I had just sat down and sunk my teeth into my cinnamon roll when Jerry Ripley came over and pulled up a chair. Jerry was the store’s head book buyer and one of my favorite persons in town.
“What the hell happened?” he asked, smiling, clearly amused.
“What do you mean?” I asked, my mouth full of pastry.
“Vanessa ‘The Outhouse’ Roberts,” he said. “She was a no-show. I’ve been calling the publicist all day today to find out what happened, but I keep getting her voice mail.”
“Oh that,” I said. “Yeah, well, the thing is . . . she ditched me. She checked out of her hotel.”
Jerry laughed, slapped the table. “Classic. Classic. Have you read her book?”
I shook my head.
“If you want a good laugh,” he said, “you really should read it.”
“Is it good?” I asked.
“The opposite of good. Furthermore,” he said, “I don’t believe it.”
“Which part?” I asked.
Jerry looked like he was about to drift away. He had a tendency to zone out in the middle of a conversation and stare up and over a
person’s shoulder for an indefinite period of time. Eventually, his eyes would come back into focus. He was a Vietnam vet and had seen real combat, and there were days I wasn’t sure if he was having a flashback or merely bored out of his skull with whomever he was speaking. And today that person was me.
He looked down at my hands, which were cleaning each other off with a napkin, and then he looked up at me, as if I had only now materialized in front of him, and said, “None of it.” He slapped the table two more times and, standing, said, “Gotta run. How’s Tate Rinehart treating you?”
“Oh, you know,” I said. “He’s from New York.”
“An ostentatious jackass then,” Jerry said. Two women sipping coffee at the next table over looked up, but Jerry didn’t pay them any mind. I braced myself, though, because I knew where this was going. Jerry said, “This one’s going to be on the radio, so just make sure he knows that he can’t say ‘motherfucker.’ Or ‘fuck.’ Or ‘cocksucker,’ for that matter.”
“Okeydoke,” I said, staring down at the sad puddle of frosting on my plate.
Jerry took pleasure in shocking his clientele, especially the blue hairs, as he called them, sometimes loud enough for them to hear. (“The blue hairs come in here sometimes looking for the latest Danielle Steele,” he’d told me once, “and I always tell them, ‘Go to K-mart! We don’t sell that crap here!’ Or they’ll call up and ask if we have that book, and when I ask, ‘What book?’ they’ll say, ‘That book from the 1970s. You know, the one with the yellow cover,’ and I’ll say, ‘Oh yeah.
That
book. Let me go check,’ and then I hang up.”) Whenever the blue hairs were present, Jerry felt compelled to remind me which words the authors were to avoid, telling me as though I hadn’t heard this speech from him a hundred times before.
Alone again, I slurped up the remainder of my coffee. I realized, with a clarity that I hadn’t had in over twenty-four hours, that I needed to return Tate’s messenger bag. I would need to provide a good excuse for why I had taken it in the first place, of course. I could say that something urgent had come up and I needed to run, but that I didn’t want to leave the bag lying there on the floor, where anyone might take it. Surely he could believe that. I could tell him that, although I’d had no idea what was inside, the last thing I wanted was to leave the new Tate Rinehart manuscript unattended. I would say, “Imagine how much angrier you would have been if I’d just left the bag on the floor and it had gotten stolen!”
While I sat there, inert, committing my lie to memory, one of the older women at the next table over made eye contact with me, pointed to the corner of her mouth, and then mimed a wiping motion. I eased my tongue out and poked around my mouth until I tasted frosting. I smiled at the woman, nodded, and picked up a napkin to wipe the rest away. It was the sort of gesture of kindness that, on a day such as this one, with the light in the room shifting to the whims of the sun and clouds, from blaring bright to eerily dark to bright again, almost brought me to tears.
“Thank you,” I said.
The woman nodded, and then she and her friend stood up, failing to gather their plates and cups, ignoring the protocol of busing one’s own table.
I picked up Tate’s messenger bag, committed to finding him and Vince. I shook it a few times, wondering what it was he kept in there. “Oh Christ,” I said, looking furtively around. I finally gave in to temptation and opened the damned thing, pulling out a fistful of pens and pencils. I reached in again and pulled out an old paperback copy of Jack London’s short stories. I opened it up, and next to the title “To Build a
Fire,” Tate had written, “Perhaps set this in Brooklyn? Contemporary times?” I pulled out another paperback, this one an old orange copy of H. G. Wells’s novel
The Island of Dr. Moreau
. Inside the front cover, Tate had written, “What if the island was Manhattan? Perhaps set it in contemporary times?”
