FICTION
Joseph McElroy
THE MAN WITH THE BAG FULL OF
BOOMERANGS IN THE BOIS DE
BOULOGNE
He was not to be confused with my new friends or my
old . He was there before I found him and he did not care about be–
ing discovered. I knew him by a thing he did. He threw boomerangs
in the Bois de Boulogne.
If
he heard any of my questions, he kept
them to himself. Perhaps we were there to be alone, I in Paris, he in
the Bois that sometimes excludes the Paris it is part of.
But what makes you think Paris will still be there when you ar–
rive? inquires a timeless brass plate embedded in the lunchtable and
engraved with an accented French name. Well, I'm
in
Paris, after
all; that was obvious even before I sat down with my friend who in–
vited me to meet him here, though the immortal name I put my
finger on, that frankly I didn't quite place, might have been instead
that of the burly American who's also, I'm told, here somewhere
staring in brass off a table - far-flung American name once com–
monly coupled with Paris itself. So now, like a memorial bench in a
park, a table bears his name, that fighter who once clued us all in
that you make it up out of what you know, or words to that effect.
His pen (or sharpened pencil) had more clout even than his
knuckles.
What is the name of that famous burly writer who lunched at
this consequently famous restaurant? Out there past the brass
plaques and dark wood surfaces and the warm glass and the conver–
sation , the city doesn't happen to answer. Not a student descending
from a bus; not a woman hurrying by with two shopping bags like
buckets; not a man in the street I've seen in many quarters carrying
under his arm a very long loaf of bread and once or twice wearing a
motorbike helmet. He is probably not the man my French friends
patiently hear me describe , who is my man in the Bois whose very
face suggests the projectiles he carries in a bag, a cloth bag I didn't
