Artistic Collaboration:  A Search for the Elusive Goblin Fish
by Hank Nuwer

 

Jimmy Dale Noble


    IN 1978, a book publisher wanted the services of a writer without good sense to trail William (Tiny) Boyles, a 389-pounder who made his living as a skip tracer.  Hired by bondsmen to bring back bail jumpers, Tiny had muscles, but he wasn't talented in the hundred-yard dash.  So he hired people with foot-racing skills like high school dropout Jimmy Dale Noble, a sometimes logger, deputy sheriff, guitar picker and songwriter in low-rent bands.
    I, a self-taught writer, went with Tiny on a couple of his appointed rounds to pick up bail skips to get to understand his job (much of the job involves uneventful stakeouts, about the most boring job you can imagine). In time, I co-wrote four adventure novels with him.  "The Bounty Hunter" series was about four friends who brought villains back to a bondsman for a percentage of the bond.  The characters were larger-than-life Tiny Ryder; Hammer, a block of granite who uttered only one sentence in every book as a character device; Jerry Jeffers, a rowdy backup singer, and Foster Foster, a bumbling journalist along to get freelance stories, who led the other three into life-threatening situations.
    The ride lasted two years.  Our last publisher, Berkely/Jove, decided the series lacked mass-market clout, ending it after the publication of Blood Mountain in 1981.  I was relieved, because Tiny and I were never going to win a Pulitzer for our fiction.  I hoped to pursue projects with substance.  
    Tiny died suddenly in 1984.  Before he died, however, the likes of Larry King, Tom  Snyder, and PM Magazine asked him to tell nationwide TV audiences about his exploits.At the end he found it hard to go on boring stakeouts to pick up punks, having enjoyed the attention of Linda Ronstadt and the Skipper from Gilligan's Island courting him at a lavish book party.  
    I never saw Tiny again after an autograph session in California late in 1981, but Jimmy Dale Noble stayed in loose touch with me even after I'd taken a job teaching journalism at Ball State University.  In the late eighties Jimmy Dale and I reunited twice briefly when I came to Missouri to write profiles on third baseman George Brett and rodeo clown Leon Coffee. At his house he told me stories about his days as a high rigger, an dangerous job requiring agility and guts.  To keep their nerve, most tree toppers chew tobacco, he said.  He didn't like the sour taste and puffed cigarettes.
    "We'd start at the very bottom and take limbs off as we went up," Jimmy Dale once wrote me in a letter.  "We'd keep going up while whacking off limbs until the remaining top was only 16 inches in diameter.  The undercut was made as far as possible without getting the saw stuck, and a small, narrow notch was taken out on the side on which it was supposed to fall.  Then, when everything was still, the final cut was made, and the top went into space.  The jar form the top breaking free usually caused the giant port to sway 15 to 30  feet like an oversized whip.  I've been damn near shaken from my perch more than once.  The only time I've felt so free was while skydiving."
    During those visits we began talking about fiction and how loggers have been excluded from the serious novelistic treatment given to cowboys and whalers.  We devised an outlive for a novel about a logger that had elements in it of myth and suspense, with a comic tone throughout.
    We collaborated in person, by phone, and by mail.  Neither of us expected to make more than $2,500 apiece for a literary novel, and so we had to write in the little time our day jobs left us.  We set the novel in St. Joe, Missouri, Jimmy Dale's birthplace and home of the Pony Express. He took me to rugged brush-and timber country to set scenes.  He knew trees by their bark and leaves.  In a sawmill, when workers cut rough timber into boards, he identified species by their scent.
    In time, the experiences form his life became the experiences of the protagonist in our thickening manuscript.  I knew more about his life than I did my own.  I lived too much in my mind, and I envied the self-assured way he accepted life's dangerous realities.
    Jimmy Dale referred to himself as a river rat; he was reared on a farm along the Missouri River near the stockyards of St. Joe.  He and other country kids entered the pens of diseased cattle at night to have rodeo competitions.  His life was shaped by the Mighty Mo and, like him, the river could be calm or wild.  Near the farm was a long bridge that led to Kansas.  As a young man he took a dare in early winter, "when it was colder than a well digger's butt in a drainpipe," and jumped, regretting the decision before his feet split the current.
    He used to tell me that there were times when the river was so peaceful ("peacable" was his word) that he preferred a seat on the bank to one in heaven.  All a river rat knew about a perfect world was a day on a sandbar with temperatures in the sixties, putting a worm with a great personality on a hook.  We would steal breaks from writing to fish- taking legal pads with us to discuss structure, characters, plotting-and that's how I remember his in my mind's eye.  The breeze is ruffling his graying hair, and his line is shaking.  I see him tense for a second, hoping the cause is a fat catfish an not the wind from the east.
    Jimmy Dale said his favorite fish was the Missouri goblin fish, named that because you only could catch one at the stroke of midnight on Halloween.  The goblin fish-- so big that two barges and a tugbout were required to get one to shore-- was a picky eater.  The only bait it would take was a June bug weighing 63 pounds.  "And everyone knows June bugs are scarce in October," Jimmy Dale would deadpan.
    I found joy in collaborating on our novel.  I have a hint of what it is like for performing arts professionals to collaborate on a beautiful work, or a symphony to put on a world premiere.  When human beings collaborate on a work of art, there is meeting of sensibilities and souls that nothing, save the birth of a child, can match for euphoria and dread and hope.
    The novel won't be finished.  Last October, right before goblin-fish season, Jimmy Dale died of a coronary.  Brain-dead, he lingered for hours.  His heart didn't want to quit.
    Farewell, partner.  I'll miss your friendship, your stories, our collaboration.  You and I didn't fail at writing that novel.  We ran out of money and time.
    Oh hell, you'd say to that, for you never permitted anyone "to butter your cherry."  We failed awright- sue us.  Grab your fishin' pole.

Read more stories