Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [38]
Covey shifted his butt, straightening slightly on his stool, abruptly overwhelmed with the urge to confess. “I’m a writer. I make a very nice living because I have written twenty-four novels.”
“Good on ya, mate.”
“No, it isn’t. It isn’t good on me at all. It sucks. You want to know why?” Of course the bartender wanted to know why. It was his job. “Because all twenty-four are exactly alike. The titles differ, so do some of the details, but basically I’ve been writing the same goddamn book over and over again for the past twenty years. Each year they sell a few more copies, and each year I get a little more in royalties and a little more disgusted with myself. Because I know I can write something else, something better.” The sanctity of the confessional was interrupted by the arrival of a trio of middle-aged white men. They entered the bar cackling with midwestern twang. Covey tried to ignore them.
“That’s why I came here. To find inspiration. To expose myself to new surroundings, new ideas.” He held up the empty lager bottle. “So far I have found only this, and it is not worth even a novelette.”
“I tell ya, they were buck naked, the both of ’em!”
“Gawann, Fred.” The doubter wore plaid shorts and a white tennis shirt stretched taut over the anchored blimp of his belly.
“He’s tellin’ the truth, Jimmy. They weren’t bad lookers, either.” A dirty snigger punctuated the observation propounded by the third man. “Shoulda seen the wife’s reaction to ’em. Edith like to have peed in her pants.” The trio chortled as one, a Topeka chorus distinctly unmelodic. The sound grated on the smooth stone of the floor.
“We tried to get the driver to stop,” said the first speaker. “Dumb Aussie ignored us. Said we were seeing things. That there wasn’t nobody living in that part of the rain forest, naked or otherwise. But I seen ’em.” He leaned forward, squinching the belly. “Bill did, too.”
“That’s right.” The second man nodded solemnly. “Buck naked, they was.”
An irritated Covey watched as the three traversed the length of the bar like oysters escaping a buffet. “What do you suppose that was all about?” He looked back to the bartender. “You have naked women living in your jungle?”
“Rain forest.” The bartender corrected him without looking up from his work. “Maybe.”
Covey chuckled, reached for his glass, hesitated. Something in the younger man’s tone…
“It’s a joke, right? You’re goofing on me.”
“No joke, mate. It’s a woman and her daughter, fair dinkum. Eleven years they been out there. Live off the land, they do. So people say.”
Covey pushed his glass aside. “Why? Why would anyone want to do that? Much less a mother and daughter.”
The bartender turned away, hunkering down with the air of a man who had already said too much. “Their business. Why ask me? You’re the writer.”
“I’m a novelist, not a reporter.” There’s something here, he found himself thinking. Something in what’s not being said. Was it worth checking out? On the face of it, the story belonged near the top of the bullshit probability index. Doubtless the bartender had overheard the three clowns from Kansas as clearly as his customer and had improvised a good gag on the spot.
But the way Covey was feeling, anything was better than flying home to face the accusatory sameness of book twenty-five and the screeching inadequacy of his meager, overpaid talent.
“I don’t believe you, of course, but certain of my fellow travelers whom I’ve been unable to avoid keep insisting I ought to see some of the jung…the rain forest…before I go home. Assuming I decide to give it a try, how might I locate these antipodean naiads?”
“You don’t. They’re supposed to live way up in the backside of the Daintree.” As bartenders do, the young Aussie busied himself polishing a glass. “You don’t ‘find’ anybody in the Daintree. It’s a garden God planted and then forgot about and now it’s all overgrown. Nobody’ll take you into the back of in there.”
Digging into a pocket, Covey extracted a thick wad of traveler’s checks. Very slowly and deliberately he signed the one on top. “Nobody?