Straight, No Ice

by Lance Mason

“You’ve got to know, Jack, that your mother won’t like the idea.” He poured a polite quantity from the whiskey bottle into his empty glass.

“How can that be true, Papa, when it’s what you do?”

“Sure, but I already had a solid job when Herself found me, Boy—not at the top of the ladder, but part way up. If she’d met me as a cub at the Star, when no one knew me from salted bacon, she’d have probably dumped me for a Havana card-shark, so she won’t want her first-and-only—that’s you—starting at the bottom of the pile.”

“But you can teach me.” The youngster looked concerned. “Can’t you?”

“Bumby, my son, coaching the game isn’t playing the game, and vice versa. Rockne was a plug on the field, and so was Connie Mack on the diamond. Ty Cobb, a bat-and-glove phenom, couldn’t have coached his way out of a skid-row beer joint.” He sipped from his glass.

“Writing for a living isn’t basking in the sun on the publisher’s veranda, nor gargling gin-and-tonics on some patron’s cruise deck. You can’t learn it at your daddy’s knee or your nanny’s elbow. Hard graft and ambition turn the wheels on the wagon, lad. Yes, I can teach you how to nail together an okay sentence, some basic tips on phrasing, and a bit of description, but you need a dose of mongrel dog to find the truth in that jumble of words, to follow the trail and see the scene out there for what it really is, painting it in your own style without exaggerating the real colors.”

“Does Mister Perkins know what you mean, Papa? Is this how you and your friends write?”

“If I’m any good at it, Jack, it’s not from a pack of scrawlers telling me how. Scottie and I had to bite and kick and scratch for our stories from the start. Dos Passos, too. Sure, it looks glamorous when your byline shows up on the paper’s front page or Esquire’s cover, or some nob reads your piece on the radio, and it does thrill your heart when you see the work given the attention you think it deserves, but the stabbing and fighting you had to dish out to start it? The cutting and doubting you had to grind through to finish it? Well, it can be a demoralizing air for a man to breathe in.”

“Like the bullfighting work?”

Recharging his glass, he waved off the dish of ice offered by his son. “All the bullfighting pieces are about grit and heartbreak, young man, either in the bull’s death or the matador’s wounds or the courage you know you can’t match against an animal of great stature. But the dilettantes and artsy journalists scream in protest against the love affair between Spain and Andalucía’s bulls. And no, these don’t make pretty pictures in the stage-play tragedy Malraux calls the human condition, one we might think is a comedy because that keeps us in the game. But it’s not. It’s murder and war and politics and Nazis and fascists raining crimes down on human history while suckers like me and Scottie try to write facts and truth in what we see.”

“That’s what I want to do, what you do with the truth.”

The writer paused over this for a long moment. “Well, fella, you keep that up and it might get you somewhere, but some ferret-faced bastards—excuse my accent—won’t credit your old man with writing things as he found them, people who condemn the liquor they’ve never tasted, and the folks who drink it, people who have a bash at soldiering though they’ve never faced the Hun, and who try to rabbit-punch the writer who shows them their own sins and ignorance.”

“People do that?”

“Better you learn it now, though your mother won’t like me telling you. They’re called hypocrites, and they attack their betters in any field they choose, with neither conscience nor character. The leaders of the mob in the world of so-called literature are the New York critics who, by the way, haven’t one ounce of courage in their souls, and don’t know the difference between a good piece of writing and lipstick.” He regarded his glass before drinking. “Dos says critic derives from hypocrite, and what’s real to one of them is what they see on a sunny day in the Hamptons or a bad night in Central Park. The number of honest ones in the world you can count with the toes on one foot, and the foot would smell cleaner than the critics.”

Jack’s father went on. “The next on the hypocrite list are politicians and generals who spend their soldiers like dominoes in a card parlor, while brown-nosing the profiteers for Upmann cigars and pedigreed champagne. If the New York City folks are the horses’ asses of polite society, those in the second category are the hogs and jackals at the public trough.”

This made the boy smile. “Do jackals and hogs go together, Papa?”

