Finders Keepers

  "The line of ownership."

  "Right. Ending with a piece of paper that says you legally own what you're trying to sell. The only thing I know for sure is that about fifteen years ago, Halliday sold a proof copy of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and it turned out to have been stolen from the estate of Brooke Astor. She was a rich old biddy from New York with a larcenous business manager. Halliday showed a receipt, and his story of how he came by the book was credible, so the investigation was dropped. But receipts can be forged, you know. I'd steer clear of him."

  "Thanks, Mr. Ricker," Pete said, thinking that if he went ahead with this, Andrew Halliday Rare Editions would be his first stop. But he would have to be very, very careful, and if Mr. Halliday wouldn't do a cash deal, that would mean no deal. Plus, under no circumstances could he know Pete's name. A disguise might be in order, although it wouldn't do to go overboard on that.

  "You're welcome, Pete, but if I said I felt good about this, I'd be lying."

  Pete could relate. He didn't feel so good about it himself.

  ***

  He was still mulling his options a month later, and had almost come to the conclusion that trying to sell even one of the notebooks would be too much risk for too little reward. If it went to a private collector--like the ones he had sometimes read about, who bought valuable paintings to hang in secret rooms where only they could look at them--it would be okay. But he couldn't be sure that would happen. He was leaning more and more to the idea of donating them anonymously, maybe mailing them to the New York University Library. The curator of a place like that would understand the value of them, no doubt. But doing that would be a little more public than Pete liked to think about, not at all like dropping the letters with the money inside them into anonymous streetcorner mailboxes. What if someone remembered him at the post office?

  Then, on a rainy night in late April of 2014, Tina came to his room again. Mrs. Beasley was long gone, and the footy pajamas had been replaced by an oversized Cleveland Browns football jersey, but to Pete she looked very much like the worried girl who had asked, during the Era of Bad Feelings, if their mother and father were going to get divorced. Her hair was in pigtails, and with her face cleansed of the little makeup Mom let her wear (Pete had an idea she put on fresh layers when she got to school), she looked closer to ten than going on thirteen. He thought, Teens is almost a teen. It was hard to believe.

  "Can I come in for a minute?"

  "Sure."

  He was lying on his bed, reading a novel by Philip Roth called When She Was Good. Tina sat on his desk chair, pulling her jersey nightshirt down over her shins and blowing a few errant hairs from her forehead, where a faint scattering of acne had appeared.

  "Something on your mind?" Pete asked.

  "Um . . . yeah." But she didn't go on.

  He wrinkled his nose at her. "Go on, spill it. Some boy you've been crushing on told you to buzz off?"

  "You sent that money," she said. "Didn't you?"

  Pete stared at her, flabbergasted. He tried to speak and couldn't. He tried to persuade himself she hadn't said what she'd said, and couldn't do that, either.

  She nodded as if he had admitted it. "Yeah, you did. It's all over your face."

  "It didn't come from me, Teens, you just took me by surprise. Where would I get money like that?"

  "I don't know, but I remember the night you asked me what I'd do if I found a buried treasure."

  "I did?" Thinking, You were half-asleep. You can't remember that.

  "Doubloons, you said. Coins from olden days. I said I'd give it to Dad and Mom so they wouldn't fight anymore, and that's just what you did. Only it wasn't pirate treasure, it was regular money."

  Pete put his book aside. "Don't you go telling them that. They might actually believe you."

  She looked at him solemnly. "I never would. But I need to ask you . . . is it really all gone?"

  "The note in the last envelope said it was," Pete replied cautiously, "and there hasn't been any more since, so I guess so."

  She sighed. "Yeah. What I figured. But I had to ask." She got up to go.

  "Tina?"

  "What?"

  "I'm really sorry about Chapel Ridge and all. I wish the money wasn't gone."

  She sat down again. "I'll keep your secret if you keep one Mom and I have. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  "Last November she took me to Chap--that's what the girls call it--for one of their tour days. She didn't want Dad to know, because she thought he'd be mad, but back then she thought they maybe could afford it, especially if I got a need scholarship. Do you know what that is?"

  Pete nodded.

