The Bookwoman's Last Fling

by John Dunning

  She was expecting a mixed lot, half of them fairly sound, the others with various problems. “One of ’em’s pretty sick and from what I heard we may lose him. We’ll see how he is tomorrow.” We stood in the yard at the end of our day and I felt at home with this woman I barely knew. Inside, we sat around the table and filled in the particulars on Cameron. He had arrived this morning, an hour after we left, driving up to the front door like he’d never been away. “I think he may have been watching the house,” Rosemary said, “just waitin’ for y’all to leave.” She didn’t know this for a fact but she could feel it in her bones. He was in an old Buick Eight with a crushed left fender, and the motor pinged like it was on its last legs. At first he was charming: a smiling jocular man with tiny hips and an enormous belly that drooped far over his belt. “You wouldn’t know him now if you passed him on the street, even if he is your part brother,” Rosemary said; “I’d bet a dollar he ain’t seen his own dick in five years,” and the table erupted with laughter.

  He had aged badly. His skin was pale and pasty, craggy like some alien desert landscape. “He looks like he might have some little skin cancers growing around his nose.”

  One thing that hadn’t changed was how he swaggered his way up the stairs to the front porch, “like he owns the world and the rest of us are just paying rent.” Sharon nodded faintly. Of the three brothers, Cameron always did put on the best swagger. But Rosemary thought life had not been good to him: he had to make a big effort just to get out of that car and haul himself up the front stairs. To a casual eye he looked more like he might be Sharon’s daddy or maybe her grandfather than her half brother. He had a fellow with him about half his age with muscles bulging under tightly rolled sleeves. Sharon asked if she had gotten a name for that one, but they had come and gone, each time there had been more tension, and there’d been no time for questions. “He just said he’d come for a book you owe him,” Rosemary said.

  “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Sharon said.

  Both of them had approached the door that first time. Rosemary described it candidly, with no effort to be overly polite. “That cracker from Muscle Beach was what we always called white trash. He stood off flexing his knuckles like he’d just die for the chance to rearrange my bones then and there, like one word from Cameron and I’d be dead meat.” They loomed there in the doorway, trying to intimidate, arguing for at least five minutes and getting more insistent all the time. “They just stood there trying to face us down. That’s when I put politeness out the back door and told ’em they might as well get used to the wait, because nobody comes in Sharon’s house when Sharon ain’t here. Nobody.”

  So they had gone away, but less than half an hour later they were back again. Now Cameron was getting ugly. “Goddammit, Rosemary, you’re takin’ a helluva lot on yourself for hired nigger help.” Sharon sat up straight in sudden hot anger. “Did he actually say that?” “Yes, he did,” Rosemary said. “I didn’t know whether I should tell you or not, you know I don’t get outta joint over stuff like that, but yeah, he said it several times to both of us. He said, ‘Maybe you think you be family or some such, but you ain’t nuthin’ but highfalutin house niggers.’” Sharon was red under the front room lamp. “Then what happened?”

  Then they argued some more, maybe twenty minutes this time, with Cameron getting madder by the minute. “Listen, you!” he yelled at one point. “I ain’t got time for this goddam song and dance, I got to be on the Coast tomorrow afternoon and I ain’t leavin’ here till I get what’s mine!” So Rosemary said, “Write us a letter about it. If it’s yours Sharon might be inclined to send it to you.” More laughter, like a soft cheering section, went around the table.

  “He didn’t like that business about the letter,” Rosemary said, “but he left again, callin’ me nigger names and cussin’ up a blue streak.”

  This time he was gone till early afternoon. “Next thing I hear out of him he’s there on the porch again, trying to kick the door down. I figure they snuck back somehow ’cause I never heard the car come up and never saw it either. We just sitting here like this and there he is, beatin’ on the door with his shoulder and his feet till I can hear the wood starting to split. Then he says, ‘Now you made me mad, nigger,’ and he keeps on sayin’ that like some crazy man. ‘Now you made me mad, nigger, now you made me mad. You shouldn’ta done that.’”

  Sharon shook her head and said, “Jesus,” under her breath.

  “That ain’t all. You wanna hear the rest of it?”

  Sharon nodded warily and Rosemary said, “That’s when Lillian comes up with the 12-gauge pump gun. I jerk the door open and she fires a load of buckshot right over their heads. Blow a hole in the porch roof big as my fist.”

  “I’ll pay for that,” Lillian said.

  “What happened then?” Sharon said.

  “Then she jack another shell into the gun and they fall all over each other trying to get down them steps. Last we seen of ’em, they be going like hell down the road, about as fast as old Cameron can move. I felt like puttin’ a load ’tween each of ’em’s hind ends.”

  Again Lillian said, “I’m paying for the damage to the porch,” but Sharon told her not to worry about it. I hadn’t said anything all this time. Once I looked up at Sharon, our eyes met, and she looked away as if it shamed her to be part of our race. Lillian said, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d let me take care of that hole in the roof,” and Louie made an aggravated motion with his hands. “Quit worryin’ over the damn hole in the roof, Lil, me and Billy can fix it good as new.”

