motel room and listening to dogs bark beneath a hot orange moon, before the simple stupid weight of accumulating days finally sucks all the wow out of a marriage? How lucky do you have to be for your love to outrace your time?) The silver bowl of the rapidly swinging spade sends a Wake up! Wake up! sunflash across the heat-dazed, sweat- sticky surface of the crowd. Lisey's husband is suddenly Scott the Pitchman, and she has never been so relieved to see that totally untrustworthy honey, I'm hip huckster's grin on his face. He has bummed them out; now he will try to sell them a throat-ful of dubious get-well medicine, the stuff with which he hopes to send them home. And she thinks they will buy, hot August afternoon or not. When he's like this, Scott could sell Frigidaires to Inuits, as the saying is…and God bless the language pool where we all go down to drink, as Scott himself would no doubt add (and has).
'But if every book is a little light in that darkness—and so I believe, so I must believe, corny or not, for I write the damned things, don't I?—then every library is a grand old ever-burning bonfire around which ten thousand people come to stand and warm themselves every day and night. Fahrenheit four-fifty-one ain't in it. Try Fahrenheit four thousand, folks, because we're not talking kitchen ovens here, we're talking big old blast-furnaces of the brain, red-hot smelters of the intellect. We celebrate the laying of such a grand fire this afternoon, and I'm honored to be a part of it. Here is where we spit in the eye of forgetfulness and kick ignorance in his wrinkled old cojones. Hey photographer!'
Stefan Queensland snaps to, smiling.
Scott, also smiling, says: 'Get one of this. The top brass may not want to use it, but you'll like it in your portfolio, I'll bet.'
Scott holds the ornamental tool out as if he intends to twirl it again. The crowd gives a hopeful little gasp, but this time he's only teasing. He slides his left hand down to the spade's collar, digs in, and drives the spade-blade deep, dousing its hot glitter in earth. He tosses its load of dirt aside and cries: 'I declare the Shipman Library construction site OPEN FOR BUSINESS!'
The applause that greets this makes the previous bursts sound like the sort of polite patter you might hear at a prep-school tennis match. Lisey doesn't know if young Mr. Queensland caught the ceremonial first scoop, but when Scott pumps the silly little silver spade at the sky like an Olympic hero, Queensland documents that one for sure, laughing behind his camera as he snaps it. Scott holds the pose for a moment (Lisey happens to glance at Dashmiel and catches that gentleman in the act of rolling his eyes at Mr. Eddington— Toneh). Then he lowers the spade to port arms and holds it that way, grinning. Sweat has popped on his cheeks and forehead in fine beads. The applause begins to taper off. The crowd thinks he's done. Lisey thinks he's only hit second gear.
When he knows they can hear him again, Scott digs in for an encore scoop. 'This one's for Wild Bill Yeats!' he calls. 'The bull-goose loony! And this one's for Poe, also known as Baltimore Eddie! This one's for Alfie Bester, and if you haven't read him, you ought to be ashamed!' He's sounding out of breath, and Lisey is starting to feel a bit alarmed. It's so hot. She's trying to remember what he had for lunch—was it something heavy or light?
'And this one…' He dives the spade into what's now a respectable little divot and holds up the final dip of earth. The front of his shirt has darkened with sweat. 'Tell you what, why don't you think of whoever wrote your first good book? I'm talking about the one that got under you like a magic carpet and lifted you right off the ground. Do you know what I'm talking about?'
They know. It's on every face that faces his.
'The one that, in a perfect world, you'd check out first when the Shipman Library finally opens its doors. This one's for the one who wrote that.' He gives the spade a final valedictory shake, then turns to Dashmiel, who should be pleased with Scott's showmanship—asked to play by ear, Scott has played brilliantly—and who instead only looks hot and pissed off. 'I think we're done here,' he says, and tries to hand Dashmiel the spade.
'No, that's yoahs,' Dashmiel says. 'As a keepsake, and a token of ouah thanks. Along with yoah check, of co'se.' His rictus smile comes and goes in a fitful cramp. 'Shall we go and grab ourse'fs a little air-conditionin?'
