by Sam Starbuck
The weather which allowed me to leave the village safely was strange, but I had told Lucas I would go and so I had to. On the day after the freeze I closed up the shop and let Charles drive me as far as the train station outside Low Ferry, with the promise that I would call him when I needed to be retrieved in a few days' time. I caught the train across the wide flat plains of northern Illinois, and made it in to Union Station in Chicago by early afternoon.
I took a cab to my hotel, which was clean and cheap but most importantly near the hospital. I ate a quick meal, brushed my hair and changed my clothes, and went out to get on the El, to make pilgrimage to Eighth Rare Books.
Chapter SIX
Eighth Rare Books is, as you may have guessed, on Eighth Street in the Near South neighborhood of Chicago. Even when I lived in the city it was well out of my way – my family lived exclusively on the north side, sent me to school on the north side until I was grown, did all our shopping on the north side. Not that there's anything wrong with the north side of Chicago, but you miss a good half of the city if you never go south of downtown, where the east-west streets stop being names and start being numbers.
The bookstore is tucked down a side-street near the Harrison train stop, in a college district but not my college district, which was further south. I had to make friends with a girl who was studying at Columbia before I discovered it, but the books were cheap there and Marjorie took a shine to me so I kept coming back even after my Columbia connection disconnected. Chicago has plenty of good bookstores and a couple of famous ones – Powell's, 57th Street Books – but secretly, from behind a desk in a shop on Eighth Street, Marjorie rules them all.
When I walked into the shop, most of the tables near the front were taken up with college students cramming for exams out of books they couldn't afford to buy, while a couple of their professors stalked the academic shelves towards the back. Marjorie, bent over the crossword, didn't look up until I cleared a pile of books off a chair next to her desk and threw myself into it, sighing blissfully.
"Who do you think you – Christopher!" she said, beaming suddenly. A few heads across the shop raised at the sound of her voice. "What on earth...?"
"Had to come into the city," I said. "Thought I'd stop and see what you're selling these days. Nasty crowd you get in here, Marj."
"Suppose that says something about you, then," she replied tartly.
"Don't be cruel! I've come to profess true love and sweep you away to my country estate."
"Hands to yourself," she ordered, then promptly leaned forward and hugged me. "Prodigal son. If you'd given me a little warning I'd have found a fatted calf."
"Well, if you can't find one in Chicago..." I grinned. "How are you, Marj? I know it's been too long."
"Overjoyed to see you, otherwise as well as ever. Business is down a little, though. Nobody reads anymore, Christopher."
"I know it," I said. "It's this newfangled television contraption, I hear it's quite the rage with the youngsters."
"It's a fad," she said complacently. "You look like hell, by the way."
I glanced at her, then past her to where someone on the other side of a bookshelf was straining to hear us talk. Everyone loves gossip.
"I had a heart attack," I said. There was a gasp from the bookshelf.
"Jesus, Chris," Marjorie said, laying down her crossword puzzle.
"Almost. I have the resurrection bit down. Kirchner – my doctor in the village, remember, I told you about him?"
"Something, yes. Bona fide house-calling, chicken-for-payment-taking country doctor?"
"He said I should get looked at by specialists. He recruited a young friend of mine to help him convince me. Lucas, the one who wanted a book we had to lie to get."
"The history scholar. Well, that's good, someone ought to be looking after you if you won't look after yourself."
"But I am! Anyway, I'm fine, it's just a routine checkup. I'm much more interested in your medical complaints. Is it the rheumatism or your spleen nowadays?"
"A properly vented spleen never acts up," she answered primly, and I was relieved to see she was taking the incredibly unsubtle hint to steer clear of my health.
I stayed for barely half an hour, though it was a good half-hour. Marj had a dinner she couldn't avoid attending, and I wanted to get an early night. I was meeting my old circle of friends for brunch the following morning, then spending the rest of the day being jabbed and photographed at the hospital.
The hotel room was quiet, considering how noisy the city is supposed to be. When I was at school I had an apartment near the El and I got used to the clacking and roaring and the occasional flash of light through my bedroom window. In Low Ferry I got used to people shouting across the street at each other early in the morning, and in winter the growl of the snow plow. In the hotel room there didn't seem to be much to get used to at all, other than the clean sterility of it.
I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and let myself drop onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Why I'd bothered calling my city friends I couldn't even have said, other than that I knew they always had a Sunday brunch. I thought, in a fit of insanity no-doubt derived from my recent brush with death, that it would be fun to see them. It probably would be, but that night I couldn't fathom having the energy to get off the bed and undress, let alone leave the hotel and socialize with friends I hadn't seen in months, if not years. Even the hospital would be less tiring. At least at the hospital they let you lie down on a bed most of the time.
