hit a button and the printer stirred. A page slid out. Lee stood up, went over to the printer, took out the page. Then he came over and handed it to me. ‘There.’
I think my hand was trembling. Just a little.
I leaned back on the couch and looked it over, slowly. The first page – or first couple of pages – of the new Reacher. Fresh off the printer. Straight out of the mind of Lee Child. (Maybe with a detour through the collective unconscious.)
Less than an hour. Five hundred words. Two fingers. ‘I find it’s about the right typing speed for me,’ Lee said. ‘It’s as fast as my brain can keep up with.’
It took a while for the text to come into focus. I think I was too awestruck or moved or something to make any sense of it at first. A labyrinth. Utterly mysterious. Then words. Then sentences.
That -ing word right at the beginning. I was right about that. Turned out to be Moving. This is how the first sentence went: Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy.
7 ENTER REACHER
Keever. Good name. I was already hooked.
Lee turned his chair round so he was half facing me, half looking back at his text on the screen. He swung his feet up on the desk.
‘I wanted to start with a verb of action,’ he said. ‘The participle came naturally.’ He went over it in his head. ‘See, I didn’t want to write, Keever was a big guy and moving him wasn’t easy. That’s too expository. This way we waste no time. It’s compact. I thought about was not easy for a moment. But the rhythm was better, wasn’t easy.’
Here it is, the whole of it, as it emerged, that afternoon, September 1, 2014. That page I had in my hand – now you have it in yours.
Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy. It was like trying to wrestle a king-size mattress off a waterbed. So they buried him close to the house. Which made sense anyway. The harvest was still a month away, and a disturbance in a field would show up from the air. And they would use the air for a guy like Keever. They would use spotter planes, and helicopters, and maybe even drones.
They started at midnight, which they figured was safe enough. They were in the middle of ten thousand acres of nothingness, and the only man-made structure their side of the horizon was the railroad track to the east, but midnight was five hours after the evening train and seven hours before the morning train. So, safe enough. No prying eyes. Their backhoe had four spotlights on a bar above the cab, like kids had on their pick-up trucks, and together they made an aimed pool of halogen brightness. So visibility was not a problem. They started the hole in the hog pen, which was a permanent disturbance all by itself. Each hog weighed two hundred pounds, and each hog had four feet. The dirt was always freshly chewed up. Nothing to see from the air, not even with thermal imaging. The picture would white out instantly, from the steaming animals themselves, plus their steaming piles of shit and their steaming pools of piss.
Safe enough.
Hogs were rooting animals, so they made sure the hole was deep. Which was no problem either. The backhoe’s arm was long, and it bit rhythmically, in fluent seven-foot scoops, the hydraulic rams glinting in the light, the engine straining and pausing, the cab falling and rising as each bucket-load was dumped aside. When the hole was done they backed the machine up and turned it around and used the dozer blade to push Keever into his grave, scraping him, rolling him, covering his body in dirt, until finally it fell over the lip and thumped down into the shadows.
Only one thing went wrong, and it happened halfway through the job.
The evening train came through five hours late. The next morning they heard on the AM station that a broken locomotive had caused a jam a hundred miles south. But they didn’t know that at the time. All they heard was the mournful whistle at the distant crossing, and then all they could do was turn and stare, at the long lit cars rumbling past in the middle distance, one after the other, seemingly forever. But eventually the train was gone, and the rails sang for a minute more, and the tail light was swallowed up by darkness, and they turned back to their task.
Twenty miles north the train slowed, and eased to a stop, and the doors wheezed open, and Jack Reacher stepped down into the dirt in the lee of a grain silo bigger than an apartment house.
‘I like the way you use “which”,’ I said. ‘Which made sense anyway. Subordinate clause, but you give it a fresh start.’
‘Yeah, which at the beginning of a sentence,’ Lee said, in a meditative kind of way. ‘It’s an accelerative word. Mostly. I have to be careful not to overdo it though. Becomes a habit.’
He stopped thinking about which for a moment. He was thinking about the whole of that first paragraph.
‘I’m tying my hands here. It’s a risk. Who is Keever? What is he? Why is he so damn important?’
‘Well, who is he?’
‘I’ve no idea at this point.’
I liked that about Lee’s writing. He didn’t know what he was doing. Didn’t need to know. Didn’t want to know. Had faith. Blind faith.
‘I’ve made him important though. The fear of the air search. Then you have all the mechanics of burying him. That’s what follows. From the sheer size of him and the importance. You have to do a good job of it or it’s like he’ll pop right back up again. You have to really get him right down there.’
I was struck – how could I not be? – by that metaphor in the second sentence. The actual word size is explicitly in there, spelling out the governing theme. But waterbed ? Where did that spring from?
‘I slept on a waterbed once. In California? It had a mattress on top, which is strange. But I found myself trying to line up that mattress with the base. Which is impossible. So I thought that was something like the technical problem for the parties unknown.’
‘You know, Keever sounds a lot like Reacher.’
‘Does it?’
‘Look at it. Listen to it. You’ve got the “er” at the end and the “ee” in the middle. It’s a para-rhyme. Keever-Reacher, Keever-Reacher. Sounds like the train. This is an alter-Reacher. And he’s huge, just like Reacher. You’re suggesting that this really could be Reacher. It is what will happen to Reacher if he’s not careful. You always have that. The potential fate for Reacher. Which he generally manages to work around. Unlike a lot of his partners. So you’re looking into the void right from the start. You’re actually building an abyss. Nothingness.’
Child said nothing.
‘But you don’t start with dialogue. You could have done. You know, “Hey, what a big bastard he was!” “What are we going to do with the body?” “I know, let’s dig a hole, a big one” – that kind of thing.’
‘Yeah,’ he grinned, ‘I know what you mean. A lot of writers are like that. They start with dialogue because it looks easier to a reader. Lots of wide open spaces and air. I very rarely start with dialogue. It’s partly tactical. I like it dense. But mostly, Reacher is not a conversationalist. I don’t want to give the wrong impression.’
‘I think Camus said something like that. Cut out all
