The Bookwoman's Last Fling (11 page)

“That was fun,” I said to Sharon in the truck.

“Yep,” she said. “Couldn't do that at the feed store.”

We were heading home by three o'clock. Sharon was tired and I drove while she slept soundly against the door. At quarter to five we pulled into her road and her eyes flicked open. “Somebody's been here,” she said. She was still in the grip of sleep and I have never figured out how she knew that. Somebody in fact had been there. “Cameron's been here,” she said.

That day I moved out of the hotel. Sharon had a tack room in the loft, which became my home of the moment. We didn't know if Cameron would return; none of us were mind readers, and even Sharon, who had somehow sensed his presence as we pulled into the road, could not remember what she'd been dreaming or if she had been dreaming at all. We did know, because Rosemary had told us, that Cameron had come calling three times; he had been increasingly insistent, and the last time he was abusive and threatening. He had come looking for a book. That was all they knew for now, but it was enough that I wanted to be here if he came again. I pulled my car into the barn and parked out of sight in the feed bin. I had my working police .38 in my bag and suddenly I was glad it was there.

Sharon and I still had no agreement written or implied: I had asked for no money and she seemed content to leave that topic alone and let it find its own place as time went by. We didn't talk about Candice that first night: I knew there was much to be said, but for now I stashed my bag in the tack room and set up the rollaway bed against the wall facing the door and left her alone. I draped my gun over the chair in its holster, within an arm's reach of the bed, and by dark I was solidly entrenched. It was like living in a cave of straw, primitive but pleasant in its way. I liked it, it was private, the bed was good, and I was as content there as I ever am anywhere.

The room was about twelve feet square with a shoulder-high window about eight inches by twelve that looked out toward the house. The window was simply for light and air: in case of fire, all you could do was go back through that wall of straw or roll yourself into a ball and kiss your ass good-bye. To get there I had to climb the narrow stairs and go through that feed room over the barn. There was a corridor of sorts, a tight squeeze between the bales of hay stacked on both sides, and a door with a lock that I would probably never use. A table and two chairs, a hotplate, and a small icebox—these were the only furnishings and appliances other than my rollaway. The hotplate was on a shelf under the window, far away from the hay and straw. “Don't leave it plugged in,” Sharon said with an apologetic shrug as she stated the obvious. “There's coffee in that cabinet and some books there too if you're a restless sleeper.” If I needed water I'd have to go down and fill my pots and canteen from the tap where we watered the horses. On dry evenings like this one I could leave the loft door open, squeeze through the straw to my room, or bed down in a sleeping bag in the dark loft, playing the radio, looking at the stars, or watching the road all the way back to the trees.

At quarter to nine that first night Sharon came over and told me to get my hunkus up to the house for something to eat. Lillian had cooked a stew. It was such a late dinner that I had almost forgotten about food, but the rich smell of it brought my hunger raging back again. Sharon had been on the telephone much of the evening, arranging for the six new horses to be brought in. “It was touch-and-go whether I'd get them,” she said. “Some people would rather just sell them to the killers, don't ask me why, and the only way I can save them is to find out early enough and pay more money than a sane person ought to. But I can outbid anybody if they get my dander up.”

She was expecting a mixed lot, half of them fairly sound, the others with various problems. “One of 'em's pretty sick and from what I heard we may lose him. We'll see how he is tomorrow.” We stood in the yard at the end of our day and I felt at home with this woman I barely knew. Inside, we sat around the table and filled in the particulars on Cameron. He had arrived this morning, an hour after we left, driving up to the front door like he'd never been away. “I think he may have been watching the house,” Rosemary said, “just waitin' for y'all to leave.” She didn't know this for a fact but she could feel it in her bones. He was in an old Buick Eight with a crushed left fender, and the motor pinged like it was on its last legs. At first he was charming: a smiling jocular man with tiny hips and an enormous belly that drooped far over his belt. “You wouldn't know him now if you passed him on the street, even if he is your part brother,” Rosemary said; “I'd bet a dollar he ain't seen his own dick in five years,” and the table erupted with laughter.

