skeletons (4 page)

“I’m scared shitless,” I said out loud.

Silence swallowed it.

I panicked. I sprang up and tore for the car and jumped in and gunned the old lady and cut down a greasewood bush and took off shouting inside myself what in the name of God am I doing here?

LIBRARIANS. There is always one who loves books enough to get there early, so at nine o’clock I moseyed over to the El Paso Public on Oregon Street and beat on the glass door until she showed up, smiled, pointed at the sign saying they opened at ten, walked away.

I beat on the door.

She returned, frowned, pointed at the sign, walked away.

I beat on the door.

She returned, unlocked, cracked the door.

“You’re early,” she said.

“You’re terrific,” I said.

She was. Late twenties, blond hair in a wedge cut, eyes as baby blue as mine, teeth like pearls, lips like roses. Dimples, too. In a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and beige pants so indigenous to her torso you could not have got her out of them without a can opener.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Annie Snackenberg.”

“That’s the worst name I ever heard.”

“What’s yours?”

“B. James Butters.”

She grinned.

“Doesn’t it ring a bell?”

“Should it?”

“With a librarian it most assuredly should. Butters. Harper and Viking. Probably the most talented author of juveniles in the world.”

“I’m in History and Literature.”

“You should be familiar with kidlit as well. And I’ve written two books under another name—William Bread.”

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

“But that’s hilarious!”

“What?”

“Bread and Butters!”

She opened the door wide enough to have a stare at me. I had compiled my wardrobe for the journey west with impeccable taste. This morning I wore a double-breasted suit of Glen Urquardt plaid in pink and gray with Duke of Windsor vents, tailored by Zegna of Italy. My silk jersey shirt was a shocking pink Pucci, my tie a mauve foulard silk with coordinated pocket square, my shoes black calf half-boots by Alan McAfee of London. Oh yes, and I had a hat—a Tyrolean velour with a badger brush.

“My God,” she said.

“New York,” I said.

She let me in and relocked the door.

“Here we are,” said I, looking round, then at her. “And well stacked we are, too. Municipally and personally.”

“Thanks. What can I do for you, Mr. Butters?”

“Marry me.”

“But before that?”

“Show me the juveniles. I want to see how many of my titles you have.”

“Juveniles are downstairs.”

“Down? They should be up,” I chided. “As accessible as possible. If you don’t hook a kid on books early, he’s lost for life. Marginally illiterate. Television.”

“I’ll speak to the Board,” she said.

Libraries are wonderful when there’s no one around but you and the books. “Good morning, everybody!” I cried, tipping my Tyrolean as we strolled. “Stretch your spines! Wash your jackets! Brush your typography!”

She stopped.

“I address the books, Miss Snackenberg. They’ve had a sound night’s sleep—now it’s time to let them know the world’s waiting for them. Gives ‘em a dandy start on the day.”

She stared at me again.

“Someone should wake the books in every library every morning.”

I followed her downstairs. El Paso’s facilities were only adequate. Oh, they had open shelves and enough chairs and a story room with a stage, but chairs should be big and browsy and artificial light is never conducive. Kids and books need natural. I went directly to the B’s in Fiction and found myself and counted.

“Only thirteen! I’ve published nineteen!”

“You haven’t.”

“I have so. I write two a year.” I was reading titles. “You don’t even have
Jerome the Germ—that
almost won the Newbery. The life story of a common childhood germ and how to defeat him—exciting, educational, marvelous.” I counted the Frisbys. “Only six of the Frisbys—how could you?”

“Frisbys?”

“My Frisby the Fly series.
Frisby Flies to France, Frisby Flies to Italy,
you know. The sophisticated fly who stows away on international flights and through his travels kids get to see foreign countries, meet the people, learn the customs, et cetera. Between tours Frisby hangs out in the TWA terminal at Kennedy—right now he’s about to embark for Africa. My girl, that series sells a hundred thousand copies a year here and abroad—and to think you have only six of the eight—”

“Perhaps they’re out.”

“Any self-respecting institution would have many of each—and absolutely every one of my titles. I trust you’ll remark this shameful omission to your juvenile buyer at the first–”

“Now just a damn minute.” Her dimples disappeared. “I didn’t let you in here early, Mr. Butters, to take a damn ego trip with you. So catch your flies and pack up your germs and hit the jet to Africa or wherever the hell you’re—”

“Harding.”

