The Bookbinder, part 1

 20 November 1999

There had been some trick of the light, some distortion through the glass. Tobey was convinced that he had seen someone inside. He had walked past the aged storefront before, never really paying any attention to the place. Not this time. 

A November day, already past that last really warm day in November. It was spitting a frigid sleet and the dark approached rapidly. He really just wanted to get home, which wasn't much further. Only five more blocks and to the right was his street. Still, he remained there at the glass for a time, hands pressed, face peering into the window. He could not say for certain what he thought he had seen. It had only been a flash, a blur in his head of something grotesque and misshapen. Now, as the bleak evening was falling around him, he could see nothing. Only dark, dusty shadows within. The weather hastened his exit from this scene, and a short time later he arrived at home. By dinner time he had forgotten the incident.

The following day was a Saturday. No school, no job to go to, no obligations on the calendar. Tobey slept until nearly 10:00 and felt no shame for it. He had rolled over lazily to peer the analogue alarm clock next to his bed when it read 9:48. He just assumed that it was AM. He remained half lounged across the bed, rearranged his morning wood and decided to take the opportunity to vigorously scratch his pubes. No reason, just that his hand was already in the neighborhood.

The urge to urinate grew with each breath, still he could not muster the energy to get out of bed. He made it until 9:52, when his bare feet hit the floor and padded off to the bathroom in the hall. He left the bathroom door open as he discharged a night's worth of Dr. Pepper, mostly into the toilet bowl. In between bursts, Tobey stopped to listen to the hallway behind him. It was then he realized the emptiness of the house around him. Ten o'clock on a Saturday morning, his mom and older sister going about their lives like he wasn't even there. It was perfect.

He didn't bother grabbing a shirt, but he did return to his room to slide his bare feet into a warm pair of slippers. It was warm enough up on the second floor, but the floors downstairs were sure to be freezing. He made his way down the stairs and into the kitchen. A look out the window above the sink showed a bright, blue day, not a cloud in the sky. Despite the bright sun, it was a bitter cold day, the wind fierce and biting from the North. The few remaining leaves of russet, gold and crimson were being ripped away from already sparse limbs. Autumn, too sweet and too short, would give way to Winter quietly this year.

Tobey rummaged about the cupboards and drawers for a bowl, a spoon and a large box of Honeycomb cereal. He dropped the spoon carelessly into the bowl with a loud clatter, then poured a heaping mound from the cereal box. There was a half-gallon jug of milk from Reiter's Dairy on the top shelf of the refrigerator, half full and passing a perfunctory sniff test. Breakfast was served.

He placed the bowl down on the small kitchen table, dragging a metal framed chair across the linoleum floor. It hadn't really made that much of a noise, but in the silent, empty house it seemed to echo off into every other room. The only other sound was the wind howling outside the house. There were a few moments when he thought the wind was actually shaking the house. It may have been.

After he had shoveled a few mouthfuls of the Honeycomb, he found that even the crunching was not enough to drown out the gale outside. His mother kept a portable radio parked on this table, where she often would listen while taking her morning coffee before work. Tobey eyed the radio between bites, finally deciding that AM radio static would sound better than this. He reached over to casually switch it on, without checking the dial to see what it was tuned for. As expected, the speaker crackled to life with WJR, where Mom would catch her weather and traffic reports. 

Some gearbox was blabbing away about the finer points of estate planning, and possible tax implications. They might as well have been speaking in Greek; it was all gobbledygook to him. But at least it was noise. Chatter, just background noise, other than that wind tunnel beyond the window. There he sat for another fifteen minutes, munching away while staring blankly at the radio. When he reached the bottom, he picked up the bowl and slurped the remaining milk loudly. He drained it, plunked the bowl down and punctuated the act with a very satisfied, " Ahhhh....".

It was at this point that Tobey made a very consequential decision. His thought process was thus: There was part of a bag of weed stashed in the garage. It was cold outside, therefore necessary to put on winter clothes to retrieve said bag of weed. This is when Tobey decided that he would get dressed and get ready to go outside. Part of this beautifully simple original plan did come to fruition. But then, as they say, there was some other shit happened.

Once fixed upon his plan, Tobey was ruthlessly efficient in assembling his wardrobe. Fresh pair of Hanes, one pair wool socks. One pair of gently worn but still clean Lee jeans. First tee-shirt in reach, favorite green fleece hoodie. All assembled and attired in about three minutes. Tobey had never been late to school a day of his life. He was off, down the stairs to the mud room, adjacent the laundry room behind the kitchen. An exterior storm door exited from the mud room to the side of the house. The detached garage was only a few feet away.

Tobey found his boots, laced them up hastily. He took a heavy, oversized Army surplus parka from a hook on the wall, grabbed his Detroit Lions toque from the bench, and took a moment longer looking for a pair of gloves, before finally realizing they were in the parka sleeves. So far, everything had gone quite smoothly, the only thing left now was to brave the elements.

