by Joe Hill
I climbed the white marble steps into the dramatic atrium of the library, beneath a copper dome eighty feet overhead. My steps echoed. I couldn’t remember when I’d last been in the place and regretted that it’d been so long. It had the soaring, tranquil grandeur of a cathedral, but, better than incense, it smelled like books.
I approached the great rosewood desk, looking for the slot to drop my book into, but there wasn’t one. Instead a sign on the desk read ALL RETURNS MUST BE SCANNED IN. There was a black laser scanner next to it with a pistol grip, just like you’d see at the supermarket checkout. I approached, thinking I would pretend to scan it and run—but the old lady behind the desk held out one quavering hand, gesturing for me to wait. Her other hand clutched a phone to her ear. She tapped one finger against the scanner and then drew her nail across her neck in a throat-cutting gesture. Broken. I thought maybe when she was free, I’d ask about renewing my library card—and wait for an opportunity to drop my mother’s late return behind the desk when no one was watching. I didn’t want to discuss her late fees and wanted even less to discuss her death.
I cooled my black Converse All-Stars next to a display showcasing local authors. The offerings included a crudely illustrated picture book about a rabid-looking koala, titled I Can’t Eat That, and the self-published memoir of a woman who claimed she’d been abducted by aliens and taught the language of dolphins, leading, ultimately, to her legal struggle to marry a porpoise. I wish I were making that up. The centerpiece, of course, were the Brad Dolan novels, Kingsward’s favorite son. I had met him once—he came to speak to my eighth-grade class. I had adored his old-fashioned mustache and bushy eyebrows and the rumble of his voice, and that he wore a plaid overcoat with a cape. I’d also been a little frightened of him—he stared out upon the classroom with eyes that never seemed to blink, studying us a bit like a general surveying a map of enemy territory.
Shortly afterward I had zipped through all thirteen of his books, sometimes cramming my hand in my mouth to stifle giggles if I happened to be reading in class. You know the books, with their exclamation points in the titles. There was Die Laughing!, the Vietnam novel about a chemical weapon unleashed by the U.S. Air Force that causes people to laugh hysterically until they keel over and for which the only cure is sex; there was Presto!, about a world where magical wands are protected by the Second Amendment and our hero is searching for the man who sawed his wife in half; and Salute!, in which Ronald Reagan wins the presidency with his running mate, Bonzo, a descendant of the monkey who starred in Reagan’s hit Bedtime for Bonzo. Are the books less funny when you know that Dolan himself was a suicide? I don’t think so, but I admit those stories carry a certain piquant sadness to them now. It’s like eating cotton candy with a broken tooth in your mouth: You get sweetness, but also the ache. A cloud of sugar, but also blood.
“No, Mr. Gallagher, we can’t bring it out to you,” said the old lady on the telephone. “I can hold the Bill O’Reilly for you here at the desk, but if you come in, you will have to return the books you already have.” She was a hobbit of a woman, with a small square face beneath silver bangs. She met my gaze with dark blue, sorrowful eyes and slowly shook her head. The voice on the other end of the line squawked indignantly. “I’m sorry, darling, I don’t like it either. The Bookmobile is off the road indefinitely, and even if it weren’t, Mr. Hennessy no longer works for the public library. His license has been revoked. . . . Yes. That’s what I said. . . . Yes, and his library card! And Mr. Hennessy was the only one qualified to drive the old—”
There was a high-pitched shout from the other end, and the librarian flinched as Mr. Gallagher banged the phone down.
“Another satisfied customer,” I said.
She gave me a resigned look. “That’s Mr. Gallagher at the Serenity Apartments. The only thing he wants to read is Bill-O and Ann Coulter, large-print editions, and goodness help us if we can’t bring him the book he’s after. He wants to know what we do with all the tax money we drain from the town budget. I’d like to tell him it pays for our subscription to Socialist Weekly.”
“I didn’t know you deliver,” I said. “Do you do pizza, too?”
