In this excerpt from Jack Heffron’s book project?that combines fiction and nonfiction, you’ll notice the strength of Jack’s?scenes and dialog, exactly the craft skills?he?will be teaching this year at the June 9-12 Writing It Real conference. In the book, Jack told me, the protagonist, Jack Finney, is a retired advertising executive who recently has been forced to go back to work. With his marriage ended, kids grown, and finances depleted, he mines his past — and America’s past — in hopes of making peace with the regrets that plague him. His search sometimes includes scenes with historical figures, such as this one with long-dead beat writer Jack Kerouac. It eventually takes him on an extended journey along Route 66.

From Route 66
by Jack Heffron

The white-haired, too-tan guy at the corner table tapped his knife against his water glass to the rhythm of ?As Time Goes By.? Finney played it well, adding some ninths and diminished chords to the basic arrangement to give it a richer, jazzier sound. The glass tapper was a hair off the beat, but no one else seemed aware that he was playing at all.

On Tuesdays he played at a winery not far from his house. A decent crowd on this Tuesday. Sort of the usual crowd?mostly older, mostly couples, though a few big groups, maybe families or co-workers. As they drank their wine and ate their dinners?salad and pizza was the evening?s special?they rarely paid much attention to him, which pretty much was how he liked it. That way he could play whatever he wanted, as long as the song added to the subdued atmosphere. Standards were always good. American Songbook. Light jazz. Johnny Mercer, Billy Eckstein. Sinatra classics. Eva Cassidy. Michaels Buble and Franks. Tom Waits.

?You?re wallpaper,? Felix, the owner, had told him when he let him play the first time. ?They should enjoy you but hardly be aware of you, know what I?m saying??

?Sure,? Finney had said, eager to land the gig, his first since giving up music so many years ago.

?Your job isn?t to draw attention,? Felix said. ?It?s to sort of make everything seem just a little bit better.?

Felix meant no disrespect. He knew his business. For twenty years a car salesman whose hobby was making wine, Felix went with his passion and opened a winery-restaurant maybe a decade ago. Grew a beard, a ponytail and started wearing only hemp clothing. From the chronic knit of his brow he looked like he?d found out that doing what you love for a living is a sure way to kill the love.

When Finney finished playing ?As Time Goes By,? he improvised for a bit, using the main chords of the song as the base, then moved smoothly into ?I Remember You.? Johnny Mercer?s ode to losing Judy Garland.

As much as possible Finney tried to connect the songs, moving seamlessly from one to the next to avoid the pause when people felt compelled to put down their forks and applaud, turning his musical service into a duty, an annoyance. Or if they didn?t feel compelled to clap, there was an uncomfortable moment of silence. Uncomfortable, anyway, to Finney.

But when ?I Remember You? ended, the white-haired guy at the corner table, sitting with a handsome woman, filled the pause with, ?Know any Billy Joel?? He flashed a big smile?mouth filled with too-white teeth that contrasted too sharply with his too-tan face.

Finney shook his head. ?Sorry.?

What about ?Piano Man???

Finney shook his head again. ?Don?t know any Billy Joel.?

?A piano man that doesn?t know ?Piano Man??? The guy tapped the woman across from him on the hand, and she turned to look at Finney. She was less attractive than he?d assumed from mostly seeing her in profile. She looked like she couldn?t care less if he knew any Billy Joel.

Finney wanted to explain that he thought Billy Joel was crap. Wanted to say it in a tone that suggested anyone who liked Billy Joel was pretty much crap too. Wanted to say, Fuck Billy Joel.

?Some Jim Croce then,? the guy said. Clearly angling for a 70s pop tune he recognized.

?Croce?s tough to do on a piano,? Finney said. ?He was a guitar player. Wrote his songs for guitar.?

?So who do you know?? the guy said, too drunk to bother concealing his disdain. Or maybe he wouldn?t bother concealing it even if he was stone sober.

Finney said, ?What about some Steely Dan??

The guy said, ?Never cared for him? and leaned across the table to resume what appeared to be an intimate conversation with the woman, quickly forgetting about the pianist who didn?t know any good songsFinney played the rest of his set without talking to anyone, enjoying the predictable progression of chords, one to the next. Familiar. Dependable. Sang about love as imagined by mid-century songwriters. Songs about lost love, usually, which he sometimes thought was the only way to truly feel it.

