HITCHING

Mort, he says to me, “Runt, you wanna bicycle, you gotta figure out how to get the money.” “Thanks,” I says. “Hey, Mort, you're a real pal, I knew that already.”

“Oh, yeah,” says Mort, “I forgot, you got all the brains in the family.”

We always talk like that. I'd kill anybody else called me Runt, and he'd kill anybody else called him Mort, but we can't kill each other, we're brothers. Oh, every now and then he pounds the crap out of me, but these days he bleeds pretty bad before I call uncle and so he don't fight me too much. Everybody else calls him Butch and me Ernie.

But it turned out it was Mort after all who thought up how I'd get the money for the bike I wanted so I could have a paper route so I could make some money. I asked the Olds for a bike, but the old man said no, I should earn the money myself, and I said how the hell can I do that with no bike for a route, and the old lady said you're thirteen years old and you shouldn't talk like that and I said something else and the old man strapped me. He thinks it still hurts. But after that I knew they'd rather die than get me the bike.

Mort saw as how I wasn't feeling too good right then and like Mort always does he tried to joke about it and then he started smart-mouthing about how he'd never stand for it and how if I didn't have him to look out for me I'd have let everybody walk all over me all my life.

He thinks he's a real bigshot because he beat up Rodney Lawrence who nobody ever beat up before and because he and Darcia Kleinsmidt go up into her dad's loft every Sunday and make out. He says he's seen her without any clothes on but I think that's a bunch of crap for the reason I will tell you when I get to that place in my story. He brags about a lot of things that I don't think he ever did.

Anyway Mort comes to me on Tuesday after milking, it's still early in the morning but it's summer and so there isn't any school and he says, “Hey, Runt, you still want a bike?”

“Hey shutup,” I said, thinking he's making fun of me again.

He says, “OK, Runt, if that's the way you want it. Only I know how you can get the money.”

Well, I thought that sounded pretty good, so I says to him, “Hey, Mort, what is it, Darcia paying you a dollar a smooch?”

“I'd be a millionaire then,” he says, and I think yeah, sure.

But I followed him around behind the barn and he tells me his plan. “See, we just hitch a ride with somebody over on I-15.”

“Somebody's gonna pay us to hitchhike?” I says, real snotty, because if I get snotty he tells me faster.

“Don't get snotty with me, Runt,” he says, and then like I figured he told me. “They're gonna pay us to get out. I read about it in the newspaper.” That means that somebody who reads the newspaper told him. “You get a ride with somebody, and then you pull a gun or a knife and make them pull off onto some lonely place or a rest stop or somewhere there isn't a lot of cars, and then you take their money and their car and leave 'em there. Or else you leave 'em their car and hitch a ride back with somebody else.”

I thought for a minute and I says, “I bet that's stealing.”

“Ooooooh,” he says, making faces like an old lady who just heard a bad word. “Ooooooh, I forgot, you always go to Sunday School.”

Which is true. I have to keep going till I'm fourteen. The old man says that till you're fourteen you can't decide for yourself. But I always stick gum under the folding chairs.

“Look, Mort,” I says, “all I care about is that if we get caught they'll stick us in jail.”

“They can't,” says Mort, “because we're both minors.”

“I am not,” I says, wondering what the hell being a miner has to do with going to jail.

“You are too and so am I. It means being under eighteen years old. That's why we can't buy beer or cigarettes. But it also means they can't put is in jail.”

“Yeah, but we'd go to the JD place in Fillmore.”

“Jeez,” says Mort, “what a runt, Runt. This'd be the first thing we ever did wrong, they don't send you to Fillmore till you done a lot of stuff.”

“What about painting Elton Barney's cow green?”

He just rolled his eyes in his head. “You remember what Sheriff Burton said?” Mort asked me, like I was real dumb. “He said, 'Boys will be boys.' ”

He said that, but I still didn't know about pulling a knife on somebody.

“Besides,” says Mort, “the guy we hit isn't gonna know who we are or where we come from.”

“I don't think I want a bike that bad,” I says, thinking how I really don't want a paper route if I gotta go to the JD place for it.

“Man, what a knockout,” says Mort. “I find out that my brother's a chicken, besides being a runt.”

Nobody calls me a chicken.

So there we were out on I-15 thumbing for a ride. Not too many people want to pick up farmers with manure on their boots, so we put on our Sunday clothes and snuck out of the house so the Olds wouldn't ask us where we was going.

But the cars still wasn't piling up in line to pick us up. Of course, on a lot of them Mort says, “Not this one.” And then I asked him why, and he says, “Car's too old, this guy doesn't have any dough,” and then one time he says, “This guy's really rich, all he's gonna have is checks and credit cards.” Credit cards in your pocket isn't much good on the farm, and anyway nobody'd be fooled, they know me and Mort and they know we never could get a credit card.

So we waited for about two hours getting hotter and sweatier and I was thinking what the hell kind of dumb thing am I doing out here? But then we see this shiny new yellow car coming along and there's just one person in it, either a girl with short hair or a guy with long hair, and old Mort jumps out in the freeway sticking his thumb out and the car slows down and the girl (this close we could tell she was a girl) flips open the back door. Me, I got in back, but old Mort, he reached through, unlocked the front, and sat down next to her.

Audi, bucket seats, thing looked like it cost a million bucks and when she started off it felt like we wasn't even moving except the telephone poles flipped by like beanpoles when you're running.

She was pretty but old, probably twenty or thirty, and if she wasn't sitting right there I know old Mort would've leaned back and said, “Stacked, man, stacked.” Instead he just kept playing with his pocket where he had a knife.

“Where you going?” she asked us, and since we wasn't going anyplace I didn't know what to say, but Mort says, “Noplace you're going, but maybe you'll come close. Where you headed?” he asks her.

“Las Vegas,” she says, and I wonder if she's one of them topless dancers.

“You one of them topless dancers?” Mort asks her.

“No,” she says, laughing. Jeez, Mort can be dumb sometimes.

“How old are you?” she asks us.

“I'm fourteen,” I lied. Mort said, “I'm seventeen,” which makes him a bigger liar than me, since I was only one year off, but Mort's big and hairy and so everybody figures he's older than he is.

Well, it was still hot but there was clouds coming in from the south and it looked like a dust storm was coming up and then rain, and so I figured we oughta get it over with so we could get back home before we got our Sunday clothes all wet and the old lady chewed us hollow. So I says, “Hey, Mort, what're you waiting for?”

“What do you mean?” asks the girl.

“Oh, nothing,” says Mort, shooting me a glare like I should drop dead.

“Well?” says I, since I don't like him glaring at me that way.

So he reached down into his pocket and pulled out his hunting knife and took it out of the sheath and reached over and stuck it right next to her ribs and he gets this mean look on his face and says, “Pull over.”

I gotta say that girl looked surprised and scared, but she didn't go crazy or anything. She just had kind of a shaky voice when she said, “Right here?”

Mort thought a second and said, “No about a mile up ahead there's a dirt road off to the right.”

And then her face turned all white and I felt real bad about what we was doing, because I wanted a ten-speed all right, but I didn't like the way she looked.

She sped up to about seventy-five.

“There's the road, right there, after that rock,” says Mort.

She sped up to eighty-five.

“What the hell're you doing?” Mort says. “I said to pull over.” And his face got real mean looking, like it does when he's trying to scare some sucker into backing down without a fight.

“I know your kind,” she says, her voice all shaky. “You'll get me off there and take my money and my car and you'll rape me and kill me.”

“No we won't,” I says.

“I'll kill you right here,” says Mort, really getting upset, I could tell because his ears was getting red.

“Go ahead,” she says. “At the speed I'm going if you kill me we'd smash up before you had a chance to get the car under control. Besides, I don't think you know how to drive.”

Course we both did, we'd been driving a tractor since we was eight. But I sure didn't want to crash at ninety miles an hour, and tell you the truth, I didn't like it how her hands was shaking taking those turns.

“You'll run out of gas pretty soon,” says Mort.

“I get fifty miles to the gallon,” she says, and her gas gauge was up above half. “I'll get to Las Vegas first.”

“Slow down,” I says, because she wasn't keeping in the lanes too good.

She sped up to a hundred and I needed to go to the bathroom.

“Please,” I says, “this isn't safe.”

“It doesn't matter,” she says. “At this speed we're bound to pass a highway patrolman and he'll pull us over and I'll tell him what you were trying to do.”

She was right. We was over a barrel, like they say, and Mort knew it too.

“Jeez,” he says, “I could cut you up into little pieces.”

He always says that when he's mad but doesn't want to fight.

She just shook harder and took a turn a little sharper and the car screeched a lot going around the turn. The wind had come up now cause we was driving into the storm, and I thought we'd get blown off the road in a minute.

“Hey, please Mort, let's quit, OK?” I says.

Mort clicked his tongue and then he says, “Man, you got a chicken for a brother nothing goes right.” Then he put the knife back into the sheath. I didn't even mind him calling me a chicken, just so the car slowed down.

But she didn't slow down and the car was up around 105, probably as fast as it could go with a headwind.

“Hey, I put the knife away, slow down,” says Mort, and suddenly I figured out he was as scared as I was. In the old man's Plymouth you never got much above 65, and we always went 55 if the old lady was in the car.

“If I slow down you'll just pull the knife out and kill me,” she says.

“Mort'll throw it out the window,” I says. “That way he can't pull it out again. And then you can just let us out anywhere along here, we'll walk.”

Mort glares at me again, but then we took another turn that slammed us over against the doors and Mort rolled down his window and threw out his knife. That knife cost him, too, and I knew he felt bad throwing it like that, even though I knew we'd hunt for it for a month before he'd ever give up finding it.

“OK, the knife's gone, now pull over and let us out,” Mort says, and now his voice is shaky.

“Uh-uh,” says the girl, and then she says, “How do I know you don't have something else hidden in your clothes.”

“Cause I said so,” says Mort.

“I'm supposed to believe you?” says the girl.

“I never told a lie in my life,” says Mort, though I figure that was about his ten millionth lie this year.

“You just go around pulling knives on people.”

“Hey, look,” says Mort, “we're sorry.”

“Yeah, we're sorry,” I says.

“Shutup, Runt,” he says.

“I'll just wait until the highway patrol stops us,” she says.

And I noticed that her voice wasn't shaky anymore.

“Please,” I says. “We'll never do it again. We just wanted the money so I could get a ten-speed bike. We wasn't gonna kill anybody.”

“Sure,” she says, and a gust of wind tossed us from the lefthand lane into the righthand lane, and I sure was glad we wasn't driving in the righthand lane in the first place. “You've got a knife hidden somewhere else.”

“Honest, I don't,” he says.

“Prove it,” she says.

“How?” he says.

“Take off your clothes and throw them out the window,” she says.

“The hell I will,” says Mort.

“That's the only way I'll know I'm safe,” she says. “But I'd rather wait till we pass a highway patrolman anyway.”

“We'll be dead before that,” I says, because right then the dust storm hit, and you couldn't see thirty feet ahead. And this was the windingest part of I-15.

“Take off your clothes and throw them out the window,” she says, and believe me, I just whipped off my shirt and my pants and my shoes and my socks and tossed them right out, even though when I opened the window the car filled up with dust. And after a minute Mort gritted his teeth and did the same. And there we sat in our jockey shorts, 5 for three dollars through the catalog.

“OK,” Mort says, “now let us out.”

“I said take off all your clothes,” she says, and I looked at her and figured out she wasn't scared any more at all, she was just getting even for how we got her scared before. But it didn't make no difference nohow, like the old man says, cause I'd have drunk straight 10/40 motor oil just to get out of that car in that dust storm. So I took off my shorts and tossed 'em out the window and then I leaned forward and kind of covered myself with my arms, which I folded in my lap like a little kid in Sunday School.

But Mort didn't make a move to take off his shorts, and by then I was so scared I started yelling at him to take off his damn shorts and then I started to cry and so he did it and threw them out the window. But he leaned forward just like I did, and covered himself, and he turned red, and just looked at the floor, and I sure as hell knew right then that he hadn't ever seen Darcia Kleinsmidt with all her clothes off or he wouldn't be blushing like a bad sunburn right now.

And I stopped crying right then and for the first time in my life I felt sorry for old Mort and felt like I oughta help him. So I says, “OK, lady, you had your joke, now stop this car and let us get the hell out and get our clothes and go home.” I was madder'n hell and I glared her down as mean as I ever did the old lady when she made me help with the dishes, and she kind of looked sick and slowed down the car and stopped. It felt so good not to be going a hundred miles an hour that we just sat there for a second before she said, “Get the hell out of my car!” and then Mort and I opened the doors, even if it meant using one of our hands that was covering ourself, and we got out into the dust storm and she took off fast and there we were, stark naked on the freeway in a dust storm about fifteen miles from home and a mile from the nearest clothes.

And then, of course, the dust storm stopped and it started to rain like crazy and Mort says, “Damn damn damn damn damn,” and I says, “I wanta find my clothes.”

So we walked along the freeway until we saw a car coming and then we dove down off into the dirt and brush beside the road so they wouldn't see us without any clothes on, only the dirt was mud from the rain and we was covered with it. “Damn damn damn,” says Mort, and I says, “Come on, Mort,” and he says, “You and your damn ten-speed bike.” We walked on to where we threw our underwear out the window only the wind had blown it away and we couldn't see it anywheres and we was soaking wet.

But we figured as how our shoes and pants wouldn't blow as far as our shorts, so we went on, dodging down into the mud whenever a car came, which wasn't all that often around here. When we got out of the mud then the rain would wash it off until the next time.

