Green Sun by Kent Anderson

Author:Kent Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Weegee’s Bird Book

Other than his patrol car and his flat, the only place Hanson spent any time at all was in Walden Pond Books. The owner, Marshall, was an old-time East Coast radical-progressive who’d moved west in the early seventies. He was a soft-spoken, thoughtful intellectual with carefully considered opinions, but Hanson had seen him make friends with raving street radicals simply by listening politely. Hanson could feel himself relax whenever he walked into the shop. Marshall knew Hanson was a cop and they were both comfortable with that—it made no difference.

Marshall’s assistant, Darrell, was in his late twenties, a UC Berkeley grad and self-proclaimed anarchist, who always seemed to be brooding, grumpy and suspicious to such a degree that it was funny, and he played it up. When it was just the three of them in the shop, Hanson felt like he was among friends.

Hanson had just finished a run around Lake Merritt and was catching his breath as he passed the bookstore. Marshall was just visible through the poster-covered window, stacking books shoulder-high on a window shelf. Hanson stopped and went inside. Marshall didn’t even notice Hanson until he was standing by the cash register behind him, drumming his fingers on the glass counter.

“Marshall,” Hanson said, “you know about stacking books so high in the window that the cops can’t see in if you’re getting robbed.”

“Who’s gonna rob this place?” Darrell said. “There’s not nearly enough money.”

“The take from a 7-Eleven isn’t usually more than thirty or forty bucks. They’ll shoot people for fifty.”

“They?”

“The disenfranchised.”

Marshall had been unboxing new books. Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis to 1960, Miles playing his trumpet, holding it with both hands as if it might overpower him and escape, leaning into the music.

“Officer Hanson,” Marshall said. “You looking for anything in particular today?”

“Birds.”

“Well,” Marshall said, laughing, “you know the store about as well as I do.”

Walden Pond had once been an appliance showroom, the space was deeper than it was wide. All the new books, bestsellers, self-help, and coffee table art books were up front on display tables and display shelves. You could bring in coffee from the coffee shop next door and sit on a flower-print sofa or one of the overstuffed chairs.

The rest of the store was serious, rows of shelves Marshall had nailed together from one-inch pine boards. Hanson could tell at a glance when a book had been added or taken away from one of the pine shelves.

The books back there were twenty, thirty, forty years old—most out of print, forgotten, ignored—their mildew smell drifting between shelves. At night, Hanson imagined, when the store was dark and silent, back in the stacks, the books talked to each other. They talked in low voices until dawn, each of them telling the same stories over and over every night about what happened or didn’t happen or might have happened, swapping different versions of the truth. All of them waiting through the days and nights for someone to pick them up, open and begin to read.

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