Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
He made arrangements through Tana to meet with Jayne that afternoon.
“Yeah, that’s just as well,” Tana told him over the phone. “If you took the thing she wanted, I don’t want to touch it. I
ain’t what anyone would call a delicate girl, but just the thought of it gives me the willies. Makes my skin wanna crawl right
off my back.”
“Just think: if that happened, maybe someone would make a book out of you,” Arthur told her.
“Ugh,” Tana said. Then she laughed and said, “I wonder what the title would be. How about ‘Bad Life Choices: The Tana Nighswander
Story’?”
“How about ‘She Deserved Better: A Girl’s Life in Gogan’?”
Tana laughed again. “You know something, Arthur? You ain’t as terrible a person as you like to think you are.”
He took the Christmobile from his apartment and drove south into Gogan. The sky was pitilessly blue and bright and every snowbank
threw a blinding dazzle of reflected sunlight. He did not think about Enoch Crane or King Sorrow or a human heart sitting
on fine china. By then he had already dismissed most of his rapidly fading recollections of the weekend—which felt like three
days, not two. Scatterday, he thought, and laughed. It was cold in the car and his breath gushed from his mouth in a golden smoke, as if he were preparing
to exhale a blast of fire.
If someone asked him what he had done with his weekend (some kindly and imaginary confessor to whom he could admit everything), he would’ve said he stole a book worth more money than most people made in a year.
He didn’t want to do it but had been made to, to keep his incarcerated mother from being assaulted by a gang of moral imbeciles.
His own crime made him sick . . . so sick, he spent the weekend fucked up in front of MTV, smoking blunt after blunt, an act that was wildly out of character for him.
He had dreamt pot-crazed dreams about the Philip Experiment and dragons.
He had spent hours chasing a dead man with a cabinet door for a chest, and if that wasn’t the stuff of fantasy, he didn’t know what was.
He got to Shut-Up-And-Eat-It ahead of Jayne, parked out back, and sat in the Christmobile holding his hands up to the heaters.
They were only just beginning to produce a trickle of lukewarm air when the Ranchero slowed to turn into the lot. He climbed
out into a sadistic cold that brought tears to his eyes and then froze them on his eyelashes.
Jayne slewed her ride to a messy stop, spraying rocks. Ronnie was slumped against the passenger-side door in a snow parka,
the hood pulled up, so Arthur couldn’t see his face, only a dark hole where his face belonged. That parka was the exact shiny
black of a body bag. He looked like he’d been zipped in and heaped carelessly into the passenger seat.
Arthur reached back into the Christmobile for the Crane journal and walked around to the driver’s side of the Ranchero. Jayne
rolled down the window and stuck her hand out. Whatever he had been planning to say went out of his mind the moment he saw
her face.
“What’s wrong with you?” Arthur asked.
There were bluish circles under her eyes and her color was bad and her lips were so chapped they were peeling. She looked
like she was fighting off a flu. She looked like death.
“Couldn’t sleep last night. Bad dreams. Probably because I knew I was going to have to deal with your sorry ass today, Oakes.”
“Was a lot worse’n bad dreams,” Ronnie said. His voice was muffled from inside the hood of his parka. “Bitch got wasted and
passed out with a lit cigarette in her mouth. Lucky she didn’t burn her face off. Or burn down the whole house.”
“I told you, fuckhead, I wasn’t smoking.”
Ronnie pushed his hood back and Arthur twitched. He looked bad too. Beneath his whiskers, his skin was cheesy, almost translucent, and his eyes glittered from dark hollows.
“Why’d you wake up coughing smoke then? I swear you were coughing sparks.”
The fine hairs on the nape of Arthur’s neck stirred with a gentle unease.
“So where was the fucking cigarette?” she yelped at him.
“You probably swallowed it. You were so wasted, I wouldn’t be surprised if you ate the whole pack and thought it was a sammidge.”
She exhaled a thin, harsh breath through pursed lips, and looked back at Arthur. They each held one end of Enoch Crane’s journal.
She turned it slightly to examine it.
“I thought it would have a nipple on the cover or something,” Jayne said. “This just looks like any other old book.”
