The Hemingway Thief

by Shaun Harris

  “Just tell him, Coop,” Grady said, and I could have sworn I saw him smirk.

  “I write the Alasdair MacMerkin series,” I said.

  “The what?”

  “Romance novels about a Scottish vampire detective,” Grady said, and snorted.

  “No shit,” Andy said, and then tilted his chin up in thought. “Yeah, my girlfriend reads that shit. There’s like a thousand of them. You write those?” I nodded in the way a guilty child admits he wet his pants. “But the name on the book ain’t Cooper. It’s uh, shit, help me out.”

  “Toulouse Velour,” I mumbled.

  “Toulouse Velour,” Andy repeated relishing each tacky syllable. “Ain’t Toulouse a chick’s name though?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s a guy’s name,” I said.

  “Pretty sure?’

  “I never officially checked,” I admitted with a shrug.

  “Can we focus on the issue at hand, fellas?” Grady growled. Andy placed his boot on top of Richard Kimble’s chest, claiming him like a conquistador planting a flag, and leaned down with his forearms crossed over his knee.

  “I got paid good money to find this kid,” Andy said, “and I’m not about to hand him over to some fag writes chick books.”

  “Don’t let the books fool you, Andy,” Grady said. “Coop’s not above shooting an unarmed man.” Andy laughed.

  “I gotta say, I ain’t too convinced,” he said. “He can barely hold the thing straight, let alone shoot. Ain’t man enough to shoot, I bet. Ain’t even man enough to write a man’s book. You know who’s good, Toulouse? You know who writes some real good shit? That guy, aw fuck, who’s that guy. Wrote the thing they made into the movie with the guy who did that other movie. Grisham! You should write something like John Grisham.”

  That’s when I shot him.

  I have nothing against John Fucking Grisham. I enjoy his books, even some of the movies, as much as anyone else. He’s never done anything to me personally. I’ve never even met the man. The only thing John Fucking Grisham ever did was to catch the literary fancy of my father. Dad was a newspaperman, and when a newspaperman reads for leisure it’s almost always nonfiction. John Fucking Grisham was Dad’s one indulgence in the field of fiction and, according to him, John Fucking Grisham was the pinnacle of not only the legal thriller, but all fiction. When I showed him my first short story, the one that had won first prize in the high school literary contest, he looked it over with barely feigned interest, grunted, and gave a four-word review: “It’s no John Grisham.”

  Dad left us that same year. I was fourteen. When I published my first book under my real name a decade later, he sent a Hallmark card—he always cared enough to send the very best—with Snoopy reading a book on the front. Inside, he had scrawled in his epileptic handwriting, “I read your book. It was no John Grisham.” Since then, whenever I publish a book I get a card. Don’t ask me how he knows my pen name. I suspect my mother told him, but I’ve never broached the subject with her. Sometimes Snoopy is on the cover. Sometimes it’s Garfield. Once it was a busty woman in a bikini, reading on a beach. Regardless of the cover, the message is always the same.

  Some people grow up in the shadow of a sibling. They have to listen to their parents lament, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?” I didn’t have a brother. I had John. Fucking. Grisham.

  It takes exactly five pounds of pressure to pull the trigger of a .40-calliber semiautomatic Glock 22, which, Grady later told me, was the gun I held in my hand. He also told me the gun had been involved in several lawsuits over its likelihood to go off by accident. I like to think it was an accident, shooting the Texan. I like to think I flinched or panicked, or whatever, but I know better. This wasn’t the first time someone had called out my masculinity, or my writing chops, or both together. There had been dozens of cocktail parties where this exact exchange had taken place. The difference was that I had never been holding a gun at the cocktail parties.

  I shot Andy in the foot, but not the foot sitting on top of Richard Kimble. This piece of luck had nothing do with my aim—my eyes had been closed when I squeezed the trigger. Andy jumped in the air and fell on his ass, howling in pain and holding his Wolverine boot as blood poured through his fingers. Grady moved fast. He shoved Dell to the ground next to Andy and told me to grab our new unconscious friend. I stood over the poor schlub as I tried to decide where to put the gun. I started to shove it down the front of my pants but thought better of it. I didn’t want my crotch to look like Andy’s foot. Grady grabbed the gun away.

