huge America in them. They have the pioneer spirit. The sea with the fishermen, and the fields of wheat to the west. The frigid north, where roams the wolf, and the sands of the desert south. The white marble cities and the little farms lost in the hills.

Looking out at the sea, I felt something cosmic in the nation and older than the settlers.

And I guess maybe that’s what he’d made my mother see, how huge everything was, and I pictured them standing in some high place, and for a moment they looked out on the world together, the height of space, and maybe they felt like they were falling through it, but holding each other.

A lobster boat was puttering near to the shore. Men in rubber pants pulled up their traps. There was wood smoke in the air, which is a smell I like. We kept walking. I scuffed the dirt in streaks with my heels. I looked at Mr. Flint and I thought, the rhapsody of entry, and then I didn’t say any more.

A few minutes later, we reached the luncheonette. We got a table.

“I’m buying,” said Mr. Flint. “It’s a celebration.”

I got fried chicken. Mr. Flint got the Reuben sandwich. I picked the skin off the fried chicken. I like the breading, but not the skin. The skin is too wet and bumpy. I stacked little pieces of the broken breading on top of the meat. That way I could eat just the breading.

Mr. Flint announced, “The white knights, formerly Caelwin’s allies, catch him and try to mate him with the inferior, watery beauties of Pelinesse. Those are no women for Caelwin—fine ladies taken up with needlepoint and the gentle arts. Weaving. Giggling in their snoods. He will not go to stud to improve the bloodlines of those anemic decadents.”

“In the new story?”

“The wizard Arok-Plin, thirsty for the blood of the young nations of the north, seeks him, too, riding out of the desolate lands of Vnokk. He wishes to use Caelwin’s life-strength in an amulet that will give him the power to melt metal with his very gaze. How do you like that? Would you like to have such an amulet?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know what I’d really do with it. I mean, you can bust metal with stuff now and I never need to.”

“Ah. Right.” He nodded.

I was just trying to answer truthfully, but now I could see Mr. Flint was a little hurt about me not liking his amulet. So I said, “I have about every Caelwin story you ever wrote.” He still didn’t say anything, so I asked him, “How did you get such a big imagination?”

“By never ordering from the menu of life, except à la carte. By letting my own heart beat so strong that my body jumps to its rhythms. Do you understand?”

I nodded. But then I thought about it and I said, “You ordered a lunch special.”

“I like the pickle.”

“I mean, you didn’t order a separate side. You just got the Reuben basket.”

“I don’t have anything against fries. What’s got into you?”

“I thought à la carte meant you ordered everything separate.”

“I wasn’t talking literally. Don’t be a chump. Anyway, why are you stacking up all your fried on your chicken after you just pulled it off?”

“I just like the fried.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m the one who has to watch it.”

I said, “Tell me about my mother.”

R. P. Flint got a look on his face that was either worried or angry, and he chewed real slow and hard, chops full.

Now I couldn’t bear to look at him, so I played with the paper placemat instead. I rolled a corner of it around the handle of my fork.

“How are you boys doing here?” the waitress said. “Still working?”

“I am always working, kindly Ruby,” said Flint. “So long as breath and mind persevere.”

“You were going to write a sonnet about me on my apron,” she said.

“Sure. I’m a couplet short of a quatrain. Think of something that rhymes with ‘carbonation.’”

“This should be good.”

I offered, “Inflammation.”

“Real cute,” said Ruby about me.

“Ain’t he the bee’s knees?” said Flint, wriggling a finger.

“Your nephew?”

“Sort of.”

I explained, “He had an affair with my mother.”

The waitress looked at Mr. Flint with a friendly kind of disgust and then said, “Prince Charming. Excuse me. I have a date with a side of mashed.”

When she was gone, Mr. Flint told me, “I wish you hadn’t said that. You can’t just say things like that.”

“It’s true. If you didn’t want people to say it, you shouldn’t have done it.”

Mr. Flint chewed again.

I said, “So?”

“So what?”

“So you knew her in high school.”

