“I know,” he said. “This stuff tastes like battery acid. It’s slop. But it’ll help keep us awake. We’ve got to do a lot of driving tonight.”
“Where are we going, Bill?”
“I’m not sure. Into Indiana, first of all. Maybe across Indiana and into southern Illinois.”
“And what will we do there?”
“We’ll get married,” he said.
Married. No one else wanted to marry her, she remembered. Not Danny, not Craig. But Bill didn’t even ask her if she wanted a wedding ring. He simply took it for granted that she would marry him.
That sounded wonderful.
“And then?”
He shrugged. “Then we find a little town,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be much, just a little place where we can live our own lives the way we want to. That’s all we need, April. Just a place to live in and each other to live with.”
“How will we stay alive?”
He put down his hamburger. “It won’t be hard,” he said. “I’m a damned good mechanic, April. I can do anything in the world with a car. And a top mechanic can always get a job. There’s not a town in the world without a garage, and there are damn few garages that can’t use a good hand. We’ll find one that can and I’ll have a job.”
“I can work, too.”
“You don’t have to.”
“But I want to,” she said. “I can get a job waiting on tables or something like that.”
“With truck-drivers making passes at you all day long? That doesn’t sound too good.”
“I’ll manage,” she said. “They won’t make passes for long. Because it won’t do them any good. When a girl is lucky enough to be married to the best man in the world, no truck driver is going to tempt her.”
He smiled at her, reached across the small table to take her hand. He squeezed her hand and she thought that love was not so important after all. Whether or not she loved him, she was very lucky to have found him, to be with him. Together they could build a real life. A good life.
“We have to save money,” she went on. “So we can buy a house and fill it with children.”
“Do you want children, April?”
“I want your children.”
“I love you, April.”
“And I love you, Bill.”
The lie came easily to her lips. She would have to repeat that lie for a lifetime, she knew. But she would never let him know that she did not love him. She had to make him very happy; she owed him that much and more.
She ate her second hamburger and smoked a cigarette while Bill got a second cup of coffee. She watched him drink the coffee. When he finished it and set the empty cup back in the saucer, she grinned at him.
“You know,” she said, “you can back out, if you want.”
“Why should I want to?”
“Because you’re getting second-hand goods.”
“April—”
“I’m not exactly a virgin,” she went on. “I’ve done some pretty disgusting things. I’m a mess, Bill. You’re getting used goods and you don’t have to get stuck with them.”
“Maybe I want to.”
“Still—”
His eyes were very serious. “You know my car, April?”
“Of course.”
“It’s a hell of a car,” he said. “It can out-drag a Mercedes, you saw it do that. Funny thing about that car, April. It’s just a bucket of bolts when you come right down to it. The body is off an old Ford that must have rusted to hell and gone twenty years ago. The transmission’s off a LaSalle, and they haven’t made LaSalles since before the second world war. The engine came out of a Chrysler that got knocked to hell in a wreck. Just a collection of broken-down parts.”
She waited for him to go on. Instead he lit a cigarette and smoked for a few seconds. Words did not come easily to him; he was not as glib as Craig, but when he spoke he said what he meant and meant what he said. And this was far more important than glibness.
“If the parts are good,” he said slowly, “it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot how many wrecks the car’s been in, or what kind of mileage it’s carrying. I guess it’s not flattering to compare you to an old car, April. But you get what I mean, don’t you? I don’t give a damn what you’ve done or who you did it with. All I care about is the kind of girl you are.”
Craig would have spoken the words differently. He would have used an image far more poetic than a simple thing like a hot-rod. But somehow Bill’s words could not make her laugh, or even feel like laughing. She knew that he meant what he said, that his simple words were essentially far more poetic than the colorful lies Craig Jeffers had told her.
She could say nothing in reply. She wished suddenly that she did love him, knowing how much he deserved her love.
But she was not without feeling for him. He was good, he was sweet, he was gentle—and she liked him for these qualities. She liked the person he was, the fine person he was.
“Hell,” he said. “I talk too much. Let’s get out of here and put some miles on the rod.”
The name of the town was Birch Creek.
The town was not so much. There were a few hundred less people than in Antrim, and the summers were a little warmer and the winters not so cold, and southern Illinois was not quite the same as southern Ohio. Aside from that, Birch Creek could have been Antrim all over again. And yet the town was entirely different.
April stood at Bill’s side in the rectory of the small church while the minister said things to them, and when the minister finished saying things Bill put a five-dollar ring on her finger and took her in his arms.
