A Slepyng Hound to Wake

by Vincent McCaffrey

  “This girl looks like a one-man woman. I’d try to get something going with this girl if I were you, and let Della chase after Bob. Boyle is just testing the temperature of the water. You did good. There are no threats. The water’s just a little warm.”

  From Henry’s angle in the chair, the glass of the photograph captured the reflection of the window. Sasha’s head was obscured by a bright rectangle of modernist anonymity. “Della’s not chasing Bob right now. I guess she’s chasing me. I think Sasha is still in love with the guy she broke up with. … So, why did he say he was advising Duggan to seek compensation for the damage to his good name? Isn’t that a threat?”

  Albert rested back on the couch, his eyes surveying the room. “That’s really the best time to get something going with a girl—after they’ve just broken off with someone they thought they loved. You step right in. You show them what real love is. You get everything the other guy got and more. … He didn’t say they were going to do it. He said he was giving that advice. It’s a potential threat. Sharon Greene hasn’t done anything yet. She’s still in the clear.”

  Henry shook his head dramatically.

  “You know nothing about this. You married your first wife when you were still in diapers. Alice picked you up on waivers because she needed a new pitcher for the stretch. Am I wrong to say you have only slept with two women in your whole life?”

  “Technically—”

  “Technically you’re not qualified—”

  “Technically, it’s not due to lack of opportunity. It’s because I’m happy with what I’ve got, and because Alice would kill me if I wasn’t.”

  “She who must be obeyed.” Henry shook his head and returned to the subject at hand. “So what should Sharon do?” He was feeling impatient.

  “I’d say … if Sharon doesn’t hear them making nicer noises, I think she ought to get the story in the newspapers. The papers will try the whole case out of court and then she’ll get her deal. So what about Barbara?”

  There was a danger with the newspapers, Henry thought. They protected their friends. Duggan was well liked. “What about Barbara? And why wouldn’t the newspapers simply come to Duggan’s defense? He’s the hometown boy who has done all those good deeds.”

  Going to the press was a whole new thought. Henry had not considered that. Albert was a move ahead on him. Albert shook his head at Henry for being naïve.

  “He’s big. Reporters hate the big guy. He’s a guy, she’s a girl—no brainer. He’s rich. Reporters hate rich people.”

  This did not work for Henry. He paused to consider this with another sip of beer. In the silence he became aware of a moan. It repeated. He looked at Albert. Albert looked side to side. The sound repeated, precisely. It was not a woman in ecstasy. It was a violin. He had never heard Sasha practice such a sound. It repeated again.

  Henry shook his head in protest. “I don’t trust reporters. They don’t get the facts straight. They take sides. They never bother to know the facts behind what you’re talking about, so they never ask the right questions. … But why did you ask about Barbara?”

  Albert sat back on the couch and gave Henry one large eye.

  “She’s still stuck on you. Your helping her out on this is going to cause you some problems.”

  The moan became louder, and faster.

  Henry defended himself. “She’s a friend. She asked for help. I just wish she had some friends in the publishing business. She’s never cultivated that side of the business. Most of the reps just push the titles the publisher has bet on. Barbara really needs to get help from someone inside. It’s all procedure now. What she wants are some records. When was the manuscript submitted and to whom. I can’t believe with all the queries and all the hoops they make writers jump through to get their work read, they keep such lousy records.”

  Albert looked at his own beer bottle and judged what remained. “I think the problem is her friend Sharon. She’s the one kept lousy records.”

  The moan now ended in a short squeal. Albert’s eyes rolled.

  Henry took a breath. “If Frankowski had used an agent like everybody else, none of this would have happened. But because Little, Brown came to him for the first book, he didn’t understand the whole publishing racket. He really was just a professor who wrote books on the side. … Besides, Sharon had a reason for dumping her records. Going on to someone’s computer is like talking to them. It’s raw. She didn’t know there was going to be a problem. Sharon doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends. And even after fifteen years, she and Barbara are not really that close. And Barbara is pretty much alone now, herself. And you don’t know the half of it—”

  The violin stopped. The sudden silence made them both look to the ceiling.

  “Which half?” Albert finished his beer with a single swallow.

  Henry told him about Sharon’s advances. Albert listened without saying anything. At the end he winced and grunted as if to say this was all Henry’s fault. Then Albert complained, “I wish you had a TV. The game is on.”

  “Turn on the radio.” Henry pointed.

  Albert reached for the brown Bakelite radio beside the couch, pulled the loose cord free with a little irritation and set it in his lap as he tuned the dial. It began to hum.

  “This is the twenty-first century, Henry. You should get a digital. One button does it.… By the way. Did you find a replacement radio for your little truck?”

  The sound of the Red Sox announcer broke clear of the hum and Albert set the radio back.

  “Benny did. Found a junker in a lot somewhere and bought the radio along with some leaf springs and a couple of other parts. Good deal. It’s like new. I came by to give you a ride, but you weren’t home.”

  Albert stretched his legs and grunted. “You owe me more than a ride.”

  Albert’s face was dramatically sullen. The Red Sox announcer was saying, “Way back, Way back … Foul ball!”

  Henry said. “What? What did I do?”

