Читать книгу Reacher Said Nothing - Andy Martin - Страница 18

Keever. Good name. I was already hooked.

Lee turned his chair round so he was half facing me, half looking back at his text on the screen. He swung his feet up on the desk.

‘I wanted to start with a verb of action,’ he said. ‘The participle came naturally.’ He went over it in his head. ‘See, I didn’t want to write, Keever was a big guy and moving him wasn’t easy. That’s too expository. This way we waste no time. It’s compact. I thought about was not easy for a moment. But the rhythm was better, wasn’t easy.’

Here it is, the whole of it, as it emerged, that afternoon, September 1, 2014. That page I had in my hand – now you have it in yours.

Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy. It was like trying to wrestle a king-size mattress off a waterbed. So they buried him close to the house. Which made sense anyway. The harvest was still a month away, and a disturbance in a field would show up from the air. And they would use the air for a guy like Keever. They would use spotter planes, and helicopters, and maybe even drones.

They started at midnight, which they figured was safe enough. They were in the middle of ten thousand acres of nothingness, and the only man-made structure their side of the horizon was the railroad track to the east, but midnight was five hours after the evening train and seven hours before the morning train. So, safe enough. No prying eyes. Their backhoe had four spotlights on a bar above the cab, like kids had on their pick-up trucks, and together they made an aimed pool of halogen brightness. So visibility was not a problem. They started the hole in the hog pen, which was a permanent disturbance all by itself. Each hog weighed two hundred pounds, and each hog had four feet. The dirt was always freshly chewed up. Nothing to see from the air, not even with thermal imaging. The picture would white out instantly, from the steaming animals themselves, plus their steaming piles of shit and their steaming pools of piss.

Safe enough.

Hogs were rooting animals, so they made sure the hole was deep. Which was no problem either. The backhoe’s arm was long, and it bit rhythmically, in fluent seven-foot scoops, the hydraulic rams glinting in the light, the engine straining and pausing, the cab falling and rising as each bucket-load was dumped aside. When the hole was done they backed the machine up and turned it around and used the dozer blade to push Keever into his grave, scraping him, rolling him, covering his body in dirt, until finally it fell over the lip and thumped down into the shadows.

Only one thing went wrong, and it happened halfway through the job.

The evening train came through five hours late. The next morning they heard on the AM station that a broken locomotive had caused a jam a hundred miles south. But they didn’t know that at the time. All they heard was the mournful whistle at the distant crossing, and then all they could do was turn and stare, at the long lit cars rumbling past in the middle distance, one after the other, seemingly forever. But eventually the train was gone, and the rails sang for a minute more, and the tail light was swallowed up by darkness, and they turned back to their task.

Twenty miles north the train slowed, and eased to a stop, and the doors wheezed open, and Jack Reacher stepped down into the dirt in the lee of a grain silo bigger than an apartment house.

‘I like the way you use “which”,’ I said. ‘Which made sense anyway. Subordinate clause, but you give it a fresh start.’

‘Yeah, which at the beginning of a sentence,’ Lee said, in a meditative kind of way. ‘It’s an accelerative word. Mostly. I have to be careful not to overdo it though. Becomes a habit.’

He stopped thinking about which for a moment. He was thinking about the whole of that first paragraph.

‘I’m tying my hands here. It’s a risk. Who is Keever? What is he? Why is he so damn important?’

‘Well, who is he?’

‘I’ve no idea at this point.’

I liked that about Lee’s writing. He didn’t know what he was doing. Didn’t need to know. Didn’t want to know. Had faith. Blind faith.

‘I’ve made him important though. The fear of the air search. Then you have all the mechanics of burying him. That’s what follows. From the sheer size of him and the importance. You have to do a good job of it or it’s like he’ll pop right back up again. You have to really get him right down there.’

I was struck – how could I not be? – by that metaphor in the second sentence. The actual word size is explicitly in there, spelling out the governing theme. But waterbed ? Where did that spring from?

‘I slept on a waterbed once. In California? It had a mattress on top, which is strange. But I found myself trying to line up that mattress with the base. Which is impossible. So I thought that was something like the technical problem for the parties unknown.’

‘You know, Keever sounds a lot like Reacher.’

‘Does it?’

‘Look at it. Listen to it. You’ve got the “er” at the end and the “ee” in the middle. It’s a para-rhyme. Keever-Reacher, Keever-Reacher. Sounds like the train. This is an alter-Reacher. And he’s huge, just like Reacher. You’re suggesting that this really could be Reacher. It is what will happen to Reacher if he’s not careful. You always have that. The potential fate for Reacher. Which he generally manages to work around. Unlike a lot of his partners. So you’re looking into the void right from the start. You’re actually building an abyss. Nothingness.’

Child said nothing.

‘But you don’t start with dialogue. You could have done. You know, “Hey, what a big bastard he was!” “What are we going to do with the body?” “I know, let’s dig a hole, a big one” – that kind of thing.’