“Generally, no, son, but no single animal comes to mind that quite blends the gluttony of the pig and the cowardice of the jackal. Perhaps a hyena.”

Jack grinned at this, too. “Have you shot a jackal, shot one dead?”

“Shooting is a sport, Bumby, while killing jackals and hyenas is extermination, and the same applies in Washington, an opinion on which Mark Twain and I agree.”

“Are there any other hypocrites?”

“So many, Captain, they can’t all be labeled in the taxonomy of perfidy.”

“Like who?”

“The moving picture crowd in California, with only rubbish to sell, and now it talks to you during the matinee at the Bijou.”

“Did you write for them?”

The man took another swallow of the tea-colored whiskey. “They asked me, like they asked Scottie. Even Perkins asked me. And they threw their money and dames at me, but I told them to parcel up their malignant tripe and ship it to China. We don’t need more corruption in our life.”

“Would you be more famous, though?”

The man sighed. “Fame is the residue of public clamor, kid. It can never define a man or the truth of his work.”

“And you’re already famous anyway.”

He pondered this, from his first-born son. Was he famous? As famous as Twain or Tolstoy or Henry James? As famous as Voltaire or Austen? Up there with Hardy or Trollope? Was he getting there? And fame wasn’t the same as recognition, the first a product of mass attention, but the second a mark of history.

“Maybe I am famous with you, your brothers, and Herself, and maybe even with some of the hypocrites, but that doesn’t make a man a great writer, Jack Boy, because you still have to put your brain in gear, and your heart, and see the world—day in and day out, through hunger and death and thievery and cowardice—for what it is, not what you want it to be.

“The cheap-writing show is all fine for the romance hacks and pulp-barkers spinning paper-thin stories about shoot-to-kill lawmen and street-corner floozies on the make, but that ain’t anything like true writing, Old Son, just a mix of flour and water for pasting patches over the holes in a reader’s Saturday night.”

“You make that sound awful, Father.”

“It’s not awful for the hacks and the typists and the book merchants making a buck, but it can be for those putting real meaning into their work and into those human beings we’re bringing to life, or back to life, on the page. It’s never a dirty business unless you let them kill your courage and your self-respect for what you’re trying to do with the words and your stories. That’s when you die.”

“Is that what’s killing Scottie?”

“Scottie got a raw hand of cards, Bumby. He got two aces on the deal and even a couple of sixes on the draw, but he got cheated out of the pot by three cheap deuces.”

Jack’s eyes nearly froze his father.

“Sorry for the rotten words. That’s just a glib dodge, and clumsy of me. Scottie’s fighting for his dignity, like a man, holding onto his courage until the end, treating death like the rude intruder it is. But it won’t leave the room, and might take him despite his strength in the clinches.”

The older man tasted the bitterness in his struggle over the coming loss of his friend. “What say we put this all outside for now and talk some more about the work.”

“But if the work has to be true and real, Papa, we can’t leave out Scottie.”

The man studied the boy. “You’re too goddamn smart for either of us, Jack, so maybe teaching you isn’t such a hare-brained idea.”

Jack smiled once more. His father did, too, then finished his drink.

In the morning, they ate eggs, ham, and bread, with milk for Jack and coffee for the writer, then they walked the true right of the river, spotting brown trout and rainbows dodging and feeding where the smooth water met the faster troughs under the trees. A cock pheasant chuckled from the oat field above the bank, and the only smell on the eastern breeze was the cook-fire pork chops from the Dutchman’s cabin on the rise, backlit by the morning sun.

“Will there be another war, Papa?”

“Not for us, Bumby, not if I have anything to say about it.”

“If it happens, where will it be?”

“All points of the compass, chap. Mussolini’s fascisti want to dominate the Commies, same with Franco’s mob in Spain. Hitler’s rousing his Jew-hating knuckle-draggers and calling himself a socialist to counter Stalin’s ‘Soviets’ in the East. Tojo’s got Manchuria and has set his sights on Burma. He’ll conquer China, given half a chance. England’s got her old colonies around the world, all under threat by strong-willed rebels or tin-pot dictators.” Jack’s father took a breath, looking across the browning meadows to the granite flanks of the Wind River Range.

