by John Dunning
“That was gonna be my next comment,” Moon said, “in more or less that same choice of words.”
“Where’re you staying, Mr. Janeway?” Crystal asked.
“He’s going where the wind blows, Mamma,” Eleanor said, as if that explained everything.
“Tonight the wind dies here,” Crystal said. “I won’t hear any argument about it, we’ve got a fine room in the loft over the shop. It’s warm and dry and there’s a good hard bed. Best of all, it’s private.”
“You’ll love it,” Eleanor said.
“In fact,” Crystal said as Rigby came in carrying some clothes, “why don’t we get that done right now?—get you into some dry duds and checked into your room. We’re putting Mr. Janeway in the loft,” she said to Rigby, who nodded. To me she said, “The only thing I need to ask is that you not smoke over there. Gaston doesn’t allow any smoking in the shop. I hope that’s not a problem.”
“Not for me.”
“Good. I’ll whip us up some cinnamon rolls to go along with the coffee. You get yourself thawed out and come back over in half an hour so we can all get acquainted.”
“Me, I gotta go,” Moon said.
“You ornery old cuss,” Crystal said. “Damn if you’re not the unsociablest one man I ever met.”
“I’ll take Mr. Janeway over to the loft while I’m goin‘ out,” Moon said to Rigby. “No sense you gettin’ wet too.”
I followed him back through the house. We popped open two umbrellas and went down into the yard. Moon pointed out the path with a flashlight he carried, leading the way to an outbuilding about twenty yards behind the house. The first thing I noticed, even before he turned on the light, was the smell…the heavy odor of ink mixed with some-thing else. The light revealed a long room, cluttered with machinery and steel cabinets. Two large ancient-looking presses stood against the far wall, a smaller handpress on a table near the door, and, nearer the door, was a vast, complicated machine from another century, which I thought was probably a Linotype. It was. “That smell shouldn’t bother you any,” Moon said. “It’s just the smell of hot type. Gaston must’ve been working out here till just before you showed up. You shouldn’t even notice it upstairs.”
He flipped on the lights. Our eyes touched for less than a second, then he looked away. “I’ll leave you a slicker here by the door, and the flashlight and the umbrella too. If you need anything else, there’s a phone upstairs, you can just call over to the house.”
The first thing I saw was a no smoking sign. Moon moved me past it, onto the circular staircase in the corner opposite the presses, then up to the loft, a spacious gabled room with a skylight and a window facing the house. In the middle of the room was a potbellied stove, which looked to be at least a hundred years old. Moon stoked it and soon had a fire going: “This old bastard’ll really dry out your duds. And it’s safe, Gaston has it checked every so often. It’ll run you right out of here if you let it get too hot on you.” He walked around the room looking in corners. Opened a door, peeped into an adjacent room. “Bathroom. There’s no tub, but you’ve got a shower if you want it.”
He made the full circle and stood before me. He radiated power, though his was wiry, a leaner brand than Rigby’s. His voice was the prime ingredient in the picture of hard male strength that he presented to the world. It was a deep, resonant baritone, bristling with Southern intelligence. He’d be great on talk radio, I thought, and I was just as sure that he’d have nothing to do with it. “The phone’s here beside the bed,” he said. “It’s on a separate line, so you just call over to the house just like any other phone call.” He bent over the end table and wrote a number on a pad. Then he stood up tall and looked at me. “I can’t think of anything else.”
“Everything’s great.”
He turned to leave and stopped at the door. “Crystal kids around a lot, but I really do have to go. There’s a waitress in Issaquah who’s got dibs on my time. You look like a man who understands that.”
“I do have a faint recollection of such a situation, yes.”
He gave a little half-laugh and asked if I’d be around tomorrow. “If you are, come see me. I run the newspaper, my shop’s over in Snoqualmie, just a few minutes from here. Anybody in either town can tell you where I’m at. If the sun comes out tomorrow, I’ll show you some of the best country in the world. I’ve got a cabin up in the hills about an hour’s drive from here. Built it forty years ago and it’s been swallowed up by national-forest lands, about a million acres of it. That’ll keep the Holiday Inn bastards at bay, at least for the rest of my life. It’s yours if you’d like to unwind in solitude for a few days.”
