Write me a Letter

it. Did I say ”punk”? I should say ”ex-punk.” With great cunning, wisdom, and gentle handling, I’d converted her from the rags, shredded panty hose, and safety pins of punkdom, to say nothing of her Day-Glo hair, back to the trouser suits and Hush Puppies of normalcy, and do you know how she repaid me? She got herself Born Again, as did her boyfriend, and they took to showing up at my office looking like those rustics in Grant Wood’s painting who are standing outside their barn waiting for rain. All right, they did tire of their antics after a couple of weeks, long after I’d tired of them, and owned up that their whole Born Again routine was done just to tease me, not that I hadn’t figured that out all by myself. The atlas, of course, Sara had purloined somehow during her punk period and foisted off on me instead of getting me a real present for my birthday or Mother’s Day or whenever it was, something I could really use. Wrinkle cream, maybe, or a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate for my bookie, Two-to-One Tim.
    Anyway. I returned the atlas to the shelf, put the checks in the big safe in the bathroom out back, then sat and waited. What I was waiting for was for George, for whom I’d left that phone message earlier, to call in or drop in. George, or Willing Boy, as I had so aptly named him once in a moment of total clarity, was not only willing, like Sara, to take my hard-earned lucre for performing simple tasks for me, he was also the airhead’s boyfriend. And thus, of course, had been her late accomplice in the highly unamusing Born Again number. And what Willing Boy was doing, I hoped, was following Miss Ruth Braukis to wherever it was Miss Ruth Braukis was going.
    Willing Boy and I had invented our own secret code for use when I had company in the office and couldn’t speak to him openly on the phone; rather, I invented it and taught it to him. For security reasons I won’t reveal all the complexities of the code at this time; suffice it to say that the message I sent to him about changing it from three o’clock to an hour later can be roughly decoded to mean, ”Get your skinny ass over here on that silly, noisy oriental motorcycle of yours pronto and follow the woman in the case.” Which, as I just mentioned, I dearly hoped he was doing, although I hadn’t spotted him outside when I escorted my client to the door, which was the other reason apart from gallantry that I’d escorted her to the door.
    I retrieved my Apple II from the safe, set her up, and switched her on. My computer has always been a she to me, why should boats have all the luck? I called her Betsy, actually, the same name Davy Crockett gave to his rifle. Were feminist groups against the practice of calling ships ”she”? Probably. It is not untrue to say that Evonne and I did not always see eye to eye on the complicated subject of women’s rights. I had—perhaps wisely, perhaps cravenly— some time ago adopted a simple strategy to deal with any potential fireworks: I agreed with her. I do not know why this makes her even madder.
    Betsy, that nosy know-it-all, couldn’t wait to inform me of what I was already well aware of—I was broke.
    I wasn’t always broke. I wasn’t one of those gumshoes who made their breakfast coffee from yesterday’s grounds and never could come up with the rent on time and had to drink cheap booze; I drank cheap booze because I liked it and usually made a pretty good living; all things considered, my per annum was certainly that of a carhop or a one-legged waitress, counting tips. But my good pal John D., owner of the Valley Bowl, had called me at home Sunday saying he needed some heavy bread for a couple of months and could I help. I said sure. He was due by Tuesday morning sometime to fill me in and pick up my check, which would pretty well clean me out. So I could certainly use a lucrative job or two right then and whatever else Miss Insanely Gorgeous Ruth Braukis was, she wasn’t short of readies, as the Limeys put it, the traveler’s checks she’d given me had hardly disturbed the wad she was carrying.
    I waited.
    I got out the typewriter and answered some mail. I could have used the computer’s perfectly adequate printer, except every other time it started printing halfway down the !!#%%$! page instead of at the top, and I couldn’t figure out why. And I was too embarrassed to ask young Mr. Nu, who ran the TV, radio, VCR, and what-have-you emporium next door to his