by Steve Vernon
“Got you,” Texas Jack Page said.
Dead writer, dead writing team and dead bug: the symmetry was priceless.
*
Texas Jack Page geared down and shifted the throttle, pushing that semi to the limit, breezing down the road as hard as he could roll. This was a fine life, just following the road wherever it lead him.
And then he heard that siren, and the bubblegum scarleted the twilight sky and Texas Jack Page pulled his rig on over.
The trooper was a big man with a bay window belly and a weather beaten face that reminded Texas Jack Page of a sheet of crumpled parchment. Texas Jack Page wondered to himself if there were words or a secret code hidden beneath the corrugate wrinkles and folds of the big trooper’s face, or if the man was nothing more than meaningless sack full of duty and habit pinned together with a shiny steel badge.
“Do you know how fast you were driving?” The trooper asked. He talked through his nose, like his sinuses were bothering him. Texas Jack Page wondered if it might be good manners to offer the man an antihistamine but he opted for repartee.
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” Texas Jack Page said.
Diplomacy was never Texas Jack Page’s strong suit. The crumpled parchment of the trooper’s face kindled into a slow burning rage. The trooper narrowed his eyes and lasered them straight at Texas Jack Page.
“Are you trying to be some kind of asshole?” The trooper asked.
“No sir,” Texas Jack Page truthfully answered. “I’m just trying to read you, is all.”
“Read me?”
“Yes sir,” Texas Jack Page said. “Every man is a book, and every book tells me a story. There’s a truth in that and it sounds like a country song if you sing it soft and slow.”
“Let’s keep this song as short as possible,” The trooper said. “Two-step time, if you please. Let me see your license.”
Texas Jack Page shrugged.
“I didn’t think I needed one. I’m just moving some books, is all.”
The trooper’s eyebrows made interesting arches that reminded Texas Jack Page of the alabaster arches that arced above the Lost Library of Atlantis. He’d dreamed of those arches one night after dozing off beneath a volume of Foucault. There he had walked with the ghost of Aristotle and had discussed the structure of true literal drama as opposed to the banality of life until he awoke in his Corpus Christi hotel room mumbling face down into a dubious stain on an unwashed pillow case.
“Son, who taught you how to drive a truck without a license?”
“Nobody taught me,” Texas Jack Page said, playing his last card with the gusto of a librarian serving a teenage delinquent an long overdue overdue-notice. “I read how, in the book that came with the truck. How else would anyone learn?”
Texas Jack Page learned everything from books. He found them far more reliable than people, who frequently lied and misled you. The trooper, however, failed to share the slightest scrap of Texas Jack Page’s philosophy of truck driving.
Which was how Texas Jack Page came to spend himself six long bookless months in a Texas jail cell.
*
Back in the Airstream, Texas Jack Page stared at the smeared carcass on his thumb. He hated silverfish. The little bastards ate the books every chance they got. They liked the taste of the glue, they did. They liked it nearly as much as Texas Jack Page loved his books. Nearly, but not half. All of his life Texas Jack Page had loved books. They had been his shelter from the nonstop rain of schoolyard bullies and his father’s endless shouts.
And worst of all were the high needling nags of his mother; forever comparing him to other boys. Why couldn’t he be like this boy or that boy? Why couldn’t he be like any other boy besides whom he really was? Nothing more than a bookworm, worse than a lowly bug, only happy when he was on his belly and elbows, leopard crawling through the pages of a Tarzan novel, a Doc Savage or best of all The Shadow.
The Hardy Boys bit him first. He turned the opening pages and skimmed the first few paragraphs of The Tower Treasure and became instantly convicted. Tom Swift tightened the noose. Tarzan finished the execution with a gallows knot grapevine. The sentence was passed. Texas Jack Page was bit by the reading bug, but bad. He found his happiness and his heaven in books. He found a sense of existence, order and adventure that compared to nothing else in his lonely quiet life. In books people were so easy to read. The villains always barked orders and snarled commands. The heroes were kind to women. And no one yelled at children.