  “Just get this asshole inside and call Digby. Wake him up if you have to,” he said. I grabbed Kimble’s shirt with both hands and dragged him into the relative safety of the cantina. Ten minutes later Grady entered, wiping the knife on his pants.

  “They’re gone,” he said.

  “Where did they go?” I asked. I had pulled the guy onto a chair and was trying to wake him up to take a drink of water. He was moaning steadily, which I took as a good sign.

  “I’m guessing Ensenada. There’s a hospital there. Dell, the one in the suit, seemed okay to drive. They should make it there before Andy loses his foot.”

  “You let them go?” I asked.

  “They’re not in any shape to try anything else tonight.”

  “But they’ll be back, won’t they? Shouldn’t we have called the cops?”

  “Shooting a man is an expensive problem in Mexico. I’m a little short on cash after the hotel and all.” He walked over to the bar sink and turned on the water. There was a plaintive groan from the pipes, but only a trickle of water dribbled out. Grady cursed and used what he could to wash his face and the back of his neck. He dried them both with the hem of his shirt. Our poor friend groaned again and leaned forward in his chair. I caught him just before he fell, and eased him back upright.

  “You call Digby?” Grady asked.

  “Got his voice mail. I’m not going down to his place in the dark. You don’t know for sure those guys left town.”

  “They’re gone,” Grady said, and waved his hand at me to dismiss my fears. “If you can’t get Digby, will you at least help me take him up to Doc’s room?”

  “Those assholes are gonna come back for this asshole, Grady,” I said.

  “Probably,” Grady said, lifting the man’s feet. I grabbed his arms. “After we drop him at Doc’s, I’m going to bed. I want to get out to the race route early tomorrow.”

  “Are you listening?” I said. “Those guys are gonna come back here, and a rum bottle won’t be enough to stop them.”

  “What should I have done?” Grady said, walking backward, avoiding the bar and kicking open the rear door with his foot. “Should I have slit their throats and dumped them in a couple of shallow graves out in the desert?”

  “No, I guess not,” I said, struggling to lift my half of our comatose charge. Less than a day later, I would be wishing he had done that very thing.

  Chapter Two

  I awoke to the sound of someone cutting toenails. It was Digby, the concierge, although the title was applied loosely. He was sitting on a stool in the corner of my room, with his shoes and socks off. He wore his usual plaid trousers with suspenders over a sleeveless Flying Burrito Brothers T-shirt. According to Butch, Digby had literally come down out of the mountains a few years ago. He’d been covered with dirt, carrying a frayed canvas backpack containing a hunting knife, the same one Grady used to cut limes, and a half-finished book of crossword puzzles. He had asked for a job, and Butch hired him on as a sort of Man Friday. This meant climbing into Butch’s wheezing pickup truck twice a month to get supplies in Ensenada. Other than that, Digby spent his time smoking weed and giving the occasional surfing lesson to the infrequent guests.

  Digby’s story changed with the tide. No one could pin down where he was from, what he had been doing in the Sierra Madres, or anything else about his past. He had once referenced a rich ex-wife in California who actually paid him alimony, but who knows if any of the wom
en he spoke of existed outside of his own fevered imagination. He may have spent time in the military, but which branch, and for that matter which country, remained a mystery. His accent changed not only from day to day, but from sentence to sentence. He told stories about chaos and beauty from all seven continents, but it was always unclear whether he had experienced these vignettes himself, or was simply repeating things he’d heard. He never spoke of any occupation before coming to the Hotel Baja, and it seemed wrong to ask him flat out. I engaged him in conversation whenever possible to suss out his origins, but even after a month I hadn’t found any answers. Grady thought it was becoming an unhealthy obsession.

  “Is there a reason you’re doing that right here?” I asked wiping the crusts of sleep from my eyes. Digby plucked an emery board from behind his ear and gently swiped it across his big toe.

  “I can’t find my clippers. I knew you had one,” Digby said, as if we had been clothes-swapping roommates for years. “Boss says you gotta get up. You’re gonna miss the race.”

