mournful whistle at the distant crossing, and then all they could do was turn and stare, at the long lit cars rumbling past in the middle distance, one after the other, seemingly forever. But eventually the train was gone, and the rails sang for a minute more, and the tail light was swallowed up by darkness, and they turned back to their task.
Twenty miles north the train slowed, and eased to a stop, and the doors wheezed open, and Jack Reacher stepped down into the dirt in the lee of a grain silo bigger than an apartment house.
‘I like the way you use “which”,’ I said. ‘Which made sense anyway. Subordinate clause, but you give it a fresh start.’
‘Yeah, which at the beginning of a sentence,’ Lee said, in a meditative kind of way. ‘It’s an accelerative word. Mostly. I have to be careful not to overdo it though. Becomes a habit.’
He stopped thinking about which for a moment. He was thinking about the whole of that first paragraph.
‘I’m tying my hands here. It’s a risk. Who is Keever? What is he? Why is he so damn important?’
‘Well, who is he?’
‘I’ve no idea at this point.’
I liked that about Lee’s writing. He didn’t know what he was doing. Didn’t need to know. Didn’t want to know. Had faith. Blind faith.
‘I’ve made him important though. The fear of the air search. Then you have all the mechanics of burying him. That’s what follows. From the sheer size of him and the importance. You have to do a good job of it or it’s like he’ll pop right back up again. You have to really get him right down there.’
I was struck – how could I not be? – by that metaphor in the second sentence. The actual word size is explicitly in there, spelling out the governing theme. But waterbed ? Where did that spring from?
‘I slept on a waterbed once. In California? It had a mattress on top, which is strange. But I found myself trying to line up that mattress with the base. Which is impossible. So I thought that was something like the technical problem for the parties unknown.’
‘You know, Keever sounds a lot like Reacher.’
‘Does it?’
‘Look at it. Listen to it. You’ve got the “er” at the end and the “ee” in the middle. It’s a para-rhyme. Keever-Reacher, Keever-Reacher. Sounds like the train. This is an alter-Reacher. And he’s huge, just like Reacher. You’re suggesting that this really could be Reacher. It is what will happen to Reacher if he’s not careful. You always have that. The potential fate for Reacher. Which he generally manages to work around. Unlike a lot of his partners. So you’re looking into the void right from the start. You’re actually building an abyss. Nothingness.’
Child said nothing.
‘But you don’t start with dialogue. You could have done. You know, “Hey, what a big bastard he was!” “What are we going to do with the body?” “I know, let’s dig a hole, a big one” – that kind of thing.’
‘Yeah,’ he grinned, ‘I know what you mean. A lot of writers are like that. They start with dialogue because it looks easier to a reader. Lots of wide open spaces and air. I very rarely start with dialogue. It’s partly tactical. I like it dense. But mostly, Reacher is not a conversationalist. I don’t want to give the wrong impression.’
‘I think Camus said something like that. Cut out all the chit-chat.’
Lee took a drag on his cigarette. ‘I’m taking a risk with this. It’s a dense wedge of text. But you’re saying to the reader all the time, don’t worry, I’m going to take you by the hand and lead you through it.’
‘“Hogs were rooting animals”?’
‘I’m really reacting to the reader’s question here. “Hold on, they’re hogs, aren’t they going to dig him up again and have him for dinner?” So we have to go down deep.’
‘With a backhoe.’
‘I love the backhoe. It’s the American word for a JCB in England. A digging machine. A giant shovel. Saves you a lot of time and energy. I’m being a little bit omniscient observer. But they are thinking and talking in their vernacular. So we’ve got to try and stick with that.’
‘You’ve got “steaming” and “steaming”. And another “steaming” in the previous. I like that. No elegant variation. It’s all steaming.’
‘I really like the steaming. “Shit” and “piss” could change – if I can find some agricultural terms. Reacher wouldn’t generally have shit and piss.’
‘You know, I have this feeling you don’t much like rural places. They come up a lot in your fiction as the natural habitat of the bad guys. Is this your take on the American pastoral? Are you being just a bit satirical here about a whole mythology of nature?’
‘It’s common in western cultures,’ he snapped back. ‘The rural is revered. Farmers are revered.’ He stood up. Wandered over to the window. Twitched the blind. Looked out on an urban landscape of roofs and windows and water towers. Some sky. A lot of concrete. ‘But Reacher is all about logic and fact. He would say it’s an unexamined assumption. Lots of different kinds of farmers. No doubt some of them are fantastic. But among them are some of the stupidest people doing the stupidest things.’
Lee – he loves a good rant. Sometimes it’s hard to stop him.
‘And if they come up with an innovation it’s only to make it even more stupid. Look at chopping up cows in order to feed them to other cows – thus causing BSE. Everybody knows they eat grass. We’re turning them into cannibals. Mad cannibals.’ He turned away from the window, sick of the sight of some distant, seemingly innocent farming community, actually full of unscrupulous maniacs. Nothing like Charlotte’s Web at all (the one with Wilbur the ‘radiant’ pig). Lee’s pigs had to be hogs, not pigs.
‘They are not necessarily the repository of wisdom,’ Lee went on. ‘They are just as much the repository of ignorance and superstition. And look at the dustbowl years. That was all the fault of the farmers. The government was trying to tell them all the time, don’t keep planting and harvesting, planting and harvesting every year, year on year, you’re going to kill it. And then it dies and blows away. And they’re, “Hey, we didn’t know!” They don’t know anything.’
I had a feeling that Make Me wasn’t going to be a hymn of praise to that little farmhouse on the prairie. Not one with a backhoe, anyhow.
Lee went and sat down again, finally running out of steam. He settled himself back in the chair and put his feet back up on the desk, crossed them, and gazed fondly at the screen.
‘I’m feeling good about it. I think it works in and of itself. It’s not overlong. And it gets you going. I wish I knew more. But it raises some great questions.’ It was something he had written for the ‘Draft’ column of the New York Times in 2012, under the heading A Simple Way to Create Suspense. ‘Ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story’ – and then ‘delay the answer’. It was easy for Lee to delay, because he really didn’t know the answer. ‘Who is Keever? Why is he dead? What happened? This is what we want to know. The questions are there. Yes, I’m feeling good at the moment.’
He nodded to himself, by way of assent to his own statement. And then he added a qualification. ‘But also I’m feeling a bit challenged by the next scene. What is Reacher even doing there? How come he’s getting off the train anyway? Why here?’
Clearly Reacher has been doing nothing of great import before the book starts up. Just roaming about, no dramas. When he steps down off that train he is re-entering the world of action, that realm in which things happen and must be reported on. Lee didn’t feel the need to keep tabs on the quiescent Reacher, Jack’s well-behaved, decent-citizen, peace-loving