Stories (2011) (81 page)

On his way back to bed, just as he passed the chair over
which the coat was draped, he felt himself brush against the sleeve of the
coat. He jerked away from it as if it were a serpent that had tried to coil
itself around his wrist.

Glancing at the coat, he was surprised to find that the
sleeves were hanging loose, and in fact, nothing was touching him but the
sleeve of his own pajama top. He had felt certain that out of the corner of his
eye he had seen the coat move, and that what he had felt was not the fine
softness of his personally designed pajamas, but the coarseness of the coat.

He climbed back in bed, lay with his head propped up on his
pillows, and studied the coat in the flashes of the lightning. When the
lightning lit things up, it was as if the coat moved, a kind of strobe effect.

“Of course,” he said to himself. “That’s it. That’s what it
was. An illusion. “

But that didn’t keep him from thinking about the touch on
his wrist. He pushed himself down into his covers, like a product being dropped
into a bag, and tried to sleep, and did, for a while.

He awoke to a rough feeling on his body. It was as if he
were wearing the coat. He rose up quickly, kicking back the covers, only to
find that he was in his pajamas, and that the coat was still in its place; one
of the sleeves however had been blown by the wind and now it lay in the seat of
the chair as if resting an invisible hand in an invisible lap.

James pulled off his pajama top and tossed it on the floor.
Tomorrow he would throw the thing away. It had somehow grown stiff, perhaps in
the wash, starch or some such thing. Fine pajamas were never to have starch.

Fine cloth of any kind was never to have starch. He would
have to speak to the maid about how she did laundry.

Punching his pillows, propping one on top of the other, he
put his back to the headboard, and watched the lighting in the window, listened
to the rain and the thunder, and then the coat moved.

James jerked his head to the chair. The coat sleeve that had
been lying in the seat of the chair had fallen off to the side again. The wind,
most likely, but it made him think of the man he had killed, how it had looked
on the man as he walked, how it had been caught up in the wind, how the lapels
had flapped, how the length of it had blown back behind him. He thought too of
the man’s father, the poor tailor, working away to make himself a coat, and how
he had proudly passed the horrible item onto his son, and then he thought of
his own father, and his similar coat, and how it had been caked with dirt, and
how the old man had had dirt beneath his nails, and then he thought of his
worn-out mother, and how they had died, without him, out there on that
god-forsaken property, and how they lay beneath that dirt, the grit of it
seeping into their coffins and onto their ivory grins.

He closed his eyes, saw the young man who had owned the coat
falling down the stairs, remembered how he had stood on the steps, his hands
out in front of him, frozen in position after the act.

The wind picked up and the sleeves of the coat were lifted
and they flapped dramatically. James felt a cold chill wrap itself around him,
and he knew it was not caused by the wind, and he knew then why he had pushed
the man, and why he had taken the coat, because the coat had belonged to him;
it was the sort of coat he had been born to wear. He had ran from such a thing
all his life, but it was his burden, this coat, and it was his past, and it was
his. The coat that should lie on his back, the sleeves that should hang on his
arms.

The wind blew harder and the rain came in the window with
it. The coat, perhaps caught on the wind, stirred, then seemed to leap off the
chair, across the bed, and flapped around James, the sleeve of it catching
about his neck.

James leaped from bed, screamed, ran wildly, tripped over a
foot stool, clambered to his feet, slammed into a wall. The sleeve was tight
around his neck, and the rest of the coat lay against his skin, and it was
coarse, so coarse. It was his life, this coarse coat, and it wanted him in it,
wanted him to claim what he deserved.

He charged into the chair at the foot of the bed, and
stumbled over it, fell toward the window, hit it with tremendous force, went
through head first, toward the street below, and then he was jerked upwards,
his head snapping back, and then the rough, workingman’s sleeve squeezed tight
against his throat and stole his breath.

