Shannon was inverted on her Auntie Mae Bell's divan, her bare legs curled over the back. She was watching a "Petticoat Junction" rerun, upside-down, full blast, and singing "My Sharona" or something at the top of her lungs. She still had on her bikini, and was contentedly losing her tan in flakes and rolls all over the rug. Even the flakes, even the rolls were darling. Sam loved her.
The Wamsutter living room was filled with evidence of the ghostwriter's occupation: papers; pencils; Bic four-color pens, both medium and fine point; a shiny new neat-looking cub reporter-model Sony micro-cassette recorder, purchased on credit from a merchant in Lincoln who was impressed by Sam's journalistic credentials (i.e., the key to Spikey's mom's house); typewriter; shirts; socks; Enema Digest, its pages all stuck mysteriously together; and an old, rickety E-flat alto saxophone, dug up at Sam's insistence from among cartons of Spikey's boyhood effects in the Wamsutter attic.
Sam had decided to take this opportunity to learn sax, because he'd already lost interest in the stupid fucking book.
It had been too optimistic to worry that it might bring about Mideast conflict, or even get a few Arab-Americans' asses kicked. This ostrichsploitation book was going to be so boring that whoever made it halfway through the first chapter would be too numb to want to kick anybody's ass.
Sam couldn't bring himself to transcribe so much as a syllable of the single micro-cassette that Spikey had officially recorded something on: I, Spikewell J. Wamsutter, hereby do affirm my tale of the pernicious embassy takeover in Eyeran in the year of our Lord—
(Sam's voice): C'mon, Sarge. Talk normal.
(Mama Mae Bell's voice): Hey now, whose book's it gonna be? His'n or your'n? G'wan, honey. I thought you was talkin' real poetical.
(Shanny's sopranino scream): My-my-my Sharona, yow!
(Sam): Hey, shut up.
(Sgt. Spikey): I. Spikewell J. Wamsutter hereby do solemnly affirm my tale of the—
(E-flat alto sax cuts in. Sam stumbling through the first few bars of a Clifford Brown tune.)
The manuscript was not exactly speeding to the typesetter. But their agent kept sending little notes assuring everybody that a six-figure advance from Minaret Press, minus commission, was "forthcoming." And, while Spikey's mom Mae Bell was a hideous cook (everything she made tasted either like popsicles or scorched plastic or somebody's dead grandma's basement walls), still she cooked a lot, bulkwise, if you made a lot of oblique comments about the legendary stinginess of midwestern Protestants. So Sam and Shannon decided to dig in and see what would happen next.
Shouldn't Sam have worried that he might be imposing on these good folks just a bit? Nah, he told Shanny. The fucking ostriches monopolized the national "consciousness" for over a year.
He was just getting some of America's own back.
In any case, free board and room, even in a forlorn place like the Wamsutter home, was nothing to sneeze at in times of double-digit inflation. Another consideration was that Shannon liked the weird old reruns they got out here this deep in the wilderness. She'd never heard of such strange goings-on as "The Beverly Hillbillies." The sweet baby hadn't even been born until 1962, for gosh sake.
In addition, Sam had finally discovered something unambiguously pleasing about his body. His huge gut-muscles and oversized jaws and gorilla sinuses seemed to have been designed for sax playing. Only two weeks at it and he was routinely using a super-stiff #5 reed—the kind Charlie Parker used to shave and scrape paint off windows with. Sam played the shit out of Spikey's old student model Conn, had already blown three valve pads completely off, shot them clear across the Wamsutter living room like frisbees to chip plaster off walls. Hot dog!
A new jazzman is born in Kiev, Nebraska!
He had even special-ordered one of those newfangled titanium mouthpieces with the sympathetically vibrating innards. It cost $259.95—worth more than the whole rest of the instrument put together, case included. It was just like the old cowboy song—With a ten-dollar horse and a fifty-dollar saddle, I'm a gonna round up those shitty-assed cattle...
But such seemingly ill-considered expenditures posed no problem at all, because everybody was going to be rich soon.
What's more, the overtones of the higher range seemed to be taking a therapeutic effect in accelerating the drainage of pus from Sam's terminally purulent nasal passages. Whenever Mae Bell complained that she couldn't seem to get that seepage to move off his shirt sleeves in the wash no matter what pre-soak or bleach product she used, he simply reminded her that it was all her darling son's doing. So try scrubbing a little harder—that is, if you don't mind.
So, fuck writing.
Sam had a contract, the advance was forthcoming, and the book would write itself as soon as Minaret Press sent a real professional whore out to Kiev to take over.
Maybe they'd send Norman Mailer himself, and he and Sam could get into bitchy altercations, and Sam could devastate the little runt with a few well-chosen pithies, and Mailer would lose control and charge like a goat, and Sam would gently pick him up under one arm, lay him down on the couch and, as the reporters' flashbulbs exploded all around, Sam would say, "Why don't you just die, old man? You haven't written anything readable in twenty-five years."
Sam had finally found himself a home. His two favorite songs, which he'd figured out, sort of, by ear, were "Joy Spring" and "Daahoud."
