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Ronald Beth was close, so close, to drying out. He had danced up into that wagon so many times before that these first weeks of itchy behavior were signs he knew well to be oncoming sobriety. He need just muddle through another week of mornings with that rash on the inside of his skin and he could safely call himself on the way to when one enjoys the drying out of one's drunk -- when the repair becomes as joyous as the preceding ruin -- the time he could begin to spy his old self flash by his bathroom mirror, when the mornings would soften to his reinvigorated grasp on them. It would go his way again. Now was the time.
His new novel. His comeback. How did he deliver the lines to his mirror?
-- It's not a Shakespeare book, Charlie, it's a Sackerson book --
--
-- Sackerson was as famous as Shakespeare. The most famous bear in all the world. --
--
-- A fighting bear. Shakespeare had to have seen Sackerson take on a dozen mastiffs while chained to a pike -- in the same theater where a month later the Chamberlain's Men would perform Juliet. I very much empathize with him, selling your stories against competition like Sackerson is like selling my book to a bunch of Youtubers.
He would be he again. He had a book to show. It made the come up sweeter the bitterer it gnawed.
This was process.
And then Katherine and Mann passed. More interested in maintaining their blog than publishing books. When Legion dumped him three years ago, Mann was there to pick up the pieces, but they had cooled off considerably, had spent eight months weaseling away from him.
They thought he was delivering them high romance set in Elizabethan London --
-- R.R., it's four hundred pages about a bear.
Mann. Everything had hurt more since all went down, but his representation would sell the book somewhere, he was R.R. Beth, he had awards.
And then came the overhand right after Katherine and Mann's double jab: Nichelle Moses's review of Must Lose Him.
She called it masterful. Nearly genius.
She wrote of the first-time novelist: Ms. Lowe has achieved something rare, a complete work in her first novel.
Ronald Beth read this review in the same hour Mann passed on Sackerson. He immediately stopped dreaming of his prodigal return to New York, of Charlie Rose, of Nichelle Moses spreading rose petals all over the pages of the Sunday supplement for his ashy rise. Ronald Richard Beth put the paper down, left his home, and drove his Saab to Uncle Pap's Liquors out on Route One.
He purchased sixty-seven dollars worth of vodka and imported beer.
On his way back home he stopped at the Lobster Dock where he picked at some fried clams and drank five Newcastle Browns on tap while watching something called the Oklahoma City Thunder perform basketball in a manner quite unlike how he remembered basketball to be.
At around 9:45PM on that Sunday night, R.R. Beth, who Wikipedia claims, "was a fashionable novelist in the eighties for his depictions of working class New Englanders in short story and novels", returned from the liquor store, returned from the bar, to his home long enough to pick up a few items.
The items found in or around the Saab, as listed on the police report, are as follows:
1 can opener 2 .45 caliber pistol 3 piggy bank full of marijuana 4 17 bottles of beer 5 1 mason jar of vodka 6 hardcover copy of 'Must Lose Him' by Gwen Lowe.
When Robert Beth left his home for the second time that Sunday night, he was likely on his way from East Tyburn to Penawap, the ocean peninsula the locals call Little Indian, a seven mile semicircle of summer camps, artists' communes, and militia basements.
His specific destination is unknown because at around midnight R.R. Beth lost control of his Saab at Old Buttermilk Lane, and went off the road.
Before the mason jar drove up under his lip and snapped off his front tooth, there was barbed wire wrapped over the windshield. This he remembered.
As he touched his mouth, the car hit something harder than wire. At forty miles per hour. R.R. Beth swallowed his tooth, and went to sleep.
He awoke looking at the moon. He turned his neck enough to see cows watching him. He turned the other way, and saw his Saab crunched up against a massive bull.
He heard the warning of an unbuckled safety belt. The bull wheezed a sad retort, it sounded like choking. Dying because of him.
He was scrambled, it was like overhearing an argument with himself for a moment: I must be able to move, I crawled from the car.
But when he tried sitting up he couldn't.
So he tried turning over to his stomach, and that worked.
A light went on further back from the road, the corner of a farmhouse in the glow.
He heard sirens as if on cue.
And all he could think was how now he had helped her book sales. They'll think this was a work, the timing of it. Legion Press will use this.
He thought maybe he could talk the locals into keeping quiet, but the math stunk once he circled around how many people that was: cops, volunteer fireman, the farmer will need a new bull -- who else? Anyone with the town's radio signal, anyone with an app on their phone that accesses the town radio; a tow truck driver; the nurses, the doctors at Penbay.
All of this before he knew if he could walk.
Dogs at the farmhouse barking. Red lights in the fog up Buttermilk Lane like a visitation. The bull groaned to life, and attempted to climb out of what he had done to it. It couldn't. But R.R. Beth crawled. Blood was draining out of his head, leaving a snake trail behind him as he moved.
Every time he looked up to see how close he was to the Saab more blood went in his eyes.
The fire trucks had arrived by the time he got to the car. They were like buoys out in the ocean over there, which made him think of lobsters. Big red lobsters they are, with glowing antennae -- prehistoric mutants, spacecraft -- anything but a fire truck. Make them a beckoning wall of light.
