a scarf, you might find it a little easier to appreciate my point of view.”
`Àll right,” he said, `Ì suppose you’ve got a point. But why argue it? Arguing with one’s self is like playing solitaire
chess–a fair game results in a stalemate every time. Let’s just say I’m doing it because I can.”
I felt a little calmer, all of a sudden. I had been down this street before. When they got the drop on you, you had to get
them talking and keep them talking. It had worked with Mavis Weld and it would work here. They said stuff like Well,
I suppose it won’t hurt you to know now or What harm can it do?
Mavis’s version had been downright elegant: I want you to know, Umney–I want you to take the truth to hell with you.
You can pass it on to the devil over cake and coffee. It really didn’t matter what they said, but if they were talking, they
weren’t shooting.
Always keep em talking, that was the thing. Keep em talking and just hope the cavalry
would show up from
somewhere.
“The question is, why do you want to?’ I asked. `Ìt’s hardly the usual thing, is it? I mean, aren’t you writer types
usually content to cash the checks when they come, and go about your business?’
“You’re trying to keep me talking, Clyde. Aren’t you?’
That hit me like a sucker-punch to the gut, but playing it down to the last card was the only choice I had. I grinned and
shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I really do want to know.” And there was no lie in that.
He looked unsure for a moment longer, bent over and touched the keys inside that
strange plastic case (I felt cramps in
my legs and gut and chest as he stroked them), then straightened up again.
`Ì suppose it won’t hurt you to know now,” he said finally. `Àfter all, what harm can it do?’
“Not a bit.”
“You’re a clever boy, Clyde,” he said, `ànd you’re perfectly right –writers very rarely plunge all the way into the
worlds they’ve created, and when they do I think they end up doing it strictly in their heads, while their bodies vegetate
in some mental asylum. Most of us are content simply to be tourists in the country of our imaginations. Certainly that
was the case with me. I’m not a fast writer–composition has always been torture for
me, I think I told you that–but I
managed five Clyde Umney books in ten years, each more successful than the last. In 1983 I left my job as regional
manager for a big insurance company and started to write full-time. I had a wife I loved, a little boy that kicked the sun
out of bed every morning and put it to bed every night–that’s how it seemed to me, anyway–and I didn’t think life
could get any better.”
He shifted in the overstuffed client’s chair, moved his hand, and I saw the cigarette burn Ardis McGill had put in the
over-stuffed arm was also gone. He voiced a bitterly cold laugh.
`Ànd I was right,” he said. `Ìt couldn’t get any better, but it could get a whole hell of a lot worse. And did. About
three months after I started How Like a Fallen Angel, Danny–our little boy–fell out of a swing in the park and
bashed his head. Cold-conked himself, in your parlance.”
A brief smile, every bit as cold and bitter as the laugh had been, crossed his face.
It came and went at the speed of grief.
“He bled a lot–you’ve seen enough head-wounds in your time to know how they are–and it scared the crap out of
Linda, but the doctors were good and it did turn out to be only a concussion; they got him stabilized and gave him a pint
of blood to make up for what he’d lost. Maybe they didn’t have to–and that haunts me-
-but they did. The real
problem wasn’t with his head, you see; it was with that pint of blood. It was infected with AIDS.”
“Come again?”
`Ìt’s something you can thank your God you don’t know about,” Landry said. `Ìt