Short Ride to Nowhere Read Free Page B

  His wife had always feeling fat, was always asking him, “How do I look in this?” and showing off the latest dress, the newest underwear, the skimpiest bathing suit, and no matter what Jenks said, she’d always ball the clothing up and kick it across the room and bring it back for something else.   Three or four times.   She’d fall apart in the middle of the bed crying silently, muttering under her breath about how old she was, how disgusting she was, Jenks helpless to convince her of otherwise.   And yet somehow this ad exec prick had managed to do something different, give her what she needed, even while he paid for ads that helped her to die inside without her even knowing it.
    Jenks crossed into midtown, pulled into the first parking lot that he could.   The guy in the booth asked him how long he’d be.   He lied and said, “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”   He might be here all day, but he wanted his car available as soon as he returned, and he didn’t want to wait while they dug it out from some back wall on the tenth level someplace.
    He came out, took a left onto Broadway, walked up to Times Square, and began looking for the Hyena.
    He’d met the Hyena when he’d tracked Hale into the city and found out that he’d been arrested.   It wasn’t that hard finding a man without any place to stay.   Jenks had checked the second hand bookshops all around Penn Station first, working in an ever widening spiral.   He and Hale used to talk about their excursions into Manhattan to pick up signed first editions and other rarities when they were younger and the world was still wide open in front of them.   They had shopped a lot of the same independent bookstores, knew some of the same store owners.  
    Probably the worst moment of both of their lives–worse than losing the wives, the kids, the dogs, everything else they’d owned, was losing the book collections because they represented something greater than themselves.   The books weren’t just a hobby but a part of history, their own and more.   Books had been Jenks’ way of breaking from his old man.   A way of holding on to a piece of time, a kind of love that was pure and couldn’t be touched.   Ten million pages of stories that had a greater truth than you could ever live on your own.
    Those last six months Hale and Jenks had started selling the books off on eBay and elsewhere, making back maybe a twentieth of what the works were actually worth.   Packing the books up with a sad love, driving every day to the post office to send the work in to someone else’s hands.   Every day, the two of them in the post office line with their arms full of packages, unable to speak, unable to explain to anyone else why this was such a killing move, why they were dying the same way at the same time, as surely as if they both had cancer and were wasting away in the hospital side by side.
    So in the city he hit the bookstores and found out that Hale had been going around and selling some paperbacks he’d either stolen, found in the trash, or bought cheap at church sales, trying to turn a profit at the indie shops.   Jenks kept asking around and shadowing Hale until he found the Hyena in Times Square, set up at a table selling knockoff Prada and Gucci purses.
    The Hyena was maybe twenty-five, what Jenks’ parents used to call mulatto but nowadays you said “mixed race” or you were being un-pc.   Jenks had other things on his mind and just thought of the guy as black.   The Hyena’s name was Ferdie, but when Jenks ran into him the first time he was wearing a T-shirt with the logo of a laughing hyena on it.   Ferdie seemed to mimic the logo, smiling wide and always throwing his head back and laughing at nothing.   He set Jenks on edge immediately.
    Ferdie said he knew Hale.   He’d been set up beside him and had rented Hale a table to sell his crappy little piles of coverless and mildew-stained books.   Ferdie gave Jenks the run-down on