'By all means,' Scott says, looking bemused, and then hands the spade to Lisey, as he has handed her so many unwanted mementos over the past twelve years of his celebrity: everything from ceremonial oars and Boston Red Sox hats encased in Lucite cubes to the masks of Comedy and Tragedy…but mostly pen-and-pencil sets. So many pen-and-pencil sets. Waterman, Scripto, Schaeffer, Mont Blanc, you name it. She looks at the spade's glittering silver scoop, as bemused as her beloved (he is still her beloved). There are a few flecks of dirt in the incised letters reading COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY, and Lisey blows them off. Where will such an unlikely artifact end up? In this summer of 1988 Scott's study is still under construction, although the address works and he's already begun storing stuff in the stalls and cubbies of the barn below. Across many of the cardboard boxes he's scrawled SCOTT! THE EARLY YEARS! in big strokes of a black felt-tip pen. Most likely the silver spade will wind up with this stuff, wasting its gleams in the gloom. Maybe she'll put it there herself, then tag it SCOTT! THE MIDDLE YEARS! as a kind of joke…or a prize. The kind of goofy, unexpected gift Scott calls a—
But Dashmiel is on the move. Without another word—as if he's disgusted with this whole business and determined to put paid to it as soon as possible—he tromps across the rectangle of fresh earth, detouring around the divot which Scott's last big shovelful of earth has almost succeeded in promoting to a hole. The heels of Dashmiel's shiny black I'm-an-assistantprofessor-on-my-way-up-and-don't-
you-forget-it shoes sink deep into the earth with each heavy step. Dashmiel has to fight for balance, and Lisey guesses this does nothing to improve his mood. Tony Eddington falls in beside him, looking thoughtful. Scott pauses a moment, as if not quite sure what's up, then also starts to move, slipping between his host and his temporary biographer. Lisey follows, as is her wont. He delighted her into forgetting her omenish feeling
(broken glass in the morning)
for a little while, but now it's back
(broken hearts at night)
and hard. She thinks it must be why all these details look so big to her. She's sure the world will come back into more normal focus once she reaches the air-conditioning. And once she's gotten that pesty swatch of cloth out of her butt.
This is almost over, she reminds herself, and—how funny life can be—it is at this precise moment when the day begins to derail.
A campus security cop who is older than the others on this detail (eighteen years later she'll identify him from Queensland's news photo as Captain S. Heffernan) holds up the rope barrier on the far side of the ceremonial rectangle of earth. All she notices about him is that he's wearing what her husband might have called a puffickly huh-yooge batch of orifice on his khaki shirt. Her husband and his flanking escorts duck beneath the rope in a move so synchronized it could have been choreographed.
The crowd is moving toward the parking lot with the
principals…with one exception. Blondie isn't moving toward the parking lot. Blondie is standing still on the parking lot side of the commencement patch. A few people bump him and he's forced backward after all, back onto the baked dead earth where the Shipman Library will stand come 1991 (if the chief contractor's promises can be believed, that is). Then he's actually moving forward against the tide, his hands coming unclasped so he can push a girl out of his way to his left and then a guy out of his way on the right. His mouth is still moving. At first Lisey again thinks he's mouthing a silent prayer, and then she hears the broken gibberish—like something a bad James Joyce imitator might write—and for the first time she becomes actively alarmed. Blondie's somehow weird blue eyes are fixed on her husband, there and nowhere else, but Lisey understands that he doesn't want to discuss leavings or the hidden religious subtexts of Scott's novels. This is no mere Deep Space Cowboy.
'The churchbells came down Angel Street,' says Blondie—says Gerd Allen Cole—who, it will turn out, spent most of his seventeenth year in an expensive Virginia mental institution and was released as cured and good to go. Lisey gets every word. They cut through the rising chatter of the crowd, that hum of conversation, like a knife through some light, sweet cake. 'That rungut sound, like rain on a tin roof! Dirty flowers, dirty and sweet, that's how the churchbells sound in my basement as if you didn't know!'
A hand that seems all long pale fingers goes to the tails of the white shirt and Lisey understands exactly what's