*
It was Texas Jack Page’s third night in the Texas jail cell. He’d spent the first night trying to convince his captors to return him his books.
“They’re my books,” He argued. “I just want to read them.”
“They’ve been confiscated,” The jail keeper said. “They’re state property now.”
“What will happen to my books?” Texas Jack Page asked.
“A lot of them have already been sent to the local hospital. Some more will be shipped off to the penitentiary. If you hadn’t caught the judge on a night after a really good lay you might be reading them there right now.”
“Will people read them, once they get there?”
“That’s generally what people do with books.”
“As long as they don’t dog ear the pages. That’s downright criminal.”
It had taken Texas Jack Page another two days to arrange the delivery of a ream of twenty pound, ninety-two bright paper. The pen had been a harder trick. They wouldn’t let him have one in the cell. They wouldn’t even let him have a pencil.
“A pen is too dangerous,” The guard said. “You might use it as a weapon.”
“The pen may be mightier than the sword,” Texas Jack Page noted. “But that there .38 caliber hawgleg hanging in your holster outranks my Bic Clic by a long old road.”
He finally talked them into allowing him a crayon. Crayola black, with a little square of sandpaper to sharpen it with. He laid the paper out on a small metal table that was bolted to the floor and sat down to write.
The convict in the other cell, a large man with a face that mushroomed out of his collar like a runaway weather balloon watched Texas Jack Page prepare his work.
“What are you writing?” The convict asked. “A book?”
“That’s right,” Texas Jack Page said. “A book. From memory. When I can’t read, I like to write.”
He wrote the first three words down.
“Call me Ishmael.”
It took him six months and nearly a gross of Crayola black crayons to complete his work. It passed the time. When he was completed his writing he left the manuscript stacked by the cell’s stainless steel toilet where it remained unmolested. Over the years, countless Texan convicts read his borrowed words page by page, channeling the spirit of Melville and a thousand other accidental masterpieces before flushing them away, one page at a time.
Crayon is transient, legends live on forever.
*
When Texas Jack Page discovered Robert E. Howard, an actual Texan who wrote the kind of tales a young man dreamed of, it was as if he’d crawled alone across a desert full of burning snails and been greeted by his reflection in a cool green oasis pool. A kindred spirit. Texas Jack Page knew instinctively that Howard was the one man who understood him. Who knew what lay beneath the mythos of Texas Jack Page.
He eagerly followed Howard’s career, picking up every copy of Weird Tales that the man’s work appeared in. When he read of the great man’s suicide, a part of Texas Jack Page turned inwards and would look no more upon the light.
His tastes grew like mildew in the walls of an old swamp house. Texas Jack Page slowly evolved, like a pupae in a pulpy cocoon. He turned from being a simple reader, into a collector. He had always been this way. While other kids built blanket forts Texas Jack Page erected a bastion of books, interlocked like bricks. He would sit there in the musty shadows of his book fort, lovingly running his thumb over the spine of a dog eared anthology, reveling
in the soft stucco sea of color and the unyielding tongue mosaic of all those magnificent words.
His fascination slowly exploded out of control. He acquired a paper route and used his money to bankroll a series of excursions into the depths of Houston’s backroom bookstores, rooting through the mildewed spin racks, shuffling through box after box, patiently unearthing his finds. There was irony here. The words of the newspaper gave him the means to purchase the dark worlds of words that he dreamed in.
Ha. Wouldn’t Mary laugh? “Why don’t you just read a newspaper?” she’d asked him time and time again. “There’s words enough in that, isn’t there?”
Ha.
Words enough.
…were there words enough and time, this reading would be no crime…
It was almost a poem.
He’d tried that once. Writing poetry, to Mary. She’d laughed. And he’d let that dream go. He didn’t blame her though. He really didn’t have the itch for that kind of curlicue logic. He preferred straight lines and hard pounding prose.
