Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

“No, it’s pretty old, I think.” He turned and looked around the shop. “Nice place ye got here.” The smell of so many books combined with her perfume was more intoxicating than any whiskey he’d ever tasted.

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s my father’s store. I just help out sometimes.”

“Ye got anything you’d recommend?”

“Well, what do you like?”

He shrugged. “Stories, I guess. Just started this one called Richard the Third. ”

“Oh, I love Shakespeare,” she said. “ ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for—’ ” She broke off then, putting her hand to her mouth and looking slightly embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I guess I got a little carried away. I almost gave away the ending.” Even though he had a thick Southern accent and a cheap suit, Susannah noticed that the customer was quite handsome in a rough, manly sort of way. She would have never thought by looking at him that he had any interest in Elizabethan drama, or, for that matter, that he’d ever read anything other than newspapers and maybe a cheap thriller or two. Her current suitor, Sandy Saunders, was the exact opposite of everything this man seemed to be. An insurance salesman for Mutual of Omaha, Sandy spent almost every dime he made from his commissions on the latest fashions and playing big-shot at the Candlelight Supper Club with a couple of his chums on the city council. Anytime he took her out on a date, it seemed as if his main objective was to stick her fingers in his mouth, which she thought was sweet the first time he did it, but had since turned creepy. Though he was attractive enough, his looks had never transcended the boyish stage and now, at thirty, were already starting to fade due to his constant carousing. Too, he was somewhat erratic, and could get angry over the most ridiculous things. For example, he’d been nursing a resentment against the mayor and the city engineer ever since they’d hired Jasper Cone to look over the town’s outhouses. Then, a couple of weeks ago, he shut up about them and began focusing all his rage on Jasper instead, saying the most cruel and hateful things about the pathetic little man. Still, that wasn’t what stopped her from fully committing herself to Sandy. Books were her greatest passion, and she could never get serious about a man who didn’t read, let alone marry one. To do so, she felt, would be like hitching her star to a fence post that just happened to breathe air and draw a paycheck. In the two years he had been courting her, he had yet to finish Treasure Island, which was the book he’d bought when he came in the shop to ask her out the first time. She sensed the customer watching her as she glided her fingers along a shelf, and it made her tingle slightly. Had Sandy ever aroused such a feeling in her? No, she thought regretfully, no matter how hard he sucked on her fingers. She pulled out two leather-backed volumes: a slightly scuffed but tight copy of Great Expectations and a pristine Collected Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. “Try these,” she told Cane, “and if you don’t like them, you can bring them back.”

He glanced at them and nodded (he would have accepted anything she handed him, even a cookbook written in Italian or a walking guide to Great Britain), then followed her to the front of the store, watching her hips slightly sway as she walked. Pulling out a wad of cash, he laid a twenty on the counter, and she began wrapping the books in a sheet of white paper. He glanced around the store again, trying to build up the courage to ask her out to dinner. Wiping his sweaty palms on his trousers, he realized that he was more nervous than he’d been when he and his brothers walked into their first bank back in Farleigh. Just then he saw Cob limping by the window. Christ, looked for him all morning, and now he shows up. “I’m much obliged,” he told her, snatching the parcel out of her hands.

“Wait. What about your change?”

“Keep it,” he said as he hurried out the door.

“Goddamn it, where have you been?” he asked Cob when he caught up with him. “I thought something happened.”

“No, I was just with the sanitation inspector.”

“Who?”

“Some guy I met this morning when I sittin’ on a bench eatin’ doughnuts.”

Cane waited until some people passed by, then pulled Cob by the shirtsleeve into an alley. “What did you tell him your name was?” he said urgently.

“Junior Bradford.”

“What else?”

“Nothing. He did most of the talking. His name’s Jasper.”

“So what is he again?”

“The sani…the sanitation inspector.”

“What the hell’s that? Is he some kind of lawman?”

“No, I don’t think so. He goes around trying to catch people doin’ their business in other people’s wells.”

“Are you sure?” Cane said. It sounded a bit unbelievable to him; maybe someone had just figured out how gullible his brother was and decided to pull his leg.

“Yeah, I was with him all morning. He’s a nice feller.”

“Christ, who in the hell would take a shit in somebody’s drinking water?”

“I don’t know, but there must be a lot of them doin’ it, the way he talks.”

“And that’s a job, what he does?”

“I guess so,” Cob said. “He seems to think it is anyway. You ain’t mad at me, are ye?”

Cane sighed and shook his head. “No, but next time don’t leave without telling me where you’re going first. I been looking all over for you. Remember, we got to be careful.”

“He wants me to go with him again tomorrow. Is that all right?”

“What, to look in more privies? Why would you want to do that?”

“I don’t know,” Cob said with a shrug. “He said we was friends. Besides, what else am I gonna do?”

Cane’s stomach growled. Looking down the street, he saw a sign hanging over a door that said WHITE’S LUNCHEONETTE. He’d been half sick all morning from the liquor he drank last night, but now he felt ravenous. “You had anything to eat?”

“Just the doughnuts,” Cob said. He wanted to ask why the lady would give them away for free, and what “on de house” meant, but his brother already seemed a little upset. Maybe later, he thought.

“Well, let’s go get something.”

“Did you have a good time out at that whore shed last night?” Cob asked as they started walking toward the diner.

“Ah, not really,” Cane said, wishing he’d had enough nerve to ask the bookstore lady her name. “But Chimney sure did.”

THAT AFTERNOON, A tree buyer for the paper mill named Nesbert Motley let Sugar out of his automobile at the bridge on the south side of town. Motley was coming back from making an offer on a pristine stand of hardwood down below Buchanan when he came around a curve and damn near ran over the black man standing in the middle of the road. He didn’t mind at all giving him a ride — some of the best days of his boyhood over in Lancaster had been spent in the company of a colored boy named Smoky Hansberry — but he was a little hesitant about being seen uptown with somebody so ragged and wild-looking. And what if he later caused trouble? It was true that Sugar looked like he was at the end of his rope. He hadn’t had a bite of food except walnuts or a drink of anything but water in three days; the loose sole of one of his shoes flapped with every step he took, and he’d had to tie a piece of ivy around his pants to keep them from falling to the ground. Probably the only thing still keeping him upright was his determination to get back to Detroit and start sweet-talking Flora’s friend.

Sugar was walking past the reeking, rackety mill wondering why someone would ever voluntarily stick around such a place when he saw a big man in front of a bar motioning him over. Sugar hesitated a moment, then crossed the street and stopped at the edge of the sidewalk. “You want something?” he asked the man.