  “Why would Butch give a shit about the race?” I said, and remembered Grady had bought the hotel yesterday, which made him Digby’s new boss. Digby was a man who adapted quickly. He tossed the clippers aside and ran his hand through his mop of tangled dirty-blond hair.

  “Had some excitement last night, didn’t you, Mr. Cooper?”

  “I’ve told you, Digby. Call me Coop,” I said. I stretched out until I nearly fell off the bed and reached for the remains of last night’s rum. It wasn’t nearly enough, but Grady would have a cooler of beer up at the race so it was no tragedy.

  “You had some excitement last night, Coop,” Digby said. He stood up, leaned against the wall, and shoved his hands in his trouser pockets, looking like a surfer’s version of Dillinger.

  “There was some commotion,” I said. “What do you know of it?”

  “I know there’s a guy nearly in a coma over in Doc’s room,” Digby said. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a small pistol with a pearl handle. He tossed it on the bed between my bare feet. “And I know the guys who put him there will be back.”

  “I was kind of thinking the same thing,” I said. “And I was kind of hoping I was wrong.”

  “No, they’ll be back. You shot the guy’s toe off. A man doesn’t let something like that stand,” Digby said. “Take the gun, Coop. That’s my favorite derringer. It only gets two shots, but I figure if you haven’t hit anything by then it ain’t gonna make a difference.”

  “That’s what you figure, huh? What if there’re more than two of them?”

  “You ever a fire a gun before? I mean before last night.”

  “Nope.”

  “Then if there were more than two, you’d be fucked if I gave you a Uzi,” Digby said, and strolled to the door. As he passed the threshold he turned on his heel, his hands stuck in his gabardine pockets. “Boss is waiting for you up on the bluff. Oh, and the water truck didn’t come today. So no showers.”

  He left whistling an old tune I couldn’t quite place. It didn’t surprise me Digby carried around a two-shot pistol in his pocket. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he carried a flame-thrower in his sock. What surprised me was how my world suddenly had an abundance of guns in it. Twenty-four hours earlier I had never even held a firearm. Now I was living like somebody found in the pages of Mickey Spillane’s wastebasket.

  I got up and kicked open the door to my bathroom. Pendira was so far off the map that it didn’t have regular running water. Every two weeks a tanker came through and filled up the tower. This meant the people of Pendira practiced a forced form of water conservation made worse whenever the truck was delayed.

  My agent, Peter Oxblood, had warned me to pick up a few gallons of bottled water on the way down. I was glad I had taken his advice. I plugged the sink and dumped a bottle in the basin so I could wash my face and brush my teeth. The Hotel Baja had been Ox’s suggestion. He had been dragged there once by one of his clients for a bachelor party. He insisted its brand of low-tide charm would help me get my head out of my ass. His words.

  After four years of perfecting the art of pretension in a place called college, I was lucky enough to publish my first novel. It was a long literary affair about a bovine veterinarian’s encounter with a PETA-like vegan cult. I called it Madge, and I have no idea how many copies it sold because Ox never had the heart to tell me.

  He couldn’t, however, hide the reviews from me. The book critic for the Washington Post suggested my novel made a solid case to reconsider book burning. The Chicago Reader merely printed the first page with the suggestion it be used to line birdcages throughout the greater Chicagoland area. My favorite of all was the little New England paper, one that did not have a book reviewer nor had it ever in its history printed a book review prior to this one, which described my book as the combined failure of delusional ego and lack of talent. The review ended with the terse yet grammatically suspect sentence: It’s no John Grisham.

  I fled to the one place that had always been a sanctuary for me: the bookstore. I huddled in the corner of the Romance section, where I wouldn’t be confronted by anyone I knew, either in person or on book covers. I sipped on black coffee and wondered if high school kids might respect me enough to let me teach them English. I was about to take a stroll down the Career Help aisle when I heard a scuffle behind me. A seventy-year-old woman was leaning against her walker and slapping a teenaged bookseller twice her size with a trade paperback.

  “I already read this one, idiot,” she wailed. “I want the new one!”

