U Is for Undertow

owner was a Hollywood producer who spent the occasional weekend in Horton Ravine. Jon knew their habits because the couple had come to a number of dinner parties Mona had given and they talked nonstop about themselves. The guy had a son Jon’s age that Jon had no use for. Mona liked him, of course, because his manners were good and he wore a coat and tie and said sir and ma’am. It was therefore doubly amusing to discover the kid’s stash of dope and pornography. Farm animals? Come on .
    In the master bedroom, at the back of a closet, Jon came across a wooden box. There was no lock on it and when Jon opened it, he found a handgun. It was a Mauser HSc .380 ACP. He took it out of the box and hefted it in his hand. Pasted in the lid of the box there was promotional material in German and English that he read with interest. The pistol was a double-action, all-steel small-frame automatic with checkered walnut grips. Very cool. According to the pamphlet, the gun had open, fixed recessed sights, a positive thumb safety, a magazine safety, and an exposed hammer for additional safety. Jon tucked the gun in his waistband and helped himself to a box of ammunition. Maybe he’d write about a crook who carried a gun just like it. He returned the empty wooden box to the back of the shelf where he’d found it. Chances were the guy wouldn’t pull the box out to check. He’d assume the gun was where he left it.
    Back in his garage apartment, Jon took a few minutes to decide where to hide the Mauser. He finally went into the bathroom and unscrewed the plumbing-access panel. He wrapped the gun and ammunition in an old towel and pushed it into the gap on the right, snug against the underbelly of the tub. He returned to his desk feeling fresh and renewed. Again, he raided his father’s study, this time taking out William Faulkner’s Light in August . Typing the first ten pages taught him something about the power of language in the hands of someone utterly in control. Faulkner was extravagant, while Hemingway was spare. The stylistic differences seemed appropriate to the tale each was trying to tell. While Hemingway stripped away, Faulkner painted layer on layer, using long, lavish sentences. Neither narrative voice was natural to Jon, but at least he was beginning to understand range and tone.
    Jon had a stack of Playboy magazines, dating back to the first of the year. The girls all had perfect bodies, but they seemed brainless to him. What difference did it make how big their tits were when the girls themselves were shallow, egotistical, and self-involved? Yeah, right. Like he’d really turn one down as unworthy of him. Since he didn’t have a prayer of meeting any of them in real life, he might as well enjoy the illusion of them as lush, sensual, and available. Leafing back through the January issue, he got sidetracked by a Ray Bradbury short story called “The Lost City of Mars” and after that, the second part of a new Len Deighton spy novel called An Expensive Place to Die. Now he’d seen two more writers with entirely different literary effects.
    His first few stabs at fiction were erratic, prose that fell flat and ideas that died in half a page. The problem, as he saw it, was that he had nothing to draw on. He’d done a lot of reading, but he didn’t have firsthand experience at much of anything. The only job he’d had was the unpaid babysitting he’d done for the Amazing Mona. Weekends, he caddied at the club, but aside from the intelligence gleaned, it was mostly step-and-fetch-it stuff—cleaning club heads and humping golf bags up hill and down. He’d had no travel adventures, no athletic triumphs, no physical challenges to overcome. Well, the latter wasn’t quite true. He’d been a fat boy and he remembered how shitty that was. He thought it best to avoid stories about prowlers lest he seem too well informed.
    He wrote part of a short story based on a notion he had about a kid contaminated by radiation, who turned into a zombie and infected his entire family before his dad shot him dead. He ran out of steam in the middle of that one because he couldn’t think where to go with it. He wrote a mawkish essay about loneliness that struck him as funny when he read it the next day—not quite what he was hoping to achieve. He wanted to write about a kid seduced by his tennis instructor, but that wasn’t exactly an area of expertise. The tennis pro at the club had put her hand over his once, showing him how the