Finally I found both my socks hung up on the bobwire fence along the edge of the freeway only thirty feet back and my shoes was right nearby, and Mort found one of his socks and both his shoes and finally I found my shirt hung up on the bobwire, too. I put it on, even though it was cold and wet, and I didn't feel so naked cause it was my Sunday shirt with the long tails, but poor Mort was still stark naked with mud on his feet, carrying two shoes and one sock, and when he saw me standing there in my shirt he started yelling about how I'd screwed up the whole thing and if it hadn't been for me and my ten-speed he'd be up in the barn with Darcia Kleinsmidt right now and what the hell did he have to have such a dumb little brother for and he wished he was an only child and it was all my fault and after this went on for a while I started to cry, because I felt like it was all true and I felt bad and anyway, I'd had a bad scare, I don't want you to think I cry alot but I think that was about the worst time in my whole life, but after a while Mort's calling me dumb made me mad and I took off running.

It was then that I saw both our pants out in the median strip hung up on some big sagebrush and I cut across the freeway without looking and so did Mort and just as we reached our pants we heard a car squeal to a stop and there was Sheriff Burton looking like he seen a ghost.

We just kind of stood there holding our pants while he crossed the road.

“Well, if it ain't Morton and Ernest Olson,” he says, when he got over to us. “What the hell're you doin' stark naked in the middle of the freeway?”

We didn't know exactly how to explain. But I was still mad at Mort and so I played dumb, seeing as how he always said I was. “Gee, Mr. Burton,” I says in my Sunday School voice, “I don't know. Mort here is always telling me how I'm dumb, but he told me it'd be real fun to play around like this in the freeway.”

You shoulda seen the look on Mort's face. But you really shoulda seen the look on Sheriff Burton's face! He just grabbed Mort by the hair and said, “You better put those pants on fast and get in my car, boy.”

Mort started to tell him something but the sheriff just looked at him real mad and said, “I don't wanna hear one word, boy. Your pa's gonna have plenty to say to you when I tell him how you been playing with your little brother.”

So we put on our pants and carried our shoes and socks and got into Sheriff Burton's car. The sheriff made me sit in front and he shoved Mort into the backseat and when he did I heard the sheriff say, “Fairy,” like the word was sour milk.

Well, when we got home the old man went off to talk with the sheriff while the old lady yelled bloody murder and made us take off our clothes and have a bath, saying all the time how much clothes cost and if us kids ever had to pay for our own clothes we wouldn't go off playing in the rain in our Sunday best.

Then while I was in the tub with the old lady washing me like she hasn't done in years since I was a kid, the old man came in with a real bad look on his face and said, “What happened,” and I thought of lying and then I figured that there wasn't no way to explain how we got where we was except the truth, so I told him the whole thing, about the ten-speed and the girl in the Audi.

When I was done, the old man said, “That true?” and I said, “Swear to God,” and the old lady said, “Don't take the name of the Lord,” and the old man said, “Thank God, Sheriff Burton said my boy Morton was a fairy,” and the old lady said, “Now, Bill, how can I teach these boys proper with you taking the Lord's name and saying fairy in front of them?” but the old man was out of the bathroom and off to talk to the sheriff.

What all happened was that nothing happened except the Olds made us work all summer for nothing just to buy new Sunday clothes, which I didn't think was fair cause we were growing out of 'em anyway and they would've had to buy us new ones before Christmas. Mort didn't talk to me much for a long time, I thought he was mad but maybe he was just feeling bad about the whole thing, but anyway he's never called me dumb since then.

Oh, the sheriff thought the whole thing was funny as hell and inside three days the whole county knew about it and Mort and I had to lick everybody all over again and some of 'em twice before they'd shutup about it. And the Olds never let us go down by the freeway for love or money, so Mort's knife was gone for good, and I knew he felt real bad.

So that fall I got a job at Fernwood's market sweeping and bagging and saved up my money so that at Christmastime I had a brand new knife for old Mort under the tree to make up for the old one, and the one I gave him was even better. But what was best of all was that the Olds gave both me and Mort ten-speed bikes that Christmas, even though it was a medium harvest, which meant that everything was OK again.

Mort and I spent a week falling down on the road a lot learning to ride, but by the time we went back to school after New Year's we didn't take the bus anymore because it was a lot more fun to ride the bikes except when it snowed. And Mort stopped calling me Runt. It was Speed and Ernie from then on, mostly cause even though I was fast, Mort was faster.

DAMN FINE NOVEL

Imagine, if you will, that you are now reading the story of a young writer, myself, who decides to write a first person story about a young writer, Abe Snow, who, after years of writer's block, realizes one day that he must write a contemporary novel, the other periods already having provided exactly enough lecture notes to fill all the class periods in a one-semester university literature course. Furthermore, as he contemplates writing it he realizes that his novel will be the perfect novel, the one embodying novelness, comprising all that is novel and nothing that is not-novel, a novel that so transcends the particular that it is both generic and sui generis. I, the narrator of the story you imagine you are reading (as opposed to Abe Snow, the narrator of the first-person story whose composition and publication my story is about), first thought of having a fictional character write the ideal contemporary novel while I was browsing through the lingerie department of the San Francisco Union Square Macy's, thinking about literature while testing how well I could see my hand through a silk teddy. It occurred to me that there would be a strong market for Minimalist underwear, which could be introduced with such advertising copy as:

Be sexy and inscrutable all at once.

or, with an appropriate photo:

Tonight you're wearing Minimalist.
He sees everything in a lingering glance
but has no idea what he's seeing
or what he's expected to do with it.

Serious literature and marketing thus became entangled in my mind during a particularly strong hormonal flow. The result is (or will be, when I write it) my story about Abe Snow. He has long known, as all serious American writers know, that serious contemporary novels must all be about the suffering and struggles of writers (or ur-writers). He has also known, as all serious American writers know, that power and truth in serious contemporary novels derive from the author's memories of childhood and the author's fantasies about extramarital involvements, which we care about only to the degree that we are convinced the author is a genius whose life and mind are worthy of such minute examination.

Abe's life-transforming insight is that serious contemporary American literature is squarely within the genre of celebrity autobiography, which can only be successful to the degree that the author/subject is, in fact, celebrated. Therefore the serious contemporary American novelist must become famous before publishing anything, so that when his fiction-cum-celeb-bio appears the public will not expect cognitive processes to be involved in the reading of the book.

Indeed, the book is not meant to be read. Rather it is purchased to be a talisman of the reader's sympathy with the Celebrated One. Having been created by the celebrity, the book is the most easily obtained scrap of his or her personal detritus, giving its purchaser immeasurable powers in the arcane vodun of Celebrism, the folk religion of the American people. The book is not an end in itself; it is a channel to the god, and therefore must be endued with mystery. Any attempt to understand the novel would show the worshiper's lack of faith in the Celebrated One, as if the presumptuous reader feels himself capable of judging whether the Celebrated One is worthy of celebration.

Hence Abe Snow realizes that to take his place in the pantheon of contemporary American letters it is essential that his genius and vision be so celebrated that he need not concern himself with the tedious labor of creating stories that people might voluntarily read for pleasure.

With this understanding, Abe's long-time writer's block evaporates at once, and he writes the ideal novel. Through a series of machinations that I have not yet thought of, Abe contrives to become a famous writer with a famous agent, and then his book brings more than a million dollars at auction.

Abe's working title, and the title he expected to see on the finished book, was, as befitted the ideal novel, F---ing Good Read. The publisher, however, presents to him the results of a survey of literary opinion-makers showing that during the coming decade they will no longer be impressed by the word f---. The publisher offers as an alternative the title Damn Fine Novel. Abe Snow finds this acceptable, and eight million copies are printed, shipped, sold, and worshipfully not read.

In addition, Abe writes a very short story about the writing of Damn Fine Novel which is published, under the title “Damn Fine Novel,” in a magazine of unassailable literary reputation. This does not increase the audience for the ideal novel, but it does mean that Abe moves directly from the bestseller lists to the anthologies of contemporary literature assembled and xeroxed by literature professors for the edification of their graduate students, who will then write theological essays affirming that Damn Fine Novel is holy writ and should be required reading for all American students. This, plus heavy exploitation of foreign and film rights, guarantees that Abe Snow will never have to write again.

At this point I (not the narrator of the story you imagine that you are reading, but the implied author of the story you are in fact reading) am uncertain whether all this happened within Snow's book Damn Fine Novel or whether his book Damn

Fine Novel was part of my own story “Damn Fine Novel,” which may or may not be the story that you, the inferred audience, are reading. And if you are in fact reading and attempting to understand it, I must say it shows a surprising lack of faith on your part, which hurts and disappoints me after all we've been through together.

BILLY'S BOX

The box was in the living room when Billy came home from school. “What's in the box?” he asked. “You'll see,” said Mom, “as soon as Dad comes home from work.”

When Dad came home, he opened the box. Inside was a television set. All of Billy's older brothers and sisters were happy to see the television, but Billy was more interested in the box. It was as tall as Billy, and so wide he couldn't touch both ends at the same time. Billy thought the empty box would be a lot more fun than the TV.

“Dad,” said Billy, “can I have the box?”

“Sure,” answered Dad.

The next day Billy hunted all over the house for things to put in his box. He found an empty toothpaste tube in the bathroom, and an empty cereal box in the kitchen. He found a whole box full of old buttons. He found a shoe that didn't have a mate. And he put them all in his box in the living room.

When his sister Annie came home from school, she said, “What is that box still doing in the living room?”

When his brother Todd came home from school, he said, “Does Mom know you have all that stuff in here?”

When his sister Dora came home from school, she said, “Can't you play without making a mess?”

And after dinner they all said, “What is all that stuff for, Billy?”

Billy didn't say anything. He just sat inside his box, putting the cereal box, the toothpaste tube, the buttons, and the shoe right out in front.

Dad smiled. “Why, it's a store, of course,” he said. “How much are those buttons selling for?”

Billy thought for a minute. “A hundred dollars,” he said.

“Oh,” said Dad. “I'm a little short this month, I can't afford that. Don't you have any bargains today?”

“Oh yes!” agreed Billy. “They're on sale for two cents each.”

“That's a real bargain,” Dad said. “I'll take three buttons.”

Then he handed Billy six cents, and Billy handed him three buttons.

“Oh,” said Billy's brother and sisters admiringly. “What a neat store!”

The next day Billy hunted for things again. This time he found a yardstick, and Mom gave him some string. He tied the ends of the string through the holes in the ends of the yardstick. He pulled back on the string and the yardstick bent a little. Then he let go of the string with a twang.

“SWICK!” he said. “SWISH! ZIP!”

When Annie came home from school, she said, “Is that box still in the living room?”

Billy was hiding down inside the box. When she said that he stood up and held the yardstick out, and twanged the string. “SWICK!” he said. Annie left the room, laughing.

Todd came home and said, “Does Mom know you've got the yardstick in your store?”

Billy twanged the string at Todd and said, “ZIP! No she doesn't, cause it isn't a store!”

Todd left the room, saying, “I thought it was a store.”

When Dora came in she said, “What's all this twanging and zipping and swicking? Can't you play without making noise?”

But Billy only twanged the string at her and whispered, “SWICK! ZIP! SWISH! TWANG!”

And after dinner they all asked, “What are you doing, Billy?”

Billy didn't say anything. He ducked down inside the box where no one could see him. Then he stood up and twanged and zipped them all.

Dad smiled. “Why, that's a castle, of course!” he declared. “Are you a knight?”

“No,” answered Billy. “I'm the king. And if you come any closer, I'll get you with my bow and arrow.” And then Billy pulled back on the string with all his might to make a huge twang. But the string didn't twang at all. Instead, the yardstick broke right in half.

“Oops,” said Billy, “I'm sorry.”

Billy's brother and sisters were about to say, “I told you this would happen,” but just in time Mom said, “Well, looks like without a bow you're not a king anymore, are you?”

Billy looked at the broken bow. “Nope,” he agreed.

“Now it's just a yardstick,” Dad said.

Billy looked at the two pieces in his hand. “I think it's two half-yardsticks,” he said.

“Well then,” Dad said, “it looks like that box isn't a castle anymore. What can it be now?”

Billy thought and thought. Then he got an idea, “it's a repair shop!”

“Good idea,” said Dad. Billy, Dad and Mom hunted through the house. Mom found glue and tape, and Dad found two straight sticks. Then Billy set the yardstick on top of the box, and he put glue on the broken place and pushed the two pieces together. Dad helped Billy tape on the two straight sticks so the yardstick would dry straight.

“And now,” said Dad, “let's leave the yardstick in the repair shop overnight.”

That's what they did. Mom turned on the television set and Billy sat down between Mom and Dad and watched the show with the rest of the family. “I'm sorry I broke the yardstick,” he whispered.

“You didn't mean to,” Dad said.

“And tomorrow it will be good as new, thanks to your repair shop,” added Mom.

Billy smiled. “I like my box,” he said.

When he went to bed, he thought for a long time about what his box would be the next day.

Maybe a zoo—if I can find a tiger, he decided at last—just before he went to sleep.

THE BEST FAMILY HOME EVENING EVER

“Next week,” said Dad at the end of family home evening, “the lesson will be about why family members shouldn't say unkind things to each other when they're angry.”

“Yippee!” shouted nine-year-old Alan. He was glad the lesson was on family members not getting angry with each other. Alan's brothers and sister always seemed to be angry with him.

He remembered borrowing Ryan's electric shaver to practice shaving and Ryan had yelled at him. At Christmastime he tied red bows on Alice's geranium to surprise her and she became really upset.

Even Dad and Mom had become irritated with him—like the time when he taped the two halves of the dining room table together underneath so that they couldn't be pulled apart to put extra leaves in. Alan thought it was funny. Dad and Mother didn't.

