Moving Up, Part One

So, as promised, here is the first installment of my Nanowrimo novel, entitled Moving Up: The Unlikely Story of Avery Key. The novel is actually not finished yet - having met the 50k word goal in time, I lost the motivation to keep working. In fact, I guess that just proves why Nanowrimo is so brilliant - the idea is to motivate you to write (even if it's lousy writing) because otherwise, perfectionism and procrastination will rule the day. And I think the former of those sins is getting me right now. Somehow I wrote 50k words in 26 days, and managed to keep the quality level up, but having met the goal, I'm crippled by the fear that if I keep going, I'll somehow ruin the novel. Ugh. Anyway, perhaps posting the novel in installments will motivate me to keep going. After all, I can't very well run out of installments to publish without finishing, can I? (I bet I can, actually, but the goal is to do otherwise.)

As you read this, please keep in mind that I wrote this at a very rapid pace, so there are going to be some hackneyed scenes, awkward dialogue, and grammatical and spelling errors (if you notice any, by the way, let me know). So, without further ado ...

Chapter One

"Avery Key was an ordinary man, but he did not lead an ordinary life. In fact, he led the sort of life that few people have ever lived, and that is perhaps why he is considered one of the greatest Americans of all time."

That sentence began Avery Key: A Life, the bestselling biography by historian Benjamin Jackson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. It became one of the most widely read biographies of an American political figure when it was released in 2060, 4 years after Key's death. Generations of American college freshmen would alternately bemoan and relish having to read this classic, and would take from it important lessons about the political foundations of the American republic.

But, this is a digression. To learn about Avery Key, we must begin, if not quite at the beginning, but certainly on the day when his life took a decisive turn.

*****

Avery sat in his van - well, not really his van, but the city's van - asleep at 11 in the morning. It was Monday, November 6, 2006 and he was back to work after a week off. He still hadn't fully recovered from the weekend. Avery and his wife didn't make much money, but then again, a case of Old Milwaukee didn't cost much. It also didn't taste like much, but then, that was hardly the point. Kate had gone to sleep early on Sunday, so Avery was left to finish off the case by himself. That was mistake number one. Mistake number two was that he stayed up far too late for someone who had to get to work by 8 o'clock in the morning. Mistake number three was that he picked up the checkbook and started flipping through. Kate always balanced the book, and so Avery was surprised to see that not only were they broke - he knew that already - but they were actually dipping into their savings a bit each month.

Drunk and worried about money, he found it impossible to sleep. Every time he tried to reassure himself - "We'll make it through, we always do" - he found something else to worry about - "The washing machine has been leaking recently and there's no way we can afford a new one." Laying there at ten past three in the morning, he wished he could just pass out and be done with it. But it wasn't to be that sort of night. Instead, he gradually flitted in and out of sleep until he was finally out at a quarter of four. Not that this was any consolation - that night, he dreamt that he was back in high school, and that, not only had he turned up at school in his underwear, but he had forgotten to write his term paper. Kate liked to call that his "Oh crap!" dream. And Avery tended to only have the "Oh Crap!" dream when there was something heavy weighing on his mind.

Returning to Monday morning, the consequence of all of the cheap beer, money troubles, and insomnia was that Avery found himself slumped in his van with his head against the driver's side window. Avery was so tired, in fact, that he didn't even notice that the windowpane was ice cold - this was a November morning in Milwaukee, after all. Or perhaps he did, but the cold felt good with his hungover headache. An inattentive observer could easily have mistaken him for a dead man.

However, it was an attentive observer who noticed Avery first. A young man, unemployed and wandering around Lincoln St. looking for a place to get a cheap meal, noted that Avery was passed out and decided that this was as good a place as any to score some quick cash.

"Hey mister," the man said in a stern voice while rapping on the window. "Hey mister, open up!"

With all the windows rolled up, the man's voice was muffled, and it took Avery a minute or so to notice that someone was talking to him. The young man then started rapping something metallic on the window. Avery finally stirred and opened his eyes.

"Hey mister, I think someone graffiti'd your car."

"Huh? Oh."

