Thief of Words

by John Jaffe

  Instead you’ll have to do with my words. Two to start with: Thank you.

  I loved our trip to Chile.

  Though I’d forgotten about the devils hanging from the ceiling. Did I ever tell you I dreamt about them? That night in my drunken stupor? Remember when we got back to our hotel room, I’d cocked my fingers into a gun, pointed at you, and said, “Bang, bang.” We fell on the bed laughing. Then I passed out—way too much elixir— and the next thing I saw were Pablo’s devils, dancing around me.

  At first they were laughing. Then they started dancing closer and closer—they definitely weren’t laughing anymore. I tried to run away, but one of them grabbed my foot. I should have been scared, but I was mad.

  When I was eleven there was a bogeyman who waited for me in my dreams nearly every night. He looked like Jethro from the Beverly Hillbillies except he was mean and hairy and half his teeth were missing. He’d always chase me, getting so close I’d wake up in a panic. Then one night, just as he was about to pounce, I got tired of being scared. I yelled at him as loud as I could, “Get out of here!” The bogeyman froze, looked at me in surprise, and melted just like the Wicked Witch of the West.

  The night after our dinner with Pablo, I did the same thing with the devils. But instead of melting, they sulked away, a silly bunch of red-faced demons dragging their tails between their legs. The next thing I remembered was waking up with a very bad headache, snuggled in your arms.

  Annie

  CHAPTER 32

  Snuggled in your arms.” A sweet phrase, Jack thought. Sweet as a Krispy Kreme. (His stock of similes was low: it was 9:15 in the morning and the coffee hadn’t kicked in.)

  Jack would have preferred to meditate on the last four words of Annie’s most recent e-mail but he had to postpone the luxury. First thing on the morning’s agenda: Arthur Steinberg.

  Steinberg’s desk was at the far end of the Features department. Jack worked his way there circuitously, as if he were sneaking up on a wild mustang. First he popped in on the managing editor, next he talked to the family editor about a Father’s Day story, then he tried to convince the classical music critic that the Persuasions coming in behind Phoebe Snow on “San Francisco Bay Blues” was a sublime moment in musical history (a discussion that only got him committed to the next concert by Baltimore’s Handel Society), and then he chatted with a Features reporter about a story on the Chesapeake Bay’s crab patrol. Only after all that did he finally approach Steinberg himself.

  “How’s it going, Arthur?” he asked.

  Steinberg flinched like a rabbit that’s just felt the raptor’s shadow. “Fine,” he said with a wary smile. “Fine.”

  Jack leaned on Steinberg’s computer terminal. The desk below him was piled with files and clippings, as well as crumpled tissues, wrappers, and mummified bits of food. Steinberg was a dour pack rat with frizzy hair and wire-rim glasses; he had a pack rat’s irritating diligence and personal hygiene. If he weren’t such a smart and elegant writer, the paper and the city fire marshal would have evicted him years before.

  Jack smiled down; Steinberg tensed. He knew what was coming next.

  “What’s the status of the Camden Yards story?”

  “Almost done, Jack. Maybe another week.”

  “Arthur, I know this will come as a shock to you, but the Star-News has decided to publish daily, not monthly.”

  “You were the one who wanted Camden Yards to be a big Sunday blowout, Jack. It takes time.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Arthur, but in between Camden interviews I want you to start on this ‘Thief of Words’ thing that I told you about. At least get the library going on a Nexis search for other newspaper plagiarists.”

  “I did that already,” Steinberg said in a voice full of righteousness. “And the Camden interviews are done. I’m starting to write.”

  Jack was about to say something snide about taking a week to write the Camden Yards story, but decided Steinberg’s eggshell ego couldn’t take it. Instead, he updated him on Ellen Gammerman’s part of “Thief.” It seems that the Pittsburgh Press plagiarist had only reluctantly agreed to an interview; he wasn’t going to give them much. Gammerman had decided to broaden the story with experts and other cases.