I can't wait for next Monday to come, Alan thought.

Then Father continued, “And I'm going to assign Alan to give the lesson.”

“Uh-oh,” Alan said.

“You can do it,” encouraged Mother. “You were so enthusiastic a moment ago.”

Alan thought for a minute. “I guess since I'm an expert on making people angry, I probably could give a lesson on how to keep all of you from being cross with me.”

Everybody laughed. But Alan really meant what he said.

He had never given a lesson in family home evening before—at least not all by himself—and he wanted to do a good job. And so he thought about it all week.

Every now and then Mom would say, “Alan, how's the family home evening lesson coming? Want any help?”

“It's coming great, Mom,” Alan would say. “I've decided to do it all by myself, but thanks anyway.”

On the Sunday night before family home evening, Alan spent a lot of the evening downstairs in his room, writing.

“What are you writing?” Dad asked.

“Things,” Alan answered, “for the family home evening lesson.” As soon as he got home from school on Monday afternoon, Alan put a sign on the basement door. It said, PLEASE DO NOT ENTER! FAMILY HOME EVENING LESSON UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

His second oldest brother Harry knocked on the basement door. “Alan,” he said. “I want to watch television.”

“Sorry,” Alan called. “You can't come down right now.”

Harry became upset. “I'm warning you, Alan, this better be a mighty good family home evening!”

“Don't worry,” Alan said.

After a while his sister Alice knocked on the door. “Alan,” she said, “all my sewing stuff is in the basement. Can I come down?”

“I'm sorry, sis, not now,” Alan replied. “Can't you crochet for a while instead?”

“I want to sew, Alan,” she said, sounding cross.

“Sorry,” Alan repeated. “But if I let you come down it would ruin my family home evening lesson.”

“It better be good,” Alice threatened.

“It'll be one of the most interesting family home evenings we've had,” Alan promised.

Finally it was dinnertime and Alan came upstairs, closing the basement door carefully behind him. When dinner was over, the family gathered together in the living room for family home evening.

After the song and the prayer, Alan stood up and said, “Tonight the lesson is on how family members shouldn't yell or talk unkindly to each other even when they're upset. When someone yells at another person it makes that person feel bad, and that isn't the way we're supposed to make people feel.”

Everyone agreed that Alan was right. Then he passed out pieces of paper to everyone. Dad read his first: “If you came home from work and you set down your briefcase and then some of us got into it and made paper airplanes out of the papers, what would you do?”

Dad thought for a minute. “I would probably get angry.”

“But what would you do about it?” Alan asked.

Dad smiled. “I'd call in the ones who made the paper airplanes and explain to them that these were important papers that other people were depending on, and I would ask them to unfold the paper airplanes and flatten out the pages as best they could.”

“You wouldn't yell?” Alan asked.

“I wouldn't yell,” Dad promised.

Mom read, “If you were making a cake and one of your children came in and jumped real hard in front of the oven and the cake fell, what would you do?”

“Well, I would feel just awful,” said Mom. “I'd explain to that child how his jumping made the cake fall and ruined the family's dessert and that I felt really bad about it.”

“But you wouldn't say anything mean?” Alan asked.

“Not if I were acting the way I should,” said Mom, smiling.

Soon all the family promised that they would not be cross or unkind to other family members anymore even when they had cause to be angry.

“Is that the whole lesson?” asked Ryan.

“No,” Alan said. “Now we'll go downstairs to the family room.”

Everyone went downstairs, Alan first. He watched them very carefully as they saw what the family room looked like.

Everything was in the wrong place. All the books were out of the bookshelves. Alice's sewing things were scattered everywhere. The boxes from the storage room were piled up around the bottom of the stairs. There were little pieces of wadded up newspaper on the floor. And facedown on the Ping-Pong table was what looked like an expensive picture that Mom was going to frame, ripped right in half. It was the worst sight any of them had ever seen.

“What a terrible mess!” said his mother, irritably.

“I know it, Mom,” said Alan. “But you can't yell at me. All of you promised you wouldn't be cross no matter how upset you got.”

Dad looked at Mom. Mom looked at Ryan. Ryan looked at Harry. Harry looked at Alice. Alice looked at Alan.

“Alan,” Alice said, “if we can't yell, can we at least whisper that we want to knock somebody's block off?”

“No,” Alan said.

Alan gave them all a little time to think. Then he asked, “Is anybody here going to be cross at anyone else, namely me?”

After a while they all said, “No, we won't.”

Then Alan smiled. “All right, you passed the test. Now I'll tell you about this mess. Actually I didn't just scatter these things around even though it looks that way. I set them all very carefully where they are so that nothing would be damaged. And see, Mom, I cut out some paper the same size as your picture and you just thought I'd ripped up the original one. I'll have everything back in place in a couple of hours.”

Then everybody laughed, because Alan had really made them realize how they had been behaving toward each other. They decided that Alan shouldn't have to put everything back alone, so they all worked together, and soon everything was back in place.

When it was all cleaned up, Alan said, “Well, I guess my lesson's over. Thanks for helping.”

“It was a good lesson, son,” Dad said. “And if we could keep from yelling about the way this family room looked a few minutes ago, I think we can keep from being upset about anything.”

“It was a good lesson,” Ryan said, “but I hope you never make the family room look like that again.”

“You must be kidding!” Alan replied. “I'll never make a mess like that again in my whole life. It took hours! You guys may think being a messy kid is easy, but I can tell you it is really hard work!”

BICICLETA

Amauri pushed the bicycle up the long hill. At the top was a small Catholic church with a little building behind where the padres lived. In back of this building was a little shack that Amauri's family called home. “Mamae (Mother)!” he called out when he neared his house, and his mother appeared at the door.

“Where have you been, Amauri?” she asked, her back still bent from the day's work of cleaning in the tall office building downtown. Then she saw the bicycle. “What do you have there, Amauri?” she asked, and her eyes looked worried.

“A bicicleta (bicycle), Mamae,” Amauri answered.

“Where did you get it?” his mother questioned again, and Amauri knew that she was afraid he had stolen it, because many of the poor people in their neighborhood sometimes stole things to get money to buy food. Amauri's mother was grateful that her five children didn't steal.

“A man gave it to me, Mother,” Amauri answered proudly. “I'm going to be a delivery boy! I'll ride the bicycle from place to place, delivering lunches to the businessmen and groceries to the ladies in fine houses!”

“You mean you have a job?” And Amauri's mother smiled with joy.

Amauri told her about how he had walked up to a man and said, “Do you need a boy to work for you?” The man had thought for a few moments and then invited him inside his store. They talked for a while, and he told Amauri that he would pay him fifty centavos an hour.

“How many hours will you work?” his mother asked.

“Eight hours every day,” Amauri answered. “That means I will get four cruzeiros a day or more than twenty cruzeiros a week. I can buy food for the family!”

Amauri hugged his mother and she hugged him back. “What a good nine-year-old son I have,” she said gratefully. “Now you are truly the man of the family. Ever since your father died I have been the only one earning money. Now you will help me buy beans and rice for our breakfast and dinner. Enough talking for now, son. Remember, the elders are coming tonight, and we must get the house ready.”

Amauri got water from the well, and his little sister Cecilia cooked the beans and rice for dinner. The other children made the two beds they all slept on, while Mother carefully swept the cold, hard-packed dirt floor.

When the missionaries came, they stood outside the door and clapped their hands together, because that is the way people announce themselves in Brazil. Cecilia ran to open the door.

“Boa noite, elderes (Good evening, elders),” she said. “Come in.”

The tall elders shook hands with everybody. Elder Samson was blond and showed many teeth when he smiled. Elder Bonner had red hair and freckles all over, even on his arms. Although they were Americans, they spoke Portuguese, but sometimes it was hard to understand them.

The elders and Amauri and his family sat on boxes around the table, and then the elders told them all about the commandments of God, including one that asked them to give the Church one-tenth of all the money they earned. Mother was thoughtful when the elders told her this, because she barely made enough money to feed the family. But then she smiled. “Of course,” she said. “That is why little Amauri got a job today. We can pay tithing to the Lord and still have enough to eat.”

Amauri felt very proud to tell the missionaries about his job. “Who knows?” Amauri said, “maybe someday I will deliver a lunch right to the building where my mother works.”

“But what about school?” asked Elder Samson.

“School is not for poor people,” said Amauri's mother sadly. “We do not have the money to buy books.”

And then Amauri remembered something awful. His face turned white. “What's wrong, Amauri?” the elders asked.

“I just remembered,” Amauri said. “I only have three days to learn how to ride the bicycle.”

“What?” asked Elder Bonner, surprised. “Nine years old and you don't know how to ride a bicycle?”

Amauri shook his head. “We are too poor to have a bicycle. Now I will have to learn before Thursday. How can I learn that fast?”

Everyone looked worried now. Learning to ride a bicycle wasn't easy.

Then Elder Bonner said he had an idea. “We will teach you how to ride!” he shouted, and Elder Samson nodded in agreement.

The next morning the missionaries came back. They could hardly wait to get Amauri out of bed and onto his bicycle.

It was harder than Amauri had thought it would be. He fell down again and again. Even on a grassy field it hurt to fall, but he kept thinking: The Lord got me this job so that my family can pay tithing. And I'm going to get back on that bicycle.

The next day Amauri rode for ten meters all by himself before the bicycle started to tip over, then he stopped it from falling by sticking out his foot. At the end of the riding lesson he told the elders, “It's time for me to go home. And you'll have to hurry—I'm going to ride this bicycle all the way back home. And I'm going to ride it very fast.”

Amauri got on the bicycle and pedaled as fast as his legs would go, the elders behind him shouting and cheering him on. When he arrived home, Cecilia and the other children ran out of the house laughing and clapping their hands.

“Como Deus me abencoe (How God is blessing me)!” he shouted to the elders when they came into the house. “First a job, and now you have helped me learn to ride a bicycle so I can do it well!”

The elders just laughed and shook his hand. And then the children hugged him in their excitement.

The next day was Thursday, and Amauri rode the bicycle all alone downtown to the store. He took the lunches and delivered them, and later took fresh meat to housewives and cabbages to restaurants. He was exhausted when nighttime came.

When he got home he tied the bicycle to a tree. Then he knelt beside it and said a prayer, thanking Heavenly Father for his help. When he was through he patted the bicycle seat.

“Oi, bicicleta (Hey, bicycle), que amigo voce e (you and I are going to be good friends)!”

I THINK MOM AND DAD ARE GOING CRAZY, JERRY

I was only forty-five minutes late getting home with the Ford, and that was only because Darrell, who is my best friend, wanted to be dropped off at his girlfriend's house in Cupertino. If I had known what was going on at home, I would have hurried. What was going on at home was the end of my peace and happiness.

“Shhh,” said Anne, my younger sister who is sixteen and had been driving for three wonderful months of parking tickets and running out of gas in odd places.

“What's up? Somebody having a surprise party?” I asked.

“No,” said my brother Todd. “At least, we're not. But Mom and Dad seem to be having some kind of party.”

“What's wrong? Everybody looks so serious.”

“What's wrong?” asked my older sister Val in tones of righteous indignation. “What's wrong?”

“Yeah. I mean, what's wrong?”

And then they told me. All at once, in loud whispers. When I had finally sorted out all the different stories, this is what I got:

When Anne got home with the Pinto, it had a new dent in the door from opening it hard into a light pole in a parking lot. But Mom and Dad weren't angry—they just smiled and took the car keys from her and went into the bedroom and locked the door. When Todd got home with the car, it was nearly out of gas, and he didn't have enough money to fill it up; but Mom and Dad didn't complain, just took the keys and went back to their bedroom and locked the door. And when Val came home four hours late from a “quick trip to the store to get more shampoo,” Mom and Dad didn't complain about the Volkswagen being gone so long—just took the car keys, and you know what happened then.

And no sooner had they finished telling me their stories than out of their bedroom came Mom and Dad, chortling and smiling. “Hi, Jerry,” said Dad.

“Hi,” I said, “Sorry I was late getting back, but I had to take Darrell to his girlfriend's house in Cupertino.”

“That's fine,” said Mom.

“Is the car nearly out of gas?” asked Dad.

“I didn't have any money to fill it up,” I said.

“Oh, fine, fine,” Mom said, giggling a little. “Could I have your car keys?”

“How come?” I asked.

Father just grinned a little broader. “We want to press them and put them in your baby book.”

I handed over the keys.

“Come into the living room, children, my loves,” sang Mother, and I swear it looked like they were prancing as they led the way.

As we followed them, Anne looked at me with a frightened expression on her face. “I think Mom and Dad are going crazy, Jerry,” she said. Her voice was trembling.

When we got into the living room, Mom and Dad were playing catch with the car keys.

“Definitely,” I told Anne. “Bonkers. Bananas. Out, so to speak, of their minds.”

When we had all settled down, looking at our once-stable parents with expressions that ranged from concern to near panic, Father began a little speech.

“Perhaps you children have never counted, but we, a middle income family, have four cars. Four cars is an unusually large number of automobiles for a middle income family, but then we have an unusually large number of drivers at home. Six, to be exact. Six drivers and four cars. One could reasonably suppose that this would be enough cars to go around, but not so. Today your mother had an appointment at the dentist's. The appointment was at 2:00, but at 2:00, even though there were supposed to be three cars at home, there were none. Mother missed her dental appointment. Does your tooth hurt, Mother?”

Mother nodded, holding her jaw. “My tooth hurts, Father.” She laughed, “And I today received three pieces of mail. One was the insurance bill. One was the bill from our gasoline credit card. And one was the monthly statement from the bank on the two cars we are still paying for. I added them up and reached a sobering conclusion.”

He did not look particularly somber.

