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BOOK ONE
To Have and Have Not
(Idaho, 1965)
God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won’t even whore. They’re all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they’re all camp followers.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY
1. HANNAH
"The house where he died. Call it the scene of the crime."
The scholar and his pregnant, newlywed Scottish wife walked along the berm, spooking some crows pecking at the bloated carcass of a black dog killed crossing U.S. Highway 75.
The scavengers scattered in a flurry of wings and reeling shadows and high- pitched shrieks, beaks dangling remnants of rotting flesh and pelt matted with dried blood. The big blue- black crows came to roost on a wire, cawing and flapping their wings at the academic and his bride peering at the house.
Richard Paulson pointed at the brown house with the three green garage doors. The home that was once known as the Topping House was surrounded by pines, and fronted one bare, cloud- shadowed hill and another dense with pine trees.
"It’s attractive," Hannah Paulson said, her voice a husky burr. She pushed her sunglasses back on her head. "Seems right for him. Rugged and handsome; built from the materials at hand."
Richard shook his head at his wife’s assessment. "From here it looks good enough, sure. By all accounts, it’s something else up close."
Hem’s house, which looked like alpine wood construction, was actually fabricated from poured concrete, stained brown and molded to resemble timber. They were the same construction techniques used at the Sun Valley Lodge, where the Paulsons had had lunch. One of Hem’s sons, Gregory, bitterly described the concrete house as a fortification fit for the paranoid man Greg’s father had allegedly been at the end.
Hem’s last wife, Mary, declared the house "depressing" shortly before she and Hem moved in during an October day in 1959.
"They say Mary will be moving soon," Richard said. "Mary’s lived here on and off since the day he died. Aaron says she may move to New York. Word is she’s mostly drunk these days. She talks of leaving the property to the Nature Conservancy. The home and fourteen acres of surrounding ground would be declared a preserve in Papa’s name if Mary did that."
Hannah stroked her blond hair behind her ears and wrinkled her nose. "How can Mary stand to live there after . . . ? To have to step over the spot where he blew his brains out every time she passes through that entryway? It’s unthinkable."
"For you, sure. You’re using yourself as a yardstick for Mary. The two of you are nothing alike."
Richard squeezed his wife’s hand, the two small diamonds in Hannah’s wedding band and ring— the fourth pair of bands he had bought in his life— digging into his palm in a freshly unfamiliar way. "I just can’t believe anybody before me hasn’t seen it the way it must have been," Richard said. "I can’t believe it took me so long to see it truly."
"And how exactly was it, Richard? You’ve been cagey about all of this. What’s your scheme? Ready at last to share?"
Richard fingered the vial in his pocket— the mysterious drug given him by that man. He hated to throw in with their lot. Every scrap of his spirit and intellect rebelled against it. Still, in the service of a righteous cause . . .
This time, at least, Richard was on the side of the angels. He was sure of that. The ends, he comforted himself again, more than justified these dark means.
He said, "The famous suicide is nothing but a myth, Hannah. I know it. I think the old bitch killed her husband. I think Mary murdered poor sick Papa. Blew the ailing son of a bitch away with his own shotgun."
EXCERPT FROM THE FOURTH ANNUAL SUN VALLEY HEMINGWAY CONFERENCE PROGRAM
Keynote Speaker: Hector Mason Lassiter (1900–)
Biography: Noted screenwriter and crime novelist Hector Lassiter, popularly regarded as "the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives," is by most measures also now recognized as "the last man standing of the Lost Generation."
As a novelist, Hector Lassiter represents a kind of vanishing breed of martial men skilled in American letters— an author of the sort typified by Ernest Hemingway. It is Mr. Lassiter’s long and storied association with Hemingway that uniquely qualifies him to keynote our fourth annual Hemingway conference here among the Sawtooth Mountains.
Hector Lassiter and Hemingway met while serving as ambulance drivers along the Italian front. Hemingway soon followed Lassiter to Paris, where the expatriate fiction writers honed their mutually iconic, distinctive, much lauded, and laconic prose styles.
Later, Papa followed Lassiter to Key West, where they weathered the Great Depression, writing, fishing, and allegedly rescuing Cuban refugees between novels, nonfiction books, and screenplays.
They also shared the early days of the Spanish Civil War, and both men ran afoul of military authorities during the Second World War for allegedly stepping outside their proscribed roles as war correspondents and actually organizing their own guerilla units—
Excerpted from Print the Legend by Craig McDonald.
Copyright © 2010 by Craig McDonald.
Published in February 2010 by Minotaur Books.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
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