“We don’t deliver anything now, darling,” she said. “The brand-new Bookmobile is a total heartbreaking wreck and—”
“Why do people keep calling it the brand-new Bookmobile?” a man yelled through a door that opened into a rear office. “Why don’t they call it the less-old Bookmobile? It’s been on the road since 2010, Daphne. It’s not old enough to be tried as an adult for its crimes, but it’s getting there.”
Daphne rolled her eyes. “The newish Bookmobile is guilty of nothing. I can’t say the same for that hapless, feckless drunk you hired to drive it. Men like Sam Hennessy make me think the death penalty wasn’t such a bad idea.”
The man in the back room called, “He wrecked a truck, he didn’t kill a child—thank God. And in my defense, Sam had all the necessary qualifications: He had the right kind of license, and he was cheap.”
“What kind of license are we talking about?” I heard myself ask. “Class B?”
A rolling office chair squeaked, and the man in the back room glided into view. He was of indeterminate age. He might’ve been seventy-five or fifty-five. His silver hair had a few threads of gold in it, and he had the striking blue eyes of an aged model, the sort of rugged gent who can be found paddling a canoe through the middle of a Viagra ad. The tie was undone. The suit was tweed, gently worn in at the elbows and knees.
“That’s right,” he said.
“I’ve got a Class B. If there’s a less-old Bookmobile, does that mean there’s also a more-old Bookmobile?”
“An antique!” the librarian announced.
“Not quite, Daphne,” said the man in tweed. “Though it’s true we only take it out for the Fourth of July parade these days.”
“It’s an antique,” Daphne repeated.
Tweed scratched his throat, leaning back in his chair to study me from around the door. “You’re a commercial trucker?”
“I was,” I said. “I’m taking the fall off to deal with some family business. What kind of truck are we talking about?”
“Wanna see it?” said the man in tweed.
“WHAT DOES IT RUN ON?” I asked after I’d stared at it for a few moments. “Unleaded? Or bong water?”
Ralph Tanner contentedly mouthed the stem of his Liverpool pipe. “It got pulled over once. The cop said he wanted to arrest whoever painted it for disturbing his peace. The chief of police tells people he has a solemn duty to impound drug paraphernalia and that’s why he keeps it locked up in this carriage house.”
The library shared a vast expanse of parking lot with the town office, the rec department, and an old carriage house. This last hadn’t kept horses in almost a century, but it still smelled like them. It was a rickety, barnlike structure with gaps between some of the planks and pigeons cooing in the rafters. Public Works kept the street sweeper and a little golf-cart-size plow for the sidewalks and parking lots in there. The older Bookmobile was parked at the back.
It was a modified panel truck on a 1963 International Harvester chassis, a three-axle twelve-wheeler. The sides had been painted with a garish psychedelic mural. Over on the passenger side, Mark Twain’s head opened like a teapot and a rainbow-colored Mississippi River frothed out. Huck and Jim and the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland rode a raft toward the back end. The caterpillar blew a long thread of smoke that billowed around the corner to become an ocean roiling over the rear bumper. Moby-Dick erupted from the waves with Ahab bound to his side and harpooning him in the eye. The Nautilus lurked in the garish depths. A gush of ocean foam melted into clouds drifting across the driver’s side of the truck. The rain poured down onto Sherlock Holmes, who did not see Mary Poppins sailing through the thunderheads above.
“Who did you say drove it back in the day? Cheech or Chong?” I asked. Then I gave Ralph Tanner the side eye. “Or was it you?”
<
br /> He laughed. “I’m afraid I sat the sixties out. The Age of Aquarius was something that happened to other people while I was watching Gilligan’s Island. I missed out on disco, too. Never owned a single pair of bell-bottoms. Instead I wore bow ties, lived in Toronto, and worked on a groundbreaking dissertation about Blake, which my thesis adviser returned to me with a can of lighter fluid. I wish my twenties had looked a little more like this. Peek inside?”
He gestured to the door into the rear. When I opened it, two rusty corrugated steps unfolded, ushering me into the Bookmobile.
