by John Dunning
“Oh, yeah!…yeah! And so much more fun than working in some accountant’s office or typing dictation for a lawyer. I mean, how can you compare typing all day with bookscouting. The only trouble with it is, it’s not reliable. You can go weeks without making a real score, and the rest of the time you’re picking up small change. So it all depends on how I’m feeling. If I think I’m gonna be lucky, I’ll hit the stores: if not, I’ll go to work for Ms. Kelly again.”
I knew I shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t be that interested in the specifics. But I had to.
“What was that book, that was worth so much?”
She grinned, still delighted at the memory and savoring each of the title’s four words. “ To…Kill…a … Mock-ing-bird !”
I tried for a look that said, It means nothing to me , but what I wanted to do was close my eyes and suffer. Jesus, I thought… oh, man ! That book is simply not to be found. Stories like that are what make up the business. A dealer in photography hands a pretty ragamuffin a thousand-dollar book, so desirable it’s almost like cash, and all because he hasn’t taken the time to learn the high spots of modern fiction.
The waitress brought our food. Eleanor reached for the salt and I saw the scar on her wrist. It was a straight slash, too even to have been done by accident.
At some time in her past, Eleanor Rigby had tried to kill herself, with a razor blade.
“So,” she said, in that tone people use when they’re changing the subject, “where were you heading when I shanghaied you in the rain?”
“Wherever the wind blows.”
“Hey, that’s where I’m going! Are you married?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Ever been?”
“Not that I can remember. Who’d put up with me?”
“Probably one or two girls I know. D’you have any bad habits?”
“Well, I don’t smoke.”
“Beat your women?”
“Not if they do what I tell them.”
She laughed. “God, a nonsmoker with a boss complex. I may marry you myself. Don’t laugh, Mr. Janeway, I’ve lived my whole life on one whim after another. Have you ever been at loose ends?”
“Once, I think, about twenty years ago.”
“Well, I live that way. My whole life’s a big loose end. I go where the wind blows. If the natives are friendly, I stay awhile and warm myself in the sun. So where’s the wind blowing you?”
“Phoenix,” I said—the first place that popped into my mind.
“Oh, lovely. Lots of sun there—not many books, though, from what I’ve heard. I’d probably have to work for a living, which doesn’t thrill me, but nothing’s perfect. How would you like some company?”
“You’ve decided to go to Phoenix?”
“Why not, I’ve never been there. Why couldn’t I go if I wanted to?”
She was looking right down my throat. She really is like Rita, I thought: she had that same hard nut in her heart that made it so difficult to lie to her.
“What do you suppose would happen,” she said, “if we just turned around and headed south. Strangers in the night, never laid eyes on each other till an hour ago. Just go, roll the dice, see how long we could put up with each other.”
“Would you do that?”
“I might.” She thought about it, then shook her head. “But I can’t.”
“Ah.”
“I’ve been known to do crazier things. I’ve just got something else on my agenda right now.”
“What’s that?”
“Can’t talk about it. Besides, it’s too long a story. My whole life gets messed up in it and I don’t think you’ve got time for that.”
“I’ve got nothing but time.”
“None of us has that much time.”
She was feeling better now, I could see it in her face. Food, one of the most intimate things after the one most intimate thing, had worked its spell again. “Oh, I needed that,” she said. “Yeah, I was hungry.”
“I’m glad you decided to stick around.”
“Sorry about that. I just have a bad reaction to that song.”
“I think it’s a great song.”
“I’m sure it is. But it gives me the willies.”
“Why would it do that?”
“Who’s to say? Some things you can’t explain.”
Then, as if she hadn’t been listening to her own words, she said, “I’ve got a stalker in my life.”
She shook her head. “Forget I said that. I’m tired…at the end of my rope. Sometimes I say things…”
I stared at her, waiting.