Next morning, bright and early, a homeless man discovered
him and pointed up, alerted others. The police came, gave him a look see. The
sleeve of the coat was wrapped tight about his neck, had practically tied
itself, and the rest of it had caught on a nail in the window, and though the
coat had torn severely, the sturdiness of the material maintained, leaving
James to hang there in his pajama bottoms which he had soiled in death.

It was most unfashionable.

Larry had a headache, as he often did. It was those
all-night stints at the typewriter, along with his job and his boss, Fraggerty,
yelling for him to fry the burgers faster, to dole them out lickity-split on
mustard-covered sesame seed buns.

Burgers and fries, typing paper and typewriter ribbons–the
ribbons as gray and faded as the thirty-six years of his life. There really
didn't seem to be any reason to keep on living. Another twenty to thirty years
of this would be foolish. Then again, that seemed the only alternative. He was
too cowardly to take his own life.

Washing his face in the bathroom sink, Larry jerked a rough
paper towel from the rack and dried off, looking at himself in the mirror. He
was starting to look like all those hacks of writer mythology. The little guys
who turned out the drek copy. The ones with the blue-veined, alcoholic noses
and eyes like volcanic eruptions.

"My God," he thought, "I look forty easy.
Maybe even forty-five."

"You gonna stay in the can all day?" a voice
yelled through the door. It was Fraggerty, waiting to send him back to the
grill and the burgers. The guy treated him like a bum.

A sly smile formed on Larry's face as he thought: "I am
a bum. I've been through three marriages, sixteen jobs, eight typewriters, and
all I've got to show for it are a dozen articles, all of them in obscure
magazines that either paid in copies or pennies." He wasn't even as good
as the hack he looked like. The hack could at least point to a substantial body
of work, drek or not.

And I've been at this . . .God, twelve years! An article a
year. Some average. Not even enough to pay back his typing supplies.

He thought of his friend Mooney–or James T. Mooney, as he
was known to his fans. Yearly, he wrote a bestseller. It was a bestseller
before it hit the stands. And except for Mooney's first novel,
The Goodbye
Reel
, a detective thriller, all of them had been dismal. In fact, dismal
was too kind a word. But the public lapped them up.

What had gone wrong with his own career? He used to help
Mooney with his plots; in fact, he had helped him work out his problems on
The
Goodbye Reel
, back when they had both been scrounging their livings and
existing out of a suitcase. Then Mooney had moved to Houston, and a year later
The
Goodbye Reel
had hit the stands like an atomic bomb. Made record sales in
hardback and paper, and gathered in a movie deal that boggled the imagination.

Being honest with himself, Larry felt certain that he could
say he was a far better writer than Mooney. More commercial, even. So why had
Mooney gathered the laurels while he bagged burgers and ended up in a dirty
restroom contemplating the veins in his nose?

It was almost too much to bear. He would kill to have a
bestseller. Just one. That's all he'd ask. Just one.

"Tear the damned crapper out of there and sit on it
behind the grill!"

Fraggerty called through the door. "But get out here.
We got customers lined up down the block."

Larry doubted that, but he dried his hands, combed his hair
and stepped outside.

Fraggerty was waiting for him. Fraggerty was a big fat man
with bulldog jowls and perpetual blossoms of sweat beneath his meaty arms.
Mid-summer, dead of winter–he had them.

"Hey," Fraggerty said, "you work here or
what?"

"Not anymore, Larry said. "Pay me up."

"What?"

"You heard me, fat ass. Pay up!"

"Hey, don't get tough about it. All right. Glad to see
you hike."

Five minutes later, Larry was leaving the burger joint, a
fifty-dollar check in his pocket.

He said aloud: "Job number seventeen."

The brainstorm had struck him right when he came out of the
restroom.

He'd go see Mooney. He and Mooney had been great friends
once, before all that money and a new way of living had carried Mooney back and
forth to Houston and numerous jet spots around the country and overseas.

Maybe Mooney could give him a connection, an
in,
 as
it was called in the business. Before, he'd been too proud to ask, but now he
didn't give a damn if he had to crawl and lick boots. He had to sell his books;
had to let the world know he existed.