Again he paused. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, Janeway. I’ve got the feeling we owe you more than we know. Does that make any sense?”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“I don’t know either, it’s just a feeling I’ve got. Like maybe you came along in the nick of time, not just to keep our little girl from getting herself wet.”
“If I did, I don’t know about it. But I’m glad I could help her.”
He looked at me hard. “The kid doesn’t tell us much anymore. She’s all grown-up, got a life of her own. She never had a lick of sense when it came to strangers. Hitchhiked home from L.A. when she was eighteen, damn near drove her mamma crazy when she told us about it that night at dinner. Today she got lucky and found you. Don’t ask me how or why, but I know we’re in your debt.”
I made a little motion of dismissal.
“All of us. Me too. Hell, I’ve known that kid since she was born, she used to hang around my printshop for hours after school, asking questions, pestering. ‘What’s this for, what’s that do?’ She’s such a sweetheart, I couldn’t think any more of her if she was my own daughter. And I know that anybody who helped her out of a tough spot could walk in here and the Rigbys would give him damn near anything they owned. So rest easy, I guess that’s what I wanted to say, just rest easy. These people aren’t kidding when they say they’re glad to see you.”
Then he was gone, clumping down the stairs, leaving me with one of the strangest feelings of my life.
I sat at the stove in Gaston Rigby’s clothes, gold-bricking.
What the hell do I do now? I thought.
7
A few minutes later I climbed down the stairs to the printshop and stood there in the quiet, aware of that primal link between Gaston Rigby’s world and my own. It was there, huge and fun-damental—amazing that I could live a life among books and be so unaware of the craftsmen who made them. Darryl Grayson had worked in a shop much like this one, and not far from this spot. Here he had practiced his voodoo, making wonderful things on quaint-looking equipment, just like this. I felt a strange sense of loss, knowing that someday we would attain technological perfection at the expense of individualism. This magnificent bond between man and machine was passing into history. I was born a member of the use-it-and-throw-it-away generation, and all I knew of Grayson’s world was enough to figure out the basics. The big press was power driven. The plate identified it as chandler and price , and it was run by a thick leather strap that connected a large wheel to a smaller one near the power source. On a table was a stack of leaflets that Rigby had been printing for an east Seattle car wash. I looked at the handpress. It had been made long before the age of electricity, but it was still, I guessed, what Rigby would use for fine work. It had a handle that the printer pulled to bring the paper up against the inked plate. The table beside it contained a few artistic experiments—poems set in typefaces so exotic and disparate that they seemed to rise up on the paper and battle for attention. It’s like beer, I thought foolishly. I had once been asked to help judge a beer-tasting, and I had gone, thinking, this is so damn silly . Beer was beer, wasn’t it? No, it was not. I learned that day that there are more beers in heaven and earth than mankind ever dreamed of. And so it is with type.
Rigby seemed to have them all, yet instinctively I knew that this was far from true. Sti
ll, his collection was formidable. They were stacked in tiny compartments of those deep steel cabinets: there were at least fifty cabinets set around the perimeter of the room, and each had at least twenty drawers and each drawer held a complete and different face. I pulled open a drawer marked cooper black and saw a hundred tiny compartments, each containing twenty to fifty pieces of type. I looked in another drawer farther along: it was called caslon old style . I did know a few of the names: recognized them as pioneers of type development, but the names conjured nothing in my mind as to what their work would look like. I didn’t know Caslon from a Cadillac, and most of the names were as foreign to me as a typeface of old China. There were deepdene and bodoni, century and devinne, kennerley, futura, baskerville, and granjon . Each took up several drawers, with compartments for various point sizes. There were some that Rigby himself didn’t know—entire cabinets labeled unknown in all point sizes, unknown antique face, c. 1700, found near wheeling, west virginia, 1972. wheeling , Rigby called it, and it seemed to have come, or survived, in only one size. At the far end, nearest the presses, was a cabinet marked grayson types , each row subtitled with a name— Georgian, pacific, snoqualmie . On the other side were cabinets marked dingbats and woodcuts . I opened the first drawer and took out a dingbat. It was a small ornament, which, when I looked closely, became a fleur-de-lis that could perhaps be the distinguishing mark of a letterhead. In the far corner was a paper cutter: next to it, coming down the far wall, a long row of paper racks. Then the Linotype, an intricate but sturdy machine the size of a small truck. This was the world of Gaston Rigby. Enter it and step back to the nineteenth century, where—forgetting its sweatshops and cruelties and injustices—man’s spirit of true adventure, at least in this world, made its last stand.