  Jack headed back to his desk, this time in a straight line. After he attended the morning editors’ meeting and gave the lobbyist story a final read-through, it was nearly noon. So he grabbed his gym bag and headed out to the Athletic Club. He would pedal the stationary bike for forty-five minutes, watch the lunchtime basketball players, and think about Jack-and-Annie e-mail.

  “Snuggled in your arms.” A brilliant phrase, he decided, better than anything Arthur Steinberg ever had written or ever would write. Jack sat down in front of a locker and opened up his bag.

  “Snuggled,” he said aloud, drawing a puzzled frown from a hairy-backed guy toweling himself off.

  Jack poked his once-flat stomach and squeezed his soft left biceps. “Snuggled in your arms.” I need to start lifting weights again, he thought.

  Later that night, arms sore from three sets of fifty-pound curls, he wrote the following:

  To ahollerman@aol.com

  From jdepaul@aol.com

  Subject: Annie, the snake slayer

  Annie,

  I remember the Jethro nightmare. You told me about it the day we biked to McIntyre’s ranch. That was before you lived in New Jersey, when you lived in Hemet, California, a little town just a mountain away from the desert. You and your mother lived at 317 W. Tremont St. It was a completely ordinary house except for two things: it sat across from an apricot orchard and was three doors down from me.

  We knew each other from first to sixth grade. It was at the beginning of junior high, just when we began to see each other with completely different eyes, that you moved East.

  We were best pals. You were Dorothy, I was the Tin Man; you were Guinevere, I was Lancelot. We did everything together. We biked all over, from the Ramona Bowl to the Soboba Hot Springs, to the hole in the mountain they said was an old uranium mine. You told me I would glow at night afterwards—and I believed you. I even checked in the bathroom mirror one night. We read a million books and swung for hours on the swings in your backyard. We named the clouds.

  One Sunday in April, when we were both eleven, your mother packed a big lunch, put an old tablecloth in the trunk of her white Impala, and drove us over the mountain and down toward the desert for a picnic.

  It was cool driving up to the pines but warm as a muffin on the other side. About halfway to the desert floor we pulled off to an overlook. Below us stretched range after range of dry hills and wide valleys. It seemed like we could see clear to Arizona; it seemed like we could see the curve of the earth.

  The mountainside, brown and lifeless in the summer, now sparkled with spring. A short jump down from the overlook was a meadow dotted with color. Your mother thought it might be a good picnic spot, so she scrambled down the rocks to investigate and we came climbing after.

  In the meadow, every cactus blossom was a different shade of yellow or magenta. There were flame-tipped ocotillo, tiny golden daisies, greenish-white jimson trumpets and the deepest purple wild indigo. We ran all over. We chased a blue-striped lizard. We popped the hollow brown pods of a strange bush covered with white flowers. You told me they were from the planet Mars and the pod dust could defeat our enemies.

  After we had spent hours in the meadow, or maybe it was only 20 minutes, your mother decided it was too rocky for picnicking. She told us to go back to the car and we’d continue on. You climbed up first; I followed a few yards behind. When you made it to the top, I was just below you on a flat granite boulder. I was looking for the best route up when I heard a loud cht-cht-cht-cht-cht. My heart froze. Not six feet away was a rattlesnake, coiled, head raised. Its rattle vibrating like a blender. “Jump, Jack!” yelled your mother. But I was too scared.

  Everything disappeared—the meadow, the road, the great blue bowl of the sky—everything but the rattlesnake
. I remember thinking, in the middle of my fear, how beautiful it was, with its shining diamond skin.

  “Don’t move!” you yelled. This was better advice, since I couldn’t make myself move anyway. And suddenly, CRASH, a rock the size of a pony smashed down by the snake and careened into the meadow.

  I looked up at you and back at the snake. It had disappeared; gone, like a conjuring trick. Had you knocked it off, or had it just slithered away? We never knew. “Are you okay?” you asked. “I’m fine,” I said. “It’s gone.”

  I climbed up to you. “Thanks,” I said, “thanks, Guinevere.” “No problem, Lance,” you replied, and we slapped our palms together.

  That memory is still vivid, not because it was traumatic—I never had nightmares about it—but because it was our first grand adventure together.

