The Salinger Contract by Adam Langer

Author:Adam Langer [Langer, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781453297940
Publisher: Open Road E-Riginal
Published: 2013-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

26

I told Conner we could meet again after I’d told the kids their bedtime stories—Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile for Beatrice, a chapter of All-of-a-Kind Family for Ramona. I had grown to cherish those bedtime story hours more than any other part of the day. They marked the only times I could say unequivocally that I was doing something worthwhile. Watching my children’s enchantment as I either read a story or made up my own, I understood that sometimes all a story needed was one or two people to read or listen to it to make it matter.

But as night fell, I grew leery. What did I really know about Conner other than what he had told me during our interviews? I remembered the first time Beatrice had seen his picture in the aisle of Borders, by now out of business and functioning on a month-to-month lease as Fireworks City. Beatrice had seemed frightened of him, and I wasn’t willing to dismiss her instincts any more than I was willing to dismiss those of my generally easygoing dog, who had growled and barked when he had seen Conner approaching. What did Conner mean about deciding to be a hero and asking if I’d act like a decent human being in return by telling his story? Might he have been going mad? Might he have chosen me to listen not because Dex would never “mess with” me, whatever that was supposed to mean, or that he trusted me with his story, or that he wanted me to tell it in case something happened to him, but rather because deep down he knew I was the only one gullible enough to believe him?

We agreed to meet at the Starlite Drive-In Movie Theatre, a half hour out of town on Old State Route 37, midway between Bloomington and Indianapolis, where he would be catching his flight home. Driving north through Ku Klux Klan country in Martinsville with Miles Davis’s “Elevator to the Gallows” playing loud on my Volvo’s stereo, I worried I would attract attention being a single male attending the drive-in, and that when I got into Conner’s car, or he got into mine, we would look like a couple of guys about to give each other hand jobs. But no one seemed to pay us any mind when I pulled into a space, Conner pulled his Nissan beside mine, and he got into the passenger seat of my car, patted me on the shoulder, and shook my hand.

“Hey buddy, what’s the flick?” he asked.

“Dunno,” I said. “I didn’t even think to check. Let’s take a look.” But the credits were long since over; the movie was already more than halfway through. It was a cops-and-robbers movie—motorcycles, automatic weapons, and a strong hero who was a man of few words—the Rock or Vin Diesel or some other strapping dude I’d never seen in a movie before.

We began by discussing our usual topics—parenthood, literature, the lousy economy—and when we were done, Conner told the rest of his story.

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