Limekiller!

INTRODUCTION

by Lucius Shepard

I believe Jack Limekiller may have been the man whom Avram Davidson wanted to be; though it might be more accurate to say that Limekiller was the man Avram hoped that he, in essence, was: a gentleman of sorts with — like Avram — an insatiable curiosity, a quick, old-worldish mind, and a quirky, pungent view of life, but a bit more swashbuckling, armed with less of a temper, and perhaps standing a few inches taller than his authorial original. I think that Avram was happy when he wrote these stories, and I’m quite certain he was happy when he accumulated the experiences that inform them. They are, of course, rife with his offbeat erudition and plavful use of language and voice, but in much of Avram’s work, that playfulness is underscored by a gloomy, embittered cast of mind. In the stories you’re about to read, those qualities are not so much in evidence. There is darkness in them, to be sure, but it’s lent a joyfully exotic gloss that reflects Avram’s love for the tropic in which they are set: British Honduras; called by him, British Hidalgo; now called Belize.

I've had the good fortune to live in that country, where Avram also lived for a time, and although I may not have walked in the exact places where he walked, although I can’t absolutely guarantee that, say, a certain one of his fictional towns is, in fact, the real town of Orange Walk, I’ve gone down similar roads in similar towns, and have seen sights and heard musics that resonate with those he saw and heard. It was a beautiful place, British Honduras, an old colonial state, and vet lacking to a large degree the impotent rancor that typically pervades colonies. Avram says of it, “… more than colony but not yet a country, and often left off maps because its name seems larger than itself.” There was about its people (and what a various people they were, in heritage African, East Indian, Anglo, Spanish, Middle Eastern, Arawak, Caribe, etc., etc.) a sweet spiciness of character and a lucidity of soul that a casual observer might have characterized as “innocence,” but was, in truth, nothing of the sort. Villains of every stamp have abounded in Belize during every era, and the earliest of them soon learned how to exploit those who had crossed the ocean to exploit them. The people of British Honduras were not innocent, then, but were infected by the vivid personality of the land that bred them, stained with its macaw and parrot colors, imbued with a gravitas by the power of the sea that hemmed them in against the savage modernity of Guatemala and sanguinary Mexico. Their violence, too, was of the land, steeped in a piratical tradition (many of the citizens of the country could trace their ancestry back to Kidd and Lafitte and divers lesser men who sailed the waters of the Caribbean beneath a black flag), and though to say other than that violence is violence, no matter its tradition, would be implausibly romantic, I will assert that in the main their violence lacked the mad dispassion of contemporary atrocity. Slaughter for them was a family thing, an occupation to which they were bom.

Unfortunately, the country that inspired the Limekiller stories no longer exists. The colony has become a full-status nation and in its nationhood has fallen prey to the great afflictions of the past century. Its fabulous creatures, manatees and tapir and jaguars and such, are dwindling toward extinction, and the mahogany forests, mentioned as depleted in the text, have now been decimated. AIDS is everywhere. Street crime is endemic. Belize City, formerly the capitol, is a sewer crawling with drug dealers. No longer can you take a night stroll without experiencing anxiety in Orange Walk or Buttermilk Cay. And where there is no crime, no drugs, no filth and disease, there is a plague of Americans. Much of Belize has been sectioned off into tourist-friendly enclaves, environments in which some aspect of the land has been preserved, albeit in a cultivated fashion, dappled with bars and hotels whose ambiance — fishing nets and floats, lots of Ye Oldes, pirate chic, etc. - has been designed to conjure (yet serves merely to parody) the quaintness of colonial days. Thus, the ragged, blustery, charming spirit of the land has been deracinated and, rather than the pungent accents and eighteenth century idioms that pepper the speech of the indigents, now you are more liable to hear flattened Midwestern vowels and Tennessee drawls. One of the only places where you still can find the country that — once — was a place well worth a visit, lies here within these pages, as witnessed by the fictive eyes of Jack Limekiller and recorded by the peerless unorthodoxy of Avram Davidson’s talent and vision.

For the term of our acquaintance, spanning his last thirteen years, Avram posed the image of a diminutive, acerbic grand- fatherly man with an untidy gray beard. On the surface, he was a crusty fellow. He did not suffer fools gladly and was frequently impatient with and demanding of his friends. Like all truly committed writers, artists who live through their work, he displayed a mixture of arrogance and insecurity toward his stories (how else can one feel about something upon which one labors to distraction?), but although his arrogance was often visible, he rarely put his insecurity on public exhibition. He told jokes whose involute form and Classical references more often than not puzzled those who heard them, and he was given to quoting passages from Virgil in the Latin whenever exasperated. In many regards, he was a man of unbending principle. For instance, being a Jew, he would never sell his books to German publishers, even when he was having serious money troubles. In his personal relationships, principle would sometimes gave way to childishness. He could be vastly self-pitying and was often verbally abusive to those whom he believed had slighted him. Doubtless all these characteristics were integral to his person, yet he was a man whose mental life was vastly separate in tone from the face he presented to the world. And beneath that surface, still vital inside his (by the time I met him) infirm body, resided a soul unalloyed in its questing nature and relatively undamaged by his service as an infantryman in World War II, by divorce, financial difficulties, poor health, by the thousand disappointments and shocks that attend all but the quickest of lives. I could never clearly gauge the shape or colors of that soul, but I imagine it as a colorful mist swirling within a glass globe that is itself held by an ornate bronze claw, rather like an object that might advance some narrative function in one of Avram's fantasy stories concerning Vergil, a spiritual artifact of unknown antiquity and unfathomable purpose, having a value that the world would someday recognize and understand and celebrate more fully than ever it did when it was housed in the flesh.