And there was more. I came to a door halfway down the far wall and opened it to find a room almost as large as the first. I flipped on a light and saw what looked at first glance to be another workshop. But there was a difference—this had neither the clutter nor the workaday feel of the other. It looked like the workplace of a gunsmith I had once known, who also happened to be the world’s most vigorous neat-freak. There was a long workbench with rows of fine cutting tools—chisels, hammers, and files of all sizes. There were several large anvils, a row of powerful jewelerlike eyepieces, two strong and strategically placed lamps. This is where he does it, I thought: does it all by hand. I realized then that I was thinking of Grayson, not Rigby, as if I had indeed slipped back in time and somehow managed to saunter into Grayson’s shop. I saw the sketches on the wall—an entire alphabet, each letter a foot square and individually framed, upper and lower case. The drawings ringed the entire room. I looked closely and decided that they were probably originals. Each was signed Grayson , in pink ink, in the lower-right corner. At the end of the workbench I found a large steel plate. It was a die or matrix, a foot square, containing the letter G in upper case. It corresponded exactly to the G framed on the wall. Just beyond the matrix was a long device that looked like a draftsman’s instrument: it had a swinging arm that could trace the G and, I guessed after examining it, scale it down. Suddenly I could see the process. Grayson would first sketch his letters on paper. Then he would cast a die in metal. Then, using his one-armed machine, he could scale it down to any point size, down to the type on an agate typewriter if he so chose. He was the Compleat Printer, with no need of a type foundry because he was his own typemaking factory. Rigby had saved a set of his sketches and some of his equipment: he had main-tained the working environment of Darryl Grayson, almost like a museum.
When I looked around again the world had changed. My calling had shifted at the foundation, and I knew I would never again look at a book in quite the same way. I lingered, hoping for some blazing enlightenment. At the far end of the room, half-hidden in shadows, was a door I hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps it was in there, the answer to everything. But the door was locked, so I had to forgo the pleasure.
I heard a bump up front: someone, I imagined, coming to fetch me. I turned out the light and went back through the shop to the front door. But when I opened it, whoever had been there was gone.
8
At the end of my universe is a door, which opens into Rigby’s universe. Either side must seem endless to a wayward traveler, who can only guess which is the spin-off of the other. We sat at the kitchen table, talking our way through their high country and along my riverbeds, and if much of what I told them was fiction, it was true in spirit and gave them little cause to ponder. I discovered that I could tell them who I was without giving up the bigger truth of why I was there. Occupation, in fact, is such a small part of a man that I was able to frame myself in old adven-tures and bring them as near as yesterday. Crystal served sweet rolls steaming with lethal goodness, the butter homemade, the sugar flakes bubbly and irresistible. Rigby sat across from me at the kitchen table, his face ruddy and mellow, cautiously friendly. Eleanor had excused herself and gone to the bathroom. Crystal pushed another roll toward me with the sage comment that nobody lives forever. That was one way of looking at it, so I took the roll while Rigby considered going for a third. “Ah, temptation,” he said in that soft, kind voice, and he and Crystal looked at each other and laughed gently as if sharing some deeply personal joke. I reached for the butter and said, “I’ll have to run for a week.” Crystal told me about a bumper sticker she had seen that said: don’t smoke…exercise…eat fiber…die anyway . And we laughed.
