Free Waking the Dead by Scott Spencer Page A

there was something high rolling in him: he loved bets, dares, and anything impractical. The money he’d made on his best-seller had already evaporated from the heat of his plans and appetites, and Willow, even in its infancy, was living in a state of ceaseless fiscal peril. Sometimes Danny was a week or two late meeting his payroll and turnover was high. I hadn’t been to the office in three months and of the eight employees, only two were familiar—Tamara and Wilson Wagner. Wagner was an enormous redhead from Providence whom Danny called Rhode Island Red, a linguist, translator, an avant-gardist who stayed on because he didn’t exactly need the money and because he could still convince Danny to invest in beatnik poetry, each volume of which was published at a loss. Wilson’s title was Executive Editor. Danny was Publisher and President. They shared an assistant. She sat in the center room, with access to Wilson’s open, chaotic office and to Danny’s, which breathed stealth and secrecy, and which was usually locked.
    How strange to remember talking to her that day, knowing now, as I could not know then, how deeply I would love her, how heedlessly I would follow where she led me, even when it cut against the grain of my life, my plans, even when it defaced the picture of myself I carried within me like a campaign poster.
    She looked up at me. A manuscript in a shiny orange box was on her desk. Her hair was half covered by a blue and white bandanna and she wore small turquoise earrings, a red and white striped blouse open three buttons on the top, in a way that was both casual and chaste. A light on the bottom of her black phone was flashing off and on.
    And so we nodded to each other and I said, “I’m here to see the boss.”
    “Who are you?” she asked. She looked me up and down, unsubtly, trying to see beyond the uniform.
    “His brother,” I said.
    “Oh, yes,” she said, with a certain lilt in her voice, an enthusiasm I took at the time for a kind of passing attraction. “He’s been expecting you. Go right in.”
    “You’re new here,” I said, inanely.
    “Yes.”The light continued to flash on her telephone.
    “Like it so far?” I asked.
    “Love it,” she said, dismissing me. (Later she would say: “Those questions of yours. And in that uniform? You were so grating. ”)
    I walked into Danny’s office. He was standing at the window, his platinum hair nearly down to his shoulders, wearing a large pink shirt, gray slacks. He was smoking a joint and watching the insurance clerks on their break in Madison Square Park. “Look at this, look at this,” he said, turning his becalmed, reddish eyes toward me. “Great game.” It was touch football, six on a side, fellows who crunched numbers in the big Metropolitan Life Building, guys suited for a great deal more adventure than their desk jobs afforded them. I came to a window as a tall black guy pulled down a wobbly pass and then stumbled and fell to his knees. “The score’s tied at fourteen,” Danny said. “Which side do you want?”
    “I’ll take the side with the ball,” I said.
    “It’s a bet,” said Danny.
    Danny was my younger brother by eleven months. He used to drive Mom and Dad into exhaustion and despair, though they felt his difficultness was probably connected to some inner excellence, some precocious impatience with the indignities of being a child. They really knew how to put the best face on things. Danny was rebellious, pleasure-seeking, fearless, and accident-prone, whereas I was deliberate, empirical, calculating, and believed in trade-offs and negotiations. Danny taught me about what to want and I like to believe I taught him a little about how to get it. He always wanted to be rich—not for the prestige but for the sheer physical pleasure. He thought of wealth as an eternal massage, as softness, convenience, and ease. He felt that being poor rubbed the spirit out of life, a spirit that could live only in an atmosphere of