Hooked, Line and Sinker

by

Janice Horton

At a book sale to benefit a museum, I found a Hemingway title in paperback, To Have and Have Not, Scribners, 1937. The title wasn’t familiar, or appealing, but I thought I should give it a chance. Writers are supposed to drink long at the well of the masters. I opened the book one evening after the dishes were washed, intending to ramp down mental activity, maybe even read myself to sleep. No chance. I got drawn into a conversation as surely as if my sister had called on the phone. “You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the building; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars?” Hemingway writes. I don’t know how it is, but I will. A few pages in we’re on a fishing boat, stalking a giant marlin. Wait a minute. I don’t want to read another epic struggle: man versus fish. I don’t like boats or deep water. Too bad. I’m the one who’s hooked, and halfway through the book in the next hour and a half. The plot line turns to smuggling, shooting, drinking and slugging. Then it gets rough. The boat’s captain breaks a man’s neck with his hands, describes the sound it makes, ties weights to the dead man’s feet and rolls him overboard. I knew I should have stopped reading. This is the scene that’s flashing through my head when I wake up at 2 am. It doesn’t keep me up all night, but it’s there. Recorded indelibly because of reading a couple of paragraphs of prose written in the iceberg style. Hemingway’s narrator is cool. “I held him quiet just a second, and then I laid him down across the stern. He lay there, face up, quiet, in his good clothes, with his feet in the cockpit; and I left him.” Later he explains to his ship’s mate why they don’t have to worry if he floats to the surface in a few days. There’s fish and currents. No one will find him. The captain knows these things. Now I know them, too.

I’ve long since stopped watching action movies rated stronger than PG-13. It’s been a long time since Dirty Harry, but I still have a couple of clips on file in my head—a prostitute who gets a drink of Drano and a lot of bullets that break up a pool party. I don’t want to see those scenes, but if I do (there’s television everywhere) I remind myself it’s Hollywood, deliberate and overdone. Not that I want to read gory stuff, either. At least I can put the brakes on. Reading the story, fleshing out the details from my own catalog of experience lets me have more control. Doesn’t it? Movie writer Richard Corliss says that “readers of a novel have already made their own perfect movie version. They have visualized it, fleshed out the locations and set the pace as they either zipped through the book or scrupulously savored every word.” We’re inclined to cast it, too, Corliss says. He makes it sound like we want to write all our own stories, to boast that we use our imaginations instead of being spoon-fed. It’s a never-ending debate in book vs. movie blogs—is it nobler in the mind to suffer the outrageous interpretation of a Hollywood director or take a stand against a sea of bullets, and by imagining our own scenes, end them? I’m glad it’s not that cut and dried. The writer hasn’t written a fill-in-the-blanks exercise. She means what she sets down. We can take it or leave it. 

If I got pulled into Hemingway’s story unawares, my choice of Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo was a deliberate one. Never a fan of westerns, the setting didn’t interest me until I started hearing about it firsthand from my son, a wildlife researcher on the King Ranch, very near where the action in the novel takes place. This sequel to Lonesome Dove did help flesh out the scrawny packet of details I had acquired about the southernmost part of Texas: “[Brookshire] had not supposed there could be country so bleak and inhospitable. . .  The ground was covered with flat cactuses . . . There were also thick, gray thornbushes called chaparral, interlaced amid the equally thorny mesquite. Several times they encountered rattlesnakes, which buzzed alarmingly . . . The Texas winds were of a different order than the winds he had been accustomed to in Brooklyn. Somehow, time after time the Texas winds lifted his hat.” Along with the flavor of the Rio Grande’s limy hills, caves, canyons and washes, cabrito and frijoles, comes a healthy serving of goose bumps. My scalp prickled as I read about Joey Garza, the slight nineteen-year-old boy, who robs trains and kills without conscience both up close — “Without saying a word, Joey stuck his pistol in the man’s face” — and from 600 yards away with a German rifle and high-power scope.  “No one killed as easily as Joey Garza.” There’s nothing tame about the Old West or McMurtry’s telling of it. The scenes  are so real, they stay with me. 

Of course a book isn’t the only place to encounter a haunting story. A retired coalmine in northeast Pennsylvania serves as a tourist attraction. Like a Disney ride, you buy a ticket and jockey for a seat on the tram. It’s cool and damp 300 feet underground and the coal gleams close over your head. The guide assures us the mine is inspected regularly; a square mile of shale is not going to let loose and drop on our heads like it has in other places where men worked. I learn that  miners, sometimes just  boys, worked sixteen-hour days, picking rock, and coughing dust, that the wages men earned were only two figures, and that unless a coal car was heaped to a certain measure, the workers didn’t get credit for that load at all. It’s the industry that put a lot of Pennsylvania towns on the map, but this small glimpse at what it cost makes me feel something like shame.

The mine tour, as the books did, added pieces to what I know about the clash of cultures, the beauty and hardness of nature, and about the past. Hemingway’s tale, set in the Florida Keys during the Depression, tells the ways of the sea, of rum runners and of tourists who want the thrill of catching a big fish without doing the hard work. McMurtry describes field amputation, eating raw horseflesh and “quirting.” I try to make sense of it: are men driven to crime because their kids are hungry, or does one small deed lead to another darker, more dangerous act? What of back-breaking labor and immigration?

It’s pitch black when the coal mine guide douses the lights at the end of the tour. I’m not sure I could find my way out if the power really failed. How many side tunnels did we pass? It’s scary in that dark, unfamiliar world. When I read To Have and Have Not and Streets of Laredo, and bought a ticket for a ride, I didn’t know what I was getting into, but what I learned made it worth the trip.

As a teacher of family literacy and adult education, Janice Horton has thought long and hard about why some students—even those with deafness, dyslexia, and attention deficit-disorder—learn to read easily while for others it never happens. Outweighing the methods, jargon and statistics, Janice thinks, is the human factor, the desire or disinterest. So she once finagled a huge donation of new children's books, but when she tried to give them away she was told, “we don't need books; we have TV.” Janice has lived in Florida, Virginia, Washington and New York, and is at home for now in Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in Northern Woodlands and Back Home magazines.