“Harding? New Mexico?”

“Yes. And I’m sorry. I apologize. I’m nervous. Where’s the lounge?”

“Lounge?”

“You know—where the staff smokes cigs and slugs caffeine all day. You always have one.”

“Oh. Upstairs.”

“I need coffee profoundly. Please?”

She considered, glanced at a clock. “All right, one cup. There’s just time before we open.”

I followed her upstairs, noting with pleasure the rodeo roll of her little rear. The lounge was in a corner of the main floor, and she already had water heating. While she brewed two cups of instant I sat at a table being moody. She joined me and we sipped. She pretended to be busy with a cigarette, but she was actually cataloguing me and filing me away for future reference.

“What made you sure someone would be here early, Mr. Butters?”

“Call me Jimmie.”

“No.”

“Because there’s always at least one in a library. Who’s as mad for books as I am.”

Coffee.

“You said you’re nervous. Why?”

“Because I’m going to Harding.”

“Why should that–”

“If you’re going to interrogate me, you have to call me Jimmie.”

“Jimmie.”

I bit on a knuckle. My only bad habit.

“I can’t remember my question,” she said. “Why would anyone as unreal as you leave New York and go to Harding, New Mexico, in the first place?”

I removed my knuckle. “All right, goddammit. Because I am a knight in shining plaid on a quest at the request of a damsel in distress. In short, a girl I know asked me to come out here and find out if a guy she knew was really killed in an accident.”

“Who?”

“Max Sansom.”

“The writer? I read about that, last week. A hit-and-run, wasn’t it?”

“She thinks he was murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“She’s crazy. She also thinks why he was murdered might be something that happened way back when.”

“Oh. She shouldn’t have asked you. She shouldn’t.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Harding’s a small town.”

“So?”

She thought about it. “I read a lot of history.” She frowned. “My conclusion is, most small southwestern towns probably have things to hide. Skeletons in their closets. Bloody and terrible things in their pasts. I’m not talking about the notorious ones like Tombstone. And out here the past isn’t very long past—it hasn’t yet healed, there are still survivors. So I don’t imagine Harding will take very kindly to anyone poking around in its closet. Particularly a dude.”

“Oh. Oh my God.”

“What?”

“When they get a gander at my car.”

Coffee. Knuckle.

“I’d watch it,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll ride in slow and order a shot of redeye and lay my six-gun on the bar and— I mean it.”

“I’m scared,” I confided. “That’s why I’m here—I mean, I planned to start for Harding early this morning, but I put it off to come here and meet you. And you turn out to be warm and intelligent and good-looks enough to be damned near edible. So let’s put it off some more and let me take you to dinner tonight.”

“All three of us?”

“Three?”

“Well, there’s my husband. And my nine-year-old son. We call him Ace.”

“Slut!”

My cry carried out of the lounge, echoing across the main floor from Literature to Science to Government to Fine Arts. Annie Snackenberg fired up, pushed back her chair, seemed ready and able, since she was my size, to drop in a dime and run me through the nearest copier. Then she simmered down. Her blue eyes turned iron.

“Sometimes,” she said evenly, “sometimes it’s hard to say whether a book is adult or juvenile. The same applies to people. But you’re a juvenile.”

“Of course. And when I hurt, I cry out. And when I learn you’re married, I hurt. And I tell you true, if I weren’t already hopelessly in love, I’d probably be with you.”

“But the damsel.”

“In distress. She’s originally from—”

The sound of the front door, unlocking.

“Oh no.” She was on her feet in a flash. “I broke the rules for you, now help me. Go out the back way, will you? Over here.”

She went to a door, opened it. I took my time, cocking my hat and shooting my cuffs. When I reached the door, she pushed me through it. Which I resented. I pulled one way on the knob, she pulled the other.

‘We have a thing about doors, haven’t we?”

“Please Jimmie. Go.”

“Don’t you want me to sign my books?”

“No!”

She pulled. I pulled.

“What’s his real name?”

“Whose?”

“Ace’s.”

“Jason, damn you!”

“That’s terrible, too.”

“Please go!”

She pulled. I pulled.

“Mr. Butters–”

“What’s your husband’s name?”

