guns and various shady dealings, he couldn’t quite believe it. The implication of course is that Kyle didn’t have the kind of background to believe it — to believe that Richard and Goldfinger’s could exist as anything but a joke. Well, let’s face it. Rank didn’t have that background either. Rank had years ago encountered a less clownish version of Ivor, a fatso of menace called Jeeves, from whom badness seemed to broadcast itself in radio waves. But that was pretty much as close as Rank had ever got to the kind of nasty that lay beyond Goldfinger’s scummy surface, should you happen to scratch it with a turquoise fingernail.
Rank, even for his time in the Youth Centre, remained basically what social worker Owen Findlay had dubbed him in his earnest letter to the Provincial Judge’s Office circa 1986: a decent kid. So let’s not quibble with Owen on this one. Owen knew whereof he spoke. Let’s give Rank, at least, that much.
But let’s not forgive him. No, we can’t. Sorry. Because his good-kid naiveté was only half of his mistake. Part two of this mistake is what’s significant. Part two is what’s outright unforgivable.
Part two being that, like any guy his age, Rank believed he was immortal. And no, just because this belief was typical of any guy his age doesn’t make it okay for a guy like Rank. Rank, if anyone, should’ve known better. The gods had grabbed Rank by the neck a couple of times now and rubbed the barbed fact of mortality directly into his idiot face. And still the big lug ambled on his way, wiping the blood from his eyes, assuming it didn’t apply to him specifically.
But what’s even worse?
Rank had forgotten to remember the essential thing about himself. To wit: where there was a powder keg, Rankin Jr. was as fire. He was King Midas in reverse, our hero: fingertips Black Plague.
25
08/12/09, 10:52 p.m.
I DIDN'T THINK I WOULD ever do this after I took up correspondence with you, but I’ve started reading your book again. It has to be my fourth or so time through it. I know I told you when we started this up months ago — decades ago, it seems like — that’d I’d read it quite a few times, but here’s a confession: this was and wasn’t true. I read it the first time the way I would any book, taking my time to get into it, wondering when in God’s name the action would pick up. And then the slow, cold recognition started to take over and I couldn’t really concentrate after that. I started reading specifically for the recognition — I remember sitting rigid at the kitchen table holding the book up in front of my face, the most unrelaxed book-reading posture you can imagine. I started blasting through paragraphs and pages until I got to something I recognized and I would feel my heart thumping in my face as my outrage reignited. It was addictive, in a way. There he was, the character I knew to be myself, lumbering in and out of scenes, and I’d be outraged when he was like me — because that was stealing — and outraged when he wasn’t — because that was lying. I started folding down pages so I could go back and read these parts again. If there was a scenario I recognized, I’d go apeshit, marvelling at your gall, at how wrong you got it, or else how mercilessly dead-on the whole thing was. Either way, it was a violation. Lies and theft; theft and lies.
So when I said I read it three more times after that, what I meant is I read it in that same state, in that same way — blasting through the pages I’d folded down in a state of high piss-off, ignoring everything that didn’t feel relevant to me personally.
Which maybe wasn’t fair.
I want to say again that I am sorry if I scared you when I first got in touch. I was aggressive and creepy about it, and I apologize. All I really wanted to tell you was what I have just said — that I took your book personally. It felt as if you had reached across the decades just to poke me hard in the gut a few times, and I didn’t understand why. What had I done to deserve this double assault? First: the angry guy, the football thug, the “innate criminal” with the eyebrow rash. Then, just