The Nature of My Inheritance (6 page)

“Hush your mouth,” said my mother, a nice
little flash of anger stoking her words.

“Yeah, zip it, Kemosabe,” I concurred.

“Stop calling me that,” he countered.

“Calling you what, Kemosabe?”

“Both of you. Stop it right now.”

The soundtrack for dinner that night was all
forks and knives against plates, glasses of juice
being gulped and set back down on the table,
highlighted by an occasional sniffle from my
stuffy nose. Looked like I was finally coming
down with the cold I had been faking all week,
comeuppance from a wrathful deity no doubt.
I went to bed early, no Xbox, no tube, no
De
rerum natura
, and slept in a pool of sweat until
late morning the next day.

“You okay in there?” my worried mom asked,
knocking lightly on my door.

“Be down in a minute,” I said, then lay there
for another half an hour thinking about how
much I missed Amanda, since the church was
closed until a replacement minister was found,
but also about Harrison, who’d given me his cell
number. I don’t think he could believe it any
more than I did, that he basically offered to let
me consider picking up where the reverend had
let off. Obviously my dad had been a fence for
the ages, since it didn’t look like Harrison was
taking his business elsewhere. Although, I had
to wonder, maybe there weren’t any available
elsewheres. Or, at least, elsewheres that could be
so covert and trusted.

“You’re young to be doing this sort of thing,”
Harrison had said toward the end of our meeting,
or whatever it was, almost as if he was thinking
out loud. “But there’s a matter of some
urgency involved here with finishing up the prearranged
transactions—”

I felt proud that I was suddenly asked to be
part of a transaction. Transactions were never
kid stuff. The word was just too big and stately
to have anything to do with playing marbles or
touch football or comparable baloney.

“—that were already in process before your
father passed. Claude ought to be in touch in a
matter of days, and there’s quite a lot of money
at stake for all three of us.”

Again, I loved feeling I was a part of a sophisticated
gang or ring where each of us depended
on the other and the lucre was flowing like
spring melt.

“So if I could trust you to help complete the
deal, I’m sure your father would’ve been grateful.
And it’ll be some decent walking-around
money for you. Just that you can’t let anyone notice,
or ever tell anybody, ever, is all.”

“You can trust me,” I said, and meant it.

Whether or not the reverend would have
been grateful, it didn’t seem to me to be very
hard work, and its shadier side attracted the anarchist
in me. Harrison would give me a book
to transfer to another man, this Claude guy, who
would give me an agreed-upon amount of
money, which I’d pass along to Harrison after
taking for myself what he called “the courier’s
percentage,” and everybody was happy as
proverbial clams. Since Harrison couldn’t safely
get directly in touch with Claude and finish
things up on his own—they didn’t want to meet
or talk or know each other at all—it was up to
me to bridge them.

“Why not?” I had asked, in all innocence.

“It’s better for you that you don’t know why
not, Liam,” Harrison explained, or rather didn’t
explain. “‘Why’ is a word best stayed away from.”

Never liked that word, anyway, so it was easy
enough for me not to ask.

“How do I reach this Claude person?”

“You don’t,” said Harrison. “He reaches you.”

“Well, how will he know if I have something
for him?”

“He won’t, not exactly. You either will or you
won’t have what he wants,” Harrison said.
“Thing is, it all runs along more smoothly than
you can imagine. Your father always told me that
Claude is a pleasant fellow, and I think you’ll agree that your father was a good judge of character.”

Fair enough, I thought, not sure whether my
dad was a good judge of character or not. Steering
clear of the word “why,” I tried to push the
river a little more. “Does Claude own a white
Porsche, like one out of a sixties movie?”

“You know, Liam, I admire your curiosity. I
admire your pluck. It’s impressive in someone
your age. The answer to the question is not necessarily.
And the answer to your next question,
if I’m guessing it right, is that it’s best you don’t
know at this point. You okay with that?”

“All good,” I said, more and more liking the
craziness of what I was hearing here.