Avery sat up, swung open the door and stepped out of the van, turning to look at the driver's side, where the young man was pointing. "Where? I don't see ..." Suddenly, the man shoved Avery to the ground. "What the hell?"

Turning around, Avery realized what was going on. The young man was brandishing a knife.

"Give me everything!"

"Hey man, you don't understand. That's my grocery money."

"I don't give a shit. I said give it, punk."

"Oh crap," Avery muttered, reaching into his pocket for his wallet and handing it over. "This is all have."

"Your watch, too."

Avery barely had time to pull to watch off before the man snatched it away and ran around the corner. Avery was still sitting on the pavement when he realized that a little boy across the street had seen the whole thing.

"Are you okay?" the boy asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"Are you the book man?" the boy asked, gesturing at the Avery's van, which read BOOKMOBILE across the side in foot tall letters (it also said CARRO DE LA BIBLIOTECA in smaller letters, because Avery mostly found himself assigned to the near-South Side, which was to center of Milwaukee's Latino community).

"Um, yeah. I'm the book man, yeah," Avery answered, dusting himself off and standing up. He looked both ways - partly looking for cars, partly making sure that the guy who robbed him wasn't still lurking around - and crossed the street. The boy stood still, staring thoughtfully, but not saying anything.

"What's your name?"

"Hector."

"Where's your mom?"

Hector pointed back over his shoulder towards a small apartment building. A young woman, maybe 25 or 26, was standing by the front window, watching Hector and holding a baby girl. The baby was wearing a little yellow dress and had a bow in her hair. The mother smiled.

"My mom said that I should get a book to read. We don't have any books at home."
"Do you want something in English or en Español?"

"English," Hector answered, looking past Avery at the van. "Do you have Green Eyes and Ham?"

"Sure, sure." Avery took the boy's hand, and turning towards the apartment, waved at the mother. Looking both ways again, he crossed the street to the van. He opened the driver's side door of the van, revealing the interior full of books - mostly children's books and adult classics. (To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet were two of the favorites - Avery had multiple dog-eared copies of each in the van.) The books were hardly organized in a manner appropriate for a librarian - the Dewey decimal system was mostly a suggestion, and most books weren't even categorized by genre or author. Luckily, Avery knew exactly where the copy of Green Eggs and Ham was, since it was a favorite of his, too. Yeah, he was a little old for a children's book - thirty-two, to be exact - but reading through the Seuss classic reminded him of happier times.

With the book in hand, Avery grabbed the barcode scanner that sat in the front passenger's seat. Frankly, he was glad that the guy who mugged him hadn't taken that, too. That had happened once, and his supervisor had forced him to do an inventory of the entire bookmobile to account for the books checked out. And when a couple books couldn't be accounted for, he had to pay for them himself - $47.83 docked from his paycheck.

"Hector, do you have your library card?" Avery asked as he scanned the book out.

Hector looked blankly at Avery, squinting as the sun came from behind a cloud.

"Hector, do you have a library card?"

Hector shook his head no.

"Okay, let's go back and ask tu mámá."

Avery grabbed a clipboard from the back of the van and again took Hector's hand, this time with Green Eggs and Hand and the clipboard tucked under his other arm. They started to cross.

"You have to look both ways, mister."

Avery stopped and smiled at Hector. "Of course." He corrected himself, looking both ways before crossing. Hector had to skip a little to keep up with Avery's long strides. They walked up to the apartment building, opening the outer door and stepping into the small lobby. It was heated, uncomfortably so - after being outside in the 30 degree weather, the lobby was like a desert. Avery looked down at Hector, who was smiling and didn't seem bothered by the heat - he still had his coat zipped all the way to his chin, and his knit cap was pulled down nearly over his eyes.

"Okay, let's call your mom. Which button is your apartment, Hector?"
Before the boy could answer, though, the inner door started to open. The young woman from the window was standing there with the baby in one arm and a library card in the other.

"I saw you coming. He always forgets his card," she said, gesturing towards Hector.

"Oh, it's no problem, ma'am," Avery answered, pulling a pen from his pocket. "I just need to copy down the name and number from the card."

"Hector is always so excited about going to the library, but with the new bébé, we don't go very often anymore."

