Skeleton Crew

S-t-u-p-i-d-d-i-t-y. Then he went on. ' 'If you give him a personal check he'll crack wise in about nine seconds.

' 'Withdraw eight hundred and some few-odd dollars from your personal account and have your bank open a new account for you in the name Arvin Publishing, Inc. Make sure they understand you want checks that look businesslike—nothing with cute dogs or canyon vistas on them. Find a friend, someone you can trust, and list him as co-drawer. When the checks arrive, make one for eight hundred dollars and have the co-drawer sign the check. Send the check to Reg Thorpe. That will cover your ass for the time being.

' 'Over and out.' It was signed 'Bellis.' Not in holograph. In type.'

'Whew,' the writer said again.

'When I got up the first thing I noticed was the typewriter. It looked like somebody had made it up as a ghost- typewriter in a cheap movie. The day before it was an old black office Underwood. When I got up—with a head that felt about the size of North Dakota—it was a sort of gray. The last few sentences of the letter were clumped up and faded. I took one look and figured my faithful old Underwood was probably finished. I took a taste and went out into the kitchen. There was an open bag of confectioner's sugar on the counter with a scoop in it. There was confectioner's sugar everywhere between the kitchen and the little den where I did my work in those days.'

'Feeding your Fornit,' the writer said. 'Bellis had a sweet tooth. You thought so, anyway.'

'Yes. But even as sick and hung over as I was, I knew perfectly well who the Fornit was.' He ticked off the points on his fingers.

'First, Bellis was my mother's maiden name.

'Second, that phrase el bonzo seco. It was a private phrase my brother and I used to use to mean crazy.

Back when we were kids.

'Third, and in a way most damning, was that spelling of the word 'stupidity.' It's one of those words I habitually misspell. I had an almost screamingly literate writer once who used to spell 'refrigerator' with a d —'refridgerator'—no matter how many times the copy editors blooped it. And for this guy, who had a doctoral degree from Princeton, 'ugly' was always going to be 'ughly.' ' The writer's wife uttered a sudden laugh—it was both embarrassed and cheerful. 'I do that.',

'All I'm saying is that a man's misspellings—or a woman's—are his literary fingerprints. Ask any copy editor who has done the same writer a few times.

'No, Bellis was me and I was Bellis. Yet the advice was damned good advice. In fact, I thought it was great advice. But here's sorrre'-ing else—the subconscious leaves its fingerprints, but there's a stranger down there, too. A hell of a weird guy who knows a hell of a lot. I'd never seen that phrase 'co- drawer' in my life, to the best of my knowledge... but there it was, and it was a good one, and I found out some time later that banks actually use it.

'I picked up the phone to call a friend of mine, and this bolt of pain—incredible!—went through my head. I thought of Reg Thorpe and his radium and put the phone down in a hurry. I went to see the friend in person after I'd taken a shower and gotten a shave and had checked myself about nine times in the mirror to make sure my appearance approximated how a rational human being is supposed to look. Even so, he asked me a lot of questions and looked me over pretty closely. So I guess there must have been a few signs that a shower, a shave, and a good dose of Listerine couldn't hide. He wasn't in the biz, and that was a help. News has a way of traveling, you know. In the biz. So to speak. Also, if he'd been in the biz, he would have known Arvin Publishing, Inc., was responsible for Logon's and would have wondered just what sort of scam I was trying to pull. But he wasn't, he didn't, and I was able to tell him it was a self-publishing venture I was interested in since Logon's had apparently decided to eighty-six the fiction department.'

'Did he ask you why you were calling it Arvin Publishing?' the writer asked.

'Yes.'

'What did you tell him?'

'I told him,' the editor said, smiling a wintry smile, 'that Arvin was my mother's maiden name.' There was a little pause, and then the editor resumed; he spoke almost uninterrupted to the end.

'So I began waiting for the printed checks, of which I wanted exactly one. I exercised to pass the time.

You know—pick up the glass, flex the elbow, empty the glass, flex the elbow again. Until all that exercise wears you out and you just sort of fall forward with your head on the table. Other things happened, but those were the ones that really occupied my mind—the waiting and the flexing. As I remember. I have to reiterate that, because I was drunk a lot of the time, and for every single thing I remember, there are probably fifty or sixty I don't.

'I quit my job—that caused a sigh of relief all around, I'm sure. From them because they didn't have to perform the existential task of firing me for craziness from a department that was no longer in existence, me because I didn't think I could ever face that building again—the elevator, the fluorescents, the phones, the thought of all that waiting electricity.

'I wrote Reg Thorpe and his wife a couple of letters each during that three-week period. I remember doing hers, but not his—like the letter from Bellis, I wrote those letters in blackout periods. But I hewed to my old work habits when I was blotto, just as I hewed to my old misspellings. I never failed to use a carbon... and when I came to the next morning, the carbons were lying around. It was like reading letters from a stranger.

'Not that the letters were crazy. Not at all. The one where I finished up with the P.S. about the blender was a lot worse. These letters seemed... almost reasonable.' He stopped and shook his head, slowly and wearily.

'Poor Jane Thorpe. Not that things appeared to be all that bad at their end. It must have seemed to her that her husband's editor was doing a very skillful—and humane—job of humoring him out of his deepening depression. The question of whether or not it's a good idea to humor a person who has been entertaining all sorts of paranoid fantasies—fantasies which almost led in one case to an actual assault on a little girl—probably occurred to her, if so, she chose to ignore the negative aspects, because she was humoring him, too.

Nor have I ever blamed her for it—he wasn't just a meal ticket, some nag that was to be worked and humored, humored and worked until he was ready for the knacker's shop; she loved the guy. In her own special way, Jane Thorpe was a great lady. And after living with Reg from the Early Times to the High Times and finally to the Crazy Times, I think she would have agreed with Bellis about blessing the slack and not wasting your breath cursing the drop. Of course, the more slack you get, the harder you snap when you finally fetch up at the end...but even that quick snap can be a blessing, I reckon—who wants to strangle?