What happened with a much longer work, a novel called Christine, began to happen here. About thirty pages in, the humor began to go out of the situation. And about fifty pages in, the whole story took a screaming left turn into the dark places I have travelled so often and which I still know so little about.
Eventually I found the guy I was looking for, and managed to raise my head enough to look into his merciless silver eyes. I have tried to bring back a sketch of him for you, Constant Reader, but it may not be very good.
My hands were trembling quite badly when I made it, you see.
CHAPTER 1
The Stand-In
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Everything, Sam Peebles decided later, was the fault of the goddamned acrobat. If the acrobat hadn’t gotten drunk at exactly the wrong time, Sam never would have ended up in such trouble.
It is not bad enough, he thought with a perhaps justifiable bitterness, that life is like a narrow beam over an endless chasm, a beam we have to walk blindfolded. It’s bad, but not bad enough. Sometimes, we also get pushed.
But that was later. First, before the Library Policeman, was the drunken acrobat.
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In Junction City, the last Friday of every month was Speaker’s Night at the local Rotarians’ Hall. On the last Friday in March of 1990, the Rotarians were scheduled to hear – and to be entertained by – The Amazing Joe, an acrobat with Curry & Trembo’s All-Star Circus and Travelling Carnival.
The telephone on Sam Peebles’s desk at Junction City Realty and Insurance rang at five past four on Thursday afternoon. Sam picked it up. It was always Sam who picked it up – either Sam in person or Sam on the answering machine, because he was Junction City Realty and Insurance’s owner and sole employee.
He was not a rich man, but he was a reasonably happy one. He liked to tell people that his first Mercedes was still quite a distance in the future, but he had a Ford which was almost new and owned his own home on Kelton Avenue. ‘Also, the business keeps me in beer and skittles,’ he liked to add … although in truth, he hadn’t drunk much beer since college and wasn’t exactly sure what skittles were. He thought they might be pretzels.
‘Junction City Realty and In – ‘
‘Sam, this is Craig. The acrobat broke his neck.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me!’ Craig Jones cried in deeply aggrieved tones. ‘The acrobat broke his fucking neck!’
‘Oh,’ Sam said. ‘Gee.’ He thought about this for a moment and then asked cautiously, ‘Is he dead, Craig?’
‘No, he’s not dead, but he might as well be as far as we’re concerned. He’s in the hospital over in Cedar Rapids with his neck dipped in about twenty pounds of plaster. Billy Bright just called me. He said the guy came on drunk as a skunk at the matinee this afternoon, tried to do a back-over flip, and landed outside the center ring on the nape of his neck. Billy said he could hear it way up in the bleachers, where he was sitting. He said it sounded like when you step in a puddle that just iced over.’
‘Ouch!’ Sam exclaimed, wincing.
‘I’m not surprised. After all – The Amazing Joe. What kind of name is that for a circus performer? I mean, The Amazing Randix, okay. The Amazing Tortellini, still not bad. But The Amazing Joe? It sounds like a prime example of brain damage in action to me.’
‘Jesus, that’s too bad.’
‘Fucking shit on toast is what it is. It leaves us without a speaker tomorrow night, good buddy.’
Sam began to wish he had left the office promptly at four. Craig would have been stuck with Sam the answering machine, and that would have given Sam the living being a little more time to think. He felt he would soon need time to think. He also felt that Craig Jones was not going to give him any.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I guess that’s true enough.’ He hoped he sounded philosophical but helpless. ‘What a shame.’
‘It sure is,’ Craig said, and then dropped the dime. ‘But I know you’ll be happy to step in and fill the slot.’
‘Me? Craig, you’ve got to be kidding! I can’t even do a somersault, let alone a back-over fl – ‘
‘Thought you could talk about the importance of the independently owned business in small-town life,’
Craig Jones pressed on relentlessly. ‘If that doesn’t do it for you, there’s baseball. Lacking that, you could always drop your pants and wag your wing-wang at the audience. Sam, I am not just the head of the Speaker’s Committee – that would be bad enough. But since Kenny moved away and Carl quit coming, I am the Speaker’s Committee. Now, you’ve got to help me. I need a speaker tomorrow night. There are about five guys in the whole damn club I feel I can trust in a pinch, and you’re one of them.’
‘But – ‘
‘You’re also the only one who hasn’t filled in already in a situation like this, so you’re elected, buddy-boy.’
‘Frank Stephens pinch-hit for the guy from the trucking union last year when the grand jury indicted him for fraud and he couldn’t show up. Sam – it’s your turn in the barrel. You can’t let me down, man. You owe me.’
‘I run an insurance business!’ Sam cried. ‘When I’m not writing insurance, I sell farms! Mostly to banks!
Most people find it boring! The ones who don’t find it boring find it disgusting!’
‘None of that matters.’ Craig was now moving in for the kill, marching over Sam’s puny objections in grim hobnailed boots. ‘They’ll all be drunk by the end of dinner and you know it. They won’t remember a goddam word you said come Saturday morning, but in the meantime, I need someone to stand up and talk for half an hour and you’re elected!’
Sam continued to object a little longer, but Craig kept coming down on the imperatives, italicizing them mercilessly. Need. Gotta. Owe.
‘All right!’ he said at last. ‘All right, all right! Enough!’
‘My man!’ Craig exclaimed. His voice was suddenly full of sunshine and rainbows. ‘Remember, it doesn’t have to be any longer than thirty minutes, plus maybe another ten for questions. If anybody has any questions. And you really can wag your wing-wang if you want to. I doubt that anybody could actually see it, but – ‘
‘Craig,’ Sam said, ‘that’s enough.’
‘Oh! Sorry! Shet mah mouf!’ Craig, perhaps lightheaded with relief, cackled.
‘Listen, why don’t we terminate this discussion?’ Sam reached for the roll of Turns he kept in his desk drawer. He suddenly felt he might need quite a few Turns during the next twenty-eight hours or so. ‘It looks as if I’ve got a speech to write.’
‘You got it,’ Craig said. ‘Just remember – dinner at six, speech at seventhirty. As they used to say on Hawaii Five-0, be there! Aloha!’
‘Aloha, Craig,’ Sam said, and hung up. He stared at the phone. He felt hot gas rising slowly up through his chest and into his throat. He opened his mouth and uttered a sour burp – the product of a stomach which had been reasonably serene until five minutes ago.
He ate the first of what would prove to be a great many Tums indeed.
3
Instead of going bowling that night as he had planned, Sam Peebles shut himself in his study at home with a yellow legal pad, three sharpened pencils, a package of Kent cigarettes, and a six-pack of Jolt. He unplugged the telephone from the wall, lit a cigarette, and stared at the yellow pad. After five minutes of staring, he wrote this on the top line of the top sheet:
SMALL-TOWN BUSINESSES: THE LIFEBLOOD OF AMERICA
He said it out loud and liked the sound of it. Well … maybe he didn’t exactly like it, but he could live with it. He said it louder and liked it better. A little better. It actually wasn’t that good; in fact, it probably sucked the big hairy one, but it beat the shit out of ‘Communism: Threat or Menace.’ And Craig was right – most of them would be too hung over on Saturday morning to remember what they’d heard on Friday night, anyway.
Marginally encouraged, Sam began to write.
‘When I moved to Junction City from the more or less thriving metropolis of Ames in 1984
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and that is why I feel now, as I did on that bright September morn in 1984, that small businesses are not just the lifeblood of America, but the bright and sparkly lifeblood of the entire Western world.’
Sam stopped, crushed out a cigarette in the ashtray on his office desk, and looked hopefully at Naomi Higgins.
‘Well? What do you think?’