Bart got sicker, and Theresa stayed away more and more to stay with him. Ray would open later and close earlier. He sat for hours in the back of the shop and heard people come by the front doors, sometimes rattling the handle. He took the books off the shelves and then restacked them, lining them up with soldierly precision and making lists of his stock. The woman who had sold him the store, a long, bent woman with a lesbian vibe named Elizabeth, had given him pages with long lists of contacts for book resellers who bought up stock from closing stores and libraries, a constant reminder that there was nothing guaranteed in what he had begun. With the shop closed he spent hours calling people, looking for more of the westerns and crime novels he loved, and every day brought cardboard boxes from Scottsdale or Presque Isle or Waukegan that smelled of ink and old paper and mold. But the store was open less and less.
In January Bart stopped getting out of bed, and Ray put a small sign in the window, help wanted. Theresa had talked with him about a decent wage, and he added a few bucks to it in his head and the next Monday he sat in the store and tapped his cane against his boot and read Hombre for the ninth time, looking up occasionally to watch people moving down streets lashed by rain, their heads tucked into their chests.
He had just nodded off when the bell rang and he jerked upright and Michelle came in, shaking the rain off of a plastic kerchief and smiling at him as if this were the date they’d set up months before. He stood slowly, putting weight on his hands until he could get steady on the cane, and took one long step out from behind the counter.
She looked around and nodded her head. “Wow. It looks great.”
“Oh,” he said and raised one hand dismissively, “a little car-pentry, new rugs.”
“No, it looks wonderful. Liz would never spend any money on the place.”
“You know her?”
“Oh, yeah. I worked here. Before the other place.”
“So you know the operation.”
“Sure. Well, the way Liz did things, anyway.”
He nodded his head, keeping his hands down to resist the impulse to reach out and touch her.
She pointed to the sign in the window. “You need help?”
He let his smile get away from him, the muscles in his face stretching in unfamiliar ways until he brought a hand up and massaged his cheek. He did move, then. Leaned into the cane and reached past her and took down the sign. Waved it and threw it behind the counter.
He closed early that night, anxious for the time to pass and for Michelle to start. Couldn’t bring himself to stop hoping, playing out different ways it could go. In the moment he’d stood on the sagging wooden porch watching her go up the street, head tucked against the rain, he let himself know he’d taken Theresa’s money, bought the store, put up the sign, all of it hoping she’d walk in off the street. Let himself run a hundred changes in his mind, let himself feel stupid and impatient and something else that might be happiness at just breathing.
He stood on the street, looked back up at the store one last time to make sure the lights were off, and was nearly knocked off his unsteady feet by Edward Gray’s daughter coming down the sidewalk, listing to one side and paddling at the air with one stiff arm. He searched his mind for her name. She held up her hands and spoke with deliberation.
“I’m so sorry.” Adrienne, that was her name. She smelled like sour fruit and was underdressed for the weather in a sweater and scuffed jeans. She said, “A little dark out here to night,” and smiled. Drunk, he realized. Her eyes were shadowed pits in her head.
“My fault,” he said and meant it. “Standing around in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking traffic.”
She patted hair the color of foam on a lifeless pond. “Not at all. Not at all.”
She kept moving along the street, downhill to wherever she lived, he hoped. He watched her go.
HE HAD AN open house in February and invited Manny, who didn’t come, and Ho and Tina, who did. Theresa was there, and Bart, skin the color of mustard and sitting in a wheelchair, though he smiled and held a glass of white wine and snapped pictures with Theresa’s little digital camera. Ray showed Ho the Web site Michelle had put together for the store and her brochures for the children’s parties she wanted to host, letting the kids make books of their own. Ho looked from the computer to Ray and then at Michelle where she sat on the floor, her ankles tucked under her as she guided Ho’s five- year- old, Ly, through an Alexandra Day book where a black dog danced with a smiling infant. Ho shook his head and smiled, and Ray opened his hands.
“What?”
“Nothing, nothing at all.”
“Oh, you know? Don’t start.”
“Did I say a word?”
“I get this enough from Theresa.” He inclined his head and dropped his voice, a hand held out as if to signal stop. “She doesn’t know. Anything.”
“So?”
“So I don’t want to go down that road.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to get into anything.”
“You think what, she’s here for six bucks an hour?”
“Fourteen. I can’t dump my life on some kid from Ohio who works in a bookstore. That life? Where I’ve been and what I’ve done?”
“Then don’t.” Ho poured more wine into his glass, waved at his daughters. “But you got this far, man. You going to spend the next fifty years dating massage parlor girls?”
Ray dropped onto the sill of the window behind the counter, massaging his thigh and grimacing, and Ho stood with his back to the room.
“I’m just saying think about what you’re going to say. You don’t have to sign a full confession to tell someone you’ve been in trouble and aren’t anymore. If you think you got to say anything except you own a bookstore in Doylestown.”