The interior door made a popping sound as the frozen weather strip separated from the frame. Tobey cracked it open a few inches and took a quick peek before reaching for the storm door handle. He could see that the storm was rattling violently, buffeted by the north wind channeled between the house and the garage. Across the driveway, about ten feet from the blacktop, there was a chain-link fence marking their boundary with the neighbors. Someone, years before they had moved in here, had mounted one of those large, clock-faced garden thermometers upon the fence. Through the frosted plexiglass pane in the storm door, he read the temp at thirteen- or fourteen-degrees F. With that wind, the wind chill was surely below zero! With a sigh, Tobey quietly reminded himself that this had to be done.

The moment he put his shoulder against the inside of the storm door and pushed it against the wind, a giant vacuum rushed into the space, slamming the interior door shut. He failed to get clear of it and it nearly knocked him down. He held on for dear life to the storm door to pull himself back upright against the wind. If he didn't take care in how he stood, he ran the risk of the oversized parka acting as a sail. After steadying his feet, he managed to get the storm door secured to it's latch and then press on to the garage.

It was only ten steps away, but it was like going uphill. When he arrived at the side entry to the detached, two-car garage, he found the knob coated in frost. His gloves were too new, too slick to gain any grasp to turn it. Tobey stood there a moment, contemplating which hand he was willing to sacrifice. Instinctively settling for the right hand, he slipped the glove off and tucked it under his left arm while briskly turning the knob and kneeing the door open. He leaped inside, slamming the door back in place behind him. It still felt like an icebox inside that garage, but at least it was in from the horrendous gale blowing outside.

He stuffed his gloves into the pockets of the parka and briskly rubbed his hands together. Inside of the garage it was maybe a degree or two above the freezing mark. He could manage for a little while without the gloves. The garage had two bays, the first of which he had entered. That was his mom's space. Parked in the next bay was his grandmother's '59 Buick. It hadn't moved since they had moved into the house three years before. Behind the Buick there was a workbench, nestled against the back wall of the garage. That workbench was Tobey's objective.

The top of the work bench was strewn with dust-covered items, most of which were exactly the same as the day they moved in. There were a variety of tools, some broken and others just left in a state of neglect. There were bins, large and small, in a hodgepodge of shapes and material; receptacles for fasteners and hardware of nearly every sort imaginable. In one corner was a stack of yellowed and grimy papers, manuals and warranties for tools and appliances, many of which had already been retired. Tobey had explored much of this space, never finding anything of particular interest. What interested him there on this day, rested upon one of the shelves beneath.

There was just enough room behind the trunk of the Buick to wedge between it and the bench. Tobey was of slight enough build to fit into this space and still be able to crouch down to access the lower shelves. He'd put his stash inside of an old Folger's Coffee tin with a miscellany of nuts, bolts and washers, shoved to the very back of the shelf. He reached until he found the familiar rim of the can, then dragged it from it's hiding place. The light from the back window above the bench was dim down at the floor, but Tobey could still plainly see that he had a problem. He had made the error of pushing that can too far back, to a point where it had rested against the back wall. Below the window. A bad seal permitted a leak down the wall. The contents inside the little sandwich baggie were fine, but the book of orange Zig-Zag papers he had carelessly tossed loose into the can were now soaked and utterly useless.

"Shit!", he quietly cursed. He knew he didn't have any other papers stashed anywhere else. This one was it and it hadn't even been a full book. His mind then quickly went to the soda can pipe. Easily improvised and no big deal if you lost the can. Except that every ounce of soda on the property was in bottles. Damn the luck! He was going to have to make the trek to the Clark station, up on Division Street. He didn't relish the trip in these frigid conditions, but it wasn't too far to go. Probably make the round trip in under fifteen minutes. He'd buy a book of Zig-Zags and a six pack of Dr. Pepper. In cans.

Tobey stuffed his little baggie into an interior pocket of the parka, then checked his pants pockets to make sure he had money. He found a ten, a wad of singles and some loose change. It would be enough for what he needed to get. He slipped the gloves back on and braced himself for the walk ahead.

After clumsily pulling the door shut, Tobey bounded down the short driveway out to Mulberry Street and turned left, that howling wind licking at his heels every step of the way. After five houses he arrived at Claypool Avenue, turning left again, now into the face of the wind. It was only seven blocks from there, up to Division Street and the Clark station at the Northeast corner. He pulled the drawstrings of the parka hood tighter and leaned into it. He tried to find some comfort in knowing that the wind would be at his back most of the way home.

He found that once he got moving at a steady pace it wasn't so bad. To the eye, it was an absolutely gorgeous day. The skies were utterly clear and bright, having the look of the shirtsleeve weather one might enjoy in mid-July. Once out in the open for a while, Tobey could feel the bright sun actually warming upon the parka. For a moment the sunlight danced like he was in some dream world, a memory of some other place and time. He could almost ignore the cold biting at his face. 

 He had made about half of the trek up Claypool, walking on the west side of the street. As it was a Saturday, there was not much activity out on the street. There had not been a single car on the road and the only sign of any activity at all came now, in the block ahead. Tobey stopped at the corner to check out what this was. A Consumers Power truck was pulled up at the curb, amber caution lights blinking, while a pair of workmen were arranging cones and tape to set up a temporary barricade. Since the path would be blocked, he decided to cross to the other side of the street there at the corner of Redbud and Claypool.