“Hm,” I said.
There was one more mass market paperback in his bag. It was
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. Tate’s note for this one was, “Would the Hudson River work instead of the Mississippi? Maybe Jim is a gang member. Make it contemporary?”
That was it. No manuscripts. No page proofs. Just three old paperbacks and a handful of writing utensils. As I began returning the books to the bag, positioning them as they had been, I felt a slight lump against the canvas. I opened the bag wide and peered inside.
“Ah ha,” I said and zipped open yet another all-but-hidden compartment. I reached inside and pulled out a small notepad. Half of the pages were filled with notes, but only the last half of the pad was filled up: The first half was blank. The pages were written in Tate’s familiar crabbed penmanship, the same penmanship that had graced the moldering paperbacks, and yet there was something more desperate about the writing here, as though a man overcome by fever had begun transcribing the voices inside his head. I could read the individual words easily enough, but the sentences were so cryptic that I couldn’t figure out what he was writing about—that is, until I saw my name on the second to the last page: “Sheahan Jack.” And then I realized that he was writing his notes backward, the way a child would encrypt his diary in order to confuse a nosy adult who might stumble upon it.
“What the hell?” I said. I turned to the last page and, beginning with the last word, read Tate’s notes. The gist of it was that he saw ample fodder for fiction in my circumstances—namely, someone who’d
had great early success but then spiraled into oblivion, working a shit job and living a shit life. He was particularly fascinated by how, in my role as media escort, I had become a butler to the kind of person I had once aspired to be. He wrote about my situation as though there were a caste system in America. The more I read, the more I began to think that maybe he had a point. After all, some smart but broke-ass kid who went to a fourth-tier state university couldn’t ever have afforded to take an entry-level publishing job in New York, even if the higher-ups actually offered the position to the poor bastard, which, of course, they wouldn’t have, given their own Ivy League pedigrees. Oh, sure, there might have been one or two examples to the contrary, but it certainly wasn’t the rule. So maybe Tate was right. I would forever be a butler to the Tates and Vinces of the world. But then I read Tate’s last sentence, which, to the untrained eye, would have appeared as the opening to his notes: “Himself killing from him keeps what?” Translated, it read: “What keeps him from killing himself?”
The “him,” of course, was me.
The pad was small enough to fit inside my coat pocket, which is where I stuffed it. A thought came to me: What if Vanessa Roberts really was suffering from postpartum psychosis? This thought quickly morphed into a mild panic attack. What if I had grossly miscalculated this one? I closed the messenger bag and carried it down to the information desk, where Jerry sat high up on a stool behind a bank of computers, overseeing the store as though he were commandeering a spacecraft.
“I need a favor,” I said.
“Shoot.”
“Can I borrow your car?”
Jerry hesitated before asking where I needed to go.
“Unfinished business,” I said. “It’s actually an emergency, but I can’t go into it right now.”
“The roads are terrible,” Jerry said.
“I’ll be careful,” I said.
Jerry studied me. “Do you have insurance?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do.” I pulled out my insurance card to show it to him, and then, for good measure, I pulled out my driver’s license and pointed to the expiration date. “Look,” I said. “It’s still valid.”
“You’re not on any drugs, are you?” Jerry asked, reaching into his pocket for his keys.
I shook my head.
“It’s the red Buick right out front,” he said. “But please be careful, please.”
“Who do you think you are? Raymond Carver?” I asked, smiling, waiting for him to smile in return. When he didn’t smile, I said, “You know—the title of Carver’s first book?
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
”
“I get it,” Jerry said flatly.
On my way to the front door, I picked up a copy of Vanessa’s book and carried it outside. I didn’t even bother looking to see if anyone was watching me.
After starting up the Buick, I turned toward the store and saw Jerry and two bookstore workers staring at me through the plate-glass window. I waved at them, but no one waved back. Pulling out of the parallel parking space, I almost hit a pickup with a snowplow attached to its nose. The driver laid on the horn and gave me the finger, and when my shrugs and mouthed apologies didn’t mollify him, I returned his gesture. At this, the driver quickly backed up. I was under the delusion that he was going to let me out, but then he began plowing mounds of snow up against the car, trapping me in place. He kept backing up and piling up more snow, until, finally, I couldn’t see out the window on my side of the car. By now, Jerry had come outside, pounding on the passenger-side door and yelling at me to make him stop.
