by Jess Walter
They’re both a little surprised by the force of his answer, and Vince knows he’s also talking to himself. They stand across from each other, staring, until Vince lets go of her cast and looks away, embarrassed. “So tell me about this house.”
Maybe it’s wrong, winding her up like this on real estate (“It’s one of those forties north-side stucco bungalows with no yard, no garage, and no charm”) since he suspects that the realtor she works for, this guy Larry, is just stringing her along for sex (“They’re asking thirty-two, but if they get twenty-five I’ll shit buttermilk biscuits”) and that she will likely never sell houses for a living (“If this thing passes FHA inspection, I will literally blow the inspector…Okay, not literally”), and yet he really does believe what he said about how you can’t apologize for wanting to be better.
Still, he’s beginning to realize that there’s another part to it, something he didn’t consider before last night.
“How’s Kenyon?” he asks.
“He’s great, Vince,” Beth says, and looks down. “Thank you.” She squeezes his arm, takes a step toward Sam’s Pit, turns to say something else, then breaks into a smile and goes into Sam’s.
Jacks passes Beth on the way out, and holds the door for her. Vince is lighting a smoke. Jacks blows on his cold hands.
“I ask you something, Jacks?”
Jacks takes a step closer, four hundred pounds packed into a running suit like nylon sausage. “What’s on your mind?”
“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
“Four years?” Jacks stares at the ground. “Four years ago I was married to Satan. So, yeah, on the whole I’d say I’m better off. What about you? Are you better off?”
Vince shrugs. “See, I never thought about it before last night. But I think a guy could move across country, change his name, job, his friends—change everything…”
A car trolls by slowly and Vince watches it pass.
“…and not really change at all.”
VINCE IS IN love.
Okay, that might be a little strong since he’s never said more than a few dozen words to this woman, and those words have only been about two subjects—donuts and books—and since he only knows her first name, Kelly, and since he only sees her once a week, when she buys a dozen to take to the nursing home where her mother lives.
But if Vince were going to be in love, this would be it. Kelly is a legal secretary who comes in at 10:50 every Wednesday morning, on her way to see her mother. And so, every Wednesday at 10:40, Vince sneaks to the bathroom to check his hair in the mirror. He takes off his apron and sits at a table with a cup of coffee and a paperback book—a different paperback each week. He was reading a book when he met Kelly four months ago; he had taken a coffee break with a worn copy of The Milagro Beanfield War that someone had left in the donut shop. Vince has always liked reading. In jail he went on nonfiction jags, reading a book a day: Lewis and Clark, Greek mythology, architecture. But he’d soured on novels years earlier and hadn’t read one until that day, when he found The Milagro Beanfield War on a chair.
He was in Chapter I, enjoying the description of some old Mexican guy’s troubled life, when he looked up and saw two long smooth legs leading up to a pair of shorts and, eventually, two electric eyes.
“Isn’t that a great novel?”
Vince looked down at the paperback and managed to mutter, “Yes.”
“Don’t you love the characters?”
“Yes.”
“Do you read a lot?”
“Yes.”
“Fiction?”
“Yes,” he managed to say to the legs and eyes.
“Me, too,” she said. “There’s nothing I love more than curling up in front of a fire with a good novel.”
Love. There it was. That was the word that did it for Vince. Love. From that moment on, he had vowed to love novels, too, to find himself curled up in front of a fire with Kelly. So now every Wednesday after work he goes to the used bookstore in his neighborhood and trades the novel he was reading for a new one. During the week, he leaves the book in his locker at work and gets as far as he can on coffee breaks so that by the following Wednesday morning he can talk intelligently about a new book when Kelly comes in. He rarely gets halfway through them, just far enough to understand what the book is about, enough to talk to her about it. Then he trades the book for a new one.
