The Bookman's Wake (6 page)

“I do what I can, but then I get restless,”
she said. “My mom and dad help out when they can, but
they don’t have any money either. For the most part
it’s on my shoulders.”

“So what do you do?” I asked again.

“I’m versatile as hell. I know a lot of
things, some of them quite well—just survival skills,
but enough to buy something to eat and a room at the Y. I
can work in a printshop. I wait a dynamite table. I mix a
good drink—once I got fired for making ‘em too
good. I type like a tornado and I don’t make
mistakes. I’m a great temporary. I’ve probably
worked in more offices as a Kelly girl than all the other
Kellys put together. I could get in the
Guinness Book of World Records
. Do they pay for that?“

“I don’t think so.”

“Probably not. They make a fortune off us freaks
and pay us nothing.”

“You could probably get on full-time in one of
those offices if you wanted. Law office maybe. Become a
paralegal. Then go to law school.”

“I’d rather lie down in a pit of snakes. I
find the nine-to-five routine like slow poison. It poisons
the spirit, if you know what I mean. About three days of
that’s about all I can stand. But that’s most
likely what I’ll do tomorrow—get my dad to take
me into town, go on a temporary, fill in somewhere till
I’ve got enough money for a few tires and some gas,
then drift away and do it all over again.”

There was a pause, not long, while she seemed to
consider something. “If I feel lucky, I might look
for books tomorrow.”

I tried not to react too quickly, but I didn’t
want to let it get past me. “What do books have to do
with working in an office?”

“Nothing: that’s the point. The books keep
me out of the office.”

I stared at her.

“I’m a bookscout.” She said this the
way a woman in Georgia might say
I’m a Baptist
, daring you to do something about it. Then she said,
“I look for books that are underpriced. If
they’re drastically under-priced, I buy them. Then I
sell them to a book dealer I know in Seattle.”

I milked the dumb role. “And you make money at
this?”

“Sometimes I make a lot of money. Like I said, it
depends on how my luck’s running.”

“Where do you find these books?”

“God, everywhere! Books turn up in the craziest
places…junk stores, flea markets…I’ve
even found them in Dumpsters. Mostly I look in bookstores
themselves.”

“You look for books in bookstores…then sell
‘em to other bookstores. I wouldn’t imagine you
could do that.”

“Why not? At least sixty percent of the used-book
dealers in this world are too lazy, ignorant, and cheap to
know what they’ve got on their own shelves. They
wouldn’t invest in a reference book if their lives
depended on it. They might as well be selling spare parts
for lawn mowers, that’s all books mean to them.
Don’t get me wrong: I love these people, they have
saved my life more times than you would believe. I take
their books from them and sell them to one of the other
book dealers—”

“One of the forty percent.”

“One of the
ten
percent; one of the guys who wants the best of the best and
isn’t afraid to pay for it. You bet. Take from the
dumb and sell to the smart.”

“That’s gonna be hard to do tomorrow,
though, if you’ve got no money.”

She opened her purse. “Actually, I’ve got a
little over three dollars in change. Pennies, nickels, and
dimes.”

“I don’t think you could buy much of a book
with that.”

She finished her soup and thought it over.
“I’ll tell you a story, and you see what you
think about it. I was down and out in L. A. I was broke,
just about like this, down to my last bit of pocket change.
So I hit the bookstores. The first one I went to had a copy
of
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
. You ever hear of that book?”

I shook my head, lying outrageously.

“A guy named James Agee wrote it and another guy
named Walker Evans illustrated it with photographs. This
was a beautiful first edition, worth maybe three or four
hundred dollars. The dealer was one of those borderline
cases—he knows just enough to be dangerous, and he
had marked it ninety-five. He knew he had
something
, he just wasn’t sure what. I figured my friend in
Seattle might pay me one-fifty for it, but of course I
didn’t have the wherewithal to break it out of there.
I also knew it wouldn’t last another day at that
price—the first real bookman who came through the
door would pick it off. I drifted around the store and
looked at his other stuff.” She sipped her water.
“You ever hear of Wendell Berry?”

The poet, I wanted to say. But I shook my head.

“The poet,” she said. “His early books
are worth some money, and there was one in this same store,
tucked in with the belles lettres and marked three dollars.
I counted out my last pennies and took it: went around the
corner and sold it to another dealer for twenty dollars.
Went back to the first store and asked the guy if
he’d hold the Agee for me till the end of the day.
The guy was a hardass: he said he’d hold it if I put
down a deposit, nonreturnable if I didn’t show up by
closing time. I gave him the twenty and hit the streets. My
problem was time. It was already late afternoon, I had only
about an hour left. What I usually do in a case like that
is sell some blood, but they’ll only take a pint at a
time and I was still seventy dollars short. So I worked up
a poor-little-girl-far-from-home hustle. It was the first
time I’d ever done that, but you know
what?…it’s easy. You guys are the easiest
touches; I guess if you’re a young woman and not
particularly hideous, you really can make men do anything.
I just walked in cold off the street and asked twenty
shopkeepers in a row if they could let me have two dollars
for something to eat. One or two of them snarled and said,
‘Get out of my life, you effing little
deadbeat,’ but you get a thick skin after the first
two or three and then it all rolls off. One guy gave me a
ten. In a cafe on the corner I got money not only from the
owner but from half the guys at the counter. I could
probably make a living doing that, but it has a kind of
self-demeaning effect, except in emergencies. You
don’t learn anything, and one day you wake up and
you’ve lost your looks and can’t do it anymore.
So I made a pact with myself, I would never do it again
unless I had to. I got back to the store right on the
button and bought my book. And my luck was running like a
charm, I didn’t even have to call Seattle, I found a
guy in east L.A. who gave me more than I’d counted
on—one seventy-five. He specialized in photo books
and I thought he might be good for this one.”

“That’s amazing.”

“Yeah, but that’s not the end of the story.
Even while he was paying me, I noticed a box of books on
his counter, new stuff he’d just gotten in. On top of
the stack was a first edition that damn near stopped my
heart. I finally worked up my courage and asked him,
‘Hey, mister, whatcha gonna want for this?’ He
got a stern, fatherly look on his face and said, ‘I
think that’s a pretty nice book, sweetie, I’m
gonna want twenty to thirty bucks for it.’ And I
almost died trying to pay him with a straight face. The
next day I called my friend in Seattle and he sent me a
good wholesale price, four hundred dollars. And there I
was, back in the chips.”

“Incredible,” I said, and I meant it. I
didn’t know many bookscouts who could pull off
something like that.

“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.”