Huston decided on the smaller of the two equipment sheds. The larger one, the one with the wide barnlike door, probably held a mower or two, maybe even a lawn tractor, the drag-along for raking and smoothing the fields, bags of lime and quick-dry for the infield, grass seed, shovels, probably a pitching machine plus miscellaneous tools. The floor would be wheel dirtied and probably crowded. The other shed would have the bats and balls and helmets, catcher’s equipment, and extra bases. These, he guessed, considering the orderliness of the complex, would all hang out of the way on the inside walls. There would probably be plenty of room on the floor for him to stretch out. Maybe rain ponchos to wrap around himself for warmth. The catcher’s chest protector to use as a pillow.
The parking lot was empty except for a few pieces of windblown litter. From forty yards away, it looked to Huston as if the place had been battened down for the winter. If he could get inside the shed without being seen, he could hole up there with his remaining groceries. Then make his way to Annabel. He tried to remember the probable distance. Tried to see the topless club on a map in his mind’s eye, the squiggling two-laner heading north-northwest, snaking toward the Ohio border. “Slouching towards Bethlehem.”
Why did you think of that? he wondered. Yeats and his mystical anarchy. His spiritus mundi, his hell-raising Sphinx. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned…”
For just a moment, he imagined himself at the front of the classroom again, reciting to his students, trying to tap into Yeats’s mad vision. How he loved those moments when he lost himself in words. Stirred himself and others with the music and the power.
Focus! he told himself now. He squeezed his eyes shut, then with one quick jerk, shook his head like a drunk trying to stay awake. Thomas Huston is dead, he told himself. The teacher is dead. The writer is dead. Words and music and stories are all dead now. Now only power remains. The power of the dead.
He stared hard at the equipment shed. “It will be locked.” Yes, but all the buildings will be locked. Nothing will be easy now, nor should it be. Everything will hurt. Everything does.
He needed a tool. Metal. Strong enough to force a padlock or to splinter the wood around a dead bolt. He was too far away to be able to see how the door was secured, so he would just have to assume the worst. He needed a pry bar of some kind. Couldn’t bang or pound or hammer, not even at night. The sounds would echo like a jungle drum.
To his left lay the town of Bradley, a quarter mile south. He had skirted it by hiking through the trees. Could he risk going back now to assess the possibilities? “You have to,” he told himself. “You have no choice.” He would stay off the main drag. Keep to the backstreets. Maybe somebody’s garage door would be standing open. Somebody’s garden shed. People are trusting out here, he thought. People don’t know.
He stood up. Brushed the leaf litter off his knees. Left his groceries nestled in the thorns.
“You don’t look that bad,” he reassured himself, though he did not believe it.
“What choice do you have?”
“Okay. Try to look normal.”
Thirty
To DeMarco’s eyes, the first several pages of Huston’s journal appeared to contain nothing but random, spontaneous notes. Ideas for scenes, characters’ names, a tentative plotline, passages quoted from Nabokov’s novel.
“When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.” (Lolita)
main character named Howard (means noble watchman) Humphreys? Harold? Houston? (means hill town; might be fun to pique readers’ curiosity)
main character needs a nemesis to parallel Nabokov’s Quilty. Denton as physical model: smooth, charming, designer clothes, lots of styled hair. He should be younger than main character, more attractive to women/girls. Somewhat predatory. Doesn’t love women the way main character does. Loves their attention, their idolatry. Narcissistic.
contemporize Lolita, but how? College freshman—too easy?
nemesis gets jealous when the narrator gets more attention than he does from the sexy new student. But why does she prefer narrator? She’s intellectual? Disdains her beauty?