I shrugged. “I suppose.”
He stood up, leaned past me and pulled open the window, which during my stint here had never been opened. Dust filled the room, and a gooey, filthy sort of light. He squinted into this light for a while, saying nothing. Then he turned to me. “Let’s go outside.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just go out.” He picked my jacket up from the floor and handed it to me.
It was really fall now. It had that smell. Leaves were getting the fragile jitteriness that meant they were thinking about taking the plunge. We sat in the scraggly grass, enjoying the yard’s only patch of sunlight, and scootched around after it as it moved.
“Can I ask you something?” I said to Wurster.
“Shoot.”
“What did my dad pay you for this?”
He sighed. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I promised him I’d teach you. I didn’t want to break the promise.”
“You’re doing this for free?”
He made a face. “It was a long time ago. I owed it to him. And besides,” he said, his voice softening, “it was…instructive, working with you. I learned some things.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding,” Wurster said.
And that was all he would say on the subject, and I never would find out what it was he owed my father for. In retrospect, I’m glad he didn’t tell me. The older I get, the more reluctant I become to judge my father, or anybody else, so terribly harshly. But that’s later.
The only other change in those last few weeks was in my relationship with Susan: I had fallen in love with her. At least I thought I had, anyway; I was reluctant to get close enough to find out for sure, the way you’re reluctant, while enjoying a balmy and empty beach, to look too closely at the sign that might or might not say NO TRESPASSING. The possibility of love was thrilling to consider, but its implications were overwhelming. Susan and I ate together, slept together. She did her laundry at our house. But the emotions went unaddressed, and I was aware that she was waiting me out, and that her willingness to wait was finite. Our relationship was a beautifully wrapped gift that, when you listened closely enough, went tick, tick.
The day I went to the post office to mail away my two weeks of Family Funnies, Ken Dorn was waiting for me. He was leaning against the self-service counter, reading a paperback book. He looked up at me and smiled politely, much in the way you would smile at a man you’ve invited into your office to fire, and said, “Timmy Mix. What a surprise!” His goatee was fully in now, as neatly trimmed as a fairway.
“Fancy meeting you here.”
“It’s nearly eleven,” he said. “I was certain you’d be here by ten-thirty.” He pointed to my package, which had the words DO NOT BEND stamped on it in dark red block letters. “What have we got here?”
“Matzoh.”
“Har, har. Just in time for Passover.”
He followed me into the line, which was long. Everyone in it seemed to have the same cold, and kleenex fluttered before the regiment of noses like a dozen flags of surrender. “So, Tim, any chance of letting me check out the drawings?”
“They’re all packed up,” I said.
“Come on, for your old pal Ken? They can seal it up again at the counter.”
I gave this some thought. “Stand a couple feet back,” I said. “No touching.”
“All right, all right. I wasn’t going to spoil your little party.” He backed off and crossed his arms smugly over his chest.
I pulled each drawing out slowly, held it up before Ken Dorn, and slid it back into the package before taking out another. Ken seemed to lose his snotty affect; the sneer disappeared from his face and he studied each drawing carefully, with a kind of scholarly detachment. I sealed them away and tucked the envelope under my arm.
“So,” I said.
He nodded. “Those are good,” he said with real sincerity. “I’m impressed.”
I waited for pride to sweep me off my feet, but it never came. I was too far resigned to what fate would bring to care what Ken Dorn thought. The sentiment was touching, though, from such an insidious little man.
“Well, thank you,” I said. “That’s very kind.”
“I mean it, they are very good.” He shrugged. “Not that it’ll make a difference.”
I was less suspicious of the content than the delivery: the supercilious whimper had crept back into his voice. “What do you mean?” I said.
“I mean, it’s a done deal. The Family Funnies is mine.”
“I haven’t even mailed these, Ken.”
“No matter. I played nine holes with Burn yesterday. I’m as good as hired.”
We moved forward in line. I was fuming. I said, “You came all the way to Riverbank to tell me that?”
“Mixville,” he said. “And hey, Timmy, I thought you’d want to know. It’s important news, isn’t it?”
“If it were correct,” I said, loudly enough so that several people turned their heads, “it would be news. As it is, it’s just idle speculation. You’re bluffing.” I couldn’t bear to look at him.
Dorn laughed. “Don’t kid yourself, Mix. You know I have the inside track.”
“Shove off.”
I stole a glance. Across his face spread the priggish leer of a corrupt cop about to toss a ziploc bag of marijuana into my car. We stood glaring at one another for a few seconds before he turned, pointed at the counter, and said, “You’re up, buddy.”
I asked the clerk to next-day my package. She taped it back up and stuck a sticker on it. I scanned the place: Dorn was gone.
“That’s fifteen bucks,” said the clerk. I barely had the energy to take the money out of my wallet.
* * *
Two days later I had come down with the post office cold and was on my way to New York to meet Susan. I had a box of tissues wedged between the seat belt thingies and a lukewarm travel mug of mint tea in the pull-out drink holder. Pierce had put some foul powder into it that was supposed to ream out the sinuses, and though I winced with every sip, I breathed better than I had in eighteen hours. I made frequent and disgusting sounds into balled-up kleenexes, which coated the floor of the car to a depth of several inches. I was not one to pretend I wasn’t sick.
Parking a Cadillac in New York was no small feat, so I gave up entirely and resorted to a garage. If things somehow managed to work out, I figured I could deduct the cost. I stuffed a wad of fresh tissues into my jacket pocket, and emerged into the cab-agitated air of New York. With my head in such a state, every gentle breeze felt like a sock in the jaw; I was convinced I could feel Brownian motion at work on every follicle of my hair.
I had expected to be on edge about Burn’s impending decision, but for some reason — the inner dullness the cold had brought on, perhaps, or the fatalistic fog encounters with Dorn invariably put me in — I was completely relaxed. I rode the elevator to the syndicate with a kind of objective calm: whatever happened, I told myself, it would have no more or less power over me than if I was watching it happen to someone else.
For this reason, I was more than a little surprised to find myself panicking at the sight of Susan sprinting past the receptionist’s desk, holding a giant cardboard box. I leapt out of the elevator, head pounding, as she vanished into the stairwell. The receptionist sat very still, her eyes round as cherry tomatoes.
“Susan?” I said. The stair door sucked shut and I could hear her footsteps faintly echoing off the concrete walls.
I ran to the door and flung it open. “Susan! Is that you?”
The footsteps stopped. I could hear her breathing. I looked down the long shaft and saw a hand, two floors below, gripping the rail. “Who is that?”
“It’s me, Tim!”
“Tib?”