Signals

by Tim Gautreaux

  The next day while Sidney was driving to work, a stranger in the next lane gave him a studying look and Sidney imagined the man knew who he was and what the reader in Indiana had written. Alone in his office, checking the figures for a local foundry, he began to feel like one of their heavy castings, an overheated engine block for a locomotive, tons of hot rage for a stranger who had a choice of all the evils in the universe on which to vent his disdain—terrorists, dictators, inducers to evil, late-night talk show hosts, politicians, telemarketers, pedophiles, famine and plague—but had decided instead to come down with two feet on a first-time novelist who’d written a tame whodunit and had sold all of 487 copies, mostly out of his trunk. Why couldn’t he have gone up against Grisham or Anne Rice? he wondered.

  Sidney spent that afternoon and much of the next day at his fast office computer trying to find the identity of the reviewer. It wasn’t hard to check. He read Zeno’s other reviews, which were generally positive, and extracted another reference to a mall bookstore in Stamp. A city directory listed one mall and two bookstores. With such an odd name as Zeno to go on, he figured a phone call would be worth a shot. At the first store an old man with hearing problems shouted into the phone that he didn’t know anyone named Zeno, but that he was having a half-off sale on all used Harlequin paperbacks. Sidney thanked him anyway and called the second store, where a girl picked up the phone.

  “Hi, this is Michelle at Bland Books,” she chirped.

  “I’m looking for a fellow book lover who might frequent your store.”

  There was a sticky noise on the phone, as if someone were chewing three pieces of gum, and then the girl said, “What’s his name?”

  Sidney’s heart gave a leap. “Zeno.”

  “I don’t recognize him. Mr. Bland will be back in fifteen minutes. You could call back. Is this an emergency?”

  “No. Not really. Is there maybe another staff member there who might know him and if he’s been in today or yesterday?”

  More sticky sounds, and then a yell that made him jerk the receiver away from his ear. “Tri-shaaa, do you know a customer by the name of Zeno?”

  Sidney could hear a response in the background. “Is he that overweight man who teaches at the junior college? The one that buys books and then returns them for refunds?”

  “I don’t know,” the girl with the phone said. “There’s a guy here wants to know if he’s been in.”

  “If it’s the customer I’m thinking of, tell him no.”

  “Sorry,” Michelle said. “We haven’t seen him.”

  Sidney rattled the keys on his computer, soon finding Jason Polinski Community College in Stamp. A scan of the faculty listings revealed Zeno Bardol, who taught language arts. This was a disappointment because Sidney had hoped the reviewer was an angry bartender or an unemployable misfit, but the fact that he taught English gave him a bit of credibility. He felt a gloom envelop him, and he got up to go home, walking quickly past fellow workers in the hall as though on an urgent mission.

  For the next week, he prayed for new reviews to be posted, something to buffer the terrible report, to get in the way of a reader’s attention, and he even imagined ordering a book himself and writing a review under an alias, giving himself four stars and saying, “Well, it ain’t so bad as the last guy says.” Sidney began to mope around the house until his wife snapped at him, “Dammit, if it’s bothering you so bad, just call the guy up. You’ve got to get over this. Work on the new book. Stop drooping around. I hate it when you get like this. My patients die on me all the time, but I just go on to help the next one. I could write a book if I wanted to.”

  This last comment bothered him because his wife indeed led an interesting life as a trauma nurse and had a lot of narrative stored up in her.

  Despite her warnings, he didn’t snap out of it. What he did do was download a route to Stamp, Indiana, gas up the Prius, and take off on a Tuesday morning without telling anyone. He decided that he just wanted to see the reviewer, maybe figure out how to talk to him without the man knowing who he was. The truth is, he didn’t know what he wanted, other than maybe he had been wronged and he should do something about it. He was tempted to let the whole thing drop, but he also knew he didn’t want to. Speeding north through the cypress swampland, he made it into the pine belt and soon rolled into a thunderstorm at the Mississippi border. Lightning bolts bombed the woods at the edge of his vision, a roadside tree brightening like tungsten. He felt sorry for anyone hiding from all the white-hot rods spearing the forest and pastures around him. He couldn’t stop himself from thinking of the strikes as bad reviews on Amazon—random and pointless attacks. He couldn’t become angry at static electricity building in clouds, but the fact that a human had singled out his novel for a literary thunderbolt made his jaw clench.