“Do something!” he yelled.
I crawled over into the passenger seat and then opened the passenger-side door, practically falling out headfirst, propelled forward by the door swinging on its hinges. I clutched and grasped at the door to keep from landing on my face and, potentially, knocking my teeth out. Back on my feet, with the door shut, I said, “He’s crazy! Just look at him!”
Snow was draped over the Buick’s roof. The pickup’s driver, not yet satiated, continued packing half the street’s snow against Jerry’s car.
Jerry momentarily slipped into his zone, staring beyond the snowplow, looking into God-only-knew-what—a land mine about to be stepped on, Vietcong snipers hiding in trees—but then he opened the bookstore’s front door and yelled, “Call the police! Hurry.”
“Hey, look. I’m sorry,” I said, but Jerry wouldn’t even make eye contact with me.
“Just give me the goddamned keys back,” he said, but he had no sooner finished speaking when we both noticed the same thing: blue-gray smoke pouring from the exhaust pipe. The car was still running. I reached down and tried the passenger door. It was locked.
“You locked it?” he asked.
“I didn’t mean to,” I said.
He looked down at the bulge in my shirt. It was the copy of Vanessa Roberts’s book that I was trying to keep from falling out and into the snow.
“Did you pay for that?” he asked.
“I’ll take care of that right now,” I said, and walked back into the store.
While I was paying for the book, using a credit card that was dangerously close to maxing out, a squad car showed up, but it was too late: The pickup’s driver had completed his task and moved on. Even when
they showed up within a reasonable amount of time, as they did today, the police in Iowa City had a tendency to miss whatever it was that they’d been summoned to witness. How many times had I called them in the dead of night to report frat boys walking across the tops of my neighbors’ cars, or pissing from their front porches, or shooting Roman candles down the length of a street instead of into the air? The police showed up, if they showed up at all, hours later, shining flashlights into bushes, as if maybe the culprits were now hiding instead of passed out on their puke-stained sofas or curled up like snakes around the cool porcelain of their hissing toilets. Not that I envied the police. They were victims themselves, as would be any university town’s police department, answering hundreds of calls each night, most of them as inane as my own, calls about grown men knocking around empty two-liter pop bottles with hockey sticks at three in the morning, or pranks involving frat boys running a half-dozen lawnmowers in front of a sorority house in the middle of the night.
“I wasn’t going to steal this book,” I said to the cashier. “I was going to bring it back. The thing is, she’s in trouble. She needs my help.”
“Don’t we all,” the cashier said without looking at me. She didn’t offer me a bag, so I took the naked book back out into the cold. Jerry, talking to a cop who was using a long flat metal device to unlock his passenger-side door, didn’t see me. I continued on down Dubuque Street, past store employees salting patches of sidewalk, and then I crossed over to the pedestrian mall, heading for the frosted-over automatic doors of the hotel breezeway and then into the hotel’s lobby, where only yesterday I had dumped off Vanessa Roberts.
At the front desk, I explained that Vanessa Roberts had checked in and then, later the same day, checked out, and now I was wondering if she had checked back in. I opened the book and pointed to the author’s photo as evidence. It was the first time I had actually looked at it. The
photo, taken by Marlis Messenger, who took all the famous authors’ photos, featured Vanessa lying across a Victorian fainting couch, the back of her hand resting on her forehead, like a silent movie star. Marlis Messenger’s photos looked like nineteenth-century daguerreotypes, with her subjects’ eyes burning bright, practically glowing, from otherwise drab or overcast backgrounds. Vince Belecheck’s photos always featured him stone-faced in front of a construction site or standing on a steel beam with his hands on his hips or, in his latest, wearing a hard hat and about to climb a telephone pole. Back when I still thought that I might one day see a published book of my own, I had imagined getting my photo taken by Marlis. In such a photo, I would stand in a blighted cornfield with two hunting dogs while clutching a shotgun (never mind that I didn’t hunt or own a weapon); in another, I would be sitting at my modest kitchen table with my ancient gas stove behind me, all four burners turned on high, and, off to the side, my yellow slicker hanging from a nail on an otherwise empty wall while I stared with great intensity into the camera’s lens. But after years of receiving free books from publishers for the authors I escorted and studying their photos, I had decided that I would forgo a photo altogether; in fact, I would probably just publish the damned book under a pseudonym. There was nothing healthy, I had decided, about meeting one’s reading public.