A Slepyng Hound to Wake Read online

  She had been Henry’s buddy. After their mother died, it was Shelagh who had taken over the house. It was Shelagh who had coached Henry through algebra and chemistry. Except for the money, she could have gone to any school she wanted, but the University of Massachusetts was the only one the old man would allow. She had tried that for more than a year, taking the bus each day out to Dorchester, taking care of homework and housekeeping at night, and waiting tables at Vinnie’s on weekends. She had managed it all until the day she ran away.

  Not long after that, it was Albert who had first taken Henry to the ballpark one July, and had bought the better seats. “Why sit in the bleachers if you don’t have to?” These came as words of revelation. It had become something of a motto with Henry since then. “Why sit in the bleachers if you don’t have to?”

  Nomar Garciaparra launched himself from his position at shortstop and extended in the air for a ball, flipping it to the second baseman before his own feet touched the ground again. The crowd erupted. But the Sox were still down by two.

  Albert was right, of course, but Henry was given to twisting it around a little. In the new world of city-bound SUVs and three-dollar cups of coffee, it was an easy motto to lampoon. “Why sit in the bleachers?”

  What if Henry had pulled a “Teddy Morris”? There was no stink on Teddy Morris any more. Henry could have gone to college and worked for a big corporation, owned a second house on the Cape, a condo in Vermont, and two cars, supported his second wife in better style than his first, raised a teenage daughter who was pregnant with no idea who the father was and a son who stole money from his wallet, had a fifty-inch plasma TV with all the channels, and died young after the second bypass.

  Henry usually raised Teddy Morris out of the grave when drinking beers with Albert at the Blue Thorn, just because it was worth more even than the mention of a snob. The only thing worse to Albert than a snob was somebody who had it all and threw it away.

  Henry considered this bit of dark fantasy now as an alternative to his riff on snobbery. It was certainly a better topic for idle ballgame chatter than whether Henry stank. Someone might overhear that and misunderstand. Whatever device Henry chose, Albert needed a jolt. Albert was being too smug. He needed a hit. He needed a cold chill down the spine of the cozy little world he had made for himself, if for no other reason than Albert had not given up on his fit over the tickets. He had raved about it for half an hour before the game. Henry was tired of it. Albert had brought it up a dozen times in the past month. Henry had paid. He was paying. He would stick it to Albert when he returned because he knew Albert’s weakness.

  Albert had gone to college. Albert could have been a lawyer and filled the affirmative-action slot at some big firm downtown and made a fortune. He had passed the frigging exams, for Christ sake. He had the freakin’ scholarship. He could have gone to Yale. But what had he done? He had stuck with Myron Evans. He had taken over Myron’s refuse removal business. He was a garbage man. A big, smug, and happy garbage man.

  But it was Albert who spoke first again as he handed Henry his beer.

  “Sweet Mother of Mercy, that girl is stacked.”

  Everybody was looking at the redhead. Diverted, Henry sipped his beer and considered his knowledge of the subject.

  “You think they’re real?”

  Henry could never tell at a distance. Mandy, the girl he had dated from the Necco candy factory, had been blessed by God and they were real. But how could you tell from a distance?

  Albert shook his head. “Nah. It’s the lift. See the lift? Real ones that big would droop.”

  Henry turned and studied the matter. The crowd around him rose to their feet. He turned toward the field in time to see a fly ball enter the upheld hands of the fellow directly in front of him.

  Sweet Mother of Mercy! Henry closed his eyes on the thought.

  “You could’a had that,” Albert said. “It was yours.”

  It was his, the one he had been waiting for.

  He kept hearing Albert’s voice well into the night, well after they stopped at the Blue Thorn on the way home. They sat at the bar and leaned into the wood. The Red Sox had lost. They had lost to frigging Detroit.

  “You were at least a foot higher.” Albert raised a hand above Tim’s head across the bar to dramatize that matter. “It was on your side. It was yours. I should have reached over myself, but it was yours.”

  Henry pleaded his case to Tim’s unforgiving eyes. “I didn’t see it.”

  Albert repeated, “It was in front of your face.”

  Tim said, “I know you. You were looking at some girl. I’ll bet you were staring at some girl.”

  Tim wiped the already clean counter once more for effect and walked away.

  Tim could be annoying. He was taking his new role as a father too seriously. Bartenders could not afford to be prudes.

  Albert nursed his glass with a smile caught in his cheeks. Henry finished his own beer as he re-imagined the moment yet again. The ball was right there.

  Henry reconsidered his plan to put an elbow into Albert’s soft spot as a way to get him back. But Albert beat him to the punch once more.

  “Will they have a funeral for the book junkie?”

  It was not Henry’s day. He must have missed some sleep. Albert had been one up on him all the way. He gave up.

  “No. I don’t think he had a family. No prayers for the book hound.”

  Henry had not known whom to ask.

  Albert looked at Henry in the mirror across the bar. “What happens? Cremation?”

