“Maybe,” said the elder. “You could sign my book for me?”
Distracted, Low Man signed the book, but with his true signature and not with the stylized flourish he’d practiced for years. He signed it:
Peace
.
“You’re a pretty good writer,” Raymond said. “You should keep doing it.”
“I’ll try,” said Low Man as he watched the old Indian shuffle away.
Low Man began to laugh, softly at first, but then with a full-throated roar that echoed off the walls. He laughed until tears ran down his face, until his stomach cramped, until he retched and threw up in a water fountain. He could not stop laughing, not even after three security officers arrived to escort him out of the airport, and not even after he’d walked three miles into town and found himself standing in a phone booth outside a 7-Eleven.
“Shit,” he said and suddenly grew serious. “Who am I supposed to call?”
Then he laughed a little more and wondered how he was going to tell this story in the future. He’d change the names of those involved, of course, and invent new personalities and characters—and brand-new desires as well—and then he would be forced to invert and subvert the chronology of events, and the tone of the story would certainly be tailored to fit the audience. Whites and Indians laughed at most of the same jokes, but they laughed for different reasons. Maybe Low Man would turn himself into a blue-collar Indian, a welder who’d quit a good job, who’d quit a loyal wife, to fly to Missoula in pursuit of a crazy white woman.
And because he was a mystery writer, Low Man would have to throw a dead body into the mix.
Whose body? Which weapon?
Pistol, knife, poison,
Low Man thought, as he stood in the phone booth outside the Missoula 7-Eleven.
“Chuck?” he asked the telephone. “Who the fuck is Chuck?”
The telephone didn’t answer.
Low Man’s last book,
Red Rain,
had shipped 125,000 copies in hardcover, good enough to flirt with the
New York Times
best-seller list, before falling into the Kingdom of Remainders. He belonged to seven frequent-flier clubs, diligently tossed money into his SEP-IRA, and tried to ignore the ulcer just beginning to open a hole in his stomach.
“Okay,” said Low Man as he stood in the telephone booth. “Crazy Horse didn’t need Tums. Okay? Think.”
He took a deep breath. He wondered if the world was a cruel place. He checked the contents of his wallet. He carried two hundred dollars in cash, three credit cards, and a valid driver’s license, all the ingredients necessary for renting a car and driving back to Seattle.
He doubted they were going to let him back into the airport, a thought that made him break into more uncontrolled laughter.
Jesus, he’d always wanted to be the kind of Indian who
didn’t
get kicked out of public places. He played golf, for God’s sake, with a single-digit handicap.
Opening the phone book, Low Man looked for the local bookstores. He figured a small town like Missoula might have a Waldenbooks or a B. Dalton’s, but he needed something more intimate and eccentric, even sacred. Low Man prayed for a used bookstore, a good one, a musty church filled with bibles written by thousands of disciples. There, in that kind of place, he knew that he could buy somebody’s novel or book of poems, then sit down in a comfortable chair to read, and maybe drink a cup of good coffee or a tall glass of the local water.
He found the listing for a bookstore called Bread and Books. Beautiful. He tore the page out of the directory and walked into the 7-Eleven.
“Hey,” said Low Man as he slapped the yellow page on the counter. “Where is this place?”
The cashier, a skinny white kid, smiled.
“You tore that out of the phone book, didn’t you?”asked the kid.
“Yes, I did,” said Low Man.
“You’re going to have to pay for that.”
Low Man knew the telephone directory was free because merchants paid to advertise in the damn things.
“Fine,” said Low Man and set his suitcase on the counter. “I’ll trade you this yellow page for everything inside this suitcase. Hell, you can have the suitcase, too, if you tell me where to find this place.”
“Breads?”
A good sign. It was a place popular enough to have a diminutive.
“Yeah, do you read?” asked Low Man.
“Of course.”
“What do you read?”
“Comic books.”
“What kind of comics?”