  We continued to the desert valley and had our picnic by a wash lined with creosote bushes and mesquite trees. We spent the rest of the day driving along county roads and exploring a desert gone crazy with flowers.

  In late afternoon we stopped by a stretch of sand dunes. You and I jumped out and ran up the nearest one. “Look out for snakes!” your mother yelled. The sand was very soft, for every two steps up, we sunk one step back. But eventually we reached the summit.

  Before us, the ridges of the dune field coiled across the valley floor like great serpents. To the southwest was the mountain, its eastern slopes a melancholy blue. Overhead, wisps of cloud began to glow pink and salmon in the fading sky. Behind, your mother watched us from the hood of the car.

  On top of the world, we stood. And then you reached out for me and I reached out for you. And, holding hands, we hurtled down the face of the dune, rolling, tumbling, somersaulting until the sky was the sand and the sand was the clouds and the clouds were the dunes and the dunes were the mountains and the mountains were the road and the road was the flowers. And everything was everything.

  Jack

  CHAPTER 33

  Annie had come armed to the Rhododendron Room of the Asheville Hilton. A stack of books sat between her and the twenty-three hungry faces staring at her. She’d been talking so long that the sound of her own voice was beginning to irritate her. Yet still they listened with an almost preternatural concentration, some furiously taking notes, others nodding in earnest agreement, as if hidden in her words was the secret that could ward off all the rejection notes of the future.

  “… And these,” Annie said, pointing to the stack of novels, “are your best friends. If you want to be a writer, read. And I’m not talking about how-to books. I’m talking about learning from those who do. Gabriel García Márquez for the fabulous, John Steinbeck for simplicity, Daphne du Maurier for tension, Kazuo Ishiguro for control—which we all could use more of—Barbara Kingsolver for heart, and never forget Vladimir Nabokov. His love affair with words should be a lesson to us all. Words. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Annie’s voice grew louder; her index finger jabbed at a ragged, marked-up copy of Lolita.

  “Words,” she said. “Beautiful, evocative, scary, cold, bitter, harsh, sweet, silly words. Words. That’s why we got into this business, right? Because we love them; we love how they make us see and feel and hear. How they take us to places we’ve never been; how they shape our mind, our memory; how they can show us anything and everything, where everything is everything…”

  Annie had gotten so worked up that she’d closed her eyes, and before she realized it, Jack’s latest e-mail had invaded her mind.

  When she opened them again, she saw three hands raised in the air.

  “Yes, Abbi?” she said to the dark-haired woman with the star and moon earrings who’d written a novel about gypsies.

  “When you say, ‘Everything is everything,’ do you mean that whatever we write, we should make sure that all the words are equally important and—”

  Annie waved her hand. “Good try, Abbi. The truth is, I was just blathering. Let’s get back to the real issue—how to get published.”

  For the next hour, Annie explained how to beat the odds in the publishing business, even though she knew how long those odds were. The day’s session ended with critiques with would-be authors.

  In the afternoon, Annie and her mother took a sightseeing drive. Then they ate dinner at a vegan restaurant that Abbi the gypsy writer had recommended. To Annie’s surprise, her mother actually liked the tofu gyro and wanted to order the tofu crème soufflé for dessert. But Annie made her order the raw sweet potato pie to go instead. The soufflé would take an extra twenty minutes and she was anxious to get back to the hotel room to write to Jack.

  To jdepaul@aol.com

  From ahollerman@aol.com

  Subject: Everything

  Jack,

  I’m still dizzy from our tumble. Rolling down hills has always been one of my favorite things to do, and now I remember why.

  Annie Hollerman of Hemet, Ca.—I like that. I like the way it feels. I particularly like the idea of my mother packing a picnic lunch (her idea of cooking was defrosting) and scrambling down a rock, except I don’t know if Donna Karan makes hiking boots.

  And I would have slayed that snake for you.