He scanned the restaurant now and then, half-looking for her. The woman who would suddenly appear. Maybe Lori from the office. Or Abby, coming back after all these years. Or Marcia, his first serious crush. Or the many others who had come and gone. Or the vague, indefinable someone who he?d been waiting for most of his life. That one. Would he even recognize her? Probably not. And he was too old now anyway. Too jaded and gray. Time to put all that foolishness behind him.

By the time he finished playing, the place was nearly empty. Jaime and Paige, the servers, bustled around collecting empty glasses from the tables. Felix ran the vacuum cleaner, jabbing it under the tables, as if angry that people had shown up and made such a mess. Finney grabbed the wad of dollar bills from the tip jar, called ?Good night? to Felix, who was busy rolling up the long cord to the vacuum.

?Yeah, good night for a Tuesday,? Felix said in his deadpan way, as if he?d rather be anywhere else than in this place he had created to pursue his dream.

Finney nodded, lugged his equipment to the car, and headed home.

****

He woke from a nightmare. Head-sweaty and anxious, curled in a tight ball with thick covers pulled tightly around him. Ten till five. Too early to get up on a dark morning, but he lurched out of bed and padded downstairs for the hum-drum comfort of coffee and the newspaper.

By the time he sipped his first cup, most of the nightmare was too hazy to recall and seemed not so nightmarish. It involved his younger boy and his long-ago job at Orville & Ross, which for some reason provided a frequent setting for his too frequent nightmares. But college was somehow wrapped up in it too. His son was in school and needed a ride to campus. For some dream-logic reason, Finney couldn?t get there to pick him up.

Much of his anxiety?in dreams and in real life?Involved work and his boys, his unwavering urge to protect them. With steaming mug of coffee in hand, he headed outside to the deck to feed his birds, knowing he would feel better right away. Just needed to reconnect with the rational, natural world.

The sun had begun rising, splattering orange and pink across a gray bulge of clouds on the horizon. The air was warm and already alive with the sound of his birds. He made soothing, slightly high-pitched sounds, sort of baby talk in some made-up language. After a few minutes, a single male cardinal zipped up onto the top of the basketball hoop, perching on the backboard and looking straight at him.

?Morning, Fred,? Finney said. He?d created a bond with this cardinal, though sometimes was not completely sure it was the same one every day. As he cooed and chattered at Fred, the bird tilted his head in quick little jerks, as though trying to make out what Finney was trying to tell him.

He?d begun the morning ritual a couple of years before. He knew the birds and squirrels and rabbits better than he knew the people in his life. He closely watched their habits and patterns. The feedings had attracted and maybe even built a big society of birds among the trees in his backyard?a thick, interconnected network of pines, oaks, and maples, a dense thatch of honeysuckle. The deck jutted nearly into the trees so that the birds could flit easily to the top of the rail, grab a piece of sunflower seed or millet and zip back to safety.

What had started with the single male cardinal had grown to a half-dozen or more males and at least as many females. And there were plenty of house wrens, finches, black-capped chickadees, tufted titmice, a couple of fat mourning doves, an occasional blue jay or red-headed woodpecker. He?d begun this daily ritual by just pouring a small mound onto the top of the deck rail but found that the birds spent more time fighting over the food than they did eating it. So he spread it out in a half-dozen or so splatters of seed far enough apart that they could munch in relative comfort.

Then he went inside, poured another cup of coffee and sat at the table right off his kitchen and read the newspaper online between watching the birds gorge on their flapping feast. Despite the plenty of seed and the wide spacing, they still fought constantly for rights to one of the splatters. He kept an eye out for the squirrels that could hoover up an entire mound of seed in minutes. For them he collected acorns that he dribbled into the yard, hoping to distract them and allow the birds to eat having to worry only about their dive-bombing compadres.