  "Only the money hadn't stopped coming then, and it was before all the snow and weird cold weather in December and January. We saw some of the classrooms, and the science labs. There's like a jillion computers. We also saw the gym, which is humongous, and the showers. They have private changing booths, too, not just cattle stalls like at Northfield. At least they do for the girls. Guess who my tour group had for a guide?"

  "Barbara Robinson?"

  She smiled. "It was great to see her again." Then the smile faded. "She said hello and gave me a hug and asked how everyone was, but I could tell she hardly remembered me. Why would she, right? Did you know her and Hilda and Betsy and a couple of other girls from back then were at the 'Round Here concert? The one the guy who ran over Dad tried to blow up?"

  "Yeah." Pete also knew that Barbara Robinson's big brother had played a part in saving Barbara and Barbara's friends and maybe thousands of others. He had gotten a medal or a key to the city, or something. That was real heroism, not sneaking around and mailing stolen money to your parents.

  "Did you know I was invited to go with them that night?"

  "What? No!"

  Tina nodded. "I said I couldn't because I was sick, but I wasn't. It was because Mom said they couldn't afford to buy me a ticket. We moved a couple of months later."

  "Jesus, how about that, huh?"

  "Yeah, I missed all the excitement."

  "So how was the school tour?"

  "Good, but not great, or anything. I'll be fine at Northfield. Hey, once they find out I'm your sister, they'll probably give me a free ride, Honor Roll Boy."

  Pete suddenly felt sad, almost like crying. It was the sweetness that had always been part of Tina's nature combined with that ugly scatter of pimples on her forehead. He wondered if she got teased about those. If she didn't yet, she would.

  He held out his arms. "C'mere." She did, and he gave her a strong hug. Then he held her by the shoulders and looked at her sternly. "But that money . . . it wasn't me."

  "Uh-huh, okay. So was that notebook you were reading stuck in with the money? I bet it was." She giggled. "You looked so guilty that night when I walked in on you."

  He rolled his eyes. "Go to bed, short stuff."

  "Okay." At the door she turned back. "I liked those private changing booths, though. And something else. Want to know? You'll think it's weird."

  "Go ahead, lay it on me."

  "The kids wear uniforms. For the girls it's gray skirts with white blouses and white kneesocks. There are also sweaters, if you want. Some gray like the skirts and some this pretty dark red--hunter red they call it, Barbara said."

  "Uniforms," Pete said, bemused. "You like the idea of uniforms."

  "Knew you'd think it was weird. Because boys don't know how girls are. Girls can be mean if you're wearing the wrong clothes, or even if you wear the right ones too much. You can wear different blouses, or your sneakers on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you can do different things with your hair, but pretty soon they--the mean girls--figure out you've only got three jumpers and six good school skirts. Then they say stuff. But when everyone wears the same thing every day . . . except maybe the sweater's a different color . . ." She blew back those few errant strands again. "Boys don't have the same problem."

  "I actually do get it," Pete said.

  "Anyway, Mom's going to
teach me how to make my own clothes, then I'll have more. Simplicity, Butterick. Also, I've got friends. Plenty of them."

  "Ellen, for instance."

  "Ellen's okay."

  And headed for a rewarding job as a waitress or a drive-thru girl after high school, Pete thought but did not say. If she doesn't get pregnant at sixteen, that is.

  "I just wanted to tell you not to worry. If you were."

  "I wasn't," Pete said. "I know you'll be fine. And it wasn't me who sent the money. Honest."

  She gave him a smile, both sad and complicit, that made her look like anything but a little girl. "Okay. Gotcha."

  She left, closing the door gently behind her.

  Pete lay awake for a long time that night. Not long after, he made the biggest mistake of his life.

  1979-2014

  Morris Randolph Bellamy was sentenced to life in prison on January 11th, 1979, and for a brief time things went fast before they went slow. And slow. And slow. His intake at Waynesville State Prison was completed by six PM the day of his sentencing. His cellmate, a convicted murderer named Roy Allgood, raped him for the first time forty-five minutes after lights-out.

  "Hold still and don't you shit on my cock, young man," he whispered in Morris's ear. "If you do that, I'll cut your nose. You'll look like a pig been bit by a allygator."