“My dear children, I believe we are the largest single mainstay for the automobile and insurance and oil businesses in America today. If we did not use our cars for one week, Ford Motor Company stock would drop three points and there would be a coup in Saudi Arabia. If we did not use our cars for a year, our country would be plunged into a major depression. We are supporting the economy of the United States of America.

“We are honored. This is a privilege for us, and we don't plan to shirk our responsibilities. However, some of this privilege ought to be shared. Mother, will you get the documents?”

Mother left the room. While she was gone, Father asked each of us in turn how much we made at our jobs. None of us was making a fortune, but we were doing surprisingly well. Even Anne, who worked in a hamburger drive-in after school, pulled down about a hundred a month. No wonder she always looked like she stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine.

And then Mother came back and handed each of us a piece of paper with the words LEASE AGREEMENT at the top of the page. I won't give you the legal language. Boiled down, it went this way:

Each of us who planned to drive any car at all during a given month had to pay a basic fee of eight dollars to cover part of the insurance costs. If our grades fell below a B average, we had to pay twenty dollars a month.

“That's quite a jump,” said Anne, who often did not have a B average.

“So is the jump in insurance rates when your grades go down,” answered Mom.

The agreement also called for us to pay all traffic fines, the deductible on the insurance in case of collision, and all the gas we used.

“What?” asked Val, turning white. “All the gas?”

“The car is to be returned home with the tank full, every time,” Dad said.

There was also a mileage fee. For the LTD, ten cents per mile. For the Pinto, eight cents per mile. For the Volkswagen, because it was old, six cents per mile, and for the Galaxy, commonly known around the house as “the Ford,” twelve cents a mile.

“Twelve cents a mile!” I shouted. That was the car I preferred to drive.

“It's the newest car. It has the greatest depreciation,” said my father, smiling.

“You will keep track of the mileage,” said Mother, “on these handy little Automobile Record sheets, which we will have printed up and placed in the glove compartment of every car. After every use of the car, you will write down your mileage and the number on the odometer. When you come home, you will give your Automobile Record sheet to the leasing company—your father or myself.”

And the final clause of the contract was the stinger. “Permission for use of the cars will automatically be suspended until all dues and remunerations are paid in full.”

“You mean we can't even be late?”

“Not even by a day,” Father said, smiling.

Anne was outraged. “I thought we were a family, not a business!”

Mother only smiled her if-you-get-upset-it-will-only-make-it-worse smile. “Every family is a business, dear. There are income and expenses and cash flow. We just think it's time that your father stopped supplying all the income and you stopped monopolizing the expenses. There's the contract. You will all please sign.”

“And if we don't?” asked Todd, already cringing because he knew the answer before he asked.

Father held up all the car keys—quite a bundle of them—and said, “The cars will no doubt miss you, and you will probably wear out your shoes faster, but the walking will be good for your health.”

Anne didn't get it. “You mean if we don't sign, we don't drive?”

“That's what he means,” said Val.

“Here are the pens,” said Mother.

“Sign or walk,” said Father.

We signed.

“After all these years,” I said, “I never knew that my parents were so greedy.”

“Think of it this way,” Dad said, putting his arm around my shoulder. “By saving money on the cars, we can go on putting food on the table. It's a fringe benefit that isn't written into the contract. Your parents won't go broke.”

As we left the room, Val whispered to me, “They go through these phases—it's part of being parents. They'll forget about it in a week.”

They didn't forget about it in a week. They didn't forget about it in a month.

“Mom, can I take the car tonight?” Anne asked. “Debbie and I want to see Superman,”

“Again?” Mother asked. “How many times have you seen it?”

“Only three,” Anne said. “Star Wars still holds the record.”

“I hardly dare ask how often.”

“Six times.”

“You may take the car,” said Mother. •

“Thanks!” Anne said.

“As soon,” Mother added, “as you settle up your car leasing bill.”

Anne looked horrified. “You didn't say anything about it.”

“Why should I have? It's your bill, not mine.”

“But I've spent almost all my money.”

“I'm sorry. Maybe Debbie can drive.”

They went over the accounts. “Your total bill is now $38.56,” Mother said.

Anne gulped. “But, Mom, that's more than a new top.”

“And just think,” Mother said with a smile, “we're only charging you half what it costs us!”

Anne went to her bedroom and got the money and paid Mother. “Take it,” Anne said. “Take it all. I don't like money anyway. I hate money. I never want to see money again. Money is filthy and disgusting. Take all of it.”

“Aren't you going to the movie?” Mother asked.

“I have forty-two cents left. That wouldn't pay for the gas to get the car out of the driveway. Let alone the movie.”

“I'm sorry, dear,” said Mother. “Perhaps if you walked to Debbie's house more often—it isn't even a mile.”

“What am I supposed to be, a pioneer?”

“But haven't you heard, dear?” asked Mother. “The sidewalks are paved all the way there.”

“Would you really thrust your own youngest daughter out in the snow and the sleet—”

“This is California, dear. If it starts snowing, I'll let you take the car for half price.”

I was in the kitchen helping Mom make tuna sandwiches for fourteen billion of Todd's friends who had just happened to come over on a Saturday. We couldn't help but overhear their conversation in the living room.

“How will we all get home after the game?” asked one of his friends. They were seniors in high school and didn't have anything better to do than worry about getting home from the game.

“Maybe I could take you,” Todd said.

“That'd be great,” said another friend.

“Wait a minute,” Todd said. “We'd have to share the costs.”

“Costs?”

“The only car big enough is the LTD. That's ten cents a mile. I figure that with the eight of you that's got to be around fifty miles. Plus a pro rata share of my monthly insurance bill and the cost of gasoline, which at sixty-nine cents a gallon and eleven miles to the gallon comes to $3.13, plus the mileage and share—that's $9.13. And there are eight of us so it's $1.14 each, with a penny left over. I'll treat you to the penny.”

They were astounded. They were appalled. “A dollar each just to get home from the game?”

“A dollar and fourteen cents. And don't forget the free penny.”

“I think my parents can take me.” Pretty soon all of them decided their parents could take them home.

“Too bad,” Todd said. “It probably costs your parents more than a buck to make a special trip there and back. You guys just don't know how much it costs to keep cars running these days.”

I spread tuna on the last sandwich as Mother ran water in the bowl. “Do you hear what I hear?” I asked.

“I think my son Todd is beginning to get some sense about money,” she answered.

I didn't say anything. I thought it sounded like my brother Todd wasn't pulling a full train.

I don't make much money at my job. Not when I have to support my driving habit and my taste in clothes and all my records and tapes and a minor addiction to buying four science fiction novels a week. I began to discover the joys of walking.

Do you have any idea how many barking, savage dogs there are on an average residential block in a California suburban community? (Seven—one with rabies.)

Do you know how many steps it takes to go a mile and a half to school on foot? (Exactly 3,168, unless you have a blister and take shorter steps.)

Do you know how hot it gets when you walk outside in the summer in California? And they don't even air-condition the street.

I also discovered that rain is wet, wind is cold, passing cars like to go fast through puddles to splash you, and you meet the strangest people waiting for the WALK signal at a busy intersection.

And even with all that walking, my automobile leasing bill was still horrendous. I had given up on the LTD except for dates, but even with the Volkswagen I was paying thirty or forty dollars a month.

“I give up,” I said. “I won't do any more business with this rip-off car leasing business.”

“Really?” asked Father, looking up from his copy of the San Jose Mercury.

“Really,” I said. “I will not pay your fees. I will not drive your cars.”

“Mother!” Father called. “Jerry has decided to become a pedestrian!”

“I have not,” I said. “I have decided to take my patronage elsewhere.”

“Where?” he asked.

“If Hertz is good enough for O. J. Simpson, it's good enough for me.”

As I left the room Dad called after me, “But, Jerry! We try harder!”

I came back three hours later. Whipped. Beaten. Defeated.

“Do you know what they charge?” I asked.

“A lot?” Father guessed helpfully.

“I couldn't rent a pair of roller skates from them for less than fifty dollars a month.”

“Ah.”

“You and Mom may be a rip-off leasing company, but at least you're competitive.”

“Oh, come off it,” Father said, laughing. “We have the best rates in town.”

“I want to buy a horse,” I said.

“I can get you a good price on hay,” Father answered. He laughed and laughed. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction. I managed to keep a smile off my face until my bedroom door was closed behind me. Then I laughed.

And then Miriam finally agreed to go on a date with me. She was the best-looking girl in the ward (also in the state; probably in the Church), and she had finally broken up with Alvin Hopper, which was no great loss to her and a tremendous gain to a college freshman like myself with excellent taste in girls. On my fourth try she agreed to go out with me. I shot the works. The LTD, complete with car wash, a thirty dollar dinner in San Francisco, a drive through beautiful scenery on the way up, Bayshore Freeway on the way back, and charming, delightful conversation all the way. The conversation was the only thing free on the whole date.

And she was worth it. She could discuss at least thirteen different topics intelligently and got a B- on all the others, which means she was more than just a pretty face. She let me open doors for her and took my arm without my even having to hint. She looked me right in the eye and never let her gaze linger for a moment on the slight complexion problem that had appeared mysteriously on my chin the day before. She was perfect.

On the way home, after we left the freeway, she asked, “You don't happen to have a throat lozenge or anything like that? I have kind of a sore throat.”

“In the glove compartment,” I said. Mom kept the glove compartment like a medicine chest—aspirin, throat lozenges, cough drops, breath mints, Kleenex, eye drops, bandages, and disinfectant. She figured that if we all had the flu and got into a traffic accident, she could make everybody feel better in minutes. Miriam reached into the glove compartment, found the lozenges, and also found the pad of Automobile Record sheets.

“What's this?” she asked.

So I told her. All about the lease agreement. How much it cost and everything. I was just about to tell her how terrible it all was when she interrupted me.

“That's terrible,” she said. “I can't believe parents doing anything like that! Who do they think they are?”

“Parents,” I said.

“Well, I'm glad my parents are more generous than that. It sounds like your father must be Ebenezer Scrooge and your mother must be Shylock.”

“Shylock was a man.”

“Stingy, anyway. How much do they charge you for lunch and dinner?”

“Nothing.”

“I'm surprised. Do they have a coin box and water meter on the shower? Do they make you pay for clean sheets?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“A car is a necessity of life,” she said. “Parents have a responsibility to provide them for their children.”

Now, you have to understand. I'm not an argumentative person. I'm quite easy to get along with. But she was talking about my parents, judging them just by the fact that they ran a rip-off car leasing business with a captive clientele. I couldn't let her go unanswered. So I answered.

“Listen, Miriam, a car is different from showers and food and bedding. It's a lot more expensive. And I eat three meals a day and sleep once a night and take a shower every morning. It's regular and predictable and it doesn't go up and down. But the car I use as often as I like, and we kids used to use the cars all the time. It cost the folks hundreds and hundreds of dollars every month. And so it was perfectly fair for them to decide we should help pay.”

“You can't live in the modern world without a car. They might as well charge you for air.” She sounded upset.

“You can live without a car,” I said. “You can walk, for example. I've walked to school a lot the last few months.”

“I can imagine,” she said darkly.

“I've enjoyed it. I've discovered there are things you can't see from a car.”

“Like bubble gum on a sidewalk,” she said, sounding rather snide.

“I think it's a good idea for us to help our parents pay for the cars.”

“And I think anybody who thinks that is crazy.”

“You do?” I asked, and I think by now I also sounded upset.

“I do. If word of this gets around, other people's parents will try it, too, and pretty soon an entire generation of young people will be trapped at home with their families night after night.”

It shows you how angry I was. I said, “That doesn't sound like a bad idea. And furthermore, I think that it's perfectly possible for people to have a good time together without having a car at all. I think it would be a wonderful date just to walk over to a girl's house and take her out walking and talking and maybe looking in store windows or maybe just seeing a little bit of the neighborhood and just getting to know each other without spending any money at all.”

“That sounds hideous.”

“Then,” I said, “I won't ask you out on such a date.”

I took her home and neither of us said another word except for a perfunctory good-night-and-thanks-for-a-wonderful-evening at the door.

When I got home, after filling the gas tank, I wrote down the mileage on the odometer, figured out my total car costs for the evening, and went inside, got the money from my room, and went into Mom and Dad's bedroom, where they were reading the Old Testament out loud to each other the way they do every night.

“Did you have a nice time?” asked Mother.

“Wonderful,” I said. “I want to settle up for tonight.”

“Oh, you don't have to do that until the first of the month,” Dad said.

“I want to do it now.” I showed them how much I owed them, counted out the money, and handed it to them. Then I carefully placed a five dollar bill on top of the rest.

“What's that for?” asked Mother.

“It's a tip,” I said. “For service above and beyond the call of duty.

“I think you're wonderful. I'm glad you laid it on the line with us. I'm glad you shared the responsibility of paying for the entire U.S. automobile industry with us kids. It's the most adult thing I've ever had to do in my life.”

Mother got tears in her eyes. Father said, “I think Jerry's grown up, don't you, Mother?”

“Yes,” Mother agreed.

“Well, you're both wrong,” I said. “I'm just completely out of my mind.”

I kissed them both good-night and went straight to bed feeling pretty doggone good. Also pretty doggone poor, since I had about six bucks to last me through the rest of the month. But as my sister Anne pointed out, money isn't everything. In fact, it's hardly anything.

GERT FRAM

Susan Parker decided to make a list. She sat down at her writing desk, the one her father had given her two years ago on her eleventh birthday and which she was already outgrowing. On the left side of a piece of paper she wrote, “People who hate me.”

On the right side of the piece of paper she wrote, “People who like me.”

