Shriver (22 page)

“You know who,” Simone said, her voice uncharacteristically hard and authoritative. “Now, where is he?”

Edsel hesitated.
Please
, Shriver thought.

“That's probably his porridge,” the real Shriver noted.

Did he say
porridge
? How pretentious!

“Well?” Simone said. “Is it his, Edsel?”

“Yes,” the student confessed. Shriver froze and sent a telepathic message:
Don't tell them I'm here, Mr. Nixon!

“Where is he, Edsel?” Simone asked.

Shriver held his breath. Edsel's feet tapped like a jazz drummer's.

The real Shriver spoke up: “Come now, Mr. . . .”

“Nixon.”

“You're kidding.
Edsel Nixon?
”

“I know what you're thinking,” Edsel said. “You're thinking, ‘This must be the most unfortunately named—' ”

“What I'm thinking,” the writer said, “is that your parents must be sadists.”

Edsel Nixon's feet ceased their tapping. Shriver could sense the boy's resolve hardening.

“Now,” the real Shriver said, “where is this imposter?”

“I don't know.”

“Edsel,” Simone said.

“He left a while ago.”

“Well, where was he going?”

“He didn't say.”

The writer sighed. “He's no help. Let's go check the room.”

“Fine,” Simone said. “I'll speak with you later, Edsel.”

Nixon said nothing, but his feet started tapping again, even more than before. Shriver watched the two pairs of shoes move off.

“All clear,” Edsel said after a while.

Shriver climbed back onto his chair. “Thank you.”

“I don't like that guy,” his handler said.

/

A few moments later, Shriver and Nixon watched from behind a fern as Simone and the writer headed out to the parking lot. Shriver detected no outward signs of intimacy between the two—no touching or other clues—but still worried that Simone would, in her weakened state, be susceptible to seduction.

“Let's see if we can find a way into your room,” Edsel said.

Shriver followed him to the reception desk.

“Oh,” Sue St. Marie said, “that lady from the college was looking for you, Mr. Shriver.”

“I know.”

“She says you have to be out of your room by checkout time.”

“When is that?”

She checked her watch. “Half an hour ago.”

“First I need to get
into
my room,” he reminded her.

“Oh—right. I did get in touch with our maintenance guy.” She searched through some message notes on the desk.

“What did he say?” Edsel asked.

“Here it is.” She read the note to herself, then said, “He's out sick today, actually.”

“First the maid is sick, now the maintenance guy?”

“What can I tell you? Don't eat the mozzarella sticks in the saloon.”

Shriver wanted to weep. He didn't so much care about his clothes, but he desperately wanted to retrieve his story before he was run out of town. He'd worked too hard on it to leave it in that decrepit hotel room.

“I'm very sorry about this,” Sue St. Marie said.

“Is there any way to break in?” Edsel Nixon asked her.

“Well, you can knock the door down with a battering ram. Or you could try to pick the lock, but then you don't strike me as the cat burglar type.”

“How about the window?” Edsel asked.

She mulled it over. “If it's unlocked, that would work. You'd just need a ladder.”

Edsel turned to Shriver. “Is your window open?”

“I don't remember.”

He knew that, at one point the other night, the window had been open as he watched the cheerleaders construct their pyramid. But had he locked it afterward?

Sue St. Marie directed them to the maintenance room in the basement. There, among the tools and saws and gloves and scattered copies of
Teen Ho
, they found a long aluminum extension ladder. They each grabbed an end and hobbled up the stairs to the lobby and out the front door. They lugged
the ladder around to the back of the hotel, where they were immediately set upon by mosquitoes. Oddly enough, none attacked Shriver's hand, where the cheerleader had applied the soothing oil.

Far out on the expanse of grass, halfway toward the railroad tracks, the cheerleaders practiced their hyperkinetic drills in preparation for the semifinals. High-pitched shouts of
Red hot! We're red hot! R-E-D-H-O-T!
floated above the prairie as Shriver and Nixon ferried the ladder across the field. When they finally set it down, Shriver's fingers were numb with divots.

