Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

  The Man Mall shares two acres of unpaved parking lot with a shabby, sprawling two-story efficiency-apartment complex. A fair number of single mothers with small children and some elderly dissolute drunks called the place . . . well, not home. I’m sure no one there viewed it as home. If you were staying at the efficiencies, home was somewhere you’d left or somewhere you were going in the indeterminate future. It was little more than a neglected, shabby motel with long-term guests, and everyone there was just making do until they got to something better. Some of the tenants had been making do for years.

  I saw him—the late return—as I swung in: a guy in a red flannel coat and a checked hat with earflaps framing cheeks chapped pink from the cold. He raised a gloved hand, and I waved reflexively back and didn’t give him another thought. It was cold and wet, and the lot was hazed over with a filthy mist. It was ten in the morning and looked like twilight.

  I pressed and held the red button on the dash until the generator chunked noisily to life, then got out and went around back to unlock the rear door. The man in the earflaps met me at the steps. He had a quizzical smile on his face.

  “Where’s the other guy? Sick?” he asked, his breath puffing from his lips in clouds.

  “Mr. Hennessy? He had a little bang-up. He’s off the road.”

  “I wondered what was up,” he said. “Feels like I haven’t seen the Bookmobile in half a century.” I thought that was funny, that he hadn’t noticed the difference between the old Bookmobile and the other one, the one Hennessy had driven into a McDonald’s. I didn’t say anything about it, though, just opened the rear door and led him in.

  The heaters roared. The lights buzzed. Earflaps shuffled in past me while I held the door and stared back toward the efficiencies. There was usually a herd of sinewy, haunted-looking mothers waiting with their children to stampede the Bookmobile. But today no one emerged. The cold, grimy mist billowed along the concrete walkways facing the building. It looked like a set in a movie about the apocalypse. I climbed up the steps and closed the door behind me.

  “I hope I’m not in too much trouble.” He slipped a sun-faded, cranberry-colored hardback out of one pocket: Tunnel in the Sky by Robert Heinlein. “I’m way overdue. But hey, it’s not my fault! If I could get to the library, I wouldn’t need you!”

  “If you and everyone like you could get to the library, I wouldn’t have a job. I think that makes us even,” I said. “Don’t worry about the late fees. We’re forgiving penalties for all Bookmobile patrons, since we were off the road for a while.”

  “Hot-diggity,” he said, like a freckled farm boy in an episode of The Andy Griffith Show. “Not that I’d mind if I did have to cough up a few pennies for the late return. This one was worth it. I wish I had another just like it.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “I love those old Heinleins, too.”

  He turned and let his gaze drift across the shelves, smiling to himself. “That one did just what I want a story to do. I like a story that doesn’t mess around too much. That starts right away, sticks the hero in a good, rotten, messed-up fix from the first paragraph, and then lets him wriggle awhile. I spend all week behind the counter in the hardware store. When I sit down with a book, I want to try someone else’s life on for a bit, some other life I’m never going to have myself. That’s why I like to read about trolls and cops and celebrities. Also, I want ’em to say clever things, because in my mind I’m the one saying it.”

  “But not too clever. Or it breaks the illusion.”

  “That’s right. Find a guy with an interesting life and then deal him a bad hand so I can see how he snaps back. And while we’re at it, I want to head somewhere I’m never going to go myself, like Moscow or Mars or the twenty-first century. NASA isn’t hiring, and I can’t afford transatlantic tickets. I’m so strapped these days, it’s just as well for me the library card is free.”

  “You’re never going to go to the twenty-first century?” I asked. I didn’t think he knew what he’d just said, but he took the question straight.

  “Well, I’m sixty-six now, so you do the math,” he said. “I guess it’s technically possible, but I’d be a hundred and two! If you told me in 1944 that I was going to have another twenty, thirty years, I would’ve fell down on my knees and kissed your feet with happiness. At the time I had half of Japan trying to drop airplanes on me. Seems greedy to hope for thirty more.”

  The sum of my entire reaction to this earnest statement was a light tingling along the scalp, a little shiver of pleasure and interest. I didn’t believe for an instant he was having me on, but the thought struck me that maybe he was mentally infirm. He wouldn’t be the only older guy who lived in the efficiencies and had trouble sorting fantasy from reality. Even his choice of words—“hot-diggity,” “shoot”—gave him a childlike aspect, suggested a boy’s mind in a man’s body.

  “It’s 2019,” I said, slowly, more to see how he would react than anything else. “It’s the future already.”

  “In which book?” he said, scanning the shelves. “I do like a good time-travel novel. Although really what I want is more good rockets-and-ray-guns stuff.”

  I paused, then said, “There are a couple Brad Dolan novels about men coming unmoored in time. But they’re not like Heinlein. It’s more . . . what? Literary?”

  “Brad Dolan?” the man in the earflaps said. “He used to deliver my papers! Or his mother did anyhow. He slept in the passenger seat most mornings. That was a while ago.” His smile took on a fretful quality, and he rubbed the back of his neck. “He’s over there now. They grow up fast, huh? Seems like ten minutes ago he was lugging a canvas sack full of newspapers. Now he’s got an M16 over one shoulder and he’s tramping through the mud. It’s Korea all over again. I don’t know what we did there, and I can’t tell what we’re doing in Vietnam either. We got enough trouble here. Men with hair down to their butts and church half empty and girls walking around in skirts so short I feel like I ought to run and get them an overcoat. Tell the truth, I’m not entirely sure about the messages you’re sending with the Bookmobile done up like it is. I can’t tell if you’re peddling books or Mary Jane.”

  I laughed but then trailed off, uncertainly, when he cocked a quizzical eyebrow at me and offered me a polite but slightly stiff smile. It was a look that said he didn’t think it was any laughing matter but in the interests of our getting along he would take the subject no further.

