Packages arrived without notice at my Denver bookstore. Most contained worthless books that I had to return. A man in Detroit sent a nice box of early Burton reprints, which I actually bought. But the strangest thing was the arrival of a true first edition, Burton’s City of the Saints, in a package bearing only a St. Louis postmark— no name, no return address anywhere on or inside the box. I waited for some word by telephone or in a separate letter, but it never came.
By the end of the month the clamor had begun to calm down. The thirtieth came: the crackpots had faded away and my new friend in Rock Springs still had not called. My suspense was delicious. I was thinking of all the places I might take her, but then the old lady from Baltimore arrived and the mystery of that wonderful inscription came to life.
CHAPTER 3
She was not just old, she was a human redwood. I got a hint of her age when her driver, an enormous black man in a military-style flak jacket, stepped out of a Ford Fairlane of mid-sixties vintage and stood protectively at her door. A bunch of rowdy kids roared past on skateboards: six of them, all seventeen or eighteen, old enough to be frisky and not quite old enough to know better.
East Colfax is that kind of street: common, rough, unpredictable. I heard one of the kids yell, “Look out, Smoky!” and I cringed at the slur and was shamed again by the callous stupidity of my own race. I could hear their taunting through my storefront, but the driver stood with patient dignity and ignored them. He had an almost smooth face with a short, neat mustache, and I liked his manner and the way he held himself. Sometimes you can tell about a guy, just from a glance.
The kids clattered away and the driver opened the car door. A gray head appeared followed by the rest of her: a frail-looking woman in a faded, old-fashioned dress. She gripped his arm and pulled herself up: stood still for a moment as if she couldn’t quite get her balance, then she nodded and, still clutching his arm, began the long, step-by-step voyage across the sidewalk to my store. She had to stop and steady herself again, and at that moment I saw the driver look up with a face full of alarm. Another wave of reckless kids was coming, and in that half second the first of them whipped by just a foot from my glass. The driver put up his hand and yelled “Stop!” and I saw the old lady cringe as a blur flew past and missed her by inches. I started toward the door, but before I could get there, the big man had stiff-armed the next kid in line, knocking him ass over apex on the sidewalk.
I opened my door and several things happened at once. Another fool swerved past, I got my foot on his skateboard, tipped him off, and the board shot out into the street, where it was smashed by a passing car. The first kid was up on his hands and knees, bleeding at the elbows and dabbing at a bloody nose. I heard the ugly words, “nigger son of a bitch,” and two more of his buddies arrived, menacing us on the sidewalk. The car had pulled to the curb and now a fat man joined the fray, screaming about the scratch on his hood. In all this chaos the big fellow managed to get the old lady into the store, leaving me alone to handle the fallout.
The bloody nose was flanked by his pals. “I oughta beat your ass.”
I laughed at the thought. “You couldn’t beat your meat without help from these other idiots. Maybe you better haul it on out of here before you get in real trouble.”
I juked them and they stumbled over one another as they backed out to the curb. It was hard not to laugh again, they were such colossal schmucks, but I let them put on a little face-saving sideshow, to which middle fingers were copiously added, and eventually they sulked away.
Now I had to go through another song and dance with the fat guy. He said, “What about my car, wiseguy, you gonna pay for my hood?” I asked if he knew how to read, pointing out that my sign said books, not State Farm Insurance. He suggested throwing a brick through my window and we’d see how funny that was. I took obvious note of his plate number and told him I’d be inside calling the cops while he was looking around for a brick. I heard him leave, putting down a foot of rubber as I opened my door and went inside.
The old lady sat in a chair with her eyes closed. I spoke to her driver, who had a name tag sewn military-style on his jacket. “Mr. Ralston, I presume.”
“Mike’ll do.”
I shook his hand, said, “Cliff Janeway,” and gave a small bow in her direction. “Welcome to East Colfax.”
* * *
The phone rang and I had a brief rush of business. The old woman sat still through it all, her balance eerily stable in what appeared to be a light sleep. Occasionally I made eye contact with Ralston, arching my eyebrows and cocking my head in her direction, but he shrugged and waited for the calls to subside. When it got quiet again I motioned him over to the end of the counter. “So…Mike…what’s this all about?”
“Beats me. I think she just got to Denver last night.”
“Just got here from where?”
“Back East somewhere. I don’t know how she made it all alone. You can see how shaky she is, and she’s got almost no money. That had to be one helluva trip.”
“What’s your part in it?”
“Let’s call it my good deed of the month.” He smiled, a humble man embarrassed by his own kindness. “Look, I’m no professional do-gooder, but this woman’s at the end of her rope. She’s staying in a tacky motel not far from here. My wife works there and I can tell you it’s not a place you’d want your grandmother to stay. Or your wife to work, either…not for long.”
“So?”
“So Denise calls and tells me she’s got a lady there who needs some help. Denise is my wife.” He said her name so lovingly that I could almost feel some small measure of the affection myself, for a woman I had never met. “You married, Janeway?”
I shook my head.
“Well, this is one of those things you do when you are. As the line goes, to ensure domestic tranquillity. You’ll understand it someday.”
I laughed and liked him all the more.
“All I can tell you right now is, this lady came a long way to see you, and she almost made it. The least I could do was get her the last few miles over here.”
I liked Mr. Ralston but I sure didn’t like what I was hearing. The arrival of an ancient and penniless woman at my door charged me with responsibility for her welfare. Maybe I owed her nothing—that was the voice of a cynic, and I am the great cynic of my day. I can be a fountain of negative attitude, but from that moment she was mine to deal with.
“I wonder if I should wake her.”
“Up to you, friend. I’m just the delivery boy.”
It was unlikely but she seemed to hear us. Her eyes flicked open and found my face, and I had a powerful and immediate sense of something strong between us. I knew that in some distant past she had been an important part of my life, yet in the same instant I was certain I had never seen her. Her face was almost mummified, her eyes watery and deep. Her hair was still lush and striking: now I could see that it was pure white, not gray, swept across her forehead in a soft wave that left her face looking heart-shaped and delicate in spite of the deeply furrowed skin. I pulled up a stool, said, “What can I do for you, ma’am?” and her pale gray eyes, which had never left my face, struggled to adjust in the harsh late-afternoon sunlight from the street. Suddenly I knew she couldn’t see me: I saw her pupils contract and expand as she lowered and raised her head; I saw the thick glasses in her lap and the lax fingers holding them but making no effort to bring them up to her eyes. The glasses were useless; she was blind. It was impossible but she had come across the country alone, trembling and unsteady…virtually sightless.