"Can" B. Worth - Part Two

"Can" B. Worth

Part Two

            I am actually used to pretending while having someone I do not want around being around watching my every move.  I resent the situation by it actually makes it easy to pretend although in this case I would have preferred to just sit in the old professor’s chair for an hour and fuss with my cell phone.  “Who cares.” I said to myself.  To have to have a forced march of pretending with an obvious “target” (a “watching you”) is easy enough for all I needed to do was “get by” him.  So I looked down at the pipe rack on the desk and picked up the three small thin books that were placed at its side with the pipe rack as one book end and… an old military green colored metal stapler, Korean War era, acting as the “other” book end.  I opened and looked at the title page of each book.

            I could tell that all three books had been purchased from old book dealers; they looked like it.  The first thin book had a title in gilt upon a deep maroon red leather spine and half marbled paper boards; a copiously better binding for an “any ole book”.  The title page read “LOGAN, …BY THE AUTHOR OF ‘SEVENTY-SIX’, London, 1840”.  An old slip of paper was loose on the title page.  It was an 1832 receipt for payment of a twenty dollars debt signed “John Neal”.  Neal was the book’s author.  He was Portland, Maine’s… if not all of Maine’s…. most famous “American Renaissance” author.  This was a … in fancy binding… later English edition of his “Logan”; an odd duck to find on a dead professor’s desk top… especially with the old receipt in it.  THAT being in there, in addition to the book itself being there… WAS NOT an accident.

            The other two books were two copies of Lowell’s “A FABLE FOR CRITICS”.  Second editions, 1848.  One was a closely trimmed smaller copy in paper boards and cloth spine; a “reading copy” to use collector iota while the other… was a Maine style homemade Civil War era “extra illustrated” copy with a Charles Briggs letter laid in and numerous author portrait illustrations tipped in… including a CDV portrait photograph of John Neal.  “Neal next to a Neal” I noted to myself before further noting that I was moving from “the tip of an iceberg” to “GOD KNOWS WHAT’S IN HERE!!!!!!!!” pretending status level.  I put the books back and the stapler back at work holding them up against the pipe rack.

            The historian reached past my restoration work to pick up the old grungy Sherlock Holmes style pipe on the desk.  He put it in the eighth hole of the pipe rack and then picked up the fifth pipe from the rack.  This pipe was a shiny, little used “chrome” (?) and wood art-ish-deco looking toward 1950’s “THUNDERBIRD” and away from Sherlock Holmes in style.  “He wasn’t suppose to smoke in here but he always did and he’d put that pipe lighted in his jacket pocket if anyone came and pretend there was no smoke in the room.  No one ever called him on it either.”

            “The pipe?” I said referring to the FIRST pipe.

            “THIS one I GAVE HIM.” said the historian holding the fifth hole pipe up before me.

            “Didn’t use that one much did he.” I said noting the obvious “new-ness” of that pipe.

            “Oh.  Ah.  No.” the historian said.

            I didn’t pursue it and he put the pipe back in the rack.  I started to pretend at the boxes behind the desk.  Merging pretend with the “GOD KNOWS WHAT’S IN HERE” I took a pen and paper slip out of my pocket and started an estimated “box count”.  The historian was staring at me again.  So I said “You want that pipe back?”

            “Pipe back?”

            “The one you gave him?  You can have it.”

            “The pipe?  Me?  Your giving it to me?  How?”

            “I give it.  You take it.  I will be cleaning out the office.  I don’t want that pipe.  You can have it.”

            “Your cleaning THIS OUT?  WHEN?

            “Hopefully I’ll start in about an hour once I’m done in here.”

            “Done in here?”

            “Figuring it out.”

            “Figuring what out?

            “The clean out.”

            “Figuring the clean out?”

            “Yep.”

            “Yep?”

            “Yep.” I said again and turned my back on the historian, stared off onto the piles of stacked boxes going back to the windows.  I held my little note card and made little dots on that card with my pen.  It didn’t matter what I marked down for I was just pretending.

            “I can have the pipe?” the historian said to my back.

            “Yep.” I said and then heard him take the pipe out of the rack.  I didn’t turn around.  He didn’t leave.