The steel shelves were bare, and a veil of cobweb hung from one of the ceiling’s fluorescent lights. I was surprised to see a handsome mahogany desk with a dark leather surface, bolted to the floor behind the cab. A runner carpet, the color of chocolate, ran up the middle. I smoothed one palm along a cold steel shelf, and my hand came up wearing a mitten of dust.
“This did for forty years,” he said from just behind me. “I suppose it could do for a few more. If we had a driver.”
I already knew I wanted the job. I had known before I was sure there even was a job. There was the practical side: I was out of work, and a low-paying job was better than none. Besides, whatever hours they were offering, it had to be substantially less than I would’ve worked if I were back behind the wheel of a long-haul rig, where sometimes I might be on the road for ten or twelve days without returning home.
In truth, though, the practical side didn’t cross my mind until later. I was spending all day every day in the place where my parents had died and felt, from that first instant, that they’d sent me a set of wheels to escape in—like sending a truck to take me away from the world’s most joyless and dismal summer camp. Your ride is here, I thought, and my arms pebbled with gooseflesh. I could not help thinking that my mother had specifically avoided returning Another Marvelous Thing so I’d have to return it for her and in such a way be led back to the place where her story with my father began.
“What’d you say happened to your last guy?” I asked.
“I didn’t,” Ralph said. He twitched his mouth back and forth to move his still-unlit Liverpool pipe to the other corner of his mouth. “A local fellow, Sam Hennessy, got out of full-time trucking to focus on the two things he loved best, reading and making homebrew. He kept his Class B valid and offered to drive the new Bookmobile, just for something to do. Alas, Sam didn’t only enjoy making homebrew. He relished drinking it as well and took to enjoying a few on his lunch break. Well, he was out a month ago in our newish Bookmobile and began to worry he was a little crocked. He decided he could use some coffee and turned in to the nearest McDonald’s. And I do mean right into it. He put the front end straight through the wall and into a booth. No one sitting there, thank God. When you think of all the kids that eat in McDonald’s.” He shuddered, then asked if I wanted to look in the cab.
On the walk around the front, he pointed to a panel on the side of the truck. There was a diesel generator behind it that ran the lights and the heat in the book car. “The nearly new Bookmobile had a pair of computers for the patrons, but I wonder if tablets could serve the same function. Checking out the books is easy enough—it’s done through an app on your phone.” He had started to sketch the job out for me as if I’d already put in my application.
I climbed onto the running board and peered into the front seat. The gearshift protruding from the center of the floor was as long as a gentleman’s cane, with a polished walnut ball on the top. Dead leaves had drifted onto the floor. The radio looked like it was AM only.
“What do you think?” he asked.
I opened the door, turned around, and sat in the driver’s seat with my feet hanging out.
“Are you asking what I think of the truck? Or what I think of the job?”
He pushed his thumb down into the bowl of his pipe and lit it with a match from a small box, took some time drawing on it to get it going. Finally he tipped his head back and blew gray smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “You ever hear the one about the guy who went to England and came back complaining about the meals? Not only was the food awful, but there was so little of it! That’s kind of like the pay we’re offering and the hours we can guarantee. It’s not even close to a full-time job. Six hours on Tuesday and Thursday, eight on Wednesday. And the money? You could make much more driving a school bus.”
“But then I’d have to get up before dawn. No thanks. Besides, like I said—I have some family affairs to deal with here.”
“Yuh,” he said, and his gaze was kind and sensitive, and I wondered if he knew. Kingsward is a big town, fourth-biggest in the state—but still not that big when you come down to it. “Can you pass a background check, Mister—?”
“John. John Davies. I think I’d squeak by. I had five years on the road for Winchester Trucking and never put a single one through the wall of a fast-food restaurant. Am I qualified, though? Wouldn’t I need to have a degree in, like, the library sciences? The library arts?”
“Sam Hennessy didn’t have a degree. Loren Hayes, who drove this very Bookmobile for almost thirty years, worked in a technical library for the air force before he came to us, but he never acquired any formal certification.” Ralph lifted his eyebrows and cast his gaze lovingly over the truck. “Won’t he be surprised to see this old thing on the road again.”
