“On our maiden voyage, from New York to Cuba, me and a brother named Hastings were working the boilers. They’d been giving us trouble from the moment Mr. Garvey bought the ship. Hastings and I were posted at those boilers to guard against any … embarrassments. The work was dull and stressful at the same time, like waiting for your sick child’s fever to break or become an emergency. Then I heard a splash off the larboard. A woman calling out for help. I ran to her, confused. We didn’t have women in the crew. Hastings stayed behind.
“When I reached the water, all I saw was a school of bluefish. I’m staring down at them, but I still hear the woman’s voice. I’m thinking she’s under them somehow, but that doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. Those fish would’ve scattered before she even touched the water. And now the sound changes; she stops calling for help and starts speaking. To me. I hear my name. And I find myself leaning over the side of the boat, stretching and stretching, straining to understand her. And then, splash, I fell right into the water. The bluefish shot right off.”
The Dean patted his forehead with a handkerchief. He’d started to sweat.
“Before I even called for help, the boiler exploded. Just like that. Hastings died right away. I was in the water two nights before rescue found me. It wasn’t so long before the Library’s invitation arrived.”
The Dean lay his hands flat on his desk and breathed deeply. He said, “How would you describe what happened to you in Paterson, New Jersey. In 1997?”
“I wouldn’t,” she said, suddenly more sober than she’d been since sunrise.
She understood the Dean knew something, had a general idea about her ordeal in a New Jersey motel room, maybe, but no one was getting the particulars. If she hadn’t told her own mother, why would she tell him?
The Dean drummed his fingers on the desk.
“Do you understand this is a rare opportunity? To be invited here. To speak with me?”
“Yes, I do,” she said.
“And would you like to stay?”
“I know I don’t want to leave.”
He dropped his elbows onto his desk so he could lean even farther across it. He seemed exasperated, but maybe a little intrigued too. Most of the Scholars would’ve swallowed sawdust to be in Adele’s chair.
“Each Scholar’s moment of clarity is never completely clear, Ms. Henry. Interpreting the field notes is like listening to a conversation through a closed door. I can’t pick up every single thing, but I get the idea. Will you at least tell me the promise you made in Paterson?”
The Dean leaned back, crossed his hands on his flat stomach, then undid one button of his vest.
Adele hadn’t been the kind of girl who’d always wanted to be pretty. She’d just wanted to look cool. As juvenile as it sounds, at thirty-eight, that was still all she wanted. But when she leaned forward in her seat, the chair pinched the sides of her thick thighs. And when she leaned back to try to cross one leg, the top leg slipped off. Too much meat below the waist. She felt she wasn’t built for swank. In this chair Adele had to sit straight, which made her feel like a child.
Adele remembered that motel in New Jersey. Being held down in the tub, nothing to stare at but the water-stained ceiling tiles.
“I promised to get them before they get me,” she said.
The Dean nodded. “Well, then, maybe you can do what I need.”
The Dean stood up, walked to the four printers. They hummed in the darkness. He returned to his desk with a sheaf of printed pages in his hands.
“I’ll make it plain. The Library is under threat, Ms. Henry.”
“And what do I have to do to protect it?”
“Whatever is required to keep it secret, to keep it safe.”
“Why does secrecy matter?”
He said, “You want the cosmic answer or the pragmatic one?”
She didn’t even speak, just curled her lips and tilted her head.
“We pay our staff in cash, and the Unlikely Scholars don’t file. That’s one hundred fifty years of back taxes. If the IRS came looking to be repaid, we’d go bankrupt for sure.”
This answer actually pleased her. Simple, practical, commonsense. The Washburn Library was dodging its bills.
The printers rattled, and the small video panels on their sides turned bright.
“So if we lose this fight, I’ll have to pack up this office,” he said. “And you’ll get booted out of that little cabin you love. Right out on your ass. And then where will you go?”
“I could find something,” she said, defensively.
