The Abominable Read Online Free PDF Page A

when I check out. No, Dan, if I manage to write this thing, I want someone to read it who would understand it.”
    “Is it fiction?”
    He grinned. “No, but I’m sure it’ll read like fiction. Bad fiction, probably.”
    “Have you started writing it?”
    He shook his head again. “No, I’ve been waiting all these decades…hell, I don’t know what I’ve been waiting for. For Death to bang on my door, I guess, to give me some motivation. Well, he’s banging.”
    “I’d be honored to read anything you’d choose to share with me, Mr. Perry,” I said. I surprised myself with the emotion and sincerity of my offer. Usually I approached reading amateurs’ efforts as if their manuscripts were coated with the plague bacillus. But I realized I’d be excited to read anything this man wanted to write, although I assumed at the time it would probably be about Byrd’s South Polar expedition in the thirties.
    Jacob Perry sat motionless and looked at me for a long moment. Those blue eyes seemed to touch me somehow—as though the eight blunt, scarred fingers of his were pressing hard against my forehead. It was not altogether a pleasant sensation. But it was intimate.
    “All right,” he said at last. “If I ever get the thing written, I’ll send it your way.”
    I’d already given him my card with my address and other information on it.
    “One problem, though,” he said.
    “What?”
    He held up his two hands, so dexterous, even with the left hand missing most of the last two fingers. “I can’t type worth a damn,” he said.
    I laughed. “If you were submitting a manuscript to a publisher,” I said, “we’d find a typist who could type things up for you. Or I’d do it myself. But in the meantime…”
    From my battered briefcase, I produced a Moleskine blank book journal—its 240 creamy blank pages never touched. The blank journal was wrapped in a soft leather “skin” that had a leather double loop to hold a pen or pencil. I’d already slipped a sharpened pencil into the loop.
    Mr. Perry touched the leather. “This is too dear…,” he began, moving to hand it back.
    I loved hearing the archaic use of the word “dear,” but I shook my head and pressed the leather-wrapped blank journal back into his hands.
    “This is mere token payment for the hours you spent talking to me,” I said. I’d wanted to add “Jake,” but still couldn’t manage calling him by his first name. “Seriously, I want you to have it. And when you write something you want to share with me, I look forward to reading it. And I promise you that I’ll give you my honest assessment of it.”
    Still turning the leather journal over and over in his gnarled hands, Mr. Perry flashed a grin. “I’ll probably be dead when you get the book…or books…Dan, so be as honest as you want in your critique. It won’t hurt my feelings a bit.”
    I didn’t know what to say to that.
      
    I talked to Jacob Perry in July 1991, twenty years ago as I write this foreword to his manuscript in the late summer of 2011.
    In late May 1992, Mary phoned to tell us that Mr. Perry had passed away in the Delta hospital. The cancer had won.
    When I asked Mary if Mr. Perry had left anything for me, she seemed surprised. Everything he’d left behind—and it wasn’t much, his books and artifacts—had been packed up and shipped to his grandniece in Baltimore. Mary hadn’t been at the hospice at the time—she’d been in a hospital in Denver. Her assistant had mailed the packages.
    Then, nine weeks ago, in the late spring of 2011, almost twenty years after my trip to Delta, I received a UPS package from someone named Richard A. Durbage (Jr.) in Lutherville-Timonium, Maryland. Assuming that it was a batch of my old books that someone wanted signed—something that really irritates me when the reader hasn’t asked permission of me to send the books—I was tempted to return the package to the sender, unopened. Instead, I used a box cutter to slash the