Bookman's wake

“No. Should I be?”

“Slater says you hired him to find your book.”

“He’s lying. I never heard of the man.”

“What about Pruitt?”

Her voice dropped off to a whisper. “Charlie’s coming. Charlie’s here. Go away, don’t call me again.”

She banged the phone down.

What a strange woman. I could just see her, scurry-ing across the room to distance herself from the telephone. Smoothing her dress, sitting primly, trying to look like a poster from Fascinating Womanhood as her big old bear came home from the hill.

Trying her damnedest to give away a book others would kill for.

I hadn’t gotten to the hard questions yet. Who really fired that gun, Mrs. Jeffords? What’s the link between you and the Rigby girl, and why do I get the feeling that it’s personal?

I knew, though, that I’d had my one shot at her. She was far away and she wouldn’t be picking up the telephone again without letting that recording screen it first.

I tried Trish and got nothing.

Decided to put Allan Huggins on hold for the moment.

Checked out of the motel and went looking for breakfast.

At eleven o’clock, I parked on the street outside the library and passed the time reading.

30

Suddenly it’s 1963. Gaston Rigby stands in North Bend at the dawn of his life, ready and waiting to be molded by the genius Darryl Grayson. Who would think that Grayson might hire him, even to sweep out the shop? Now there are days when every green kid with a yen to publish turns up on Grayson’s doorstep, hat in hand, begging for a chance to work for nothing. The mystique is in full bloom, and Grayson is still well on the sunny side of fifty. What is it that separates Rigby from the others?…How does he get to Grayson on that primal level, that place where the genius lives? Grayson leaves no clue. He is not one to talk of such things. The hunt for verbal profundity makes him uneasy and, if he’s pushed too hard, cross. Speaking of Rigby, Grayson will say only that he’s a good one. He’s willing to let it go at that, as if trying to isolate and define everything that goes into making a good one is beyond him. And this is Archie he’s talking to, and Archie knows a good one as well as he does.

Moon looks back at it many years later. At times he thinks Rigby took the place of the younger brother— almost but not quite. He thinks Grayson and Rigby were, almost but not quite, like father and son. That spiritual bond can be difficult to understand when you stand outside it: it goes deeper than anything Moon has ever seen between men of solidly heterosexual persuasion. He insists he felt no jealousy: he is secure in his own importance to Grayson, and if Rigby mattered as much on another level, why should it worry him? He was still Grayson’s best friend in life. They grew up together, they swam buck naked as kids, tramped woods and fields, hunted deer and birds, chased women as young hell-raisers, drank, dreamed and shared the same calling. When Grayson left the South after the war and wrote that he had found a promised land, Moon came along to see for himself. Moon still remembers the first words he spoke as he got off the train in Snoqualmie. What the hell is this little burg gonna do with two goddamn printers, for Christ’s sake ?

But Moon is a mechanic and Grayson is an artist. They coexist perfectly, perhaps the only friends in history—to hear Moon tell it—who never had a disparaging word between them. Moon does worry, especially in the beginning, that Grayson is chasing an impossible dream. Nobody ever made money doing small-press books. Put that in caps and say it again. NObody. If you can do it for twenty-five years and not lose your pants, you can call yourself blessed. Grayson never made a dime. His entire operation was bankrolled with family money. Eventually the boys came into hundreds of acres of prime Georgia planting land—peaches, corn, just about anything a man wanted to grow. But Darryl and Richard Grayson were not farmers. They sold the land and Grayson took his half and did what he did with it. His books made enough to keep most of his principal intact, and that’s all they ever made in his lifetime.

What is it about the book business anyway, Moon wonders. Sometimes it seems like nobody on any level of it makes any money. Maybe if you’re Random House and you can figure out how to publish nobody but James A. Michener, you can make a little money. Everybody else picks up peanuts.

Why do they do it? he wonders. But he knows why.

Now it’s 1963 and Rigby arrives, joining Grayson in the quest for the perfect book. Look at you, Darryl , Moon says over beer in the town bar, you’re launching a life . Grayson just nods in his cups. What has never been said—what Moon tells Trish Aandahl years after Grayson’s death—is how much influence Rigby had on Grayson. Rigby was truly remarkable for a kid: damn, he had the greatest hands , Moon says, he’da been a great doctor, delivering babies, coaxing ‘em into the world…he could coax butter out of a witch’s heart and his instincts for binding and design were almost as fine and fully formed as Grayson’s. Rigby offers his opinions timidly at first—a kid does not come in and tell a genius how to run his business— but he soon learns that Grayson has no ego in the heat of the work. Grayson will listen to the man in the moon if the guy can give him an idea, and Gaston Rigby is a fountain of ideas. Do you think, Darryl, that the center of the page is too dense?…Not by much, maybe, but listen to what the words are saying and look at it again . Grayson studies it. He walks away and looks from afar. More often than not, he decides that Rigby is right. Their talk runs nonstop through the day, every word germane to the work at hand. There is never a joke between them or a comment on the outside world or a reflection on womanhood. There are no calendar-girl pinups, no radios or newspapers, nothing that would take away Grayson’s concentration even for a moment. There are no clocks. Grayson comes down to the shop in the morning and Rigby