He tried not to think about the scurry of the office that awaited him, focusing instead on the scurry of birds feeding, each of them intent on getting enough seeds to eat, poking at the piles before skittering away, as if called to some urgent detail that must be handled that instant. He also tried to manage the feeding, giving preference to the cardinals. When a squawking jay or plump woodpecker muscled in, he went outside to drive it away. Just as with his sons, now grown and gone, he wanted to nurture and protect, to orchestrate their lives. Which probably was why they called him so rarely now.

While Finney packed his lunch, Kerouac showed up, offering his usual tsk-tsk, sophomoric banter about skipping work and following one?s true calling. ?Making your lunch?? he said.

Finney didn?t bother answering as he pulled the stems off some field greens.

?Off to work??

Again Finney said nothing.

?You know this is what you should be doing,? Kerouac said, stabbing a finger at the window above the sink to the deck where at least a dozen birds now flitted in their morning breakfast.

?You hear of anybody paying eighty K to feed birds, let me know.?

?So you must worship at the altar of Mammon.?

Finney chuckled as he ripped up field greens and placed them in a Tupperware bowl.

Kerouac said, ?That?s your problem, Jack.?

?I thought you were my problem, Jack.?

Kerouac?s face crinkled. After a pause, he said, ?I?m trying to help.?

?By freeing me from the chains of avarice? So you?re Jacob Marley. Thought you were someone else.?

?There is none so blind??

?What do you think Dickens cleared on his little holiday classic? Roughly. Just ballpark. In today?s dollars. Probably didn?t foresee grabbing movie rights??

Kerouac shook his head. ?Doesn?t make it any less true. The theme of that story is just as true today. Grubbing for dough is a dead end.?

?A lofty sentiment but not one shared by the Internal Revenue Service.?

?Man, you got to find your balance.?

?Yeah, ambiguity is such a bitch.?

?Find your true you. Figure out what it is you want.?

?I want to be an Indian. Sitting high up on a hill overlooking prairie grass bending in a summer breeze. Playing a pan flute. That?s what I want.?

?You need the road, man. The road. That?s what it?s all about. That?s where you see the whole world open up.?

Finney grabbed a cup of yogurt and put it in the bag with the salad. Aware of the time and that he was running late, he hung his lunch bag on the doorknob so he wouldn?t forget it, and headed upstairs.

Kerouac followed him.

As Finney stood in the shower, hot water pounding onto his shoulders, Kerouac said, ?Your brother?s death. That was hard for you.?

Kerouac usually kept things more general, attacking subjects at an oblique angle with beatnik banter. Today, apparently, he wanted to be more direct.

Finney, said. ?Yes. Hard. But not how you?d think. Not at the time. My ex drove us home from the hospital and I didn?t cry at all. I was pissed.?

?Of course you were. Anybody would be.?

?But I was pissed mostly about her driving. My ex. She nearly wrecked twice. I yelled at her. Told her to watch what the fuck she was doing. My brother?s death, losing him?that seemed somehow completely natural. Inevitable. Part of a plan.

?Divinely ordained.?

?But not for him. For me. Which shows you the depth of my narcissism. Even his death was about me. He was the one good thing that I had to hold on to so of course he had to be taken away. Of course. Inevitable as the sunrise in the morning. So hell yeah I was pissed. But not even a little bit surprised. It was exactly what was going to happen.?

?Like a test from God.?

?Well,? Finney hesitated, ?maybe.?

?You saw yourself as sort of a Job figure.?

?Not sure I want to get biblical about it, but, sort of, I guess, yes. Punished for my prideful, lustful, sinful ways. It was nuts. Doesn?t that sound nuts??

?Grief isn?t logical. You can?t expect it to be logical.?

?But we do. And when it?s not, we start reaching for explanations. Like my mom. She sees God?s hand everywhere. Blames earthquakes on abortion. She?s crackers for Catholicism.?

Finney got out of the shower, toweled off, headed to the bedroom to dress. Kerouac followed him.

?It?s her road, man,? Kerouac said. ?You got to find your road.?

Buttoning his shirt, Finney said with a smirk. ?So that?s the answer.?

?The answer is asking the right question.?

?Oh, tell me, wise prophet, what?s the right question??

Kerouac sprawled onto the unmade bed, folded his arms behind his head. ?What?s your road, man?? he said. ?What?s your road??