‘Yeah,’ he grinned, ‘I know what you mean. A lot of writers are like that. They start with dialogue because it looks easier to a reader. Lots of wide open spaces and air. I very rarely start with dialogue. It’s partly tactical. I like it dense. But mostly, Reacher is not a conversationalist. I don’t want to give the wrong impression.’

‘I think Camus said something like that. Cut out all the chit-chat.’

Lee took a drag on his cigarette. ‘I’m taking a risk with this. It’s a dense wedge of text. But you’re saying to the reader all the time, don’t worry, I’m going to take you by the hand and lead you through it.’

‘“Hogs were rooting animals”?’

‘I’m really reacting to the reader’s question here. “Hold on, they’re hogs, aren’t they going to dig him up again and have him for dinner?” So we have to go down deep.’

‘With a backhoe.’

‘I love the backhoe. It’s the American word for a JCB in England. A digging machine. A giant shovel. Saves you a lot of time and energy. I’m being a little bit omniscient observer. But they are thinking and talking in their vernacular. So we’ve got to try and stick with that.’

‘You’ve got “steaming” and “steaming”. And another “steaming” in the previous. I like that. No elegant variation. It’s all steaming.’

‘I really like the steaming. “Shit” and “piss” could change – if I can find some agricultural terms. Reacher wouldn’t generally have shit and piss.’

‘You know, I have this feeling you don’t much like rural places. They come up a lot in your fiction as the natural habitat of the bad guys. Is this your take on the American pastoral? Are you being just a bit satirical here about a whole mythology of nature?’

‘It’s common in western cultures,’ he snapped back. ‘The rural is revered. Farmers are revered.’ He stood up. Wandered over to the window. Twitched the blind. Looked out on an urban landscape of roofs and windows and water towers. Some sky. A lot of concrete. ‘But Reacher is all about logic and fact. He would say it’s an unexamined assumption. Lots of different kinds of farmers. No doubt some of them are fantastic. But among them are some of the stupidest people doing the stupidest things.’

Lee – he loves a good rant. Sometimes it’s hard to stop him.

‘And if they come up with an innovation it’s only to make it even more stupid. Look at chopping up cows in order to feed them to other cows – thus causing BSE. Everybody knows they eat grass. We’re turning them into cannibals. Mad cannibals.’ He turned away from the window, sick of the sight of some distant, seemingly innocent farming community, actually full of unscrupulous maniacs. Nothing like Charlotte’s Web at all (the one with Wilbur the ‘radiant’ pig). Lee’s pigs had to be hogs, not pigs.

‘They are not necessarily the repository of wisdom,’ Lee went on. ‘They are just as much the repository of ignorance and superstition. And look at the dustbowl years. That was all the fault of the farmers. The government was trying to tell them all the time, don’t keep planting and harvesting, planting and harvesting every year, year on year, you’re going to kill it. And then it dies and blows away. And they’re, “Hey, we didn’t know!” They don’t know anything.’

I had a feeling that Make Me wasn’t going to be a hymn of praise to that little farmhouse on the prairie. Not one with a backhoe, anyhow.

Lee went and sat down again, finally running out of steam. He settled himself back in the chair and put his feet back up on the desk, crossed them, and gazed fondly at the screen.

‘I’m feeling good about it. I think it works in and of itself. It’s not overlong. And it gets you going. I wish I knew more. But it raises some great questions.’ It was something he had written for the ‘Draft’ column of the New York Times in 2012, under the heading A Simple Way to Create Suspense. ‘Ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story’ – and then ‘delay the answer’. It was easy for Lee to delay, because he really didn’t know the answer. ‘Who is Keever? Why is he dead? What happened? This is what we want to know. The questions are there. Yes, I’m feeling good at the moment.’

He nodded to himself, by way of assent to his own statement. And then he added a qualification. ‘But also I’m feeling a bit challenged by the next scene. What is Reacher even doing there? How come he’s getting off the train anyway? Why here?’

Clearly Reacher has been doing nothing of great import before the book starts up. Just roaming about, no dramas. When he steps down off that train he is re-entering the world of action, that realm in which things happen and must be reported on. Lee didn’t feel the need to keep tabs on the quiescent Reacher, Jack’s well-behaved, decent-citizen, peace-loving twin. ‘Look at Robert de Niro being Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Classic method acting. He had to be Jake. Just as there are method actors, so too there are method writers. They will write out whole bios and calendars for their characters and pin them up on the wall.’

I glanced at the walls of his office. They were blissfully devoid of little bits of paper stuck to the plaster.

‘A lot of readers come up to me and say – or send me emails and say – “How come Reacher gets into all this mayhem all the time? Can there be that much drama in these little towns?” You could do Waiting for Reacher, but I’m not into that.’

