Bech Is Back Read Online Free Page A

both.”
    He attempted a signature, hated the “nry,” and slashed a big “X” across the sheet. “Your vibes are destroying me,” he said.
    “That was a dollar fifty,” Norma said, standing in protest.
    “Yeah, and here’s the sales tax,” Bech said, and X-ed out the preceding signature, whose jerky “ch” linkage had disturbed him as he did it, though he had decided to let it pass. He crumpled the sheet into a ball and hit her with it squarely between the two pieces of her bathing suit.
    After this, when they sat down on opposite sides of the long table, fear of this quarrel’s being repeated clotted their rapport. Fear of impotence seized his hand. The small digital muscles, asked to perform the same task thousands upon thousands of times, were rebelling. Sabotage appeared on the assembly line. Extra squiggles produced “Hennry,” andthe “B” of “Bech” would come out horribly cramped, like a symptom of mental disease. While the sun poured down, and the other resort guests could be heard tinkling and babbling at the thatched beach bar not far away, Bech would write “Henry” and forget what word came next. The space between his first and last name widened as some uncappable pressure welled up between them. The whole signature kept drifting outside the arrows, though he shoved with his brain while Norma tugged the stacks of sheets into repeated readjustments. Their daily quota fell below two thousand, to seventeen hundred, then to three boxes, and then they stopped counting boxes.
    “We
must
sign them all here,” Norma pleaded. “They’re too heavy to take away with us.” Their two weeks were drawing to a close, and the wall of unopened boxes seemed to grow, rustling, in the night. They sliced them open with a blade from Bech’s razor; he cut his forefinger and had to pinch the pen through a Band-Aid. The pens themselves, so apparently identical at first, revealed large differences to his hypersensitive grasp, and as many as six had to be discarded before he found one that was not too light or heavy, whose flow and his were halfway congenial. Even so, one signature in five came out defective, while Norma groaned and tried to massage her own shoulders. “I think it’s writer’s cramp,” she said.
    “But you’re not writing,” he said. “You know, toward the end of his career Hogan would absolutely freeze over a one-foot putt.”
    “Don’t make conversation,” Norma begged. “Just inscribe.”
    The loudspeaking system strung through the palm trees interrupted its millionth rendition of “Yellow Bird” to announce his name. Over the phone in the manager’s office, the man from Superoil said, “We figured you’d be a hundred-percentdone by tomorrow, so we’ve arranged for a courier to jet in and ship the sheets to our bindery in Oregon.”
    “We’ve run into some snags,” Bech told him. “Also, the pullers are restive.”
    The voice went a shade more hollow. “What percent would you say is still to be executed?”
    “Hard to say. The boxes have grown big as freight cars. At first they were the size of matchboxes. Maybe there’s ten left.”
    A silence. “Can you stonewall it?”
    “I’m not sure that’s the phrase. How about ‘hot-dog it’?”
    “The jet’s been commissioned; it can’t be cancelled. Do the best you can, and bring the rest back in your luggage.”
    “Luggage!” Norma scoffed, back at the igloo. “I’d just as soon try to pack a coral reef. And I re
fuse
to ruin my last full day here.”
    Bech worked all afternoon by himself, while she sauntered on the beach and fell in with a pair of scuba divers. “Jeff wanted me to go underwater with him, but I was scared our hoses would get tangled,” she reported. “How many did you do?”
    “Maybe a box. I kept getting dizzy.” It was true; his signature had become a cataclysmic terrain of crags and abysses. His fingers traced the seismograph of a constant earthquake. Deep in the strata of time, a hot