by John Dunning
He wrote of his travels in the Congo, Zanzibar, Syria, Iceland, India, and Brazil. He wrote books on bayonets, swords, and falconry. He was one of those brilliant swashbuckling wizards who comes along rarely, who understands life and writes exactly what he sees without pandering to rules of propriety or knuckling under to religious tyranny. His kind does not have an easy life. He is resented and shunned by churches and genteel society; if he’s lucky, he may escape being burned at the stake. In Burton’s case, he was victimized after death by his pious, narrow-minded Roman Catholic wife. Lady Isabel torched his work, burning forty years of unpublished manuscripts, journals, and notes in her mindless determination to purify his image.
This is why I am not religious. If and when we do learn the true secret of the universe, some kind of religion will be there to hide it. To cover it up. To persecute and shred, to burn and destroy. They stay in business by keeping us in the Dark Ages.
Darkness is what they sell.
By the middle of the second week, I had a good grasp of Burton’s life and times; by the middle of the third, I knew what I wanted to do with my fifty grand. All I needed was to find the right copy of the right book.
I sent out feelers. Booksellers around the country began calling me with tips. By the middle of the fourth week, I had been touted to the Boston Book Galleries and an upcoming Burton that was rumored to be everything I wanted. I made plans to fly East.
How can I describe the joy of pulling down those sweetheart books for twenty-nine thousand and change? I knew I’d probably have to pay what the trade considered a premium. Dealers dropped out of the bidding early, and the contest winnowed down to two collectors and me. When it went past twenty I thought the hell with it, I wasn’t buying these books for resale, this was food for the soul and I didn’t care if I had to spend the whole fifty grand. The Seattle stash was found money, in my mind. People who gamble in casinos on Indian reservations sometimes call their winnings Indian money. They put it in a cookie jar and give themselves permission to lose it all again. But a book like the Burton set is never a gamble. I wasn’t about to throw my bankroll at a roulette table, but thinking of it as Indian money made me instantly more competitive and ultimately the high bidder. There was a time when it would have been unthinkable to spend so much on a single first edition. I laugh at those days.
I laughed a lot in the wake of Boston. I was amazed at how far my Burton story had been flung. It surpassed even Janeway’s Rule of Overkill, which goes like this: getting the media’s interest can be so much more difficult than keeping it. Reporters and editors are such pessimistic bastards—everyone wants a few inches of their space or a minute of their time, and they put up walls that are all but impregnable. Editors will send a grumbling reporter many miles to cover a man with a butterfly collection and ignore some shameful injustice that’s been growing in their own backyards forever. Out-of-town experts thrill them, but anyone who openly tries to lure them will get brushed off faster than a leper at a nudist colony. The key to the gate is your own indifference. Be shy enough and the media will swarm. At that point anything can happen.
I was indifferent, I was almost coy, and overnight I became the most prominent Richard Burton specialist in America. I didn’t claim to be the best or the brightest: I probably wasn’t the wisest, whitest, darkest, wittiest, and listen, this part’s hard to believe, I may not have even been the prettiest. The events that put me on the map were arbitrary and embarrassingly unjustified. A single piece in The Boston Globe, passionately written by a rabid Burton fan on his day off, led to my appearance on NPR, and to far greater exposure when a Boston wire-service bureau chief ordered a light rewrite and put that Globe piece in newspapers around the country. I didn’t kid myself—they were all using me as a modern hook for the story that really interested them, because Burton’s story had been history, not news, for more than a century. But this is how I got my fifteen minutes of fame: I was carried there on the broad shoulders of a man who died sixty years before I was born.
At home I had twenty calls on my answering machine, including one from Miranda. Because of the Denver angle, both local papers had carried my AP story from Boston. Lee had seen it, and of course he wanted to see the books. Miranda invited me for “supper” that night, making the distinction that this was not “dinner,” it was family, and there would just be the three of us. It was a weeknight; we’d make it a short evening for the good of us all. Lee was in the middle of a complicated trial and I had lots of work to do. Even Miranda had an early date the next morning, at a neighborhood old-folks’ home where she worked as a volunteer.
