I took another sip of the spiked coffee. It tasted bitter, like death.
“Go on,” I said.
He took the second photocopy from the table. “I asked him to reconstruct what he thought remained,” Leo said, “kind of like connect the dots.” He held it out.
This time I took it.
M F RE NE was scratched in uneven letters on the underside rail in the photocopy.
“You remember when she-?”
I crumpled the photocopy and threw it across the room.
“Dek-”
I reached to touch the bottom rail of the old Underwood. The metal was cold. I kept my hand on it until the metal warmed to my touch.
Of course I remembered.
She asked us, after school, to come with her. “For moral support,” she’d said, smiling mysteriously. We’d go, certainly; Leo and I were weeks past needing any kind of justification to follow her anywhere. So it was, on a gray afternoon in early February, that the three of us marched from Rivertown High to one of the dingy side streets off Thompson Avenue.
She laughed when she stopped us in front of a junk shop. “Behold,” she said, and with a grand wave of her hand, as though she were presenting the crown jewels, she pointed to the old black typewriter in the window, set alongside a weed whacker with a frayed rubber cord, a girl’s faded pink tricycle with a cracked front tire, and a set of chipped floral teacups. “I’m going to write my way out of this town,” she announced as we went in.
The junk shop smelled of mildew and used-up lives. The crafty old character inside told her the old Underwood had been reconditioned, but when he pulled it out of the window and set it on the counter, we could see that all he’d done was turn a hose on it and leave it to dry in the sun. He wanted fifty bucks for it; she offered twenty. Leo and I lounged by a rack of women’s clothes that smelled of sweat and mothballs, high school senior males, clueless but striving for cool, as she and the old man dickered in the gloom. She was golden and blond and blue-eyed, tenacious as a ferret. He was grizzled, big-bellied in a stained undershirt, and had a greasy bald head that looked hardened, like a crustacean’s shell, around a brain that must have been haggling for fifty years. Still, we were betting on her, and we almost applauded when she ended up giving him twenty-six for that old Underwood; her crumpled twenty, four of mine, two of Leo’s. I suspected it was less her willpower that ended it than the old crafty’s recognition that twenty-six was all we were packing, and that there was little chance that anyone else would want that old typewriter. Folks in Rivertown communicated more with whiskey drinks and long-necks than with small words typed on a page.
With our princess between us, Leo and I traded off lugging the old iron back to her father’s apartment above the pinball place. Because we were boys, bent on impressing a girl and supposed to know of things mechanical, we turned it upside down on the kitchen table and slathered it with too much oil from a can some tenant had left under the sink.
She went to a drawer, came back with a fork, M.M.’S FUTURE MACHINE, she scratched on its underside, in scraggly letters. Then she hid it in the back of her closet so her father wouldn’t see it when he came stumbling home, late that night, stinking of whatever was on the skin of the women who worked the men behind the bowling alley.
I crossed the room, picked up and smoothed the photocopy I’d crumpled and thrown, and looked again at the connections Leo’s expert had drawn between the specks, M F RE NE. It wasn’t hard to fill in the rest of the letters: M. M.’S FUTURE MACHINE.
Leo took my cup off the card table, went into the kitchen, and returned with more coffee and Jack. He’d made the mix stronger this time, at least fifty-fifty. He sat by the space heater, I sat back down in my desk chair, and for a little while we said nothing.
Sometime later, his voice came through the whiskey. Except it wasn’t his voice, his adult-Leo voice. It was the voice he’d had when he was in high school, creaking and starting, prone to change pitch without warning. “Can we hope Maris is still alive?” that voice asked.
I drank more and told that voice I didn’t know.
Nineteen
Leo met her first. In high school, Leo met everybody first. It was hard not to notice him, afire in his mismatched madras plaids, fluorescent stripes, and outrageous red tennis shoes. At five foot six, he was the shortest boy in the senior class, weighed not much more than a hundred pounds, and was already balding. However, with a ready grin and an intellect as bright as his plumage, Leo sparkled in a thousand colors, bright as the Hope Diamond. Sooner or later, everyone got drawn to Leo.
“You wouldn’t believe this girl in my American lit class, just transferred in,” he said as we walked home at the start of the second semester. “She’s a junior, at first glance as bland as an egg white scrambled with skim milk.” Leo was contemplating a career as a novelist then and spoke of everything in terms of metaphors, similes, and other things I didn’t understand. “Until she smiles, and then, man, her face lights up like”-he paused, because only a brand-new simile would serve such a goddess-“like the Encyclopedia Britannica in a silk dress.”
I laughed, picturing blue-bound books dressed for a prom.
He stopped, his pale, narrow face intent. “I mean it, Dek, she is the most beautiful, the most wondrous, most amazing, smartest-”
I held up my hand to silence the spew. “All right, she’s perfect. And you’re in love… again.”
“She wants to be a writer, too; a George Eliot, a-”
“What’s this new girl’s name?”
“Don’t laugh; it’s sort of a boy’s name,” he said.
“I got branded with ‘Vlodek’ at birth; I never laugh at names.“
“Maris.”
“Like Roger Maris, the Yankee slugger?”
“Indeed,” he said. That was a word he was using a lot, our senior year. Indeed.
“What’s her first name?”
“That’s it.” He smiled. “Maris. Her last name is Mays, like Willie Mays. Her mother told her she named her Maris Mays so boys would never forget her.”
We started walking again.
“It’s a perfect name for a great woman writer,” he said after we’d gone another block. “Like George Eliot, like-”
“Indeed,” I shouted at the corner where I turned off to go to work at the laundry. I didn’t think he heard me; I didn’t think he even noticed I’d peeled away. For all I knew, he kept talking about Maris Mays all the way to his house.
I spotted her the next day, a blond shadow of medium height, in an almost colorless gold-tinted corduroy jumper, keeping to the walls as she moved between classes. Rivertown High allowed that, allowed anonymity, perhaps more than most high schools. Like all schools, Rivertown had cliques: the jocks, the activists, the physically superior-the noticed. They were small groups, though, for those were days of marauding Japanese steel and murderous Taiwanese efficiencies, when Rivertown students came home to announcements of layoffs and factory shutdowns, predictions of financial freefalls, and fits of uncomprehending rage. A pall hung over Rivertown, as noxious as any of the clouds of smoke that used to blanket the town, only this time it extended past the factories to darken the halls of the high school as well. Most of the students at Rivertown lived under that cloud, stunned, just trying to get by. There was no time for cliques.