Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  “Neither did I,” said Cable, digging around for a few potatoes for Val’s bowl, “read it, that is. Not the final version. Pounded out the revision, sent it off, and the rest—” he daintily dropped a sixth potato into her bowl, “is crass commercial history. Ha!” She couldn’t tell whether he was bleating at how many potatoes he’d managed to shovel into her bowl or how very well he’d hoodwinked a major publisher and the general reading public.

  Decker moved in closer, she felt him up against her back, and the prospect of some home-cooked stew made her feel surprisingly weak in the knees.

  “Bloody bore,” Cable barked. “The things I love can’t earn enough for a postage stamp.” He ladled stew into Decker’s bowl. “The things I hate could buy a whole floor of offices on Bay Street and start a goddamn foundation.”

  Val headed over to the futon and sat cross-legged with her bowl. Decker joined her, leaving more room between them than they had been able to spare anytime over the last couple of days. “Which is why,” Cable said, pulling what looked like a couple of reams of paper out of a wooden basket next to his wood stove and slamming it onto the table—Val thought she saw the typewriter jump—“which is why you can’t have Asteroid unless—” Val watched him over a spoon topped with parsnips and beans; with the word unless, she was back in the game “—unless you publish this one first.” He divided the stack of papers into two unequal piles of typescript, then whacked the smaller manuscript with the back of his hand.

  She could hardly catch her breath. Suddenly it was all hers, a publishing coup that would evaporate all strangeness between her and Peter Hathaway, his harrowing heliotropic ovoids hurtling toward her mother ship in final committed abandon, and her hands started to shake as she came to terms with how damn much that was exactly what she had wanted all along, all along. “What is it?” she managed to croak as Decker took the bowl from her and she tried to get to her feet. They were hers—Asteroid, Hathaway, and the slim unknown.

  Charles Cable tugged at his waistband in a confrontational kind of way. “My memoirs,” he bellowed.

  17

  Stall him.

  It was the only thing that made sense once she abandoned the idea of pummeling him senseless with the ladle. It was a tumble of decision-making in the space of less than ten seconds while she chewed and swallowed a parsnip and controlled her expression. She then said the one thing no author in her experience could ever resist, which would buy her time to figure out her next move. “Tell me about your memoirs, Charlie.”

  If Cable had known Val Cameron, he would have instantly been suspicious of her motives. Tell me about your memoirs, for Val, was something along the lines of encouraging him to describe his most disgusting personal habits, naked and with full sound effects. But it worked. He launched into some proto-PR spiel about the time being right to expose something or other, presumably not himself, and Val’s brain went into overdrive.

  If she told him she couldn’t make such a deal, that Fir Na Tine couldn’t be pressured into publishing a book it hadn’t even vetted just to get The Asteroid Mandate, then she’d lose the contract. Also Peter. And probably her job. Her whole body felt scalded with an anger she had to hide. If she agreed to his absurd demand, this snaggletoothed, thunderbolt-hurling weird-ass writer of space junk, then where in the hell were her professional standards? And how on earth could she equivocate without his seeing right through her? Which of the following reasonable replies would buy her some time?

  I’ll have to talk to Peter, Charlie.

  I’d like to read the memoirs first, Charlie, before committing.

  Let’s do one deal at a time, Charlie. First The Asteroid Mandate, then we’ll talk memoirs.

  Nothing would fly, and she knew it. For all his bellowing and bluster, he’d see right through her, take whatever she said for reluctance—worse, criticism—and they’d lose him. Since he set this ridiculous condition in the first place, he was not in a reasonable frame of mind. But if she didn’t say something along those lines, then he’d clap his hands, ask for the contract she’d brought, sign it, and she, Val Cameron, would have to go home to her apartment and turn all her mirrors to face the wall so she wouldn’t have to face herself. Ever.

  No, she’d have to stall, and stall so sublimely Charles Cable would never see it. “Excuse me, Charlie,” she said, dabbing her lips with her shredded napkin just as he was launching into the year he covered city council meetings as a stringer for a newspaper. “Bathroom?” She ignored Decker’s quizzical look as Cable directed her to the outhouse in the woods behind the cabin.