We ate on their patio, laughing over my close call with Archer the last time I had seen them. “I was holding my breath,” Miranda said: “For a minute I thought you were going to take him apart before God and all of us.” She glanced at Lee and said, “Not that Cliff wouldn’t have been justified, sweetheart. I know the man’s your oldest friend, and it’s certainly not my habit to apologize for my guests. But that one’s a real bastard and I just don’t like him.”
Lee smiled in that easy way he had. “Hal’s had a hard life. That’s what you need to understand about him before you judge him too harshly.”
“Why is it me who’s got to understand him?. I like people I
already understand.“
“Give him just a little break, Miranda. His family was against his writing career from the start and he had to struggle all through his life. His early books—all the ones that people are now calling modern classics—were rejected by everybody for years. He has suffered the tortures of the damned—the truly gifted man whose talent was ignored for decades, actually. If he’s bitter it’s because of the bestseller mentality and what he sees as the dumbing-down of our literature.”
“I know that but it’s such an old, tedious story. He’s hardly the first writer to feel unappreciated. How many talented people never do get recognized? You don’t see them whining about it, or causing a fuss when all someone wants to do is admire them. There’s just no excuse for boorish behavior. He should cut off his ear and enjoy some real pain.”
I asked for a truce. “I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it. Really, I barely noticed it.”
Abruptly, thankfully, Lee changed the subject. “Let’s look at your books,” he said, and we went back into the house. He studied the three volumes in awe, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “My God,” he said. “Where on earth did these come from?” Ultimately, I didn’t know: the auction house wasn’t required to disclose consignors’ names. Miranda wondered who Charles Warren had been, how someone who had received such a warm inscription could remain so unknown to Burton’s biographers. Finally Lee brought up his own volumes to compare. There was no comparison. Lee’s were near fine, more than good enough for most collectors of hundred-year-old books. Mine were a full cut above that: unblemished, stratospheric, factory-fresh. Placing the two sets side by side gave new meaning to the words rare books.
“I’d say you did well, even at thirty thousand,” he said. “In fact, if you want to sell them and make some instant money…”
“I’m going to hang on to these, Lee. They’re going into my retirement fund.”
That night I had a message from Erin on my machine. “I am going crazy on some planet called Rock Springs. Now I know what happens when all hope dies—rock springs eternal. My desperation simply cannot be described! It’s so bad that I’m actually calling you in some misguided hope for relief. Of course you’re not there, but I guess that is my relief.”
I left an answer on her home phone—“I warned you about Wyoming, kid”—and in the morning, when I turned mine on, she had already replied: “I beg your pardon, you certainly did not say I was being sent to Mars. It looks like we’ll wrap it up here in a couple of weeks, but that sounds like eternity on this end of it. I will need some very serious pampering when I get home.”
I thought about her a lot that day. We were having some fairly intimate bullshit for two
people who had yet to touch, feel, probe, or say more than a few direct words to each other. At bedtime I launched a new attack on her hated answering machine. “Look, let’s make a date. You. Me. Not this gilhickey you make me talk to. Us, in the…you know…flesh. Didn’t mean that the way it sounded, it just popped out. Didn’t mean that either. I promise to be civilized. I swear. White sport coat. Pink carnation. Night of the thirtieth. Come by my bookstore if you get in early enough. Call me if you can’t make it.”
She didn’t call. But soon the crank calls began.
