Scare Tactics Read Free Page A

pads: David was using up more than one a night in a rage of completion. Each day the odor of violets, mysteriously present, masked the odor of dissolution in the casita. I was frightened for David, nearly sleepless at night for fear he wouldn’t, after all, reach the dizzying conclusion of his novel.
    A week after our first meeting on the running track at Sprayberry, I let myself in, and took a few moments to adjust to the portent that the odor of violets was absent from the casita. David Hallowell lay very still on his back, his eyes open and staring, a slight smile of peace on his lips. His ordeal had ended. In his right hand there was a note to me.
    We have done it!
    It was signed, David.
    I gathered up the last pages of Angels and Aborigines strewn across his worktable and stumbled sobbing into the chicken-infested yard. The Mexican woman, children dangling haplessly from her swirling skirt, hurried outside and, hearing me, began her own lamentation. The children, one by one, contributed their voices. Dogs barked mournfully up and down the barrio.
    “He has no family,” I told the coroner. “He was the last of his line. And, except for Mrs. Cerador and myself, he had no friends.”
    I sold my car, one jump ahead of the repo man, raising enough cash to retire the note and afford David Hallowell a modest but decent funeral.
    The night following his burial I assembled all of the yellow pages in my studio, changed the ribbon on my Smith-Corona electric, drank two double scotches to fortify myself, then began typing the book I had been born to write.
    ANGELS AND ABORIGINES
    a novel by Jack Mayo
    I made a few editorial changes as I went along. Nothing major. Ten days later I mailed the typescript to an editor who had almost forgotten I existed, at an august publishing house in New York. The manuscript went through the house like wildfire. It knocked them all on their asses.
    Angels and Aborigines was published the following spring, in a first edition of half a million copies. The Book-of-the-Month Club ordered an additional quarter of a million. Word of mouth secured the number one position on the New York Times best-seller list two weeks after publication. The novel stayed at number one through six additional printings, for eighteen glorious weeks. The reviews—ah, God, the reviews! Each one a nutritious sweetmeat, a seductive paean, an exaltation of a unique talent! I swept all of my peers under the rug that season—Norman, Philip, John. Even they came forth with tributes for the literary event of the decade. The King Rat currently in residence at the Dream Factory snatched the cheese from all the other rats, paying an unheard-of sum for movie rights. Thirty-three foreign editions were planned. The appeal of my novel was universal.
    My novel, yes. Mine by escheat, if you will.
    I had known what I must do, even before David Hallowell was laid to rest. Because—to be brutally honest about the matter—if I’d simply arranged for posthumous publication of the novel, it would have done far less well with his name on it. Perhaps Angels and Aborigines would have been grievously neglected. Those things happen. The bald truth is, publishers and the literati take little interest in dead authors, particularly those who have had the bad fortune to die without first establishing a reputation that will, you might say, tide them over. In taking credit for what David had written I was, in fact, ensuring the widest possible circulation for a great book. I assumed the role of literary celebrity and, I must say, played it with panache. This was a requirement for bestsellerdom that had to be fulfilled. It kept me busy for months. And as I read and reread the novel (some of the more wittily salacious passages made for uproarious cocktail party entertainment), it became rooted in my soul that I was the true proprietor of the words I recited.
    For my services as executive consultant to the film version of Angels and Aborigines, my Hollywood