Death Is a Lonely Business (8 page)

"Do I do that to you?" I said.

But he was gone.

Crumley did not call for twenty-four hours.

Grinding my teeth into a fine powder, I primed my Underwood and steamrollered Crumley into the platen.

"Speak!" I typed.

"How come," Crumley responded, typing from somewhere inside my amazing machine, "I spend half my time almost liking you and the rest being mad as hell?"

Then the machine typed, "I'll telephone you on the day the old canary lady dies."

It's obvious that years back I had pasted two gummed labels on my Underwood. One read: OFFICIAL OUIJA BOARD. The other, in large letters: DON'T THINK
.

I didn't. I just let the old Ouija board bang and clatter.

"How soon do we work together on this problem?"

"You," responded Crumley in my fingertips, "are the problem!"

"Will you become a character in my novel?"

"I already am."

"Then help me."

"Fat chance."

"Damn!"

I tore the page out of the machine.

Just then, my private phone rang.

It seemed it took me ten miles of running to get there, thinking,

Peg!

All the women in my life have been librarians, teachers, writers, or booksellers. Peg was at least three of those, but she was far away now, and it terrified me.

She had been all summer in Mexico, finishing studies in Spanish literature, learning the language, traveling on trains with mean peons or busses with happy pigs, writing me love-scorched letters from Tamazunchale or bored ones from Acapulco where the sun was too bright and the gigolos not bright enough; not for her anyway, friend to Henry James and consultant to Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. She carried a lunch-bucket full of books everywhere. I often thought she ate the brothers Goncourt like high tea sandwiches in the late afternoons.

Peg.

Once a week she called from somewhere lost in the church-towns or big cities, just come up out of the mummy catacombs at Guanajuato or gasping after a climb down Teotihuacan, and we listened to each other's heartbeats for three short minutes and said the same dumb things to each other over and over and over; the sort of litany that sounds fine no matter how long or often you say it.

Each week, when the call came, the sun blazed over the phone booth.

Each week, when the talk stopped, the sun died and the fog arose. I wanted to run pull the covers over my head. Instead, I punched my typewriter into bad poems, or wrote a tale about a Martian wife who, lovesick, dreams that an earthman drops from the sky to take her away, and gets shot for his trouble.

Some weeks, as poor as I was, we pulled the old telephone operator, calling from Mexico City, would ask for me.

"Who?" I would say, "What was that again? Operator,” would hear Peg sigh, far away. The more I talked nonsense, the longer I was on the line.

"Just a moment, operator, let me get that again. The operator repeated my name. "Wait, let me see if he's here. Who's calling? And Peg's voice, swiftly, would respond from two thousand miles off. "Tell him it's Peg! Peg."

And I would pretend to go away and return. "He's not here. Call back in an hour." "An hour...” echoed Peg. And click, buzz, hum, she was gone.

Helped into the booth and yanked the phone off the hook.

"Yes?" I yelled.

But it wasn't Peg.

Silence.

"Who is this?" I said.

Silence. But someone was there, not two thousand miles away, but very near. And the reception was so clear, I could hear the air move in the nostrils and mouth of the quiet one at the other end.

"Well?" I said. Silence. And the sound that waiting makes on a telephone line. Whoever it was had his mouth open, close to the receiver.

Whisper. Whisper.

Jesus God, I thought, this can't be a heavy-breather calling me in a phone booth. People don't call phone booths! No one knows this is my private office.

Silence. Breath. Silence. Breath.

I swear that cool air whispered from the receiver and froze my ear.

"No, thanks," I said.

And hung up.

I was halfway across the street, jogging with my eyes shut, when I heard the phone ring again.

I stood in the middle of the street, staring back at the phone, afraid to go touch it, afraid of the breathing.

But the longer I stood there in danger of being run down, the more the phone sounded like a funeral phone calling from a burial ground with bad telegram news. I had to go pick up the receiver.

"She's still alive," said a voice.

"Peg?" I yelled.

"Take it easy," said Elmo Crumley.

I fell against the side of the booth, fighting for breath, relieved but angry.

"Did you call a moment ago?" I gasped. "How'd you know this number?"

"Everyone in the whole goddamn town's heard that phone ring and seen you jumping for it."

"Who's alive?"

"The canary lady. Checked her late last night...”

"That was last night."

"That's not why I'm calling, damn it. Get over to my place late this afternoon. I might just rip your skin off."

"Why?"

"Three o'clock in the morning, what were you doing standing outside my house?"

"Me!"

"You better have a good alibi, by God. I don't like being spooked. I'll be home around five. If you talk fast you get maybe a beer. If you bat an eye, I kick ass."

"Crumley!" I yelled.

"Be there." And he hung up.

I walked slowly back toward my front door.

The phone rang again.

Peg!

Or the man with cold ice in his breath?

Or Crumley being mean?

I banged the door open, jumped in, slammed it, and then, with excruciating patience, rolled a fresh white sheet of Elmo Crumley into my Underwood and forced him to say only nice things to me.

Ten thousand tons of fog poured over Venice and touched at my windows and came in under the cracks in the door.

Every time it is a damp drear November in my soul I know it is high time to go from the sea again, and let someone cut my hair.

There is a thing in haircutting that assuages the blood and calms the heart and makes the nerves serene.

Beyond that, I heard the old man stumbling out of the morgue in the back of my mind, wailing, "My God, who gave him that
awful
haircut?"

