Chapter 7
Seven
Arthur spent his Sunday afternoon in a state of mounting suspense, struggling to work through a straightforward translation
of The Life of Saint Aubin. Sentences lost their coherence halfway through. He went from one word to the next and found himself unable to string them
together into anything that made sense. His stolen books sat in a stack to one side of the kitchen table, hovering at the
periphery of his vision.
Jayne had promised that Tana would come for the loot on Sunday afternoon, but she had not said when. The longer he waited,
the worse he felt. He forgot to turn on the lights and went on working while the tide of late-day shadows rose high enough
to drown him in gloom. Finally, he could no longer read the words on the page. The light switch was just out of reach. He
didn’t get up to turn it on. He was too old to slip into his bedroom and hide under the covers, but sitting quietly in the
dark of the kitchen felt like the next best thing.
When someone rapped at the front door, his throat clenched up so tightly, he thought he might not be able to breathe. Tana
Nighswander waited on the porch, a pizza box balanced in one hand and a look of disinterest slapped across her foxy, freckled
face.
“You had dinner?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
She offered him the box.
“Boneless wings,” she said. “All yours.”
“I don’t know if I can eat ’em,” he said. “I feel sick.”
“Your appetite will come back,” she said. “Doesn’t really matter what you’ve done. Or had done to you.” She spoke like one discussing something that had been learned firsthand.
“Thanks.”
He put the pizza box on the cast-iron radiator to the left of the door and returned to the kitchen to get the books. It felt
like picking up a bundle of dynamite—old dynamite, sweating amber beads of nitroglycerin, ready to go off at one wrong jolt. Tana was waiting where he had left her
in the hall.
“I’ll be back next Sunday,” she said. “Don’t be empty-handed.”
Van emerged from his bedroom just as she left, the screen door smacking shut behind her. He peered out at her as she crossed
the street to a dumpy Civic with the Shut-Up-And-Eat-It light box mounted on the roof. Arthur wondered if he noted the books
under her arm. Van’s head swung around and his gaze lit upon the box of wings.
“You ordered from Shut-Up-And-Eat-It and you didn’t even ask if I wanted something?” Van asked. “I thought you cared.”
“They’re yours,” Arthur said. “I don’t even know why I ordered them. I got no appetite.”
A frown line appeared across Van’s pale brow. “You okay? You don’t look so hot.”
“Too many translations, too little time,” Arthur said.
Van stroked his nonexistent beard. “You need to do something to relax. That little Gwen Underfoot maybe.”
Arthur opened his mouth and closed it and then turned back to the kitchen. Van cawed like a crow.
On the Friday following, Arthur Oakes lifted first editions of Malamud’s Dubin’s Lives, Rothstein’s The Runner, and Sontag’s The Benefactor.
The week after that, it was a hardback first of Edward Abbey’s Good News, a copy of Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz that at least looked old, and a handsome fifth edition of Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham.
It hurt him to swipe this last, a slender, well-kept hardcover with a fantastical tree on the dust jacket, but there were
five copies in stock. No one would miss it.
By then it was the middle of October. Tana turned up on Sunday night to make the third pickup. That time she had a cold Hawaiian pizza for him. She took the books and considered their spines.
“These worth anything?” she asked.
“Farmer Giles is priceless, as far as I’m concerned.”
“The last bunch were duds,” she said, hefting them in one hand. “Jayne was bitchin’ they were hardly worth the gas to drive
’em to Boston.”
“Maybe whoever Jayne is selling to figures she’s easy to cheat. It’s hard to know what a book is worth when you’ve never read
one.”
Tana’s eyes flashed. “My sister doesn’t need to read a phone book to beat your face in with one. That’d be an education for you.”
After she was gone, he sat at the kitchen table, picking pineapple off a cold slice. He was wondering what sort of masochist
wanted fruit on their pizza when the phone rang.
“Hey,” Colin said, without so much as a hello. “Want to see something really scary?”