  She walked out in an unhurried way, drew the front door shut, and dove into the rucksack Decker had blessedly left there on the porch. She pulled out the contract Ivy League Ivy had faxed and slipped it out of sight under the waistband of her sorry-looking pants. As she turned to head into the woods to find the john, she saw Decker standing inside at the window, a beer in his hand, watching her with a slight smile.

  He had seen it all.

  She flashed him a look of wide-eyed desperation, something she thought might convey what the hell am I supposed to do?—the same look he’d seen plenty of times over the past two days—and clutching the contract against her skin, she loped off into the woods.

  Charlie Cable’s outhouse was maybe half the size of Bob’s Bait Shop and had a stack of old magazines, a pyramid of toilet paper rolls, posters stapled to the inside walls about the virtues of sunscreen, and—unbelievably—a seashell pink toilet seat in the built-in bench over the pit. What it didn’t have was a door. The man can’t tolerate human society enough to live in town like a decent person, but when he does his business, anyone’s welcome. Fortunately, the outhouse faced away from the cabin. Where’s that contract, Cameron, huh? Just hand me a pen and I’ll hand you two manuscripts!

  Val pushed back the lid. For some reason, she thought as she breathed through her mouth, she just couldn’t lie and say she didn’t bring a contract with her, not in front of Wade Decker. Maybe she couldn’t swim naked in the waterfall, but she could at least tell the truth. So she watched in a disembodied sort of way as her hands tore the contract in half, then quarters, and let the pieces flutter down into the pit.

  From deep inside the sleeping bag, Val shined the flashlight on her wrist. 2:47 a.m. She flicked off the light and lay there, the weight of the manuscript on her stomach. She was wide awake. And all she was aware of was the sick pounding of her heart. At the end of the evening all three of them had gone to bed, Cable climbing the ladder to his loft, his baggy jeans slipping to a point below his butt crack.

  She shook her head.

  He was going to be some all-new circle of Hell for the Publicity Department. Decker clipped off a smile at her as he turned on his side away from her in his sleeping bag, some four feet away. Val waited until Cable’s snores burbled out from the loft, and Decker’s steady breathing told her he was asleep, then she crawled out of her bag and felt her way to the table where Cable had left his memoirs.

  She had palmed Decker’s LED flashlight while they stayed up swapping stories, then she dug deep into her sleeping bag, turned on the light and started to read the mem-WAHRS that were holding The Asteroid Mandate hostage. Four hours later she turned off the light, half sick. “Actually, Charlie, I don’t have a contract,” she had explained earlier when he brought it up. “I just thought it would be nice to meet, spend some time…” She waggled her head in a loosey-goosey way that had nothing to do with who in the world she really was.

  A stellar move, it turned out. He seemed to buy it. And for the rest of the evening she strove for enough bonhomie to prove her point. She was gay just short of manic, charming just short of sociopathic. She discovered a tilt of her head she never knew she had, an arch of her eyebrow that could house Boy Scouts in a storm. She laughed musically. She imparted confidences of no substance whatsoever.

  The closest she came to flirting with the coo
t was to touch his arm once, when she asked whether brawn and brains ran in his family. She was a full set of underwear short of shameless. Then she remembered an old boyfriend had once told her that whenever she thought she was being winsome the average male still needed a secret decoder ring. Even Decker seemed to like the show, which really depressed her. By bedtime they were singing Welsh drinking songs and everybody forgot about contracts and memoirs.

  Val eased out of the sleeping bag and tiptoed over to the table, where she replaced the manuscript. She was strangely devoid of feeling. And strangely devoid of a plan. She climbed back into the bag, her eyes wide and inconsolable in the dark. There was a rustle, and a hand drew back the flap. Decker’s whisper came close to her ear. “How bad are they?”

  “Oh, God, Wade,” she moaned softly, happy he was awake and she could disgorge some of the horror. “They’re self-indulgent and actionable.”

