“I’m versatile as hell. I know a lot of things, some of them quite well—just survival skills, but enough to buy something to eat and a room at the Y. I can work in a printshop. I wait a dynamite table. I mix a good drink—once I got fired for making ‘em too good. I type like a tornado and I don’t make mistakes. I’m a great temporary. I’ve probably worked in more offices as a Kelly girl than all the other Kellys put together. I could get in the Guinness Book of World Records . Do they pay for that?“
“I don’t think so.”
“Probably not. They make a fortune off us freaks and pay us nothing.”
“You could probably get on full-time in one of those offices if you wanted. Law office maybe. Become a paralegal. Then go to law school.”
“I’d rather lie down in a pit of snakes. I find the nine-to-five routine like slow poison. It poisons the spirit, if you know what I mean. About three days of that’s about all I can stand. But that’s most likely what I’ll do tomorrow—get my dad to take me into town, go on a temporary, fill in somewhere till I’ve got enough money for a few tires and some gas, then drift away and do it all over again.”
There was a pause, not long, while she seemed to consider something. “If I feel lucky, I might look for books tomorrow.”
I tried not to react too quickly, but I didn’t want to let it get past me. “What do books have to do with working in an office?”
“Nothing: that’s the point. The books keep me out of the office.”
I stared at her.
“I’m a bookscout.” She said this the way a woman in Georgia might say I’m a Baptist , daring you to do something about it. Then she said, “I look for books that are underpriced. If they’re drastically under-priced, I buy them. Then I sell them to a book dealer I know in Seattle.”
I milked the dumb role. “And you make money at this?”
“Sometimes I make a lot of money. Like I said, it depends on how my luck’s running.”
“Where do you find these books?”
“God, everywhere! Books turn up in the craziest places…junk stores, flea markets…I’ve even found them in Dumpsters. Mostly I look in bookstores themselves.”
“You look for books in bookstores…then sell ‘em to other bookstores. I wouldn’t imagine you could do that.”
“Why not? At least sixty percent of the used-book dealers in this world are too lazy, ignorant, and cheap to know what they’ve got on their own shelves. They wouldn’t invest in a reference book if their lives depended on it. They might as well be selling spare parts for lawn mowers, that’s all books mean to them. Don’t get me wrong: I love these people, they have saved my life more times than you would believe. I take their books from them and sell them to one of the other book dealers—”
“One of the forty percent.”
“One of the ten percent; one of the guys who wants the best of the best and isn’t afraid to pay for it. You bet. Take from the dumb and sell to the smart.”
“That’s gonna be hard to do tomorrow, though, if you’ve got no money.”
She opened her purse. “Actually, I’ve got a little over three dollars in change. Pennies, nickels, and dimes.”
“I don’t think you could buy much of a book with that.”
She finished her soup and thought it over. “I’ll tell you a story, and you see what you think about it. I was down and out in L. A. I was broke, just about like this, down to my last bit of pocket change. So I hit the bookstores. The first one I went to had a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . You ever hear of that book?”
I shook my head, lying outrageously.
“A guy named James Agee wrote it and another guy named Walker Evans illustrated it with photographs. This was a beautiful first edition, worth maybe three or four hundred dollars. The dealer was one of those borderline cases—he knows just enough to be dangerous, and he had marked it ninety-five. He knew he had something , he just wasn’t sure what. I figured my friend in Seattle might pay me one-fifty for it, but of course I didn’t have the wherewithal to break it out of there. I also knew it wouldn’t last another day at that price—the first real bookman who came through the door would pick it off. I drifted around the store and looked at his other stuff.” She sipped her water. “You ever hear of Wendell Berry?”
The poet, I wanted to say. But I shook my head.
“The poet,” she said. “His early books are worth some money, and there was one in this same store, tucked in with the belles lettres and marked three dollars. I counted out my last pennies and took it: went around the corner and sold it to another dealer for twenty dollars. Went back to the first store and asked the guy if he’d hold the Agee for me till the end of the day. The guy was a hardass: he said he’d hold it if I put down a deposit, nonreturnable if I didn’t show up by closing time. I gave him the twenty and hit the streets. My problem was time. It was already late afternoon, I had only about an hour left. What I usually do in a case like that is sell some blood, but they’ll only take a pint at a time and I was still seventy dollars short. So I worked up a poor-little-girl-far-from-home hustle. It was the first time I’d ever done that, but you know what?…it’s easy. You guys are the easiest touches; I guess if you’re a young woman and not particularly hideous, you really can make men do anything. I just walked in cold off the street and asked twenty shopkeepers in a row if they could let me have two dollars for something to eat. One or two of them snarled and said, ‘Get out of my life, you effing little deadbeat,’ but you get a thick skin after the first two or three and then it all rolls off. One guy gave me a ten. In a cafe on the corner I got money not only from the owner but from half the guys at the counter. I could probably make a living doing that, but it has a kind of self-demeaning effect, except in emergencies. You don’t learn anything, and one day you wake up and you’ve lost your looks and can’t do it anymore. So I made a pact with myself, I would never do it again unless I had to. I got back to the store right on the button and bought my book. And my luck was running like a charm, I didn’t even have to call Seattle, I found a guy in east L.A. who gave me more than I’d counted on—one seventy-five. He specialized in photo books and I thought he might be good for this one.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the end of the story. Even while he was paying me, I noticed a box of books on his counter, new stuff he’d just gotten in. On top of the stack was a first edition that damn near stopped my heart. I finally worked up my courage and asked him, ‘Hey, mister, whatcha gonna want for this?’ He got a stern, fatherly look on his face and said, ‘I think that’s a pretty nice book, sweetie, I’m gonna want twenty to thirty bucks for it.’ And I almost died trying to pay him with a straight face. The next day I called my friend in Seattle and he sent me a good wholesale price, four hundred dollars. And there I was, back in the chips.”
“Incredible,” I said, and I meant it. I didn’t know many bookscouts who could pull off something like that.
“Oh, yeah!…yeah! And so much more fun than working in some accountant’s office or typing dictation for a lawyer. I mean, how can you compare typing all day with bookscouting. The only trouble with it is, it’s not reliable. You can go weeks without making a real score, and the rest of the time you’re picking up small change. So it all depends on how I’m feeling. If I think I’m gonna be lucky, I’ll hit the stores: if not, I’ll go to work for Ms. Kelly again.”
I knew I shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t be that interested in the specifics. But I had to.
“What was that book, that was worth so much?”
She grinned, still delighted at the memory and savoring each of the title’s four words. “ To…Kill…a … Mock-ing-bird !”