He had aged badly. His skin was pale and pasty, craggy like some alien desert landscape. “He looks like he might have some little skin cancers growing around his nose.”

One thing that hadn't changed was how he swaggered his way up the stairs to the front porch, “like he owns the world and the rest of us are just paying rent.” Sharon nodded faintly. Of the three brothers, Cameron always did put on the best swagger. But Rosemary thought life had not been good to him: he had to make a big effort just to get out of that car and haul himself up the front stairs. To a casual eye he looked more like he might be Sharon's daddy or maybe her grandfather than her half brother. He had a fellow with him about half his age with muscles bulging under tightly rolled sleeves. Sharon asked if she had gotten a name for that one, but they had come and gone, each time there had been more tension, and there'd been no time for questions. “He just said he'd come for a book you owe him,” Rosemary said.

“I don't know what he's talking about,” Sharon said.

Both of them had approached the door that first time. Rosemary described it candidly, with no effort to be overly polite. “That cracker from Muscle Beach was what we always called white trash. He stood off flexing his knuckles like he'd just die for the chance to rearrange my bones then and there, like one word from Cameron and I'd be dead meat.” They loomed there in the doorway, trying to intimidate, arguing for at least five minutes and getting more insistent all the time. “They just stood there trying to face us down. That's when I put politeness out the back door and told 'em they might as well get used to the wait, because nobody comes in Sharon's house when Sharon ain't here. Nobody.”

So they had gone away, but less than half an hour later they were back again. Now Cameron was getting ugly. “God
damm
it, Rosemary, you're takin' a helluva lot on yourself for hired nigger help.” Sharon sat up straight in sudden hot anger. “Did he actually say that?” “Yes, he did,” Rosemary said. “I didn't know whether I should tell you or not, you know I don't get outta joint over stuff like that, but yeah, he said it several times to both of us. He said, ‘Maybe you think you be family or some such, but you ain't nuthin' but highfalutin house niggers.'” Sharon was red under the front room lamp. “Then what happened?”

Then they argued some more, maybe twenty minutes this time, with Cameron getting madder by the minute. “Listen, you!” he yelled at one point. “I ain't got
time
for this goddam song and dance, I got to be on the Coast tomorrow afternoon and I ain't leavin' here till I get what's mine!” So Rosemary said, “Write us a letter about it. If it's yours Sharon might be inclined to send it to you.” More laughter, like a soft cheering section, went around the table.

“He didn't like that business about the letter,” Rosemary said, “but he left again, callin' me nigger names and cussin' up a blue streak.”

This time he was gone till early afternoon. “Next thing I hear out of him he's there on the porch again, trying to kick the door down. I figure they snuck back somehow 'cause I never heard the car come up and never saw it either. We just sitting here like this and there he is, beatin' on the door with his shoulder and his feet till I can hear the wood starting to split. Then he says, ‘Now you made me mad, nigger,' and he keeps on sayin' that like some crazy man. ‘Now you made me mad, nigger, now you made me mad. You shouldn'ta done that.'”

Sharon shook her head and said, “Jesus,” under her breath.

“That ain't all. You wanna hear the rest of it?”

Sharon nodded warily and Rosemary said, “That's when Lillian comes up with the 12-gauge pump gun. I jerk the door open and she fires a load of buckshot right over their heads. Blow a hole in the porch roof big as my fist.”

“I'll pay for that,” Lillian said.

“What happened then?” Sharon said.

“Then she jack another shell into the gun and they fall all over each other trying to get down them steps. Last we seen of 'em, they be going like hell down the road, about as fast as old Cameron can move. I felt like puttin' a load 'tween each of 'em's hind ends.”