  That night, in a mildewed motel outside of Cairo, he called his wife.

  “You’re where?” she shrilled.

  “I’m going up to meet the guy.”

  Her voice came like a rifle shot. “You’re an idiot. I didn’t know what to think when you weren’t home for supper. I was about to call the police.” She was screaming at this point.

  He was surprised at her anger and sat up straight in bed. “Look, relax. I just have to figure out how to talk to the guy about things, and then I’ll come home.”

  “Yes, like you talked to that man about the used car he sold you five years ago. You were almost arrested for what you put that salesman through.”

  “Why do you have to bring that up?”

  She made her voice calm. “Sid, do you have your pistol with you?”

  “I left it upstairs, though let me tell you, I thought about bringing it along.”

  There was a long silence on the line. Finally his wife said, “You have no idea how hard you are to live with, do you?”

  “I’m all right this time. Keep the light on for me?”

  All he heard was a click and a heartless dial tone. Sidney bit his lip, wondering if he should get drunk or something, punch the wall a couple times, then drive back to Louisiana. But he just could not let things drop. He realized this about himself, but blamed it on genetics, though his parents were calm people, really good tax accountants.

  On the hunt now, he fired up his laptop and began mining it for information on Zeno Bardol. He bought an online report for $18.75 that yielded much information, telling him Zeno had no police record, no traffic offenses, was sixty years old, and lived at 670 Sesame Lane in a house he’d purchased thirty-five years ago. Included in the report was an interview that a Canadian student, Marie Labat, had done with him years before, about teaching writing. The site promised updates if their Internet crawler found more records. Sidney closed his laptop, turned on his rusty bedside lamp, and reread a short story he had written and printed out the week before, looking for opportunities for revision, but finding none. Then he made plans.

  Stamp was a town of about four thousand people, many of them employed at a stamping and forging plant where giant presses slammed sheet steel into truck bumpers and 30,000-pound hammers crushed glowing billets of steel into crankshafts in one shot, a ka-thump that traveled a mile or more in all directions, vibrating the whole town. He ate a breakfast of soggy hash browns and tasteless bacon at a café full of old men wearing feed-store caps. Though he couldn’t hear the stamping plant, he could see vibration lines in his coffee, each circular wave a huge gear hammered into being.

  He drove out to the junior college, asked a department secretary where and when Zeno Bardol’s class was meeting, and stood outside the classroom door with a manila folder in his hand until a bell rang like a fire alarm. When the last student left, he walked into the room, smiling.

  “Mr. Bardol?”

  The face that looked up was all bulldog. The dove-gray eyes seemed almost blind. “You’re not from the dean’s office, are you?”

  Sidney smiled wider. “No, I’m Bob Carnisky. I know a former student of yours, Marie Labat.”

  “Who?
”

  “She’s a girl from Canada who interviewed you a few years ago.”

  “Oh yeah, the little Frenchie.” Zeno Bardol straightened up in his flimsy chair, and Sidney saw that he was a big man, a little bent and overweight, but still able looking.

  “Well, she called me the other day and I asked her if she knew someone I could pay to examine a short story I’d written. She said I might check with you.”

  Zeno picked up a pile of handwritten freshman themes and let them drop back to the desk. “I’ve no lack of things to read. And I teach three other sections just like this one.”

  Sidney leaned in. “It’d mean a lot to me. You know how hard it is to find someone to mark up creative work.”

  Zeno looked up at him, and Sidney saw in his eyes some sort of damage, maybe from reading freshman essays for several decades, the same clichés, the same mistakes. Maybe he would welcome something different to read.

  “You don’t sound like you’re from around here,” Zeno said suddenly.

  “I used to live in east Texas. A long time ago.”

  He nodded. “Hard to break old speech rhythms, I guess.” He stood up. “Well, you’re not a student, so how much are you willing to pay for an evaluation of your story there?”

  “Would fifty dollars work?”