Mary never understood his need for fantasy. Newspapers were just too much truth. Texas Jack Page had lived with the truth for all of his life. Not good enough. Not big enough. Not strong enough.
Not man enough.
Books were his alter ego. His dimension X. His reality could only be found in fantasy, horror and the dark stuff. He figured Stevenson had it right; “Every man, two sides, two halves.” Texas Jack Page found his Hyde-ing place in the cave of reality and fantasy, lit only by the plain white light of offprint vellum.
Ed Lee.
Steve King.
Jack Ketchum.
The gods.
Book after book. At first categorized and alphabetized and then later simply stacked. He grew from a collector into an accumulator. He became a packrat and then he discovered the internet; a way to reach out to the world without ever leaving his trailer. Without risking the exposure of a single glance, the dangers of possible confidence, the myth of alleged reality.
Texas Jack Page became a hermit. He lived alone in a trailer in the center of a flat Texas plain. The grocery boy brought him case after case of pork and beans. He learned to bake bread and make his own beer. The trailer’s breathable space grew cloistered and thick with a miasma of ass-propelled methane and the aroma of brewing yeast.
And yet outside his trailer, outside his tiny world his legend slowly metamorphosised. He was Texas Jack Page. Groveling sycophants e-mailed his screen name, begging for a glimpse of his dark secret world. The legend began and was added to, in entry after entry, a walking shroud sewn from a cybernetic-skyful of countless message board threads.
Texas Jack Page said this. Texas Jack Page found that.
On line, Texas Jack Page was ten feet tall. His high heeled boot prints stomped across the message boards of a hundred websites. Touching lives and tantalizing the imagination of hungry young fiction cannibals.
And with every message, Texas Jack Page slowly divorced himself from reality. Eventually Mary found a Houston lawyer and divorced herself from Texas Jack Page. It was just as well. She never understood how words could be wind and wonder. Words could do anything. They took you anywhere. Magic ink. Beauty in shadow. His light was darkness, his kingdom was words and shadows and Mary walked the hell on out of it.
Packrat, she’d called him, right after the divorce. She’d telephoned to say goodbye. A hundred miles of telephone cable couldn’t touch the estrangement of Texas Jack Page's soul.
“I’m sorry,” She said. “You’ll have to live alone.”
“I’ve always been there,” said Texas Jack Page.
He cashed in what savings were left following the settlement, loaded a lonely steel gray pickup truck with a legion of pilfered plastic milk cartons full of dreams and paper, and moved to the desert. He moved to a long aluminum trailer, the color of rocket ships and silver bullets.
He built a fence around the trailer and built a gate that he locked. Above the gate, two words, burned onto a faded pine board.
The Alamo.
Texas Jack Page had found his home. They sent him divorce papers. Texas Jack Page pasted each slice of paper onto the walls of his trailer and when the walls were filled he began stacking books in front of the papers. He figured it fine insulation against the cold Texas winters. A man could live here.
A man could die.
Until death do we part. That was what she had said that day in the church. There’d been a lot of words said that day but he remembered those in particular. He remembered her mouth moving around the words like she was making them up, like she was birthing them on her tongue and chewing them and spitting them out.
From that moment on Texas Jack Page lived for his books. A few shrewd investments in the Texas oil field and a timely inheritance from a ne’er do well uncle who had more secret assets than his relatives had ever guessed gave Texas Jack Page the independence he needed to build his collection and legacy.
He went through several drafts of a long multi-codacilled will and testament, the bulk of which consisted of a list of books he wanted to be buried with. He wrote and rewrote this list, giving a quiet Houston estate lawyer enough business to screw up his courage and propose to a lonely Dallas librarian who promptly gave birth to triplets a year after their honeymoon.
And Texas Jack Page’s list of coffin books became larger. A signed manuscript of Dante’s Inferno. An original draft copy of Stephen King’s Pet Semetary. TM Wright’s Manhattan Ghost Story. Mitford’s American Way of Death. The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
His wedding album.
