Excerpt reveal: Rough Pages by Lev AC Rosen

Posted on by Vaseline

“Are you in trouble?” I ask.

“Maybe,” he says, looking at the floor and then at his cigarette. “But worse, if it’s me, then everyone in this house is.”

“What?” I ask, my body cold.

He says nothing, and instead inhales deeply from the cigarette, then coughs. I realize I’ve never seen him smoke before. He coughs some more, while I wait. Finally, he looks at me.

“You know how much I love to read,” he says, and I nod, thinking of his room upstairs, every wall a shelf of books, every table covered with them. “Well, on my day off I usually help out at Walt’s, the bookstore in North Beach.”

I shake my head; I don’t know. “Help?”

“The owners are gay. Howard and DeeDee, old friends, both loved books, so they opened the store years ago. They had a lot of gay titles in stock, so I became friends with them, and last year they decided to start a book service, you know, send members one book a month that would otherwise be hard to get, or maybe try to publish a few new books themselves.”

“A book service?” I ask, wondering how that could be so much trouble.

“There’s a publisher who’s been selling gay books through the mail for years, Greenberg. He’s sold over a hundred thousand copies of The Invisible Glass. People want gay books, Andy. Donald Webster Cory, remember, who wrote The Homosexual in America? He started his own book service with the same idea, and so Howard and DeeDee thought, why not us? Just in California, for people who came into the store, people we knew…at first.”

“Isn’t Greenberg going to get sued by the post office? Maybe jail time.” The smoke curls from his cigarette and fades as he reaches the yard outside our little alcove, as if he can’t escape.

Pat looks back down at his hands. “Yes. But that’s why it’s so important, Andy. These are our stories and we need to read them, no matter what the government says. We need to read them so we know there’s more of us out there, a community waiting. One guy wrote, a college student in Fresno, and he said he found a coupon to sign up in a bookstore in another store, and he signed up right away. He’s never met another gay person before, and these stories are…” Pat wipes his eyes. “Howard wrote back to him. He writes back to all of them, so they don’t feel alone.”

I nod. “Okay. I get why this is important.” I’ve never really been a reader, but if I’d read more when I was on the force, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so alone. “So what’s the danger?”

“The store has been closed for at least a week and DeeDee and Howard haven’t answered their phones either. I went by on my day off and no one was there. I’m worried. They’re almost never closed this long and never without telling me.” He takes another drag on the cigarette and looks at it as if he thinks it will taste better.

“Maybe there was an emergency?” I ask.

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m talking to you. I’m afraid the government found out, the post office told them, and… mailing obscene material through the mail is a federal offense, right?” He drops the cigarette from his hand, landing with a splotch of red cinders. He stomps it out.

“Sure, but how would that be bad for you or the family?”

He swallows and looks up at me. Pat is usually so full of mirth and mischief, but now he looks genuinely frightened. “Don’t you understand? We send the books to subscribers. That means we need… their names, addresses…” He turns, steps out of the alcove, and enters the rotunda. The stones creak under his feet and the light from the house falls on him, pale and yellow. I follow him down.

“There’s a list,” I say, realizing. “A list of homosexuals.” As we walk away from the house, the smell of smoke fades and the perfume of the flowers becomes stronger, overwhelming.

Pat nods. “Hundreds. And I’m working on it. And I’m sending out the ‘illegal material’ too. If the government finds out and decides to investigate…” He stares at the sky.

“They could track down everyone here. And then the adoption…” It suddenly dawns on me. Adoption is difficult. The government investigates the families. The Lamontaines must have had to pretend for a long time that all they could do was go through with the adoption. If the government finds out that the family has a homosexual in their employ, even if they pretend they didn’t know… I swallow.

He nods, looks back at the house, and then walks around the side of it. There are bare trees here with long, thin branches. I remember they used to bloom pink. When we reach the side of the house, he steps off the roundabout onto the grass and kicks it. “They’re taking her. I’m so sorry, Andy. I just…” He looks down again and starts to cry. I reach over to put my hand on Pat’s shoulder.

“Okay, Pat. I’ll look into it. And when they have the list, I’ll figure out how to keep the family safe.”

He reaches out and grabs my hand tightly. “Thank you, Andy. I’m so scared. What if I ruined everything?”

I don’t say anything. I don’t have the words to tell him that he might have done that.

Click below to pre-order your copy Rough pagesavailable from October 1, 2024!

Poster Placeholder from amazon- 17 Place name of bn- 97 Poster Placeholder from booksamillion- 44 ibooks2 85 Image Location of bookstore- 61

Avatar for Vaseline
Vaseline https://newspowergreen.biz.id

You May Also Like

More From Author