“Which room?” Edsel asked, staring up at the identical windows.

“Nineteen.”

They counted the windows from the end of the building until they estimated which one was Shriver's. It was not open, but from this angle, they couldn't tell if it was locked. With some difficulty, they hoisted the ladder up and extended it until it reached the second floor.

“Here,” Edsel said, holding out a rusty box cutter he'd picked up in the maintenance room. “To cut through the screen.”

“Me?” Shriver had expected the young man to climb up the ladder.

Edsel looked at the ground. “Afraid of heights,” he said.

Shriver slid the box cutter into his back pocket and approached the ladder, which, despite its weight, now struck him as thin and insubstantial. He put his hands on a rung and tested the ladder's sturdiness. It seemed strong enough, though there was some give. Edsel stepped forward and, with one hand, took hold of the ladder from underneath, to stabilize it. With his other hand he continued to swipe at the marauding mosquitoes.

Shriver began to climb. The ladder shuddered under his weight. He was only two feet above the ground and already he felt vertiginous. From far behind him he heard the cheerleaders chanting:
We're too hot to handle, there's no doubt! We're too hot to handle, we'll knock you out!
He ascended, one rung at a time, as mosquitoes buzzed around his face.

“Is the window locked?” Edsel asked.

Shriver, who had been staring straight ahead, glanced up. “Can't tell yet,” he answered through clenched teeth.

The sun beat down on his head. With each step the ladder shivered, despite Edsel's hold upon it, and each vibration made its way into Shriver's bones. The box cutter weighed ten pounds in his pocket.

At the top he took a deep breath. The window appeared to be open a half inch. Through the glass he could see only the thick curtain.

“It's open!” he tried to shout, though it came out a thin whine.

“Cut the screen out,” Edsel called up to him.

As Shriver slowly reached back to retrieve the box cutter from his pocket, he stared up at the deep bowl of clear blue sky overhead. Somewhere on the other side were billions of planets spinning in their rutted orbits, impossibly cold and empty, and oblivious to this quaking man on an aluminum ladder. What difference would it make if he plunged to the ground and landed on the blade of the box cutter? By the same token, what did it matter that he was not the real Shriver, but an imposter bumbling through a pointless charade? Paradoxically, the thought that his actions meant so little in the grand scheme of things gave him strength. His head cleared; his hands grew calm and steady. With the mental clarity of a surgeon, he decided he would seek out Simone to confess
his story. Perhaps she would even forgive him before sending him on his way.

Gimme an S!
the cheerleaders cheered.
Gimme an H!

Bolstered by his newfound optimism, he pulled on the window frame until it opened out all the way.

Gimme an R! Gimme an I!

He opened the blade and began to slice the edge of the screen.

Gimme a V! Gimme an E!

He felt his foot slip and the box cutter flopped from his hand like a fish and fell to the ground below.

Gimme an R!

Then his other foot slipped.

Shriver! Shriver! SHRIVER!!!

He plummeted the length of the ladder, his feet
thuk-thuk-thukking
at each rung, his arms flailing at blank air, and then, before he knew what had happened, he landed on his back, his lungs emptied of all oxygen, the blue sky clouded by swarming insects that may or may not have been real.

“Mr. Shriver! Are you all right?”

Edsel Nixon's normally tranquil face, now twisted into a fearful mask, floated above him. Then the sky filled with other faces, pink-cheeked cherubs with their hair neatly swept back into ponytails. There among them was an angel, surely, with a face as familiar as that seen in old Italian frescoes.

“Are you okay, mister?” the angel asked.

“Aw, he just got the wind knocked outta him,” another cherub declared.

A hand, light as a feather, alighted on his chest.

“Breathe,” the angel chanted. “Breathe.”

With each incandescent syllable uttered by this vision, Shriver's lungs expanded a little more, until he could finally pull in
a satisfying breath. Soon the faces came into sharp focus, their cupid-bow lips smacking with bubblegum, their eyes grown bored now that the foolish grown-up was out of danger.

“Thank you,” he whispered to the brunette, whose smile made the sun look ridiculous.