Again Lillian said, “I'm paying for the damage to the porch,” but Sharon told her not to worry about it. I hadn't said anything all this time. Once I looked up at Sharon, our eyes met, and she looked away as if it shamed her to be part of our race. Lillian said, “I'd really appreciate it if you'd let me take care of that hole in the roof,” and Louie made an aggravated motion with his hands. “Quit worryin' over the damn hole in the roof, Lil, me and Billy can fix it good as new.”

We ate and talked some more, and afterward Sharon walked me back to the barn. “All of a sudden I'm nervous,” she said. “No matter how careful I am, the books make me vulnerable.”

“Would you be open to a visit from the guy at the Blakely Library? I'm not lobbying for him, but I know he'd like to see your stuff. And he's got a lot of well-heeled people in his corner, so he can get the money if you ever do want to sell it.”

“I wouldn't want him to come all the way out here for nothing.”

“He's a book guy, Sharon, this is what he does. He'd like to see it just for future reference, so if you ever do want to donate or sell it, you won't have to reinvent the wheel every time you talk. I imagine he'll want to make notes for his own information, if that's okay. For bibliographical purposes.”

“And you trust this guy?”

“His word is like money in the bank.”

“Okay, I'll see him,” she said. “What's his name?”

“Carroll Shaw. The library is a private one; he's the director of special collections. I think it's an honorary job, which means he gets the satisfaction of putting it together and a lot of credit from book people all over the country. They've got some well-heeled backers and they're housing a world-class collection about an hour's drive north of San Francisco. Their whole mission is to protect books like yours, to preserve whatever's donated in the spirit it was given.”

“Don't they all do that?”

“Not unless you nail them to the wall and tack them down with Monster Glue. The first thing even a high-class library might want to do is sell off the dupes to generate revenue. I think it's vital from your viewpoint that the collection stay together. So whether you sell the books or not, listen to what Carroll has to say.”

“I will, I promise.”

“Don't do anything you might regret later.”

“I won't.”

“Swear to God,” I said, and she made a sign in the air and we laughed.

We walked around the barn and stood in the shadows of the loft.

“What else are you thinking?” she said.

“I'm thinking I'll stick around a while. If that's okay with you.”

“You think Cameron will come back?”

“Who knows what a guy like that might do? He's been here three times in one day and once he tried to kick the door in, so you've got to figure he's serious. Even if Lillian did scare him off for the moment, you need to know where he is.”

“Then what?”

“Then we'll see.”

 

The new horses arrived the next morning. She pulled off their shoes and turned them out and let them wander freely across the field. The sick horse was a sorry-looking thing, scrawny and scabby, trembly, with pus running down his face from an infected eye. He stood apart, wary as she approached him, but too sick to run away anymore. Her voice was almost mesmerizing, and after a while he closed his eyes and let her touch him.
Go ahead, kill me,
he seemed to say. She rubbed his ears and slipped a halter over his head and put the chain end of a lead shank through the halter and snapped it under his chin. All this time she kept talking, touching him, and I held him while she felt his legs. She hugged his head and ran her hands gently across his body till his trembles went away. This took a long time, but she went about it like she had nothing better to do with the rest of her life. I remembered what Junior had said about her hands but this was more than that. I thought she was treating him with her voice as well as her hands.
There you are, little guy, you're home now…you're home now…you're gonna be fine…my what a sweet little guy you are…
the same words over and over while she rubbed his neck and upper legs.

“He's got two bad tendons that never were treated right,” she said. “Somebody fired him at some point but I don't think it did him much good.” I asked her what that meant and she said, “Basically you take a hot iron and burn holes in his legs. The idea is that all the healing properties in his body rush to that spot and help him get well.”

Both front legs were bowed, she said, “and his lip's all screwed up where somebody had a mean twitch on him. Indicates a hell-raiser at some point, but there ain't much hell in him now. He's got bad feet: quarter cracks, a deep sand crack on that rear left hoof and a bone spavin on his right rear leg. Right now he's pretty miserable, he probably hurts everywhere all the time. He's mighty tired of living, but maybe I can coax some life into him after all. He might do okay here.”