"Well, that's why we have the Bookmobile!" Avery exclaimed more excitedly than he had intended.

"El carro de la biblioteca!" Hector mimicked in Spanish, smiling.

"Sí, Hector," his mother said. "You see? Excited," she said to Avery.
Hector continued to smile at his mom and Avery.

"Hector, unzip your coat. It's too hot in here." She turned to Avery. "He loves that coat. We got it from Channel 12," she said, referring to the local ABC station that gave away donated coats to the poor every winter.
As he stood writing, Avery suddenly felt very self-conscious and felt the need to break the silence. "You didn't happen to see the guy who robbed me, did you?"

"Perdon?"

"Oh, nevermind." Avery finished writing the information down from the card. "Okay, that's it. You just need to have the book back when I come around again in three weeks. Or you can drop it off at one of the branch libraries - you can go to Forest Home or Zablocki on Oklahoma. Do you know where those are?"

"Sí," she answered. "Thank you."

Avery smiled and handed Hector the book and the library card. He waited until the boy had gone inside and his mom closed the inner door before he opened the door unto the street. The cold air seemed even colder by contrast with the overheated lobby.

Avery dashed across the street, forgetting again to check for cars. As he looked back over his shoulder, he could see Hector in the window, shaking his head as if to gently scold him. Avery smiled.

*****

The remainder of the morning went by uneventfully. Which is to say literally so. A cold November day is hardly the best time to run a bookmobile. Most people would rather do their browsing of books inside, thank you very much. Avery would normally have listened to the radio, but someone had broken off the antenna last week, and so the only signal that came in clear was the heavy metal station. But the silence just reminded Avery of his hangover, and he started hankering for some coffee.

Though he was technically supposed to stay out in the neighborhood until at least 2 o'clock, Avery always preferred to cut off a few minutes early. That way, he had enough time to grab some food, or get gas, or just get back to the main library a bit early. Today, his goal was to make it to Esmerelda's bakery on Mitchell before they closed. It helped that he knew Esmerelda herself, but still, he didn't want to keep her - bakers work long enough hours without having to stay open later in the afternoon for slackers.

Pulling a U-turn, Avery headed back east on Lincoln and then left onto Forest Home, one of the main streets on the South Side, heading northeast until it connected with Mitchell Street. This section of the neighborhood was called, officially, the Historic Mitchell Street Shopping District, but that was just a glamorous way of referring to the six-block stretch of Mitchell that had, on one point in time, been a relatively upscale shopping area, but was now mostly home to small business catering to recently arrived immigrants from Latin America - employment agencies, check-cashing shops, and at least a half-dozen shops selling dresses for weddings, communions, and quincineras.

At 12th and Mitchell, Avery stopped the van - half pulled-over, half blocking the street - and hopped out, dashing into Esmerelda's. "Hey, Esmé! Can I get a coffee and, um, whatever's fresh?"

"You come in here at five to two and expect hot coffee and fresh pastries?" Esmé teased, even as she was filled his cup while her daugher, Cecilia, grabbed a pain au chocolat.

"Oh, you wound me!" Avery exclaimed in mock horror. Esmé smiled. "What do I owe you?"

"Half off on the pastry, so ..." she paused, adding it in her head.

"Oh, dammit," Avery cursed as he reached for his wallet and remembered that it had been stolen. "Esmé, I don't have my wallet. I got robbed ..."

"That's okay, Ave. I know you're good for it." She smiled. "Besides, I already put cream in your coffee."

"Thanks a bunch. I owe you." Avery took the coffee and the pastry.

"But you'd better get out there before they tow you."

"Oh yeah, hey," Avery stuttered. He was still embarrassed by not having the cash to pay Esmé. He knew that she only barely did enough business to pay the rent on the store and the mortgage on her house since her husband had died two years earlier. And, though Esmé seemed confident that he'd have the cash for her, he wasn't so sure himself.

He waved goodbye as he backed out the door and hopped back into the van. He'd only been in the bakery a minute, but the cars on Mitchell were already backed up for a block and they were honking. He quickly dropped his coffee into the cup holder and headed downtown.