  “Remember, it was my money bought that truck.”

  “It was mine. The part I borrowed, I paid you back.”

  “But you tricked me. If I had known you were going to use it to bid on that truck, I would have bid myself.”

  “You dropped out.”

  “ ’Cause I knew I didn’t have any money left. You had borrowed it.”

  “No. You dropped out cause you thought the rich-looking guy in the blue jacket was going to stay in the bidding. You dropped out.”

  Briefly, Albert considered this.

  “I want interest,” Albert finally answered.

  Henry sat up. Tim Wakefield struck the batter out.

  “Like what?”

  “I want to borrow it to take Junior up to Lake Richardson to fish. Those old car radios get reception up there the new ones don’t. I can listen to the ballgame while I’m fishing.”

  Henry sat back. Fishing was a sport he did not understand. He could listen to the ballgame in the comfort of his own home.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mrs. Murray was sitting on the steps to the porch. She had a collection of weeds in one gloved hand and seemed to be taking a breather. More weeds were lying wilted in the shadows on the short walk. The sun had set, and only the glow of the sky illuminated the narrow yard. The still air was pungent with the smell of the tomato plants at the side of the house. Her pruning had produced a small pile of dark-colored fruit in a wide wicker basket beside her.

  Henry paused at the metal gate. To him, she appeared to be very sad at that moment. He was not sure if it was only the cast of light on her face, or something real.

  “How’s it goin’?” was all he could think of to say.

  “Pretty well. … It’s a nice evening, don’t you think?”

  Her voice was uncertain. He suspected she had been thinking on things past, more than the present.

  He opened the gate and walked to the bottom of the steps as he answered, “Pretty fine. Makes you want to run around in a field and c
atch lightning bugs.”

  It was what he did every midsummer night when he was a kid.

  Her eyes widened. “Yes! Exactly… . Where are the fireflies? There used to be so many fireflies.”

  “I guess there aren’t enough fields in Cambridge.”

  “No. No, you’re right. You need fields. I remember when I was in college at Bennington, I took a summer session because I’d been sick the winter before. … There was a wide-open grassy field there. They’ve built something on it since then. One night we had the most amazing time. There was no moon. It was

  terribly hot, and we were all outside for what little air there was and the stars were brilliant in the sky—and the fireflies came and it was as if the stars had dropped right down out of the sky, onto the field; and one by one we began to run about in them, until there were dozens of us, all twirling and circling in the starlight, and … well, we weren’t wearing all that much anyway in the heat, and people just started shedding their clothes rather naturally. It was an all girl’s school then, remember. The sweat was so heavy you could see the reflection of the fireflies on our bodies as we danced. There was no music. Some giggling. Some laughing. Breathless words. … There we were, all madly running around on the wide-open grass, chasing madly through the stars as they winked. We all had long hair in those days, and some girls had the poor bugs tangled in their hair … I think we were all in a dream. You should have seen it.”

  It was a nice thought.

  “All girls,” he repeated

  “Yes … then.”

  Henry’s imagination of hundreds of naked young women running in the half-light of an open field beneath the stars actually stopped his breath. He could easily imagine Mrs. Murray running naked in the grass with lightning bugs winking in the loose flag of her black hair.

  Her face had changed. The sadness was gone.

  He wondered, “Were you a hippie then?”

  “Oh, gracious no. There were very few real hippies. Most of us just dressed the part when it suited us. I was very middle-class … well, perhaps not typical. My family have always been teachers. Both my parents were. And my grandparents. Except Grandpa Huffy. He was a farmer. But Grandma Lu—she was a teacher. In Greenfield.”

  “Huffy and Lu?”

  “Humphrey and Luella.”

  “They don’t make names like that anymore.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “People don’t run naked in the fields anymore, either.”

  “No, they don’t …”

  “It’s too bad …”

  “Yes …”

  Henry climbed the steps past where she sat.

  “Take some tomatoes,” she said. “I can’t eat them all.”

  He thanked her and took two.

  “A woman was here to see you earlier,” she said, half turning to look up at him on the porch.

  “Who?”

  “She wouldn’t leave her name. I asked. Thin. Fairly tall. Very blonde. Blue eyes. Very nicely dressed.”

  “Sounds like Sharon. The woman whose husband wrote Hannibal’s Dance.”

  “Yes! It was her, I’ll bet it was. Yes.”

  It was odd that she should come here, Henry thought.

  “Thanks.” He started to move again.

  “And your phone has been ringing all afternoon.”

  That could be Della, of course, but a lot of people were getting his number these days. He was going to have to change the number soon.

  “And there’s a letter. On the table in the hall. … You get so few letters. Almost no junk mail. Why is that?”

  “It all goes to the post office box. No one has my home address.” Almost no one, he had thought.

  She shook her head and squinted at him, as if studying something mysterious.

  “You know, you are very old-fashioned. You have a computer, but, beyond that, you seem to live in another age. … It’s the books, isn’t it? The books. They’re part of an age gone by, now.”

  “I guess so. Probably so.”

  He picked up the letter before the screen door had struck, and read it as he held the tomatoes beneath his nose, enjoying the smell. The letter was from the Law Offices of Boyle & Doyle, a request for him to make an appointment for a deposition.