The first name she put on the left side was Todd Slover. He was definitely a hater. She had accidentally jabbed him in the arm with a pencil and now he would probably die of lead poisoning.

Mrs. Gray was on the “People who hate me” side, too. She had brought a fishbowl to school for the lesson on lizards. The class was supposed to catch a lizard and put it in the fishbowl. Susan broke the fishbowl.

It hadn't been a good day at school.

The list of haters kept growing. In big letters she wrote, “MOTHER.”

Mother had sent her to the store for eggs. Susan had been absolutely positive Mother had sent her for eggs. She got home with the eggs. Mother thanked her for the eggs and then asked about the butter, which is what she sent her to the store for.

“Eggs are nice, I can always use them,” Mother said. “But what I need to finish the cookies for the party tonight is butter.”

“Oh, yeah, butter,” Susan had answered. Mother had gotten that tight little look she always got when she was trying not to get mad. Susan had decided that was a good time to head for the bedroom.

Susan held up the list and looked at it. So far, it said:

  People who hate me  People who like me

  Todd Slover
  Mrs. Gray
  MOTHER

It was a depressing list. She had already made three people very angry today. And the night was still young.

And so Susan decided that it was about time for Gert Fram to write another novel. Gert Fram was a world-famous thirteen-year-old novelist who preferred to avoid publicity and therefore never published more than one copy of her work. So far, she had written five novels. They were arranged in a neat stack on the desk: Samy Davis Worm, by Gert Fram. Little Purple Pears, by Gert Fram. A Decent Book about Nothing, by Gert Fram. Water Warts, by Gert Fram. And her favorite: Chapy Nukls. Also by Gert Fram.

Susan picked up her pen and reached for an empty book. She had made a batch of about five books the last time. They consisted of pieces of paper about two inches by four inches, stapled together along one edge. Making the empty book first was a good idea. That way she always knew when to end her novel, because she would run out of paper.

She thought for a moment, and then wrote, “RASIN MOON, by Gert Fram.” Then she smiled, and began to write:

“There was a little man & everyday he would eat and he would eat rasins always, now there was a rasin moon in the sky. And every day it would get fatter because the rasins would keep growing + nobody would eat them exept gravity + it doesn't have a mouth, well, this little man was getting hungry for rasins one supper night but the world would run out because the rasins would evaporate, + if it wasn't for evaporation the rasin moon would be a nothing moon, the man decided to go to the rasin moon but he didn't know that there was such thing as one but he decided to check anyway. He didn't really know how to get up there but all of a sudden”

All of a sudden what? Susan Parker pursed her lips. Susan always pursed her lips when Gert Fram was stuck for an idea. Finally Gert Fram got the idea and Susan unpursed her lips and wrote some more:

“it started raining. It was raining up instead of down, no, it was evaporating rasins. so the little man jumped on a rasin + flew up on it. when he got up in space he saw the rasin moon and it looked like one big Prune. He was overjoyed. In fact he was so overjoyed that he forgot his name and that is why his name isn't said in this book.”

Susan Parker laughed. Gert Fram really had a funny way with words.

“He had a bunch of rasins for his supper + he was thirsty and he didn't know what to do. All of a sudden he got an idea. He jumped on a molecule + floated down to the supermarket. He went in and got all the juice, and threw it all in the sky + it started floating up and it made a juice moon. For days he lived up there + after a while he got sick of it so he went down to earth again, + threw all the food and it all floated up in the sky. There was a banana moon + a cornflake moon etc. There even was a pencil moon because he accidently threw some pencils, soon it was a food sky + soon all the gravity got soaked up so there was none left. So the little man observed + every thing floated down to earth again.”

Uh-oh. Last page. Two-inch by four-inch pages filled up fast. Gert Fram decided to wrap things up fast.

“All except rasin moon because he was there in the first place + it wouldn't be fair. After a while the rasins stopped evaporating but the rasin moon stayed. in the sky. It was happy + so was the little man.”

On the back of the book Gert Fram drew a picture of a wrinkled up lumpy moon with little wrinkled lumps rising up to it and a man at the bottom. She labeled it, “The little man riding up to the rasin moon.”

Actually, both Susan and Gert Fram knew how to spell raisin. But leaving out the first i gave the word a little more class.

Susan reread the novel. Gert Fram was OK.

“It's dinner time, Susan and Annabelle and Vanessa and Jonathan!” her mother called from downstairs. Susan leaned back in her chair and wondered whether her agent would like Rasin Moon. Probably not. Her agent wasn't really very happy because nobody had ever bought any of Gert Fram's novels yet and a ten percent commission of nothing doesn't add up to much.

“Susan, everybody's here except you!”

Susan proudly added Rasin Moon to her library.

Downstairs Father was mumbling something to Mother. Then Father called out, “Gert Fram! It's suppertime!”

Susan got up carefully from her chair and walked with dignity to the door of her study/library/den/bedroom. Then she ran down the stairs and scurried into the dining room and dove into her chair and said, “Gert Fram just finished a novel and it's the greatest yet.”

No one paid much attention to what she said, however, because in diving for her chair she had jostled the table and two glasses of lemonade had spilled.

“Can't you be careful for even a minute!” her mother said, crossly wiping up the mess.

“Gert Fram writes a novel and Susan has to drown us to celebrate,” Jonathan said in his funny voice that he reserved for making jokes about Susan.

Susan got up from the table and ran back upstairs. She heard them talking downstairs. “You didn't need to talk like that, Jonathan.”

“Dad, she's so dumb, she's always knocking things around—”

“She's not dumb, and now she's upset and gone upstairs—”

“Careful, Annabelle, the lemonade's about to drip off the table on you.”

Susan shut the bedroom door. She walked to the desk and added a name to the list: “Creepy Jonathan,” she wrote, because he hated to be called that. Then she heard her father calling. “Gert Fram or Susan Parker, whichever of you is hungrier, come downstairs and eat dinner.”

Susan didn't want to go back down. Everybody would watch her walk in and sit down. Jonathan would be thinking she was dumb. So would everybody else. On the other hand she was hungry.

Well, if Susan didn't have any nerve, Gert Fram did. Gert Fram walked with dignity out the door of the bedroom and down the stairs. She paused at the bottom of the steps (all great and famous writers pause at the bottoms of stairways), and then turned and walked with dignity to the table.

She heard Jonathan laugh and only looked down her nose at him. Susan would have been humiliated. But Gert Fram could put such riff-raff in their place.

But during dinner she forgot to be Gert Fram and almost cried once when she knocked over the salt and Annabelle sighed and set it back up. Annabelle could afford to sigh. She was sixteen and smart and wore makeup and never spilled anything.

After dinner everything went okay for about two minutes. Then she heard her father say, “All right, who did it?”

He sounded angry.

“Who did what, dear?” Mother asked in her don't-be-angry-dear voice.

Susan looked up at her mother and said, “If it's something bad, I did it.”

Father came into the dining room holding the Herald.

“I did it, all right,” Susan said.

“Somebody cut something out of the other side of the newspaper and now all I've got is half a crossword puzzle,” Father said. Father always did the crossword puzzle.

“Well, dear,” said Mother in her please-don't-get-upset-at-anyone voice, “you never do more than half of it anyway.”

Father didn't think it was funny. “I thought I told everybody in the family not to cut anything out of a newspaper until it was a day old!”

Susan jumped up from the table, where she had been sitting pulling petals off the flowers in the vase. “Well I thought it was the old newspaper and it was a picture of a bride who's getting married in the temple and I cut it out because I wanted a picture of her and I'm sorry I didn't know it was today's paper.”

Father and Mother looked at Susan. They really weren't sure what to say to this outburst.

“I'll go get the picture and I'll glue it back in!” Susan shouted. “I'll glue it back in with my own blood if you want, I'm sorry I cut out the crossword puzzle!”

Then Father noticed the little pile of petals on the table.

“Susan, you have pulled every single petal off the flowers.”

Susan looked at the petals. She looked at her father. She decided not to cry in front of them. She ran out of the room.

As she left, she heard Mother saying to Father, “I really don't think that was the best time to say that, dear.”

When Susan got to the front door, which she had to pass in order to go up the stairs, Vanessa was standing there with her boyfriend Raymond. They looked very surprised to see her. They looked like it was not a pleasant surprise. Because Susan didn't know what else to do, she stopped and looked at them and said, “Hi.” Raymond let go of Vanessa's hand.

Raymond made a face and looked away and Vanessa said, “Honestly, there isn't a place in the entire house where a person can find any privacy.”

Susan tried to defend herself. “There isn't another stairway. When I'm going to my room I have to pass through here.”

Vanessa looked up at the ceiling in disgust. “When you are coming, you could at least have the courtesy to announce your presence.”

“All right, all right,” Susan said. She walked up the stairs, shouting at the top of her voice, “I'm coming, I'm coming! Unclean, unclean! Beware, beware! Susan's presence is coming!”

From downstairs somewhere three voices shouted at once, “Susan will you stop that shouting! For heaven's sake!” Jonathan's voice added, “What a jerk.” Mother's voice said, “Jonathan, that doesn't help a thing.”

Susan slammed her door and didn't hear anything else from downstairs.

I will not cry I will not cry I will not cry.

She didn't cry. Instead, she sat down at the desk and wrote on the list. When she was finished, it looked like this:

  People who hate me  People who like me

  Todd Slover
  Mrs. Gray
  MOTHER
  Creepy Jonathan
  FATHER!!!
  Vanessa
  Raymond
  Annabelle
  The whole world
  The whole universe!!!!!!!

Then, to be fair, she thought for a while about whether anybody liked her. Under “People who like me” she finally wrote, “The dog because he's too dumb to know how dumb I am and because whenever I spill something which is alot he gets to lick it up.”

Then she thought for a while more and under “People who like me” she wrote in big letters, “GERT FRAM.”

Then Gert Fram started writing another novel. It was called Susan the Jerk. It went like this:

“Once upon a time there was a jerk named Susan. She was the only jerk in the entire world except for the soda jerk and people liked him because they liked soda but they didn't like Susan because she was also a creep, she was a creep because everytime she did something it was wrong. once she tried to pet a dog but the dog bit her because he didn't like to be peted. once she tried to vacuum the rug but the vacuum sucked up the whole rug and then the floor and then the whole basement which made everybody mad because they were all in the basement and got sucked up and couldn't get out until Susan cleaned the dust bag on the vacuum cleaner which she didn't do right so that everybody yelled at her and made her do all the dishes for a week which wasn't a good idea because she broke them all.”

Susan stopped and reread what Gert Fram had just written. Boy, wasn't it the truth!

“They never let Susan go anywhere except with a gag on her mouth because if they didn't keep her mouth shut she would talk all the time and also they have to tie her up and put her in the corner because she is all the time wiggling and poking people. This is all because Susan is a jerk.”

Gert Fram was beginning to warm up to this.

“Boy is Susan a jerk. She is not only a jerk, she is a jerk with bad manners, she burps and doesn't say excuse me and kicks people when they are walking by because how was she suppose to know they were going to walk by right then? What a jerk, jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk.”

Gert Fram was running out of paper. It was time to wrap up the novel with a bang. Gert Fram always liked to end her novels with a bang.

“So one day Susan the jerk decided that one jerk on the earth was enough, and it better be the soda jerk because everybody likes him, and so she left the earth and flew off on a rocket. But because Susan was a jerk the rocket crashed and blew up the sun and everybody had to use flashlights all the time from then on because without the sun it was always night and everytime their flashlights ran out of batteries they would shake their fists and yell, boy that Susan is sure a jerk.”

Gert Fram had some space left, so she drew a picture of Susan's rocket ship crashing into the sun.

Then she got up (with dignity) from the desk and walked to her dresser, where there were a lot of things stacked. There was the china elephant with the broken trunk because she had dropped it. There was the library book that Mother had had to buy because Susan had dropped it in the gutter and the pages had gotten all thick and wrinkly even after they dried. There was the watch with the broken glass because Susan had accidentally scraped it against a cement wall during class break at junior high. There was a ripped picture of Jesus from Sunday School that the teacher had given her because after she ripped it Susan had felt so bad she had cried. This was when she was seven and sometimes let herself cry.

Susan remembered that the Sunday School teacher had hugged her and said, “Hey, Susan, don't cry like that. You're sorry you ripped the picture, aren't you?”

Susan had nodded and said in her squeaky trying-not-to-cry voice, “I didn't even mean to.”

“I know you didn't mean to,” said the Sunday School teacher. “And when you say you're sorry about something, Jesus said that people are supposed to forgive you.”

“I'm sorry,” Susan had said, and cried again, even louder.

The Sunday School teacher gave her an even bigger hug. “That's all right. I forgive you.”

But Susan had cried even louder.

“Why are you still crying?” asked the Sunday School teacher.

“Because I ripped Jesus's picture and he'll be mad at me.”

Susan remembered that the teacher had gotten tears in her eyes. “Jesus is never mad at you,” Susan remembered hearing the teacher tell her. “And to show you, I want you to keep this picture, and every time you see it, you remember that even when you make mistakes Jesus still loves you and forgives you.”

Susan set down the picture on her dresser. If I say I'm sorry maybe they'll forgive me, she thought.

So she opened the door and started down the stairs. Then she remembered Vanessa and Raymond by the front door and she coughed. She kept coughing all the way down the stairs.

“What is it, you got pneumonia?” said Jonathan, who was sitting in the living room. Vanessa and Raymond were gone. Susan chose to ignore Jonathan's comment.

Mother was in the kitchen. Father was in the den. Susan decided to go in and say she was sorry to Mother. Then if it went OK she'd go in and say it to Father.

Mother was finishing up the refreshments for the party. She didn't look up when Susan came into the kitchen, but that never stopped Mother, she always knew when somebody came into the kitchen. “Are you feeling better now, Susan, dear?” Mother asked.