  Morris, who had been raped before, held still, biting his forearm to keep from screaming. He thought of Jimmy Gold, as Jimmy had been before he started chasing the Golden Buck. When he had still been an authentic hero. He thought of Harold Fineman, Jimmy's high school friend (Morris had never had a high school friend himself), saying that all good things must end, which implied the converse was also true: bad things must end, too.

  This particular bad thing went on for a long time, and while it did, Morris repeated Jimmy's mantra from The Runner over and over in his mind: Shit don't mean shit, shit don't mean shit, shit don't mean shit. It helped.

  A little.

  In the weeks that followed, he was ass-raped by Allgood on some nights and mouth-raped on others. On the whole, he preferred taking it up the ass, where there were no tastebuds. Either way, he thought that Cora Ann Hooper, the woman he had so foolishly attacked while in a blackout, was getting what she would probably have considered perfect justice. On the other hand, she'd only had to endure an unwanted invader once.

  There was a clothing factory attached to Waynesville. The factory made jeans and the kind of shirts workmen wore. On his fifth day in the dyehouse, one of Allgood's friends took him by the wrist, led Morris around the number three blue-vat, and told him to unbuckle his pants. "You just hold still and let me do the rest," he said. When he was finished, he said, "I ain't a fag, or anything, but I got to get along, same as anyone. Tell anyone I'm a fag and I'll fuckin kill you."

  "I won't," Morris said. Shit don't mean shit, he told himself. Shit don't mean shit.

  ***

  One day in mid-March of 1979, a Hell's Angel type with tattooed slabs of muscle strolled up to Morris in the exercise yard. "Can you write?" this fellow said with an unmistakable Deep-South accent--kin you raht? "I hear you can write."

  "Yes, I can write," Morris said. He saw Allgood approach, notice who was walking beside Morris, and sheer off toward the basketball court at the far end of the yard.

  "I'm Warren Duckworth. Most folks call me Duck."

  "I'm Morris Bel--"

  "I know who you are. Write purty well, do you?"

  "Yes." Morris spoke with no hesitation or false modesty. The way Roy Allgood had suddenly found another place to be wasn't lost on him.

  "Could you write a letter to my wife, if I sort of tell you what to say? Only put it in, like, better words?"

  "I could do that, and I will, but I've got a little problem."

  "I know what your problem is," his new acquaintance said. "You write my wife a letter that'll make her happy, maybe stop her divorce talk, you ain't gonna have no more trouble with that skinny bitchboy in your house."

  I'm the skinny bitchboy in my house, Morris thought, but he felt the tiniest glimmer of hope. "Sir, I'm going to write your wife the prettiest letter she ever got in her life."

  Looking at Duckworth's huge arms, he thought of something he'd seen on a nature program. There was a kind of bird that lived in the mouths of crocodiles, granted survival on a day-to-day basis by pecking bits of food out of the reptiles' jaws. Morris thought that kind of bird probably had a pretty good deal.

  "I'd need some paper." Thinking of the reformatory, where five lousy sheets of Blue Horse was all you ever got, paper with big spots of pulp floating in it like pre-cancerous moles.

  "I'll get you paper. All you want. You just write that letter, and at the end say ever' word came from my mouth and you just wrote it down."

  "Okay, tell me what would make her most happy to hear."

  Duck considered, then brightened. "That she throws a fine fuck?"

  "She'll know that already." It was Morris's turn to consider. "What part of her does she say she'd change, if she could?"

  Duck's frown deepened. "I dunno, she always says her ass is too big. But you can't say that, it'll make things worse instead of better."

  "No, what I'll write is how much you love to put your hands on it and squeeze it."

  Duck was smiling now. "Better watch out or I'll be rapin you myself."

  "What's her favorite dress? Does she have one?"

  "Yeah, a green one. It's silk. Her ma gave it to her last year, just before I went up. She wears that one when we go out dancin." He looked down at the ground. "She better not be dancin now, but she might be. I know that. Maybe I can't write much more than my own fuckin name, but I ain't no stupe."

