The Book Thing (3 page)

“May I?” she said, indicating the box, picking up a box cutter next to it, but only because she didn’t want him to be able to pick it up.

“It’s mine,” he said.

She looked at the label. The address was for this house. Cover, should the ruse be discovered? “William Kemper. Is that you?”

“Yes.” His manner was odd, off. Then again, she was the one who had shown up at his home and demanded to inspect a box addressed to him. Perhaps he thought she was just another quirky Baltimorean. Perhaps he had a reductive name for her, too. Nosy Woman.

“Why don’t you open it?”

He stepped forward and did. There were at least a dozen books, all picture books, all clearly new. He inspected them carefully.

“These are pretty good,” he said.

“Good for what?”

He looked at her as if she were quite daft. “My work.”

“What do you do?”

“Create.”

“The man who brought you the books …”

“My younger brother, Tate. He brings me books. He says he knows a place that gives them away free.”

“These look brand-new.”

He shrugged, uninterested in the observation.

Tess tried again. “Why does your brother bring you books?”

“He said it was better for him to bring them, than for me to get them myself.”

Tess again remembered bumping into Walking Man on Twenty-Fifth Street, the hard thwack of his knapsack, so solid it almost left a bruise.

“But you still sometimes get them for yourself, don’t you?”

It took him a while to formulate a reply. A dishonest person would have been thinking up a lie all along. An average person would have been considering the pros and cons of lying. William Kemper was just very deliberate with his words.

“Sometimes. Only when they need me.”

“Books need you?”

“Books need to breathe after a while. They wait so long. They wait and they wait, closed in. You can tell that no one has read them in a very long time. Or even opened them.”

“So you ‘liberate’ them? Is that your work?”

Walking Man—William—turned away from her and began sorting through the books his brother had brought. He was through with her, or wanted to be.

“These books weren’t being neglected. Or ignored.”

“No, but they’re the only kind of books that Tate knows how to get. He thinks it’s all about pictures. I don’t want to tell them they’re not quite right. I make do with what he brings, and supplement when I have to.” He sighed, the sigh of an older brother used to a sibling’s screw-ups. Tess had to think that Tate had done his share of sighing, too

“William—were you away for a while?”

“Yes,” he said, flipping the pages, studying the pictures, his mind not really on her or their conversation.

“Did you go to prison?”

“They said it wasn’t.” Flip, flip, flip. “At any rate, I got to come home. Eventually.”

“When?”

“Two winters ago.” It seemed an odd way to phrase it, pseudo-Native American stuff, affected. But for a walking man, the seasons probably mattered more.

“And this is your house?”

“Mine and Tate’s. As long as we can pay the taxes. Which is about all we can do. Pay the taxes.”

Tess didn’t doubt that. Even a ramshackle pile in this neighborhood would have a tax bill of at least $15,000, maybe $20,000 per year. But did he actually live in the house? Her eyes now accustomed to the gloom, she realized the stable had been converted to an apartment of sorts. There was a cot, a makeshift kitchen with a hot plate, a mini fridge, a radio. A bathroom wasn’t evident, but William’s appearance would indicate that he had a way to keep himself and his clothes clean.

Then she noticed what was missing:
Books.
Except for the ones that had just arrived, there were no books in evidence.

“Where are the books, William?”

“There,” he said, after a moment of confusion. Whatever his official condition, he was very literal.

“No, I mean the others. There are others, right?”

“In the house.”

“May I see them?”

“It’s almost dark.”

“So?”

“That means turning on the lights.”

“Doesn’t the house have lights?”

“We have an account. Tate said we should keep the utilities, because otherwise the neighbors will complain, say it’s dangerous. Water, gas and electric. But we don’t use them, except for the washer-dryer and for showers. If it gets really cold, I can stay in the house, but even with the heat on, it’s still cold. It’s so big. The main thing is to keep it nice enough so no one can complain.”

