Bookman's wake

It was the second time she had said something like that. I was beginning to wonder if she had been star-crossed by her name, doomed to play out the destiny of a lonely woman whose entire life could be told in two short stanzas.

“I do what I can, but then I get restless,” she said. “My mom and dad help out when they can, but they don’t have any money either. For the most part it’s on my shoulders.”

“So what do you do?” I asked again.

“I’m versatile as hell. I know a lot of things, some of them quite well—just survival skills, but enough to buy something to eat and a room at the Y. I can work in a printshop. I wait a dynamite table. I mix a good drink—once I got fired for making ‘em too good. I type like a tornado and I don’t make mistakes. I’m a great temporary. I’ve probably worked in more offices as a Kelly girl than all the other Kellys put together. I could get in the Guinness Book of World Records . Do they pay for that?“

“I don’t think so.”

“Probably not. They make a fortune off us freaks and pay us nothing.”

“You could probably get on full-time in one of those offices if you wanted. Law office maybe. Become a paralegal. Then go to law school.”

“I’d rather lie down in a pit of snakes. I find the nine-to-five routine like slow poison. It poisons the spirit, if you know what I mean. About three days of that’s about all I can stand. But that’s most likely what I’ll do tomorrow— get my dad to take me into town, go on a temporary, fill in somewhere till I’ve got enough money for a few tires and some gas, then drift away and do it all over again.”

There was a pause, not long, while she seemed to consider something. “If I feel lucky, I might look for books tomorrow.”

I tried not to react too quickly, but I didn’t want to let it get past me. “What do books have to do with working in an office?”

“Nothing: that’s the point. The books keep me out of the office.”

I stared at her.

“I’m a bookscout.” She said this the way a woman in Georgia might say I’m a Baptist , daring you to do something about it. Then she said, “I look for books that are underpriced. If they’re drastically under-priced, I buy them. Then I sell them to a book dealer I know in Seattle.”

I milked the dumb role. “And you make money at this?”

“Sometimes I make a lot of money. Like I said, it depends on how my luck’s running.”

“Where do you find these books?”

“God, everywhere! Books turn up in the craziest places…junk stores, flea markets…I’ve even found them in Dumpsters. Mostly I look in bookstores themselves.”

“You look for books in bookstores…then sell ‘em to other bookstores. I wouldn’t imagine you could do that.”

“Why not? At least sixty percent of the used-book dealers in this world are too lazy, ignorant, and cheap to know what they’ve got on their own shelves. They wouldn’t invest in a reference book if their lives depended on it. They might as well be selling spare parts for lawn mowers, that’s all books mean to them. Don’t get me wrong: I love these people, they have saved my life more times than you would believe. I take their books from them and sell them to one of the other book dealers—”

“One of the forty percent.”

“One of the ten percent; one of the guys who wants the best of the best and isn’t afraid to pay for it. You bet. Take from the dumb and sell to the smart.”

“That’s gonna be hard to do tomorrow, though, if you’ve got no money.”

She opened her purse. “Actually, I’ve got a little over three dollars in change. Pennies, nickels, and dimes.”

“I don’t think you could buy much of a book with that.”

She finished her soup and thought it over. “I’ll tell you a story, and you see what you think about it. I was down and out in L. A. I was broke, just about like this, down to my last bit of pocket change. So I hit the bookstores. The first one I went to had a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . You ever hear of that book?”

I shook my head, lying outrageously.

“A guy named James Agee wrote it and another guy named Walker Evans illustrated it with photographs. This was a beautiful first edition, worth maybe three or four hundred dollars. The dealer was one of those borderline cases—he knows just enough to be dangerous, and he had marked it ninety-five. He knew he had something , he just wasn’t sure what. I figured my friend in Seattle might pay me one- fifty for it, but of course I didn’t have the wherewithal to break it out of there. I also knew it wouldn’t last another day at that price—the first real bookman who came through the door would pick it off. I drifted around the store and looked at his other stuff.” She sipped her water. “You ever hear of Wendell Berry?”

The poet, I wanted to say. But I shook my head.

“The poet,” she said. “His early books are worth some money, and there was one in this same store, tucked in with the belles lettres and marked three dollars. I counted out my last pennies and took it: went around the corner and sold it to another dealer for twenty dollars. Went back to the first store and asked the guy if he’d hold the Agee