surprised. He made the letter in the sweet night air for them again, indenting at the proper points with his finger.
“ ‘Hello from Bellis. I am sorry for your problems, my friend, but would like to point out at the start that you are not the only one with problems. This is no easy job for me. I can dust your damned machine with fornus from now unto forever, but moving the KEYS is supposed to be your job. That’s what God made big people FOR. So I sympathize, but that’s all of the sympathy you get.
“ ‘I understand your worry about Reg Thorpe. I worry not about Thorpe but my brother, Rackne. Thorpe worries about what will happen to him if Rackne leaves, but only because he is selfish. The curse of serving writers is that they are all selfish. He worries not about what will happen to Rackne if THORPE leaves. Or goes el bonzo seco. Those things have apparently never crossed his oh-so-sensitive mind. But, luckily for us, all our unfortunate problems have the same short-term solution, and so I strain my arms and my tiny body to give it to you, my drunken friend. YOU may wonder about long-term solutions; I assure you there are none. All wounds are mortal. Take what’s given. You sometimes get a little slack in the rope but the rope always has an end. So what. Bless the slack and don’t waste breath cursing the drop. A grateful heart knows that in the end we all swing.
“ ‘You must pay him for the story yourself. But not with a personal check. Thorpe’s mental problems are severe and perhaps dangerous but this in no way indicates stupiddity.’ ” The editor stopped here and spelled: S-t-u-p-i-d-d-i-t-y. Then he went on. “ ‘If you give him a personal check he’ll crack wise in about nine seconds.
“ ‘Withdraw eight hundred and some few-odd dollars from your personal account and have your bank open a new account for you in the name Arvin Publishing, Inc. Make sure they understand you want checks that look businesslike—nothing with cute dogs or canyon vistas on them. Find a friend, someone you can trust, and list him as co-drawer. When the checks arrive, make one for eight hundred dollars and have the co-drawer sign the check. Send the check to Reg Thorpe. That will cover your ass for the time being.
“ ‘Over and out.’ It was signed ‘Bellis.’ Not in holograph. In type.”
“Whew,” the writer said again.
“When I got up the first thing I noticed was the typewriter. It looked like somebody had made it up as a ghost-typewriter in a cheap movie. The day before it was an old black office Underwood. When I got up—with a head that felt about the size of North Dakota—it was a sort of gray. The last few sentences of the letter were clumped up and faded. I took one look and figured my faithful old Underwood was probably finished. I took a taste and went out into the kitchen. There was an open bag of confectioner’s sugar on the counter with a scoop in it. There was confectioner’s sugar everywhere between the kitchen and the little den where I did my work in those days.”
“Feeding your Fornit,” the writer said. “Bellis had a sweet tooth. You thought so, anyway.”
“Yes. But even as sick and hung over as I was, I knew perfectly well who the Fornit was.”
He ticked off the points on his fingers.
“First, Bellis was my mother’s maiden name.
“Second, that phrase el bonzo seco. It was a private phrase my brother and I used to use to mean crazy. Back when we were kids.
“Third, and in a way most damning, was that spelling of the word ‘stupidity.’ It’s one of those words I habitually misspell. I had an almost screamingly literate writer once who used to spell ‘refrigerator’ with a d—‘refridgerator’—no matter how many times the copy editors blooped it. And for this guy, who had a doctoral degree from Princeton, ‘ugly’ was always going to be ‘ughly.’ ”
The writer’s wife uttered a sudden laugh—it was both embarrassed and cheerful. “I do that.”
“All I’m saying is that a man’s misspellings—or a woman’s—are his literary fingerprints. Ask any copy editor who has done the same writer a few times.
“No, Bellis was me and I was Bellis. Yet the advice was damned good advice. In fact, I thought it was great advice. But here’s something else—the subconscious leaves its fingerprints, but there’s a