That soul was, quintessentially, the soul of a recluse. I usually picture Avram alone in a darkish room made claustrophobic by tumbled books and stacks of yellowed newspapers and magazines, old tins stuffed with whatnots, and a track winding through them that allowed access to other, equally cluttered rooms. The dank basement apartment in Bremerton, Washington, where he spent the final years of his life, was devoid of natural light and devoid, also, of any bright color, of television, of all but the most basic modernities. Like a wizard’s cell, it stood in relation to Avram’s person as did his body to the soul that hobbled about inside its own teetering house. He lived, you see, mostly far from Bremerton, amid mostly unreal kingdoms of his own device, one of which — British Hidalgo — was slightly less unreal than the rest and added a crucial touch of the material to the lively next-to-nothingness contained in that glass globe. But for all the limitations of his physical existence during his later years, Avram traveled widely, as he did for all his years, through the borderless countries of his brain and brought us back his stories for souvenirs.

I first met Avram some twenty years ago at the Clarion Workshop at Michigan State University, where he was a teacher for one week and I was a student. Avram was ill and taking various medications, thus not at his best. The teaching of writing is an elusive process; indeed, there are those who claim it can’t be taught. During his time at the workshop, Avram — by virtue of his illness — did little to disprove this. That said, if he had not taught at Clarion, I doubt I would have become a writer. He validated me in a way I needed, treating me less as a student than a colleague, encouraging me to challenge myself, to explore and not exploit my gift. Yet in his encouragement there was ever a cautionary note. Once while we were going over a manuscript of mine, he said, “This is very good.” Then, giving me a deadpan look, he added, “Are you sure you want to be a writer? You’d make more money as a podiatrist.” He was a walking life lesson relating to the potential hardships of a writer’s life. One day at lunch, we (the students) were gathered at table in the cafeteria when Avram approached, cane hooked over an arm, carrying a tray laden with four entrees, two salads, several desserts, innumerable rolls. We gaped at him, wondering first how this smallish man was planning to consume so much food, and, secondly, wondering why he would attempt such a monumental consumption. He took a seat, hung his cane on the edge of the table, unloaded the tray, arranged his utensils, taking an inordinately long time to accomplish this. Finally, he looked at us and pointed to the banquet in front of him. “Why all this?” he said. “Next week, it’s back to soupbones.”

After Clarion, I didn’t see Avram for several years, though we carried on a correspondence; but when I moved to Seattle, I took the ferry across the Sound to visit him with some regularity. During those visits, I would help him with errands. He was by then limited to a walker, incapable of leaving the apartment without assistance, and he would often call me and ask me to come visit, and when I did, I would find myself pushing him about Bremerton in a wheelchair, obedient as a horse to his demands, helping him with the groceries, bill-paying, library returns, and that sort of thing. I was being used, of course, and there were times when I became impatient with him for taking advantage of the relationship. But it gradually dawned on me that this is what friends did — they used one another — and that I was using Avram every bit as much as he used me, though my usage of him was less labor intensive: as mentor, touchstone, resource. On occasion, he, too, would become impatient. Once, when I was beginning to write my own Central American stories, I wrote him a letter expressing some insecurity as to whether people would think that I was encroaching on his literary turf. A few days later, I got back a post card that read: “That’s right, Shepard. I’ve staked claim to the entire Caribbean littoral. It’s mine, all mine. Keep your grubby hands off.” I was so confounded by this burst of acerbity, it took me a goodly while to understand that he was telling me I was an idiot for assuming that any writer could dispossess another of the opportunity to examine a certain region or historical moment. At any rate, our friendship passed, as most friendships do, through phases of intimacy and neglect, waxed minimal, became exuberant, grew intensely divisive and reached grudging accord, and then, one morning shortly after I learned he was failing, I picked up the phone and was informed that he had died… a death, I believe, that warranted much more of a salute than it received.