Cal, of course, had done that awful job. So I had several reasons to go visit. Cal, the worst barber in Venice, maybe the world, but cheap, called across the tidal waves of fog, waiting with his dull scissors, brandishing his Bumblebee Electric clippers that shocked and stunned poor writers and innocent customers who wandered in.

Cal, I thought. Snip away the darkness.

Short in front. So I can see.

Short on the sides. So I can hear.

Short in back. So I can feel things creeping up on me.

Short!

But I didn't make it to Cal's, just then.

As I stepped out of my apartment into the fog, a parade of great dark elephants went by on Windward Avenue. Which is to say a pavane of black trucks with huge cranes and immense pile-pullers on the back. They were in full thunder, and heading for the pier to knock it down, or begin to knock it down. The rumors had been afloat for months. And now the day was here. Or tomorrow morning at the latest.

I had more of the day to wait to go see Crumley.

And Cal was not exactly the greatest lure in the world.

The elephants lumbered and groaned their machineries and shook the pavement, on their way to devour the fun house and the horses on the carousel.

Feeling like an old Russian writer, madly in love with killing winter and blizzards on the move, what could I do but follow?

By the time I got to the pier, half the trucks had lumbered down on the sand to move out toward the tides and catch the junk that would be tossed over the railings. The others had headed out toward China on the rotting planks, sawdusting the wooden mulch on the way.

I followed, sneezing and using Kleenex. I should be home lying with my cold, but the thought of going to bed with so many fog and mist and rain thoughts slogged me on.

I stood amazed at my own blindness, halfway down the length of the pier, wondering at all the people here I had seen but never known. Half of the games were nailed shut with freshcut pine planks. A few stayed open, waiting for the bad weather to come in and toss hoops or knock milk bottles down. Outside half a dozen stalls, the young men who looked old or the old men who looked older stood watching those trucks growling out on the sea end of the pier, getting ready to tooth and nail sixty years of past time.

I looked around, realizing I had rarely seen behind the dropped flat doors or the rolled-down and battened canvasses.

I had the feeling again of being followed and spun about.

A big plume of fog came along the pier, ignored me, and passed on.

So much for premonition.

Here, halfway to the sea, there was a small dark shack that I had passed for at least ten years without seeing the window-shades up.

Today, for the first time, the shades were raised.

I looked in.

My God, I thought. There's a whole library there.

I walked swiftly over, wondering how many similar libraries were hidden away on the pier or lost in the old alleys of Venice.

I stood by the window, remembering nights when I had seen a light behind the shade and a shadow-hand turning pages in an invisible book, and heard a voice whispering the words, declaiming poetries, philosophizing on a dark universe. It had always sounded like a writer with second thoughts or an actor slipping downhill into a ghost repertory, Lear with two extra sets of mean daughters and only half the wits.

But now, at noon this day, the shades were up. Inside, a small light still burned in a room empty of occupants but filled with a desk, a chair, and an old-fashioned but huge leather couch. Around the couch, on all sides, towering to the ceiling, were cliffs and towers and parapets of books. There must have been a thousand of them, crammed and shoved up to the ceiling.

I stepped back and looked at the signs I had seen but not seen around and above the shack door.

TAROT CARDS. But the print was faded.

The next sign down read PALMISTRY.

The third one, in block letters, was PHRENOLOGY.

And beneath, HANDWRITING ANALYSIS.

And to one side, HYPNOTISM.

I sidled closer to the door, for there was a very small business card thumb-tacked just above the doorknob.

I read the name of the shack's owner:

A. L. SHRANK.

And underneath the name, in pencil not quite so faint as
canaries for sale,
these words:

Practicing Psychologist.

A sextuple-threat man.

I put my ear to the door and listened.

In there, between precipice shelves of dusty books, did I hear Sigmund Freud whispering a penis is only a penis, but a good cigar is a smoke? Hamlet dying and taking everyone along? Virginia Wolf, like drowned Ophelia, stretched out to dry on that couch, telling her sad tale? Tarot cards being shuffled? Heads being felt like cantaloupes? Pens scratching?

"Let's peek," I said.

Again, I stared through the window, but all I saw was the empty couch with the outline of many bodies in its middle. It was the only bed. Nights, A. L. Shrank slept there. Days, did strangers lie there, holding on to their insides as if they were broken glass? I could not believe.

But the books were the things that fascinated me. They not only brimmed the shelves but filled the bathtub which I could glimpse through a half-open door to one side. There was no kitchen. If there had been, the icebox would have been filled, no doubt, with copies of
Peary at the North Pole
or
Byrd Alone in Antarctica.
A. L. Shrank, it was obvious, bathed in the sea, like many others here, and had his banquets at Herman's Hot-dogs, down the way.

But it was not so much the presence of nine hundred or a thousand books, as it was their titles, their subjects, their incredible dark and doomed and awful names.

On the high, always midnight shelves stood Thomas Hardy in all his gloom next to
The Decline and Fall
of
the Roman Empire,
which leaned on dread Nietzsche and hopeless Schopenhauer cheek by jowl with
The Anatomy
of
Melancholy,
Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Freud, the tragedies of Shakespeare (no comedies visible), the Marquis de Sade, Thomas De Quincey, Hitler's
Mein Kampf,
Spengler's
Decline of the West . . .
and on and on. . . .