“Some day I’ll get you a better ring,” he told her the night before. “A decent one, with diamonds.”
But she had said, “This is all the ring I ever want. Just this and you. Who needs diamonds?”
So they were married in Birch Creek, and they took a two-room kitchenette apartment on the main street of town above a dry-goods store. They spent their wedding night in a motel three miles from town. Bill had said that you just could not spend your wedding night in your own home, and that the motel would be worth the five bucks it cost them.
It was worth more than that.
It was worth the world.
She learned something that night, something that made her want to laugh and cry at once. She had gone with Bill to get away from the town, to escape her problems and start in fresh. And a very strange thing had happened.
She had fallen in love with him.
This was love, she knew. This was love, and it made the cardboard infatuation with Craig fall away and disappear as if it had never existed in the first place. This was love, and she had been miraculously lucky, managing to get away from Antrim and at the same time finding love as an added dividend.
Because that night someone opened the gates to Heaven and the world went away in a shining pink cloud. That night it was not sex but love, not flesh but a pair of spirits meeting. Everything Bill did to her made her realize how lucky she was, how happy she was going to be.
“Your name is Mrs. Piersall now,” he had said, his mouth close to her ears. “How does it sound?”
It sounded wonderful.
The lovemaking was gentle and fiery at once, a mutual meeting that words would only injure. It was fire and ice, softness and hardness, everything good and nothing bad. Bill was her husband, he had given her a ring, and now she was giving him a ring in return. It was perfection, utter perfection, and it washed away all the ugliness of her past.
The bad parts simply dissolved and disappeared. Danny Duncan was gone now. So was Craig Jeffers. And the night with Margo Long, the lesbian interlude conducted in horrid drunkenness on the chaise in Craig’s garden, simply ceased to exist. It was as though it had never happened at all. There was only Bill, Bill her lover, Bill her husband, Bill her man.
Nothing else.
They would have a good life now. They were in a town that accepted them as a decent pair of newlyweds starting life togeth
er. Bill had a good job and she was working part-time in a restaurant. They were saving money, money for a home and children.
Sometimes she lay awake at night after Bill had dropped off to sleep and her mind wandered back to Antrim. She had almost lost Bill. She had come close to running to New York, had come even closer to ruining and wasting her life with Craig.
She had been very lucky.
And she lay in bed snug at Bill’s side, listening to his measured breathing, and she thought about her luck. She had everything she had ever wanted now. She was going to hang onto it. She was going to stay happy forever.
She thought about the happiness that waited for them. The happiness of a house of their own, for example. The happiness of being parents, of having children. The happiness of growing old, not as Craig Jeffers would grow old, alone and bitter, but as two people aging together, side by side, always close, always in love.
She liked Birch Creek and she was incredibly happy there. But the town was immaterial. It might as well have been Cedar Hills or Brackle or Lipton’s Landing. Any town would do.
The background didn’t matter. She mattered, and Bill mattered, and that was all.
THE END
A New Afterword by the Author
April North was the first book I wrote for Beacon Books, although it may or may not have been the first title of mine that they published. A Diet of Treacle (which Beacon called Pads Are for Passion) was also published in 1961 and went to Beacon after several other publishers had passed it up. I don’t know the order in which they were published, and, now that I think about it, I can’t imagine why anyone would care.
I can’t say I remember much about the writing of April North. Now I have a copy in front of me as I write these lines and I could read it and refresh my memory, but I’m not going to do that. I mean, I wrote it. Why would I want to read it?
That reminds me of a story. Some years ago, a book tour led me to the Left Coast Crime Conference, held that year in Scottsdale, Arizona. Robert B. Parker was also in attendance, and I sat in on a program in which he fielded questions from the audience. Bob didn’t much like to give speeches but was comfortable with a Q&A, and he charmed his audience as effortlessly as his hero Spenser charmed them in print.
One of the questions concerned Bob’s view of his own work. What was his favorite Spenser novel?
“Oh, hell, I don’t know,” he said. “I let go of them once I write them. I never read them once they’re published. Does anybody?” He’d evidently spotted me in the rear of the hall, and called out, “Larry, do you ever read your own work?”
“I read nothing else,” I replied.
Well, it got a good laugh. In point of fact I do sometimes reread books of mine. But I find it virtually impossible to look over my very early work. I’m not sure what it is that puts me off. It may be that my writing ability has—thank God!—increased over time, and that the work of my less skillful earlier self seems amateurish, clumsy, and wooden. It seems just as likely that it’s the young author I don’t want to look at, that the glimpses of my younger self that the work affords embarrass me with revelations of callowness and vapidity. Or perhaps I’m just afraid to open those several closets for fear of what I might find there.
