by Chris Belden
“I also love TV!” Zebra Amphetamine shouted as she pumped Shriver’s hand. “McLuhan said it’s a cool medium, but I find it red hot, don’t you?”
“I don’t really know.”
Simone, he could see, stood talking with T., who was touching her arm in a familiar manner.
“I mean, what is there to fill in?” Ms. Amphetamine asked. “TV fills you up to bursting. I love it!”
She turned and walked away, her earrings swinging with each long stride. Shriver was about to approach Simone when Jack Blunt appeared in front of him.
“You crafty old bugger,” the reporter said with a chuckle. “You’re putting on quite a performance, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“That whole bit about the cheerleaders, the television shows. You’re making yourself out to be some sort of primitive type. Is this a kind of performance piece you’re working here? Are you testing people—maybe gathering data for that next big novel we’ve all been waiting for?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’ll get it out of you yet, Shriver,” Blunt promised. “I’ve got some calls in to New York, your old agent, all the usual suspects—someone’s going to crack under the pressure.”
He began to walk away, his pen held aloft like a baton, then stopped and turned back.
“Almost forgot.” From under his arm he pulled a rolled-up newspaper. “Take a look,” he said, unrolling the paper. There, a headline: FAMOUS AUTHOR REAPPEARS, and underneath, in a small but crystal-clear black-and-white photograph, sat Shriver in the booth at the Bloody Duck Saloon. “I think it’s a rather nice shot of you,” Blunt said. “Very flattering.” He cackled and headed off.
Well, that’s it, Shriver thought. I’m done for.
Simone appeared at his side, having extricated herself from the cowboy.
“Nicely done,” she said, placing a hand on his arm.
“Excuse me?” Her hand—it was so warm.
“The panel,” she said.
“Oh, yes. I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.”
She squeezed his forearm and said, “Oh, no. It was great. Everyone’s buzzing.”
Shriver followed her into the lobby, where he felt everyone’s eyes on him. He waited for someone to shout, “Imposter!” Now that his face was in the papers, he needed to confess to Simone right away.
“I was hoping we could have lunch,” he told her.
“Oh gosh, I’d like that, I really would, but there’s this problem with Gonquin, and . . .”
“Still no word?”
“Nothing. Her friend is going ballistic, the police are talking to people. It’s crazy.”
“Do they suspect foul play?”
Simone shrugged. “They’re going to want to talk to you too.”
“To me?”
“I guess you were the last person to see her.”
“I was?”
“I’m sorry, I have to go. Edsel will take care of you.”
Then she was gone.
Several people approached and asked Shriver to sign copies of Goat Time.
“You’re a breath of fresh air, sir,” one elderly gentleman declared. “I’ve been coming to this conference for many years, and you hear a lot of hooey at these panels.” He cocked his gray head toward Basil Rather nearby. “But you were a real person up there. Thank you.”
Two older women appeared.
“Is Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior?” one of them asked.
The other woman frowned and said, “Leave him alone with that stuff, Jillian.” She handed Shriver a copy of Goat Time. “Please make it out to Jillian and Lillian.”
The two women appeared remarkably similar: pale eyes, button noses, even their silver hair was cut in the same style.
Jillian said, “I can see that you’re lonely. I used to be lonely before I found Jesus.”
Shriver kept his head down and wrote, To Jillian & Lillian.
“Jesus fills up your life. Yes, sir. Fills you up more than whiskey. Fills you up more than women. Fills you up more than writing or reading or—”
“Jillian!” the other woman said. “Let the man be.”
Shriver wanted to write something clever but was stuck.
Jillian leaned uncomfortably close and whispered, “I know who you are.”
“You do?”
“Jillian, I’m warning you,” Lillian said.
Feeling suddenly sweaty, Shriver looked at Jillian’s face, just inches from his own, and wondered how she could possibly know who he was. Had they met? Surely he would remember her. She was an attractive woman, about sixty, her teeth straight and white, her eyes wide and lively.
“Who am I?” Shriver asked, not at all certain he wanted to know.
“Just a man,” she answered. Then she stood up straight and said, “But with the Lord Jesus as your Savior, you could be much, much more!”
Relieved, Shriver wrote, From just a man, then signed his name.
“Thank you,” Lillian said, taking the book. She grabbed Jillian by her elbow and pulled her away.
“Good luck!” Jillian called over her shoulder. “You’ll need it without Jesus!”
Shriver waved as Lillian dragged her off. Perhaps Jillian was right—perhaps he should pray to get out of this mess he’d gotten himself into. As he considered this option, the man in the bright red suit coat quickly approached. He had no book to be signed.
“Mr. Shriver, is it?” Extremely short, he had a trim, wide-shouldered physique, like a teen gymnast. His dark eyes, set far apart, blazed beneath a full head of brown hair so neatly combed that a line of pale skin showed at the part. “Detective Krampus,” he said, displaying a shiny badge inside a leather wallet. He then pulled a pencil and a small notebook from his jacket pocket. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Gonquin Smithee.”