“Not comics,” said the kid. “Comic books.”
“Okay,” said Low Man. “What kind of comic books?”
“Good ones.
Daredevil
,
Preacher,
Love and Rockets, Astro City.
”
“Do you read mysteries?”
“You mean, like, murder mysteries?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“No, not really.”
“Well, I got a mystery for you anyway,” said Low Man as he pushed the suitcase a few inches across the counter, closer to the cashier.
“This is a suitcase,” said Low Man.
“I know it’s a suitcase.”
“I just want you to know,” said Low Man as he patted the suitcase, as he tapped a slight rhythm against the lock. “I just need you to understand, understand this, understand that there are only two kinds of suitcase.”
“Really?” asked the cashier. He was making only six bucks an hour, not enough to be speaking metaphysically with a total stranger, and an Indian stranger at that.
“There is the empty suitcase,” said Low Man. “And there is the full suitcase. And what I have here is a full suitcase. And I want to give it to you.”
“Mister,” said the kid. “You don’t have to give me your suitcase. I’ll tell you where Breads is. Hell, Missoula is a small town. You could find it by accident.”
“But the thing is, I need you to take me there.”
“I’m working.”
“I know you’re working,” said Low Man. “But I figure that car, that shit-bag Camaro out there is yours. So I figure you can close this place down for a few minutes and give me a ride. You give me a ride and I’ll give you this suitcase and all of its contents.”
There was a pistol, a revolver, sitting in a dark place beneath the cash register.
“I can’t close,” said the cashier. He believed in rules, in order. “This is 7-Eleven. We’re supposed to be open, like, all the time. Look outside, the sign says twenty-four hours. I mean, I had to work last Christmas.”
“Sweetheart,” said Low Man. “I’m older than you, so I remember when 7-Eleven used to be open from seven in the morning until eleven at night. That’s why they called it 7-Eleven. Get it? Open from seven to eleven? So, why don’t you and I get nostalgic, and pretend it’s 1973, and close the store long enough for you to drive me to the bookstore?”
“Mister,” said the kid. “Even if this was 1973, and even if this store was only open from seven to eleven, it would still be three in the afternoon, like it is right now, and I would still not close down.”
“Son, son, son,” said Low Man, losing his patience. “What if I told you there was a dead body inside this suitcase?”
The cashier blinked, but remained calm. He had once shot a deer in the heart at two hundred yards, and bragged about it, though he’d been aiming for the head, the trophy hunter’s greatest sin.
“That suitcase is too small. You couldn’t fit a body in there,” said the kid.
“Fair enough,” said Low Man. “What if there’s just a head?”
The cashier ran through the 7-Eleven employee’s handbook in his memory, searching for the proper way to deal with a crazy customer, a man who may or may not have a dead man—or pieces of a dead man—in his suitcase, but who most definitely had a thing for bookstores. The cashier had always been a good employee; his work ethic was quite advanced for somebody so young. But there was no official company policy, no corporate ethic, when it came to dealing with a man—an Indian man—who had so much pain illuminating both of his eyes.
“Mister,” said the cashier, forced to improvise. “This is Montana. Everybody’s got a gun. Including me. And since you aren’t from Montana, and I can tell that by looking at you, then you most likely don’t have a gun.”
“Your point being?”
“I’m going to shoot you in the ass if you don’t exit the store immediately.”
“Fine,” said Low Man. “You can keep the damn bag anyway.”
Leaving his suitcase behind, Low Man walked out of the store. He still carried his computer case and the yellow page with Bread and Books’ address.
In the 7-Eleven, the cashier waited until the Indian was out of sight before he carefully opened the suitcase to find two pairs of shoes, a suit jacket, four shirts, two pairs of pants, and assorted socks and underwear. He also found a copy of
Red Rain
and discovered Low Man’s photograph on the back of the book.
Away from that black-and-white image taken fifty pounds earlier, Low Man walked until he stumbled across the Barnes & Noble superstore filling up one corner of an ugly strip mall.