Back the other way he saw figures standing on the porch of the farmhouse, like old wooden clothespins on a line.
He reached for the crumpled door of the Saab, and with it went to pulling himself above water; there is something like the legendary strength a woman can unlock when her child is in danger that a man finds only at a moment of great shame. R.R. Beth climbed up the side of his mistake, and stood his lean body against the Saab. When faced with downfall, and no escape, it was time to get broad shouldered, no matter his ribs, or his tooth.
-- This fucking cow. R.R. Beth said, a hundred yards from where it could have been the bull's fault.
R.R. ducked into the cab of the car, and took up a bottle of Dutch beer, (white label with a silver moon); his can opener was still on the dash.
He looked at the bull. It looked like a bear. An old black bear chained to a pike. He looked over where the cows had been standing, as if to accept their judgment, and there were women there, three of them. Must have walked down from the farm.
"Can I help you?" He said in that old R.R. Beth way, meant as rakish and half-wild, meant as a quote that would be passed around by these women. But he was too old for rakish and half-wild. And he was too drunk to annunciate.
So he turned his back on them. He hummed a tune, preparing for some handiwork. He started with Patsy Cline: hm Ha huh huh hmm, just like we used to do -- I'm always huh hm, after midnight, that's my way of saying, I love you, hm, haha, hm, hm, -- it morphed into Ben E. King soon enough, So don't forget who's takin you home, and in who's arms you're gonna be -- so darling, save . the last dance . for me.
The second beer was drunk up, and none of the light brigade up at the road had come down to the field.
The women were gone.
The bugbear groaned, a sad sack noise. Was he asking for release? Yes. He was.
R.R. Beth went back into the car. Bending over, even slightly, scrambled the lights around. He came back up with the pistol, and waited for the patches on his sight to settle.
Once they did he crawled along the edge of the car, to the front, to the bull.
-- Hello, you poor bastard. He whispered. And thought: he could say the same to me, if we could walk away.
He looked behind him. The three women were back. Why were they watching him? Where were the farmers?
-- Go on, you cows. He said, and he thought he meant the cows.
He reached through a hole in the windshield, and grabbed the book -- the book -- such a clever cover illustration, a topographical map of the state of Maine, its eggplant shape infested with beautifully articulated black lobsters --
MUST LOSE HIM
Gwen Lowe
-- Yes? Are you all a visitation? Yes. A message, yes? You, yes. You clothespins.
Here he was, against the car, two beer bottles in the grass at his feet, the dying bull; a book in one hand, the pistol in the other -- he was a sainted statue out of some pagan ritual. Take a picture, and go forth with Freemason conspiracy. These spirits he had called upon himself.
-- Cows! He yelled.
-- Desist! He yelled.
-- Animals! He yelled at -- now they were cows again.
He thought: One day you are you, the next you're in a field with dead animals, and ghosts, and Indian spirits.
He looked at the Colt. Had never fired it. A morbid gift from his oldest friend.
-- You're suicide pistol, the man had said to him upon the gifting.
-- If you ever decide to use it, Richard, do it with a good old-fashioned .45; you don't want your end to come by some little kraut nine millimeter.
And after a moment of handling,
-- This was my service pistol, Grey Fulsom had told him.
R.R. Beth, known for an uncanny ability to layer the symbols of mythology onto the modern psychology of his characters had to put a read of the situation he found himself in. Was this dreamland his end? End games could come circuitous and unforeseen until too late. Even this morning he felt as his namesake Richard to be in the winter of his discontent. He grew strong again, the shit attached to his life and career, this last darkest half a decade was falling away, could be pissed away like a stone.
But here he was, and he was here, pistol, bottles, book, and cow. He was here, and Gwen Lowe was in New York. Where she was, was a place he had been once: realizing a dream, to be an author of note, a voice, taken in by her new keepers.
And he was an old dog in the bear ring.
Cops and firemen coming over the field now. And not long they'd see the pistol in his hand and really go cop -- sir, what I'm gonna need you to do right now is to put that pistol down right now, and you with it.
No, he didn't think he would.
Three women with black hair and black eyes had been just over there, and now were not. They forsook him. Might have showed up just long enough to guess what he would do next. Had they put the pistol in his car? He didn't remember taking it out of the library. Witches waiting to end his biography.
The bull mewled. A sighing dying call. Giving in, no defiance in the moo-moo.
R.R. Beth felt one last prick of that belligerence he had carried throug his life, and he was the one chained up to that pike, staked and set for dying time, and he thought: No. Not yet.
He turned towards waving cops, revealing the pistol pointed at the ground.
R.R. Beth, who once was a great man, a man who was loved, and who loved, who once was a dashing portrait on the inside of those classic book jackets from Legion Press, smiled at the cops. Without his tooth, he looked like a naughty child.
R.R. Beth who was once R.R. Beth, fired three rounds into the brain of the bull, and gave it rest. Then he fell into a pocket of cow shit, and went to sleep.
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