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(2012)

The Marlbane Manchester Musser Award

If you’d happened to spot Riley on the train that afternoon, your eyes drifting up momentarily from your BlackBerry, iPod or other hand-held device, you probably wouldn’t have made much of him. He was in his fifties then, taller than average, thinner than average, with a tendency to hunch inside the black leather coat he affected (knee-length, of a style thirty years out of date, replete with once-shining buckles, zippers and studs in the shape of miniature starbursts) and hair that would have been gray or even white but for the providence of the Clairol Corporation. He’d applied a mixture called “Châtain Moyen” in the shower just that morning, expecting, as the label promised, medium brown, but getting instead something between the color of a new penny and a jar of marinara sauce. In any case, he was oblivious. He had his head down, studying the stained typescript of his generic acceptance speech, abbreviating in the left-hand margin the title of the award he was now on his way to receive, though he already had it by heart: The Marlbane Manchester Musser Award in Regional Depiction from the Greater Stuyvesant Area Chamber of Commerce and Associated Libraries. He just didn’t want any slip-ups, that was all. Especially if alcohol was involved. And alcohol was always involved.

He’d left Buffalo at seven-forty a.m. and expected to be in Albany by two — at least that was what the Amtrak timetable proposed, and whether or not Amtrak would deliver was beyond his control. In Albany, he was to be met by Donna Trumpeter, of the Greater Stuyvesant Women’s Service Club, who would drive him in her own personal blue-black SUV the remaining forty-eight point five miles to the town itself. There would be a dinner, served either in the town hall or a school cafeteria gussied up with crepe paper and a banner, he would give his speech and read a passage from his latest novel, Maggie of the Farm, accept a plaque and a check for $250 and drink as much scotch as was humanly possible before he was presented at the local Holiday Inn for a lukewarm shower, a stab at sleep and, in the morning, acidic coffee and rubberized waffles, after which Donna Trumpeter or one of her compatriots would return him to the train station so he could reverse the journey he was now undertaking.

“Why do you even bother?” his third wife, Caroline, had thrown at him as he was shrugging into his coat that morning for the drive to the station. “It’s not as if you don’t have a trunk full of awards already — awards you never even glance at, as far as I can see.”

He had his hand on the doorknob, the slab of the door thrown back on the awakening light of a bitter morning desecrated with sleet, an inch of it already on the ground and more coming. “For the publicity.”

“Publicity? What kind of publicity you think the Greater Stuyvesant area is going to give you? Nobody in New York’s ever heard of it. I’ll bet they’ve never even heard of it in Albany. Or Troy either. Or what, Utica.

“It all adds up.”

“To what?”

He sighed. Let his shoulders slump into the cavernous hollows of the coat. “For the money then.”

“The money? Two hundred fifty bucks? Are you kidding? That’d barely cover dinner at Eladio.”

“Yes,” he said, the draft raw on the left side of his face.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I’m kidding.”

She might have had something more to say about it, but really, what did it bother her what he did — she had a car and a credit card, and a night alone never killed anybody — but she just bunched her chin and squinted her eyes as if to get a better read on him. The sleet whispered over the pavement. The air tasted of metal. “My god,” she said. “What did you do to your hair?”

He was in the club car, scarring his palate with superheated coffee out of a cardboard container and masticating an ancient sandwich advertised as chicken salad on wheat but which managed to taste of absolutely nothing, when a powerfully built middle-aged man came swaying down the aisle, pushing a boy before him. Riley glanced up, though he wasn’t naturally curious, despite his profession. What he knew of people he knew from his early wild years — and from the newspaper and movies, or films as he liked to call them — and that had been enough to get him through fourteen novels and counting. He believed in giving people their space and if he didn’t really have much use for the rest of humanity, that was all right — he led a pretty hermetic existence these days, what with his books, the cats (six of them) and Caroline, Caroline, of course. He liked to say, only half-joking, that he resented strangers because they always seemed to be in his way but that he was willing to tolerate them — and here he’d shrug and grin — because, who knew, they might just buy his books.

At any rate, there was something about these two that caught his attention, and it might have had to do with the fact that they were the only other people in the car but for the attendant, a recessive little man of indeterminate age and origin who looked as if he’d rolled over more miles than all the truckers in western New York State combined. Still, they made an odd pair. The man was white, fleshy in the face, with eyes that seized on Riley and then flung him away just as quickly, and the boy — he looked to be eight or nine — was dark-skinned, Hispanic maybe. Or maybe Indian — from India. All this went through Riley’s head in an instant and then he dismissed it and returned to his sandwich and the newspaper he’d spread out on the plastic tabletop, even as the big man and the boy settled into the booth directly behind him.

After a while he felt the booth heave as the man got up and went to the counter to order a coffee for himself and hot chocolate and a sticky bun for the boy. It took no more than a minute or two for the attendant to irradiate the drinks in the microwave and hand over the cellophane packet with the bun smeared inside, but the whole while the big man kept his gaze fixed on Riley, a gaze so steady and unrelenting Riley began to wonder if he somehow knew him. A single jolt of paranoia sizzled through him — could this be the deranged yahoo who’d called up early one morning to say how disgusted he was by Maggie of the Farm because Maggie was such a slut, and go on to wonder, in a pullulating spill of profanity, why that had to be, why every woman in every book and movie and TV show had to be such a fucking slut? — when he realized that the man wasn’t looking at him at all. He was looking beyond him to where the boy sat, as if the boy was a piece of luggage he was afraid somebody was going to dash by and snatch.

Then the man was swaying down the aisle again, this time more gingerly — and dangerously — because he had his hands full, a cardboard cup in each hand and the sticky bun dangling from two fingers in its shrink-wrapped package. Again the booth heaved. There was the faintest rasp as the cardboard containers made contact with the table. The rails clacked. Scenery rushed past the windows. The man said something (Spanish, was he talking in Spanish?) and it was followed by the noise of crinkling cellophane as the treat was unwrapped — whether by the boy or the man, Riley couldn’t say.

All of a sudden he was irritated with himself — what did he care? Since these two had come into the car he’d been stuck on the same paragraph, reading it over and over as if the words had no meaning. Exasperated, he glanced out the window as a lone clapboard house flashed by, then a series of brown rippled fields, then another house and another expanse of field, equally brown and equally rippled. He’d just brought his eyes back to the paper when the man’s voice started up behind him.