  Henry shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Alice’s mother was cremated,” Albert added. “She wanted it that way. She was cheap to the end.”

  Henry shook his head again with nothing to add.

  His own mother’s funeral had been short. His father would not have it drawn out. She was buried at Mount Auburn near a cluster of chestnut trees. His father had picked that spot himself. Give the old man credit for that, at least. He hadn’t been cheap when it mattered most.

  Henry remembered little of it. Probably because he was bawling his eyes out. Twelve is too young to lose a mother. Shelagh was the one who had always said the ceremony had been too short. But Henry had been up there a hundred times since, and he had always thought his mother would have liked the spot. When she was alive, she had kept a few dried chestnuts, collected during her frequent walks, on the little table near her bed. For good luck, she said.

  Henry put his finger up to catch Tim’s attention for another beer and pushed the image of his mother out of his head. Albert seemed to be waiting for more detail.

  Henry said, “Eddy Perry was an odd little fellow. Looked like one of those guys you see at the racetrack.”

  “You ever sell anything to him?”

  “No. He lost his store not long after I quit working for Barbara. But I saw him around a few times.”

  Albert squinted at him. “But something still bothers you about it?”

  It was true. Something was still bothering Henry about Eddy Perry. Why?

  “Yeah. … Maybe it’s just the image of an old bookseller coming to a sad end. I saw his apartment. He had nothing left. I don’t know how he was getting by, but it seemed so damn desolate. And then there’s that place we went to—the guy with the shoe boxes—seeing them both the same day. It was a pretty bleak picture.”

  Albert grunted, finished his beer, and shook his head. Henry prepared for the inevitable rant.“I see it every damn week. You’ve seen it before yourself. It’s just people who don’t take care of themselves. They don’t know what to do with their lives. They’re lost. Life is really so simple. You either fish or cut bait. But these days it looks to me like half the people out there just want to eat. They don’t want to fish. They don’t want to cut bait. They just say, ‘Fry it up in a good cornmeal batter please, and cut me a lemon for the side, thank you.’ They don’t have the faintest idea even how to fish. They don’t want to learn. They won’t get ou
t of bed in time to cut bait. They just want to eat. And then they make a mess. Don’t even clean up after themselves. I worked sixty hours last week. You know that. Sixty hours. And half of it went to taxes. City of Boston raised the taxes on my house again last year just because I keep it up. Doesn’t pay. I ought to let it fall down.”

  Albert stopped talking long enough to drink the rest of his beer in one long swallow. Henry took the opportunity.

  “What does that have to do with Eddy Perry?”

  Albert answered, still irritated.

  “Everything!”

  Albert’s unified trash-field theory was not Henry’s favorite.

  Henry said, “Eddy was just a drug addict with a love for books—”

  Albert interrupted. “Another lost soul.”

  “A lost soul, maybe.” Henry kept talking. He wanted to make his point now. “I wonder about that. I’d like to find out. I’d like to find out what happened to his soul.”

  Albert turned and looked at him with a big eye.

  “You only had two beers. You’re not ready to talk like that.”

  Henry hunched his shoulders with both forearms on the bar, and grasped his glass between both hands. He felt like hunkering down. He might be getting sick. He was never sick, but this might be the time. It was that kind of day.

  He said, “I had one more at the game.”

  Albert’s voice was not forgiving. “That was no better than water. It’s too early in the evening to be talking about finding souls.”

  “I just wonder who he was.”

  “You’re feeling your mortality. It’s just you turning forty.”

  “I’m not forty yet. You don’t have to be religious to believe in a soul.”

  “Damn near.”

  Henry persisted. “It’s just what a person is, without the ugly details of dental floss and toilet paper.”

  “A dirty stinky person.”

  “The essence—”

  Albert interrupted again, “The perfume of a week’s worth of garbage.”

  Henry answered, “A person is more than the sum total of their garbage.”

  Albert raised an eyebrow at him. “Is that your philosophy then?”

  Henry sat back. “Eddy Perry was a bookseller. How did he become a bookseller?” He looked at Albert as if the question might be guessed.

  Albert scowled. “You can’t expect to understand what motivates everyone. It’s usually just the path of least resistance that takes folks along.”

  Henry said, “I’d like to know. … Someone has to bother.”

  Albert said, “I guess it doesn’t hurt me, one way or the other. You’ve heard me say it before, ninety percent of everything is trash. Sooner or later, I’ll have to haul it. I’m in the only business there is with a guaranteed future.”

  Henry turned his head to look at Albert’s face. “Doesn’t that depress you a little?”

  Albert grimaced a bit with the thought. “No. Yeah. Sometimes. Not often. Sometimes you can see a life there. You can see the geology of a person’s life in the layers of trash they accumulate. You see what they cared about. Their taste in clothes. The cereal they liked to eat. The kind of music they listened to. It’s no different really than the rest of mother nature. Layer after layer. It’s just the turning forty thing that’s got a hold of you, Henry. You’re starting to feel like things don’t last forever. Time to start living before you start dying.”

