کتاب 07-10

10

He said the candy bar was awful and he needed another one to get the taste out of his mouth. She gave him a cigarette instead and another splash of rum. He lit up with his thumb.

Harper wasn’t so sure about the escape plan. It had too many moving parts. She had a list going, beginning with the letter A (Father Storey is responsive), continuing on through E (create a distraction by dropping the bell in the steeple), and finishing with Q (Don leads the other boats north). That was way too much of the alphabet.

The Fireman, on the other hand, loved the plan. Of course he did. He had the starring role. Harper kept trying to subtract letters, and he kept trying to add them.

“I wish we had time to dig a tunnel,” the Fireman said.

“To where?”

“It doesn’t matter. You can’t have a decent prison break without a tunnel. The aspiring novelist in me wants a secret tunnel hidden behind a false wall, or a poster of a famous movie star, or possibly in the back of a wardrobe. We could call it Operation Narnia! Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like that.”

“I wouldn’t like if you turned into a novelist. I might have to tear off half your face. That’s what I did with the last wannabe writer to cross my path.”

He swished the dregs of his banana liquor around his paper cup and then tossed the last of it back. “I forgot your husband was an aspiring novelist.”

“Sometimes I think every man wants to be a writer. They want to invent a world with the perfect imaginary woman, someone they can boss around and undress at will. They can work out their own aggression with a few fictional rape scenes. Then they can send their fictional surrogate in to save her, a white knight—or a fireman! Someone with all the power and all the agency. Real women, on the other hand, have all these tiresome interests of their own, and won’t follow an outline.” A glumness settled upon her. It crossed her mind that she had never been Jakob’s friend or wife or lover, but only his subject, only material. Writers were as parasitic, she supposed, as the spore itself.

“I am in one hundred percent agreement on the subject of outlines. Any writer who works by outline should be burned at the stake. Possibly with their own outline and notecards used as kindling. That’s what I dislike most about our plan. It’s an outline. Life doesn’t work by outline. If I were writing this scene, I wouldn’t even bother describing our plan, not in any detail. I already know it won’t work out the way we’re hoping. It would just be wasting the reader’s time.” He saw the look on her face and kicked her foot. “Oh, come on. We have candy bars and smokes and booze and evil plans. Don’t get morose on me. What else is in that lunch box of yours?”

She took out a deformed, tumorous potato and set it on the bed.

The Fireman recoiled. “Aa! What the awful, bearded Christ is that?”

“That? That’s Yukon Gold, Chumley,” she said.

“Ah, well,” he said. “I suppose we’ve had enough chocolate. How about a baked potato?”

He picked it up and clasped it between his hands. Smoke began to rise from between his fingers and with it, the smell of roasting spuds. The smell cheered Harper up. She couldn’t help it.

“I love a man who knows how to cook,” Harper said.