  We ate and talked some more, and afterward Sharon walked me back to the barn. “All of a sudden I’m nervous,” she said. “No matter how careful I am, the books make me vulnerable.”

  “Would you be open to a visit from the guy at the Blakely Library? I’m not lobbying for him, but I know he’d like to see your stuff. And he’s got a lot of well-heeled people in his corner, so he can get the money if you ever do want to sell it.”

  “I wouldn’t want him to come all the way out here for nothing.”

  “He’s a book guy, Sharon, this is what he does. He’d like to see it just for future reference, so if you ever do want to donate or sell it, you won’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you talk. I imagine he’ll want to make notes for his own information, if that’s okay. For bibliographical purposes.”

  “And you trust this guy?”

  “His word is like money in the bank.”

  “Okay, I’ll see him,” she said. “What’s his name?”

  “Carroll Shaw. The library is a private one; he’s the director of special collections. I think it’s an honorary job, which means he gets the satisfaction of putting it together and a lot of credit from book people all over the country. They’ve got some well-heeled backers and they’re housing a world-class collection about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. Their whole mission is to protect books like yours, to preserve whatever’s donated in the spirit it was given.”

  “Don’t they all do that?”

  “Not unless you nail them to the wall and tack them down with Monster Glue. The first thing even a high-class library might want to do is sell off the dupes to generate revenue. I think it’s vital from your viewpoint that the collection stay together. So whether you sell the books or not, listen to what Carroll has to say.”

  “I will, I promise.”

  “Don’t do anything you might regret later.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Swear to God,” I said, and she made a sign in the air and we laughed.

  We walked around the barn and stood in the shadows of the loft.

  “What else are you thinking?” she said.

  “I’m thinking I’ll stick around a while. If that’s okay with you.”

  “You think Cameron will come back?”

  “Who knows what a guy like that might do? He’s been here three times in one day and once he tried to kick the door in, so you’ve got to figure
he’s serious. Even if Lillian did scare him off for the moment, you need to know where he is.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we’ll see.”

  The new horses arrived the next morning. She pulled off their shoes and turned them out and let them wander freely across the field. The sick horse was a sorry-looking thing, scrawny and scabby, trembly, with pus running down his face from an infected eye. He stood apart, wary as she approached him, but too sick to run away anymore. Her voice was almost mesmerizing, and after a while he closed his eyes and let her touch him. Go ahead, kill me, he seemed to say. She rubbed his ears and slipped a halter over his head and put the chain end of a lead shank through the halter and snapped it under his chin. All this time she kept talking, touching him, and I held him while she felt his legs. She hugged his head and ran her hands gently across his body till his trembles went away. This took a long time, but she went about it like she had nothing better to do with the rest of her life. I remembered what Junior had said about her hands but this was more than that. I thought she was treating him with her voice as well as her hands. There you are, little guy, you’re home now…you’re home now…you’re gonna be fine…my what a sweet little guy you are… the same words over and over while she rubbed his neck and upper legs.

  “He’s got two bad tendons that never were treated right,” she said. “Somebody fired him at some point but I don’t think it did him much good.” I asked her what that meant and she said, “Basically you take a hot iron and burn holes in his legs. The idea is that all the healing properties in his body rush to that spot and help him get well.”

  Both front legs were bowed, she said, “and his lip’s all screwed up where somebody had a mean twitch on him. Indicates a hell-raiser at some point, but there ain’t much hell in him now. He’s got bad feet: quarter cracks, a deep sand crack on that rear left hoof and a bone spavin on his right rear leg. Right now he’s pretty miserable, he probably hurts everywhere all the time. He’s mighty tired of living, but maybe I can coax some life into him after all. He might do okay here.”

  She put him in a stall and gave him a warm mash, and he ate like a starving castaway.

  “Nothing wrong with his appetite,” I said.

  “That’s the good news.” She touched the side of his face, then lifted her hand a few inches and wiggled her fingers. “I think he’s blind in this eye. I’ll give him an antibiotic and see how he is tomorrow. Maybe all he needs is time and a new outlook on life.”

  She leaned toward him and made a soft kissing noise and he put his head on her shoulder. “Look at him,” she said. “He’s a real lover boy. He loves to cuddle.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “He does now. I think we’ll call him Paul, after a fellow I once knew. Life treated him badly too.”

  We went up to the house and sat on her porch, and there I began to ask more questions. I wondered if she knew what the deal was between Junior and Damon: it seemed like an unholy alliance or at least an uneasy one. “It’s really pretty simple,” she said. “They’ve got a crackerjack three-year-old and some other nice horses they want to take out to Santa Anita this winter. But the will won’t be settled for a while yet, so they’ll want to get all of us together. Apparently Bax has told them he’s fine with it. I’m the stumbling block.”

  “What do you think you’ll do?”