“Go back to selling that ass?” the Dean muttered.
She stood, shot right up. “You speak like that one more time. Go ahead and test me.”
The Dean smiled. “No, Ms. Henry, I wouldn’t want to do that.”
“So what’s the threat?”
“Mr. Washburn. He’s the threat. He means to shut us down.”
She flopped down into her chair again. “Why?”
“He isn’t as devout as we are. Do you know Solomon Clay?”
“I’ve read his files …”
“I’m sending you west. With him.”
“With … ?” She squeezed the arm rests of her chair. “He’s here?”
The Dean opened the middle drawer of his desk and set a thin gray manuscript onto the tabletop. “You can have the life you want, Ms. Henry. The one you deserve. I promise you.”
She looked at the book.
“And what’s it going to cost me?”
“You just have to remember who gave it to you,” he said, opening the cover.
The Dean flipped through a series of yellowed, aging pages. Adele saw lines of writing in black ink, red ink, even scrawls made with something like ash. Different penmanship, maybe different eras. She couldn’t read the words with the ledger upside down.
“I’m sending you with Mr. Clay. He’s going to try and convince Mr. Washburn to change his mind, but you’re my fail-safe. Solomon thinks of himself as the Scholar of all Scholars. More a prophet than a worker. He won’t get blood on his hands, if it comes to that. But you will.”
“So you don’t really trust him?” she asked.
“No. But I don’t really trust anyone.”
“So why send me?”
The Dean smiled. “I trust your greed.”
And Adele felt slightly pitiful. This came on suddenly, overwhelmingly. It was because she knew instantly that she would do it. “It” being whatever was required to keep what she’d been given. Earned. Deserved. A cabin. Nice clothes. Groceries. Even the research. The shame wasn’t in discovering that she had a price; everyone had one of those. Maybe it was just in learning, so concretely, that this was what she cost.
AND YET, no matter how earthshaking a moment is, there’s that minute right afterward when you return to the unconcerned world. Which is exactly what Adele experienced after she’d heard all the Dean had to say. She signed on for the work because there were no competing bids, then stepped out of Armageddon and onto a wooden staircase. Found that reality hadn’t shifted noticeably. Her bra still cut into her shoulders. She still stood five-foot-one.
Adele took the stairs one at a time. When she reached the bottom, she meant to sprint toward her cabin and finish off the pitcher of manhattans, one big gulp before the epic trip, but she couldn’t get around the man waiting for her down there. A myth stood in her way.
He overshadowed her. Not Lake. Too skinny. “Don’t moisten your panties,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s been known to happen the first time a lady meets me.”
“Meets who?” she asked.
“I’m Solomon Clay.”
She felt a wave of awe powerful enough to knock her down. But the guy seemed so pleased with himself that she refused to show it. Adele struggled to keep her balance and pressed one hand against the wall. Which made Solomon Clay laugh.
“Yeah,” he said. “You know me.”
Solomon Clay extended his right h
and as if it were the tip of a scepter. It was narrow, rough, gnarled; glorious and unnatural; as stirring as a rusted red bridge abandoned in the countryside; you see one and think, That thing will never fall.
He left the hand out there so long she wasn’t sure if he wanted her to kiss it or to bow. Finally, she forced herself to shake his hand, the least objectionable option.
Adele shivered with revulsion at the touch.
“Did I just give you a climax?” he asked with a smirk.
What kind of prophet was this?
As soon as he let go, she put her hand in her coat pocket. The fingers all but quivered, and she hated to think Solomon Clay read this as excitement. She felt tempted to explain everything about her ordeal in Paterson, New Jersey, just so he’d understand her reaction clearly. She’d give him answers that she’d denied her own mother if it would remove that gloating grin.
But before she could decide, Adele heard another sound in the long hall. A familiar voice. One she’d last heard in 1997. It wriggled across the stone floor. It curled up the length of her right thigh. It settled in the pocket between her upper thighs. She actually felt a weight press against her pelvis. It reminded her of that gruesome weekend, the last time she’d been held tight.
