It ended there. Drew looked up at the boy.
‘It goes on about the first bus of the day,’ James Hawkins said. ‘The kind that runs on wires. A trolebus, he calls it. It’s Spanish for trolley. The wife of the man narrating the poem, or maybe it’s his girlfriend, is sitting dead in the corner of the room. She shot herself. He’s just found her.’
‘It doesn’t strike me as deathless poesy,’ Drew said. In his current gobsmacked state, it was all he could think of to say. Regardless of its quality, the poem was the first new work by John Rothstein to appear in over half a century. No one had seen it but the author, this boy, and Drew himself. Unless Morris Bellamy had happened to glimpse it, which seemed unlikely given the great number of notebooks he claimed to have stolen.
The great number.
My God, the great number of notebooks.
‘No, it’s sure not Wilfred Owen or T. S. Eliot, but I don’t think that’s the point. Do you?’
Drew was suddenly aware that ‘James Hawkins’ was watching him closely. And seeing what? Probably too much. Drew was used to playing them close to the vest – you had to in a business where lowballing the seller was as important as highballing potential buyers – but this was like the Titanic suddenly floating to the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, dinged-up and rusty, but there.
Okay, then, admit it.
‘No, probably not.’ The photocopy and the letter to O’Connor were still side by side, and Drew couldn’t help moving his pudgy finger back and forth between points of comparison. ‘If it’s a forgery, it’s a damned good one.’
‘It’s not.’ No lack of confidence there.
‘Where did you get it?’
The boy then launched into a bullshit story Drew barely listened to, something about how his Uncle Phil in Cleveland had died and willed his book collection to young James, and there had been six Moleskine notebooks packed in with the paperbacks and Book of the Month Club volumes, and it turned out, hidey-ho, that these six notebooks, filled with all sorts of interesting stuff – mostly poetry, along with some essays and a few fragmentary short stories – were the work of John Rothstein.
‘How did you know it was Rothstein?’
‘I recognized his style, even in the poems,’ Hawkins said. It was a question he had prepared for, obviously. ‘I’m majoring in American Lit at CC, and I’ve read most of his stuff. But there’s more. For instance, this one is about Mexico, and Rothstein spent six months wandering around there after he got out of the service.’
‘Along with a dozen other American writers of note, including Ernest Hemingway and the mysterious B. Traven.’
‘Yeah, but look at this.’ The boy drew a second photocopy from his envelope. Drew told himself not to reach for it greedily … and reached for it greedily. He was behaving as though he’d been in this business for three years instead of over thirty, but who could blame him? This was big. This was huge. The difficulty was that ‘James Hawkins’ seemed to know it was.
Ah, but he doesn’t know what I know, which includes where they came from. Unless Morrie is using him as a cat’s paw, and how likely is that with Morrie rotting in Waynesville State Prison?
The writing on the second photocopy was clearly from the same hand, but not as neat. There had been no scratch-outs and marginal notes on the fragment of poetry, but there were plenty here.
‘I think he might have written it while he was drunk,’ the boy said. ‘He drank a lot, you know, then quit. Cold turkey. Read it. You’ll see what it’s about.’
The circled number at the top of this page was 77. The writing below it started in mid-sentence.
never anticipated. While good reviews are always sweet desserts in the short term, one finds they lead to indigestion – insomnia, nightmares, even problems taking that ever-more-important afternoon shit – in the long term. And the stupiddity is even more remarkable in the good notices than in the bad ones. To see Jimmy Gold as some sort of benchmark, a HERO, even, is like calling someone like Billy the Kid (or Charles Starkweather, his closest 20th century avatar) an American icon. Jimmy is as Jimmy is, even as I am or you are; he is modeled not on Huck Finn but étienne Lantier, the greatest character in 19th century fiction! If I have withdrawn from the public eye, it is because that eye is infected and there is no reason to put more materiel before it. As Jimmy himself would say, ‘Shit don’t
It ended there, but Drew knew what came next, and he was sure Hawkins did, too. It was Jimmy’s famous motto, still sometimes seen on tee-shirts all these years later.