The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (19 page)

“I'm glad,” Vera said when I told her I was quitting. “Somebody should be there to make sure it stays open—somebody who knew him.”

The professors who had stopped sending students in for books placed orders again now. Even some who had never known Tom or been in the store called up with orders, and their students dutifully came by, holding copies of the syllabus and looking anxious for being in a place where a murder had happened. It wasn't much, but it was enough to tide us over for the time being.

Tom's daughter was born. Rosalita named her Rigoberta, and she was called Bertie by everyone. Winter rolled into spring again, but there was no Bartenders' Ball that year. The cat Emma Goldman padded softly around, looking for something she couldn't find. I kept hearing Tom's voice—I could hear him laughing in delight. But no one played the whirling dervish music anymore, and Emma Goldman didn't dance.

The Greek underworld had a distinct geography. There were specific rivers to cross—Acheron, the river of Woe; Cocytus, the river of Lamentation; Phlegethon; Styx; and Lethe, the river of Forgetfulness. And there were different areas within the underworld where dead souls were sent—Erebus; Tartarus, where the wicked would meet their everlasting torment; and the Elysian Fields, where the good would live in eternal bliss.

Hades reigned in the underworld with Persephone (when
she was not on her summer vacation), but he did not judge the souls when they arrived. That was done by a trio of judges—Rhadamanthus, Minos, and Aeacus. After the judgment was complete, punishment was left in the hands of the Furies, who were feared because they were so just.

Tom was presumably sent straight to the Elysian Fields. He had been a generous and kindly man, so it would only be just. There was no doubt he deserved a blissful eternity.

But I worried. According to Virgil, the boatman Charon had to ferry dead souls across the river of Lamentation to arrive at the entrance to the underworld. He would consent to take only those souls who had passage money with them between their lips. I worried that this might be a problem for Tom, who had been so short of cash lately because of all the repairs to the bookstore. Without the proper fee, Charon left poor souls in a shadowy limbo outside the gates of the underworld, stranded on the far shore of Lamentation.

It seems wrong that the dead would have to pay money to get into heaven—or even to get into hell. More to the point, it seems unjust.

But perhaps on the banks of Lamentation, when the time comes, we will find all of our friends, all of us who are chronically short of cash. It would be a good place to hold the next Bartenders' Ball. Tom would be there to welcome us all with joy.

Vera never spoke about her first husband. It was known, though, that he had caused her trouble and left some deep emotional scars as souvenirs. She had not intended to ever get married again. Or even fall in love again—because it's the love that really traps you, that keeps you sticking with someone you would be
better off without. Vera never meant to lose herself like that again.

But Pete—Pete had scars, too. So much so that he had given up wanting anything from the world anymore, except maybe to sit quietly at the bar and drink a beer and listen to Billy Joe play the blues. He and Vera just began talking one night. That's how it started.

After the long cold winter when Tom died, Vera and Pete decided to get married. It seemed the only thing to do—to hold on tight to each other and to promise forever.

The wedding was held at Vera's house out in the pine woods south of town. The woods themselves were still black and dreary, but inside the house it was warm from the fire in the fireplace and from all of Vera and Pete's friends standing together talking and smiling and drinking wine. Pete didn't look quite like himself, dressed up in his good suit and his tie with his hair carefully combed, but Vera looked pretty in her blue silk dress and seemed happy while she promised to love him and honor him and cherish him. Blossom openly wiped away tears; Rafi did it more furtively.

The party afterward lasted all night. People danced and Billy Joe played with Charlie Blue bashfully backing him up. Endless food kept appearing from the kitchen. It felt good to laugh together in the warm little house, but all night long I couldn't forget the dark, cold woods around us.

It was Jake who finally closed the book that Tom had been reading and put it away—not on the shelves to be sold, though, but tucked under the counter.

“Who do you think did it?” I asked him—the question we
had all been asking each other over and over for months.

“Could have been anyone,” he said. “Just some loser.”

“Do you think it was a botched robbery, like the police say?”

“Could have been. This place is empty enough of customers a lot of the time.”

“But Tom would have just given the money to someone who needed it. Why would they shoot him?”

“Maybe they just fucked up,” Jake said.

“There wouldn't have been enough money here to make it worth it. Everybody knows that.”

“I guess not everybody.”

“Do you think it was someone else? Something else? Something political? People were awfully bent out of shape about this war. Awfully gung-ho.”

“Not enough to put their own rosy asses on the line, I notice,” Jake said.

“There's a difference, though, between putting yourself at risk and gunning down an unarmed man. Plenty of fanatics would be willing to do that.”

Jake considered this for a minute and then lit another cigarette.

“Do you have a theory?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Or maybe yes—too many theories. Like I can't help but think that someone like Stinky, say . . . someone who had something to prove . . .”

“I doubt that little pissant would have the guts to pull the trigger. He's never been anything other than talk.”

I remembered Stinky's fingernails digging into my skin, the stench of his breath in my face, how he had started to push me down on my knees.

“See, that's the thing,” I said. “It's the pissants who do it. It's the pissants who get in over their heads trying to prove
something. And then things get out of hand.”

“Maybe,” Jake conceded. “But whoever it was, it was just some loser who fucked up.”

At first, no one was ever alone in the bookstore. There was, after all, a murderer on the loose, and if you let yourself think too clearly about that, a wave of fear rolled up and the silence took on a frightening, suffocating quality of real terror. But human beings are resilient. By the time the spring sun was hot enough to open the dogwood blossoms, I was opening the store by myself in the morning quiet.

I don't know of a town in the whole South where there is an especially high demand for communist books, and after the first few weeks of mourning drew us all together there, it became clear to me that it had been Tom whom people had come to see, Tom himself who had brought people to the store, and without him, I had a lot of empty time on my hands.

The bookstore was converted from an old house. No matter how often I swept the floorboards, they always felt dusty to my bare feet. The windowpanes rippled gently and made the outside seem dreamy and unreal. The books looked permanently settled into their shelves, even where they were all jumbled together. The rooms smelled of sawdust, of old paint and paper, and—very faintly—of Tom. But that may have just been my memory fooling me.

After Bertie was born, Rosalita, who might otherwise have felt only blissful joy, felt instead despair. She pondered the Fates
that could have made life otherwise, but had chosen to make it unbearably hard. She felt walls all around her, and it seemed incomprehensible to her that she had once been filled with hope and expectation. It seemed incomprehensible that she would ever feel those feelings again. She and Bertie lived in Tom's house, surrounded by all she had left of him.

It became hard for Rosalita to stay awake. She became listless and forlorn, and although the sound of the baby's crying could drag her to the side of the cradle that Billy Joe had made for her, it hurt her to look at her baby's eyes and see the ghost of Tom looking back at her from so far away. The space between the living and the dead is not a long distance, but once someone crosses it, they can never cross back.

“I'm worried about Rosalita,” Blossom said to me, standing next to my table and holding the coffeepot in her hand while I ate breakfast. “That child is looking too thin for someone who has a new baby. I can tell she's not eating. Does she come into the bookstore any?”

“Not so far,” I said. “Vera went by to see her yesterday, see if she needed anything, but she was asleep.”

“Where are her folks?”

“I'm not sure—I think her mother is in Guatemala. And I think I heard that her daddy was disappeared. Tom was pretty much the only family she had. Other than the baby.”

“A baby is one kind of family,” Blossom said. “A mama is another.”

She looked thoughtful, and then she shook herself. “Are you done eating those biscuits?” she asked me. “Then come with me and help me carry some things.”