“Very well, say on.”
For a moment “James Hawkins” seemed unsure how to do that. Then he tucked his manila envelope more firmly under his arm and began to hurry through the glossy pages of Dispatches from Olympus, passing a note from Faulkner scolding an Oxford, Mississippi, feed company about a misplaced order, a gushy letter from Eudora Welty to Ernest Hemingway, a scrawl about who knew what from Sherwood Anderson, and a grocery list Robert Penn Warren had decorated with a doodle of two dancing penguins, one of them smoking a cigarette.
At last he found what he wanted, set the book on the desk, and turned it to face Drew. “Here,” he said. “Look at this.”
Drew’s heart jumped as he read the heading: John Rothstein to Flannery O’Connor. The carefully photographed note had been written on lined paper tattered down the lefthand side where it had been torn from a dimestore notebook. Rothstein’s small, neat handwriting, very unlike the scrawl of so many writers, was unmistakable.
February 19, 1953
My dear Flannery O’Connor,
I am in receipt of your wonderful novel, Wise Blood, which you have so kindly inscribed to me. I can say wonderful because I purchased a copy as soon as it came out, and read it immediately. I am delighted to have a signed copy, as I am sure you are delighted to have the royalty accruing from one more sold volume! I enjoyed the entire motley cast of characters, especially Hazel Motes and Enoch Emery, a zookeeper I’m sure my own Jimmy Gold would have enjoyed and befriended. You have been called a “connoisseur of grotesqueries,” Miss O’Connor, yet what the critics miss—probably because they have none themselves—is your lunatic sense of humor, which takes no prisoners. I know you are physically unwell, but I hope you will persevere in your work in spite of that. It is important work! Thanking you again,
John Rothstein
PS: I still laugh about the Famous Chicken!!!
Drew scanned the letter longer than necessary, to calm himself, then looked up at the boy calling himself James Hawkins. “Do you understand the reference to the Famous Chicken? I’ll explain, if you like. It’s a good example of what Rothstein called her lunatic sense of humor.”
“I looked it up. When Miss O’Connor was six or seven, she had—or claimed she had—a chicken that walked backwards. Some newsreel people came and filmed it, and the chicken was in the movies. She said it was the high point of her life, and everything afterwards was an anticlimax.”
“Exactly right. Now that we’ve covered the Famous Chicken, what can I do for you?”
The boy took a deep breath and opened the clasp on his manila envelope. From inside he took a photocopy and laid it beside Rothstein’s letter in Dispatches from Olympus. Drew Halliday’s face remained placidly interested as he looked from one to the other, but beneath the desk, his fingers interlaced so tightly that his closely clipped nails dug into the backs of his hands. He knew what he was looking at immediately. The squiggles on the tails of the ys, the bs that always stood by themselves, the hs that stood high and the gs that dipped low. The question now was how much “James Hawkins” knew. Maybe not a lot, but almost certainly more than a little. Otherwise he would not be hiding behind a new moustache and specs looking suspiciously like the clear-glass kind that could be purchased in a drugstore or costume shop.
At the top of the page, circled, was the number 44. Below it was a fragment of poetry.
Suicide is circular, or so I think;
you may have your own opinion.
In the meantime, meditate on this.
A plaza just after sunrise,
You could say in Mexico.
Or Guatemala, if you like.
Anyplace where the rooms still come
with wooden ceiling fans.
In any case it’s blanco up to the blue sky
except for the ragged mops of palms and
rosa where the boy outside the café
is washing cobbles, half asleep.
On the corner, waiting for the first
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.”