He’d like to finish some of the books, but he needs to get a new one each week—so they have something to talk about, but also because he superstitiously believes he might find the novel that causes her to fall for him. But there’s another reason he never finishes, if he’s honest with himself. He’s afraid of being disappointed by the endings, which is the reason he stopped reading fiction. He’d read Great Expectations at Rikers and had loved it—this story of a criminal secretly sponsoring some poor kid’s life—until the jail librarian pointed out that Dickens had written two endings. When he found the original ending Vince felt betrayed by the entire idea of narrative fiction. This story he’d carried around in his head had two endings? A book, like a life, should have only one ending. Either the adult Pip and Estella walk off holding hands, or they don’t. For him, the ending of that book rendered it entirely moot, five hundred pages of moot. Every novel moot.
So he only reads the beginnings now. And it’s not bad. He’s even begun to think of this as a more effective approach, to sample only the beginnings of things. After all, a book can only end one of two ways: truthfully or artfully. If it ends artfully, then it never feels quite right. It feels forced, manipulated. If it ends truthfully, then the story ends badly, in death. It’s the reason most theories and religions and economic systems break down before you get too far into them—and the reason Buddhism and the Beach Boys make sense to teenagers, because they’re too young to know what life really is: a frantic struggle that always ends the same way. The only thing that varies is the beginning and the middle. Life itself always ends badly. If you’ve seen someone die, you don’t need to read to the end of some book to learn that.
Vince’s sampling of the beginnings of novels was going fine until a few weeks ago, when Kelly failed to ask about a book he was reading (Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn) and Vince panicked, ran to the dotty old clerk at his used bookstore, and asked for help. The clerk, Margaret, theorized that perhaps Vince’s reading list was becoming too prosaic and linear (“Too plotty”) to duly impress a twenty-six-year-old woman in the year 1980. Since then Margaret has been sending Vince in some strange directions, toward modernism, metafiction, and the avant-garde. And Vince has been pleasantly surprised. Last week he read Pricksongs and Descants, a book of short “fictions” by Robert Coover, and found himself explaining to the seemingly refascinated Kelly the way Coover fractured the world into not only different points of view, but into different realities. (“It’s like there are all these pieces on the ground and we can pick them up and make the world we want.”) He was thrilled when she expressed interest and peppered him with questions.
So now he’s gone even further into experimental fiction with this System of Dante’s Hell, an angry, concentric, metaphoric, poetic guidebook to hell by the militant black author LeRoi Jones. Vince isn’t sure he gets it, but he’s enjoying the language and some of the images as he starts in on the fourth circle of hell—“A summer of dead names. Early twilight of birds beyond the buildings…” and that’s what he’s reading when Kelly walks in and comes directly to his table.
About Kelly: she is five feet ten inches tall, a former college volleyball player, twenty-six, white. Soft clear skin. She irons creases in her tight blue jeans, and wears her long blond hair in a perfect feather, middle-parted, falling away from her face like angel wings. Tic calls her Farrah. “Oh, here comes Farrah,” he says.
Even the oldest men look up from their donuts.
“Hi, Vince.” She smiles. “Don’t tell me that’s another new book?”
He nods.
“You’re amazing.”<
br />
Smiles.
“What is it today?”
Vince holds it up and tries not to sound rehearsed. “It’s about how we create our own version of hell right here on earth.”
“Huh,” she says noncommittally, and Vince keeps going.
“For this guy, hell is Newark, New Jersey. You ever been to Newark, Kelly?”
“No,” she says. Is that distraction he reads? “I guess I haven’t.”
Vince stands. “Yeah, Newark is bad, but me, I’d put hell closer to Paterson. Compared to Paterson, Newark is Sea World.”
Yes, she is definitely distracted: smiles and nods but doesn’t laugh at his joke. “Huh,” she says again, and turns toward the donut case. That’s it? That’s all he’s getting today? He follows, crushed, puts on his apron and walks around the case. LeRoi Jones. Stupid. Vince curses himself and the bookstore clerk. I’m too far out there, he thinks, and wonders if he ought not to go to another John Nichols book. He thinks Milagro might be part of a loose trilogy. That seems smart: when in doubt, go with a trilogy.