*****

Avery took surface streets downtown. Partly it was that he really preferred not to drive on the freeway - no character, just mile after mile of pavement - and partly it was because the Marquette interchange construction project had made a horrid mess out of getting to and from downtown. It was scheduled to be completed in two years, but Avery wasn't holding his breath. All it took in Milwaukee for a construction project to fall behind was for winter storms to show up early and often. Of course, Avery's preferences when it came to driving on the freeway didn't really much matter, since the bookmobile could barely hit 55 on a good day. In the cold weather, and with a low tank of gas, a full-size van stuffed with a few hundred pounds of books wasn't the most nimble of automobiles.

Avery crossed the 6th Street Bridge and passed the Amtrak station, turning onto Wisconsin Avenue just east of the Main Library. The building was, if anything, the classic American library - a large neo-classical building with Doric columns and a large staircase leading to the main entrance. Outside, on the median strip on Wisconsin Avenue were statues of honoring George Washington and Civil War Union soldiers. The reading rooms inside were cavernous and voices echoed off the high ceilings and marble floors. Avery often wondered if the architects who designed libraries did that on purpose so that people would be even more self-conscious of their talking.

But, of course, when driving the bookmobile, Avery didn't enter from the front. He pulled around the rear of the building, backing carefully into the loading dock. The dock, naturally, was not built in neo-classical style, but rather in neo-practical. It was smelly and dirty, the asphalt covered in a thin layer of motor oil and the scent of garbage in the air from the nearby bins. In the winter, snow would pile high and mix with soot from exhaust fumes to make a disgusting brown sludge. Because of that foul mixture, Avery always hoped for fresh snow even when he was working outside - at least it was a fresh layer of snow to cover over the old.

"Hey, hey! Watch it!"

Avery slammed on the breaks, and checked his mirrors. He couldn't see what the commotion was.

"Ave! Pull back out! We've got some books spilled in the dock."

Avery rolled down his window and leaned out. Now he could see what had happened - a large library cart full of books had dumped in the dock. Several of guys were hustling to pick up the mess, but fully half the books were still scattered about.

"Tony, you need a hand?" Avery asked as he hopped out.

"Yeah sure, Ave," Tony answered, walking up and shaking Avery's hand. "Been a while, huh, man?"

"Yeah, well, you're the out who went and took a vacation."

"Visiting my mother-in-law in the U.P. hardly qualifies."

"Well, it sure beats this place," Avery retorted as he bent over to clean up the spilled books. In reality, he was pretty happy with his job, but it's not like this is what he had intended when he went off to college. No one ever says that they want to be a bookmobile driver when they grow up. But, like many English majors, stacking classics on library shelves was as close as Avery was going to get to writing the great American novel. Thing is, at least most English majors had actually gotten their degrees. Avery had never quite had the ambition to stick out college, and had dropped out halfway into his sophomore year. The mounting student loans hadn't helped.

"But yeah, man, in the U.P., the snow's already two feet deep on the ground. Crazy, man," Tony continued talking. The U.P. he was referring to was the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which was actually a large peninsula jutting off of northern Wisconsin, forming the barrier between Lake Superior to the north and Lakes Michigan and Huron to the south. If the U.P. was known for one thing to Milwaukeeans it was that it got very cold there, and snowed a ton. While most Americans probably think of Milwaukee as far north, the U.P. is what Milwaukeeans think of as far north. (Canadians, of course, see things differently.)

Within a few minutes, the spilled books were cleaned up, though now there was a nearly full library cart full of books that were completely out of order. Tony started to push the cart inside when Leonard stopped him. "Maxine wanted me to take care of these."

"Okay, man, I just thought I'd help, cause ..."

"No, I'll do it," Leonard responded tersely, pulling the cart inside.

Tony turned around to face Avery. "Shit, I hate that guy. He acts like he owns the effin' place." Tony struck a match and lit a cigarette.

"Can I bum one?"

"Yeah, sure, man," Tony answered, handing Avery a cigarette. He started to offer a match, too, but Avery waved him off and pulled out a lighter from his pocket.

"I got robbed today down on Lincoln," Avery said as he took his first drag.

