"It ain't never gonna happen. You won't ever be a novelist," he said over his newspaper. "You lack the discipline."

Mark looked down at the short story he was writing when Ken said that, wanting to say What about this? but remaining quiet. Instead, he continued with his short story, carefully forming the next words from the mouth of the protagonist with his fountain pen. Ken had always said that writing with a fountain pen made no sense; authors sat at typewriters and pounded away. Fountain pens were a thing of the past. Maybe so, but he liked how the anachronism felt in his hand as it scratched along the lines of what he wanted to say on the paper.

"If you want to be a novelist, you'd have to get some discipline, and you just don't have it," Ken added, still reading his paper. A trail of smoke from his cigarette poured up, over the edge of the sports section. "Take Hemingway. I read somewhere that he sat at his typewriter every day until he had five thousand words behind him. Every day. No exceptions."

Upon hearing this again, for the third time in a week, Mark wanted to repeat out loud another mantra Ken had used on him almost weekly: Believe none of what you hear, very little of what you read, and only half of what you see. Instead, he finally said what was on his mind. "I've written plenty of stories." He held up the science fiction piece he was working on as tangible evidence.

"That's a pamphlet," Ken commented over the top of the paper. "Five thousand words a day," he repeated himself. "Every day. Discipline."

After gathering his things together, Mark went to his room. He was too angry with Ken to complete the story he'd been working on. Instead, he put on his earphones, carefully placed a Bowie record on the turntable, and drowned out his anger to the instrumental side of Low. What would it mean to Ken if he could write a novel? Probably nothing, but it would prove him wrong. Discipline. Ten minutes into the record, he had fallen asleep with the phones on his ears. He awoke to the tick tick of the needle when the side had finished playing.

He pulled off the earphones, walked to the back porch of the house, sat down on the top stair, and watched the grass grow. When are you going to mow that lawn? he heard Ken ask in his mind. Discipline. He stood, walked around to the shed, pulled out the gas mower, and started yanking on the cord. He was soon cutting trails in the back lawn. Ken walked onto the porch, a beer bottle in his left hand and the paper in the other, and nodded his head in approval.

"Discipline, discipline, discipline," Mark said when his back was turned to Ken. He wouldn't hear him over the howl of the machine. "I wasn't ever going to mow the lawn either, I bet. Didn't have the what? The discipline."

An hour later, the lawn was nearly naked of his lack of discipline. Mark pushed the mower back into the shed, locked it, and started for the library. "I could mow all of Canada and he'd say I lacked discipline," he said to an old lady who was sitting waiting for a bus on the street that led him to the building.

Once inside, he headed straight for the section that had the books on novel writing and picked up The Art of Fiction. Twenty minutes into reading into it, someone slapped him on the back.

"Mark!" Tim said.

"What's up, Tim?" Mark responded. What was Tim doing in a library? Tim couldn't read. Everyone in the family knew that Tim was not a reader.

His brother-in-law sat across from him at the table after turning around a chair so he could straddle it in his way with chairs and said, "Looking for work. Thought the library might need a janitor."

"Do they?" Mark asked.

"Haven't asked. What you reading?" Tim reached across the table, flipped the book up so he could read the title, and said, "Ah. Art book. Planning on learning to draw?"

"It's a book on writing," Mark replied, pushing it down again so he could continue to read.

"Say, speaking of writing ... you know when Ken is going to the rigs?"

It struck Mark immediately to ask what any of the family goings on had to do with writing, but he held his tongue, since he Tim hated being corrected. "Why?" he asked instead.

"Landlord found out we have a dog," Tim explained. "Need a place to keep it for a little while."

"Ken wouldn't ...," Mark began.

"I know. You know. That's why I need to know when he's off to Alberta." He shuffled about on his chair.

"This Monday, for two months," Mark said. He closed the book, stood, and headed for the book checkout. He did not say another word to Tim before walking back home.

Reading and walking down the main street of the city was a habit for Mark, so he made it home without getting hit by a car while crossing at lights. Once home, he went to his room and finished the book. He would write a novel.

After dinner that night, he approached Ken and informed him of his goal to write a novel that would be ready and waiting before Ken got back from the rigs. Ken made a point of insisting it would never happen—Mark lacked the discipline to do such a thing—but Mark just ignored this and went to his room and read through the book again.