“Henry.”

“My God. What’s he do?”

“He’s—with the government.”

“If you ever divorce him, will you notify me in care of my publishers?”

“Yes! Now will you please—”

“Kiss me goodbye, Annie?”

“Bigamist!”

I let her close it. But before I could go she reopened and whispered. “One other thing. Harding runs an ad in the paper here every spring inviting El Pasoans to come on over there for a celebration or something. I remember because they run it every year. I think they call it ‘Buell Wood Day.’”

“Cowboys are living proof that the Indian fucked the buffalo.”
This was my greeting by Harding, New Mexico. Inscribed on the wall over the John in the bathroom of my motel room when I checked in that afternoon, having dallied in El Paso as long as I dared. The drive over was dull, dull. Fifty miles of miles. Desert. Great gobs of space and sky. And in the distances, barren and sullen mountains.

I registered into the Ramada Inn, Room 112, that being the only motel in town with the amenities of a bar and coffee shop, unpacked, lay down for a siesta, dreamed of making lewd love to a blonde librarian in Caldecott color, was waked by a sound.

Wind.

I called the desk. “Does the damned wind here blow all the damned time?”

“Sure does, in the spring.” A female voice. Undoubtedly a teenage twit who diddled boys.

“I need to see a man in Harding named Vaught. Charles S. Vaught Jr.”

“Judge Vaught?”

“Judge?” Tyler had never told me that. “Where will I find him?”

“The courthouse—where else?”

“Does this county have a coroner?”

“Gollee, I don’t know. You could ask the County Sheriff’s Department.”

I asked. The county medical examiner was a local GP named Dr. Jack Shelley II. I called his office. The nurse said he was booked till five-thirty, but would see me then. What is your medical problem, sir?”

“Syphilis.”

I lay down again, dozed, woke with an idea, called the desk, got Miss Diddle again.

“You keep your registration cards on file for a while, don’t you?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Will you look back in the cards”—I did some quick arithmetic—“back about ten days ago and see if somebody named Max Sansom registered in here? From New York City?”

“Urammm. I don’t know if I’m s’posed to give out—”

“Please do, my dear. And you shall have your reward in heaven if not sooner.”

“Okay. Just a sec.”

After a minute, a man’s voice, guarded. “This is the manager, Mr. Butters. Why do you require this information?”

“I don’t require it. But Max is a friend of mine, and I’m just trying to catch up with—”

“I’m sorry, I’ve checked. Ten days ago would have been April twenty-seventh, and no one by that name was staying with us.”

“Try the twenty-sixth. Or the twenty-eighth.”

“I have. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks a bunch.”

I put down the phone. Sansom had to stay at the Ramada. There was no other with a bar. He might even have been assigned this room.

The wind again. It gave me fits. It snooped at the window, it burgled the door. It was a small, incessant wind which caused a small, incessant ache in the EAR OF THE MIND.

To get out of the room, to pass the time, to scout the town, I went for a spin. I remembered Tyler saying once that Harding had peaked too soon. From its founding in 1885 it had aspired to become a county seat, and when, in 1910, after much finagling in Santa Fe, it had finally nailed down the designation, it immediately built a costly —for the time—courthouse even though statehood for New Mexico and official county government were yet two years off. This humble ambition achieved, and having next got out of its system a couple of bloody, traumatic events, Harding pulled in its horns, hunkered down, and resolved to tough out the twentieth century the way it was. It had had its excitement early. The third act of its drama had preceded the first. Very well, if that was all she wrote, why not ring down the curtain, tell everyone the show was over, douse the lights, go home and go to bed?

My impression, however, as I toured it slowly, was not that of a town long defunct, nor even of one lapsed into dusty senility. On the surface it seemed an amiable, sturdy, damned near idyllic place, a minor glomeration of gentlefolk entirely reconciled to, and at peace with, each other. The main drag east and west was Gold Street, its counterpart north and south Silver. All the streets had mineral names: Platinum, Zinc, Slate, Iron, Tin, Nickel, Quartz, Mica, Mercury. The trees were mulberry and cottonwood and cypress and chestnut, and rooted among them were low houses of adobe and stucco and brick painted yellow, lavender, and pink. Most had bottles of bright blue glass in their windows.