The warm smile that dawned on Harrison’s
face made me feel ten stories tall. How I wanted
to know what book it was he had in his briefcase.
What century, who the writer was, what
the binding looked like, all that interesting stuff.
No doubt it was worth some righteous dough,
but strange as it sounds, that came in kind of
second for me. We—my family and my dad’s
old church—needed money, for sure. But the
book itself, the physical object, and my response
to it, had a quality that couldn’t be put into
words, even if I had a thousand years to try. The
closest I could come, then or now, was love. I’m not the sentimental kind, not much anyway.
But love was what I felt, both pure and simple,
and impure and not so simple. No, it wasn’t the
same love I had for Amanda—I felt no deeper
love for anyone or anything—but still, it was a
rich, growing love for these old leather-bound
antiquarian Xboxes, vellum-covered TVs with
programming by Boethius and his excellent
crew of fellow scribes caught immortal on the
page. How I wanted to tell Harrison right then
and there I was all in. Instead, I kept my cool.
He would find out soon enough. Smart son of
a gun probably already knew he had a partner
in me.

Besides, the words my mother told me not
long after my father’s death came back verbatim,
sharp as the razor I’d just started using on the
feathery whiskers on my chin, firm as the
smooth cement floor on which my dad cracked
his skull. “Now you’re going to have to be the
head of the family,” she had told me, “and take
your father’s place in whatever ways you can.” I
had no idea what that might require of me when
she said it. But times had changed, quick as a slip
on a step, and life was upside down and inside
out. I couldn’t afford to sit around wishing
things were like before. I knew what I had to do
in order to measure up. Knew what kind of man
I had to be.

With that decision, my course was essentially
set for many years of my young life. To cut away
the fat and the gristle and carve straight to the
meat of the matter, I went for it. Harrison met
me briefly, furtively, near an elementary school
playground, to pass along the book he’d brought
for my father—this time in a nondescript brown
paper bag—after phoning to find out if I was up
to the task after giving it a little thought.

“Yes, sir,” I told him. “Proud to have the opportunity.”

I fulfilled my obligations well enough that I
continued as go-between, wearing my father’s
sometime mantle with pride, caution aplenty,
and in the growing knowledge that any college
degree I might have pursued was trumped by
the symbiotic education I was getting by handling,
researching, and reading these books.
Fatuous or gushy as it might sound, they inspired
me to learn more than I ever might have
learned in academia.

What astounds me, looking back at those callow
days, those yearning-to-learn days of methodical
madness, those good boy-bad boy days,
me watchfully passing back and forth the rarest
of rare books and the coldest of cold cash, is that
the Harrisons and Claudes of this world would
take a chance on an underage, unproven cadet.
See, the way I figure it, if my saintly father had
been selected as the perfect recruit to be a part
of this operation of liberation, as they saw it, or,
more like it, pretended to in order to maintain
their dignity, their integrity, and all that, then I,
his eldest, but an innocent youth, was an even
better go-between and minor partner in the
scheme.

Wisely, I never spoke with Harrison about
the genesis, as it were, of my involvement in my
father’s onetime sub rosa business. All we discussed
was books, payables, receivables, and a
number—there were many more than just that
one Claude—of code-named collectors and
dealers. Claude? As it turned out, all of our buyers
were named Claude. Because transactions
were cut in cash, I never saw a personal check,
never saw a driver’s license or any other form of
identification. I didn’t know and I didn’t want
to know the real names of these fellow addicts.
Claude was a perfect moniker, I thought, since,
I mean, please, was anybody in the history of the
world ever really named Claude?