  "I could write how much you like to squeeze her bottom when she's wearing that green dress, how's that? I could say thinking of that gets you hot."

  Duck looked at Morris with an expression that was utterly foreign to Morris's Waynesville experience. It was respect. "Say, that's not bad."

  Morris was still working on it. Sex wasn't all women thought about when they thought about men; sex wasn't romance. "What color is her hair?"

  "Well, right now I don't know. She's what you call a brownette when there ain't no dye in it."

  Brown didn't sing, at least not to Morris, but there were ways you could skate around stuff like that. It occurred to him that this was very much like selling a product in an ad agency, and pushed the idea away. Survival was survival. He said, "I'll write how much you like to see the sun shining in her hair, especially in the morning."

  Duck didn't reply. He was staring at Morris with his bushy eyebrows furrowed together.

  "What? No good?"

  Duck seized Morris's arm, and for one terrible moment Morris was sure he was going to break it like a dead branch. HATE was tattooed on the fingers of the big man's knuckles. Duck breathed, "It's like poitry. I'll get you the paper tomorrow. There's lots in the liberry."

  That night, when Morris returned to the cellblock after a three-to-nine shift spent blue-dying, his house was empty. Rolf Venziano, in the next cell, told Morris that Roy Allgood had been taken to the infirmary. When Allgood returned the next day, both his eyes were black and his nose had been splinted. He looked at Morris from his bunk, then rolled over and faced the wall.

  Warren Duckworth was Morris's first client. Over the next thirty-six years, he had many.

  ***

  Sometimes when he couldn't sleep, lying on his back in his cell (by the early '90s he had a single, complete with a shelf of well-thumbed books), Morris would soothe himself by remembering his discovery of Jimmy Gold. That had been a shaft of bright sunlight in the confused and angry darkness of his adolescence.

  By then his parents had been fighting all the time, and although he had grown to heartily dislike both of them, his mother had the better armor against the world, and so he adopted her sarcastic curl of a smile and the superior, debunking attitude that went with it. Except for English, where he got As (when he
wanted to), he was a straight-C student. This drove Anita Bellamy into report-card-waving frenzies. He had no friends but plenty of enemies. Three times he suffered beatings. Two were administered by boys who just didn't like his general attitude, but one boy had a more specific issue. This was a hulking senior football player named Pete Womack, who didn't care for the way Morris was checking out his girlfriend one lunch period in the cafeteria.

  "What are you looking at, rat-face?" Womack enquired, as the tables around Morris's solitary position grew silent.

  "Her," Morris said. He was frightened, and when clearheaded, fright usually imposed at least a modicum of restraint on his behavior, but he had never been able to resist an audience.

  "Well, you want to quit it," Womack said, rather lamely. Giving him a chance. Perhaps Pete Womack was aware that he was six-two and two-twenty, while the skinny, red-lipped piece of freshman shit sitting by himself was five-seven and maybe a hundred and forty soaking wet. He might also have been aware that those watching--including his clearly embarrassed girlfriend--would take note of this disparity.

  "If she doesn't want to be looked at," Morris said, "why does she dress like that?"

  Morris considered this a compliment (of the left-handed variety, granted), but Womack felt differently. He ran around the table, fists raised. Morris got in a single punch, but it was a good one, blacking Womack's eye. Of course after that he got his shit handed to him, and most righteously, but that one punch was a revelation. He would fight. It was good to know.

  Both boys were suspended, and that night Morris got a twenty-minute lecture on passive resistance from his mother, along with the acid observation that fighting in cafeteria was generally not the sort of extracurricular activity the finer colleges looked for on the applications of prospective enrollees.

  Behind her, his father raised his martini glass and dropped him a wink. It suggested that, even though George Bellamy mostly resided beneath his wife's thumb and thin smile, he would also fight under certain circumstances. But running was still dear old dad's default position, and during the second semester of Morris's freshman year at Northfield, Georgie-Porgie ran right out of the marriage, pausing only to clean out what was left in the Bellamy bank account. The investments of which he had boasted either didn't exist or had gone tits-up. Anita Bellamy was left with a stack of bills and a rebellious fourteen-year-old son.