"Shit, man. Again?"

Avery nodded. "I fell asleep in the damn van and some punk pulled a knife on me." He sighed. "Eh, the kid probably needed the cash more than me, hey?"
Tony laughed. He knew that Avery wasn't exactly pulling down the big bucks, because, of course, they were both making the same amount. Thing was, Tony's wife had a decent office job in over in East Town. Kate, on the other hand, was working her way through grad school waiting tables and selling homemade jewelry. Sometimes Tony would buy a necklace from Kate just to help out a little, ever though he thought her jewelry was ugly.

They finished their cigarettes and headed inside from the cold. Avery had left the van pulled halfway into the dock. Frankly, he didn't figure anyone would much notice, or care. When Avery had started at the library three years earlier, the staff in the restocking department (of which the bookmobile crews were a part) was top-notch. But after a few months, old man McGee had stepped down and retired to Florida, leaving Maxine in charge. Within a year, she managed to take the department from one of the best in the library to one of the worst. But her cousin was the overall branch manager, so Maxine enjoyed unearned job security.

The biggest problem was staffing, epitomized by Leonard. He had worked in the library for years, but always in low-level positions. He was one of those guys who thought that he knew everything about everything and bristled at being ordered around. Problem was that he was barely capable of reordering a shelf without help. Somehow, though, he ended up as the assistant manager of restocking. Mostly, though, that meant that he acted as Maxine's enforcer, bossing people around on her orders, since she couldn't be bothered most times to interact with her own employees.

As Avery and Tony entered the main restocking room, they couldn't help but notice that the place looked even more disheveled than normal. The sorting table where books that needed re-shelving would be placed was piled with all matter of books, some in stacks but most just scattered about in no order. Some books had even been thrown down open, their pages creased and torn. The whole table looked much like the dock had looked after the cart dumped.

"Shit, look at this mess," Tony said, stopping and shaking his head. "Whatever, man."

"Come on, we'd better get to it."

"I guess."

Avery and Tony started to sort the book, first simply arranging them into neat stacks, and then separating them by fiction or nonfiction.

"Hey, Tone, why don't you grab that cart from earlier. We'd may as well sort those, too."

"Sure, man," Tony answered, walking over to grab the cart. "Hey, Ave?"

"Yeah?"

"Didn't there used to be four full shelves of books on this?"

"Yeah, sure, I think."

"Well, there's barely three on here now."

"Whatever, less work for us."

Tony wheeled the library cart over to the restocking table and began to unload the book into a stack by Avery, who then sorted them into two piles for fiction and non-fiction.

Suddenly, there was a large banging noise from a different part of the floor.

"What was that?" Tony asked.

"Probably someone spilled some books or something. Just more for us to clean up, I guess."

Tony laughed.

But then, they began to hear loud voices shouting. Avery recognized Maxine and Leonard as two of the voices, but there were several others.
"Some sort of ruckus, sounds like," Tony opined. He had stopped working for the moment. Avery was still sorting books, but slower and less attentively. Just as he put a biography of Franklin Roosevelt in the fiction pile, he heard Maxine's distinctive voice shrieking.

"You can't do this to me! You can't do this to me!"

Avery and Tony both started walking towards the inner hallway where Maxine's office was located - and from where the yelling was emanating - when they suddenly saw a sight that they may have secretly wished for many times, but certainly never thought they'd see - Maxine and Leonard were being led away by the police in handcuffs. Maxine was still yelling, but the police were hustling her towards the door (and the dock) at an ever-quickening pace. Avery and Tony stepped to the side just as the police passed them wordlessly.

Avery and Tony shared a knowing glance, and without so much as a word, began to following the police officers back out to the dock, keeping a respectful 10-12 steps behind them. When they got to the dock, they found Maxine and Leonard being loaded in the back of a paddy wagon that was parked halfway into the dock.

"Whose van is this? Who has the keys to this thing?" a police sergeant was asking loudly, gesturing towards Avery's bookmobile. "Who can move this heap for us?"

Tony looked at Avery, who was just staring at his feet.

"Give me a break, man. You'd have left it there, too. You know you would have."

Tony just laughed.