Where’s Lloyd?

I can’t find Lloyd Hill, and it bothers me.

I was sipping coffee two tables away from a man who looks so much like Lloyd that I finally walked over and asked. “No,” the man said, and by the time he had spoken I knew he wasn’t Lloyd.

Lloyd was soft-spoken, so soft-spoken that sometimes you wondered if Lloyd could really be Lloyd E. Hill, author of The Village Of Bom Jesus.

Lloyd saved my life one afternoon, when a family of deer appeared out of thin air. He snapped his steering wheel hard right, swerved around the deer, then turned hard left and slipped us back onto pavement, a nimble move executed in a car the size of an F150, going sixty miles an hour. After I turned to look at the fleeing deer, I looked at Lloyd, who smiled, then said more than he usually said, “Close one.”

In a bar one night, Lloyd filled my head with one of those brain teasers. “There’s a farmer who has a goose and a fox and a bag of grain, and he has to get them across the river to get them to market.” Lloyd shared the rules about how many things could fit in the farmer’s boat, and what each animal ate, then assured me that I’d solve the thing in no time. I laughed at this quiet fisherman, farmer, tool maker, scientist, grandfather, and author who thought he could stump me with a logic problem. “Drinks are on me until I figure it out,” I said. When I ran out of money, I started begging, but Lloyd kept his word and withheld the solution, because I had made him promise.

Lloyd didn’t look the part of an author, which is a funny thing for another author to say, since I’ve met plenty of tall authors and short ones, old ones and young ones, quiet ones, loud ones, sober ones and drunks. I think about Lloyd trying to sell his book in today’s publishing world, afraid that many agents would find him too old, his story too offbeat, not Upmarket enough, without a High Concept one-line hook to describe it, and then I realize that part of whom I’m missing is me. I’m about the age now that Lloyd was then, and I have a book out to others for judgment.

I can’t find his picture anywhere, not on his dust cover, not online, not in any bios or obituaries. If you know Lloyd, or if you’ve seen him, please tell him hello from Philip Deal, his friend from all those years ago. I remember you, Lloyd E. Hill, and I miss you.

Note: After writing my final words, I found an answer about Lloyd, in an article written in 2010: “Hall on April 14 was presented with the Dallas Paleontological Society’s highest honor, the Lloyd Hill award. The award is named for the late Lloyd Hill, an amateur fossil hunter and longtime member of the Dallas Paleontological Society. Hill wrote the well-regarded novel The Village of Bom Jesus.”