In twenty minutes my dilemma had been honed to a razor-thin edge. Something had to give, for deception is not my strong point. There was a time when I could lie to anyone: the world I went around in was black-and-white, I was on the side of truth and justice, and the other side was overflowing with scum-sucking assholes. Those days ended forever when I turned in my badge. I could like these people a lot: I could open a mail-order book business in a house up the road and be their neighbor. Every morning at eight I’d wander into Rigby’s shop and learn another secret about the universe beyond the door, and sometimes in the evenings Crystal would invite me for dinner, where I’d give them the true gen about my rivers and deserts. Shave about eight years off my age and you could almost see me married to their daughter, raising a new generation of little bookpeople in the shadows of the rain forest. They were the real stuff, the Rigbys, the salt of the earth. Suddenly I liked them infinitely better than the guys I was working for, and that included all the judges and cops of the great state of New Mexico.
They were not rich by any means. The microwave was the only touch of modern life in the house. The refrigerator was the oldest one I’d ever seen still working in a kitchen. The stove was gas, one step up from a wood burner. The radio on the shelf was an Admiral, circa 1946; the furniture was old and plain, giving the house that rustic, well- lived look. Whatever Darryl Grayson had taught Gaston Rigby all those years ago, the art of making money was not part of the mix. Grayson’s name had come up just once, in passing. Fishing, I had cast my line into that pond with the offhand remark that Eleanor had told me of a man named Grayson, who had taught Rigby the business. His hand trembled and his lip quivered, and I knew I had touched something so intrinsic to his existence that its loss was still, twenty years later, a raw and open wound. Crystal came around the table and leaned over him, hugging his head. “Darryl was a great man,” she said, “a great man.” And Rigby fought back the tears and tried to agree but could not find the words. Crystal winked at me, encouraging me to drop the subject, and I did.
“What’s all this?” Eleanor said, coming in from the hall. “What’re we talking about?”
“I was just asking about the Linotype,” I said, making as graceful a verbal leap as a working klutz can expect to achieve.
“There hangs a tale,” Eleanor said. “Tell him about it, Daddy.”
Rigby tried to smile and shook his head.
“You tell ‘im, honey,” Crystal said.
Eleanor looked at her father, then at me. “It’s just that we had a kind of an adventure getting it here.”
“It was a damned ordeal was what it was,” Crystal said. “What do you think, Mr. Janeway, how does ten days without heat in weather that got down to twenty below zero sound to you?”
“It sounds like kind of an adventure,” I said, and they laughed.
“It was our finest moment,” Eleanor said, ignoring her mother, who rolled her eyes. “Daddy heard from a friend in Minnesota that a newspaper there had gone broke and they had a Linotype in the basement.” “It had been sitting there for twenty years,” Crystal said, “ever since the paper converted to cold type. Hardly anyone there remembered what the silly thing had been used for, let alone how to use it.”
“It was ours for the taking,” Eleanor said.
“Craziest damn thing we ever did,” Crystal said. “
Who’s telling this, Mamma? Anyway, it was the middle of winter, they were gonna tear down the building and everything had to be out within two weeks.”
“It was one of those instant demolition jobs,” Crystal said. “You know, where they plant explosives and bring it all down in a minute.”
“So we drove to Minneapolis,” Eleanor said.
“Nonstop,” said Crystal.
“The heater in the truck went out in Spokane…”
“Didn’t even have time to stop and get it fixed. We took turns driving, sleeping when we could.”
“Hush, Mamma, you’re spoiling the story. So we get to Minnesota and it’s so cold my toenails are frozen. The snow was piled four feet deep, the streets were like white tunnels. You couldn’t even see in the shops at street level.”
“They had this thing stored in a basement room that was just a little bigger than it was,” Crystal said. “They must’ve taken it apart and rebuilt it in that room, because right away we could see that we’d never get it out unless we took it apart and carried it piece by piece.”
I looked at Rigby. “Had you ever done anything like that?”
He shook his head.
“He had to figure it out as he went along,” Eleanor said.
“Gaston can do anything, once he sets his mind to it,” said Crystal.
“Anybody can, with a little time and patience,” Rigby said.
“We spent two days in that basement,” Eleanor said, “tearing down this machine, packing the parts, and putting them on the truck. It was so cold your hands would stick to the steel when you touched it, and all around us the wreckers were stringing explosives.”
“But we got the damn thing,” Crystal said, “and sang Christmas carols all the way home…in February.”
“We thought of getting the heater fixed in Montana,” Eleanor said, “but by then, hey, it was up to ten degrees—a major heat wave.”
“And we could smell home,” Rigby said.
