Ive shipped Dust Off to my editor at Putnam. Shes starting her vacation, so I get a month of not thinking about the book before knowing whether she likes it, thinks its publishable, or fixable or unfixable. In one scene, V I scales the back of Wrigley Field in the dark, on the track of a missing teenager: I walked up the wall until my knees were at squat angle, then used my toes and thighs to push myself standing, got a hand up, grabbed the clay tiles at the top of the wall. One last hoist, come on Warshawski, you fast smart detective, do it. “What you doing up there?” I was lying on top of the clay tiles, a beached whale. The drunk I’d passed earlier, or maybe a different drunk, was standing underneath me. “Practicing for the Olympics,” I said. “The wall climbing event.” “Seems kind of a funny place to practice.” “Yeah, I can’t afford a gym.” I got to my hands and knees. My muscles were wobbly, not good, since I had a lot more stadium to cover. Right hand forward on the sloping clay tile, left knee, left hand, right knee. “You fall, you gonna crack your head open, no Olympics, no medals,” my companion said. “They got those places on the Internet where people give you money, you say you need to join a gym, they pay your membership.” I grunted. Crowd-sourcing, what a great idea. Way better to be in a gym than creeping along the clay tiles of Wrigley Field in the dark. “You ain’t the first to be up here practicing, case you interested,” my friend said, as if the memory had just pinged a neuron. “Other person didn’t say nothing about no Olympics. Maybe they stealing a march on you, or maybe you ain’t no Olympic athlete yourself.” I sat up, banging a knee into the edge of one of the tiles. “When was this?” I tried to keep my voice casual. “Oh, tonight. Don’t have me no watch, can’t tell you exactly when, but when I called out, he moved fast, way faster than you, Missy. If he is your rival, you better get your faster moves worked out.” “He? It was a man?” “Didn’t ask for an ID. Small kid, might have been twelve or thirteen. Wore one of those big sweatshirts, got caught on the tiles. He moved like a crab through the sand with a kingfisher after him and if you’d a asked me, I’d a said he was breaking in, not training for no Olympics. What about you?” “I think he was breaking in, too.” Bernie, Boom-Boom’s jersey hiding her breasts, small, agile, looking like a twelve-year-old boy in the dim light. “Meaning, maybe you breaking in, too.” Ignore the grinding pain in the knees where the tiles cut through my jeans. Force the numb fingers to cling to the tiles. Inch by inch, until I felt the metal of the staircase next to me, a sharper shape in the shapeless night. I pulled myself upright, clung to the metal with my feelingless fingers, flexed and stretched by legs, swung the right leg out and over the stairwell fence bar, slipped, fell backwards onto the bleacher stairs. “Hey! You in the ballpark now!” my cheering squad shouted. “You don’t belong in there, they gonna arrest you, give you fines.” I didn’t bother responding. “Hey, you still alive?” the drunk shouted. “You find any beer, you drop it over the wall, you hear?” I sat up, rubbed my spine. Everything in one piece. I’d done the easy part.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 22:39:26 +0000
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