“He’s still knocking around?”
“Oh, yuh. He’s at Serenity Apartments, same as our friend Mr. Gallagher, who’ll read anything and everything as long as it was written by someone who works at Fox News.” Ralph thought for a bit, then said, “Loren loved this truck. Handed me the keys and gave it up for good in 2009.” Ralph turned a wry, wistful look upon me. “We were getting ready to retire it, and he decided to retire with it. He had a bad experience behind the wheel and scared the hell out of himself. He was driving around and suddenly didn’t know where he was anymore. There’d been other disconcerting moments before that. He’d tell me someone who’d been dead for ten years had asked him about a book, that kind of thing.”
“Ah, that’s too bad,” I replied, thinking about my mother, about dementia. “You positive he’d still know it if he saw it?”
Ralph returned my gaze with a blank stare. “Hm? Oh, yes. I’m afraid I’ve given you the wrong impression. Loren can be forgetful, but no more so than anyone else his age. He’s still sharp enough to beat me at rummy. We play the last Thursday of every month, and I usually lose to him. No, he’s still all there.”
“But . . . you said he was driving into town and didn’t know where he was?”
“Yes,” Ralph said. “He was very badly shaken. He couldn’t tell if it was 1965 or 1975 or what. Every block looked like a different decade to him. He was worried he wouldn’t be able to find his way home to the twenty-first century.” He looked at his watch and said, “I should get back to the library. My coffee break has been long enough. You’ll e-mail me with your details? My address is on the library Web site. I look forward to continuing our conversation very soon.”
I followed him out, waited while he locked the carriage house, and said good night. I stood there and watched him go, blue smoke spilling from his pipe and mingling with the blue fog that had started to drift out of the trees. The night had turned clammy while we were inside.
He’d disappeared back into the library before I realized I still had Another Marvelous Thing in my coat pocket.
I PROBABLY SAW A FEW without recognizing them for what they were—the ghosts. That’s what I thought they were at first. Now I know better.
Late returns . . . that was Loren’s term for them, although I wouldn’t hear it for months, wouldn’t meet him until a chilled, soggy day just after Christmas.
Once when I’d been driving the old Bookmobile for no more than a few weeks, I saw a little girl walking with her mother. The little girl wore a pair of Mickey Mouse ears and was skipping, jumping in shallow puddles left by a recent rain. Her mother had a flowered kerchief over her hair and carried
a paper sack with twine handles. The sack said WOOLWORTH’S on the side. I remember thinking that odd, because there’d been a Woolworth’s in downtown Kingsward when I was a child, but it had been closed since 1990. When I pulled up to a stop sign, I looked for them in the passenger-side mirror, but they were gone. Were they late returns? I don’t know.
Another time two shrunken old ladies, sisters, entered the truck at St. Michael’s Rest, one of the old-folks’ homes on my Tuesday schedule. They browsed without speaking to me. Instead they talked about Ted Kennedy and the accident at Chappaquiddick. “The men in that family is all whoremasters,” said one of the women, and the other replied, “What does that have to do with going off the road?” It was only after they were gone that it seemed to me they’d been speaking in the present tense, as if Chappaquiddick had only just happened, as if Ted Kennedy were still alive.
It was early November, the first time it happened, and I knew it. The first time I encountered someone who had slipped forward, who climbed up into the truck from a different when.
On Thursdays my route took me through West Fever, a miserable tick of a town burrowed into one side of the county. It contains a bit of pastureland and a lot more marsh, a few gas stations, and a single shopping center known locally as the Man Mall. In the Man Mall there’s a shop that sells fireworks, another that sells guns, a liquor store, a tattoo parlor, and an adult-toy shop with a peep show in the back. With forty dollars in your pocket, you can hit the Man Mall on a Friday night, get shitfaced, get blown by a stripper, get her name tattooed on your arm, celebrate by launching a bottle rocket over the interstate, and pick up a .38 so you’ll have an easy way to kill yourself in the morning.