Finally, however, I pushed myself upright long enough to change into pajamas and pull the blankets back. I was unconscious not long after my head hit the pillow, and the next thing I knew was the alarm on the nightstand buzzing me insistently awake the following morning.
***
There were ten of us at brunch that Sunday, myself and seven people I knew plus two new additions I'd never met before. One of them, Derek – a bespectacled and earnest man about my age – was clearly my replacement.
Most of my friends hadn't changed much, except in circumstance: those who had been single were now married, and those who had been married were either parents or divorcees or both. Gone, too, was the champagne, which was what used to make our Sunday brunches last well into Sunday dinner sometimes. There were too many children toddling around the chairs for drinking to be an approved activity, apparently.
Oh yes, there were children. Two infants and three toddlers, plus a seven-year-old that Angie, whom I'd dated for about a month one time, was babysitting for a coworker.
"There's a new play at Steppenwolf, Chris," she said, chewing on a piece of fruit from the huge bowl of fruit salad in the middle of the restaurant table. "You'd like it. I think it's about the metropolitan identity or something."
"It's tedious," my replacement added. I grinned at him. "Old ground, shiny new costumes."
"I think he'd like to go out though," Mara waved a forkful of sausage before taking a bite. "Remember that little jazz club we used to go to?"
"I think so," I said. "The one with the rotten bartender who watered your margarita if you asked for it blended?"
"Where Angie did a striptease for the pianist," Steve said. Angie elbowed him and rolled her eyes at the kids.
Had that been me, in the club, cheering that business on? I remembered it, so it must have been, but it seemed more like something I'd watched on television once. Television itself seemed like something I'd read about in a book. I didn't own one in the village. A television, I mean. I owned a lot of books.
"Anyway, Chris, it's closed up but the little Chinese place next to it is now a hookah bar," Mara continued.
"A what?" I asked.
"Turkish food and hookahs. All legal, of course. Tobacco only."
"Yes – let's take him there, he'll love it," Brent said.
"Chris the romantic," Angie added, winking at me.
"You liked Casablanca, didn't you?" Steve asked.
"You wore blue; the Nazis wore grey,"
Mara quoted. Misquoted, actually.
"I'm afraid I can't," I answered, hoping I didn't sound as sharp as I suspected. A roomful of smoke would get me no gold stars from the doctor. "Business, you know how it is. I'm not in town long enough for much pleasure."
"Business? What business?"
"Oh, dinners and meetings and things," I said vaguely. They were dissatisfied with this reply, but nobody protested too loudly. After all, they'd found a new replacement Chris, which was just as well.
They moved on to other things, and I sat back and listened. Angie's husband seemed nice, and Steve's wife got him to stop drinking quite so much. Mara and Thomas and Brent were working their way up their respective career paths. The children were adorable, and Derek knew enough about literature to pass muster. They were getting along just fine without me.
The one true redeeming quality of that morning's brunch was that it gave me something noisy and distracting to play back in my head later that day. I'm not one to say that modern medicine is a horrible thing, as I've reaped my share of benefits from it, but there is some terror involved. Terror! Giant whirring machines – x-rays bouncing off my insides – tubes where tubes should never be – sterile jars, cold stethoscopes, paper gowns, biopsy needles, and thick folders with charts stapled to them. The whole ghastly mess, in some kind of cyclical rerun of the time when my father's heart was failing him in the hospital and the doctors whispered to me that I ought to have mine looked at, if I really had been feeling uneven beats for a few months. I hadn't wanted to die like dad, so I'd put it off – until I realized that putting it off was probably what had killed him.
All this sounds more dramatic than it actually was, but I spent that day and most of the next in the hospital, while my health insurance adjusters probably groaned and made a note to raise my rates. My city doctors showed me into a conference room at the end of it and shrugged at me. Stress-induced heart failure, yes, but there was no further damage to the heart itself. I should learn to expect the arrhythmia. I could try surgery, but –
No, I couldn't. I didn't want to. I was scared, and why shouldn't I be. The mortality rate was high, the return uncertain, and I lived a quiet life.
More shrugging. It's your health, Mr. Dusk.
And with that I fled, signing all the proper forms and collecting all the paperwork and running away to Eighth Rare Books. It was the next best thing to my home – my village, my bookshop, my upstairs bedroom and tiny kitchen.
