now I just didn’t know. At this point it was weird no matter where Sam Hellerman was.
Amanda was out trick-or-treating with her friends. It was a transitional time for her, the last year when trick-or-treating was appropriate, and the first year when all the girls switched from being cats or pumpkins to dressing up as hookers or French maids or slutty celebrities. Little Big Tom had been freaked out by her hoochie mama costume. “Everyone’s a ho for Halloween!” she had shouted, and then she had stormed out, slamming the door. Now, that, I thought, is one hell of a song title. I was looking forward to eavesdropping on the family discussion where LBT tried to explain how her Halloween costume was all about disrespect for women and Vietnam, but I knew I would have to wait.
I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I retreated to my room and turned the TV on. Channel two was playing horror movies all night, and Evil Dead II had just started. I put on Rattus Norvegicus, turned the TV sound down, sat down on my bed, and tried to think of something to do.
I turned to the CEH books, which I had arranged on my desk in a row against the wall, and thought about where to go next with the reading list. I had given it my best shot, but in the end I couldn’t make it through The Journal of Albion Moonlight. I think the most likely explanation for its existence is that some typesetter wanted to demonstrate all the different typefaces and font sizes and layouts his fancy printing press could do. Back in the days before computers, it must have been pretty impressive. As a story, though, it was a waste of three hundred and thirteen pages. And it told me nothing about my dad. If he went around pretending he was into it, I’d have to say he was one (devil-head) pretentious bastard of a kid. But maybe he tried to read it and didn’t get 171
it and gave up on it in frustration just like me. That’s how I’d prefer it to have been, but there was no way to know.
I had had an easier time with Siddhartha, CEH 1964. It’s about this freaky Buddha-wannabe kid, a sort of George Harrison type who wanders the earth looking for enlighten-ment or whatever. Everybody in the book is all impressed with him, kind of like how the Catcher Cult people just love that Holden Caulfield to pieces. Personally, I couldn’t really see the attraction, but the book wasn’t bad. If Catcher in the Rye were a kung fu movie, and HC went up to a mountain to learn some paradoxical truths and some martial arts techniques named after animals from an eccentric old monk, then you’d pretty much have Siddhartha. Except they leave out the part where he flies through the air beating up ninjas and finally kills the guy who murdered his family when he was a little kid in the flashback at the beginning: maybe that’s in Siddhartha II. There were several passages that my dad had marked by drawing lines on the outer margin in pencil, sometimes with question marks and once with a kind of emphatic exclamation point. It made me think of my dad as an intense, yet deep and sensitive, guy.
One corner of a page of Siddhartha, CEH 1964, had been folded over to mark the place, which happened to be the best scene in the book, where this sexy girl named Kamala kisses the main guy to reward him for reciting a poem about how hot she is. It reminded me of how Fiona-Deanna had made out with me because she was impressed with my powerful vocabulary, and somehow that felt encouraging. It gave me a feeling of everything coming together.
But there was also, at the top of one page, a spot where the word “help” had been written heavily in pen over and over, so that it had almost pierced through the paper and etched the word into several pages below it. That seemed 172
kind of desperate looking and sad, especially as it contrasted starkly with the serene tone of the book itself. In any other situation, this would have struck me as unremarkable. I’d done the same sort of thing countless times in my notebooks.
But because it had been written by my dad, however long ago, it was simply excruciating to look at. I would never know what had caused him that kind of distress, though I suppose he had found comfort in Siddhartha, which was yet another thing I probably would never quite understand all the way. I shook the thought out of my head.
Well, at least Siddhartha was short, which was the way to go when choosing books from the CEH library. I decided the next one would be Slan, CEH 1965, which was short as well.
Evil Dead II had ended, and channel two was about fifteen minutes into Blood on Satan’s Claw. I let the last couple of songs on Pink Flag play out, and then put on Black Rose. I carefully replaced Siddhartha in its slot amongst the other books, feeling a bit solemn as I always did when handling them. Then I stood there staring at them for a while.
Something was bugging me. Something about the books . . .
Many of the titles would make great band names. I had always thought that one of the best potential band names among them was La Peste, CEH 1965, a book I hadn’t even considered trying to read because it was in French, and I was pretty sure it would be too tough for me, despite my mastery of the present tense and telling time in the twenty-four-hour system. But obviously, my dad had been able to read French all right, if this had been among his books. I couldn’t imagine reading a whole book in French. The educational system must have been quite a bit better back then, I thought, before they decided to adopt the collage ’n’ Catcher curriculum.
Now, if this were a murder mystery, and I were a weird Belgian guy with a big mustache, this is the point where I 173
would suddenly stop dead, drop my tiny glass of chocolate liqueur, and say something like “But no! But I have been an imbecile! Imbécile! ” And then you’d have to wait another fifty pages or so to find out exactly what the hell I had been talking about. But I won’t do that to you.
The salutation of Tit’s note had been mon cher monsieur,
“my dear sir” in French and kind of a standard French way to start a letter. I hadn’t thought too much about it before. But the thought that struck me while I was standing there in front of the books, looking at La Peste, CEH 1965, and listening to Thin Lizzy was: what if mon cher monsieur hadn’t been a real part of the note, but rather part of the key, like the scratched-out and corrected date?
Well, that was it. Tit had been very, very complicated about it, though and even with the key from the Catcher I almost didn’t realize I had cracked the code. But after a lengthy scribbling session, I pretty much had it. The salutation was indeed an indication to the recipient that the coded message would be in French. Tit had left out the punctuation and accents, regrouped the characters in strings of fourteen, and recopied the resulting coded message backward before arranging the fourteen-character clumps underneath each other—man, those boys must have had a lot of time on their hands.
It decoded to:
“J’ai vu MT hier soir et je l’ai ramonée sec. Détails à suivre.
Vas-tu aux funerailles? J’aimerais meiux être ligoté et fouetté.”
At first, though I recognized it as French, I wasn’t able to figure out exactly where all the accents and spaces and punctuation went, though it helped that the capital letters had remained in the code-parallelogram. The word mieux had been misspelled. As I’ve said, despite three-plus years of study, French wasn’t my strongest suit. But I was highly motivated.