Mr. Flint took another bite of his Rueben. He wiped pink sauce off his lips with his napkin. He half-shrugged and said, “Okay. We knew each other in high school.”

“Did you date her then?”

“Did I…? No, not really. Not what you could call ‘date.’ You know, this is a colliding of worlds. You here. One world runs into another one.” He sucked at his teeth. “Think about this: I could have Caelwin stumble on an electrical citadel. With a field of static energy like a veil of light and a buzzing sound. And in the citadel could be some creatures from another planet with ray-guns and all. But I’m worried how it would be, with a sword yarn mixing with a space yarn. What do you think?”

“You’re…You aren’t answering.”

“You haven’t asked any question.”

“When did you see her again?”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about this, pal.”

“But now I asked a question.”

“She’s a gorgeous woman, your mother. You must know that. If she’s ever in the dumps, you’ve got to tell her that. Tell her people think she’s gorgeous. You’ve got to make a woman realize how they delight men’s eyes. Because otherwise they all think they have lousy figures or bad hair.”

“You’re not answering.”

“I don’t have to answer a thing. Your mother is a delicious woman. That’s all you’ve got to know. Do you have to go to the john?”

“No. Why?”

“Because you have your legs all screwed up like that.”

“Sorry,” I said, and unwound them. I told him that my mother always says I need to sit like I’m willing to take up more room.

“She’s not wrong,” he said. “She’s a smart woman, your mother. Smart as well as beautiful. It’s one of the great mysteries that people take up different amounts of room. I mean, you think of, for example, a guy like me, normal sized, and a short little guy, let’s say he’s five two or something. We both have these thoughts and these feelings, but mine extend through more of the universe. More of the universe is made up of me. No matter how big his thoughts are, when it comes down to it, more of space is not him—and more of it is boiling with R. P. Flint. It’s a question of how much you fill. Isn’t that funny?”

“Where was the hotel?”

“You don’t let up.”

“I read your letter.”

“You read my goddamn letter.”

“She tore it up.”

Mr. Flint wiped his mouth with his napkin, creased it into a square, and threw it down on his plate. “Look, kid, you’ve met me. Here we are. That’s it. Now you know me. You’re done. We’re right in town. Let me give you change for the bus. You go back home and tell your mother I’m here whenever she wants to come up and see me.” He stood up. “Get up. I’m paying. You need to use the john.”

“I don’t. That’s just my legs.”

“You have a long trip ahead of you.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Why? What do you want to learn?”

That stumped me. I didn’t answer.

“What do you want to learn?”

I didn’t have anything to say.

Mr. Flint took his coat from the hook on our booth and he put it on and the moment was passing. He said, “I’ve got to go. Our hero is tied to a pillar, about to be gored by a pterodactyl.”

“You said it might be a bat.”

“I just said that to make conversation. That’s the stupidest goddamn idea I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“No stupider than a pterodactyl.”

“A pterodactyl has a beak. It can rend, like the heaven-sent eagle that disemboweled Prometheus. A vampire bat would just crawl all over him and, I don’t know, nibble.”

“Things that crawl can be awful.”

“Are you getting cute?”

I didn’t understand him. He was trying to get past me to the door.

I tried to say something, but Mr. Flint held out his hand and interrupted me. “It was nice meeting you. Real nice. A pleasure.”

I shook his hand.

I said, “I’m not going.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know what it was like.”

“Laying your mother?”

“Don’t you say that.”

“I can’t tell you anything.”

“Why not? Where did you meet? What did she say to you? What did she tell you about my pop?” I asked him. “What did she say about me?”

Mr. Flint looked stumped. He pressed his thumbs hard against the table edge and watched them whiten. He lifted his hands and put them in his pockets.

“Jesus,” he said. “I need a beer.”

“What did she tell you?”

Mr. Flint picked up the bill and took out his wallet and thumbed through it until he had enough money. He put the money down on top of the bill. “You have a quarter?” he asked me.

I wasn’t giving him any change.

“Look,” said Mr. Flint, in a different kind of voice, “I haven’t seen your mother since high school.”

