by John Dunning
I tightened the last of the lugs with my fingers. Not much time left now, and it wasn’t going to end with the whole company out in the street singing “Maria.” I needed some quick inspiration and got it—the thin point of my filing-cabinet key shoved into her air valve brought the spare hissing down flat. She didn’t hear a thing: the rain was drumming on her roof and her window was up. I got up and walked around the car, looking at her through the glass. She cracked the window and gave me a hopeful smile.
“The news is not good. Your spare’s flat too.
”She didn’t say anything: just took a deep breath and stared at her knuckles as she gripped the wheel. I fished for a legitimate opening, any bit of business that might make her trust a half-drowned stranger on a dark and rainy night. “I could call you a cab,” I said, and my luck was holding—she shook her head and said, “I don’t have enough money left for a cab.” That was a cue, but I didn’t leap at it like a sex-starved schoolboy, I let it play out in a long moment of silence. “I could loan you the money,” I said cheerfully, and I thought I saw her doubts begin to vanish in the rain. “Hey, you can mail it back to me when you’re flush again.” She gave a dry little laugh and said, “That’ll probably be never.” I shrugged and said, “You’re on a bad roll, that’s all Look, I don’t want you to get any wrong ideas, but I’ve got a car right across the street. I could drive you home…as long as you don’t live in Portland or someplace.”
She seemed to be considering it. I knew I didn’t look like anything out of the Seattle social register, so sincerity was probably the best I could hope for. I leaned in close, crossed my arms against her window, and talked to her through the crack. “Look, miss, you can’t stay out here all night. If you’re broke, I’ll loan you the money for a place…a cheap place, okay?…no strings attached. Call it my good deed for the year, chalk it up to my Eagle Scout days. If you’re worried about me, I can understand that, I’ll slip you the money through the window and give you an address where you can send it back to me when your ship comes in. What do you say?”
“I thought Good Samaritans were extinct.”
“Actually, I’m your guardian angel,” I said, trying for a kidding tone to put her at ease.
“Well, you’ve sure been a long time coming.”
“We never show up until the darkest possible moment.”
“Then you’re right on time.”
“I could spare thirty dollars. You won’t get much of a room for that, but it’s better than sitting in your car all night.”
She leaned close to the crack and studied my face.
“Why would you do something like that?”
“Because you look like you’ve just lost your last friend. Because I know you’ll pay me back. Because once or twice in my life, I’ve been so far down it looked like up to me.”
“Richard Farina.”
I didn’t say anything, but I was surprised she had made that connection.
“That’s the title of a book by Richard Farina. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me .”
I said, “Oh,” and pretended not to know it. I’d have to watch that, keep the literary metaphors out of my talk until I saw where we were heading.
“So what do you say?” I asked.
“I won’t take your money…but, yeah, maybe a ride…I could use a ride if you’re going my way.”
“I’m sure I am.”
I told her to stay put and I’d drive up close so she wouldn’t get wet. Then I had her, snuggled in the seat beside me. No wonder monsters like Ted Bundy had it so easy. That thought crossed her mind too and she said, “I guess I’m a sitting duck if you’re some wacko from a funny farm.” She shrugged as if even that wouldn’t matter much. I gave her the big effort, a smile I hoped was reassuring. “Ma’am, I don’t blame you at all for thinking that, I’d be thinking it myself if I were in your shoes. All I can tell you is, you’re as safe with me as you’d be in a police station.”
I hoped this wasn’t laying it on too thick, but it didn’t seem to bother her. “My name’s Janeway.”
Her hand was warm and dry as it disappeared into mine. “Eleanor Rigby.”
I was surprised that she’d use her real name: she probably hadn’t had time yet to get used to being a fugitive.
“Eleanor Rigby,” I repeated. “You mean like…” and I hummed the staccato counterpoint.
She tensed visibly at the melody. For a moment I was sure she was going to get out and walk away in the rain. “You’ve probably heard that a million times,” I said, trying to make light of it. “I imagine you’re sick of it by now.” Still she said nothing: she seemed to be trying to decide about me all over again. “Look, I didn’t mean anything by that. I grew up on Beatles music, it was just a natural connection I made. I sure wasn’t relating you to the woman in the song.”
Her eyes never left my face. Again I was certain I was going to lose her, she seemed that ready to break and run. “We can start all over if you want. My name’s Janeway, and I’ll still loan you the thirty if you’d rather do it that way.”
She let out a long breath and said, “No, I’m fine.”
“And your name is Eleanor Rigby, I understand. It’s a great name, by the way. Really. How’d you come to get it?”
“The same way you got yours, I imagine. I come from a family of Rigbys and my father liked the name Eleanor.”
“That’s as good a way as any.”
Now she looked away, into the rainy night. “This is going to be a lot of trouble for you.”
“Trouble’s my middle name. Which way do you want to go?”
“Get on the freeway and go south. Stay in the left lane. When you see 1-90, branch off to the east, take that.”