You’re my special flower.
But that whisper wasn’t real. It wasn’t. Was not. Only a memory activated by touch. Now her own hand, still in her coat pocket, felt as hot as an ember thrown from the flame.
“So you’re my shield bearer,” Solomon said.
“I’m what?” she asked. She hadn’t quite heard what he said because she was looking past Mr. Clay, peeking into the far corners, just in case. Just in case.
“You know the tradition? The shield bearer accompanies the veteran soldier into battle.”
“I thought we were Scholars.”
“Not in the field. Out there, think of yourself as my valet.”
Adele watched Solomon’s face. Did he know, even suspect, what the Dean had told her? He might be the legend, but she was the fail-safe. Solomon Clay seemed too confident to consider such a thing.
They walked along the hallway now. Past the guard’s desk and out the side door of the Washburn Library. Eventually it would be summer, the better of the three seasons there in the woods (rainy season being the third). In summer the wind would romp with the fallen leaves. Right now the snow simply pinned the whole world down.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“I came up in Chicago,” he said quickly.
“Then where’d you pick up all this shield bearer mess? Ancient Greece?”
“What’s wrong, woman? Are my big words confusing you?”
He sneered and looked down at her. He was a light-skinned black man. Her friends used to call them yellow-boys. Girls dated them and girls hated them, usually at the same time. Boys who’d been told they were beautiful only because of their complexion. They might have a face like a bullfrog’s balls, but with that golden skin they couldn’t fail. She loathed that deeply bred confidence. And, of course, she also envied it.
He walked her all the way to her cabin, and when they got there, she felt surprised they’d gone so far so quickly. She wasn’t tipsy anymore. Being insulted by this prick had sobered her right up. Big words, my ass.
And yet, she had to admit a certain admiration for the man. If nothing else he looked astoundingly young. Solomon Clay had to be seventy, but he looked forty-five, at most. As they moved, he smoothed his wavy hair and tapped down the fine wisps above his ears. He even smoothed his eyebrows. Half-pathetic for a man his age, maybe, but he was strangely beautiful for a man so old. Men grow handsomer over time; women just mature. Everyone seemed to agree.
Oh, she knew it was silly to care so much about aging. To think like those ladies whose comfortable lives let them be conceited full-time. But rich women weren’t the only ones yearning to save their sweet faces. What girl doesn’t watch her loosening skin with regret? Maybe even lady alligators sigh at their reflections in the river.
“Lake is inside packing your things,” Solomon said. “Then he’ll drive us to town. You handle our tickets.”
He pulled an envelope from a pocket inside his jacket. She snatched it from his hand, in a hurry to get away from him.
“That’s bad manners, Adele. You better work on that.”
“Or else what?”
She cocked her arm slightly and squeezed her hand around the envelope as if it were a weapon she could use to crack Solomon’s skull.
“You know I stopped calling you new folks Unlikely Scholars years ago.”
“What do you use instead?” She crossed her arms to defend against the inevitable insult.
“You all come here and start dressing like businesspeople, so I just call you pros.”
He looked her up and down.
“But I’m guessing you’ve been called a pro plenty of times before.”
He walked off, and she watched him go. He swaggered like a child.
The Dean had told her to crush anyone who threatened the Library. They might be going out into the field to negotiate with Mr. Washburn, but she hoped Solomon Clay would give her an excuse to inflict a little violence on him while they were there. Hurting a man like that would be very satisfying.
INSIDE THE CABIN Lake had finished putting her things into suitcases, even her underwear. When she walked in, Lake stood by the kitchen table. He unplugged the old toaster on the kitchen counter, and in his enormous hand the black cord looked like a line of thread.
“I’ll take your bags down to the truck,” he said. “You can meet us there in fifteen minutes. Will that be enough time?”