For days after Boston I had crackpots calling at all hours: people who claimed to have real Burton books and didn’t, fools who wanted me to fly to Miami or Portland or Timbuktu on my nickel to check them out, wild people with trembling voices who needed a drink or a fix and had battered copies of Brodie’s biography or cheap Burton reprints that could still be found in cheesy modern bindings on chain-store sales tables. One man, certain that he was Burton’s direct descendant, had talked to Burton for years in his dreams and had written a twelve-hundred-page manuscript, dictated by Burton himself, with maps of a fabulous African kingdom that remained undiscovered to this very day. A woman called collect from Florida with a copy of Richard Burton’s autobiography, in dust jacket, signed by Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and some woman named Virginia Woolf. All she wanted for it was $1,500, but I had to take it now, sight unseen, or she’d get on the phone and after that it was going to the highest bidder. There were calls from Chicago and Phoenix and Grand Rapids, Michigan. An old woman in Baltimore said my book had been stolen from her family. She talked in a whisper, afraid “they” would overhear her, and when she insisted that the man in the inscription had been her grandfather and that he had been there when Richard Burton had helped start the American Civil War, I moved on as quickly as I could without being rude. One thing I knew for sure—there’d be another hot item in the next mail, and another with the next ringing of the telephone.
Packages arrived without notice at my Denver bookstore. Most contained worthless books that I had to return. A man in Detroit sent a nice box of early Burton reprints, which I actually bought. But the strangest thing was the arrival of a true first edition, Burton’s City of the Saints, in a package bearing only a St. Louis postmark— no name, no return address anywhere on or inside the box. I waited for some word by telephone or in a separate letter, but it never came.
By the end of the month the clamor had begun to calm down. The thirtieth came: the crackpots had faded away and my new friend in Rock Springs still had not called. My suspense was delicious. I was thinking of all the places I might take her, but then the old lady from Baltimore arrived and the mystery of that wonderful inscription came to life.
CHAPTER 3
She was not just old, she was a human redwood. I got a hint of her age when her driver, an enormous black man in a military-style flak jacket, stepped out of a Ford Fairlane of mid-sixties vintage and stood protectively at her door. A bunch of rowdy kids roared past on skateboards: six of them, all seventeen or eighteen, old enough to be frisky and not quite old enough to know better.
East Colfax is that kind of street: common, rough, unpredictable. I heard one of the kids yell, “Look out, Smoky!” and I cringed at the slur and was shamed again by the callous stupidity of my own race. I could hear their taunting through my storefront, but the driver stood with patient dignity and ignored them. He had an almost smooth face with a short, neat mustache, and I liked his manner and the way he held himself. Sometimes you can tell about a guy, just from a glance.
The kids clattered away and the driver opened the car door. A gray head appeared followed by the rest of her: a frail-looking woman in a faded, old-fashioned dress. She gripped his arm and pulled herself up: stood still for a moment as if she couldn’t quite get her balance, then she nodded and, still clutching his arm, began the long, step-by-step voyage across the sidewalk to my store. She had to stop and steady herself again, and at that moment I saw the driver look up with a face full of alarm. Another wave of reckless kids was coming, and in that half second the first of them whipped by just a foot from my glass. The driver put up his hand and yelled “Stop!” and I saw the old lady cringe as a blur flew past and missed her by inches. I started toward the door, but before I could get there, the big man had stiff-armed the next kid in line, knocking him ass over apex on the sidewalk.
I opened my door and several things happened at once. Another fool swerved past, I got my foot on his skateboard, tipped him off, and the board shot out into the street, where it was smashed by a passing car. The first kid was up on his hands and knees, bleeding at the elbows and dabbing at a bloody nose. I heard the ugly words, “nigger son of a bitch,” and two more of his buddies arrived, menacing us on the sidewalk. The car had pulled to the curb and now a fat man joined the fray, screaming about the scratch on his hood. In all this chaos the big fellow managed to get the old lady into the store, leaving me alone to handle the fallout.
The bloody nose was flanked by his pals. “I oughta beat your ass.”
I laughed at the thought. “You couldn’t beat your meat without help from these other idiots. Maybe you better haul it on out of here before you get in real trouble.”
I juked them and they stumbled over one another as they backed out to the curb. It was hard not to laugh again, they were such colossal schmucks, but I let them put on a little face-saving sideshow, to which middle fingers were copiously added, and eventually they sulked away.
