Death Is a Lonely Business Page 6

  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 buses 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 lunchbucket 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 Teotihuacán, 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.

  Peg.

  Some weeks, as poor as I was, we pulled the old telephone tricks.

  The operator, calling from Mexico City, would ask for me by name.

  “Who?” I would say. “What was that again? Operator, speak up?”

  I 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.

  Peg.

  I leaped 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 leaded 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, hall
way 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 shade 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 thumbtacked 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 Woolf, 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....

  Eugene O’Neill was there. Oscar Wilde, but only his sad prison essay, none of his lilac fluff or gentian laughs. Genghis Khan and Mussolini leaned on each other. Books with titles like Suicide As an Answer or The Dark Night of Hamlet or Lemmings to the Sea were on the high shelf in snows. On the floor lay World War Two and Krakatoa, the Explosion Heard Round the World, along with India the Hungry and The Red Sun Rises.

  If you run your eye and mind along books like that, and run your stare along again, disbelieving, there is only one thing you can do. Like a bad film version of Mourning Becomes Electra, where one suicide follows another and murder tops murder, and incest incites incest, and blackmail supersedes poisoned apples and people fall down stairs or step on strychnine tacks, you finally snort, toss back your head, and …

  Laugh!

  “What’s so funny?” said someone behind me.

  I turned.

  “I said, what’s so funny?”

  He stood with his thin pale face about six inches from the tip of my nose.

  The man who slept on that analysis couch.

  The man who owned all those end-of-the-world books.

  A. L. SHRANK.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Your library!” I stammered.

  A. L. Shrank glared, waiting.

  Luckily I sneezed, which erased my laugh and let me cover my confusion with a Kleenex.

  “Forgive me, forgive,” I said. “I own exactly fourteen books. It’s not often you see the New York Public Library imported to Venice pier.”

  The flames went out in A. L. Shrank’s tiny, bright-yellow fox eyes. His wire-thin shoulders sank. His tiny fists opened up. My praise caused him to glance through his own window like a stranger and gape.

  “Why,” he murmured, amazed, “yes, they’re all mine.”

  I stood looking down at a man no taller than five-one or five-two, maybe less without his shoes. I had a terrible urge to check to see if he wore three-inch heels, but kept my eyes level with the top of his head. He was not even aware of my inspection, so proud was he of the proliferation of literary beasts that infested his dark shelves.

  “I have five thousand nine hundred and ten books,” he announced.

  “You sure it’s not five thousand nine hundred and eleven?”

  He very carefully looked only in at his library and said, in a cold voice, “Why are you laughing?”

  “The titles—”

  “The titles?’ He leaned closer to the window to search the shelves for some bright traitor among all those assassin books.

  “Well,” I said, lamely, “aren’t there any summers, good weather, fair winds, in your library? Don’t you own any glad books, happy finds like Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town? The Sun Is My Undoing? In the Good Old Summertime? June Laughter?”

  “No!” Shrank stood on tiptoe to say this, then caught himself and sank down. “No—”

  “How about Peacock’s Headlong Hall, or Huck Finn, Three Men in a Boat, How Green Was My Father? Pickwick Papers? Robert Benchley? James Thurber? S. J. Perelman—”

  I machinegunned the titles. Shrank listened and almost cringed back at my recitation of joy. He let me run down.

  “How about the Savonarola Joke Book or The Funny Sayings of Jack the Ripper—.” I stopped.

  A. L. Shrank was all shadow and ice, turning away.

  “Sorry,” I said, and I was. “What I’d really like to do some day is come by to browse. That is, if you’ll let me.”

  A. L. Shrank weighed this, decided I was repentant, and moved to touch his shop-front door. It whined softly open. He turned to examine me with his tiny, bright amber eyes, his thin fingers twitching at his sides.

  “Why not now?”
he said.

  “I can’t. Later, Mr.—”

  “Shrank. A. L. Shrank. Consulting psychologist. No, not Shrink, as you might be thinking, as in psychiatrist. Just plain Shrank, meadow doctor to lost creatures.”

  He was imitating my banter. His thin smile was a weak-tea duplicate of my own. I felt it would vanish if I, in turn, shut my mouth. I glanced above him.

  “How come you’ve left that old tarot card sign in place? And what about phrenology and hypnotism—”

  “You forgot to mention my handwriting analysis sign. And the one mentioning numerology is just inside the door. Be my guest.”

  I moved, but stopped.

  “Come along,” said A. L. Shrank. “Come on,” he said, really smiling now, the smile of a fish, however, not of a dog. “Step in.”

  At each gentle command, I inched forward, my eyes touching with all too obvious irony on the hypnotism sign above the tiny man’s head. His eyes did not blink.

  “Come,” said A. L. Shrank, nodding at his library without looking at it.

  I found the invitation irresistible, in spite of the car crashes, dirigible burnings, mine explosions, and mental delapidations I knew each book contained.

  “Well,” I said.

  At which moment the entire pier shook. Far out at the end, in the fog, a great creature had struck the pier. It was like a whale brunting a ship, or the Queen Mary plowing into the ancient pilings. The big iron brutes out there, hidden, were beginning to tear the planks apart.

  The vibrations knocked the planks and came up through my body and Shrank’s body, with jolts of mortality and doom. Our bones shook in our blood. We both jerked our heads to try to stare through the fog at the devastation somewhere beyond. The mighty blows jarred me a modicum away from the door. The titanic buffeting trembled and shivered and inched A. L. Shrank on his sill like a lost toy. A paleness bloomed within the paleness of his face. He looked like a man panicked by an earthquake or a tidal wave rushing at the pier. Again and again the great machines hammered and pounded in the fog a hundred yards away, and invisible cracks seemed to appear in A. L. Shrank’s milk-glass brow and cheeks. The war had begun! Soon the dark tanks would lumber along the pier, destroying as they came, a flood of carnival émigrés running before them toward land, A. L. Shrank soon to be among them as his house of dark tarot cards fell.