Mother sounded so kind that Susan ran right over and leaned on the counter and said, “Mother, I'm sorry I've been acting like such a creep and doing everything wrong and I'm sorry I pulled the stupid petals off the stupid flowers and spilled the lemonade and bought eggs and cut out the crossword puzzle and didn't announce I was coming and everything.”

Mother looked at her with horror in her eyes. “Susan, for heaven's sake, look where you're leaning!”

Susan looked where she was leaning. Her elbows were crushing the jello and whipped cream and pineapple dessert that Mother had all ready for the party. Her elbows were covered with jello. The dessert was completely smashed. Susan looked up at her mother.

“What in the world am I going to do now!” her mother said, wringing her hands. “They'll all be here in half an hour and there's not a hope in the world of making anything else! Susan, sometimes I think we ought to build a bomb shelter for all of us to hide in whenever you're around!” Mother had meant that last sentence to be a kind of joke, but Susan didn't notice that. She just stood there, deciding not to cry, and then deciding that she couldn't help it, and then with tears running down her cheeks and her face all crinkled up she ran out of the kitchen and up the stairs and slammed the door.

In the living room Jonathan said, “Well, that's two slammed doors tonight, tying the world's record. If we make three slammed doors it'll be a new champion!”

Mother said, “Jonathan, I'm getting very cross with you.” Then she went upstairs and tapped on Susan's door.

“Susan,” Mother said.

“Go away and leave me alone,” Susan's voice said. Susan's voice sounded like there was a lump in her throat and tears in her eyes and a pillow in front of her face. Mother thought about going in anyway, and then she decided that it was not a good idea. Instead she went to the den and asked Father to go to the store and buy something for dessert for the party tonight.

The party was fun and noisy and all the adults played games and talked and ate the store-bought dessert and said thank you for the wonderful evening and went home.

Then Mother and Father talked quietly for a few minutes and they decided that Father would go up and talk to Susan.

Father knocked on the door. “May I come in?” he asked.

“Certainly,” answered a voice.

Father came in.

“Susan, I want to talk to you for a couple of minutes.”

Susan turned around on her chair and looked at him in dignified surprise. “I'm terribly sorry, sir, but you must have the wrong address. There is no Susan here.”

Father looked at her for a moment and said, “I'm afraid I must have been given the wrong address. Who does live here?”

“No one lives here. This is the office and studio and den of Gert Fram, the world-famous author.”

Father smiled. “I've never been in the office and studio and den of a world-famous author before.”

“Well, you needn't ask for an autograph,” Gert Fram replied. “I gave up signing autographs years ago. It was such a bother.”

“I don't want an autograph,” Father said. “I think I want an exclusive interview.”

Gert Fram tilted her head. “For that, I'm afraid you'll need to consult my agent. I never grant interviews on the spur of the moment.”

Father looked at the floor. “You're not making this very easy for me,” he said.

A funny look passed across Susan's face, but it was Gert Fram who answered him.

“That's because it shouldn't be any easier for you than it is for me,” she said disdainfully. “Fair is fair and right is right. Besides, I know what you're really here for.”

“Do you?”

“Of course. You're like all the others. You want a sneak preview of my latest novel.”

“I don't really think that's why I came up here, Susan,” Father said.

“Oh, you'll definitely want to read it when you hear the title. It's called Susan the Jerk.”

This time it was Father's face that got the funny look. “I guess you're right,” he said. “I really do want to read it.”

Susan handed him the book with a shaking hand. Gert Fram's voice was steady, however, when she said, “I knew it would work. My titles are irresistible.”

Father sat on the bed and read Susan the Jerk from the beginning to the end. He looked at the picture of the rocket ship crashing into the sun for a long time.

When he looked up at Susan, he saw Gert Fram watching him carefully, one eyebrow raised. Father sighed.

“Gert Fram, you're a fine author and I'm very impressed with your book. But there's been a terrible mistake made here. I really came to this address to see somebody else. You see, I respect you and admire you but you're just not in my class, Miss Fram. I was looking for a woman named Susan Parker. I wanted to tell her that I'm sorry that I've been cross with her. I wanted to tell Susan Parker that her father and her mother love her so much that when they know she's unhappy and it's their fault, they feel terrible until they can make it right. Can you pass that message along for us?”

“I hardly run a messenger service here,” Gert Fram answered. But then her voice cracked and she said, “But I'll try to let her know. I don't think she'll believe that message, though.”

Father bowed his head. “I hope she believes it. Because Susan just might be thinking right now that she's a jerk. And it just isn't true. She's a wonderful person. It's just that her parents and her brother and sisters are so used to having her around that they forget how wonderful she is. They forget to treat her like a wonderful person. But oh, Miss Fram, if they ever lost Susan they'd miss her so much—”

And suddenly Susan realized that the reason that Father had stopped talking was because he was crying. She had never seen her father cry before. And he was crying because he loved Susan Parker so much and right then Gert Fram disappeared and Susan Parker was back and she was crying and hugging her father but mostly letting him hug her. He was saying, “My little girl, my little girl.”

Finally Susan said, very softly, “I'm not a little girl, Father.”

Father took her by the shoulders and held her away from him a little and looked into her eyes. He looked a long time into her eyes and then he smiled, even though he still had tears, and he said, “You're absolutely right. And to think I didn't realize it until this moment.”

Then they both said a lot of things and didn't say other things and went downstairs for family prayer. Then Mother and Father kissed Susan good-night and she went back upstairs. She undressed for bed and said her prayers and got under the covers and turned off the light.

A few minutes later she turned the light back on and got up and went to the desk. She picked up the book Susan the Jerk and turned it over and on the last page, in little letters where there was still some space left, right after where it said, “boy that Susan is sure a jerk,” she wrote:

“But whenever they said that, Susan's father said, you better watch it, that's my dauter you're talking about, and they didn't say it anymore.”

That was a better ending to the novel. Susan turned off the light and went to sleep. In the morning she would realize that she had never washed the jello dessert off her elbows and it was now all over her bedroom, but tonight it didn't matter. It didn't even matter in the morning.

AFTERWORD

“ENDER'S GAME,” “MIKAL'S SONGBIRD,” AND “PRENTICE ALVIN AND THE NO-GOOD PLOW”

These works share a common fate—they were killed commercially by the publication of a novel that superseded them. Not long ago I wrote an essay about this process for Foundation, a British literary journal about speculative fiction, and that essay will serve as a complete afterword to those stories in this collection. So here it is:

MOUNTAINS OUT OF MOLEHILLS

I never set out on a regular program of turning my old novelettes and novellas into novels. At the time I wrote most of my shorter works, I thought they were just right at that length. Yet somehow the expansion of old stories has become a regular feature of my career.

My novel Songmaster was built from the novelette “Mikal's Songbird.” Hart's Hope began life as a novella of the same name. Wyrms was originally written as the novella “Unwyrm.” Eight years before Ender's Game was published as a novel, the novelette of that name was my first published science fiction story.

In fact, I've gone even further—I find myself revising my old books. My first novel, Hot Sleep, and my first book, the collection Capitol, were replaced by the 1983 novel The Worthing Chronicle; it, in turn, will be included in the megabook Worthing Complete sometime in the next few years. Recently St. Martin's Press brought out Treason, a reworking of my second novel, A Planet Called Treason.

What's going on here? Is all this meddling with dead works a sort of resurrection or is it literary necrophilia? Am I making silk purses out of sows' ears, or am I so short of new ideas that I have to go back to what I did in bygone years? Am I a modest fellow who, in learning new skills, discovers the inadequacies of early work and tries to repair them, or am I so narcissistic that I find my past works too fascinating to ignore?

Maybe all of those things, or none of them. Each one of these expansions and rewrites came about in its own way, not because of any plan of mine, so I doubt they have any meaning in the aggregate. But perhaps an account of how these stories were transformed over time will have some value in understanding why they are the way they are.

SONGMASTER

Barbara Bova had just become my agent, and 1 hadn't sent her anything of novel length to sell. She was not deterred—I got a phone call from her saying that she had just received a decent offer from a publisher for the novel version of my novelette “Mikal's Songbird,” which was at the time nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards.

“What novel version?” I said.

“Well, that's the problem,” said she. “I need a few paragraphs from you telling how you'll change it to make it a novel.”

“But it's a novelette. It's finished.”

“Think about it for a while, dear. Maybe you'll find a novel in there somewhere. If you don't, I'll just turn down this very nice offer.”

Now, you must understand—I don't automatically say yes just because I'm offered money. I had already turned down a request for a sequel to A Planet Called Treason because I couldn't think of an adequate storyline, and I fully expected to do the same with this proposal.

I thought back over what happened in “Mikal's Songbird” and tried to find a hook where I could hang new story elements. I rejected at once the idea of using the same plot and simply taking more words to tell it—I loathe excess description and empty writing. Besides, the world of “Mikal's Songbird” was very sketchy and not terribly interesting. Nor could I think of a subplot that would add meaningful pages.

Then I realized that there might be something worth exploring in how Ansset became a Songbird. The Songhouse might be developed into a strange and fascinating milieu. I knew at once that it should be a sort of medieval monastery, a retreat and a school, a place where souls are saved—and, in the struggle, hurt.

Looking back, I can see now that part of my fascination with the Songhouse was a desire to explore the relationship between the individual and a highly demanding and rewarding community, which in my case meant the Mormon Church. While Mormonism has no monastic tradition, a good case could be made for the idea that the whole church is a kind of monastery, insulating its members from the world behind walls, not of stone, but of culture.

At the time, however, it just seemed like a pretty good science fiction idea— one that I could hang a novel on. At the same time, it involved a structural insight that I have used to good effect many times since: When expanding a short work into a long one, the place to go for a new material isn't after the initial short story, but before it. By starting much earlier, and explaining how the characters got to where they are at the beginning of the short story, the milieu is much richer, the cast of characters much fuller, the characterization much deeper than it was in the original story.

Much outlining and map-drawing later, I sat down and began writing. The first section, in the Songhouse, grew to be much longer than I had expected. When it was done, I realized that it could stand alone quite nicely, so I sent it to Barbara, who sold it as a separate novella to Stan Schmidt, then quite new as editor of Analog. Word for word, it was identical with the opening chapters of Songmaster; as with the recent publication of sections of the Tales of Alvin Maker as separate stories, the novella “Songhouse” was a case of excerpting from a novel, not expanding a short work after the fact.

By the time I got to the events of the original novelette the milieu and characters had grown and changed so much that hardly a word of “Mikal's Songbird” was usable. Events had new meanings; characters had different things to think and say. This first time, it was quite wrenching for me to throw out the entire text of a story that had been, after all, quite successful. But it had to be done if the novel was to have any integrity.

Songmaster ended up with some serious structural flaws—for instance, the “Kyaren” section lags quite badly and the novel seems to end when Ansset becomes emperor, so that readers often find it hard to figure out why there are still so many pages left. But these are the product of my unfamiliarity with the novel form, not the fact that Songmaster was an expansion. Despite its flaws, in fact, Songmaster is my earliest novel that I am willing to stand by in its original form, so that the editing I did in preparation for Tor's recent reprint was on the level of tinkering with style. The structure has problems, but I'm willing to live with them, because the story still feels true to me as it stands, even if it isn't as artful as I'd like.

DERIVATIONS

In a way, “Mikal's Songbird” was an adaptation right from the start. The novelette was only my fourth science fiction sale. “Ender's Game” had been the first, a story that was quite easy to write. My next story died instantly; my third and fourth, “Follower” and “Malpractice,” sold—but only with strong editorial suggestions from Ben Bova at Analog. The next few stories I wrote, however, went nowhere —they were so bad that not only did no one buy them, but also one editor sent me an incredible two-page letter that can only be classed as hate-mail, and followed up by reviewing one of those unpublishable stories in a fanzine! These stories were so bad that someone had to drive a stake through their hearts, just to make sure they didn't rise again.

And I was afraid. Though I had done quite well as a playwright in the Mormon theatre scene in Utah, I had no guarantee that I'd have a career in a genre that actually paid writers enough to live on. To me, at that bleak moment, it looked as though “Ender's Game” might be the only successful story I'd ever write.

But I was determined to try again. This time, though, I went back to “Ender's Game” and tried to determine what it was about that story that worked. In my ignorance, I saw only the most superficial strengths of the story: The hero was a child with extraordinary ability, who goes through a great deal of personal pain inflicted by adults who are trying to exploit him. Maybe this was a pattern I could use again, thought I.

There were other patterns, of course, that I might have followed: The success of “Ender's Game” might have led me to write more military-training stories, for instance, or I might even have attempted a sequel at that time. Instead, true to a view of storytelling that I did not become conscious of until long after, I looked to the character's role in his community in order to find the essence of the tale.

I should point out, too, that I thought of “Ender's Game” as a successful story only in an artistic sense—I knew it worked, but because it had not yet been published, I had no idea whether it would be popular.

When I set out to follow that same pattern, I knew I had to come up with another way for my new child-hero to be exceptional. I'd used military talent with Ender; why not musical ability for my new hero? From there it was a fairly simple matter to come up with Ansset, Mikal's Songbird; though the plot doesn't follow “Ender's Game,” the lifeline of the character certainly does.

I wrote “Mikal's Songbird” quickly, and knew all through it that this story was alive the way “Ender's Game” had been alive. It was still hot from xeroxing when I stuffed it into an envelope and mailed it to Ben Bova.

A couple of days later, though, in rereading the story, I knew that there were serious problems. This didn't bother me—I was excited about the fact that for the first time I actually understood narrative well enough to see the flaws. So I did a substantial revision of the story, and then sent the new version to Ben, with a letter asking him to toss the first version and look only at this one.