  After my talk, where I warped out into the power of words (and quoted you, by the way), I met with five writers whose works I had critiqued. There wasn’t a talking gun in the bunch, thank God. Though three had written mysteries. Talk about glut. There’s a mystery sub-genre for every niche you could imagine: food, dogs, cats, horses, boats, suffragettes, priests, nuns, rabbis, psychics, Buddhists, nihilists. And that’s not including the disabilities: quadriplegics, paraplegics, agoraphobics, the hearing impaired, the sight impaired, not to mention the sleuth with Tourette’s syndrome.

  Mercifully, the mystery writers I talked to today didn’t dabble in medical oddities. One of them was actually pretty good. His book was about a garbage man, of all things. I think he’s actually discovered a new sub-genre: trash.

  In the late afternoon, my mother and I took a spin around the mountains here. I’d love to show you Asheville. It’s beautiful. They call it the Sedona of the East, because it’s got a ton of weird quartz configurations they call vortexes, just like the ones in Arizona. Supposedly, the vortexes provide the perfect spiritual vibrational pull, kind of like a DSL line to God.

  Say what you will about the new age mumbo jumbo of the magnetic pull in the world’s oldest mountains, but when the deep lavender mist hangs low in the Smokies and creates an echo of peaks and valleys, it’s a stirring sight that can churn up spiritual rumblings in the most skeptical of souls.

  Even my mother, who’s about as spiritual as Judge Judy, was awed by the beauty of these mountains. We were driving up and down the blacktopped curves of a road so shiny and new it was like floating on a black satin ribbon. Just as we got to the bottom of a little valley, we passed a waterfall.

  Waterfalls aren’t unusual in the Smokies, but there was something startling in the perfection of this one. Maybe it was the way the rocks aligned and caught the sun, or the innocent clarity of the water, or the green of the surrounding forest, or maybe it was that my mother and I had finally found the way to love each other for who we are, as opposed to who we’re not. Whatever it was, it took us both by surprise.

  I pulled the car to the shoulder and stopped. We were silent for a few moments as we watched the water tumble over the rocks. “It’s like it’s holy,” my mother said. I could barely hear her; she said it so softly.

  We sat there for about ten minutes and when I drove away, she said, “I felt like organ music was going to start any second. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”

  I thought about writing you there with me, as you’ve been writing me places with you. But then I realized it would change the memory, as your writings have changed my memories. And this memory, this shared moment with my mother, is one to keep.

  There must be something to this vortex thing. After the waterfall trip, I’ve been feeling a strange desire to eat brown rice, th
row the I Ching coins and denounce my earthly possessions. So the next time we meet—how about dinner at my place Saturday night?—I’ll be the one dressed in orange and magenta with my head shaved smooth.

  Annie, the snake slayer

  CHAPTER 34

  Laura Goodbread walked up to the mezzanine conference room near the national desk. She was a few minutes early for the meeting; only Kathleen Faulkner was there, sitting at the conference table. Kathleen glanced up at Laura, then resumed checking things off on that day’s story budget for the Metro section.

  There had been a daily 4 P.M. news meeting at the Star-News since Gutenberg was a paperboy. It had been pushed ahead to 4:15 in the early nineties, but out of habit or tradition everybody still called it “the four o’clock.” (The name stayed the same even during the Gulf War, when it had been held at 3:30 to accommodate breaking military news.)

  The four o’clock was usually wall-to-wall editors—one from each department—but on this day, Laura Goodbread had been deputized to represent Features because Jack was busy and the other Feature bigwigs were unavailable. Laura didn’t mind; she secretly enjoyed the four o’clock, its unvarying routine reinforced all her prejudices that editors were rigid, soul-sucking pod people. And, in Laura’s opinion, Kathleen Faulkner was the queen soul-sucker.

  Laura sat down on the opposite side of the table and looked her over. Could her Jack DePaul hunch be true? Would he be attracted to her? Kathleen was cool and tightly wound; Jack was warm and loose as old sweat socks. Still, she had a patrician beauty and Jack was a competitive little bastard. Laura could see him chasing her just for the pure challenge of it.

  Next through the conference-room door came Cleo Brown, a wire editor, and Thurman Descanso from Business. Cleo and Laura had arrived at the Star-News around the same time and had roomed together for a few months. Cleo slapped her budget down on the table and squeezed her considerable bulk into a chair.