  “Oh,” he whispered. “I see.”

  “They’re disorganized, petty, and boring.” She sniffed. “You come off okay,” she added with a little roll of her hand he couldn’t see because it was inside her sleeping bag.

  “Good to know.”

  Val started to feel giddy. “Although why the resplendent Leslie chose you is a matter of some mystery, apparently.”

  “I can understand why.”

  “He devotes a sentence and a half to you.”

  “True love.”

  “Half a dozen others don’t get off so lucky.”

  Silence. Then: “Can you edit them?”

  “No one can edit them. Where they’re not actually incoherent, they’re rant, cant, and bile in Courier twelve point.” And, although she wasn’t about to mention it to the man who wouldn’t talk about his dead wife, Charles Cable’s mem-WAHRS contained some disturbing passages about Leslie Decker that were dated two and a half years ago. All of which added up, in Val’s mind, to a possible motive for murder. She’s all I have, my beautiful brave Leslie, all I have in the noble fight against everything wicked that seeks to destroy our lake paradise. Without her fine mind and passionate heart, everything we’ve worked for is lost. If something happens and Leslie walks away from this life and death struggle where we’ve been comrades in arms all this time, I’ll just have to wring her faithless neck.

  This sort of revelation was baffling.

  If Charlie Cable had killed Leslie, why would he draw such attention to himself?

  If Charlie Cable hadn’t killed Leslie, why would he draw such attention to himself?

  And how had a writer that bad topped the New York Times bestseller list for thirty-two weeks?

  Decker curled an arm under his head. “The show tonight was very entertaining.”

  “I’m glad you liked it.”

  “A side of you I’ve never seen.”

  She shot him a hangdog look. “In our very long acquaintance.”

  He grunted. “What are you going to do?”

  “Cry. Chew off a fingernail. Stall.”

  “And then what?”

  Her lip trembled. “Call my unindicted co-conspirator and appeal to his better nature.”

  “That would be Hathaway?”

  “Of course,” she hissed. “Who else is there?” It was such a sorry truth of her life, such an elephantine truth about her heart, that she started to cry. Her shoulders were too tired to shrug. “He’s got to walk away from everything with Charlie’s name on it.”

  “If you can appeal to sex, money, or vanity, it just might work.”

  Val kicked at the interior of the bag in a fit of sudden sweatiness. “You don’t know him,” she whispered fiercely.

  “Actually,” said Decker lightly, “I know him very well.” He started to move away. “I just haven’t slept with him.”

  The next morning, while Decker took a quick dip in the glassy lake, Val shoveled in some stale cornflakes and watched Charlie Cable hook up his marine radio just long enough to call Portage Airlines for a pickup. An hour and a half later she cast a mournful eye at the manuscript for The Asteroid Mandate, where Charlie had tossed it on his breadbox until Fir Na Tine met his demands, and felt that leaving it behind was some kind of heart-wrenching war story about separated lovers. All she could bring away from her two days in wilderness hell were Charlie Cable’s memoirs, which she clutched under her wing. She found herself wishing it was a can of SpaghettiOs.

  Cable had made it clear while he soaked his eggs in ketchup that Val was his editor. “Cameron,” he said, “you’re a stand-up kind of gal. I trust you with my memoirs. Nobody else. You, Cameron, you hear me? Part of the deal. Least I can do, you come all this way for me.” His uncombed hair was vertical. On him it looked like an experiment in static electricity. And all she could say was, “Oh, Charlie,” wondering balefully just how fast she could circulate her c.v. She felt like a 1983 Dodge Dart in a wrecking yard, compacted down to the size of a suitcase.

  Decker beamed.

  She loped to the float plane and turned. Because Cable was watching her intently, she gave him a look like she knew she was holding a lost book of the Bible. Many waves, a few blown kisses, and Val found herself airborne with Decker and a burly guy named Luther. She sat behind them, past caring about altitude. The two men speculated happily about the cause of engine malfunction all the way back to the Hathaway cottage. After a perfect landing at Peter’s dock, Decker absentmindedly helped her out of the plane, arguing the fine points of pistons with Luther, gave Val’s back a brotherly pat, and climbed back inside.