“Sometimes he calls me and plays that song.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“I know him by sight, I don’t know his name. Obviously he knows mine.” She shivered deeply. “I don’t talk about this. But you’ve been such a dear…I can’t have you thinking I’m crazy.”
“Have you called the cops?”
She shook her head. “Cops don’t seem to be able to do much with people like that.”
“If he’s harassing you on the phone, they can catch him. The time it takes to trace a call these days is pretty short; damn near no time at all.”
“So they’d catch him. They’d bring him in and charge him with something minor, some nothing charge that would only stir him up.”
“How long has he been doing this?”
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and said, “Not long, a few weeks. But it seems like years.”
“You can’t put up with that. You’ve got to protect yourself.”
“Like…get a gun, you mean?”
I let that thought speak for itself.
She sighed. “I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”
The strange thing was, I believed her.
“Do you have any idea what he wants?”
“I think I know what he wants. But just now I would like to please change the subject. Let’s get back to happy talk.” She cocked her head as if to say, Enough, already . “Those wet clothes must feel awful.”
“I’ve been wet so long it feels like dry to me. What was that guy’s name?”
“That’s more like it. His name was Richard Farina.”
“Is his book worth anything?”
“Mmmm, yeah,” she said in a singsong voice. “Hundred dollars maybe. I wouldn’t kick it out in the rain.”
The waitress came and left the check.
Eleanor looked at me hard. “So tell me who you really are and what you’re doing. I mean, you appear out of the night, kindness personified, you walk into my life when I’ve never been lonelier, you’re going where the wind blows but you don’t have a change of clothes. What are you running away from?”
“Who said I’m running away?”
“We’re all running away. Some of us just don’t get very far. Yours must be some tragic love affair for you to run with only the clothes on your back. What was her name?”
“Rita,” I said, suddenly inspired. “It’s funny, she was a book person, a lot like you.”
“No kidding!”
“The same only different.” I fiddled with the check. “She’d love that story you told me.”
“The book world is full of stories like that. Books are everywhere, and some of them are valuable for the craziest reasons. A man gets put on an Iranian hit list. His books go up in value. A guy writes a good book, a guy writes a bad book. Both are worth the same money on the collector’s market. A third guy writes a great book and nobody cares at all. The president of the United States mentions in passing that he’s a Tom Clancy fan and suddenly this guy’s book shoots into the Hemingway class as a collectible. And that president is Ronald Reagan , for God’s sake. Does that make any sense?”
“Not to me it doesn’t.”
“It defies logic, but that’s the way it is today. People latch onto some new thing and gorge themselves on it, and the first guy out of the gate becomes a millionaire. Maybe Clancy is a master of techno-babble. Do
you care? To me he couldn’t create a character if his damn life depended on it. You watch what I say, though, people will be paying a thousand dollars for that book before you know it. Then the techno-babble rage will pass. It’ll fade faster than yesterday’s sunset and the focus will move on to something else, probably the female private detective. And that’ll last a few years, till people begin to gag on it. Meanwhile, it takes a real writer like Anne Tyler half a career to catch on, and James Lee Burke can’t even find a publisher for ten years.”
“How do you learn so much so young?”
“I was born in it. I’ve been around books all my life. When I was fourteen, I’d ditch class and thumb my way into Seattle and just lose myself in the bookstores. So I’ve had six or seven years of good hard experience. It’s like anything else—eventually you meet someone who’s willing to show you the ropes. Then one day you realize you know more about it than your teacher does—you started out a pupil, like Hemingway with Gertrude Stein, and now you’ve taken it past anything the teacher can do with it. And it comes easier if you’ve had a head start.”
“Starting young, you mean.”
She nodded. “At sixteen I had read more than a thousand books. I knew all the big names in American lit, so it was just a matter of putting them together with prices and keeping up with the new hotshots. But it’s also in my blood. I got it from my father: it was in his blood. It took off in a different direction with him, but it’s the same stuff when you get to the heart of it. Books…the wonder and magic of the printed word. It grabbed my dad when he was sixteen, so he knows where I’m coming from.”
