By Paul Stapleton

After the eviction, I took to living out of my car for a single weekend—which was more than enough—in Oak Park, Illinois, where I parked on a quiet side street next to Hemingway’s birthplace, doing my best to weigh my options favorably. Over the years, I had read enough Camus to be a danger to myself if not select others. It was summer and it was hot. I had no job. I had no apartment. I had no girlfriend. I had no boyfriend. Really, I had no people at all. I was an only child, my parents were deceased, my ex-wife had moved to Las Vegas for a tenure-track job (no kids), and I had no health insurance. 

My car had no air-conditioning. 

And as of the last billing cycle, I had no cell-phone service. 

My life as an academic, and arguably, my life in general, was a bust. 

I began contemplating a certain pilgrimage, the destination Ketchum, Idaho, the town where my personal inspiration—and the fatal topic of my dissertation—shot himself, died, and was buried. 

(I myself am a registered Democrat and not a gun owner.)

Ketchum lay on the banks of the Big Wood River in a depression of the Sawtooth Mountains next to Sun Valley, the ski resort, and from the east, the road leading to Ketchum passed some seriously deadbeat places like the barbed-wired testing grounds of the Idaho National Laboratories, a town of paint-peeling shacks called Atomic City, and a federal wilderness called Craters of the Moon, which to a solitary melancholic driver like me, just pulling in from Chicagoland, looked like an enormous abandoned parking lot, hacked by giants into huge piles of busted-up blacktop, which was actually petrified lava from ages and ages ago, a place so barren it made me wonder if death were perhaps the author of things. 

I parked my car in a tidy little campsite in the federal campground there, feeling right at home. While pondering the darkness of the rocky wilderness, I noticed a thick, serendipitous coil of rope left behind perhaps by the previous campsite residents. I figured it might come in handy and threw it in the trunk.

When I arrived in Ketchum the next morning, I easily found Hemingway’s grave in the Ketchum town cemetery where his rectangular tombstone beckoned from a bed of pine needles, recumbent beneath towering spruces redolent and casting down continuous shade. I scanned the landscape—the mountains and the clear, flowing river nearby—and wondered where the house might be where the author shot himself. After asking around, I learned the local library owned it. 

At the front desk, the librarian said I could look at a video of the house on a special computer terminal in the Hemingway Reading Room, but I could not see the house itself. He seemed to think looking at videos was the same thing as seeing things in person.  

I did not.   

I persisted in asking questions about the whereabouts of the house, and the librarian persisted in recommending the video. A few nosy patrons, a hale, keen-eyed couple—Sun Valley types—looked me up and down and declared I couldn’t see the house as if it were their business what I could or could not see. 

Then they stared at me, domineeringly, as if their eyes could whisk me into oblivion.

I was a weak-boned thin individual—for the most part thin—a forty-year-old white male in a T-shirt, cut-off jeans, and flip-flops, sporting bifocals, the kind with the line, and I was well-aware that I did not measure up to any golden ratios. 

I wiggled my toes, which broke their trance and coaxed them back to the topic at hand. 

“But the library owns the house,” I said. “It’s a public entity.”  

“The people living out there don’t care for the public,” they said.

“What kind of people don’t care for the public but live in a house owned by the public library?” I asked.

The librarian intervened. “A writer and her family,” he said. 

“How is a writer and her family living out there?”  

“Because she won a grant.” 

I assessed this new information, quickly, strategically. 

“I’d like to see an application for that grant,” I informed the librarian.  

Now he looked me up and down and said, “You’d have to be an author or scholar first.” 

“Maybe I am an author or scholar first, albeit maybe not a particularly success…,” I paused, “eye-catching one.” 

Now I looked him up and down.

He was fondling a clumsy stack of books, secure in his swivel chair. 

A flake of dandruff clung to his eyebrow.

“I’d like to see the application,” I demanded, “and the house, too, so I can decide if I should apply to go live in it.” 

He nervously fiddled with his fingers before informing me that the application was on that special computer terminal in the Hemingway Reading Room. “But the deadline has passed,” he said.

“I’ll take a look anyway.”

The Sun Valley couple persisted with their interference. 

“The people out there don’t like tourists,” the one said. 

“Tourists are a pain in the tuchus,” said the other.

“It’s not their house,” I said, “and I’m not a tourist.”  

“It’s on a private road,” the one said. 

“You sure look like a tourist,” said the other.   

“Every private road is connected to a public one,” I said. “And I’m here on personal business.”

“God damn the roads! If you go out there, you’ll regret it.”  

“Your business is to keep out.”  

At this point, it became a matter of self-respect that I go out there. 

“We’ll see,” I said before I turned and walked away.

I began imagining myself as Hemingway running into these very same people in this very same library and in the very same way, finding it a matter of self-respect to go out to the house, then publishing an article about it in some high-paying magazine. Although he would confess to some bleak initial intentions, the article would become widely celebrated for the existential implications of his search. 

While imagining this, I began searching for that special computer terminal in that reading room where I chanced upon a clean well-lighted bookcase loaded with a cache of local maps, atlases, and gazetteers quietly waiting for someone like me so they could be ransacked. 

The maps had it right, and when I got out there, the private road was exactly where it was supposed to be, as was the house, which unfortunately I never reached because of some unusually large kittens cavorting on the road in a manner I considered inviting. 

The kittens really liked my rope. 

The mother mountain lion, however, was hardly interested in the rope, and in the course of her attack, she exerted an assertiveness I can only describe as authorial. 

A crowd gathered afterwards, including the police, emergency workers, a local newspaper reporter, and that goddamned Sun Valley couple. They chastised me about how lucky I was to have escaped with my life. With something akin to admiration, the paramedic bandaging my feet declared, “Survival instinct, buddy, it kept you kicking.”

The police then arrested me for trespassing.

Surprisingly, I felt exhilarated. 

The next morning, after I was assigned a court date and given my release, I decided to forget about Hemingway’s house. Some things were better off left alone.  

I hit the road again, headed back to Chitown, hoping to find an English department in need of a last-minute instructor for the fall. As I passed through the Craters of the Moon, I tossed the court-appearance ticket out the window. In the rearview mirror, I watched it skim the highway, and catching a draft, dance into the wilderness. 

*   *   *

Paul Stapleton’s writing has appeared in Aethlon, Ruminate, storySouth, and elsewhere, and he won a Pushcart (XXXVII) for a short story in J Journal. He lives in North Carolina.