  Zeno’s eyebrows went up. “Like a cop on Saturday night. Come on to the student center and I’ll let you buy me a cup of coffee. If we go to my office, whiny kids will come in asking for everything under the sun.”

  So for twenty minutes Sidney had Zeno to himself. He handed over his story and said he’d been trying to get better at writing for twenty years, which was true. Zeno read the first sentence and sniffed, closing the folder. “Tell me about it. I try to make myself look productive around here, so I put down the words that remind me of what language can do. I’ve had some success in literary magazines. Gave me some cred as a writing teacher. Now and then they let me teach the advanced fiction-writing course.”

  “I haven’t published anything yet,” Sidney told him. “My wife said I should ask someone’s opinion to see if I’m wasting my time.”

  Zeno nodded and mentioned that his wife had told him something similar, long ago. Like most people who have to talk to strangers for any length of time, he began to summarize parts of his life, mentioning that he had two daughters and a son, that his wife had left him many years before. He waved his hand as though brushing away a large insect. “That’s all in the past, I guess. And now I’ve finally had a book accepted for publication.”

  Sidney nodded slowly and took a sip of coffee. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. Old Zeno would have a book on Amazon, a big target for him to bomb with a weapons-grade review. “So this book, when’s it coming out?” His right hand began to shake, so he covered it with his left.

  “Pretty soon. Maybe two months. It’s being published by a small press in New York owned by Random House.” Zeno pushed away his Styrofoam cup of coffee. “Well, got to go.” He tucked Sidney’s folder under his arm. “I can have this marked up for you by Friday morning. You want to come by the office after my first class? Nineish?”

  “Sure. You going home?”

  “I stop off at a bar and put down three cold ones. No offense, but I like to be kind of alone. Unwind a bit and get away from some of the creepy people I work with.”

  “I understand.”

  “Friday, right?”

  “Friday at nine.”

  —

  Sidney drove back to the motel, a faded-out place with exterior doors that had been recoated so many times the paint dripped in thousands of jellied tears. He lay in the creaking bed feeling that his mission had been partially accomplished. However, he still wondered why a man like Zeno would write such a cruel review. He didn’t seem to be the type. No doubt the man had an edge to him. But he didn’t seem to be the vicious dullard he’d hoped he might find, someone petty, small-minded, weak.

  He had a day and a half to kill, so he tried to find a decent place to eat. At a meat-and-three diner surrounded by trucks, he ate the most tasteless hamburger steak he’d ever had. He could feel the slug of the stamping machine come up from the floor through his stool and into his pelvis. The next morning he went to an antique engine show where motors idled in a field by the hundreds, their pop, splut, whoosh, and bang drowning out the thunder of the stamping plant right down the road. He bought a pastry from a stand touting local foods and it tasted like chilled lard. The exhibitors at the show were friendly, corn-fed people open to talking about their displays, and he wandered among them until lunch, when he bought an abomination the locals called a loose meat sandwich. After one bite he slammed it into a trash barrel and bought a rib-eye special from the local Shriners’ food wagon. As he chewed and chewed through the gummy white bread, he thought about the source of the meat, the sickly cow, a species of living jerky, eating brambles all its life, leaning against a fence one morning and looking so pitiful that the owner decided to shoot him and sell him to the Shriners before he died on his own. The steak was increasing his anger, and he sat in the sunshine at a splintery picnic table imagining a food review he might write that was filled with images from an infernal kitchen run by a ghoul wearing a fez.

  Thursday night he rode up and down the highway and spotted the area’s only Mexican restaurant. Surely he could get a meal with some zing to it, at least a little peppery burn, a rotella surprise, a garlicky guaco. The only Mexican decoration in the dining room was a plain sombrero nailed to the wall behind the register. The salsa that came with the chips was pure tomato catsup, and every entrée came with a side of fries. He went back to the hotel and felt the jump of the stamping plant in the mattress. That night they must have been making ship anchors with one stroke because the bedside lamp was winking. He fell asleep wondering if Zeno Bardol had felt the ka-thump all these years. If every ounce of his compassion had been hammered out of him.

  The next morning, he was waiting at Zeno’s office door. The teacher showed up looking hungover, his eyes tinted yellow. He brushed past Sidney and plopped in his chair, but not before giving him an annoyed glance. “You know,” he began, “not everyone is cut out to be a writer of literary fiction.”