I put my hands in my underarms. I didn’t say a word. Mr. Flint snorted and frowned.

“It’s true,” he said. “That’s how it really is. I write her letters, she never writes back.”

“I read the letter. You said that you met her in a hotel.”

“I didn’t.”

“I read it.”

“I know I wrote that. Okay? But I didn’t meet her.”

“You said in a hotel. At least once. Maybe more.”

“Can we get out of here?” he asked, looking around quickly. “These people aren’t really that interested in their meatloaf.”

We went outside. A few cars drove past. I had my coat on.

“You said in a hotel,” I pressed.

“Christ.”

“I’m just telling you what you wrote in ink.”

“Women”—Mr. Flint looked gray—“women like some romance in their life. They like it when a man talks to them from outside the wee world of lawns, you know what I mean? The little china tea-set world. So I wrote your mother some letters.”

I said, “They weren’t true. The letters.”

I think Mr. Flint started to shake his head, but then he stopped. His head was getting lower on his shoulders. He was staring at the metal railing. He looked up quickly at my mouth, and he explained, “Women need some romance. I know how to lavish romance. It’s what they love.”

“You haven’t seen her in twenty years.”

He said, “I knew her in high school. She was the most beautiful…She was…You know how it is. I couldn’t get her out of my head. So a few years ago I found out where she was and I wrote to her and asked what she was doing. She never wrote back, so I wrote again, and it just became this sort of—you can think of it like a novel. Okay? It became a story I was telling her.”

“She said it was true.”

“Then she’s nuts.”

“She said you had an affair during the war.”

“Maybe she did.”

“So?”

“With another man. At least, not with me. I don’t know. But I can promise you: not with me. I’d be dancing to the moon in gingerbread slippers if it was me.”

“So you never went to a hotel and there was never an evening on the telephone wires and the rhapsody of entry.”

“Jesus. Some things you write don’t sound so good when they’re read back to you.” He squinted in the sun and his mustache slanted. He said, “No. Really. I made it all up.”

I didn’t know what to believe. I asked him, “She was beautiful in high school?”

“There was no girl like her. Cross my heart.” R. P. Flint kept ducking his head. He said, “Kid, you can be proud.” He punched me on the arm, and it was like a little brother pretending to be an uncle. “Okay?”

I nodded. I guessed there was nothing else to know. More cars went past. I couldn’t think of any more questions.

“Let’s go down to the docks,” said R. P. Flint, “and watch the boats come in.”

We went down the street, which was steep, to the pier. Fishermen were carrying crates up ramps. They yelled things to each other. For a while, R. P. Flint and me sat there side by side.

We couldn’t see the ocean from where we were sitting—just the harbor—but the swells drew up and lay down the seaweed. The sky was as blue as a stupid postcard, and the islands were as green as islands. Mr. Flint smoked a cigarette like he wished it was a pipe.

I said, “So you just write her letters?”

Flint blew a stream of smoke, which wavered as he nodded.

“How long have you been writing her?”

“Can we not, you know, talk about this?”

I stopped talking so I wouldn’t bother him. He was the one who kept talking.

“You think I’m a drip,” he said.

I told him I didn’t.

He said, “People might say so, but I’ve got…I told you: A man needs a great passion for a great art. For me, it happens to be your mother. I worship her as the paragon of women. The paragon. It doesn’t matter whether she cares. You know what? I’m like the knights in the old medieval stories. She’s my courtly lady. I ride into battle with her favor on my crest, okay, and it doesn’t matter whether she ever even stoops to kiss me. I remain faithful until the end. Whatever may come.”

“She tears the letters up,” I said.

He hardly moved his head.

I faced back forward. On one of the boats, some men were playing cards. There was a breeze sometimes, and they held down the discards with their fists.

Mr. Flint was blushing and he kept staring out at the islands.

He was thinking about awful things. Just watching the seagulls. I felt bad, so I told him, “I liked the pun on Boothbay.”

“Hm?” said Mr. Flint.

