Who Made Stevie Crye? Read Online Free PDF Page B

lapis-lazuli eyes. Flustered or sated (Stevie did not know which), he finally dropped his stare, wiped his hands on a rag, and closed the Exceleriter’s hood.
    “There we go,” he said. “Maybe the extra you get out—the times when your writing goes really deep—maybe that’ll remind you of me. I can’t do that really heavy writing stuff, but you and this typewriter can.”
    Stevie softened again. “That’s sweet, Seaton. You’ve saved me time and money both. I’m grateful.”
    At the young man’s insistence, she sat down at the machine and, to demonstrate that his repair work had succeeded, typed several lines of quick brown foxes jumping over lazy dogs. No more stalled typing element. No more raucous blatting. Stevie put her thumb to her nose, waved her fingers in the air, and gaily unburdened herself of her own Bronx cheer.
    “That’s not for you,” she told Seaton quickly. “That’s for the jerks over at PDE.”
    He smiled a bemused, feckless smile that soon evaporated. However, it did last long enough to convince Stevie that Seaton could occasionally drop in on the Real World from his fog-shrouded hideaway in Never-Never Land, and she felt much better about him. Standing at the glass counter in the front of the store writing out her personal check for $10.67, she felt much, much better about Seaton. In fact, she left a five-dollar tip for him with the office-supply company’s cashier.
    On the twilight drive back home Stevie fell into playing a funny sort of game. Calling up an image of Seaton Benecke’s face, she would slide this phantom around the inside of her windshield as if it were a big transparent decal too moist to stay in one spot. Then she would try to superimpose the remembered faces of people who vaguely resembled him on the restless outlines of Benecke’s features. The headlights of oncoming vehicles played continual havoc with this bizarre game, but on a deserted stretch a few miles below the Barclay exit she succeeded in obtaining a ghostly match. Startled, she blinked. She blinked to disrupt and banish both phantasmal images.
    Seaton Benecke, she had just realized, looked a great deal like the unfortunate young man who had tried to assassinate the President early in his term. This eerie coincidence probably accounted for her uneasiness in Benecke’s presence, her uncharitable first impression of him. A weight lifted from Stevie’s mind. She was pleased to have found a semirational basis for her initial antipathy toward the young man. Moreover, she was glad she had triumphed over this silly aversion before leaving his family’s store.
    For the remainder of the way home Stevie thought about Marella and Teddy, her unfinished book proposal, and the money she had saved by heeding Dr. Elsa’s advice. Besides, her generous tip to Seaton had salved her conscience without unduly diminishing her savings on the repair. PDE, after all, had wanted five times as much. All in all, a highly satisfying trip.

VI
    The next day, even with Marella back in school and the Exceleriter in perfect repair, Stevie’s work did not go well. She typed the first paragraph of her book proposal for the Briar Patch Press at least seven times, screwing words into and out of the tangle of her sentences as if she were testing Christmas tree bulbs and finding nearly every one of them either forlornly lackluster or completely burnt-out. Nothing seemed to work. Her proposal had no intellectual festiveness. Whoever ultimately tried to read it would conclude by tossing the whole shebang into a wastebasket.
    “Yippee,” said Stevie. “What fun.”
    She rolled her seventh clean sheet of paper into the machine, stopped about midway down its length, and typed a string of abusive upper-case epithets at herself:

    CALL YOURSELF A WRITER, STEVIE CRYE? YOURE AN INCOMPETENT HACK WHO CANT HACK IT. A GRUB, A DRUDGE, A DULLARD, A PENNY*A*POPPER. YOU HEARD ME, A PAUPER. AND NO WONDER, POOPSIE. ALL YOUR BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS BANG DOWN