Tiny, powerful hands took hold of his arms, his wrists and hands, and pulled him onto his unstable feet. By the time he'd shaken the blinking lights from his eyes the girls had returned, antelope-like, to their practice field, and Edsel Nixon was nowhere to be seen.

“I'm in!”

The graduate student waved from the open window. The mesh screen hung loose at the edges, like a flap of skin.

There was a bloodcurdling screech, and Edsel vanished. Suddenly, his feet and legs appeared out the window. Behind him, barely discernible in the darkened room, loomed a large pink figure.

“Where are you going?” Delta Malarkey-Jones shouted from the open window. She draped the black curtain before herself like a toga. “Come back!”

Edsel scrambled to the ground. “I guess we aimed for the wrong room,” he said, wiping himself off.

“Was that
you
who screamed, Mr. Nixon?”

“She caught me off guard,” the boy replied, a little defensively.

“Sorry,” Shriver called up to Delta with a hesitant wave.

“Don't be,” she laughed. “You made my day!”

/

After moving the ladder over to the appropriate room, Edsel Nixon bravely climbed up again, only to find the window closed and locked tight.

Leaving the ladder angled against the building, they moped their way back to the lobby, where Sue St. Marie informed them that the afternoon maid was due in around two.

“And she has the only other key with her?” Shriver asked. “There is no master key in the building?”

The clerk looked at him blankly from beneath her towering beehive. “Sorry. I guess we need to rethink our security policy.”

Shriver leaned against the counter and put his head in his hands. Just a few moments ago, when he'd been gazing up at the limitless sky, he had felt so strong and invincible. Now he felt defeated, done for.

“Oh!” Sue St. Marie exclaimed. “I almost forgot. Someone left this for you, Mr. Shriver.” She held up a manila envelope marked “SHRIVER.”

“Who was it?” Shriver asked. “Was he tall? In dark clothes?”

“You'll have to ask my little sister,” she said. “It was here when I arrived this morning.”

Shriver turned to Edsel Nixon and said, “I need a drink.”

As Shriver and Edsel headed to the saloon, Jack Blunt came bounding across the lobby, looking almost as disheveled as Shriver in a brown corduroy jacket and checked shirt, his toupee only partially affixed to his scalp.

“Hey, you!” he said. “I don't know who the hell you are, and I sure as hell don't know why you did what you did, but I want to thank you.”

“Thank me? What for?”

“For handing me the literary story of the year! This is going to be on front pages all over the world!”

“It is?”

Blunt laughed, exhaling a waft of whiskey breath. “ ‘Reclusive author comes out of hiding, then turns out to be an
imposter, in turn prompting the
real
reclusive author to come out of hiding.' Man, that is golden!”

“Excuse me,” Edsel Nixon said. “I'm wondering, since you're one of the few people to have met the real Shriver—why didn't
you
know this man here was an imposter?”

“Hey, it's been twenty years. People change. The guy says he's Shriver, he looks reasonably like him—hey, I bought it. So sue me.”

Shriver turned to Edsel. “I really need that drink.”

“Hey,” Blunt said, “I'm headed to the airport to pick up your agent.” He laughed. “Listen to me. I mean, the
real
Shriver's agent. Maybe you could come along.”

“I don't think so.”

“Oh, come on. I'll play nice. I want your side of the story. You know—what motivated you, how you did it, all that good stuff.”

“No, thank you.”

“This is your chance. You could be famous too. The next Clifford Irving. Maybe even get a book deal!”

Edsel Nixon stepped forward, positioning himself between Shriver and Blunt. “He said no. Now leave him alone.”

Shriver could have hugged the boy.

“Fine, okay,” the reporter said, backing away. “But listen, if you change your mind, Mr. . . . uh . . . What
is
your name, anyway?”

“It's
Shriver
.”

Blunt laughed again. “Tell that to the fellow in
there
,” he said, gesturing toward the saloon. Then, with a wave and a wink, he headed out the door.

Inside the saloon, Shriver and Nixon found the real Shriver at the bar, nursing a glass of whiskey.