He looked exhausted from such a relatively long speech. Tess could tell that her mere presence was stressful to him. But it didn’t seem to be the stress of
discovery.
He wasn’t fearful. Other people made him anxious in general. Perhaps that was another reason that Walking Man kept walking. No one could catch up to him and start a conversation.

“I’d like to see the books, William.”

“Why?”

“Because I—represent some of the people who used to own them.”

“They didn’t love them.”

“Perhaps.” There didn’t seem to be any point in arguing with William. “I’d like to see them.”

From the outside, Tess had not appreciated how large the house was, how deep into the lot it was built. Even by the standards of the neighborhood, it was enormous, taking up almost every inch of level land on the lot. There was more land still, but it was a long, precipitous slope. They were high here, with a commanding view of the city and the nearby highway. William took her through the rear door, which led into an ordinary, somewhat old-fashioned laundry room with appliances that appeared to be at least ten to fifteen years old.

“The neighbors might call the police,” William said, his tone fretful. “Just seeing a light.”

“Because they think the house is vacant?”

“Because they would do anything to get us out. Any excuse to call attention to us. Tate says it’s important not to let them do that.”

He led her through the kitchen, the lights still off. Again, out-of-date, but ordinary and clean, if a bit dusty from disuse. Now they were in a long shadowy hall closed off by French doors, which led to a huge room. William opened these and they entered a multi-windowed room, still dark, but not as dark as the hallway.

“The ballroom. Although we never had any balls that I know of,” he said.

A ballroom. This was truly one of the grand old mansions of Roland Park.

“But where are the books, William?” Tess asked.

He blinked, surprised. “Oh, I guess you need more light. I thought the lights from the other houses would be enough.” He flipped a switch and the light from overhead chandeliers filled the room. Yet the room was quite empty.

“The books, William. Where are they?”

“All around you.”

And it was only then that Tess realized that what appeared to be an unusual, slapdash wallpaper was made from pages—pages and pages and pages of books. Some were only text, but at some point during the massive project—the ceilings had to be at least 20, possibly 30 feet high—the children’s books began to appear. Tess stepped closer to inspect what he had done. She didn’t have a craft-y bone in her body, but it appeared to be similar to some kind of decoupage—there was definitely a sealant over the pages. But it wasn’t UV protected because there were sun streaks on the wall that faced south and caught the most light.

She looked down and realized he had done the same thing with the floor, or started to; part of the original parquet floor was still in evidence.

“Is the whole house like this?”

“Not yet,” he said. “It’s a big house.”

“But William—these books, they’re not yours. You’ve destroyed them.”

“How?” he said. “You can still read them. The pages are in order. I’m letting them live. They were dying, inside their covers, on shelves. No one was looking at them. Now they’re open forever, always ready to be read.”

“But no one can see them here either,” she said.

“I can. You can.”

“William is my half-brother,” Tate Kemper told Tess a few days later, over lunch in the Paper Moon Diner, a North Baltimore spot that was a kind of shrine to old toys. “He’s fifteen years older than I am. He was institutionalized for a while. Then our grandfather, our father’s father, agreed to pay for his care, set him up with an aide, in a little apartment not far from here. He left us the house in his will and his third wife got everything else. My mom and I never had money, so it’s not a big deal to me. But our dad was still rich when William was young, so no one worried about how he would take care of himself when he was an adult.”

“If you sold the house, you could easily pay for William’s care, at least for a time.”

“Yes, even in a bad market, even with the antiquated systems and old appliances, it probably would go for almost a million. But William begged me to keep it, to let him try living alone. He said grandfather was the only person who was ever nice to him and he was right. His mother is dead and our father is a shit, gone from both of our lives, disinherited by his own father. So I let William move into the stable. It was several months before I realized what he was doing.”

“But he’d done it before, no?”

Tate nodded. “Yes, he was caught stealing books years ago. Several times. We began to worry he was going to run afoul of some repeat offenders law, so grandfather offered to pay for psychiatric care as part of a plea bargain. Then, when he got out, the aide watched him, kept him out of trouble. But once he had access to grandfather’s house …” He shook his head, sighing in the same way William had sighed.