  Upstairs, he fingered through the phonograph records on the floor before he sat down. It troubled him that he had not yet found a good case to hold the records. He worried that they might warp in the heat. It was something else he had better deal with sooner than later.

  Pulling a Copland from one stack, he slipped it on the turntable before sinking into his Morris chair. It concerned him as well that he was tired again. He was going to have to get his schedule back. He definitely felt like he had less energy than he used to. Was he getting old?

  Tomato juice sprang from his mouth and dropped to his shirt as he took his first bite. He was dribbling on himself like an old man.

  By the time the second part of “Our Town” had begun, he had drifted toward sleep. The knock at the door that opened his eyes was unfamiliar.

  She was wearing one of the peasant dresses she liked to make herself from odd fabrics she found. He had always liked them better than her usual jeans.

  “Barbara …” The surprise must have shown on his face, and she half-smiled in response. She looked around the room a moment before speaking, her eyes stopping on Sasha’s picture.

  “I need to talk to you. I hope you aren’t in the middle of something … I tried calling. I know you just don’t answer the phone sometimes.”

  He turned down the music, offered her a beer—which she took, to his surprise, given that she had always preferred wine—and they sat again in the living room.

  “What’s up?” His attempt to put on a cheerful face seemed to have an opposite effect on her.

  She crossed her legs. He had always liked her legs.

  “I am in more trouble than you want to know about. And you know I wouldn’t ask if I could avoid it.”

  He was confused. He thought he was already helping her.

  “Just tell me what you need.”

  “Well, more than anything, I need more money. You know I borrowed money from Sharon—well, borrowed is not technically correct. She owns a third of the store now. …” He did not know that exactly. He had assumed there was an arrangement. Barbara looked down with some inner shame. “But the losses keep mounting. The sales in the store have continued to drop. They are down by at least a third of what we were doing as recently as 1999. And the rent—you know about the rent. I dropped my health insurance. That was almost four hundred dollars a month. We are way behind on all our bills, and I’ve stopped buying almost anything new. Trade credit is still bringing in quite a lot of used stock, but it’s not really enough. People who actually read are happy to get credit when they bring in books, but the occasional readers and the collectors dumping things don’t want credit, they want cash. I haven’t been to an auction in over a year.”

  “I noticed …”

  She shrugged. “I mean, what are my options? We had such an enormous overstock in the basement that we haven’t been hurting that much for titles yet, but you know how it is. You get a new lot in and it’s like spore in the air to the book hounds.”

  He said, “I know.”

  She smiled weakly. “We are behind on our rent. The landlord has an offer for the space from someone else. If we move … well, you know. It’ll cost a fortune. We can have a sale, but moving will still cost too much. And then we’ll have all the new cost of establishing ourselves in another location. You went through some of that with me back in the eighties .… Besides, you know having a sale is only good for short-term gains. The week after it’s over, some cheapskate is asking when the next sale is going to be. We built that store on having good stock, not cheap stock. We built a reputation .…”

  The tone of her voice was not convincing. She knew who she was talking to. It was just an incantation now.

  “It doesn’t matter, Barbara. Tha
t age is over. There aren’t ten people in ten thousand who pass your store every day who know who Edna O’Brien is, or Henry Green, or Anthony Powell, or Jean Rhys, or Compton Mackenzie, or—”

  “Quit! Stop. Right—I know. You know …”

  She was pained. This was the voice he had begun to hear too often many years ago, before he had finally left Alcott & Poe—but then it was about other matters.

  He sat forward to speak, lowering his voice. “Okay. Look. The point is that you’re selling to a smaller audience. Fewer and fewer people out there are truly literate. More and more people think they’re literate, but don’t think enough to want anything more than a television set and the latest George Duggan novel. And you want an answer. You want a solution … I don’t have one.”

  She offered a wan smile in return. “You did. You went off and started your own book business. You saw it coming. You told me it was coming. You were right.”

  This was unfair. He had only seen the obvious. He had left for other reasons, but he still admired Barbara for holding on to the old ideal. When he had left, the monthly costs for the store had been almost thirty-thousand dollars. It must be a great deal more now.

  He suddenly felt guilty. This was his own shame, after all. “It’s no comfort to me. I can’t afford much more than a fifty-year-old truck, and when my friends come to me for help, I don’t have diddlysquat to give them. I have my precious freedom. My independence. And I might have two thousand in the bank right now. But that’s about all. And if you want it, it’s yours.”

  Her eyes changed. They glistened in the light of the lamp. She was crying. He had only seen that once before.

  Her voice was husky. “You know that’s not enough … but that’s really the point, isn’t it? You can’t really help. I’m just hurting you by coming here and putting an edge on it.” She took a few short breaths. “You know … when my father died a few years ago—”

  He nodded. He remembered her telling him. Henry had met her father only once. The old man, at least a foot shorter than Henry and still a bantam of muscle, had taken Henry’s arm in a vise grip and pulled him to the side. “She’s yours, you know. You’ll never do better. Let her think she’s the boss, and she’ll never say no. Just like her mother.”