Bookman's promise

I left an answer on her home phone—“I warned you about Wyoming, kid”—and in the morning, when I turned mine on, she had already replied: “I beg your pardon, you certainly did not say I was being sent to Mars. It looks like we’ll wrap it up here in a couple of weeks, but that sounds like eternity on this end of it. I will need some very serious pampering when I get home.”

I thought about her a lot that day. We were having some fairly intimate bullshit for two people who had yet to touch, feel, probe, or say more than a few direct words to each other. At bedtime I launched a new attack on her hated answering machine. “Look, let’s make a date. You. Me. Not this gilhickey you make me talk to. Us, in the…you know…flesh. Didn’t mean that the way it sounded, it just popped out. Didn’t mean that either. I promise to be civilized. I swear. White sport coat. Pink carnation. Night of the thirtieth. Come by my bookstore if you get in early enough. Call me if you can’t make it.”

She didn’t call. But soon the crank calls began.

For days after Boston I had crackpots calling at all hours: people who claimed to have real Burton books and didn’t, fools who wanted me to fly to Miami or Portland or Timbuktu on my nickel to check them out, wild people with trembling voices who needed a drink or a fix and had battered copies of Brodie’s biography or cheap Burton reprints that could still be found in cheesy modern bindings on chain-store sales tables. One man, certain that he was Burton’s direct descendant, had talked to Burton for years in his dreams and had written a twelve-hundred- page manuscript, dictated by Burton himself, with maps of a fabulous African kingdom that remained undiscovered to this very day. A woman called collect from Florida with a copy of Richard Burton’s autobiography, in dust jacket, signed by Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and some woman named Virginia Woolf. All she wanted for it was $1,500, but I had to take it now, sight unseen, or she’d get on the phone and after that it was going to the highest bidder. There were calls from Chicago and Phoenix and Grand Rapids, Michigan. An old woman in Baltimore said my book had been stolen from her family. She talked in a whisper, afraid “they” would overhear her, and when she insisted that the man in the inscription had been her grandfather and that he had been there when Richard Burton had helped start the American Civil War, I moved on as quickly as I could without being rude. One thing I knew for sure—there’d be another hot item in the next mail, and another with the next ringing of the telephone.

Packages arrived without notice at my Denver bookstore. Most contained worthless books that I had to return. A man in Detroit sent a nice box of early Burton reprints, which I actually bought. But the strangest thing was the arrival of a true first edition, Burton’s City of the Saints, in a package bearing only a St. Louis postmark— no name, no return address anywhere on or inside the box. I waited for some word by telephone or in a separate letter, but it never came.

By the end of the month the clamor had begun to calm down. The thirtieth came: the crackpots had faded away and my new friend in Rock Springs still had not called. My suspense was delicious. I was thinking of all the places I might take her, but then the old lady from Baltimore arrived and the mystery of that wonderful inscription came to life.

CHAPTER 3

She was not just old, she was a human redwood. I got a hint of her age when her driver, an enormous black man in a military-style flak jacket, stepped out of a Ford Fairlane of mid-sixties vintage and stood protectively at her door. A bunch of rowdy kids roared past on skateboards: six of them, all seventeen or eighteen, old enough to be frisky and not quite old enough to know better.

East Colfax is that kind of street: common, rough, unpredictable. I heard one of the kids yell, “Look out, Smoky!” and I cringed at the slur and was shamed again by the callous stupidity of my own race. I could hear their taunting through my storefront, but the driver stood with patient dignity and ignored them. He had an almost smooth face with a short, neat mustache, and I liked his manner and the way he held himself. Sometimes you can tell about a guy, just from a glance.

The kids clattered away and the driver opened the car door. A gray head appeared followed by the rest of her: a frail-looking woman in a faded, old-fashioned dress. She gripped his arm and pulled herself up: stood still for a moment as if she couldn’t quite get her balance, then she nodded and, still clutching his arm, began the long, step- by-step voyage across the sidewalk to my store. She had to stop and steady herself again, and at that moment I saw the driver look up with a face full of alarm. Another wave of reckless kids was coming, and in that half second the first of them whipped by just a foot from my glass. The driver put up his hand and yelled “Stop!” and I saw the old lady cringe as a blur flew past and missed her by inches. I started toward the door, but before I could get there, the big man had stiff-armed the next kid in line, knocking him ass over apex on the sidewalk.

I opened my door and several things happened at once. Another fool swerved past, I got my foot on his skateboard, tipped him off, and the board shot out into the street, where it was smashed by a passing car. The first kid was up on his hands and knees, bleeding at the elbows and dabbing at a bloody nose. I heard the ugly words, “nigger son of a bitch,” and two more of his buddies arrived, menacing us on the sidewalk. The car had pulled to the curb and now a fat man joined the fray, screaming about the scratch on his hood. In all this chaos the big fellow managed to get the old lady into the store, leaving me alone to handle the fallout.

The bloody nose was flanked by his pals. “I oughta beat your ass.”

I laughed at the thought. “You couldn’t beat your meat without help from these other idiots. Maybe you better haul it on out of here before you get in real trouble.”

I juked them and they stumbled over one another as they backed out to the curb. It was hard not to laugh again, they were such colossal schmucks, but I let them put on a little face-saving sideshow, to which middle fingers were copiously added, and eventually they sulked away.

Now I had to go through another song and dance with the fat guy. He said, “What about my car, wiseguy, you gonna pay for my hood?” I asked if he knew how to read, pointing out that my sign said books, not State Farm Insurance. He suggested throwing a brick through my window and we’d see how funny that was. I took obvious note of his plate number and told him I’d be inside calling the cops while he was looking around for a brick. I heard him leave, putting down a foot of rubber as I opened my door and went inside.

The old lady sat in a chair with her eyes closed. I spoke to her driver, who had a name tag sewn military-style on his jacket. “Mr. Ralston, I presume.”