Who Made Stevie Crye? Read Online Free PDF Page A

company.
    “You’re Seaton?”
    “Yes, ma’am. Seaton Benecke. You’re Stevenson Crye, the writer. I read all your stuff. I even go to the library and work through past issues of the Ledger looking for your stuff.”
    “Goodness,” Stevie said. No one outside Barclay had ever professed any interest, big or small, in her competent but obscure canon, and she did not know what to say. Was this dumpy, squeaky-clean youth trying to impress her? If so, what for? Dr. Elsa had supposedly been forthright in telling the Beneckes that Stevie was bringing her Exceleriter to them because of the outrageous service charges at PDE Corporation. She certainly couldn’t afford to tip Seaton for his unexpected flattery. Was that what he was futilely wangling for?
    The boy—actually a man in his ambivalent midtwenties, suspended between senior-class prom and full membership in the Jaycees—led her through the stacks of office supplies (typing paper, file cards, manila folders, staples, address labels, and lots more) to an immense work area with a concrete floor and unit after unit of modular metal shelves. One of these Erector Set towers housed typewriters, a veritable parliament of typewriters, some in their dust covers, some with their insides exposed and their platens lying beside them like carbon-coated rolling pins. Each typewriter had a tag wired to its carriage or its cylinder knob. Seeing so many machines in so many different states of disrepair, like bodies in the impermanent mausoleum of a morgue, Stevie feared that Seaton Benecke would place her Exceleriter on a shelf and promptly forget about it. She was surrendering her typewriter to a kind of high-tech cemetery.
    “Are all these others ahead of mine?”
    Seaton put her machine on a workbench and wiped his hands on his coveralls. “No, ma’am. I’ve got the cable you need. I’ll have it installed in a jiffy. You need your typewriter.”
    “Don’t these other folks need theirs?” She made a sweeping gesture at the broken, cannibalized relics behind the workbench. “Is this where superannuated typewriters come to die?”
    “Some people just leave them here, Mrs. Crye. Abandon them or trade them in. I fix the ones that need to be fixed.” He did not look at her when he talked, but of course he was busy peering into the guts of the Exceleriter and affixing a new ribbon-carrier cable to the element on which the type disc moved. A shock of white-blond hair fell across one eye, but his pudgy fingers went about their intricate task with unimpeded speed and deftness, a miniature screwdriver flashing spookily from the dim cavern of the machine. “I enjoy fixing typewriters for people who need them.”
    An icicle of apprehension slid through Stevie’s heart. Why, though, she could not say. She probably should have asked for an estimate before letting him start work. Or was it something else? On some basic level, Seaton Benecke’s handiness and his blasé, vaguely patronizing manner intimidated her. He seemed unaware of the effect he was having on her, though, so maybe she was reading too much ulteriority into his irritating emphasis on the same word. He was a young man without much grip on others’ reactions and sensibilities. His work must often isolate him in this echo-prone typewriters’ graveyard.
    “That’s good,” Stevie said belatedly, just to make conversation. “You like what you do.”
    “I’d rather do what you do. I’d rather be a writer.”
    By sheer dint of will, Stevie kept from laughing. She had seldom met anyone who seemed so ill-suited to the occupation. Seaton Benecke would not look you in the eye, his speech was repetitious and remote, and his awareness of his surroundings seemed limited to whatever he happened to be working on. His fingers loved her Exceleriter—she could see that—but otherwise he impressed her as having all the passion and tenderheartedness of a zombie in a George Romero flick. A cruel, uncharitable judgment, but there it