He had seen Waiting for Godot about forty times, he reckoned. (‘Forty!?’ ‘Thirty-nine maybe.’) He denounced a recent production involving Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. It was too local, too northern, and they weren’t really trying. Self-indulgent. I said something about Hamlet, about how not much happened for long periods, it was all anticipation and retrospection on things that really had happened off. Lee didn’t fully approve of Hamlet either. Self-indulgent. Too long. Were they paid by the minute? ‘Only Macbeth would you leave alone. All the others you would want to speed up. I hate these Richard IIIs which are supposed to be authentic and they’re just too long and slow.’

He wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the comedy in Shakespeare either. ‘It’s just not funny enough.’

I asked, ‘Do you ever want a comic touch in your books?’

‘Of course Reacher has more in the way of sardonic humour than he is given credit for. But I’m allergic to comic thrillers. We’re talking about killing here. That doesn’t seem like the right place for a lot of humour. There are moments – when Reacher leaves a body in the trunk of a car for the rest of the gang to find.’

‘Classic Reacher sense of humour.’

‘But I’m not going out of my way to try and be funny. Look …’ He scanned the screen. Only one thing went wrong – that is almost funny. It’s wry.’

He kept on contemplating what he had written. ‘It indirectly involves Reacher. The train is Reacher. Another big guy – as you say, an alternative to Keever.’

‘As big as a silo.’

All this talk of size brought us round to the subject of how much he hadn’t written exactly. On that particular day. We understood – it was implicit – that it was all about the quality not the quantity. On the other hand Lee likes to crank it out, if possible. Steadily. Day by day.

‘So is that the first page, then?’

‘It’s two pages – of a book. Five hundred words. Half a per cent of a book. On day one. That’s not bad. On a good day, fairly relaxed, I can do fifteen hundred words.’ Lee likes to use the word efficient or efficiency in relation to his work. ‘The efficiency is severely hampered by not knowing what’s coming next. So it’s inefficient. But it’s efficient because I don’t do revisions.’

‘Not at all?’

‘Not much. And I certainly don’t let other people do revisions for me.’ Which started him off on another of his rants. ‘Look at this word,’ he says. ‘Waterbed. Or nothingness or whatever. Barring catastrophe or the end of the world, I know that this will be published, and in this form. Waterbed will remain. Right there, where I’ve put it. So I care about that word. In the movies, it’s a completely unreal feeling. How can you care about this word or that one when you know it’s not going to be there further down the line. A lot of other people are going to come along and rewrite it. Waterbed will be gone. You can’t care about it in those circumstances. This is why I’m writing novels and not films.’

Feeling. It was all about the feeling. Everyone thought that feeling was the thing that was left out in a Lee Child novel. Whereas the truth was that it was all feeling, all the way through, every last word. And it had to feel right.

‘That is why I can’t change anything. The book is like a diary of how I felt at the time. I can’t change that.’

‘I lost count of the cigarettes. Do you think I should be adding up the butts? Making a tally? People probably want to know what the optimal number of cigarettes is, how many per thousand words.’

‘Too many cigarettes. End of a paragraph, end of a sentence: another cigarette. Normally I’d have had more coffee too.’ He turned and looked right at me. ‘I am writing on the verge of a stroke. I’m teetering on the edge.’

‘Hey, you haven’t finished the book yet. You’ve barely started. We need to know who the hell Keever is.’

It was the first time the thought had occurred to me. Is that why he had let me in on the whole thing – to bear witness, just in case this was the last time? Before it was too late. Despite a solid collection of bad habits, he looked healthy enough. For now. I needed a full medical report. A brain scan maybe. Lungs too.

Lee was like an ageing boxer. Muhammad Ali or Joe Frazier coming back for one more big fight. Another twelve rounds in the ring. Another payday. But conscious all the while this could be his last shot at the title. Right up against the odds. And I was his only spectator.

Which reminded me, just a little, of Reacher: this is what he does, he bears witness. Without Reacher it’s just another tree falling in the forest, silently.

The old split between ‘office’ (downstairs) and ‘home’ (upstairs), in the Flatiron district, had gone. Now it was all one. Which was probably why we were quarantined off, in the dedicated office, at the back of the apartment. Lee reckoned the trouble with working from home was that you are never done, you are always on. And so it proved. He got back to me later that night with some small but significant revisions to what he had already done in the afternoon. A few points had been nagging him.

This is the email he sent me:

Went through what I wrote again and made minor changes that I think snap the voice into better focus – following James Wood’s Flaubert theory [in How Fiction Works], the ‘semi-close 3rd-person’ voice there should subtly modify to better characterize the actors. Now I think I have it down, so at the page break we’re really going to feel the country villains stepping off stage, and Reacher stepping on.

There was one thing about what he had written that, to my way of thinking, was definitely wrong. But I didn’t like to mention it to him. I thought it would be stepping over the line. Like making some kind of sarcastic remark to Reacher.