Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“All right!”

“All books are in some way about other books.”

“I get it!”

It was an endless search, and endlessly fruitful; the dead sent me hurtling through time, through the centuries, and while Bruno seethed at my wide-eyed reverence for something as inert and unmanly as a book, Dave was intrigued. Sometimes he’d flop down beside me after a fight, and with blood streaming down his face he’d say, “Tell me what you’re reading about.” And I’d tell him, keeping an eye on Bruno, who burned with white-hot ignorant hate. More than once he tore my books into shreds. More than once I sat horrified as one of them flew off the edge of a cliff. There goes Crime and Punishment ! There goes Plato’s Republic ! The pages may have spread like wings as they fell, but they wouldn’t fly.

The boys demanded that while reading, I keep one eye out for police and tourists. Terry nudged me in a way that said, “Do this one small thing to keep the peace,” so I acquiesced, though as a lookout I was terrible. I was too busy observing the gang and coming to conclusions that I was burning to share. Bruno, Dave, and Terry had smashed their way into supremacy of the district and now were undefeated and bored. They had big plans for themselves; they wanted to climb the underworld ladder- which I suppose is a descent- but they were aimless and drowning in the tedium and didn’t know why. I knew why, and I couldn’t stand it that nobody asked me. After raiding my father’s shed, I had even worked out the solution.

One day, despite myself, I spoke up, and pushed my brother in a new terrible direction.

“I know why you’re bored,” I said.

“He speaks!” Dave shouted.

“Yeah,” Bruno said. “Now shut up!”

“Hang on,” Dave said, “I want to hear what he has to say. Go on, you sorry sack of shit, tell us why we’re bored.”

“You’ve stopped learning,” I said. No one responded, so I braved the silence and sliced right through it. “You’ve peaked. You know how to fight. You know how to steal. You keep doing the same thing day in and day out. You’re no longer stimulated. What you need is a mentor. You need someone in the crime scene to tell you how to get to the next level.”

Everyone absorbed my advice. I returned to my book, but I was only pretending to read. I was too excited! There was a warm river trickling through my veins. What was this feeling all about? It was brand-new.

Bruno threw a stone so it hit the tree inches above my head.

“Look around, dickhead. This isn’t the city. Where the fuck do we find someone like that?”

Without looking up from my book, and concealing my inner fire, I pointed up to my father’s proudest achievement- the prison on the hill.

“So how are we supposed to know who to ask to mentor us?” Dave asked.

“I already know,” I said.

My father’s shed was furnished with every conceivable detail about the prison and prison life, including, thanks to his whipping the warden at pool, files on the prisoners themselves. After coming up with my idea, I had studied every file on the whole menagerie of scum up there and had stolen the file of the clear winner.

“First I ruled out white-collar criminals, domestic abusers, and anyone who’d committed a single act of passion,” I said.

“And?”

“And I also excluded rapists.”

“Why?”

“Because there really isn’t any money in it.”

“Have you bloody picked one or not?” Bruno shouted.

I put down my book and reached into my bag for the file. My heart was beating so wildly I could feel it against my chest. I slid the file across a grassy patch of ground to Bruno and with my mouth dry as a new towel said, “This is your man.”

Bruno took a look. The others crowded around. The inmate’s name was Harry West; he was doing life. If there was a crime, he’d committed it: shoplifting, assault and battery, breaking and entering, possession of an illegal firearm, malicious wounding, grievous bodily harm, drug possession, drug dealing, drug making, attempting to bribe an officer of the court, successfully bribing an officer of the court, tax evasion, receiving stolen goods, selling stolen goods, arson, larceny, manslaughter, murder- the whole shebang. He’d set fire to brothels. He shot a man on the dance floor of a bar for doing a fox-trot during a waltz. He stabbed a horse at the racetrack. He’d broken arms, legs, feet, toes, broken ligaments, fragments, particles, matter; his charge sheet stretched back fifty years.

“Why him?”

I sprang to my feet. “The criminal underworld runs the industries of gambling and prostitution. Brothels, strip clubs, bars- these are the venues where the action takes place. You need to find someone who has links to all these things. And someone who’s a career criminal. You don’t want some fly-by-nighter.”

You had to hand it to me, I knew what I was talking about. The boys were impressed. They took another look at the life and times of Harry West. It looked like he’d spent more than half his life in a cell. That’s a life without a lot of running.

I went on: “It’s impossible to know how high up he is in the criminal underworld, but even if he was just answering phones, he’s been in it for long enough to know how the whole system operates. I’m telling you, this is the guy!”

I was electrified. No one had ever seen me like that. Their eyes scrutinized me. A little voice in my head tut-tutted me for encouraging them, but I had spent nearly my entire waking life hatching quirky ideas, and no one other than Caroline had ever heard a single one, until now.

“Let’s do it,” Bruno said, and immediately my stomach tightened. Why? A strange physical reaction was going on inside me. As soon as my idea was embraced, I no longer liked it. It now seemed to be a stupid idea, really awful. I liked it much better when it was in my head all alone. Now that it was going out in the world, I would be responsible for something I no longer had any control over.

This was my first of a lifetime of battles with ideas: the battle of which ones to air and which ones to bury, burn, destroy.

It was decided that because Bruno and Dave had juvenile records, it would be safer if Terry went to meet Harry West and report his findings back to the gang. One early morning in the middle of winter, before school, I accompanied Terry up to the prison. I was keen to go, not only because it was my idea, but because I had never been to the Palace (as it was often referred to in our home) that my father built.

You couldn’t see it from the town that day. A heavy layer of gray fog swallowed half the hill, including the jail, and snaked down to meet us as we fought our way up toward it. When we reached the halfway mark, we could see the shifting wall of fog in front of us. It curled into knots. We walked right into it, right into the soup. For a good twenty minutes we couldn’t get a fix on anything. To make the ascent harder, it had been raining and the winding dirt road that led up to the peak was a river of mud. I was cursing my own head the whole way up. What a big mouth!

When we saw the heavy gates of the prison emerge out of the fog, a long shiver swept over my body. Terry smiled optimistically. Why wasn’t he worried? How can the same situation make one person garrote himself with nerves and another person bright and cheery?

On the other side of the gate, a solitary guard was standing erect. He peered curiously at us as we leaned up against the bars.

“We’d like to see Harry West,” I said.

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“Martin and Terry Dean.”

The guard eyed us suspiciously. “Are you family?”