Now I had to go through another song and dance with the fat guy. He said, “What about my car, wiseguy, you gonna pay for my hood?” I asked if he knew how to read, pointing out that my sign said books, not State Farm Insurance. He suggested throwing a brick through my window and we’d see how funny that was. I took obvious note of his plate number and told him I’d be inside calling the cops while he was looking around for a brick. I heard him leave, putting down a foot of rubber as I opened my door and went inside.
The old lady sat in a chair with her eyes closed. I spoke to her driver, who had a name tag sewn military-style on his jacket. “Mr. Ralston, I presume.”
“Mike’ll do.”
I shook his hand, said, “Cliff Janeway,” and gave a small bow in her direction. “Welcome to East Colfax.”
* * *
The phone rang and I had a brief rush of business. The old woman sat still through it all, her balance eerily stable in what appeared to be a light sleep. Occasionally I made eye contact with Ralston, arching my eyebrows and cocking my head in her direction, but he shrugged and waited for the calls to subside. When it got quiet again I motioned him over to the end of the counter. “So…Mike…what’s this all about?”
“Beats me. I think she just got to Denver last night.”
“Just got here from where?”
“Back East somewhere. I don’t know how she made it all alone. You can see how shaky she is, and she’s got almost no money. That had to be one helluva trip.”
“What’s your part in it?”
“Let’s call it my good deed of the month.” He smiled, a humble man embarrassed by his own kindness. “Look, I’m no professional do-gooder, but this woman’s at the end of her rope. She’s staying in a tacky motel not far from here. My wife works there and I can tell you it’s not a place you’d want your grandmother to stay. Or your wife to work, either…not for long.”
“So?”
“So Denise calls and tells me she’s got a lady there who needs some help. Denise is my wife.” He said her name so lovingly that I could almost feel some small measure of the affection myself, for a woman I had never met. “You married, Janeway?”
I shook my head.
“Well, this is one of those things you do when you are. As the line goes, to ensure domestic tranquillity. You’ll understand it someday.”
I laughed and liked him all the more.
“All I can tell you right now is, this lady came a long way to see you, and she almost made it. The least I could do
was get her the last few miles over here.”
I liked Mr. Ralston but I sure didn’t like what I was hearing. The arrival of an ancient and penniless woman at my door charged me with responsibility for her welfare. Maybe I owed her nothing—that was the voice of a cynic, and I am the great cynic of my day. I can be a fountain of negative attitude, but from that moment she was mine to deal with.
“I wonder if I should wake her.”
“Up to you, friend. I’m just the delivery boy.”
It was unlikely but she seemed to hear us. Her eyes flicked open and found my face, and I had a powerful and immediate sense of something strong between us. I knew that in some distant past she had been an important part of my life, yet in the same instant I was certain I had never seen her. Her face was almost mummified, her eyes watery and deep. Her hair was still lush and striking: now I could see that it was pure white, not gray, swept across her forehead in a soft wave that left her face looking heart-shaped and delicate in spite of the deeply furrowed skin. I pulled up a stool, said, “What can I do for you, ma’am?” and her pale gray eyes, which had never left my face, struggled to adjust in the harsh late-afternoon sunlight from the street. Suddenly I knew she couldn’t see me: I saw her pupils contract and expand as she lowered and raised her head; I saw the thick glasses in her lap and the lax fingers holding them but making no effort to bring them up to her eyes. The glasses were useless; she was blind. It was impossible but she had come across the country alone, trembling and unsteady…virtually sightless.
I couldn’t just shake that off, and I still felt some vague sense of kinship between us. It was probably simple chemistry, one of those strong and instant reactions that certain people have when they meet, but it had happened so rarely in my life that its effect was downright eerie. And this was doubly strange, because I now began to sense that her reaction to me was almost a polar opposite. Her face was deeply apprehensive, as if I had some heaven-or-hell power and she was finally at the time in her long life when the accounting had to begin.