Without letting the landlord know, as he owed considerable
back rent, he cleaned out his apartment.

Like his life, there was little there. A typewriter, copies
of his twelve articles, a few clothes and odds and ends. There weren't even any
books.

He'd had to sell them all to pay his rent three months back.

In less than twenty minutes, he snuck out without being
seen, loaded the typewriter and his two suitcases in the trunk of his battered
Chevy, and looked up at the window of his dingy apartment. He lifted his middle
finger in salute, climbed in the car and drove away.

Mooney was easy to find. His estate looked just the part for
the residence of a bestselling author. A front lawn the size of a polo field, a
fountain of marble out front, and a house that looked like a small English
castle. All this near downtown Houston.

James T. Mooney looked the part, too. He answered the door
in a maroon smoking jacket with matching pajamas. He had on a pair of glossy
leather bedroom slippers that he could have worn with a suit and tie. His hair
was well-groomed with just the right amount of gray at the temples. There was a
bit of a strained look about his eyes, but other than that he was the picture
of health and prosperity.

"Well, I'll be," Mooney said. "Larry Melford.
Come in."

The interior of the house made the outside look like a barn.
There were paintings and sculptures and shelves of first-edition books. On one
wall, blown up to the size of movie posters and placed under glass and frame,
were copies of the covers of his bestsellers. All twelve of them. A thirteenth
glass and frame stood empty beside the others, waiting for the inevitable.

They chatted as they walked through the house, and Mooney
said, "Let's drop off in the study. We can be comfortable there. I'll have
the maid bring us some coffee or iced tea."

"I hope I'm not interrupting your writing," Larry
said.

"No, not at all. I'm finished for the day. I usually
just work a couple hours a day."

A couple hours a day?
 thought Larry. A serpent of
envy crawled around in the pit of his stomach. For the last twelve years, he
had worked a job all day and had written away most of the night, generally
gathering no more than two to three hours' sleep a day. And here was Mooney
writing these monstrous bestsellers and he only wrote a couple of hours in the
mornings.

Mooney's study was about the size of Larry's abandoned
apartment. And it looked a hell of a lot better. One side of the room was
little more than a long desk covered with a word processor and a duplicating
machine. The rest of the room was taken up by a leather couch and rows of
bookshelves containing nothing but Mooney's work. Various editions of foreign
publications, special collectors' editions, the leather-bound Christmas set,
the paperbacks, the bound galleys of all the novels. Mooney was surrounded by
his success.

"Sit down; take the couch," Mooney said, hauling
around his desk chair.

"Coffee or tea? I'll have the maid bring it."

"No, I'm fine."

"Well then, tell me about yourself."

Larry opened his mouth to start, and that's when it fell
out. He just couldn't control himself. It was as if a dam had burst open and
all the water of the world was flowing away. The anguish, the misery, the years
of failure found expression.

When he had finished telling it all, his eyes were
glistening. He was both relieved and embarrassed. "So you see, Mooney, I'm
just about over the edge. I'm craving success like an addict craves a fix. I'd
kill for a bestseller."

Mooney's face seemed to go lopsided. "Watch that kind
of talk."

"I mean it. I'm feeling so small right now, I'd have to
look up to see a snake's belly. I'd lie, cheat, steal, kill–anything to get
published in a big way. I don't want to die and leave nothing of me
behind."

"And you don't want to miss out on the good things
either, right?"

"Damned right. You've got it."

"Look, Larry, worry less about the good things and just
write your books.

Ease up some, but do it your own way. You may never have a
big bestseller, but you're a good writer, and eventually you'll crack and be
able to make a decent living."

"Easy for you to say, Mooney."

"In time, with a little patience . . . "

"I'm running out of time and patience. I'm emotionally
drained, whipped.

What I need is an
in,
 Mooney, an
in.
 A name.
Anything that can give me a break."

"Talent is the name of the game, Larry, not an
in,"
 Mooney said very softly.