“But if I had to bet a year’s pay, I’d say it’s in Europe, probably Spain. Hitler’s got no real opposition at home and isn’t ready for war yet. Same with Stalin and Mussolini. But Spain’s looking at a battle over who’s going to govern, so that could blow.”

“Would we fight there, Father?”

“We can’t let that happen, Boy. Not this country, at least. If men want to go and fight for their heroes or against the hypocrites, that’s fine by you and me. We can watch it and write about it, but we can’t go in like we did in France and Belgium, or Churchill’s fiasco in Gallipoli against the Ottoman Turks.”

“Are people going to die?”

“Yes, a lot of people will die in any war, but especially the next one.”

“But not us?”

“Not us, old man, not if I can help it. Now, let’s get back to the house. I need to write today.” And he did.

The writer found an idea about the Spain he knew and the Africa he knew and a man he thought he knew, and that started the thread that went back into his own life and forward into the life of the man in his attention, and that of a woman who found him on the street one night outside El Bombero in the autumn in Santander in Cantabria on the north coast of Spain. The man was bleeding from his nose and a knock on the head by two thieves who had robbed him, and she was with her three English friends, and was English herself, and had come over by motorcar from Bordeaux where her family-owned property, and through the Basque country and Bilbao to Santander for a slumming holiday at the seaport town’s best, but still cheap, hotel. She got the bleeding man inside El Bombero against the protestations of its jefe and the half-inebriated denizens trying to find the coins for another drink.

Now the writer had to discover, or uncover, or recover, from some old memory or desire or his imagination, what direction or portrayal or emotional mix the story would or could take or describe or reveal—or avoid. Would the breakthrough come before lunch, or in the evening, or next Wednesday, or in a month? Would it ever come, or did he have to rewrite it all and leave out the bar or the town or the season or the woman? Perhaps, rather than English, were her friends German? Was it in Avila instead of in Santander, or in Burgos, with its magnificent cathedral? Or maybe in Nairobi at the Norfolk Hotel, and the man is a mid-level diplomat who took a wrong turn off the Valley Road, and she’s the widow of a hunter killed by snakebite from a green mamba in the Okavango while guiding the Duke of York on a kudu hunt?

Would these elements make a story, a true one, a real one, or was he writing caricatures for comic books that never could show real life in resonant fiction, and did he even know what “resonant” meant anymore, or was he too far removed now from the grit and gravel of hard times and a man’s desperation and loss of blood to tell the story he wanted to tell? If this was so, he had to leave the open, peaceful country and its predictable landscapes and find the stories and the people out there in the wilderness of damage and loss, and write the stories for himself and the men and women who would take the time and show the interest to read them and talk about them so that he could feel he had done something of weight and value.

When the time came for his son to crack out on his own, were these the things he could teach Jack, or would the boy need to take the knocks every living person had to take so that he or she might survive the storm?

Author’s Note: Though never a Hemingway fiction devotee, I did enjoy sections from Death in the Afternoon and Byline, and bios of him in That Summer In Paris (Morley Callahan) and Hemingway's Boat (Paul Hendrickson). His intensity of observation-and-repsonse did convey important insights into some episodes of history in Asia and Spain in the '30s, Europe in WWII, and Cuba in the '50s.

BIO: Lance Mason's writing reflects both his farm-town origins and his extensive travel abroad. He has explored, lived, and worked overseas for decades, traveling the world by foot, bicycle, motorcycle, train, tramp steamer, and dugout canoe, about 15 years of which was spent living in current or former Commonwealth countries. These experiences that have both enhanced and interfered with Mason’s writing life. His work has appeared in 50+ journals, collections, anthologies, etc., was included in Fish Publishing's 2025 Memoir Prize (Ireland), received a Silver and 2 Golds in the 2024 and ’25 Solas Awards, and his fiction recently appeared in ShortStoryStack (Palisatrium), Eerie River's BLADES, and Cowboy Jamboree's PRINE PRIMED.