Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [162]
“They are very entertaining.”
“They’re okay, Miss Abigail. Not my real good stories. Kind of the reason I left that story for you to read was that I didn’t want you to think I was a trivial writer.”
“My goodness, son, you’re not even twelve years old.”
“Sure, but I’m behind schedule. I’ve just started my serious writing.”
“Why do you want to be a writer so badly?”
Gideon’s face reddened. “It’s a secret,” he said.
“We already share one secret.”
“I don’t even share this secret with my sister.”
“All right, have it your way.”
Gideon looked at the floor and shoved his hands in his pockets, then remembered Miss Abigail didn’t like the boys putting their hands there and pulled them out quickly. “Miss Abigail, I want to be a writer because writers know when a person is lonely. I mean, when Molly read me some books, those writers reached out and said, Look, Gideon, we know about your loneliness and we know that you feel downtrodden. And they said ... I’ll stand up for you. You’re not alone anymore.”
“You know that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t you think a writer should develop a balanced view of life? Writers have to know how to laugh, to drink, to be ridiculous and just a little crazy. That takes time.”
“I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that, they have to get mad and stay mad. If things don’t make a writer mad, he’ll end up writing ‘Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail.’”
“What makes you angry, Gideon?”
“You know.” ‘
“You mean the situation with the negroes?”
“I cry about it some nights. It’s much worse than Jewish people are treated and we get treated pretty badly, sometimes. I can’t understand what keeps them from rebelling.”
“When people have been reduced to slaves, it takes a long time to mount the rage needed to rebel. They accept their misfortune passively. It’s a lot easier than fitting oneself for a noose. Perhaps their children will rebel.”
“Well, that’s something I’m going to do as a writer, make people angry. I’m going to stir them up.”
She stared at the boy for ever so long. He was so small, so meaningless in the grand scheme of things. A billion or so other young men had frothed in anger before him and they were never heard from again. Yet there was something about this child. He was already accepting the pain of other people. Of course, the cheapest commodity in the world was unfulfilled genius. He craved recognition as a unique human being. What kind of bloody curse was he putting on himself? Or can the poor little fellow even help himself? In her ten years as a teacher, she had searched for, longed to find that kind of wild spark in one of her pupils. Good Lord, he was it. She knew. There was something about the way he looked into her eyes ... no, there was something haunting about this boy.
“Tell me, Gideon. Do you want to have, or do you want to be?”
“I’m going to be,” he answered without hesitation.
She hefted the composition book. “This is a very good story,” she said. “I don’t think Hemingway wrote it much better.”
Gideon turned his eyes away in shame. “You, uh, read A Farewell to Arms, then?”
“Yep, partner, I read it.”
“Yeah, I should have known. Well, maybe I did use a few of his ideas.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that. We all start out following our hero and then, somewhere along the line, we start to put our own stamp and style on things. There was an awful lot of Mozart in Beethoven, until Beethoven found his own way to say it.”
“I’m glad you told me. I always felt I was cheating.”
“When you’re telling your stories to the class, I have detected a lot of Jack London, as well as Eugene O’Neill.”
“To be honest and absolutely truthful, Miss Abigail, I’ve fooled a lot of other teachers.”
“I’ll bet you did. Why did you set this story in Mexico?”
“My sister Molly and I just finished reading Tortilla Flat together. John Steinbeck is going to be my favorite writer.”
“I don’t believe I know him.”
“He’s new. He’ll be the greatest of them all. Tortilla Flat is about the Mexicans ... the Chicanos in Monterey. Boy, does he stand up for those people.”
“We mentioned Eugene O