Читать книгу Fleeing the Past - Christopher LaGrone - Страница 8

The unexpected phone call from Nancy came in mid-December 2018.

“Denny, I have terrible news,” she said. “Chris died.”

And that’s how the completion of The Delta Tango Trilogy began.

I had gotten to know Nancy as the person in charge of author events at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on Colorado Boulevard in Denver. Over several years she hosted me each time I had a new book, and we collaborated on several Colorado Authors’ League events.

One day, I think it was in 2016, she asked if I would be willing to look at a manuscript written by a young guy who wanted very much to be an author; he needed a professional critique of what he had written.

Sure, I said. I enjoy working with aspiring writers.

Chris LaGrone (the brother of Nancy’s sister-in-law, I later learned) was then in his late thirties. He had been an agent in the U.S. Border Patrol for a time and had written a novel based on his experiences.

I read it and was impressed with the quality of his writing and the content of his story. But I told him, “No publisher will ever publish this, Chris, because it’s too linear. It’s just your character’s experiences getting into and going through the Border Patrol Academy, being a field trainee, and then becoming an actual agent.” I thought it provided insights the public didn’t have, but to make a compelling book it needed more.

“Novels,” I told him, “have subplots—twists and turns that make the overall story more complex, and thus, more interesting.”

I gave him an example: “You’re writing about someone whose job is to catch illegal aliens trying to sneak into the United States. Why not have him fall in love with an illegal? That would complicate matters!” I suggested that he read Helen Thorpe’s wonderful book Just Like Us to learn what a so-called “Dreamer” faces living in America without legal status.

I also told Chris his main character, Layne Sheppard, needed to have a personal issue to overcome—a demon to conquer. I left it to him to decide what that would be.

Chris proved to be the most coachable writer I’ve ever worked with. He came back to me some time later with a rewritten manuscript that contained love, conflict, and a demon for the main character. Again, I read it. And again, I was impressed. But again, I saw a problem.

“No publisher will publish this, Chris,” I told him. “Two hundred fifty thousand words is too long.”

But I offered a suggestion: “We could turn this into a trilogy,” I said. “This would break nicely into three books.”

Chris liked that idea and saw immediately how to divide his story into three parts. Thus began almost two years of rewriting and editing. Chris would send me chapters as he finished drafts. I’d edit them and send them back to him for revisions. He’d return them to me, and I’d add the finished versions to a growing manuscript file.

We had finished Book One this way and were halfway through the same process for Book Two when Chris informed me that he was going to Argentina in August 2018 to improve his already fluent Spanish and learn more about the Hispanic culture. From Argentina he was to travel to Chile and Peru.

Before Chris left Denver, he finished drafts of all of Book Two’s chapters, and we discussed a rough outline for Book Three. His absence allowed me time to focus on a book of my own that I was finishing.

In late October I emailed Chris, asking when he would be returning. “We need to hit it once you are back in town,” I wrote.

“I’m in South America for another few months,” he wrote back. He was looking forward to visiting the Atacama Desert in Chile, where the thirty-three Chilean miners were trapped underground for sixty-nine days before their dramatic rescue in August 2010.

By early December 2018, Chris had made his way to Cusco, Peru (elevation 11,152 feet), via Lima (sea level). He was headed for Machu Picchu, the center of the Inca civilization of the fifteenth century, high in the Andes Mountains.

“Chris suffered from severe asthma his entire childhood,” his mother Sherryl told me later. “It continued into his adult life. Changing altitude quickly when he flew from Lima to Cusco, his body was not able to adapt to the thin air quickly enough.”

I can’t begin to express how stunned I was when I received that startling phone call from Nancy in December 2018. But, somehow I knew right away what I wanted to do.

“This isn’t the time,” I began. “But when you think the time is right, please tell Chris’s mom and sister (Aimee) that, if they’d like to have the trilogy finished as Chris’s legacy, I’ll volunteer to write Book Three. I have a good idea where Chris was going with it.”

By then I had worked with Chris for more than two years. Over countless meetings I had coached him to develop the story as a three-book series. While Book Three wasn’t yet in draft form, Chris and I had discussed it at length. I didn’t know exactly how he planned to conclude, but he’d put all of the building blocks in place. And I’d edited enough of his writing to have a good feel for how he expressed things; I was confident that I could replicate his style.

I’ve never been in the Border Patrol, of course, and know virtually nothing about being an agent. Sustaining Chris’s intimate knowledge of life in the Patrol would have been impossible for me. Luckily, I had a source who agreed to provide me with insights into Border Patrol policies and procedures and many examples of an agent’s adventures. Thus, I knew I’d be able to fill Book Three with the kinds of true-life experiences Chris related so realistically in the first two books.

Just after the start of the new year, Nancy made sure I knew when and where Chris’s memorial service would be held, and said she hoped I would attend. I didn’t want to miss it, and afterwards I was thankful I hadn’t, because, for as well as I had gotten to know Chris, I had no idea how important writing was to him until I listened to speaker after speaker talk about how badly he wanted to become a successful writer. It drove everything Chris did the last several years of his life.

I knew then what to expect, and a week or so after the service I received an email from Sherryl LaGrone that read, in part: “Aimee and I are very much interested in having you finish Chris’s work.” A week later his mother and I talked by phone, and in March I met her face to face for the first time, before a Colorado Rockies Spring Training game in Scottsdale, AZ.

The book I was finishing when Chris died was my tenth as an author, but all are non-fiction. I had tried writing fiction almost forty years earlier but decided that, as a career newspaper journalist trained in reporting facts accurately, I just wasn’t good at making things up. But I’d edited many novels and had been working with Chris for two years. So, I was willing to take another crack at “making things up”—especially since Chris had done most of the hard fictionalizing: creating characters, setting scenes, and establishing the story arc.

My first step was to finish editing Book Two. I decided to end it five chapters earlier than Chris planned, and use those chapters in Book Three. I also had other material from Chris to build on, meaning at least a third of Book Three is his origination.

From there it was just a matter of answering the recurring question every novelist faces, though it was a new one for me: What happens next?

Chris inspired the answers.

I hope I’ve honored my friend Chris with the way I completed the story he created, and that my attempt to capture his storytelling style reads like the rest of this trilogy.

—Denny Dressman