Ray looked across at her, and she turned her head and smiled and then looked down, and he felt the floor dropping away and a thudding in his head.
Ho motioned him out to the porch and looked up and down the street, then told him Cyrus was dead.
“The guys from New En gland?”
“No. That’s over.”
“Over?”
“That guy, Scott? He was making this move on his own, took some of the guys from the Outlaws and came down here on his own. With his end of an armed robbery at an Indian casino. That’s what the cash was.”
“How do you know this?”
“A friend showed me some transcripts.”
“Transcripts?”
Ho looked around again and lowered his head. “Federal wiretaps.”
“Jesus.”
“It was everything he had, his own money.”
Ray nodded. It explained the way things played out. He shook his head. “How did it show up on wiretaps?”
“The FBI was on him up there. They scooped up everybody on the New Hampshire end of it.”
“Then who got Cyrus?”
“That wasn’t business.” Ho smiled. “He was screwing around
and his old lady caught him.” Ray saw the woman at the aban
doned house. Tattoos of the sun and moon on her hands and ice-
blue eyes.
Ho turned to go back inside, shivering and pulling in his shoulders.
“Does this mean it’s over?”
Ho shrugged but smiled. “There’s no one left.”
“How do we know?”
Ho looked at him. “The only people you got to worry about chasing you are all up here.” He reached out and tapped Ray’s forehead.
LATER HE WAS alone with Michelle, and he moved along the table they had set out, throwing empty plastic wineglasses into a plastic bag. Michelle fiddled at the CD player she had set up, and the gentle electronic music she liked started up. Quiet voices and lush sounds that were like being wrapped in something soft. It wasn’t what he would have chosen, but he was getting used to it, starting even to depend on it. Like her sweet perfume and the quotes she put up on the board near the door every day. Admon
itions to be brave and alive. Rilke and Emerson and Rumi. That made him secretly siphon off books and try to parse out the meaning of the poems she loved.
He became aware of her behind him and stopped. He turned and she took the plastic bag from his hand and dropped it on the floor and moved into his arms and they were dancing. He was stiff and moved slightly to the beat, and she rested her head on his shoulder, and after a minute he lost the sense of the music and just swayed with her. He tried out different things in his head. Telling her where he had been and what he had done. Wondering what she needed to know to know him.
She finally said, “What happened?”
“What?”
“In August?” She kept her head tucked against him, her breath warm on his chest. “Was it the accident?”
He had been waiting for this question since they day she had come in about the job but still wasn’t ready for it. “Yes. No.” He shook his head. “I was in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” She picked her head up, and suddenly it was much more difficult and there was something guarded in her eyes.
His eyes flicked over her face and he looked down again. “I’ve made some mistakes in my life.”
She stopped moving, and then he did, a beat too late.
“Tell me.” But her face was different, harder, and it was an interrogation and his mind was blank.
The door chimed and they both looked up, Michelle pulling away and moving to the stacks, collecting paper plates left by Ho’s kids. He looked after her, his hands still in the air, then turned to the door to see two kids, thirteen or fourteen or fifteen. One short and blond, the other long, with black hair hanging lank over his eyes. They moved to the counter and dropped a pillowcase on it, spilling hardback books, and Ray pawed through them while the short kid fidgeted and the tall kid stared hard at him. The tall one wore a thin black jacket with duct tape on the elbow, and Ray remembered he’d seen them before, by the side of the road in Warrington. The tall kid had a runny nose, and they both had red cheeks from the cold. The short one was just getting fuzz on his chin and had spots of something purple and sticky-looking on his army coat.
There were some old books that looked like they were worth something. Jack London, The Iron Heel and Call of the Wild. Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Some others he didn’t recognize. Some of them in plastic covers. First editions or something. He took more out of the pillowcase and found two candlesticks and a bell that looked to be real silver.
The short kid flicked the bell with his finger, miming plea sure at the bright sound. “Gimme a hundred bucks. And you can keep all that shit.”
Ray looked them up and down and smiled.
“Yeah? That ain’t much for all this swag.”
“No, it’s like a deal.”
Ray put sunglasses on the tall kid in his head and laughed. Manny and Ray, a month out of Lima, scoring from empty houses near the Willow Grove mall and trying to dump the stuff in the pawnshops along 611.
The blond kid snapped his fingers under Ray’s nose and pointed. “Fitzgerald, you know him?” He looked into the corner of the room as if something were painted there. “ ‘All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath.’ “ He pantomimed laughing, like a dog panting, and looked over his shoulder at his friend, who smiled and nodded as if the blond kid had done a card trick he’d seen before.
The tall one looked at Michelle, who had stopped what she was doing and stood listening. His face changed and he looked hard at Ray. “Don’t fuck with us, man. Just pay us or let us be on our way.”
Ray nodded slowly. “Where did you get this stuff?”
The blond kid snorted, but the tall one reached over and started snapping the books back into the case. “We’re out of here, Lynch.”
