Generosity: An Enhancement Read Free Page B

of a lightning farm that would “shoehorn the Wahhabis out of the West Wing once and for all.”
    Russell polished up the mordant letter to Grace and mailed it to a famous glossy, on a long-shot lark. When—craziest of fantasies—the magazine took the story, Stone went back to his letters to Grace and polished up another.
    In his second piece, he recounted his fast-food-lunch conversation with a Tohono O’odham former EMT who’d just received a two-year suspended sentence for being up on the roof of a clinic with four buddies, a couple of pairs of defibrillator paddles, and a box of 200-gram tubes of paddle gel. “We weren’t doing anything, really.” The second reputable magazine Stone sent it to jumped on it.
    The third essay transcribed Stone’s meeting with a narrow-eyed vagrant outside El Con Mall who wanted Stone’s opinion on nerve regeneration, water-powered cars, and the Pseudo-Baldwin. The man warned Russell not to cross him: “I can put the word out to acontinent-wide street-person network that’ll make your life hell from Miami to Vancouver . . . We’ve even got contacts in the European Union.” At Grace’s urging, Russell submitted the piece to the Valhalla of New York literary weeklies. The day the impossible acceptance letter arrived, he called Grace in France. They giggled at each other for half an hour.
    The secret of these pieces lay in the hapless narrator: bewildered victim of the world’s wackiness. “I seem to be the kind of flavorless, neutral guy whom the truly hard-core outsiders in this life claim for one of their undiscovered own.” The reporter was exactly that goggle-eyed Midwestern rube ripe for conversion whom Grace always found so unwittingly hilarious.
    Overnight, these three pieces changed Russell Stone’s life. The magazine payments let him quit his desperate community newspaper job and write essays full-time. Agents called, wanting to represent him. An editor at a major New York house wrote to ask if he had enough pieces for a book.
    Public radio commissioned him to write a piece for an omnibus program broadcast on 350 local stations. He wrote and performed a brief burlesque about trying to understand the musings of his Hindu dermatologist, whose sentences began in the
Physicians’ Desk Reference
and ended in
The Ramayana
. The producer declared him as droll a voice actor as he was a writer, and offered another ten-minute spot whenever Stone wanted.
    “Bravo,” Grace wrote. “How much did they pay you? Enough for a transatlantic ticket and a week of B and B’s?”
    Then a letter came, nestled in a batch of reader mail:
     
Dear Mr. Russell Stone,
    The Tohono O’odham Nation faces many challenges. You have just added to them. Charlie Melendez is a decent young man who got in trouble. You’ve profited by mocking both him and our people.
    I hope your writing will be less destructive in the future.
    Sincerely,
    Phyllis Manuel, San Xavier District
     
    Stone agonized for several days over an apology, which he mailed out just before the fan-mail bag delivered a new land mine:
     
Mr. Stone,
    I’m not sure why anyone would laugh at a man who is mentally ill. But I’m willing to forgive you, if you can help me find my father, Stan Newstetter, the man you call “Stan Newton” in your story, “Ear to the Network . . .”
     
    Stone had to confess to Mr. Newstetter’s daughter that he hadn’t really met the man outside El Con, but in a strip mall somewhere in the vast retail wastelands along Speedway, the precise coordinates of which he’d failed to write down. When Julie Newstetter wrote back and asked why he’d said El Con, he had no answer except the name’s comical sound.
    A month later, Charlie Melendez tried unsuccessfully to take his own life.

     
    So you know this story:
Lord Jim
, or a plot to that effect. Not that Stone collapsed all at once. I see him shriveling gradually, over many years. He never told anyone about the letters—not his mother, not