“She still hasn’t turned up?”
“I understand you were with her late last night.”
“Well, there was a whole group of us.”
“Where was this?”
“In my hotel room.”
“Room number nineteen?”
“That’s right,” Shriver answered, a little unnerved.
“Who was present?”
“Uh, let’s see. It was very late, and everyone had been drinking . . . There was Professor Wätzczesnam . . .”
“Yes,” the detective said, scribbling loudly in his notebook.
“Ms. Amphetamine . . .”
“Yes.”
“Edsel Nixon, a graduate student . . .”
“Yes.”
“Ms. Malarkey-Jones . . .”
“The ample woman?” Krampus asked, displaying a copy of Harem Girl.
“Correct. And the folksinger from the café.”
“Christo?”
“You seem to know all this, Detective.”
“Anyone else in your room last night?”
“And Ms. Smithee, of course.”
“That’s all?”
“I think so.”
“You think so, or you know so?”
“I know so.”
Shriver then recounted for him the events of the night before.
“And you didn’t notice Ms. Smithee’s departure?”
“I don’t know when she left.”
“Did you spend the night together, Mr. Shriver?”
“Are you asking if I slept with Ms. Smithee?”
Krampus raised one thin eyebrow.
“The answer is no,” Shriver said.
The detective wrote furiously in his little book.
“If you knew anything about the poor woman,” Shriver continued, “you wouldn’t need to ask such a question.”
“Why do you say ‘poor’ woman?” Krampus asked.
“I don’t know. Obviously she’s in some sort of bad situation. You don’t just up and leave in the middle of a conference.”
“Hm.” More scribbling in the notebook. “Any ideas
about what happened to her?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Did you notice any friction between her and anyone else?”
“Well, she was squabbling with Ms. Labio,” Shriver said. He hadn’t intended to mention this because, he thought, it might look bad for Ms. Smithee’s friend.
“They were fighting?”
“Not fighting, I would say.”
“A lovers’ spat?”
“I suppose so.”
“About . . . ?”
“Ms. Labio objected to Ms. Smithee’s drinking.”
“Was she imbibing a lot?”
“She had a few, I’d say.”
“Anything else about her behavior last night?”
“Not that I noticed.”
“No problems with any of the other authors?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I was told she took exception to a question you posed to her yesterday.”
“Oh. Yes. She didn’t like my question, but then last night she told me she’d changed her mind.”
“When? While you were together in your hotel room?”
“No. Right here in the lobby. During Mr. Rather’s reading.”
“You didn’t attend Mr. Rather’s reading?”
“I left when the sound system started acting up.”
“I see.”
More scribbling.
“And how did Ms. Smithee get along with Mr. Rather?”
“Okay, I suppose.”
“Didn’t he accuse her of sabotaging his reading?”
“Not directly.”
“Do you think she did sabotage the reading?”
“I hadn’t considered it. But no, I don’t think so. I think it was an accident.”
“Did you sabotage the reading?”
“Of course not!”
Detective Krampus slid the notebook and pencil into his jacket pocket.
“Thank you, Mr. Shriver. I hope you’ll be available for more questioning, if need be.”
The little man turned and marched off. Shriver felt a mounting sense of anxiety as he watched the bright red suit coat disappear around a corner. Still, he supposed it was preferable that everyone obsess on Ms. Smithee’s disappearance rather than on the scandalous impersonation taking place right under their noses.
“Is that police detective a midget?” Edsel asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Or a dwarf? What’s the difference, anyway?”
While his handler attempted to distinguish for himself the difference between a dwarf and a midget—“Which one has the short arms and legs?”—Shriver noticed in his peripheral vision a dark figure over by the exit. His immediate assumption, from years of habit, was that Mr. Bojangles had entered the room. He turned and was about to call out the cat’s name when he remembered where he was. There was no Mr. Bojangles, of course, nor any black figure at all. The exit door was empty. He felt a pang of sadness and wondered how the little kitty cat was holding up all alone.
“Do you think there was foul play?” Nixon asked.
“Like what?”
The graduate student shrugged. “I dunno. Murder?”
/
Since there was some time to kill before Zebra Amphetamine’s reading, Edsel Nixon offered to drive Shriver around town, to show him “the few sights worth seeing in our little burg.” Shriver accepted, intending to have the young man stop at a liquor store along the way.
They rode beneath a sleek blue dome of sky. The temperature had risen into the eighties. Students traversed the campus in thin T-shirts and short pants, sunglasses hiding their eyes.
Edsel Nixon pointed out the college football stadium and hockey arena. In between these two enormous structures stretched a practice field where hundreds of ponytailed girls in colorful uniforms ran, leaped, and shouted on the grass. As the jeep sputtered past, Shriver watched a pyramid of cheerleaders rise, and at the top stood the brunette girl from the hotel, waving.
Nixon abruptly turned right, just past a frozen custard stand shaped like a giant ice cream cone. Two-story brick buildings lined the town’s Main Street, clothing stores and Laundromats and insurance offices topped by apartments with large, old-fashioned windows.