“Well, it isn’t. It’s worth more than all the other books I brought you put together.” She tugged on it—but he didn’t let
go. Instead, he bent slightly to meet her gaze directly. “Jayne. Ask your buyer for thirty. Not twelve. Thirty.”
Jayne’s eyes were watery and bloodshot, and there were deep lines etched around her mouth, the sort of lines one expected
to see in a woman twice her age.
She lives hard, Arthur said to himself. She won’t live long going the way she does.
Then he thought, I wouldn’t give her past Easter, a thought that gave him a shudder. Hadn’t there been something about Easter in his weed-stoked dream of dragons?
“I got no other place to take it, and she knows it. I’ve never budged her a penny. Miserable old bitch. I tried to argue her
up once and she looked at me like I was dog puke on the sidewalk. Stopped answering my calls for two weeks. In the end I got
less’n her first offer and had to take it.”
Arthur said, “If she doesn’t want it for thirty, tell her to think on it. Tell her she can have a week, and then you’re going
to start tearing pages out and using them for toilet paper. She’ll come up. Maybe not to thirty. But at least to twenty. Maybe
twenty-five.”
Jayne’s eyes were fogged with exhaustion, but one corner of her mouth twitched at that. “Gosh, you’re bold today. I hope this isn’t because you want something out of Tana she hasn’t given you yet. That what you want? You want anal?”
A sliver of disgust—for himself as much as for Jayne—lanced right through him, an emotion that felt like a stabbing. He said,
“No. I want to be left alone until after February break.”
Her wide lips twitched in another suggestion of a smile. “Your momma got a parole hearing then, don’t she? End of February?”
“Yes, she does. And I’m going up there to testify on her behalf.” To grovel, if he had to.
“Too bad they found a shiv in her cell. That probably scotches that. A concealed weapon, that’s a serious thing. Looks to
me like she’s going to have to do her full stretch. Don’t get your hopes up, Arthur. They pass her over, she’s in there another
year. Dr. Oakes won’t graduate until 1991, and neither will you. You and me still got a lot more business to do, I think.”
He felt ill at the thought of being caught, ruined, arrested. But he felt worse at the thought of continuing to get away with
it, stealing for Jayne month after month, with no hope of reprieve.
“No,” he said. “You forget. I graduate. I won’t have access anymore.”
“You’re friends with that shiny-headed rich bastid the Underfoots work for, ain’t you? Wren? In his house all the time? You
don’t have access to the school library anymore, you’ll still be able to get into The Briars. Colin Wren’s grandfather is
a rich ol’ queen. I bet there’s plenty to take in there.”
A sick throb pulsed in the side of his neck, up into his jaw. He shook his head. “Can’t. I’ll be gone, Jayne. I leave for
the UK in the middle of July to see my grandparents, and this year, I’m not coming back. I’m enrolling at Magdalen College
in Oxford to get my master’s degree.” When he thought of Oxford, it was with the desperation of a man who finds himself in
freezing seas, a mile from shore, battling against the force of the tides.
Jayne smirked and looked away. “We can talk about that later, I guess.”
“Talk about what?”
“Your post-graduation plans. I’m thinking that’s something we probably ought to decide together. If your mom is still in the
clink then, I figure you’d want to put off going to England and stay right close, for emotional support. Hell, if you were
to leave, who knows what would happen to her? She might get so heart-broke she decides to kill herself in her cell.”
His legs felt weak. He wondered if they’d give out on him, if he’d just sit down now on the frozen blacktop.
“They skinned a fella to make this,” Jayne said, considering the book now. “Think of that. I guess books and men aren’t so
different. They’re both red after they’re opened up.” She tossed it into Ronnie’s lap. He had pulled his hood back up, might’ve
gone to sleep. She said, “If my Boston connection really does go to twenty, you can have a break till the end of February.
But then we’re back in business, Artie. I’m getting a lot out of our little book club. Aren’t you?”
He straightened. She was laughing when she rolled up her window. The inside of the window was steamed over from condensation,
so she looked like a ghost of herself, seen through the glass. She looked like a drowning victim, submerged beneath a layer
of ice.
Arthur never stole another thing for Jayne Nighswander.