Now it is Ted’s arm which is gripped, and none too gently.
“Wait a minute!” Ted says. “There’s something else! Something even more valuable! I don’t know if there’s a word for it, but…”
Before he can continue, the Sergeant-at-Arms drags him out and hustles him rapidly down the hall, past several gawking boys and girls almost exactly his own age. There is a word, and he’ll learn it years later, in Blue Heaven. The word is facilitator, and as far as Paul “Pimli” Prentiss is concerned, it makes Ted Stevens Brautigan just about the most valuable hume in the universe.
Not on that day in 1916, though. On that day in 1916, he is dragged briskly down the hallway and deposited on the granite step outside the main doors and told by a man with a foot-thick accent that “Y’all just want t’stay outta heah, boa.” After some consideration, Ted decides the Sergeant-at-Arms isn’t calling him a snake; boa in this context is most likely Dixie for boy.
For a little while Ted just stands where he has been left. He’s thinking What does it take to convince you? and How blind can you be? He can’t believe what just happened to him.
But he has to believe it, because here he is, on the outside. And at the end of a six-mile walk around Hartford he thinks he understands something else as well. They will never believe. None of them. Not ever. They’ll refuse to see that a fellow who could read the collective mind of the German High Command might be mildly useful. A fellow who could tell the Allied High Command where the next big German push was going to come. A fellow who could do a thing like that a few times—maybe even just once or twice!—might be able to end the war by Christmas. But he won’t have the chance because they won’t give it to him. And why? It has something to do with the second doctor changing his number when Ted landed on it, and then refusing to write another one down. Because somewhere down deep they want to fight, and a guy like him would spoil everything.
It’s something like that.
Fuck it, then. He’ll go to Harvard on his uncle’s nickel.
And does. Harvard’s all Dinky told them, and more: Drama, Debate, Harvard Crimson, Mathematical Odd Fellows and, of course, the capper, Phi Beta Crapper. He even saves Unc a few bucks by graduating early.
He is in the south of France, the war long over, when a telegram reaches him: UNCLE DEAD STOP RETURN HOME SOONEST STOP.
The key word here seemed to be STOP.
God knows it was one of those watershed moments. He went home, yes, and he gave comfort where comfort was due, yes. But instead of stepping into the furniture business, Ted decides to STOP his march toward financial success and START his march toward financial obscurity. In the course of the man’s long story, Roland’s ka-tet never once hears Ted Brautigan blame his deliberate anonymity on his outré talent, or on his moment of epiphany: this is one valuable talent that no one in the world wants.
And God, how he comes to understand that! For one thing, his “wild talent” (as the pulp science-fiction magazines sometimes call it) is actually physically dangerous under the right circumstances. Or the wrong ones.
In 1935, in Ohio, it makes Ted Brautigan a murderer.
He has no doubt that some would feel the word is too harsh, but he will be the judge of that in this particular case, thank you oh so very much, and he thinks the word is apt. It’s Akron and it’s a blue summer dusk and kids are playing kick-the-can at one end of Stossy Avenue and stickball at the other and Brautigan stands on the corner in a summerweight suit, stands by the pole with the white stripe painted on it, the white stripe that means the bus stops here. Behind him is a deserted candystore with a blue NRA eagle in one window and a whitewashed message in the other that says THEIR KILLING THE LITTLE MAN. Ted is just standing there with his scuffed cordovan briefcase and a brown sack—a pork chop for his supper, he got it at Mr. Dale’s Fancy Butcher Shop—when all at once somebody runs into him from behind and he’s driven into the telephone pole with the white stripe on it. He connects nose-first. His nose breaks. It sprays blood. Then his mouth connects, and he feels his teeth cut into the soft lining of his lips, and all at once his mouth is filled with a salty taste like hot tomato juice. There’s a thud in the small of his back and a ripping sound. His trousers are pulled halfway down over his ass by the force of the hit, hanging crooked and twisted, like the pants of a clown, and all at once a guy in a tee-shirt and gabardine slacks with a shiny seat is running off down Stossy Avenue toward the stickball game and that thing flapping in his right hand, flapping like a brown leather tongue, why, that thing is Ted Brautigan’s wallet. He has just been mugged out of his wallet, by God!
The purple dusk of that summer night deepens suddenly to full dark, then lightens up again, then deepens once more. It’s his eyes, doing the trick that so amazed the second doctor almost twenty years before, but Ted hardly notices. His attention is fixed on the fleeing man, the son of a bitch who just mugged him out of his wallet and spoiled his face in the process. He’s never been so angry in his life, never, and although the thought he sends at the fleeing man is innocuous, almost gentle
(say buddy I would’ve given you a dollar if you’d asked maybe even two)
it has the deadly weight of a thrown spear. And it was a spear. It takes him some time to fully accept that, but when the time comes he realizes that he’s a murderer and if there’s a God, Ted Brautigan will someday have to stand at His throne and answer for what he’s just done. The fleeing man looks like he stumbles over something, but there’s nothing there, only HARRY LOVES BELINDA printed on the cracked sidewalk in fading chalk. The sentiment is surrounded with childish doodles—stars, a comet, a crescent moon—which he will later come to fear. Ted feels like he just took a spear in the middle of the back himself, but he, at least, is still standing. And he didn’t mean it. There’s that. He knows in his heart that he didn’t mean it. He was just… surprised into anger.
He picks up his wallet and sees the stickball kids staring at him, their mouths open. He points his wallet at them like some kind of gun with a floppy barrel, and the boy holding the sawed-off broomhandle flinches. It’s the flinch even more than the falling body that will haunt Ted’s dreams for the next year or so, and then off and on for the rest of his life. Because he likes kids, would never scare one on purpose. And he knows what they are seeing: a man with his pants mostly pulled down so his boxer shorts show (for all he knows his dingus could be hanging out of the fly front, and wouldn’t that just be the final magical touch), a wallet in his hand and a loony look on his bloody kisser.
“You didn’t see anything!” he shouts at them. “You hear me, now! You hear me! You didn’t see anything!”
Then he hitches up his pants. Then he goes back to his briefcase and picks it up, but not the pork chop in the brown paper sack, fuck the pork chop, he lost his appetite along with one of his incisors. Then he takes another look at the body on the sidewalk, and the frightened kids. Then he runs.
Which turns into a career.
Five