“This is downtown,” Nixon said. “That’s where we had dinner last night.” He pointed out Slander’s Restaurant. “Oh my God.”
Emerging from the Church of Pornocology was T. Wätzczesnam, his enormous cowboy hat tilted downward to shield his eyes. The cowboy glanced up just as the jeep came up alongside him, as if he had recognized its distinctive rattle.
“What luck!” he hollered. “Where are you boys headed?”
Edsel Nixon braked at the curb. “I’m just showing Mr. Shriver around town.”
“Great!” The cowboy, with surprising dexterity, bounded into the backseat. “I suppose you’re wondering what I was doing in that den of questionable repute.”
“It’s none of my business,” Nixon said as he steered into the slow flow of traffic.
“ ‘I am sure no other civilization, not even the Romans,’ ” the professor quoted in a stentorian manner, “ ‘has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid dirty sex. Because,’ Nixon, ‘no other civilization has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the WC.’ ”
“Is that a quote, sir, or is that your own opinion?”
“Both, my ignorant friend. Both.”
“Was it Hugh Hefner?”
“Mr. David Herbert Lawrence, you imbecile!”
“Sorry, sir. And how was your visit to the underworld?”
“Illuminating.”
“Pull over here, will you?” Shriver said.
“Ah, Shriver”—the cowboy smiled—“you are a mind reader.”
In Big Chief’s Liquorarium, Shriver and Wätzczesnam picked out a pint of whiskey each. At the counter, Shriver realized he’d left his wallet in his damp suit coat and his per diem money at the hotel.
“Mr. Nixon, can I trouble you for a loan of a few dollars? I seem to have misplaced my wallet.”
“Of course.”
Edsel dug into his pocket and pulled out some crumpled bills. Big Chief grunted thanks and slid the bottle into a brown paper bag.
Half an hour later, the three men sat on the gently sloping banks of the aptly named Black River, watching the murky water rush by. Nearby stood a cluster of trees, their narrow trunks marked by past floods. Shriver and T. took occasional swigs from their bottles while Nixon drank from a can of warm root beer.
“I’ve always thought it was strange that the river flowed north,” Nixon said as a tree limb floated by.
“So, Shriver,” Wätzczesnam said, ignoring his student, “have you been interrogated by our diminutive friend in red?”
“I have.”
“Your observations?”
“He strikes me as determined.”
“Is he a midget or a dwarf?” Nixon asked.
“I believe he is merely stunted,” the cowboy answered. “And for your information, a midget is a dwarf, only with more proportional features. But then the term ‘midget’ is out of favor in these dreary, overly sensitive times.”
“How do you know all that?”
“I know all, Mr. Nixon. And do not forget it.”
During this exchange, Shriver thought he saw something moving among the nearby trees, a blur of black caught out of the corner of his eye. But when he turned to look, nothing was there. Was he suffering a stroke? Hallucinating? Did he miss Mr. B. so much that he imagined him around every corner?
“Any idea about what happened to our friend Ms. Smithee?” Wätzczesnam asked.
“Maybe she just ran away from Ms. Labio,” Shriver said.
“Ah, yes. I wouldn’t blame her.”
A long-legged mosquito landed on Shriver’s hand. He smacked it hard and peeled the corpse from his skin.
“That was a male,” the cowboy said.
“A male?”
; “Only the female mosquito bites.”
“How can you tell the difference?”
“The males have those long legs. They feed off plants. It’s just the ladies you have to be careful of. Words to live by, eh, Shriver?”
“I suppose you’re right, T.”
“ ‘Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman!’ ”
“Was that Otway, Professor?” Edsel Nixon asked.
“Indeed it was.”
“I take it you’re not a married man, T.?” Shriver asked, emboldened by the whiskey.
The cowboy pushed the lip of his hat back and sighed. Edsel Nixon picked up a stick and tossed it at the river.
“Don’t get me wrong, Shriver, I’d love nothing more than to give it a shot, but I’m afraid it’s not in the cards for this decrepit old cowhand.”
T. gazed at the black water gliding silently by. Shriver seemed to have strummed a deep chord in the man.
“No,” T. said, “I long ago came to the conclusion that to be a writer—a true writer—one must sacrifice such conventional comforts as marriage and family. How can you create whole worlds, living and breathing characters—how can you construct plots that pulse with universal truth—and at the same time maintain any kind of meaningful relationship with another person? Both paths demand everything from you. What self-respecting woman would tolerate a man who is chained to his desk for days on end, concocting an alternate reality in a fevered state that has no room for cuddling or cozy chats over dinner? And what novel or story or poem will forgive a man for setting it aside just to attend a dinner party or a piano recital? No! You’d get pulled apart like saltwater taffy, and then neither the art nor the marriage succeeds. You must pick one or the other, Shriver. But then I needn’t tell you that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s pretty well-known that your wife . . . Well, it didn’t work out, did it?”
“That’s well-known?”
“Come, come, old man. You may have crawled into a cave, but you don’t write a novel like that without some attention being paid to your sex life.”