It’s customary at this pass, in most introductions, to list through the included stories and give a brief preview of each, saying that “Bloody Man,” for instance, is a ghost story concerning, among other subjects, pirates. But that would be misleading and more than a little shallow as an approach to Avram’s work in general or the specific. For one thing, given the ghostly status of the country where they take place, all the Limekiller tales are, by virtue of that alone, ghost stories, regardless whether a literal supernatural-type ghost can be perceived flitting about in them. For another thing, these are not like other stories in the least, and you cannot so easily sum them up. If you haven’t read Avram Davidson before, you are about to enter uncharted territory as regards the art of the narrative. Certainly you will be able to find, should you care to look closely, traditional narrative mechanisms buried among Avram’s sentences — foreshadowings, structural elements, and so on. Yet you don’t feel them moving you along as you do in more traditionally narrated stories. No grinding noises such as are made by primitive machines. No great grandiose tidal sweep of, yee-haw! Writing. No stampede of eloquence. No institutional overlay of Bauhaus Existential. No Stylemaster style. Reading Avram, and in particular, reading the Limekiller stories, you are simply dropped into the exceptionally active mind of the narrator and twitched along from thought to thought, something like the way a sun-dazzle will appear to be shifted from point to point on the surface of water slopping against the pitch-coated pilings of a pier in Avram’s (and Limekiller’s) own Point Pleasaunce. The mechanics of the story become obscured and you are made dizzy, dazed, much like Limekiller himself might feel, walking, (shall we imagine?), in the strong sun, slightly trashed by a hangover, trying to figure out some minor money hassle, distracted by this slash of color, that burst of song, or. Well, perhaps a sample would be instructive:

“Night. and not the plenilune, either. You can bet your boots, Limekiller has no boots, he has, though, a shovel! Limekiller feels that if he eats another pannikin of rice and beans or of the thin chowder called fish-tea that he. that he… What he is after, he is after turtle eggs, so significant a source of insult in the rich, rich Chinese culture, largely represented in British Hidalgo by the canny and philoprogenitive merchant Aurelio Aung and about 327 of his descendants. Better be exceedingly careful in talking about turtles to the Aung. More better say as little as possible about eggs at all to any of them. To ask, even to ask, ‘Don Aurelio, do you think it's going to rain?’ would bring conversation to a sudden and deathly still halt. As for that sole man ever to have placed his hand on the ancient and naked head of old Aurelio Aung (for what reason, knows only God!), death did not exactly come on swift wings, but it is certain that Aurelio Aung III felled him with a kick he had learned before kung fu became well-known in the regions of the dark west and that Aurelio Aung Jr. had assisted III to propel the man down a flight of stairs at the bottom of which a throng or tong of unnumbered Aung were waiting to and did kick him with many sharp kicks of their sharp- pointed shoes (they being fashionable, and Old Aung had imported them and sold them in considerable numbers), before P.C. Oscar Spencer C. Featherstonehaugh Smith, then on duty, had finished strolling over quite leisurely…

This, the opening of “Limekiller at Large,” inundates you with atmospheric fact, with a tumbling-downstairs rhythm to accompany the single tumbling-downstairs event detailed, and submerges you in the mind of the narrator, ne Limekiller, without saying a thing about him, other than he is hunting turtle eggs with a shovel. But as you are twitched and shifted, like a sun dazzle, across the light chop of Avram’s prose, you come to know so many things about Jack Limekiller and about the many things he knows, it feels that you are not reading a story, but listening in on his selfconversation, that little talk we’re always having with ourselves, that flippy voiceover that captions all our experiences, this being an especially clever and artful specimen, yet every note authentic. And so when you reach the end of the story, though you have endured, witnessed, felt what Limekiller himself endured, witnessed, felt, though you have sensed the incidence of character development, conflict, denouement, etc., it seems less a story than a passage of time that had a story in it, along with innumerable other flashes and dazzles that related to the story in obliquely enchanting and curiously illuminating ways. That last, I suppose, is as good a definition as any of an Avram Davidson story.

So.

Having experienced one such enthralling passage of time with embedded story, the obvious next step would be to proceed on to another, just like Jack Limekiller would and did. Here, in this little book, you’ll be able to do that five more times and will likely expect to continue passaging thereafter.

Unfortunately, only six Limekiller passages exist.

Or, as Avram might have said, six are all there is and six is all there are.

These are they, and they are, in my view, whatever anyone else may tell you, regardless of whether a book entitled The Best Of Avram Davidson rests on a thousand and one shelves, the best of Avram Davidson, his most evocative, most generously spirited, and most Avramesque work. Despite his previously mentioned response to mv letter, I think Avram did stake claim to a place and time that no other writer should touch. That place and time resides here in this little book, complete with dialects, recipes, shanties, magic, duppies, pirates, drunkards, tapirs, manatees, pretty girls, a hero or two, and, of course, ghosts. Open its covers and a mist will boil forth, swirling, many-colored, to surround you — a mist rife with a myriad distinct voices, bursts of idiosyncratic speech, fragments of all-but-forgotten lore, a strange druggy perfume compounded of the smells of shandygaff, jacaranda, brine, palm oil, gasoline fumes, creosote, orange groves, and ought else. These stories are far more than the relics of a great fantasist, a great writer, a man whom I knew and venerated and — when he wasn’t pissing me off — loved.

These stories are his soul.