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Lincoln considers briefly how far to play along. “A book about walking tours of Chicago.”
“Ah, exploring the city on foot. I bet that will sell!”
He must be a cold caller, Lincoln thinks. In this economy guys like him are desperate. Any second now he’s going to pull out a brochure about his nifty portfolio of horribly undervalued Midwest stocks. “What can I do for you?” Lincoln repeats.
The man is impervious. “I imagine book editing is one of the most satisfying jobs possible,” he muses. “Working with words and ideas, collaborating with others. It’s sort of like the theater in that way.”
Maybe he’s just out of his mind. “Yes. Now, what was it you wanted to see me about?”
“I really just wanted to make your acquaintance.” That locked-in gaze again.
“Well, here I am. But I’m afraid I’m kind of busy.” Lincoln sits up and tidies some loose pages of Professor Fleace’s manuscript.
“I mustn’t steal your time,” says Buford. He reaches in his briefcase and pulls out a small snapshot, then hands it to Lincoln. The photo shows a hefty, well-dressed, elderly black woman, standing in front of a blank interior wall. The woman from the L. In the picture, she is wearing a large, white medical collar around her neck and looking profoundly mournful. “My mother.”
Lincoln says nothing but simply stares at the picture. After a moment, Buford reaches across the desk and retrieves the snapshot from Lincoln’s hand. “Ever since, she’s had terrible neck pain and terrible headaches,” Buford continues. “She can’t get comfortable, standing, sitting, lying down. We’ve been to several doctors and a chiropractor. No relief. She may have to have surgery. You forget sometimes the fragility of our skeletal structure. Your head is like a big pumpkin sitting up there on a thin stalk.” Buford places his hands on both sides of his face as if to brace his pumpkin.
In addition to his roiling stomach and the short blasts of pain shooting from the long-ago break in his arm, Lincoln’s neck immediately begins to ache. “The detective said we aren’t supposed to talk to each other,” he says weakly.
“Achh, the Chicago Police Department.” Buford shakes his head and returns the photo to his briefcase.
Lincoln quietly takes several deep breaths. He clears his throat. “I’m sorry about your mother,” he says, trying to mirror the cordial demeanor of his visitor. “But what do you want?”
“Let’s just say I’m exploring options. My mother is in a bad way, and we, the family, we need to make some accommodations. I’m pinpointing the responsibility for her condition, then looking at opportunities up to and through the courts.”
“Why me?” Lincoln croaks. It’s all he can think to say.
“You were the direct cause,” Buford explains in the solemn tone a health official might have used in breaking the news to Typhoid Mary.
This is too much. “You can’t be serious,” Lincoln tells him. “The police aren’t going to bother with this. Maybe, maybe you’d have a civil case against the CTA or the gangbangers who started the panic, but me—I was a victim too! It was an accident! You can’t sue somebody for something like that.” Before he’s finished, Lincoln already regrets his self-defeating outburst—exposing anger, blurting presumptions.
Buford assumes the advantage gracefully. “Now, Mr. Lincoln,” he says, sitting back in his chair, “my father, God rest his soul, practiced law in Chicago for forty years, and one thing he taught me was that you can sue anyone for anything. You might not always win, but you can always sue.” Buford washes Lincoln in a warm smile. “But we are getting ahead of ourselves,” he continues. “I just wanted to meet you, let you know about my mom, and test your sympathy, so to speak.”
Lincoln works to gather himself. Never admit, never concede.
“You are involved in a very special enterprise here,” Buford goes on, gesturing to take in the cluttered desk, the manuscripts stacked on the floor against the wall, the overflowing bookshelf. “Literature has interested me from my earliest days. I’d come home from school and lie on my bed, reading. I guess you could say I was kind of a nerd, but I loved books. I majored in English in college.”
A gloomy thought presses on Lincoln. “The U of C?” he asks.
“No, Kenyon.”
Ah. Lincoln feels a slight lift. The curse is broken. “Good school.”
“I went to the U of C for my masters, in psychology.”
So it’s a conspiracy, after all. “You are a psychologist?” Lincoln asks.
“By training.” He takes a business card out of his wallet and passes it to Lincoln. “At the moment, I’m a professor of happiness studies at DePaul. You know the field?”
“Uhh...”
“Rather new. Quite interesting. What makes people happy. You’d be surprised. We’re just starting to quantify, but the results so far are remarkable. I must tell you about it sometime. There might be something there for you.” Buford stands and extends his arm. “But I shouldn’t take any more of your time. This has been most edifying for me. I’m so glad to have made your acquaintance.”
Lincoln rises uneasily and shakes hands. Can his crisis really be passing so quietly? When they stop shaking, however, Buford doesn’t let go. They remain connected, awkwardly, across the messy expanse of Lincoln’s desk. “And now that we are acquainted, maybe you would be so kind as to take a look at something I’ve written,” Buford says. “It’s very modest. Just a small collection of poems.”
In the silence, Lincoln feels acutely the grip of Buford’s hand. “We don’t really publish poetry,” Lincoln says, hedging slightly since once, a year or two before Lincoln arrived at Pistakee, Duddleston unaccountably printed a small anthology of poems by mothers about their sons. Unsold copies used to lie around the office like old telephone books that no one bothered to discard.
“Well, you might just enjoy taking a look,” Buford continues. He drops Lincoln’s hand and pulls a rather thin manila envelope out of his briefcase, then places it directly in front of Lincoln in the middle of his desk. “Of course, my mother is a great fan of my work. I think it would ease her situation enormously if she had the pleasure of seeing it published.” Buford studies Lincoln’s face. “Looking forward to hearing from you,” the visitor says before turning and marching out.
