Looking for Rachel Wallace

8

In my mouth there was still the faint taste of batter-fried shrimp with mustard fruits as I hung around the front door of the Crimson Book Store on Mass. Ave. and watched Rachel Wallace sign books. Across the street Harvard Yard glistened in the fall rain that had started while we were eating lunch.

Rachel was at a card table near the check-out counter in the front of the store. On the card table were about twenty copies of her new book and three blue felt-tipped pens. In the front window a large sign announced that she’d be there from one until three that day. It was now two ten, and they had sold three books. Another half dozen people had come in and looked at her and gone out.

Linda Smith hung around the table and drank coffee and steered an occasional customer over. I looked at everyone who came in and learned nothing at all. At two fifteen a teenage girl came in wearing Levi’s and a purple warmup jacket that said Brass Kaydettes on it.

“You really an author?” she said to Rachel.

Rachel said, “Yes, I am.”

“You write this book?”

“Yes.”

Linda Smith said, “Would you like to buy one? Ms. Wallace will autograph a copy.”

The girl ignored her. “This book any good?” she said.

Rachel Wallace smiled. “I think so,” she said.

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about being a woman and about the way people discriminate against women, and about the way that corruption leads to other corruption.”

“Oh, yeah? Is it exciting?”

“Well, I wouldn’t, ah, I wouldn’t say it was exciting, exactly. It is maybe better described as powerful.”

“I was thinking of being a writer,” the kid said.

Rachel’s smile was quite thin. “Oh, really?”

“Where do you get your ideas?”

“I think them up,” Rachel said. The smile was so thin it was hard to see.

“Oh, yeah?” The girl picked up a copy of Rachel’s book and looked at it, and turned it over and looked at the back. She read the jacket flap for a minute, then put the book down.

“This a novel?” the girl said.

“No,” Rachel said.

“It’s long as a novel.”

“Yes,” Rachel said.

“So why ain’t it a novel?”

“It’s nonfiction.”

“Oh.”

The girl’s hair was leaf-brown and tied in two pigtails that lapped over her ears. She had braces on her teeth. She picked the book up again and flipped idly through the pages. There was silence.

Rachel Wallace said, “Are you thinking of buying a copy?”

The girl shook her head. “Naw,” she said, “I got no money anyway.”

“Then put the book down and go somewhere else,” Rachel said.

“Hey, I ain’t doing any harm,” the girl said.

Rachel looked at her.

“Oh, I’m through anyway,” the girl said and left the store.

“You got some smooth way with the reading public,” I said.

“Little twerp,” Rachel said. “Where do I get my ideas? Jesus Christ, where does she think I get them? Everyone asks me that. The question is inane.”

“She probably doesn’t know any better,” I said.

Rachel Wallace looked at me and said nothing. I didn’t have a sense that she thought me insightful.

Two young men came in. One was small and thin with a crew cut and gold-rimmed glasses. He had on a short yellow slicker with a hood up and blue serge pants with cuffs that stopped perhaps two inches above the tops of his wing-tipped cordovan shoes. He had rubbers on over the shoes. The other one was much bigger. He had the look of a fat weightlifter. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but he was starting to get bald. He wore a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt, a black down vest, and chino pants rolled up over laced work boots. The sleeves of his shirt were turned up.

The small one carried a white cardboard pastry box. I edged a little closer to Rachel when they came in. They didn’t look bookstorish. As they stopped in front of Rachel’s table I put my hand inside my jacket on the butt of my gun. As the small one opened the pastry box I moved. He came out with a chocolate cream pie and had it halfway into throwing position when I hit him with my shoulder. He got it off, side-armed and weakly, and it hit Rachel in the chest. I had the gun out now, and when the fat one grabbed at me I hit him on the wrist with the barrel. The small one bowled over backwards and fell on the floor.

I said, “Everybody freeze,” and pointed my gun at them. Always a snappy line.

The fat one was clutching his wrist against his stomach. “It was only a freaking pie, man,” he said.

The small one had scrunched up against the wall by the door. The wind was knocked out of him, and he was working on getting it back. I looked at Rachel. The pie had hit her on the left breast and slid down her dress to her lap, leaving a wide trail of chocolate and whipped cream.

I said to the men, “Roll over on the floor, face down. Clasp your hands back of your head.”

The little one did what I said. His breath was back. The fat one said, “Hey, man, I think you broke my freaking wrist.”

“On the floor,” I said.

He went down. I knelt behind them and searched them quickly with my left hand, keeping the gun clear in my right. They had no weapons.

The bookstore manager and Linda Smith were busy with paper towels trying to wipe the chocolate cream off Rachel; customers gathered in a kind of hushed circle—not frightened, embarrassed rather. I stood up.

Rachel’s face was flushed, and her eyes were bright. “Sweets for the sweet, my dear,” I said.

“Call the police,” she said.

“You want to prefer charges?” I said.

“Absolutely,” she said. “I want these two boars charged with assault.”

From the floor the fat one said, “Aw, lady, it was only a freaking pie.”

“Shut up,” she said. “Shut your foul, stupid mouth now. You grunting ass. I will do everything I can to put you in jail for this.”

I said, “Linda, could you call the buttons for us?”

She nodded and went over to the telephone behind the counter.

Rachel turned and looked at the five customers and two clerks in a small semicircle looking uncomfortable.

“What are you people looking at?” she said. “Go about your business. Go on. Move.”

They began to drift away. All five customers went out. The two clerks went back to arranging books on a display table downstairs.

“I think this autographing is over,” Rachel said.

“Yeah,” I said, “but the cops are coming. You gotta wait for them. They get grouchy as hell when you call them and screw.”

Linda Smith hung up the phone. “They’ll be right along,” she said.

And they were—a prowl car with two cops in uniform. They wanted to see my license and my gun permit, and they shook down both the assault suspects routinely and thoroughly. I didn’t bother to tell them I’d already done it; they’d have done it again anyway.

“You want to prefer assault charges against these two, lady?” one of the prowlies said.

“My name is Rachel Wallace. And I certainly do.”

“Okay, Rachel,” the cop said. There was a fine network of red veins in each cheek. “We’ll take them in. Sergeant’s gonna like this one, Jerry. Assault with a pie.”

They herded the two young men toward the door. The fat one said, “Geez, lady, it was just a freaking pie.”

Rachel leaned toward him a little and said to him very carefully, “Eat a shit sandwich.”