  “That is the new one,” the poor clerk replied with surprising calm. He had turned to take the brunt of her tirade with his back. Another clerk, a mousy-looking girl with a ponytail, peeked around the bookshelf. The clerk under fire looked at her pleadingly, but she tilted her head up as if she heard someone call her name and quickly disappeared.

  “How could it be new?” the incensed old woman said. “I already read it.”

  “It came out last month, ma’am. They can’t write them as fast as you read them.”

  “I’ve had it with this nonsense,” the woman said, and threw the book at him. He dodged and the paperback landed next to me. “I want to see your manager.” She didn’t wait for a reply and stalked off, walker clanging like a battle staff, presumably to harass the manager. I picked up the book, curious to see what could inspire such an insatiable need in an otherwise-frail old woman.

  The cover showed a bare-chested man with abs that could cut glass. He was bending over a woman in a flowing gown as she reached for a wooden stake at the side of her bed. I found that the author had well over twenty books on the shelf above me, all in the same series. I remembered hearing a story about a Newsday columnist who’d written a romance novel as a joke and it became a bestseller. At the time I took it as a bitter grad-student yarn designed to deride the low-born genre novel, but looking down the aisle filled with bustiers and cod pieces I was struck with inspiration. I left the store with the complete series, along with the beginnings of several others.

  Henry Cooper, for all intents and purposes, was dead to the publishing industry. What better place to reinvent myself than in the polar opposite of literary fiction? I locked myself in my garden apartment and read every romance novel available, of which there was legion. I ate up every convention and every trope. I read and I wrote. I absorbed and I disseminated. After four months locked up like Don Quixote in his attic, my only contact with the outside world being delivery guys and Ox’s messages on my answering machine, I emerged just as addled as the man of La Mancha, but my quest was already finished. The first MacMerkin novel was complete. I had fallen as Henry Cooper and stood up again as Toulouse Velour. Ox sold the book within two weeks. It became a phenomenon within two months of hitting the shelves. As the ink flowed, so did the money, and things went pretty well for a few years.

  About a year ago, I found a fruit basket on my doorstep. An assistant or intern at my publisher sent me a fruit basket, a congratu
lations on MacMerkin’s Regret hitting the New York Times Best Seller List. It would have been a thoughtful gesture if the basket hadn’t been filled with an assortment of fruit wrapped in pink tissue and surrounded by bath gels and scents not meant for anyone with a Y chromosome. The basket was also pink, and the graphic on the card was a silhouette of a woman taking a bubble bath. The caption read “For when you need a day just to be a girl.” It was after the basket’s arrival that I started to call my masculinity into question. The doubts continued to creep in until it culminated on the morning after a party at Ox’s place. I woke up with a hangover and a brunette. Usually this was something to be happy about, but I made the mistake of taking her to breakfast. A friend of hers had brought her to the party because they were both enormous fans of Toulouse Velour, who was supposed to be there.

  “I’ve read all her books,” she had said between bites of Belgian waffle.

  “Toulouse is a man,” I said, realizing she had no idea who I was. Toulouse’s identity was not exactly an open secret in the publishing industry. Only I, Ox, the publisher, and a handful of others knew. Knowing Toulouse’s real name was like knowing that Carly Simon was really singing about Warren Beatty, or David Geffen, or whoever it was. “It’s a man’s name.”

  “Oh, that’s just a pen name,” she had laughed. “Like a joke, you know. A man doesn’t write that way. A man can’t write that way. At least not a straight man.”

  I had called Ox from the cab on the way home from breakfast and asked him if he thought our publisher might be interested in something new. Maybe something edgy or even gritty? A noir tour de force. Maybe I could even publish it under my real name? He informed me that my head was up my ass and suggested a long holiday in Baja.

  In my suite at the Hotel Baja I dragged my toothbrush across my teeth and considered the small pistol sitting at the edge of my bed. I kept my eye on it as I slipped into my jeans and a fairly clean T-shirt. I told myself there was no need for a gun. I am not a gun person. I live a life devoid of guns. If you live by the gun, you die by the gun. You’ll shoot someone’s eye out. Just say no, and so forth. I was flat out not going to carry a gun.