Marjorie understood, of course, so she coddled and entertained me while I nursed the bruised places where they'd poked me and the bloody places where they'd stuck me. We sat and talked about the usual subjects (books, writers, politics) until we were both talked out and her customers had grown annoyed with the rumpled young man who was taking up all of her time.
***
Thankfully, the weather held while I was in the city. The train ride back to the village that Friday was pristine and beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that I stepped onto the platform at my stop with the sudden realization that I should have called Charles before leaving the city. I would be waiting for quite a while in the dry but chilly afternoon before he showed up, if he was even able to get away and drive out to meet me.
I needed to call him, but I also knew that I'd need to find a telephone and money for the call, which was more organization than I was willing to cope with immediately. I'd just come from the warm, comforting rocking of the train into the freezing country air with my coat half-on while I carried my bag towards a windbreak.
"Hi! Hello there, Saint Christopher! Come and say hello!"
I looked up from fumbling attempts to button my coat and saw a young woman in a thick woolen dress and dark heavy boots hurrying towards me. Beyond her, an older man was securing the door of a camper-trailer hooked to a large, battered pickup truck. Two Low Ferry boys were loitering around the camper, looking curious.
"Gwen!" I said, startled. "Is that you?"
"Who else?" she said, stopping in front of me and looking me up and down. "Well. I heard you'd died but you don't look resurrected."
"Who told you – never mind," I said, because the children turned guilty faces towards me. One of them was the boy Lucas tutored.
"Come on, then," Gwen said, hands on her hips, and I grinned and shoved my arms through them, hugging her. She hugged back, tight enough for me to swing her up and around while she laughed. "Oh, Saint, it's good to see you."
"You too! I didn't think you'd make it through for another month."
"Well, the road was good and we'd worn out our welcome where we were," she said, taking my hand and dragging me towards the trailer. "We're on our way to camp. Do you need a ride?"
"I do, as a matter of fact," I answered, allowing myself to be pulled into the front seat of the truck after Gwen. Her father, Tommy, slammed the door on the trailer and slapped my shoulder in greeting as he climbed into the driver's seat. The village boys rough-housed their way into the back of the cab. The warmth was a welcome relief, as was the grunt and purr of the engine.
"Good to see you, Saint," Tommy said, easing the truck out of the train-station parking lot.
"You too, Tommy. I see you brought the whole clan," I said, as Tommy pulled the truck neatly into a slow-moving line of cars and campers of various sizes and ages, all of them looking battered and weather-beaten. "You just get into town?"
"Manner of speaking," Tommy replied with a grin, not taking his eyes off the road. "Buyin' supplies."
"From who?" I asked. Tommy tapped the side of his nose. The train station was a popular place for truck-drivers to pull up for the night. Unscrupulous drivers sometimes sold some of what they had to people who needed it. They got to pocket the cash, after all, and insurance covered the loss.
"Lucky we found you," Gwen continued, as the caravan made its way out onto the road. Mud and snow pocked the surface, making it a little perilous, and the campers moved slowly. "Been to city?"
"Just came back," I said. "You?"
Gwen shrugged cheerfully. "We've been round and about. Do you need any chickens?"
A loaded question requiring a cautious answer: "Dead or alive?"
"Prefer 'em dead?" Tommy asked.
"Usually. I'll take a few, but not for a few days," I said, as the truck grumbled its way towards Low Ferry. "Just looking forward to getting home today."
"Is it long, the train to city?" Gwen asked.
"Not really. City itself's a little tiring, though," I replied.
"So I hear," Tommy observed.
"How come you two are hanging around with these troublemakers?" I asked, turning to the boy and his comrade.
"Came to see the Friendly," the boy piped up. "Bernie MacKenzie said they were coming."
"Your parents know you're taking rides from strangers?" I inquired.
"Do yours?" Gwen asked, elbowing me.
"Oh, I'm a latchkey kid," I answered. The boy leaned over the seat, watching the road. "Good to see you though, Gwen."
"Is it now?" Gwen replied. "Were you waiting for the Friendly, or for me?"
I laughed. "No other woman for me but you, Gwen."
"Easy, boy," Tommy put in.
"It's just his cat's tongue," Gwen said complacently. "He's a city boy, they love their land more than their women."
"Unkind!" I said. "Don't tell me you don't love the road more than your man, Gwen."
"Haven't got a man," she replied. "Besides, it's different. People change when they own land."
"Well, we can't all live as free as the Friendly do."