Until death do us part.
* * *
Mary and Texas Jack Page had met in a clearance bookstore. She’d been browsing through a shelf full of fantasy, searching for an elusive volume of Mccafrey’s Pern cycle; while Texas Jack Page was rooting through a half dozen small press anthologies, juggling mathematics in his brain, trying to confirm a pattern between release dates, author’s birth dates, and ISBN numbers.
When their elbows brushed and they dropped books simultaneously, Texas Jack Page knew that he had finally found his great love story. He paid for her book and a boxful of his and they went for coffee. Three months later Mary Elizabeth Wilbanks and Texas Jack Page were married on the steps of a chapel overlooking their favorite bookstore.
He tried to live a real life for as long as he could. Watching television and talking about the weather and manufacturing a steady paycheck but the books always called him back. He would spot that vital volume necessary to complete a collectable series. He’d think of the unpaid telephone bill, pull his wallet from his pocket and the book would be his. When it became clear that his love for books came before his love for her, Mary left.
Now, on the eave of his 48th birthday, Texas Jack Page was completing a dream. Sealing him self in a long silver plated coffinful of books. No longer need he bother trying to decide which ones he would take with him. A final carton of unpacked books would accomplish the deed.
He stood on a teetery stool and three volumes of collected fantasy, the last remnants of Mary’s book collection, to reach the top shelf with his last few books.
Algernon Blackwood.
August Derleth.
William Hope Hodgeson.
The tattered sleeve cuff caught again on the pine wood. He yanked, and lost his balance.
The stool tipped sideways.
The three books of fantasy slid from beneath his feet. For a moment he was airborne, soaring like a god. Gravity took him and the shelf along with him and in a fine domino moment the entire structure went the way of Newton’s apple. Thousands of books and hundreds of board feet of pine seconds came humpty dumptying down.
Texas Jack Page lay there under the books.
His left arm was twisted in a strange kind of way. He could feel his back with the tips of his fingers, the elbow crooked beneath his shoulder. He tasted blood.
“Pulped,” He said. “I’ve been pulped.”
He grinned
at the irony, tasting blood and ink and an age of pointless dust. He looked upwards. He saw nothing but books, and glints of darkness, the crushing heaviness of the boards and all those pages.
“This is it,” He said. “This is the end of Texas Jack Page.”
He could move his right hand. He wiggled his fingers and felt a book beneath their grasp. He squidged the book closer to himself, inching it, painful synaptic twitches, forcing it, forcing it.
There. It was close enough to lay his hand upon it.
“Got it,” He whispered, his senses swimming from the effort. He nearly passed out.
“Not yet,” He told himself.
He forced the book open, peeling the cover back over itself. He couldn’t see the words. He could barely feel the page.
“Damn it,” He swore. “If only I’d thought to learn Braille.”
He clutched at the page, trying to force meaning through his hammered fingertips. And then he felt a tickling against the palm of his hand.
Something moving. Something small.
He saw a glimmer of light, high overhead. Through the darkness he saw a vision of an angel, with wings of folded books.
“Careful,” He warned the angel. “You’ll crack the spine.”
He felt the tickling against the palm of his hand.
“Damn it,” He swore. “I didn’t live this long to be eaten by silverfish.”
Only it wasn’t silverfish. There were too many of them for that. He felt them moving upon his palm, up his arms, up towards his face.
“Damn it,” He repeated himself. Then he cursed himself again because he hated repetition.
And then he saw them, moving in the darkness, stilting towards him in tiny millipedic steps. The words, the letters of each word, the ink and his blood and the fever of his ferverous obsession had somehow given them life.
Maybe it was a dream. He hated books that ended that way.
Or maybe he’d just gone mad.
He watched the letters, now close enough to his eyes to see them moving through the book filtered darkness. The s’s slithering like small snakes, the l’s and I’s pogosticking angrily, the x’s scissor walking pinching with each little step…
