The Return Ticket

An early birthday present for Bob.

As told by Mark Twain, deceased

Everybody on this riverboat is dead. So the night Mr. Hemingway fought Mr. Poe on the foredeck, the fight was not the strange part. The strange part was Mr. Broomall of Maryland. He was alive. He was taking notes, and he had a return ticket in his coat.

I was holding the money. Mr. Hemingway believes every American book came out of one of mine, which is flattering and nearly true, so I had forty dollars on him to win outright. Mr. Poe I could read if you paid me.

Hemingway looked down at Poe across the deck chairs and reviewed him.

“Skillful,” he said. “Marvellously constructed. And dead.”

Poe set down his glass. “You write, sir, like a man sending a telegram and paying by the word.”

Mr. Wilde put ten on Poe before the sentence was finished. Mrs. Parker lit a cigarette. Miss Dickinson wrote something on a slip, folded it twice, and handed it to me with a dollar.

Poe was a sergeant major of artillery before he was a poet, and he opened like one.

Poe threw the deck chair at Hemingway’s face. Hemingway blocked it with an arm. Poe’s boot went into his bad knee underneath.

Hemingway dropped to the boards, and for a moment it was a farewell to arms and legs both.

He came up boxing, but he came up slowly, and he kept the bad leg behind him. He jabbed twice to find the range.

The right that followed, Poe slipped. The next one he did not. It carried Poe into the rail, and I began to count my winnings.

Poe wiped his lip with his thumb, and the thumb came away red. The dead bleed on this boat. It is one of the management’s little jokes.

He turned side-on and sank his weight. His hands came open.

I understood then that a man with a hundred and seventy-five years and no appointments can learn nearly anything.

Three blows landed on Hemingway that I heard and did not see. Then Poe’s heel came round at the height of a man’s hat, and there set up in Mr. Hemingway’s skull a tintinnabulation, and nobody on deck needed to ask for whom.

Hemingway shook his head like a dog coming out of the river, and it did not clear.

“Well,” said Mrs. Parker. “He’s been busy.”

Hemingway could not reach him. Every time he stepped in, a foot was there first, and he was stepping in on one good leg. So he did the arithmetic a fighter does.

He dropped his left hand and put his weight on the bad knee. It nearly folded. He walked in on it anyway.

The kick took him in the ribs with a sound like a dropped trunk. He clamped his arm down over Poe’s leg and kept it.

“There’s your grace under pressure,” said Mrs. Parker.

Now Poe stood on one foot with a heavyweight attached. Two hooks went into his body. A short right hand, traveling perhaps eight inches, ended the business.

Poe slid down the rail and sat. He was awake. Nobody counted.

He looked past Hemingway, at the live man’s notebook.

“And what is a living man doing on this boat?”

“Research,” said Mr. Broomall. He did not look up from the page.

Poe read the cover upside down. “Death’s Head. You have a title there, sir, that I would have stolen.”

“It’s taken. I’ll take a blurb for it, though.”

Nobody had asked Poe for a kind word since 1845. “In a moment,” he said.

Then he turned to Hemingway.

“Skillful. Marvellously constructed. And dead. So are you, sir. You will need a new adjective.”

The deck roared. Hemingway, bent over his ribs with the bad leg stuck out straight, laughed before any of them. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” he said, and gave Poe his hand.

I ruled for Hemingway. The deck overruled me. Then I unfolded Miss Dickinson’s slip. Mr. H. the fight. Mr. P. the last word. She held out her hand without looking up.

I have said the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Poe found the lightning. I had forty dollars on the bug.

Poe, still sitting against the rail, had not forgotten what he owed. He held out his hand for the pencil. Mr. Broomall held the notebook steady for him. I read the line over Poe’s shoulder. Read it at midnight. The dreary is optional. Poe’s thumb left a red print beside it. Mr. Broomall shut the book and put it inside his coat, next to the ticket. It is the only thing I have ever seen leave this boat.