“Does your father deal in books?”
“He wouldn’t be caught dead. No, I told you his interest went in another direction. My dad is a printer.”
She finished her coffee and said, “I’d give a million dollars if I had it for his experience. My father was present at the creation.”
I looked at her, lost.
“He was an apprentice at the Grayson Press, in this same little town we’re going to. I’m sure you’ve never heard of the Grayson Press, not many people have. But you can take it from me, Mr. Janeway, Grayson was the most incredible book genius of our time.”
6
There wasn’t much to see of North Bend, especially on a dark and rainy night. I got off at Exit 31 and Eleanor directed me through the town, which had long since rolled up its awnings for the night. The so-called business district was confined to a single block, the cafe, bar, and gas station the only places still open. But it was deceptive: beyond the town were narrow roads where the people lived, where the Graysons had once lived, where Eleanor Rigby had grown from a little girl into a young woman. We went out on a road called Ballarat and soon began picking up numbered streets and avenues, most of them in the high hundreds. It was rural by nature, but the streets seemed linked to Seattle, as if some long-ago urban planner had plotted inevitable annexations well into the next century. We came to the intersection of Southeast 106th Place and 428th Avenue Southeast: I still couldn’t see much, but I knew we were in the country. There was a fenced pasture, and occasionally I could see the lights of houses far back from the road. “Here we are,” Eleanor said abruptly. “Just pull over here and stop.” I pulled off the road across from a gate, which was open. My headlights shone on a mailbox with the name rigby painted boldly across it, and under that—in smaller letters—the north bend press. We sat idling. I could hear her breathing heavily in the dark beside me. The air in the car was tense.
“What’s happening?” I asked her.
“What do you mean?”
“Is there a problem?”
“Not the kind of problem you’d imagine. I just hate to face them.”
“Why would you feel like that?”
“I’ve disappointed them badly. I’ve done some things…stuff I can’t talk about…I’ve let them down and suddenly it’s almost impossible for me to walk in there and face them. I can’t explain it. The two people I love best in the world are in there and I don’t know what to say to them.”
“How about ‘hi’?”
She gave a sad little laugh.
“Seriously. If people love each other, the words don’t matter much.”
“You’re very wise, Janeway. And you’re right. I know they’re not going to judge me. They’ll just offer me comfort and shelter and love.”
“And you shudder at the thought.”
“I sure do.”
We sat for another minute. I let the car idle and the heater run and I didn’t push her either way. At last she said, “Let’s go see if Thomas Wolfe was right when he said you can’t go home again.”
I turned into the driveway. It was a long dirt road that wound through the trees. The rain was beating down steadily, a ruthless drumbeat. In a moment I saw lights appear through the trees. A house rose up out of the mist, an old frame building with a wide front porch. It looked homey and warm, like home is supposed to look to a tired and heartsick traveler. But Eleanor had begun to shiver as we approached. “Th-there,” she said through chattering teeth. “Just pull around the house and park in front.” But as I did this, she gripped my arm: my headlights had fallen on a car. “Somebody’s here! Turn around, don’t stop, for God’s sake keep going!” Then we saw the lettering on the car door—the vista printing company—and I could almost feel the relief flooding over her. “It’s okay, it’s just Uncle Archie,” she said breathlessly. “It’s Mamma’s uncle,” she said, as if I had been the worried one. A light came on, illuminating the porch and casting a beam down the stairs into the yard: someone inside had heard us coming. I pulled up in front of the other car at the foot of the porch steps. A face peered through cupped hands at the door. “Mamma,” Eleanor said, “oh, God, Mamma.” She wrenched open the door and leaped out into the rain. The woman met her on the porch with a shriek and they fell into each other’s arms, hugging as if they hadn’t seen each other for a lifetime and probably wouldn’t again, after tonight. I heard the woman yell, “Gaston!…Get out here!” and then a man appeared and engulfed them both with bearlike arms. I had a sinking feeling as I watched them, like Brutus might’ve felt just before he stabbed Caesar.