I turned the corner and saw Interstate 5, the cars swirling past in the mist. I banked into the freeway, glancing in my mirror. No one was there…only Poe, interred in the backseat.
“You’d better turn that heater on,” she said. “God, you’re so wet.”
“I will, soon’s the car warms up.”
She gave me a look across the vast expanse of my front seat. “I guess you’re wondering what I was doing in a bar if I was so broke.”
“I try not to wonder about stuff like that.”
“This is the end of a long day, in a very long week, in a year from hell. I was down to my last five dollars. The only thing I could think of that I could buy with that was a margarita. I had two and killed the five. Sometimes I do crazy things like that.”
“So now what do you do? Do you have a job?”
She shook her head.
“At least you’re not stranded here. I couldn’t help noticing the Washington plates on your car.”
“No, I’m not stranded. Just lost on planet Earth.”
“Aren’t we all. I’m not so old that I don’t remember what that feels like.”
“You’re not so old,” she said, looking me over.
“You must be all of thirty.”
I laughed. “I’m not doing you that big a favor. I’ll be forty years old before you know it.”
“Almost ready for the nursing home.”
“You got it. Where’re we going, by the way?”
“Little town called North Bend.”
Ah, I thought: Grayson country.
She sensed something and said, “Do you know North Bend?”
“Never been there.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s just a wide place in the road, but it happens to be where my family lives. You know what they say about families. When you come home broken and defeated, they’ve got to take you in.”
She was still tense and I didn’t know how to breach that. Food might do it: I’d seen that happen more than once.
“Have you had dinner?”
She looked at me. “Now you’re going to buy me dinner? Jeez, you must really be my guardian angel.”
“So what do you say?”
“I feel like the last survivor of the Donner party. That means yes,
I’m starving.”
I saw an intersection coming up, filled with neon promise.
“That’s Issaquah,” she said. “There’s a Denny’s there. It was one of my hangouts when I was in high school. Can you stand it?”
I banked into the ramp.
“You look terrible,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have a change of clothes. Maybe they’ll let you in if you comb your hair.”
“If I get thrown out of a Denny’s, it’ll be a bad day at Black Rock.”
Inside, we settled into a window booth. I ordered steaks for both of us, getting her blessing with a rapturous look. I got my first look at her in good light. She was not beautiful, merely a sensational young woman with world-class hair. Her hair sloped up in a solid wall, rising like Vesuvius from the front of her head. It was the color of burnt auburn, thick and lush: if she took it down, I thought, it would reach far down her back. Her nose was slightly crooked, which had the strange effect of adding to her appeal. She could stand out in a crowd without ever being a pinup. Her looks and ready wit probably made job-hunting easy, if she ever got around to such things.
“So what do you do for a living?” I asked.
“Little of this, little of that. Mostly I’ve been a professional student. I’ll probably still be going to college when I’m thirty. I graduated from high school at sixteen and I’ve been in and out of one college or another ever since. I go for a while, drop out, drift around, go somewhere else, drop out again. I transfer across state lines and lose half my credits, then I have to start up again, learning the whole boring curriculum that I learned last year and already knew anyway, just to get even again. Schools shouldn’t be allowed to do that—you know, arbitrarily dismiss half your credits just so they can pick your pocket for more tuition. But that’s life, isn’t it, and I’m sure it’s nobody’s fault but my own. It drives my family nuts, the way I live, but we are what we are. My trouble is, I’ve never quite figured out what I am. This is a mighty lonely planet, way off in space.”
It was the second time she had said something like that. I was beginning to wonder if she had been star-crossed by her name, doomed to play out the destiny of a lonely woman whose entire life could be told in two short stanzas.
“I do what I can, but then I get restless,” she said. “My mom and dad help out when they can, but they don’t have any money either. For the most part it’s on my shoulders.”
“So what do you do?” I asked again.
“I’m versatile as hell. I know a lot of things, some of them quite well—just survival skills, but enough to buy something to eat and a room at the Y. I can work in a printshop. I wait a dynamite table. I mix a good drink—once I got fired for making ‘em too good. I type like a tornado and I don’t make mistakes. I’m a great temporary. I’ve probably worked in more offices as a Kelly girl than all the other Kellys put together. I could get in the Guinness Book of World Records . Do they pay for that?“
“I don’t think so.”
“Probably not. They make a fortune off us freaks and pay us nothing.”
“You could probably get on full-time in one of those offices if you wanted. Law office maybe. Become a paralegal. Then go to law school.”
“I’d rather lie down in a pit of snakes. I find the nine-to-five routine like slow poison. It poisons the spirit, if you know what I mean. About three days of that’s about all I can stand. But that’s most likely what I’ll do tomorrow—get my dad to take me into town, go on a temporary, fill in somewhere till I’ve got enough money for a few tires and some gas, then drift away and do it all over again.”
There was a pause, not long, while she seemed to consider something. “If I feel lucky, I might look for books tomorrow.”
