Free Waking the Dead by Scott Spencer

of C. might not wait for me, worried that in trusting Isaac I was falling for a rich man’s idle promises— like Charlie Chaplin used to in those painful comedies, in which he’d be befriended by a slaphappy drunken plutocrat, only to be coldly rejected in the sobriety of the next day. As for my mother, she was passionately against the war in Vietnam and though the Coast Guard was not a combat unit of the armed forces, she was sick with worry that I’d get myself killed. “All Danny had to do was say he was a homo,” she reasoned with me, though even as she said it she knew I could never take that route. She tried to get her boss, Earl Corvino, to pull some strings with his pals in the Democratic Party—the party of peace, now that Nixon was in—but he advised her against it. (We all knew he wasn’t thinking of anything except saving himself the trouble of doing her a favor—as she aged on the job, the old pol was getting cool and even abusive. He saw his own decay in her graying hair.)
    It was an autumn weekend, uncommonly hot, with the sky the color of a spoiled oyster. I went into Manhattan dressed in my whites. I was a skinny thing, then, and with my startled, spiky military haircut I looked like I’d just pecked my way out of an egg. Danny had just begun his business; it was the first year of Willow Books and I was going to meet him at his office. Our plan was to have lunch and then spend the rest of the day getting into trouble. (This was before Danny’s appetite for destructive recreation became ravenous: these were the hors d’oeuvres, the mere morsels of mayhem, before the feast of self-abuse began.)
    I was one hundred and one percent aware of how rigid and antique I looked walking into the offices of Willow Books in my white uniform, with its blue epaulets and gung ho cap, and my caste mark sewn onto the forearm of my right sleeve—at that point petty officer second class, with the eagle, crossed anchors, and double chevron.
    Willow Books had been created by Danny after a visit to some communizing, draft-dodging friends of his up in New Hampshire. He’d somehow ended up at a yard sale in Keene and there found an old book called The Science of Marriage . It had been published in 1902 by a man calling himself the Reverend Otto Olson. It was a sputtering, hilarious, rather loony sex manual for who the Reverend Olson described as “gentle people of all denominations.” It was what our mother liked to call “a fountain of misinformation.” And Danny, cleverly, had an instinct that it would be great fun for thousands of people to read such a corseted, guilt-ridden, Byzantine sexual document. The book was in the public domain; all Danny needed to raise was the cost of manufacturing 10,000 copies. And as he had a knack for making rich friends, he soon was in business. The Science of Marriage ended up selling 250,000 copies. Danny’s picture was in Newsweek and he also appeared on a TV panel, along with five other “hippie moguls,” though one best-seller and a hand-painted tie hardly qualified him on either count. But he was in business, nevertheless. He plowed the profits into an apartment for himself, new books to publish, a company car, and rented space in a red stone building shaped like a rook on the corner of 23rd and Fifth. The floors were slanted; the windows throbbed with sunlight. I emerged from the elevator into the little reception room— beanbag chairs, copies of Rolling Stone , a huge mural of a willow tree in the moonlight. The receptionist’s name was Tamara. Her small, peaked breasts were visible beneath her diaphanous Indian blouse.
    “Hi, Fielding,” she said. “Kill anyone today?”
    “Not yet, Tamara,” I said. “Is Danny here?”
    Danny had a real appetite for ideas and schemes, but there was a methodology to business, a certain kind of orderliness that repulsed him. He was living well. He would always live well, despite the setbacks to come. Even when we were growing up