  Henry blew a low whistle at the image. “A pleasant thought. I don’t think Eddy had enough to speak of geologically. It didn’t look to me like he had anything at all.”

  Albert worked Henry’s thought a bit further. “And you’re wondering what you’ll have in the end. Aren’t you? Who is going to say a prayer for Henry Sullivan when he goes?”

  Tim spoke from the far end of the bar. “You know, Henry, you ought to get married. You need a wife.”

  Henry shook his head in disbelief. “Jesus, you are something else, Tim. It took the combined efforts of both Albert and myself to get you out of that one-room studio in Charlestown. I still have a piece of the wedding cake in my freezer. You have no authority on the subject. Not yet.”

  Tim looked back directly at Albert and spoke in tones of pity. “He’s going to die a lonely man, all by himself. Who’s going to come to his funeral when some shelf of books falls down on his stupid head?”

  Henry sat up straight from his slump. He knew the right answer to that.

  “Alice will come. Alice will be at the funeral just to be sure I won’t be coming over afterwards for any fried chicken.”

  Albert’s laugh quieted the voices behind them in the bar.

  Chapter Three

  “Henry.”

  It was Barbara’s voice. She never said “Hello” when she called on the phone. He pretended not to know who it was, just to irritate her.

  “Who is this?”

  She ignored him. “Wake up. I read in the papers that you were questioned by the police.”

  She could tell by his voice that he had been sleeping.

  He chided her. “That’s old news. You’re behind on your reading.”

  “You’re right about that. Time has been a little tight around here. What happened?”

  He took a breath to get a bit more oxygen into his brain for a good answer.

  “All I did was buy a book. I don’t know. But Eddy Perry is dead.”

  Barbara had known Eddy, though Henry could not help but wonder if there was some other reason for her call. Henry had not been in Alcott & Poe in weeks, and he could not remember when they had last spoken.

  “Very sad. … I guess he’ll never write the book he used to talk about.”

  The concern in her voice was real. She cared about Eddy, but then she cared about almost everyone. “Earth Mother,” he used to call her.

  Henry remembered seeing the typewriter on the desk in Eddy’s apartment. “What kind of book?”

  “I don’t know. Just something I heard him say more than once. I only saw him in the store now and again. You know, I was afraid he might be stealing, because of the drugs and all. But he was always friendly. I think he liked to talk to me. I never heard him say more than a few words to Sharon or anyone else, but he always seemed to like me.”

  Her assistant, Sharon, was a different story—an ice queen by comparison to Barbara. Most people liked Barbara. She was the nosy, assuming, irritating, opinionated, outspoken, well meaning type that everyone was fond of. She had easily overwhelmed Henry during the years he had worked for her.

  “He was a sad case. Had he sold anything to you recently?”

  “Not in a while. You know we’ve been a little short on capital lately. But someone else told me they saw Eddy making the rounds with a few items some months back. I think he was trying to get something going again with selling books. I think he might have been getting back on his feet.”

  “I guess that makes it even sadder.”

  There was a silence that made it clear Barbara was trying to work her way toward another topic.

  She said, “But, you’re okay. You didn’t lose much?”

  “Fine. No. Everything is fine. I might be out four hundred and fifty dollars, but I have enough coming in to cover it.”

  She paused. He knew the amount was not important to her. She was working toward something else.

  “If you need any help, you can ask, you know. I won’t bite.”

  “I don’t remember any biting.”

  He was sorry he said it, as soon as the words were out.

  “You’re being nasty.”

  “I didn’t bring it up.”

  There was another brief silence.

  “How’s Miss Toth?” Barbara’s tone of voice had somehow changed. Just a nuance. It was funny how she remembered names. The second time he had taken Della out on a date they had bumped into Barbara at the Gardner Museum.

  “She’s fine.” He knew she would want more.

  “Are you still going out with her?”
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  “No.” The less he said, the better.

  “That was quick. You looked pretty serious.”

  “It didn’t work out.”

  “Sorry. I know you only take the girls you’re serious about to the Gardner.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It’s where you took me, the first time you took me anywhere.”

  “I guess so.”

  “It was sweet.”

  He was not going to say anything else. He let a moment of silence break the chain. He could see the pattern and knew where this was headed. She finally spoke.

  “You want to go to dinner sometime and talk?”

  “Thanks. No.”

  “I’ll bite.”

  “Thanks. But no.”

  “All right. … But, you can still come up and see me sometime.”

  “Okay.”

  She hung up without saying goodbye.

  Barbara was getting better looking as she got older. Was that just him or was it true? When he had worked for her, back in the ’80s, she was just a skinny little rich girl out of Boston University with the want to run her own business because she could not stand taking orders from anyone else. It had taken Henry months to convince her she should mix used books with her new stock, but in the end she had listened. Unfortunately, as much as she liked dealing with people, she had failed to convince him in turn that the human race was worth saving.