  “Don’t know yet. I’m not sure I can do anything legally; the executor would probably side with them pretty quickly. There’s two ways you can look at it. I don’t particularly like racing, but these horses have been well-trained and they’re fit, ready to run. This is what they’ve been aimed at; when HR was alive he and Junior were supposedly getting them ready, and I’m not sure I should step in now and mess that up. I doubt HR would actually have taken them racing, but this new crop they’ve got is exceptional. I watched Damon work one colt on our track and he does run like the wind, he could really be something good. If it was just Damon taking him I’d say no way, I’d fight him to the death. But believe it or not, I trust Junior. Maybe his bedside manner with people is lacking but I think he’ll do what’s right for his horses.”

  She remembered her mother in scattered episodes: here sometimes, gone with Geiger for weeks at a time. She had often been left with Rosemary during her school years. Louie had taught her about horses when they were home. “In a real way Louie and Rosemary raised me.”

  She was eleven when her mother died. “That’s when they really raised me full time.”

  They were good teachers, she said. Rosemary taught her right from wrong and Louie showed her how to sit a horse properly.

  But as time went on, her discontent deepened. “I never lost the feeling that my life would have been so much different if she had lived.”

  Gently I eased into the subject of her mother’s death. “Where were you when she died?”

  “I was here: it was the middle of the school semester.”

  “Who was here then?”

  “Rosemary, Lillian…”

  “Your dad?”

  “He was in California.”

  “There at the farm?”

  “No, he had gone to a friend’s ranch to look at some horses he wanted to buy.”

  “So she was alone.”

  She nodded. “HR found her when he came home.”

  “Where was Junior?”

  “Out there at the racetrack. Junior was always there when HR went racing.”

  “What about your brothers?”

  “Racing at Bay Meadows. Cameron was at some county fair.”

  All in Northern California, she said.

  “Why did the cops out there assume Candice’s death was an accident? Was there an autopsy?”

  “Yes, it was the peanuts that killed her. That was never in question.”

  “The real question was, how’d she get them? The cops had to wonder about that.”

  She fell into a long silence, so long I had to prod her. “Sharon?”

  “I think they suspected…”

  “What?”

  “They thought she might have eaten them intentionally.”

  “Why would they think that?”

  “Someone told them she was unhappy.”

  “Who told them that?”

  “I never knew. Someone they talked to, and then they asked Louie about it. Someone had told them she was unhappy and that’s how the question came up.”

  “So whoever it was, they got the idea she might have done it herself. And they never found any other theories or motives? Seems like they were pretty quick to make that call.”

  “Actually, they talked to everybody. I’ve got some of the reports. There came a time when they couldn’t do any more.”

  “Okay, I understand that, I had a few like that myself.”

  I asked her to tell me about her brothers.

  “Cameron’s the oldest, but they’re all getting up there now: When Candice married HR they were as old as she was.”

  “Did they resent Candice?”

  “At first, I think. Then they learned she was far from a young gold digger, she could buy and sell them all fifty times over.” Sharon laughed. “I’d love to’ve been there then, when that realization first came over each of them. Wish I had their faces on film. I’d play it back on my TV on Saturday nights just for amusement.”

  That afternoon I looked through Sharon’s books while she made some telephone checks. I wrote out detailed notes and checked them against my earlier impressions from the old man’s books. By late afternoon Sharon had learned where Cameron had been staying: a flophouse indeed, but he had already checked out. Before evening we had begun to slip into a routine. In the morning we did the stable work, and after breakfast she made some phone calls. Baxter was indeed at Golden Gate. “That’s where I expect Cameron to go if he goes back to California,” she said; “either to Golden Gate or some county fair. I think they’re running at Pomona now.”

  She had made contact with half a dozen horse
men she knew on the Coast. “If he shows up anywhere out there, we’ll know. Then what?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I wasn’t stonewalling her; I had been thinking about it for days.

  I talked with Rosemary and Lillian the next morning, and with Louie early that afternoon. At first they went on about how great Candice was—nice but not particularly helpful. “They all think she walked on water,” I told Sharon. “They need to understand that I’m not here to sandbag your mom, but I’ve got to get the names of any people who had anything against her.” This might be difficult, I admitted: “I need you to convince them to tell me the truth, no matter where that leads.” Sharon said she’d speak with them, and the next day I went through it all again. Now their manner was cool but I thought I was getting at the truth.

  Rosemary said Candice knew a few young men, one who went back to her childhood. “She had funny made-up names for ’em. One was like Tricky Dicky, like that president Tricky Dicky we had. That wasn’t exactly right, but it was something like that.”

  “Yeah, she made up names for lots of people,” Lillian said. “She had names from her storybooks, and she’d slap one of them names on somebody if she liked ’em and the name fit. I forgot about Tricky Dicky, but I remember it now.”

  I asked if they had ever seen any of these people.

  “I seen Tricky Dicky one time,” Rosemary said.

  They had been at the farm in California and this young man had been buzzing around her. “I never seen him up close, but sometime she’d walk down to the gate and he be there and they walk under the trees and talk.”

  “She had a friend name Gail,” Louie said. “I didn’t know about none of them boys, but I remember Gail from down on the farm.”