Ray held up a hand. “Wait a minute, okay?”
The tall kid moved toward the door, wiping at his nose with his free hand, and Ray snapped the register open and he stopped. The shorter kid stood up and angled his head to see. Ray came out with two twenties and held them out to the kids. Michelle sighed and disappeared into the back of the store. The blond kid, Lynch, pointed at his friend and the pillowcase. For the first time, Ray noticed a bruise on the tall kid’s face, the shape of a hand etched in faint and fading blue.
The blond kid said, “What? This shit is worth like ten times that.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Then what?”
“Take the money.”
The kids looked at each other, then reached for the money. Ray held out another two twenties, but when the kids reached for them, he jerked the bills back and held them high.
“This is to buy books with.”
The kids looked at each other again, the blond one, Lynch, shrugging.
“Buy,” Ray said again. He picked up the day’s paper and dropped it where they could see he had circled half a dozen ads in red. “These are garage sales. Go by these places and buy what-ever books you find. Don’t pay more than a buck a book, and don’t bring me CDs or DVDs or games or any other shit. Just books.”
The tall kid shrugged and wiped at his nose with the back of his hand.
Ray said, “Get receipts.”
He let the blond one take the money and watched it disappear into his coat and handed the tall one the newspaper. “Take that shit back where you found it and go buy me some books. Every book you bring me I’ll pay you another buck. So drive hard bargains.”
Ray watched them walk to the dark street through the front windows, heads together, talking and laughing. He saw a young blond girl come out from behind a column on the porch as if she’d been hiding there. She fell in beside the boys, and Lynch took her arm. When she turned one last time to look at the store, he saw a ring of livid purple around her right eye.
He turned to see Michelle in her coat. Her head was down.
“Okay, see you,” she said.
“Wait.”
“What?”
She looked at him and then away, and he had that feeling again of recognition he had had before on the street in August.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you, you know. Coming back?”
“Why is Theresa’s name on the store?”
“I told you I was . . . in trouble.”
“Are you in trouble now?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Why do you pay me under the table?”
“What’s going on? Isn’t that better for you?” He looked around as if there were someone else he could bring into the conversation.
“Is it? Those kids stole that stuff.”
“Yeah, but’”
“You thought it was funny or cute or something.”
He smiled, saw at once that was the wrong thing. “They’re kids, Michelle.”
“Kids like you?”
“Once, yeah.”
She was shaking her head and moving to the door. “So you’re what? The cool guy who buys stolen stuff and maybe sells you some weed?”
“Where is this coming from?”
“I see you when there are policemen on the street.”
“You see me?” He wanted to say, I see you, too, but wasn’t sure what it was he saw.
“You get this look. And you move away from the window. One time that cop went next door and you hid in the stockroom.”
“I didn’t hide. I had shit to do.” But he didn’t believe himself, either. He was getting angry, felt something twisting out of his hands, the desire to restrain it somehow propelling it away.
“Yeah, okay. I’ll see you, Ray.”
He grabbed his cane and started after her, but she was through the door and down the street faster than he could cross the room. He stumped out to the top of the stairs, the cold gripping at him. Watched her moving under the lights away up the street toward Main. It began to snow, white flakes sticking to his hair and his shirt like nature trying to erase him from the scene.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
SHE DIDN’T COME back the next day, or the next. He called her over the next three days, stammering vague messages to her voice mail and hanging up. He sat in the store and stared, reading the last quote she had put up over and over. “I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.” Rilke, one of her favorites. He got out Letters to a Young Poet when he was alone in the store and scoured it for traces of her, all the time willing himself to be smarter and more patient. When the store closed he sat in the light from the street and touched the pages and held it up to his face, hoping her scent would have lingered on the book.
STRANGE WEATHER MOVED in. Hot, damp days in which the sun furiously melted the last of the snow and kids built slick gray snowmen in their shirtsleeves. Bart moved into the hospital, and Ray would go there at the end the day, so Theresa could take a break. He’d bring his father crime novels. Elmore Leonard and Donald E. Westlake and John D. MacDonald. Bart loved anything with guys fighting over a briefcase full of money. Faithless women and smoking pistols. At first Ray would drop them on the nightstand and take the old ones, but after a week he noticed they were untouched and started reading them aloud. Bart would close his eyes and fall asleep, and Ray would stick a tongue depressor in the book and leave it on the nightstand.
One night, in the middle of The Hunted, during a long chase across the Negev, Bart put his hand on Ray’s arm and held it there. Ray closed the book and waited, feeling the papery skin and the rocklike bones beneath.
“I always wanted to see the desert.” Bart’s voice was like something rimed with salt, gritty and brittle.
“Me, too.”
“You should go.”
“Maybe.”
“Nah, just go. Take that girl from the store.”
Ray thought about that, and about what to say. “That would be good.”
The Dope Thief Page 19