Now Eleanor was waving to me. I got out and walked through the rain and climbed the steps to the porch. “This is the man who saved my life,” Eleanor said dramatically, and I was hooked by the woman and pulled in among them. The man gripped my arm and the woman herded us all inside. “This place is a shambles,” she said, picking up a magazine and shooing us on. I was swept through a hallway to a well-lit kitchen where a tall, thin man sat at the table. He got to his feet as we came in, and we all got our first real look at each other. The woman was young: she might easily have passed for Eleanor’s older sister, though I knew she had to be at least my age. But there wasn’t a wrinkle on her face nor a strand of gray: her only concession to age was a pair of small-framed granny glasses. The man was burly: my height and heavier, about the size of an NFL lineman. His hair was curly and amber and he had a beard to match. The man at the table was in his sixties, with slate-gray hair and leathery skin. Eleanor introduced them. “This is my father, Gaston Rigby…my mother, Crystal…my uncle, Archie Moon. Guys, this is Mr. Janeway.” We all shook hands. Rigby’s hand was tentative but his eyes were steady. Archie Moon gripped my hand firmly and said he was glad to meet me. Crystal said that, whatever I had done for their daughter, they were in my debt—doubly so for bringing her home to them.
There was more fussing, those first awkward moments among strangers. Rigby seemed shy and reserved: he hung back and observed while Crystal and Eleanor did the talking. Hospitality was the order of the moment: Crystal wanted us to eat, but Eleanor told her we had stopped on the road. “Well, damn your eyes, you oughta be spanked,” Crystal said. She asked if we’d like coffee at least: I said that sounded wonderful. Eleanor said, “I think what Mr. Janeway would like better than anything is some dry clothes,” and Crystal took my measure with her eyes. “I think some o
f your old things would fit him close enough, Gaston,” she said. “Get him a pair of those old jeans and a flannel shirt and I’ll get the coffee on.”
Rigby disappeared and Crystal bustled about. “Get down that good china for me, will you, Archie?” she said, and Moon reached high over her head and began to take down the cups. Eleanor and I sat at the kitchen table, lulled by the sudden warmth. Impulsively she reached across and took my hand, squeezing it and smiling into my eyes. I thought she was probably on the verge of tears. Then the moment passed and she drew back into herself as Moon came with the cups and saucers and began setting them around the table.
“None for me, honey,” he said. “I been coffeed-out since noon, won’t sleep a wink if I drink another drop.”
“I got some decaf,” Crystal said.
“Nah; I gotta get goin‘.”
“What’ve you gotta do?” Crystal said mockingly. “You ain’t goin‘ a damn place but back to that old shack.”
“Never mind what I’m gonna do. You don’t know everything that’s goin‘ on in my life, even if you think you do.”
They laughed at this with good humor. They spoke a rich Southern dialect, which Crystal was able to modify when she talked to us. “This old man is impossible,” she said. “Would you please talk to him while I get the coffee on?—otherwise he’ll run off and get in trouble.”
Moon allowed himself to be bullied for the moment. He sat beside Eleanor and said, “Well, Mr. Janeway, what do people call you in casual conversation?”
“Cliff sometimes brings my head up.”
“What line of work are you in?”
“Why is that always the first thing men ask?” Crystal said.
“It defines them,” Eleanor said.
“So, Mr. Janeway,” Moon said loudly. “What line of work are you in?”
“Right now I’m between things.”
“An old and honorable calling. I’ve been in that line once or twice myself. Sometimes it can be pretty good.”
“As long as you come up smiling.”
“Just for the record,” Crystal said in her Southern voice, “we don’t care what you do for a living. I’m just glad you were in the right place at the right time, and I’m grateful to you and we’re so glad you’re here with us.”