Monday came and Ken was off to the rigs. Mark stared at a blank page of loose leaf, his fountain pen ready, but nothing came to him. This was not going to be another short story; this was going to be a novel. It didn't have to be only a novel; it had to be a decent antithesis to his stepfather's constant proclamation: a rebuttal worthy of a man with five inches of steel plate in his crude-stained skull. Something he would eat crow over.

Monday passed without a word finding its ink to Mark's page, but he was not worried; it would come when it felt like coming. There was no real hurry, since Ken wouldn't be back from the rigs for two months, and Mark estimated, based upon the speed he wrote short stories, it would take him only two months to write a novel.

With Tuesday came the dog. Mark kept his door closed when his sister and brother-in-law arrived with the German shepherd puppy, but he could hear his mother and sister arguing over the dog no matter how much he tried to filter it out. He wanted to swing open his door and yell I'm trying to write a novel in here! but did not. Instead, he put on his earphones, turned up the volume, and drown out the hollering with Elvis Presley.

Just as Mark expected would be the case, the dog stayed. Something about the idea of having the thing put down if his mother didn't sit on it for a few months won her over, no matter what Ken would have said on the matter. Mark made it clear to his mother that he would have nothing to do with the care of the hell hound. He also made sure that Tim and Jane were absolutely aware that the dog was not to come in his room.

"Don't worry about it," Tim insisted before heading out the back door. "It's a nice dog! Just a puppy!"

By the end of Tuesday, the novel still had not started to write itself. As hard as Mark tried to push the word discipline out of his mind, he could not, and it was keeping him from hearing his own voice. When Ken's voice wasn't echoing in his mind, the dog's scratching on his door to be let in distracted him. That night, Mark fell asleep with his fountain pen still in his hand and the loose leaf binder he wrote in across his stomach. He dreamt of the oil rigs he'd seen while living in the camps with his family when he was nine. They were happy memories of a time before Tim and his mutt.

When he awoke, he knew what he would write. It was perfectly clear in his mind, and he started with such fury that he forgot to go to the washroom when the need struck him. By noon, he had written fifteen pages: his first chapter of a novel about living with the crew when he was younger. A novel about life in the camps. The smells. The crummies, crew, and all the food anyone could ever hope to stuff down. A murder mystery. After lunch, it started to write itself where Mark had left off.

And so the days went. Page after page became covered in the ink of his discipline. Ken had been wrong. It didn't matter that Hemingway pounded five billion words before eating breakfast every day. This novel was on its way, and it would be in Ken's hands by the end of the summer.

Tim and Jane made a point of coming over to the house every other day to mooch groceries and see their dog. Sometimes, they would sit at the kitchen table, playing crib, smoking away, laughing about whatever it was that amused Tim, calling for the dog. Mark managed to shut it out and keep writing.

"Hey, Mark, come and play crib!" Tim called out one day when Jane was busy at their apartment with exterminators.

Cribbage. A game that made no sense, and took time away from the novel that Ken said he would never write. Although he didn't want to play crib with Tim, he did anyway, to keep the peace; Tim hated when anyone turned down a game, and when Tim hated something, he walked around like his nose had been knocked three inches out of joint to the left. Though he played crib with Tim, his mind was writing the next pages of his novel.

"Your mom says you're writing a book," Tim said as he moved his peg a few spots forward.

Mark didn't want to talk with Tim about the novel. Everything that Tim knew about, he claimed he could do, too, and do a better job of it than anyone else. He didn't know what to say. "I'm trying," he finally admitted.

"How far along?" Tim asked as he looked at his cards.

"It's coming," Mark replied, shrugging.

"You know," he said, "if you really want something to write about, I could tell you a few stories about ...." And on and on Tim went about so and such. "Now that would be a bestseller."

Tim won the game without much effort that day, and Mark, having appeased the Tim-God, returned to his room and put to paper all of the pages he had written in his head while losing miserably at crib. His protagonist was on to someone in the camp—the murderer had been found out in principle. The first draft was nearly complete.

The next time Tim and Jane came over, Jane opened Mark's door as she looked for something in the house, and the dog ran in to the room. Within seconds of seeing the dog, Mark had it by the scruff of the neck and was throwing the cur into the hallway.

"Keep that flea market out of my room!" he shouted.

"Hey! Hey!" Tim shouted back. "Keep your hands off my dog!" He stood in a fighting position, as if Mark had just manhandled his kid niece. Mark had seen Tim angry before, and knew what it meant to make Tim mad, but he didn't care.

Blood rushed to his ears as Mark readied himself to get pounded into the wall and said, "Keep that piece of night soil out of my room."