After hustling across to the east side, he continued north. He looked back to the other side, watching the workers. He couldn't tell if they were there for the electric or the gas. They were at the back of their truck, gathering something from the tool bins. Tobey didn't know enough about it to tell what they were doing. As he walked on, he happened to notice that the area they had taped off ended just before the old, abandoned store he had peered inside the day before. For the first time that he had ever paid attention, he looked above the entry and could make out most of the faded sign: Thibodaux & Co. - Bookbinders. He tried sounding out the name in his head. thigh-bow-dox? thib-o-dax? 

Tobey put his head down, leaning into the wind, and pressed on the remaining distance until the crossing at Division Street. A quick look, both ways, showed the street was deserted. He still dashed across the road, even though he needn't have. It was approaching noon and Tobey had forgotten that a little less than an hour to the north, in Ann Arbor, the Michigan Wolverines were hosting the arch-rival Buckeyes today. Kickoff was less than an hour away and the vast majority of the region were already hunkered about their television sets, with their buffets of gameday fare. Tobey was a decided minority, not really interested in college football at all.

An annoying electronic chime sounded at the door. That was new. He saw it was the old hippie, Earl, working today. They exchanged nods as Tobey found the stack of Pepsi stock at the end of the coolers. He had to rearrange the stack of cardboard cartons before finding the Dr. Pepper. He hooked his fingers into the plastic collar that held the cans together and then stopped to ponder how he would manage this with his heavy gloves on. From his stool behind the cashier station Earl called out, "Hey kid, there's some cold ones in the cooler if ya want."

"Nah, I don't need nothin' cold today! These are for later...", Tobey replied, holding up the six pack as he turned to the counter, "and I'm gonna need a pack of those orange Zig-Zags. Or whatever you got."

"Well, let's see. I got orange somethin' here... your Mom know yer smokin' that shit?" Earl plucked a book of the orange Zig-Zags and rang up the total. "Five-forty-three, young man."

Tobey grinned sheepishly as he handed Earl six dollars. He took the change and the rolling papers, stuffing them into his pants pocket, then removed the cans from the plastic collar to arrange in the large cargo pockets on the front of the parka. Problem solved. Donning his gloves again he made ready for the trip back home. At least the wind would mostly be at his back this time. 

The sun, climbing to it's mid-day roost, lit the path south on Claypool very brightly. Only a narrow strip of shadow fell, along the sidewalk on the west side of the street, where the Consumer's crew was now joined by a smaller truck and another man in a reflective vest. Tobey figured this guy was some kind of boss. Taking a quick look both ways he still found Division to be abandoned. He trotted across to the other side, the same way he had come before. As he proceeded down the street, he kept watching the utility crew, wondering what it was about.

The night before he had stayed up rather late, playing games on his Playstation and listening to Art Bell on the radio. There had been a lot of discussion about the looming Y2K catastrophe. Tobey wasn't really sure he understood what the big worry was about the whole thing, but they sure made it sound terrifying. Even in his youthful naivete, Tobey had enough sense about him to realize that many of the callers to the program were whack jobs. Then there were the ones who seemed to be making sense. That's when it got terrifying. He started to wonder if this Saturday morning job site had something to do with some Y2K preparation. 

When he entered the block where they were set up, he stopped there on the opposite sidewalk to watch for a minute. The view was partially obstructed, but he could see that they had opened the steel doors in the concrete. He'd always wondered what those doors had been for. He could see the third man, the boss, more clearly now. He wore the same heavy jacket as the others, with the reflective vest over and a hardhat, but instead of coveralls and work boots, this man wore ordinary trousers and dress shoes. Beneath the brim of his hardhat were large sunglasses with mirrored lenses. For a moment Tobey was sure that the man was looking right at him, but he couldn't be sure.

Tobey continued to stand right there watching, as the boss man walked around to the back of his truck and then stepped back up onto the sidewalk. The man continued right up to the doorstep of the old Bookbinders and rapped at the glass in the door. Tobey could hear the insistent rattle, even with the wind roaring down through the street between them. Now his curiosity faded from what the crew was doing and shifted instead to whether or not anyone would answer the knocking. The man remained there at the door, awaiting some response. It seemed like a long time, though it was really little more than a minute. While he waited, the man glanced back over across the street again, just for an instant.

Then, somewhat to his surprise, Tobey saw the door open. There was a woman there. He could not see great detail, but he was pretty sure it was a woman, an older woman in a severe looking, full length black dress. Her hair was very dark, drawn back in a tight bun perched atop her head. He thought that all she needed was the pointed hat and the broom. It certainly wasn't who, or what, he had glimpsed through the glass the day before, but she was spooky enough. He felt himself frozen there, unable to look away, until he thought her gaze extended beyond her guest and across the street to him. For just one instant he felt that they made direct eye contact. It brought a shiver up his spine and he quickly looked away.

Tobey then hastened back to his garage, where he planned to park himself in the back seat of the old Buick, twist one and blaze up before returning to his Playstation. Maybe tonight he'd leave the radio off.