In twenty minutes my dilemma had been honed to a razor-thin edge. Something had to give, for deception is not my strong point. There was a time when I could lie to anyone: the world I went around in was black-and-white, I was on the side of truth and justice, and the other side was overflowing with scum-sucking assholes. Those days ended forever when I turned in my badge. I could like these people a lot: I could open a mail-order book business in a house up the road and be their neighbor. Every morning at eight I’d wander into Rigby’s shop and learn another secret about the universe beyond the door, and sometimes in the evenings Crystal would invite me for dinner, where I’d give them the true gen about my rivers and deserts. Shave about eight years off my age and you could almost see me married to their daughter, raising a new generation of little bookpeople in the shadows of the rain forest. They were the real stuff, the Rigbys, the salt of the earth. Suddenly I liked them infinitely better than the guys I was working for, and that included all the judges and cops of the great state of New Mexico.
They were not rich by any means. The microwave was the only touch of modern life in the house. The refrigerator was the oldest one I’d ever seen still working in a kitchen. The stove was gas, one step up from a wood burner. The radio on the shelf was an Admiral, circa 1946; the furniture was old and plain, giving the house that rustic, well-lived look. Whatever Darryl Grayson had taught Gaston Rigby all those years ago, the art of making money was not part of the mix. Grayson’s name had come up just once, in passing. Fishing, I had cast my line into that pond with the offhand remark that Eleanor had told me of a man named Grayson, who had taught Rigby the business. His hand trembled and his lip quivered, and I knew I had touched something so intrinsic to his existence that its loss was still, twenty years later, a raw and open wound. Crystal came around the table and leaned over him, hugging his head. “Darryl was a great man,” she said, “a great man.” And Rigby fought back the tears and tried to agree but could not find the words. Crystal winked at me, encouraging me to drop the subject, and I did.
“What’s all this?” Eleanor said, coming in from the hall. “What’re we talking about?”
“I was just asking about the Linotype,” I said, making as graceful a verbal leap as a working klutz can expect to achieve.
“There hangs a tale,” Eleanor said. “Tell him about it, Daddy.”
Rigby tried to smile and shook his head.
“You tell ‘im, honey,” Crystal said.
Eleanor looked at her father, then at me. “It’s just that we had a kind of an
adventure getting it here.”
“It was a damned ordeal was what it was,” Crystal said. “What do you think, Mr. Janeway, how does ten days without heat in weather that got down to twenty below zero sound to you?”
“It sounds like kind of an adventure,” I said, and they laughed.
“It was our finest moment,” Eleanor said, ignoring her mother, who rolled her eyes. “Daddy heard from a friend in Minnesota that a newspaper there had gone broke and they had a Linotype in the basement.” “It had been sitting there for twenty years,” Crystal said, “ever since the paper converted to cold type. Hardly anyone there remembered what the silly thing had been used for, let alone how to use it.”
“It was ours for the taking,” Eleanor said.
“Craziest damn thing we ever did,” Crystal said. “
Who’s telling this, Mamma? Anyway, it was the middle of winter, they were gonna tear down the building and everything had to be out within two weeks.”
“It was one of those instant demolition jobs,” Crystal said. “You know, where they plant explosives and bring it all down in a minute.”
“So we drove to Minneapolis,” Eleanor said.
“Nonstop,” said Crystal.
“The heater in the truck went out in Spokane…”
“Didn’t even have time to stop and get it fixed. We took turns driving, sleeping when we could.”
“Hush, Mamma, you’re spoiling the story. So we get to Minnesota and it’s so cold my toenails are frozen. The snow was piled four feet deep, the streets were like white tunnels. You couldn’t even see in the shops at street level.”
“They had this thing stored in a basement room that was just a little bigger than it was,” Crystal said. “They must’ve taken it apart and rebuilt it in that room, because right away we could see that we’d never get it out unless we took it apart and carried it piece by piece.”