“Today, I need…” and Kelly describes a dozen donuts, including five jellies.
“That’s more jellies than usual,” Vince says quietly as he fills the box. He crouches and watches her through the glass case, the symmetry of tight jeans on toned legs. God. As he fills the box, Vince notices a white political button pinned to Kelly’s coat. It has red and white stripes, and in blue letters: Grebbe and GOP.
He stands and faces her. “Gre-e-e-eb?”
“Greb-eee. Aaron Grebbe. He’s a lawyer at the firm where I work…and a friend of mine. He’s running for state legislature.”
“You gonna vote for him?”
She smiles. “Yes. I am. He’s a good man.” She looks down at the donuts.
Vince nods, seals the box, and puts it on the counter. “Then you’re a Republican?”
She flinches. “No. Well, maybe. When I was young I was a staunch Democrat. Everyone was. But now…I just think the country is so screwed up that we need a change. That’s what Aaron’s campaign is about. Returning America to its glory.” She shrugs, a little embarrassed. “At least that’s what Aaron always says.”
“What’s he think about the hostages?”
“He says it’s not really an issue for state legislature.”
Vince nods.
“But he wants them to come home, I’m sure.”
“Goin’ out on a limb, isn’t he?”
She laughs. “You should vote for Aaron. You’d like him. He reads a lot. Like you.”
“Yeah?”
“But he likes nonfiction, mostly. Hey, are you going to hear Reagan’s son tonight?” Kelly asks. “Aaron’s going to be there. You could meet him.”
“Yeah,” Vince says. “I was thinking about going to Reagan’s son.”
She smiles again, and in that smile Vince has visions of children and country clubs, of creases ironed into his own jeans.
“Then I’ll see you there,” she says.
“Okay,” he says, and watches her leave. He runs to the back, throws his book in his locker, grabs the newspaper and begins flipping the pages, looking for some mention of Ronald Reagan’s kid coming to town.
“I READ A book one time,” Tic says as he lugs a tray of maple bars to the front. “It was called 1984 and we had to read it in school and it was by this French dude Harwell. He wrote it in, like, the 1500s and he predicted that by 1984, there wouldn’t be any football or basketball or anything. The only sport would be BMX bike racing. That’s why I ride my bike everywhere. Because when we make it back to the Olympics in ’84, that shit is going to be an Olympic sport and I’m gonna get me a fuckin’ gold medal, guaran-damn-teed. And then, when we go back to a gold standard, that medal is gonna be worth its weight in gold, man.
“This book said that bike racing will be taught like karate, in dojos. I’m gonna be sensei of my own BMX dojo, man. We’ll sleep and meditate and smoke weed and screw…everything from the seats of our bikes. People will come from miles around to learn from the various masters. Every few months I’ll just disappear, wander the countryside, teaching and—”
Vince interrupts. “Hey, Tic? How old are you?”
Shrugs. “I don’t measure time like everyone else, Mr. Vince.”
“But you’re old enough to vote?”
“Yeah…”
Vince holds out the folded newspaper. “I need someone to go hear Reagan’s son with me and—”
“Whoa, whoa.” Tic steps away from the newspaper as if it were a bomb. “I don’t vote, Mr. Vince. That’s what they want…register your ass. So when the shit comes down, they just go to their master list and there’s Maxwell Ticman, 2718 West Sherwood Avenue, Spokane, Washington, and bang! First thing next morning, you got a fuckin’ homing device in your teeth.”
He walks away, leaving Vince staring at the newspaper story.
DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL David Best comes out into the lobby, red-faced. “First of all, do not come in here without calling first.” David looks even older when he’s angry like this and Vince can imagine the strain on his heart filling those thick limbs with blood.
Vince throws hands up, pleads guilty to David and his receptionist. “I’m sorry.”
“What? Carlisle? Carson? What is it today?”
“No, no. I don’t want to change my name. Nothing like that.”
“Then what?”
Vince looks from David to the receptionist and back. “Don’t you think we should talk about this in private, David?”
