Limekiller!

Unfortunately, the country that inspired the Limekiller stories no longer exists. The colony has become a full-status nation and in its nationhood has fallen prey to the great afflictions of the past century. Its fabulous creatures, manatees and tapir and jaguars and such, are dwindling toward extinction, and the mahogany forests, mentioned as depleted in the text, have now been decimated. AIDS is everywhere. Street crime is endemic. Belize City, formerly the capitol, is a sewer crawling with drug dealers. No longer can you take a night stroll without experiencing anxiety in Orange Walk or Buttermilk Cay. And where there is no crime, no drugs, no filth and disease, there is a plague of Americans. Much of Belize has been sectioned off into tourist-friendly enclaves, environments in which some aspect of the land has been preserved, albeit in a cultivated fashion, dappled with bars and hotels whose ambiance — fishing nets and floats, lots of Ye Oldes, pirate chic, etc. - has been designed to conjure (yet serves merely to parody) the quaintness of colonial days. Thus, the ragged, blustery, charming spirit of the land has been deracinated and, rather than the pungent accents and eighteenth century idioms that pepper the speech of the indigents, now you are more liable to hear flattened Midwestern vowels and Tennessee drawls. One of the only places where you still can find the country that — once — was a place well worth a visit, lies here within these pages, as witnessed by the fictive eyes of Jack Limekiller and recorded by the peerless unorthodoxy of Avram Davidson’s talent and vision.

For the term of our acquaintance, spanning his last thirteen years, Avram posed the image of a diminutive, acerbic grand- fatherly man with an untidy gray beard. On the surface, he was a crusty fellow. He did not suffer fools gladly and was frequently impatient with and demanding of his friends. Like all truly committed writers, artists who live through their work, he displayed a mixture of arrogance and insecurity toward his stories (how else can one feel about something upon which one labors to distraction?), but although his arrogance was often visible, he rarely put his insecurity on public exhibition. He told jokes whose involute form and Classical references more often than not puzzled those who heard them, and he was given to quoting passages from Virgil in the Latin whenever exasperated. In many regards, he was a man of unbending principle. For instance, being a Jew, he would never sell his books to German publishers, even when he was having serious money troubles. In his personal relationships, principle would sometimes gave way to childishness. He could be vastly self-pitying and was often verbally abusive to those whom he believed had slighted him. Doubtless all these characteristics were integral to his person, yet he was a man whose mental life was vastly separate in tone from the face he presented to the world. And beneath that surface, still vital inside his (by the time I met him) infirm body, resided a soul unalloyed in its questing nature and relatively undamaged by his service as an infantryman in World War II, by divorce, financial difficulties, poor health, by the thousand disappointments and shocks that attend all but the quickest of lives. I could never clearly gauge the shape or colors of that soul, but I imagine it as a colorful mist swirling within a glass globe that is itself held by an ornate bronze claw, rather like an object that might advance some narrative function in one of Avram's fantasy stories concerning Vergil, a spiritual artifact of unknown antiquity and unfathomable purpose, having a value that the world would someday recognize and understand and celebrate more fully than ever it did when it was housed in the flesh.

That soul was, quintessentially, the soul of a recluse. I usually picture Avram alone in a darkish room made claustrophobic by tumbled books and stacks of yellowed newspapers and magazines, old tins stuffed with whatnots, and a track winding through them that allowed access to other, equally cluttered rooms. The dank basement apartment in Bremerton, Washington, where he spent the final years of his life, was devoid of natural light and devoid, also, of any bright color, of television, of all but the most basic modernities. Like a wizard’s cell, it stood in relation to Avram’s person as did his body to the soul that hobbled about inside its own teetering house. He lived, you see, mostly far from Bremerton, amid mostly unreal kingdoms of his own device, one of which — British Hidalgo — was slightly less unreal than the rest and added a crucial touch of the material to the lively next-to-nothingness contained in that glass globe. But for all the limitations of his physical existence during his later years, Avram traveled widely, as he did for all his years, through the borderless countries of his brain and brought us back his stories for souvenirs.