“Yabtúb,” I said. “The Princess of Yabtúb.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Flint. “Yeah. That’s not a pun. It’s just backwards.”

“In the story, is the place Yabtúb supposed to be like Boothbay Harbor?”

“No.”

“The opposite of Boothbay?”

“No.”

“Like Boothbay backwards?”

“No. It’s nothing like Boothbay.”

I nodded. We sat for a minute. I told him, “You could have called it Robrah Yabtúb.”

He nodded. “Sure. I could’ve.”

He stood up and kicked at the pier. He told me, “I’m going back to my house now. I’ve got some writing to do.”

Ten feet under my shoes, the sea grew and shrank.

“All right?” said Mr. Flint. “It was really nice to meet you.” He smiled at me, even though I could tell it wasn’t a real smile. Mr. Flint held out his hand again like he had in the luncheonette. “It’s been a pleasure. A real pleasure.”

I stood up and I dusted off my pants and I shook R. P. Flint’s hand. I said politely that it was good to meet him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know this isn’t what you were expecting.”

I shrugged. “It’s not what you were expecting, either,” I said.

R. P. Flint nodded. “You’re a great kid, pal.” He smiled, and this time it was for real. I smiled back. The sun was bright and we were both squinting. He said, “What’s your name again?”

I told him, “Jim.”

“Jim what?”

I stared at him. For a second he didn’t realize what he’d said.

I said, “The same as my mother’s. You write to her.”

“Oh, sure,” he said.

“So.”

“So, it’s…”

“Hucker.”

“Of course, Jim. I know.” He fumbled with the air. “All right. Great. Good-bye,” he said quickly, and walked away as fast as he could.

I watched him. He moved as fast as a crab on the beach.

He hadn’t known her name. He had no idea. None. He walked up the hill.

I just stared at him. I stood there and watched him go up the road and I wondered how many women Mr. Flint was writing to. I bet there was a list. Probably a monthly calendar, and he went through them all by date. Maybe Mr. Flint wrote to a lot of the women who were girls at his high school. I pictured their legs, their arms in front of Dickie Flint still, white hands sorting cards, writing “DANCE” in block letters, slim fingers held up to answer questions about Uruguay, pale socks twirling past his pimpled face, his slack, stupid mouth where he sat at his desk, scratching his lower lip with his upper—and maybe there were others, too, other women he thought about alone—the teller at Mr. Flint’s bank, the typists at Utter Tales, Ruby at the luncheonette, who knows?—and he wrote his dirty letters in which he loved each one like no one else had ever loved him before, and in each envelope, the future was just beginning, a new future with just him and this girl, and she and he were going to meet in some courtyard with a fountain and wine and flutes, and Mr. Flint was never alone.

That was all. He walked away, trying not to look back at me, because he knew what I was thinking. Then he was gone, around a corner, and I went up and waited for three hours for the next bus back to Portland.

On the bus, Caelwin, called the Skull-Reaver, returned to do battle with his erstwhile ally, the King of Pelinesse, that he might seize the scepter of that benighted realm, but I couldn’t fix my eyes on the page because the darkness was starting to fall over the salt marshes and towns.

Mr. Flint, I guess, was back at his house. Hunched over, drinking root beer, sleeves rolled up, one lamp. Doing his evening’s work. I pictured him reading out the best passages to himself in a voice as swollen as opera, about the breasts and the thighs; and there they were; all of them, like women in a sunken kingdom, sitting in his garden with seaweed waving around them, there in his undersea court, his consorts, yielding up thegemof etc., and etc., and etc.

I decided I would have to phone my mother from Portland. I would have to tell her I was okay and I guess I’d have to ask her who she really’d had the affair with, and probably there’d be more stories after that. All the stories of parents that I couldn’t even hardly imagine, all the things that happened to people in houses and hotels in this world, on this Earth, on this stupid Earth.

Caelwin was riding to the north, his demesne expanding; and on the bus, I stared at my own reflection in the window, my own twined legs, until evening came, and all that was left was specks; and then my traces grew so tiny I could not even be seen.