  She stood there watching as Luther backed the plane away from the dock, feeling strangely disappointed. We shared SpaghettiOs and underwear and moose muck and that’s the best you can do, Decker? Her baldheaded, gay accountant had patted her in the same way after he told her she owed the government over a thousand dollars. Just then Wade Decker looked right at her through the windshield, mimed a telephone with his right hand, and pointed at her.

  She gave him a tight smile that would have put a toothless moonshiner to shame, and then tried a casual wave that came across like she was casting out demons. What on earth was her problem? Maybe she’d used up all her charm the night before. While Luther kept jawing away, turning the plane in an easy float, Decker smiled and gave her a two-fingered salute.

  Inside the Hathaway cottage, she set Charlie Cable’s manuscript on the table by the phone, then went into the L.L. Bean bedroom and stripped off the torn pants that dried mud had hardened into a papier mâché sculpture. She shuddered as she pulled off the top that smelled like either bog or sweat and allowed herself a naked sixty seconds collapsed on the down comforter before showering and getting into the change of clothes she had brought. As she brushed her teeth and hair and slid some lipstick over her mouth, she felt a ripple of her professional self. Good. She found a bottle of Perrier in the fridge—Muffy and Lana weren’t completely useless—and filled a glass. Time to make the call, but first she needed to settle into her game head.

  But instead of dredging up useful memories of publishing contracts where she had bested Peter Hathaway, she pictured toting the rucksack and paddles and life jackets through mosquito-infested woods. She pictured paddling so hard she could no longer feel her arms. She pictured dragging the canoe through the deep mud until her legs were shaking uncontrollably. Not only had she, Valjean Cameron, done these things, she had done them well.

  Game head, achieved.

  She picked up the phone and dialed the private line.

  “Hathaway.” No peppermint foot bath today, apparently.

  “Peter,” she said in her most business-like way. “Val.”

  “Where the hell are you?” His voice had rocketed up an octave. He actually sounded worried.

  “At your place.”

  “I had to call Caroline Selkirk, finally, when I didn’t hear from you.” The way he said Caroline’s name made her sound like some especiall
y difficult department at AT&T. “She didn’t know where you were either. Just that Wade Decker was flying you to Cable’s and that’s the last she heard.”

  “The weather was bad, so we did the rest of the trip by canoe.”

  “Canoe?” He was incredulous. As if she had said jet pack.

  “Yes. Listen.” This was her one clear shot at getting him to understand the problem and work with her to figure out a solution to Cable’s extortion. “Charles Cable won’t sign off on The Asteroid Mandate—”

  “What!”

  “—Listen. He won’t sign off on Mandate unless Fir Na Tine first comes out with his memoirs.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  It was delicious to hear his disbelief. The Peter Hathaway of yore. “No.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Without Cable’s knowing, I read the memoirs last night.”

  “And?” He sounded like she couldn’t possibly get the words out fast enough.

  And this, Val told herself with quiet satisfaction, was why she was Peter Hathaway’s senior editor, for just these matters of taste and experience. “They’re unpublishable.” It was a word the two of them saved for only the most craven and despicable works, because each of them believed there was nothing so problematic they couldn’t bring it into line with some Olympian editing.

  There was silence on the other end. A thousand miles away, she could still see his face, that narrow-eyed look he’d get when he was calculating how to get the author he wanted at a price he could tolerate. But in the case of Charlie Cable’s demand, professional pride would bubble to the top of the bile in Peter Hathaway’s throat.

  Fir Na Tine stood for something, damn it, in that amazing shrinking world of book publishing. Without standards of excellence, pretty soon what everyone called literature would be shaped by writer wannabes with a credit card and the link to CreateSpace. Saying no to Charlie Cable’s demand drew an indelible line in the sand, and Val and Peter stood unbowed on the other side.