“How many books have you stolen for him?”

“Fifty, a hundred. I tried to spread it out to several places, but the other owners are, well, a little sharper than Octavia.”

No, they’re just not smitten with you,
Tess wanted to say.

“Could you make restitution?”

“Over time. But what good would it do? William will just steal more. I’m stuck. Besides …” Tate looked defiant, proud. “I think what he’s doing is kind of beautiful.”

Tess didn’t disagree. “The thing is, if something happens to you—if you get caught, or lose your job—you’re both screwed. You can’t go on like this. And you have to make restitution to Octavia. Do it anonymously, through me, whatever you can afford. Then I’ll show you how William can get all the books he needs, for free.”

“I don’t see—”

“Trust me,” Tess said. “And one other thing?”

“Sure.”

“Would it kill you to ask Octavia out for coffee or something? Just once?”

“Octavia! If I were going to ask someone there out, it would be—”

“Mona, I know. But you know what, Tate? Not everyone can get the girl with the duck tattoo.”

The next Saturday, Tess met William outside his house. He wore his knapsack on his back, she wore hers on the front, where Carla Scout nestled with a sippee cup. She was small for her age, not even twenty-five pounds, but it was still quite the cargo to carry on a hike.

“Are you ready for our walk?”

“I usually walk alone,” William said. He was unhappy with this arrangement and had agreed to it only after Tate had all but ordered him to do it.

“After today, you can go back to walking alone. But I want to take you some place today. It’s almost three miles.”

“That’s nothing,” William said.

“Your pack might be heavier on the return trip.”

“It often is,” he said.

I bet
, Tess thought. He had probably never given up stealing books despite what Tate thought.

They walked south through the neighborhood, lovely even with the trees bare and the sky overcast. William, to Tess’s surprise, preferred the main thoroughfares. Given his aversion to people, she thought he would want to duck down less-trafficked side streets, make use of Stony Run Park’s green expanse, which ran parallel to much of their route. But William stuck to the busiest streets. She wondered if drivers glanced out their windows and thought: Oh, the walking man now has a walking woman and a walking baby.

He did not speak and shut down any attempt Tess made at conversation. He walked as if he were alone. His face was set, his gait steady. She could tell it made him anxious, having to follow her path, so she began to narrate the route, turn by turn, which let him walk a few steps ahead. “We’ll take Roland Avenue to University Parkway, all the way to Barclay, where we’ll go left.” His pace was slow by Tess’s standards, but William didn’t walk to get places. He walked to walk. He walked to fill his days. Tate said his official diagnosis was bi-polar with OCD, which made finding the right mix of medications difficult. His work, as William termed it, seemed to keep him more grounded than anything else, which was why Tate indulged it.

Finally, about an hour later, they stood outside a building of blue-and-pink cinderblocks.

“This is it,” Tess said.

“This is what?”

“Go in.”

They entered a warehouse stuffed with books. And not just any books—these were all unloved books, as William would have it, books donated to this unique Baltimore institution, the Book Thing, which accepted any and all books on one condition: They would then be offered free to anyone who wanted them.

“Tens of thousands of books,” Tess said. “All free, every weekend.”

“Is there a limit?”

“Yes,” Tess said. “Only ten at a time. But you probably couldn’t carry much more, right?” Actually, the limit, according to the Book Thing’s rather whimsical website, was 150,000. But Tess had decided her aunt was right about people according more value to things they could not have so readily. If William thought he could have only ten, every week, it would be more meaningful to him.

He walked through the aisles, his eyes strafing the spines. “How will I save them all?” William said.

“One week at a time,” Tess said. “But you have to promise that this will be your only, um, supplier from now on. If you get books from anywhere else, you won’t be allowed to come here anymore. Do you understand, William? Can you agree to that?”

“I’ll manage,” William said. “These books really need me.”

It took him forty-five minutes to pick his first book,
Manifold Destiny,
a guide to cooking on one’s car engine.