David turns and stalks into his office. He has to raise each shoulder to hoist his haunches and legs. He edges around his desk and sits. “You don’t just drop by the office. I’ve told you that. You call, give us a number, and I’ll meet you somewhere. Anywhere you want. And if you have to come in, if it’s some kind of emergency, you call first. You have no idea who could’ve been in my office.”
“I thought you said it doesn’t matter,” Vince says. “That I’m not worth killing.”
He sighs. “I’m sorry about that.”
“I know. I was a little crazy yesterday.” Vince laughs at himself. “I went after this kid parked in front of my house.”
“For Christ’s sake, Vince—”
“No, it’s okay. I didn’t hurt him. Nice kid, actually. Waiting for his girlfriend. She was just trying to sneak out of her house. But it made me realize that you’re right. I have been acting paranoid, like I’m living my old life. But I’m not there. I’m here. I got a new name, new life. I should be…I should be better than I was four years ago.”
David listens without judgment.
“I mean, there’s no reason I can’t…you know, be a part of things. Maybe go back to school. Or get married. Have kids. Join a country club. That kind of thing. I’m smart. I could do anything I set my mind to, right?”
David smiles. “You got a particular country club in mind?”
Vince looks at the framed picture above David’s chair. In the portrait, Jimmy Carter seems even more forlorn than he did yesterday. Vince nods at the picture. “You probably have to go with the guy in charge, huh?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The president. You’d probably get in trouble if you went with me to hear Reagan’s kid tonight.”
David looks over his shoulder, as if seeing the portrait of Carter for the first time. “I can vote however I want, Vince.”
Vince puts a newspaper clipping on David’s oak desk. A small headline reads: REAGAN’S SON COMING TO SPOKANE.
“It’s tonight, at nine, at Casey’s restaurant on Monroe.”
David pushes the clipping back. “I can’t go with you to this, Vince.”
“Yeah, sure.” Vince nods, folds up the clipping, and puts it back in his pocket.
“I’m sorry, but it would be—”
“No, it’s no big deal.”
“I’m glad you’re getting involved politically, though.”
Vince leans forward. “They
don’t tell you about that in the program. You get your voting rights restored, but what if you’ve never—” Vince shifts his weight. “In my neighborhood only the jerks cared about this stuff. Politicians paid unions and churches to deliver neighborhoods, and the aldermen and councilmen were just two more guys with their hands in your pocket. Nobody voted. Why bother? But now—” Vince can feel his train of thought getting away. “See, what I’m tryin’ to figure out—” He leans forward. “David, how do you know who to vote for?”
David looks tired. “Go home, Vince.”
VINCE SETS THE SYSTEM OF DANTE’S HELL down on the counter.
Margaret, the moon-eyed clerk at The Bookend, is in her sixties, white-haired and bird thin, wearing a peasant dress and a glasses chain around her neck. She stands behind the counter—covered with slipcases and homemade bookmarks—behind her a deep, one-story room, books double-filed and stacked to the ceiling in dark rows, more books piled in every corner. Margaret looks into Vince’s eyes and seems to know it’s gone badly. She covers her heart with her hand. “Oh, no. What happened, Mr. Camden? Did we go too far with the Afro-American literature?”
“I don’t know what we did, Margaret. I just know she didn’t like this one.”
Margaret removes her big round glasses and shakes her head. “Now don’t lose heart, Mr. Camden. We’re not beaten yet. Remember: Win the mind and the heart will follow.” She comes around the counter. “Or is it the other way around?”
He follows her to the stacks of alphabetical paperbacks. “The good news is that there are more books,” she says, “always more books. Let’s start from the top, shall we?” She makes clicking noises as she looks through the bottoms of her bifocals. “Perhaps the experimental fiction was a bit of a stretch, Mr. Camden. I know just what we need—something romantic and sweeping. An epic!”
“Actually”—Vince steps in behind her—“I want something on politics. You got anything like that?”
She doesn’t turn to face him. “Oh, a political novel. Excellent. Perhaps Robert Penn Warren?”