Within a few days I got a cheque. Ben had bought the first version, flaws and all. At that moment I knew I had a career—not because I had found a repeatable formula, for in fact I had not, but rather because I had found a road into that place inside myself from which true stories arise. For a long time my stories have grown out of childhood and adolescence, probably because that was the role in life that I best understood—it was not until Speaker for the Dead that I was able to work with truly adult characters, and even then the story was heavily populated with unusual children.

SCHOOLING MYSELF

What Ben ended up publishing was, of course, the revised version of the story— he had simply bought the first version before the second one arrived. From the start, however, and at every step thereafter, the story of Ansset was continuously derived from previous versions, expanding and growing every time I went back to it. Every version represents another stage in my self-schooling as a writer of narrative.

Even in the writing of the novel Songmaster, I was consciously “at school.” I knew that Hot Sleep was a failure as a novel (though, ironically, it remained my best-selling book until the publication of the novel Ender's Game); in order to overcome my dread of a novel's sheer length, I had conceived Hot Sleep as a series of novelettes, not a true novel. I was also beginning to realize that A Planet Called Treason was rushed, sketchy, abrupt, not a smoothly flowing work. In other words, I still didn't know how to write a novel.

In order to try to understand how a novel worked, I carefully examined Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. I ended up, alas, with little intellectual understanding of the novel form, but the sheer reading of the book gave me a feel for a novel's pace. It was as if reading Humboldt's Gift set my metabolic rate; then, when I sat down to work on Songmaster, I was able to keep up that same rhythm of event, language, and scene. No one reading my work will ever accuse me of being Bellowesque; nevertheless, his novel was my touchstone in discovering how to write a true novel.

As a result, Songmaster was my one story with explicit connections with other works, a clear pattern of growth and change that paralleled my own. Expanding it to a novel may have come from a commercially-minded editor's suggestion to my agent, and my own source for the story's idea may have been a deliberate mining of my own previous work, but it ended up as a story I believed in passionately—and the process of writing it was a kind of training ground for my career as a writer, just as my characters Ender and Ansset had to go through training to become a person capable of surviving.

HART'S HOPE AND WYRMS

The next “short” work I adapted into a novel followed quite a different pattern. Roy Torgeson had asked me for a fantasy story for his Chrysalis anthology series, and I began developing Hart's Hope from a map I had doodled and an idea about somebody whose magical power was the negation of magic. The story grew in the back of my mind while I worked on finishing the first draft of my novel Saints and a production revision of my historical Mormon play Father, Mother, Mother, and Mom; when Saints and FMM&M were finished, I turned with relief to a fantasy tale as an antidote to the rigours of historical writing. However, having just finished a sprawling novel of a thousand pages, it's hardly a surprise that Hart's Hope began growing out of control. Before I had finished the novella, I knew exactly how to turn it into a novel; I sent a copy to Barbara at the same time as my submission to Roy, and she soon sold it as a prospectus for a novel. While the novel version went through a couple of major rewrites over a period of years before it finally was published in 1983, it remained substantially the same story as the novella—the novel was not so much an expansion of the novella as the novella was a compression of the novel.

The same is true of the novel Wyrms and the novella “Unwyrm.” I was writing “Unwyrm” for George R.R. Martin's Campbell-nominate anthology series, and as I wrote it I discovered that it simply would not stay under 40,000 words. The novella that George ended up buying was a cut-down version that removed several important plotlines; I finished the novel version only a few weeks after the novella.

(The collapse of Blue Jay Books killed the anthology, so that “Unwyrm” never appeared in print.)

So neither Hart's Hope nor Wyrms represents an expansion on the order of Songmaster. The “short” version in both cases was very long, and in both cases I knew it would be a novel before the novella was completed.

ENDER'S GAME

The novel Ender's Game is the only work of mine, besides Songmaster, that was truly expanded from a short work that I had not intended to expand. Indeed, I had never expected to do anything with Ender Wiggin again. A friend had once urged me to write a sequel to “Ender's Game,” but when he suggested possible storylines, they were lame enough to convince me that a sequel was impossible.

In 1980, though, I was beginning to work with a novel idea with the working title Speaker of Death, a sketchy idea about an alien people who periodically mauled each other in devastating wars that were, without their realizing it, their means of reproduction. The truth would be discovered by a human character whose job was speaking the truth about people at funerals. I couldn't make the idea work, however, until suddenly it dawned on me that the Speaker should be Ender Wiggins as an adult. Who better to understand the impulse that made a species nearly destroy itself than a man who had once inadvertently destroyed another people?

At once the work began to come to life. In 1982 an outline was ready to offer to a publisher. It was explicitly a sequel to “Ender's Game”, which remained my most popular—and most anthologized—story. Barbara offered it to Tom Doherty, the former publisher at Ace who was starting his own company. For financing reasons I got a request to hurry and write a draft of the book before the end of 1982; I complied, but in the process learned that this was going to be harder to write than I supposed. There was more to my story than one human and a bunch of aliens. I was getting involved in creating a human family in whose lives Ender was deeply involved. And the story simply wasn't working. I didn't know how to write it.

A few months later, I realized why. In order to make Ender viable as a character in Speaker of Death, I had to expand on the meaning of the events in “Ender's Game.” I had to deal with the transformation of Ender Wiggin in the aftermath of his xenocide. And to do that in Speaker of Death meant picking up the story right at the end of “Ender's Game,” showing Ender's self-discovery and his transformation into a Speaker. Then I'd have to skip three thousand years and begin an entirely new storyline. It was impossible!

So when I happened to run into Tom Doherty at the ABA in Dallas in the spring of 1983, on impulse I proposed to him that instead of the horribly deformed Speaker that was emerging, all the problems would be solved if I went back and rewrote “Ender's Game” as a novel, incorporating into it all the changes that were needed to properly set up Speaker. Tom promptly agreed, and on a handshake I was committed to my second expansion of a novelette into a novel.

Just as I had studied “Ender's Game” in order to write “Mikal's Songbird,” now I recalled my experience with Songmaster in order to figure out how to write Ender's Game. I decided at once to begin Ender's Game much earlier than the novelette—to start when Ender was still with his family.

In a way, this was analogous to starting Songmaster when Ansset was in the Songhouse; but it was also a radical departure, because instead of having a protagonist who was completely cut off from his family—the standard adolescent hero of most Romance—I was now committed to creating a hero whose connections to his family were still very much alive. I hardly knew how to begin; and so I mined my own life, looking back at my relationship with my older brother and sister as I had thought it was when I was about ten years old, then exaggerating it extravagantly in order to make it a justification for much of Ender's behaviour later on. (I couldn't very well use my childhood as it actually was, since my actual childhood produced, not a twisted military genius, but rather a bookish homebody.)

As with Songmaster, by the time I got back to the point where the novelette should have been inserted into the novel, the character and milieu had changed so much that only the first sentence of the novelette was usable: “Remember, the enemy's gate is down.” However, I felt not a qualm about losing the novelette itself—I had known all along that it would be unusable because of my experience with Songmaster. In fact, I was delighted, because this proved that there was far more going on in the novel than I had ever conceived of when writing the novelette. And when I got to the payoff scene, where Ender discovers that he has been fighting the real war, not a simulation, I knew that there was still one more payoff to go —the final chapter, entitled “Speaker for the Dead.”

Ironically, though, this duplicated one of the structural flaws in Songmaster— once again, few readers could understand why there were still so many pages left when the story was clearly over. Even this flaw didn't bother me. I had a master's degree in English by now, so I knew how to excuse it in literary terms: I was making the reader go through the same kind of revision of the meaning of the story's past that Ender went through. Ah, how the tools of criticism allow us to justify the lapses of our art!

OTHER ADAPTATIONS

Besides expansions of short works to make novels, I have also revised my first two novels. Part of my motive was simple literary self-defense—by revising them, I disarm critics who are apt to scorn them, because I in effect am saying, “I know they weren't all that good.” But much more important to me was the fact that I still cared about the stories. Jason Worthing and Abner Doon of the Worthing stories and Lanik Mueller of A Planet Called Treason were once important enough to me that I wrote books about them; just because I now knew more about writing books didn't mean that I should care less about the stories I had told back when I was a novice.

Hot Sleep and Capitol, I felt, were bad enough that the need to fix them was almost an emergency. Even though they were still in print and still selling rather well, I was able to persuade Susan Allison to withdraw both books and allow me to replace them with a single work to be called The Worthing Chronicle. Little did either of us know how hopelessly uncommercial the result would be—but I still regard it as one of my best works, and I'm grateful to her for allowing me to publish it.

The flaws in Hot Sleep had arisen from my feeble attempts to control the vast sweep of time involved in the story. With The Worthing Chronicle, I unified the story by containing it within a frame, the story of a village whose life had been deeply affected by the outcome of the whole Worthing story. In effect, the new novel was the story of how people are transformed by stories—a circularity that still delights me. It's a series of fictions and dreams and memories all bound up so closely together that it's impossible even within the story to say what is real and what is now. The process of adaptation was exhilarating—but, as with Songmaster and as would later be true with Ender's Game, hardly a sentence from the original books remained in the new version.

Indeed, if there is anything that I think is the key to successfully transforming one version of a story into another, it is to completely discard the first text and develop a new text that contains the same story—the same causally related events—but enriches them with new characters and relationships, new and richer milieux, and many more ideas than the original version contained.

That's why I was so frustrated by the fact that St. Martin's Press, in its eagerness to capitalize on the commercial success of Ender's Game, insisted on going back to press with a new printing of A Planet Called Treason before I had time to write a completely new version. I had long harboured an ambition to return to the tale of Lanik Mueller, but this time tell it in third person, with many more characters and subplots that would make it one of my deepest novels instead of the shallowest. To my outrage at the time, Thomas Dunne would not relent and allow me to do the ideal version of the book. Instead, all I had time to do was revise the opening and edit heavily throughout the book. The result was a novel that, while no longer embarrassing, was far short of the ideal that I had harboured in my imagination. The book remained in first person and continued to follow the same narrative line, with no new characters or events. It was and remains quite frustrating, but at present I have no plans to go back and revise it ever again—if for no other reason than because there is no reversion clause in my contract with St. Martin's (the result of signing a contract as a naive youth without an agent), so that the same publisher would own any revision of the book. Besides, a third version of the same book is certainly too absurd to contemplate.

THE ABYSS

My most recent venture into expanding a shorter work was my novelization of James Cameron's film The Abyss. The problems of novelizing a screenplay are enormous—they are made virtually hopeless in most cases by the fact that the novelizer is forced to work from the screenplay alone, and the screenplay is not a viable story. A screenplay is only a plan for a work of art, like a fresco painter's cartoon; it is not until director and actors interpret the script that it becomes a finished story.

The only reason I agreed to do the novelization was because Jim Cameron was as determined as I was to make the novel a viable work of art in its own right. Unlike most novelizers, I had complete access to the film itself, and to all of the screenwriter's research material. Even more important, however, was the fact that Cameron allowed me to do to his screenplay what I had done to “Ender's Game” and “Mikal's Songbird” in order to expand them—I went back before the beginning of the original story and developed the earlier lives of the characters.

This time, however, I could not go as far as I had with my own work, if only because when I got to the point where the film began, the words and events of the film had to be used exactly as they stood. (We take pride in the fact that this novelization contains every word of significant action and dialogue that actually made it into the film, besides occasional extra scenes that I wrote.) Nevertheless, my preliminary chapters, including a chapter about the early life of a non-human character that quite properly did not end up in the final book, became the root of the novel.

When I gave the early chapters to Cameron, he immediately called them “backstory,” the information about characters that never shows up in a film. I was content to have him regard those chapters that way. After all, he liked them well enough that he showed them to the actors, allowing them to help shape their thinking about their roles. But to me, they were not “backstory,” not background at all. Instead, they set up fundamental questions in the readers' minds, questions that are not resolved until the end of the book. The film is structured as an adventure story that is taken over by the strong relationship story contained within it. My novel, however, is structured as a character story from the beginning, so that to me, at least, the novel is truer to the tale both Cameron and I wanted to tell than the film is.

I don't call this a flaw in the film, but rather a limitation of the cinematic form; and Cameron would certainly dispute my conclusion that the book is “truer.” Perhaps this idea is merely my way of making the book my own even though the bulk of it is a retelling of someone else's story. One thing is certain, however—if this novel transcends the limitations of most novelizations, it is because I went back to the time before the story and added new material that transforms the meaning of the events in the film when we finally come to them.

ALVIN MAKER

Even my Tales of Alvin Maker—Seventh Son, Red Prophet, Prentice Alvin, and the yet-unpublished Alvin Journeyman and Master Alvin—began as a shorter work. As I studied the works of Spenser with Norman Council at the University of Utah, I determined to attempt for my people something of what he accomplished for his: create a verse epic in the vernacular. Of course it was a mad enterprise from the start. Who reads long poems anymore, especially narrative poems? Especially poems written in a folky mountain-country voice:

Alvin, he was a blacksmith's prentice boy,
He pumped the bellows and he ground the knives,
He chipped the nails, he het the charcoal fire,
Nothing remarkable about the lad
Except for this: He saw the world askew,
He saw the edge of light, the frozen liar
There in the trees with a black smile shinin cold,
Shiverin the corners of his eyes.
Oh, he was wise.