I tried not to react too quickly, but I didn’t want to let it get past me. “What do books have to do with working in an office?”
“Nothing: that’s the point. The books keep me out of the office.”
I stared at her.
“I’m a bookscout.” She said this the way a woman in Georgia might say I’m a Baptist , daring you to do something about it. Then she said, “I look for books that are underpriced. If they’re drastically under-priced, I buy them. Then I sell them to a book dealer I know in Seattle.”
I milked the dumb role. “And you make money at this?”
“Sometimes I make a lot of money. Like I said, it depends on how my luck’s running.”
“Where do you find these books?”
“God, everywhere! Books turn up in the craziest places…junk stores, flea markets…I’ve even found them in Dumpsters. Mostly I look in bookstores themselves.”
“You look for books in bookstores…then sell ‘em to other bookstores. I wouldn’t imagine you could do that.”
“Why not? At least sixty percent of the used-book dealers in this world are too lazy, ignorant, and cheap to know what they’ve got on their own shelves. They wouldn’t invest in a reference book if their lives depended on it. They might as well be selling spare parts for lawn mowers, that’s all books mean to them. Don’t get me wrong: I love these people, they have saved my life more times than you would believe. I take their books from them and sell them to one of the other book dealers—”
“One of the forty percent.”
“One of the ten percent; one of the guys who wants the best of the best and isn’t afraid to pay for it. You bet. Take from the dumb and sell to the smart.”
“That’s gonna be hard to do tomorrow, though, if you’ve got no money.”
She opened her purse. “Actually, I’ve got a little over three dollars in change. Pennies, nickels, and dimes.”
“I don’t think you could buy much of a book with that.”
She finished her soup and thought it over. “I’ll tell you a story, and you see what you think about it. I was down and out in L. A. I was broke, just about like this, down to my last bit of pocket change. So I hit the bookstores. The first one I went to had a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . You ever hear of that book?”
I shook my head, lying outrageously.
“A guy named James Agee wrote it and another guy named Walker Evans illustrated it with photographs. This was a beautiful first edition, worth maybe three or four hundred dollars. The dealer was one of those borderline cases—he knows just enough to be dangerous, and he had marked it ninety-five. He knew he had something , he just wasn’t sure what. I figured my friend in Seattle might pay me one-fifty for it, but of course I didn’t have the wherewithal to break it out of there. I also knew it wouldn’t last another day at that price—the first real bookman who came through the door would pick it off. I drifted around the store and looked at his other stuff.” She sipped her water. “You ever hear of Wendell Berry?”
The poet, I wanted to say. But I shook my head.
“The poet,” she said. “His early books are worth some money, and there was one in this same store, tucked in with the belles lettres and marked three dollars. I counted out my last pennies and took it: went around the corner and sold it to another dealer for twenty dollars. Went back to the first store and asked the guy if he’d hold the Agee for me till the end of the day. The guy was a hardass: he said he’d hold it if I put down a deposit, nonreturnable if I didn’t show up by closing time. I gave him the twenty and hit the streets. My problem was time. It was already late afternoon, I had only about an hour left. What I usually do in a case like that is sell some blood, but they’ll only take a pint at a time and I was still seventy dollars short. So I worked up a poor-little-girl-far-from-home hustle. It was the first time I’d ever done that, but you know what?…it’s easy. You guys are the easiest touches; I guess if you’re a young woman and not particularly hideous, you really can make men do anything. I just walked in cold off the street and asked twenty shopkeepers in a row if they could let me have two dollars for something to eat. One or two of them snarled and said, ‘Get out of my life, you effing little deadbeat,’ but you get a thick skin after the first two or three and
then it all rolls off. One guy gave me a ten. In a cafe on the corner I got money not only from the owner but from half the guys at the counter. I could probably make a living doing that, but it has a kind of self-demeaning effect, except in emergencies. You don’t learn anything, and one day you wake up and you’ve lost your looks and can’t do it anymore. So I made a pact with myself, I would never do it again unless I had to. I got back to the store right on the button and bought my book. And my luck was running like a charm, I didn’t even have to call Seattle, I found a guy in east L.A. who gave me more than I’d counted on—one seventy-five. He specialized in photo books and I thought he might be good for this one.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the end of the story. Even while he was paying me, I noticed a box of books on his counter, new stuff he’d just gotten in. On top of the stack was a first edition that damn near stopped my heart. I finally worked up my courage and asked him, ‘Hey, mister, whatcha gonna want for this?’ He got a stern, fatherly look on his face and said, ‘I think that’s a pretty nice book, sweetie, I’m gonna want twenty to thirty bucks for it.’ And I almost died trying to pay him with a straight face. The next day I called my friend in Seattle and he sent me a good wholesale price, four hundred dollars. And there I was, back in the chips.”
“Incredible,” I said, and I meant it. I didn’t know many bookscouts who could pull off something like that.