  Sidney shivered as though he’d received a costly court judgment. Zeno Bardol began to tell him how his short story didn’t really have an ending. His voice was courteous but firm as he explained that the main character was flat and the plot seemed borrowed from television, as was the New York setting. He leaned back in his chair, stopped speaking for a moment, and looked out through a very small office window, really just a glass hole in the cinder-block wall. Sidney pondered the critique and was glad he’d left his gun in Louisiana. But he also felt foolish because he’d driven eight hundred miles to meet what seemed to be the one man in the world who really hated the way he wrote. So he just asked questions as if he were interested in the answers, watching the man’s face for clues.

  When Zeno handed over the story at the end of their discussion, Sidney saw that there were more comments handwritten on each page than there was text. “You have a good critical eye,” Sidney mumbled, trying carefully to control his voice. “Do you ever write reviews of books?”

  Zeno looked at him suspiciously. “Yeah, I do. Mostly in literary magazines and, I’m ashamed to admit, now and then on Amazon.”

  Sidney pretended to be surprised. “Oh, yeah? I bet you’ve written about some losers.”

  Zeno folded his hands on his desk and leaned forward. “Not really.”

  “Well, I’m glad you take it easy on people, then.” He looked down at the highways of red lines traversing his story.

  “I do. But sometimes, maybe when I’ve had a few, or I read work by someone who has absolutely no idea what he’s writing about, no heart, you know, I can get surly. If he had heart, he wouldn’t write about things he had no experience with. Readers deserve better than that.” Here he made eye contact. “Sometimes a guy writes about war or loving someone, an
d I can tell that he’s a coward or a loveless person. It’s just an attitude that infects every word, and then almost any reader can see he’s a phony.”

  Sidney swallowed hard. Trying to keep his voice from trembling, he asked, “What do you like about books, you know, the ones you like?”

  Zeno frowned. “I like most of them, really. Even pretty bad ones, bad detective books, novels with all sorts of historical mistakes. I respect the effort, I guess. Writing a book asks for sacrifices, takes a writer away from his or her spouse sometimes.” He shook his head. “Did you say you have a wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s nice. It must be nice to still have a wife. Same wife as always?”

  “Yes.”

  “I envy you.” Zeno sat back in his chair. “Well, do you have any questions?” He opened his hands as if to receive something.

  Sidney wanted to tear off his mask and ask why Zeno had written such a terrible review about his book. But he held back, because he was ashamed and already knew why. Instead, he asked, “Does the vibration from the stamping plant bug you?”

  Zeno was quiet. Then he said, “Sometimes at night I can feel it in my back, and I think, That machine doesn’t stop, and I can’t either. You’ve got to keep at it. If something bad happens, ignore it and keep on producing. The machine doesn’t whine when it bangs out a bad refrigerator door.”

  A class bell echoed down the tiled hall. Zeno stood and picked up a stack of essays and moved for the door.

  “Wait, here’s your money.” Sidney followed him into the hall and held out an envelope.

  “What? Oh, heck. Just keep it.” And he was gone, his rubber-soled shoes lisping off toward one of the building’s many overheated rooms.

  Driving back to Louisiana, he tried to relish the thought of waiting for Bardol’s book to appear, but all he could think of was similar trips he’d made about three times a year. Several to spy on his daughters, one to a telemarketer’s house in Florida, another to an eBay seller in Mississippi who’d sold him a lousy used laptop, one to an IRS agent in Atlanta, enough visits to keep him awake and remembering all the way home. The trips were joyless adventures, but there was something inside that made him want to get even with people. Or maybe something that wasn’t inside him. At the time he had found it thrilling to insult the IRS agent to his face, but now he remembered the man’s pained, embarrassed expression. The elderly gentleman in Mississippi grudgingly gave him another used laptop and a little gas money, but Sidney remembered with a pang that he lived in a small rusty trailer. As the interstate rattled under his car’s wheels he wondered what he had gotten out of Zeno Bardol other than more criticism. Almost automatically, he began to plan his review, forging razory words into murderous sentences.