Jane intervened, pushing Tim back from her brother. "Leave him alone, Tim," she said. "It's no big deal."

Mark shut his door and began work on the second draft. This writing came more easily, since the novel was already written. As he copied out the first draft, he threw the first draft into the garbage, page by page, as he always did with first drafts. Two weeks later, he had his second draft, piled neatly on his floor beside his bed. Ken would know. The novel had been written. He had discipline.

"I noticed quite a bit of paper in your trash bin," his mother said over dinner. "Was there something wrong with it?"

Mark leaned over his mashed potatoes and almost laughed at his mother, but held back. "That was my first draft of my novel," he finally explained. "I didn't need it anymore, since I've already written the final draft from it."

She smiled at her son.

Mark wanted to celebrate. The novel was a task of the past, sitting beside his bed, nicely stacked, and waiting. The Death of Digger Discipline he had called it. Ken would see the humor in that. As hard on him as Ken was, he had a sense of humor when he was truly proved wrong. He always nodded his head and smiled when Mark mowed the lawn when least expected, and this novel was more than an hour's work in the yard. Mark suspected that all of the jabbing was Ken's way of trying to encourage him to climb higher and run faster.

"Can I go downtown to see a movie?" he asked his mother. "I want to relax a bit."

Mark's mother gave him a twenty dollar bill, kissed him on the forehead. He was soon on the bus downtown. Which movie he saw didn't matter to him. It passed quickly and didn't make any sense. All that mattered to Mark was the look on Ken would have on his face when he came back from the rigs and had that novel staring him down. Discipline.

While walking, almost dancing, towards his house, Mark heard hollering coming up the street. Tim, Jane, and Mark's mom were shouting at one another. Mark could not determine what the fight was about. The porch light was on and the backdoor was open. As much as he did not want to enter the house, he walked up the back stairs into the kitchen, into the middle of the fight. As soon as he entered the room, everyone shut up and looked at him.

Mark had never seen his mother's face so flushed and angry. Jane was seated at the kitchen table, a half-played game of crib in front of her. Tim turned so that he was looking at the refrigerator, instead of directly into Mark's eyes.

"Mark," his mother said.

"We ... I ...," Jane mumbled as she tried to look at her brother. She shuffled the deck of cards she was holding.

The dog came into the kitchen from the hallway, and the three adults stared at it as soon as it entered. Mark then ran into his room. The door was open. He could smell urine as he switched on his light.

Beside his bed sat a pile of yellow stained papers, strewn about. His heart pounded as he slowly approached his novel. Pools of urine and ink smears lay where once was his novel, his discipline.

"Who opened my door?" he screamed so loudly he could feel his tonsils push into his ears. When he turned around, the first face he saw was Tim's.

"I guess you have your first major critic," Tim barely had time to say before Mark had his hands around his neck.

When he awoke the next day, under an icepack, Mark could not remember what had happened during the brawl from the moment he'd grabbed Tim. His mother was leaning over him, shifting the pack over his eye, sighing.

"Did I at least take one of his teeth out?" he managed to ask.

"You didn't get much of a chance," his mother replied. "He knocked you in the head pretty quick."

"My novel," Mark then mumbled.

"There was nothing left of it," his mother admitted. "The paper fell apart when I picked it up."

Fifty-thousand words of handwritten discipline pressed down on Mark's body at that moment. He had nothing: neither to show Ken, nor with which to stand up to Tim.

"I'm going to tell Ken ...," he began.

His mother quickly put her finger over Mark's lips. "No, please don't," she said. "For me. Ken would scream bloody murder if he knew I let them keep the dog here."

"But ...."

"Please," she insisted.

He looked up at his mother with his good eye. She was visibly afraid of what Ken's reaction would be if he gave up the fact that Tim and Jane had kept their dog at the house. He wouldn't do that to his mother.

The final week of the two months passed slowly with Mark staying in his room, in bed, recovering from being hit in the eye. The swelling was almost completely down by the time Ken came back from the rigs.

After a big dinner, Ken walked up to Mark's bedroom door, knocked, and looked in. "So how's my little novelist doing?" he asked, clearly amused with himself. "Where's the novel you said you were going to write?"

From the darkness, with a sheet pulled over his face like a newspaper, Mark replied, "I didn't write one. I guess I lack discipline. It ain't never gonna happen."

Copyright © 2002 Quinn Tyler Jackson
All rights reserved

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