And in my father’s gone but not forgotten
footsteps, I wound up keeping some of the
books I should have passed along for my commission
but could not part with. All more or
less on the up and up, for the record, since I
paid Harrison for what I kept, cash out of my savings from the middleman fee, and just told
potential buyers that the book wasn’t available
after all, instead offering them one of my father’s
books I didn’t care to keep any longer.
Sure, I ran into disappointment now and then,
but, knock wood, not suspicion. Between the
reverend’s sterling reputation among the various
parties and my own winning youthful
earnestness—weird that the less innocent I was,
the easier it became to make myself look innocent—
all moved forward without a hitch. At
the same time, I didn’t let my immediate family,
or anyone else, know about my trove. It was a
challenge, but though I didn’t increase the
number of volumes in my little collection, I systematically
increased its value. By the time I was
in my early twenties, still living at home after
Andrew himself had headed off to college, or,
well, community college, my smuggler’s Bibles
housed rare books that were worth upwards of
two and a quarter million dollars in retail value.
That family acquaintances thought I was an underachiever
who sadly lost his footing after his
father’s death was flat-out wrong but worked
sweet as punch for me. I bagged groceries at the
local store and eventually worked my way up to
manager, just for show, but was making clandestine
gelt hand over fist, or maybe hand
under fist would be the more apt metaphor. Either
way, an illness, an obsession, a passion—
forgive me, my Amanda—for which there was
no clear cure had taken me over.

I did figure out ways to funnel money to my
mother for household expenses over the years,
sometimes considerable amounts that surprised
her, covering my tracks by lying that I had hit
lottery jackpots, a grand here, a few thousand
there. She bought it since she didn’t have much
choice, and was grateful in her poker-faced way.
I also clenched my teeth and tithed to the
church, whose new pastor delivered sermons
that moved me not one bit more than my father’s
had. But I attended services anyway, partly
to accompany my mom, partly to make Harrison
happy, since he wanted me to maintain as
virtuous an image as possible. But mostly because
Amanda, who worked as a bank teller during
the week and, having moved on from her
Sunday school teaching, sang in the choir on
Sundays, even taking over conducting whenever
the regular director—Mrs. Thoth, a nice lady
with a pear-shaped face, who had worked with
my father for many years—was absent. She,
Amanda I mean, had grown more and more
fine as the years went by. Age became her, at least
to my Amanda-consecrated eye. In all truth, she was a beautiful young woman with a warm
smile and ready laugh, a prize many would consider
worthy of far better than the lanky likes of
me. But that wasn’t a roadblock that could stop
my heaven-ordained pursuit.

If I was Dante, Amanda was my Beatrice.
After some initial hesitation on her part, we
began taking walks after services. Walks that
were, for many months, opportunities to get to
know one another. I think she began to see me
less as the minister’s son and more as a real person,
well-meaning if quirky, devoted if shy—shy
at least around her. As for me, my adolescent
longings were eclipsed by her simple presence,
the presence of a truly decent human being. We
spoke of our love of music, hers, and books,
mine. She started reading some of the masterworks
of literature and philosophy that interested
me most—some of which I secretly owned
as first editions—as well as a few novels by
Lawrence and Henry Miller that I considered
classics. And I went over to her house to listen
to recordings with her of her favorite music. I
might never have guessed that, along with Bach,
Mozart, and Beethoven, her most cherished
composers were Maurice Ravel and, yes, Claude
Debussy. That she also liked Prince made me fall
for her all over again.

Somewhere in one of my smuggler’s Bible
books, there must be written a theory that
would explain the things that came together all
at once during that misty May of my twenty-first
year. Well, not the things themselves. But
how those things were connected by taut invisible
strings which that gnarly puppet master
known as god had decided in his great wisdom
to pull. I can try to explain, since god certainly
would never bother and even my beloved
Boethius might not have been equal to doing.

Amanda had floored me when, the year before,
she allowed me to kiss her during one of
our walks. A long, tender kiss beneath a secluded
tree, a kiss I had never believed in my heart of
hearts would ever translate from fantasy to flesh.
Who knows, maybe rubbing elbows with my
learned librarian friend Harrison—who I suppose
had become a bit of a father figure for
me—gave me an air of sufficient sophistication
that Amanda, over half a dozen years my senior,
considered attractive. Perhaps having more
money stashed under a scrap heap of laundry in
my closet than all my neighbors had, added up
times two, afforded me an adult confidence.
Maybe it was because I actually finally succeeded
in reading Nabokov and even tried my hand at
understanding paperback translations of the
works I owned in Greek and Latin, French and
German. Who knows. Why ask why?