“I’m sure.”
He went to prop the door open, but she stood there already and held it for him. So he went back to the kitchen table and lifted both bags. As he came closer, she couldn’t help it, she stepped backward as far as she could without letting the door swing shut.
Lake stopped there and said, “Mr. Clay was giving you hell.”
“You heard?”
“Through the door.”
“He’s the legend, I guess.”
Lake shrugged. The suitcases seemed weightless when he held them, but she hated to think how much heavier they’d be when she was on her own.
“He’s not actually from Chicago, you know. He’s from a town called Elgin.”
“Oh,” she said.
Adele knew what Lake was doing, trying to pop a few holes in that asshole’s balloon, but geography wouldn’t reduce him. She still felt small in comparison, intimidated by Mr. Clay. She appreciated Lake’s attempt, though, and smiled politely.
“Also, Solomon Clay is not that man’s given name. He took it on when he got here.”
Lake stooped and looked into her eyes.
“What’s his real name, then?” she whispered.
“Maurice Storch.”
Maybe Lake caught the first chuckles bubbling behind Adele’s eyes, but he didn’t wait around to watch.
Adele spent the next five minutes in the bedroom lying on her star of Bethlehem quilt, laughing herself into a stomachache. She imagined introducing herself to old Mr. Washburn. Hello, I’m Maurice’s shield bearer!
After that was through, she spent another five minutes talking to herself about this new position with the Library. Convincing herself to embrace it. To be brave. The sight of the Vermont woods through her cabin window helped give her courage. You made it here, she thought. And who would’ve believed you could? Not even you.
Adele went to the vanity table near her bed and pulled her hair down from its ponytail. The straight brown locks barely reached the tops of her shoulders, but she still felt good about the look. It had taken her six years to grow this much back. She brushed it a little, but not too hard because her scalp had always been tender. Then she pulled the brown hair together again, twisted it, and tied it off with a little maroon hair band. Adele turned her head and looked at the ponytail in profile. Like this she appeared business-
minded, professional. One serious brunette. Adele Henry.
Keep going, she said to herself in the mirror. Keep going.
After that she put a few last supplies into her old purse, the big green one she’d brought with her from her previous life. The only item that remained from those decades. Only as she left the cabin did she open the envelope and look at the pair of tickets she’d been given. Final destination: Garland, California. But the trip out there would take days, not hours.
Adele Henry and Maurice Storch were going Greyhound.
SEEING AMERICA BY BUS is like touring the Louvre in a Porta Potti.
And that’s all that will ever need to be said about that.
THE LOUNGE of the Garland bus station collected dust better than most vacuums. It wasn’t a dirty place, exactly, no trash on the waiting room floor, but Adele nearly had a coughing fit the moment she opened its doors. Solomon Clay didn’t make things any easier when he refused to carry his own bags inside. She had to make three trips from the bus to the waiting room, first carrying his things over, then hers. By the third trip she was heaving, inhaling great quantities of the gritty station air.
Meanwhile Solomon Clay sauntered over to the public telephones as if he were about to ring up another assistant to take her place. She got to rest, really gather herself, only after hauling in all five of their suitcases, and at one point Adele felt nostalgia for her carefree days at the Scarborough Women’s Correctional Facility.
Water, that’s what she needed, so she got in line at the concession counter but didn’t realize she had no money until the woman demanded a dollar. Mr. Clay had been buying all her meals at different spots on the road. She hadn’t received even a nickel before leaving the Library. Embarrassed, she slinked away.
Adele didn’t run right over to Solomon now, because then she’d feel too much like a kid looking for her allowance, and this guy didn’t need any more help treating her like a pup. So she crept toward him instead. He kept his back to the waiting room, phone receiver against his ear. Adele came close enough to pick Solomon’s pocket (which she considered), but then she heard him say, “We’re at the Greyhound station, Mr. Washburn.”
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