But there's something about great works of art like The Faerie Queene that makes the beholder long to go and do likewise. In awe of Spenser and yet ambitious to learn from him, I wrote my way many stanzas deep into the story, until I reached a sort of conclusion when Alvin and his friend Verily Cooper tried out Al's golden plow in the rich soil near the banks of the Mizzippy. At that point I gave the poem an ending—after a fashion:

The rest of the tale—how they looked for the crystal city,
How they crept to the dangerous heart of the holy hill,
How they broke the cage of the girl who sang for rain,
How they built the city of light from water and blood
—
Others have told that tale, and told it good.
And besides, the girl you're with is cruel and pretty,
And the boy you're setting by has a mischievous will.
There's better things to do than hear me again,
So go on home.

At that point, exhausted, I set the poem aside, uncertain where the story should go from there.

Though “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow” won a Utah state fine arts contest, I never did get back to the poem, except to revise it slightly for forthcoming publication in a Mormon journal. Still, the story of it hung with me, in part because, in true Spenserian manner, it is an elaborate allegory for some of the most important tales of the epic of my own people; in part because I fell in love with that hill-country voice and the American frontier magic I had devised for the story. Here was a fantasy that was completely American—no elves, no dragons, no European myths and legends, and the setting was a log cabin, not a castle, and the people wore homespun and hunted with muskets instead of donning armour to go a-pricking with lance and sword. I wanted to go back and finish it.

The opportunity came in 1983, when I finally realized that while long narrative poems have no particular audience, long fantasy novels—or trilogies—do. The language would be daring, for fantasy, as would the setting, but at least the ordinary-looking paragraphs between ordinary-looking book covers would reassure the audience that this story would be accessible.

I wrote an extended outline of the trilogy (supposedly starting with Prentice Alvin) and sent it to Barbara. Tom Doherty bought this one and a story collection as well. (He then had six of my books under contract though not one had yet been published. His faith in me—an author whose books, up to then, had never earned out their advances—was extraordinary, and will always be appreciated.)

When it came time actually to write the Alvin Maker books, I began as I did with every other expansion and adaptation: I started the longer version before the beginning of the original story. I didn't dream at the time that I wouldn't reach the events of the narrative poem until the middle of the third volume, but the introductory chapter became the novel Seventh Son, and the chapter in which Alvin was captured by Indians became the novel Red Prophet, so that by the time I finished Prentice Alvin in 1988, the world had grown so full and the characters so numerous that at times I despaired of containing the whole thing in any finite number of books.

Nevertheless, it was the story that I had begun back in graduate school, even though the text had changed, the characters had been transformed, and the world had grown wider and stranger than I had ever imagined at first. Yet it's hard for me to imagine that I ever thought the story was complete, as far as it went. There was so much more possibility; in writing the first version of it I had thought I was completing the story, but in fact I was merely essaying the first rough draft, the first bare outline of what the tale could be.

I think perhaps that's the case with all my work. At the time I write it, I think it's complete, I think I have discovered all its possibilities and now an sharing them with an audience. But the stories that are best, that are most alive to me, I can't leave them alone. They keep growing whether I like it or not. I keep imagining them without regard for the fact that they have already been written down, published, reviewed, and remaindered.

I'm not “expanding” shorter works at all, I think. I'm merely returning to unfinished acts of imagination, warming myself at fires that only burn the hotter for having lain dormant during all the intervening years. Each tale finds its own occasion to come to life and grow again, and what I've been learning is not so much how to expand novelettes as how to tell stories more fully than ever before.

Does the process end? I'd like to think so. There are plenty of new stories to tell, and I don't have any older works that cry out to me for further development.

Except that I just finished a short story called “Lost Boys” that I once envisioned as a novel of contemporary horror. Since it's the most autobiographical piece I've ever written, I know I could expand on it considerably simply by mining my own life—and so who knows? Maybe a trend that began quite accidentally will continue deliberately.

“MALPRACTICE”

This story was my second science fiction sale. It is a one-idea story—something that I have since learned is not a terribly good idea. The idea? Heart transplants were big news back in the late seventies; I wondered what might happen if, far from rejecting the transplant, the host began to find itself being replaced by the growing cells of the transplanted organ. It would certainly solve the problem of rejection. However, I had neither the scientific knowledge to make the idea really plausible, nor the skill as a writer to make the question of human identity transcend the nonsense science. The result is a story that was more a placeholder in Analog than a particular standout.

“FOLLOWER”

Unlike “Malpractice,” “Follower” actually represents a trend I would pursue later in my career. The thriller-story structure isn't for me, but the motif of a child who has a twisted relationship with adults is a strong one in my work. When I submitted this to Ben Bova, he told me it was all right as far as it went—but it simply didn't end. He suggested an ending to me. I liked it, wrote it just as he suggested it, and sent it back. I didn't alter a word of the first part of the story in order to make the ending work. Then, when the story came out, I was repeatedly told by friends and kin alike that they had guessed the ending almost from the beginning of the story. Ironic that I didn't guess it—I had to wait for Ben to give it to me!

This story is one of the few I've written that began, not with the story idea, but with a sentence. “His dog and his doctor disagreed”—that was the phrase I tried to hang a story on. I know many a writer who does begin writing with an evocative sentence, but it rarely works for me.

“HITCHING”

This story began with a news story about some people who were murdered by a hitchhiker. I have never in my life picked up a hitchhiker or, for that matter, hitched a ride myself—my parents drummed that rule into my head before I could see over the dashboard of a car. But still, I began to wonder if there was some way that an unarmed driver could stop a murderous hitchhiker. It struck me that the only reason the hitchhiker's weapon gives him power over the driver is that the driver still hopes that if he just goes along and does what he's told, the hitchhiker will let him live. But what if the driver starts from the assumption that he's already as good as dead, and his only goal is to make sure the hitchhiker doesn't outlive him? Then all he'd need to do is smash the car into an overpass abutment and the hiker would have hitched his last ride.

That led to the thought that if you could once convince the hitchhiker that you were more dangerous than he was, then his behavior would be under your control. The tables would be turned.

The idea became a story when, instead of a crazed maniac killer, I decided the hitchhiker would be someone more innocent at heart. The result was this story, which appeared in a regional magazine and won a few laughs from a few readers before the magazine went out of business.

“DAMN FINE NOVEL”

This story began as a conversation with a couple of dear friends, Clark and Kathy Kidd, as we were driving away from the Casa Maria restaurant in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. We were joking about brand names that might tell what a product actually is, instead of completely unrelated names. “Tight-ass Jeans” instead of Jordache, for instance. Then I applied the idea to books and decided it was about time I wrote a novel called “F---ing Good Read.” But we decided that nobody would publish such a title, so we'd have to call it “Damn Fine Novel.”

I wrote the story the next morning, with the idea of submitting it to the graduate writing course I was taking at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It ended up being a kind of twisted Escheresque literary joke, and as my wife pointed out when I read it to her over the phone, there was no way I could turn this story in to the workshop, since it absolutely ridiculed the kind of story that these students were trying to write. So instead of turning it in for a grade, I published it pseudonymously in the Green Pages section of my fanzine, Short Form. It marks the only time that I've used the “F-word” (as we Mormons call it) in my fiction; I hope that the necessity for using it here will be obvious.

“BILLY'S BOX”

There are three LDS Church magazines. While I was working for The Ensign, the magazine for adults, the offices of The New Era, the Church's teen magazine, were in the suite just south of us, and the offices of The Friend, the Church's children's magazine, were in the suite just north of us on the twenty-third floor of the LDS Church Office Building. We saw the other magazines' editors now and then, and got to hear them moan about how rare it was for them to get good fiction. So while Jay Parry and Lane Johnson and I were working on story ideas, we inevitably turned to trying to write stories that would meet the needs of The Friend and The New Era.

One of the results was “Billy's Box,” a story in which I tried to realistically depict a very young child in a story that might appeal to slightly older children—and, I hoped, their parents.

“THE BEST FAMILY HOME EVENING EVER”

The Mormon Church encourages its members to meet together as families in their own homes every Monday night. This story should make clear both what Family Home Evening is supposed to be—and what it more commonly is. This specific story, however, is based on some experiences of my brother-in-law, Scott Allen, when he was very young.

“BICICLETA”

This story is a pretty faithful depiction of a real incident that happened on my mission to Brazil, when we taught a young boy to ride a bicycle. What I couldn't convey in the story was the desperate poverty and ignorance of this family, and yet the powerful love that bound them together. They were good people, and for the first time I realized that it was possible for people to sleep packed into a room the size of a small conference table and still be decent, civilized human beings. Teaching the boy to ride a bicycle was such a pathetically small thing to do to help them—but it was something, and that was more than I had ever been able to do before. I think it was this family's desperate financial condition that finally killed any remnant of allegiance to free market capitalism that I might still have had.

“I THINK MOM AND DAD ARE GOING CRAZY, JERRY”

I wrote about a half-dozen stories for The New Era magazine during this time, and while the editor, Brian Kelly, bought several of them, to my memory only this one actually appeared in print—the others were somehow not quite “correct” enough for an official Church publication. This was not an issue of censorship. The Church leadership was the publisher, not some outside censor, and they had not only the right but the responsibility to make sure that what appeared in the Church magazines was exactly what they wanted to say to the members. In the meantime, though, there were things that needed to be said in some unofficial forum, not by way of criticism, but in order to show the great variety of possibilities for individual identity within the larger community identity.

Unfortunately, in LDS Church publishing at that time it seemed there were only two kinds of publisher: official or quasi-official Church publishing, which by definition could publish only the most narrowly acceptable kind of material; and the dissident press, which delighted in publishing things that were either so literary as to be unreadable, or so offensive and inflammatory that most Mormons could only perceive it as another form of anti-Mormon literature. What was missing was the loyal alternative press, by no means an opposition, but rather a more open unofficial press that could speak freely, but in ways that the Church membership would receive as coming from within the Church, not outside it.

I waited a long time for such a press to appear, believing that if it did, it would be quite successful. While I was waiting, I wrote a few works that belonged in that genre: Saintspeak: The Mormon Dictionary, a gentle satire that nevertheless affirms Mormon values and only criticizes the Saints where we tend to depart from those values; and Saints, a Mormon historical novel that gives a perspective that could never be published by the official LDS press if only because the official press is not free to imagine what thoughts might have passed through Joseph Smith's head, or what words he might have whispered to his wife in bed. The response from the Church membership was all the proof I needed that there was a great hunger for this kind of writing among the loyal members of the Church. So this past year—1989—I used earnings from my science fiction that I could ill spare and launched my own publishing company, Hatrack River Publications, to bring out the kind of book that I thought was needed. It will take time to build an audience—we have no promotional budget and must rely on word of mouth—but our first two novels are doing very well, and in the coming year we expect to publish several more, including novel adaptations of some of my early LDS plays.

All of that began, really, with the stories I sold to The New Era that, unlike “I Think Mom and Dad Are Going Crazy, Jerry,” were never cleared for publication. And, though this story is definitely an early work of mine, and does not represent the level of skill and sophistication that Hatrack River Publications looks for in the books we publish, the story does represent the basic approach: humor, satire, along with an honest representation of LDS life.

“GERT FRAM”

“Gert Fram” was my first published fiction. I wrote it years after the first draft of “Ender's Game”; in fact, I whipped it out in one night to meet a deadline for The Ensign magazine's special fine arts issue in July of 1977. It is sentimental—but with sentiment that is deeply felt within the Mormon community. It is the most strongly Mormon of all my works, I think.

I had an uncredited collaborator on this story, by the way—Gert Fram herself. Gert Fram was the nom de plume of my then-future sister-in-law, Nancy Allen (now Nancy Allen Black). In her childhood she actually wrote all but the last of the Gert Fram books, exactly as they appear in this story; she, with a friend of hers, lived a pretend life as world-famous authors, and produced these books for each other. So, while the incidents of this story are entirely out of my imagination, the character of Gert Fram and the books she wrote are entirely the creation of the young Nancy Allen. I keep urging her to write the young adult novel Gert Fram, so that I can publish it with Hatrack River. Nancy remains the most madly creative person I've ever known, and if she actually wrote the book, I think it would be a work of genius.

It was for this story that I first used the pseudonym “Byron Walley,” which appeared as the credit line for all my fiction in the LDS magazines. It began for one of the traditional reasons: I already had my name too often in the July 1977 fine arts issue of The Ensign. Both an article and a poem appeared under my name. “Gert Fram” appeared under the name Byron Walley, and my play “Rag Mission” appeared under the name Brian Green. I liked the Byron Walley name and have used it ever since when pseudonyms were required.

Now, at last, you have come to the end of this book. The introductions and afterwords themselves amount to some forty thousand words—a slim novel's worth of text. It is outrageous that I should imagine anyone would want to read all of this; and yet, whether or not you read the introductions and afterwords, I hope some people will read at least some of the stories, if only because it is there that some of my most heartfelt work has appeared. I have often said, in other places, that it is in the short fiction that you find the cutting edge of science fiction and fantasy. New authors show up there first; new ideas and techniques also tend to find their way into the magazines before the book publishers are ready for them, or before the writers are willing to invest a novel's-worth of time in them.

Some of our best writers, of course, almost never write short fiction, like Tim Powers, or write it almost as an afterthought it seems, like Lisa Goldstein. Others, like Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury, write almost nothing but short fiction. But the fact remains that if you want to understand what science fiction is, you must read the short fiction —The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America; The Hugo Winners, an anthology series edited and introduced by Isaac Asimov; Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison, the definitive anthology of the sixties and seventies in science fiction. There you'll see most of the history of science fiction unfold. There you'll see the first blossoming and the freshest songs of most of the writers who created this field and keep it alive.

In these pages you've seen something far less interesting (to everyone but me and my mother): my personal history as a writer. Every step I've taken in my books began with a step taken in one or more of these stories. Every idea I've explored in my novels, I first broached in fiction in one of these tales. And if I have anything of value to say to you, I hope I've said it here.