Never mind. I’m not going to reread April North just so I can natter on about it to you. I mean, you’ve already read the book. And it’s not Finnegan’s Wake. You don’t need to have me explain it to you.
Which won’t put me at a loss for words.
You know what I’ve always liked about April North?
The title.
Which is to say that I like the protagonist’s name. Beacon must have liked it, too, because the company didn’t change the title. As a publisher, the company could be a pain in the ass, not so much because their editors changed titles but because they were apt to change everything else. A team of editorial hirelings went through every manuscript Beacon bought, and if they didn’t make changes on just about every page—just arbitrary rewording to no apparent purpose—then they weren’t doing what they’d been hired to do and risked losing their jobs. But I didn’t realize they were doing this until I’d already published three books with them and had moved on to other things.
One thing we agreed on, though, was the title. I still like it. It sounds, I dunno, classy. And I came up with it while trying to work a variation on a theme.
My friend and colleague Hal Dresner wrote several books for Nightstand Books as Don Holliday. (Only a few, after which he leased the name to ghostwriters.) One of the ones he wrote and showed to me featured a blowsy dame whom he called June East—as a play on Mae West.
Hence April North, who had nothing else in common with either June East or Mae West. But I have to say I still like her name better than either of theirs.
The other thing I can tell you about April North—still without my having to read it—is that because of it I was threatened with a lawsuit.
By this time—late 1962, early 1963—I’d moved back from New York City to Buffalo, or more specifically to 48 Ebling Avenue, in the township of Tonawanda. The house had a full finished basement attractively paneled in knotty cedar, and I’d tricked out an alcove down there as an office where I wrote a little of this and a little of that, but nothing at all for Beacon. A couple of other writers were playing Sheldon Lord for me, and in return for the entrée my name afforded to Beacon Books, I was getting a little off the top. Two hundred dollars a book, if memory serves.
My agent found these writers. I never knew who they were and I’m not sure they knew who I was. But one fellow who ghosted one or two books for me was my friend Peter Hochstein, who had been my occasional college roommate. He was between jobs in the advertising business, which he professed to loathe, so he set up shop in a hotel on Broadway and Sixty-Ninth Street and knocked out a couple of books as Sheldon Lord. Then he decided he missed office life and gabbing at the water cooler, and went back to Madison Avenue.
But in the interim he did one thing he wasn’t supposed to do, which was tell the world about our ghostwriting deal. The word got around to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where we had both gone to school and where April North is essentially set. (The town in the book is given as Antrim and Yellow Springs is mentioned as being nearby, but although Antrim’s fictional, it might as well be Yellow Springs.)
Well. There’s a character in the book called Danny Duncan. And in Yellow Springs a Martha Duncan learned of the book, got hold of a copy, and was outraged that her son’s name had been used in the book. Now I didn’t know Martha Duncan, or Danny Duncan, either. I’d once met a Judy Duncan, who turned out to be Martha’s daughter, but the meeting was brief and unmemorable—I think I sold her a guitar—and I didn’t know she had a brother or a mother or, really, anything in the world but a thirdhand guitar.
But evidently Peter had known Martha Duncan, although not all that well, just well enough that Martha felt betrayed because Peter had gone and put her son in a book—and a marginally obscene book at that. So she wrote a letter to Peter, whom she of course believed to be the book’s author, and she sent a copy of that letter, along with a letter from her lawyer, to the folks at Beacon.
Who sent the letter to my agent, who sent it to me.
I was rattled. What concerned me most was that Beacon would now know that I’d run in a ghost. That knowledge, plus the threat of a lawsuit, might well prompt them to wash their hands of Sheldon Lord altogether. I wrote to Martha Duncan at length, telling her that I’d written the book myself, and that I didn’t know her or her son, and that the description of the book’s Danny Duncan (“a tall rangy senior who played first base on the baseball team and second-string end on the football team”) didn’t seem libelous to me.
I probably pointed out that the book was published in 1961, when Peter was still finishing up at Antioch and her son had not yet become either tall or rangy. In any event, I heard nothing further of or from Martha Duncan. And, mirabile dictu, my relationship with Beacon rema
ined as it had been, with various ghosts writing various books. When they did, I got my two hundred dollars.
I still like the title.
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block ([email protected]) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.
A Biography of Lawrence Block
Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.
Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.
Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in Manhunt, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and the New York Times. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including Enough Rope (2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.
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