Fucking colonial clipper ships are everywhere,
thought Low Man,
even in Missoula, Montana.
But he secretly loved the big green boats, mostly because they sold tons of his books.
Low Man stepped into the store, found the mystery section, gathered all the copies of his books, soft and hard, and carried them to the information desk.
“I want to sign these,” he said to the woman working there.
“Why?”
“Because I wrote them.”
“Oh,” said the woman, immediately dropping into some highly trained and utterly pleasant demeanor. Perhaps everybody in Missoula, Montana, loved their jobs. “Please, let me get the manager. She’ll be glad to help you.”
“Hold on,” said Low Man as he handed her the yellow page. “Do you know where this place is?”
“Breads?”
There it was again, the place with the nickname. Everybody must go there. At that moment, there could be dozens of people in Breads. Low Man wondered if there was a woman, a lovely woman in the bookstore, a lonely woman who would drag him back to her house and make love to him without removing any of her clothes.
“Is it a good store?” asked Low Man.
“I used to work there,” she said. “It closed down a month ago.”
Low Man wondered if her eyes changed color when she mourned.
“The kid at 7-Eleven didn’t tell me that.”
“Oh,” said the woman, completely confused. She was young, just months out of some small Montana town like Wolf Point or Harlem or Ronan, soon to return. “Well, let me get the manager.”
“Wait,” said Low Man, handing her his computer case. “I found this over in the mystery section.”
He’d purchased the computer case through a catalogue, and had regretted it ever since. The bag was bulky, heavy, poorly designed.
“Thank you. I’ll put it in Lost and Found.”
Low Man’s computer was an outdated Apple, its hard drive stuffed to the brim with three unpublished mystery novels and hundreds of programs and applications that he’d never used after downloading them.
Free of his possessions, Low Man waited. He watched the men and women move through the bookstore.
He wondered what
Missoula
meant, if there’d been some cavalry soldier named Missoula who’d made this part of the world safe for white people. He wondered if he could kill somebody, an Indian or a white soldier, and what it would feel like. He wondered if he would cry when he had to wash blood from his hands.
He studied the faces of the white people in the store. He decided to choose the one that he would kill if he were forced to kill. Not the woman with the child, and certainly not the child, but maybe the man reading movie magazines, and, most likely, the old man asleep in the poetry-section chair.
Low Man stared at the gold band on the dead man’s left hand. Low Man was still staring when the dead man woke up and walked out of the store.
Low Man had been married twice, to a Lummi woman and a Yakama woman, and had fathered three kids, one each with his ex-wives, the third the result of a one-night stand with a white woman in Santa Fe. He sent money and books to his Indian children, but he hadn’t seen his white kid in ten years.
“Mr. Smith, Low Man Smith?” asked the Barnes & Noble manager upon her arrival in Low Man’s world. She was blonde, blue-eyed, plain.
“Please,” he said. “Call me Chuck.”
“My name is Eryn.”
Low Man wondered if he was going to sleep with her, this Eryn. He’d spent many nights in hotel rooms with various bookstore employees and literary groupies. That was one of the unpublicized perks of the job. He always wondered what the women saw in him, why they wanted to have sex with a stranger simply based on his ability to create compelling metaphors, or even when he failed to create compelling metaphors. The women were interested in him no matter what
The New York Times Book Review
had to say about his latest novel. Low Man was bored with his own writing, with his books, and to be honest, he’d grown bored with his literary life and the sexual promiscuity that seemed to go with it. Last year, after meeting Carlotta at the Native American Children of Alcoholics convention in Albuquerque, after sharing a bed with her for five nights, he’d vowed to remain faithful to her—and had been faithful to her and the idea of her—even though they’d made no promises to each other, even though she’d talked openly of the three men who were actively pursuing her, of the one man that she still loved, who had never been named Chuck.