  I studied him while he studied the shelves. My scalp was still crawling strangely, but other than that I felt fine. If he was playing a game with me, he was playing hard, completely committed to the performance. But I didn’t think it was an act. The possibility that someone from the mid-sixties had shown up to return an overdue book, and maybe get something new to read, did not have the effect on me you might think. I wasn’t frightened, not at any time. I wasn’t alarmed. I felt something closer to gratitude and also . . . bemusement. In the older, truer sense of that word, which once meant a sweet perplexity.

  I had a thought then—a little tug of curiosity—and acted before the idea even had time to settle.

  “You liked Tunnel in the Sky, huh? I’ve got something for you. Have you tried The Hunger Games?” As I spoke, I slipped The Hunger Games off the YA shelf and held it out to him.

  He peered down at it—a slick black paperback that had a gold bird embossed on the cover—with a puzzled half smile on his face. He lifted two fingers to his left temple. “No, I missed that one. Is that Heinlein or . . . excuse me. That book does something funny to my eyes.”

  I looked down at it. Just a trade paperback. I looked back. He had an expression of concentration mingled with faint anxiety, and the tip of his tongue flicked out to touch his lips. Then he reached out and gently took the paperback from me . . . and his face relaxed. He smiled.

  “I’ve been shoveling out my sister’s walkway all morning. I guess I’m a little punchy,” he told me. “And more snow coming this weekend.” He shook his head but smiled down at the book
. “Well, this looks like the thing.” He read out the shout line on the cover: “‘In the future, the only thing more lethal than the games . . . is love!’”

  I looked at the book myself, and for a moment my vision darkened and my head went woozy, as if I had stood up too fast.

  He was still holding The Hunger Games, although it took a moment for me to recognize it. It remained a black paperback, but the cover now showed a girl in a clinging flame-colored sci-fi gown preparing to shoot an arrow from some kind of mechanical, laser-guided bow. Her face was drawn in an expression of terror while her eyes flashed with righteous fury. She crouched in a Dagobah-like forest of psychedelic-colored trees. It was the cover of a pulp sci-fi novel from the early sixties, right down to the price tag in the upper left corner: 35¢. I know something about the famous pulp artists of the era, and I think it was a Victor Kalin, although I find it hard to tell him from Mitchell Hooks. Google ’em—you’ll get the idea. It had the battered look of a paperback that has passed through quite a few hands, most of them clumsy and in a hurry.

  Something sharp twinged in my head, behind my eye. It was as if someone was pressing their thumbs into my temples. Earflaps looked at me with some concern.

  “You okay, mac?” he said.

  I didn’t answer. Instead I said, “Can I see that?” and took the book back from him.

  It was a 35¢ paperback when I looked down at the cover. But when I turned it over to read the back, I found myself looking down at a black trade paperback, the one I recognized from my own time. I flipped to the cover again. Black, smooth, glossy, with a golden brooch printed on it and a bird on the brooch. Then I lifted my face and looked at Earflaps. His gaze had drifted away from me, was floating across the books on the top shelf.

  “I can’t see some of them,” he said in a casual tone of voice. “They go all funny when I try to read the titles. The words swim away when I try to concentrate on them. Some of them anyhow. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is all right. So’s the Narnia books. But the ones in between”—he was staring at the Harry Potter novels—“I can’t see them right. Mister, am I having a stroke?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  He sighed and looked at me and smiled and put one palm to his left temple. “I ought to take my book and go. I think I need to lie down.”

  “Let me get you checked out,” I said.

  I sat behind the mahogany desk, and he produced his library card: Fred Mueller, 46 Gilead Road. There was a borrower number (1919) but no barcode to scan with my phone. Which was just as well—when I picked up my smartphone, the screen was completely black and the white circle was spinning around and around, as if it had just crashed and was trying to reload.

  Mueller didn’t seem to notice the phone. His gaze passed the gadget in my hand without catching upon it. Here was the very embodiment of the future, the twenty-first century made solid in the form of an iPhone Plus, so much more beautiful and science-fictional than anything in Heinlein, than anything on the original Star Trek—and it might’ve been a pencil for all he cared. His indifference didn’t surprise me, though. He couldn’t see the Harry Potter books either, and I thought I knew why. They didn’t belong in his when, hadn’t happened yet. He could see The Hunger Games, and I thought I understood that, too. It didn’t belong in his when either—not until I handed it to him. Once it was in his hands, he saw it as he needed to see it, to accept it. It took a form he could understand, that wouldn’t trouble him.

  I’m probably wrong to suggest I understood this all right away. I was more like the blind man holding on to the elephant’s knee, dimly beginning to suspect he had his hands on an animal instead of a tree trunk. It didn’t all make sense in the moment, but I instinctively felt that there was a logic to the situation that might yet be revealed.

  “Don’t you need to stamp it?” he asked, putting his hand on the paperback and turning it to face me.

  And there was that pulp cover again that I’m almost sure was painted by Victor Kalin, although if you look at Kalin’s Web site showcasing his fifties-and sixties-era paperbacks, you won’t find it there. How could you? The Hunger Games was published in 2008. By then Fred Mueller had been dead for almost half a century. He dropped dead in January of 1965, suffered a fatal heart attack while shoveling his sister’s walkway—as you have almost certainly guessed by now, I read about it on my phone that evening, the phone he couldn’t see. He’d won the Distinguished Service Medal in the Surigao Strait, during some of the fiercest fighting of the Pacific war. He was survived by a son, who, according to the obituary, was a math student in Cambridge, England.

  Fred put his Heinlein on the table, took his vintage copy of The Hunger Games, and moved toward the exit, a door in the side of the library car. He had his hand on the latch when he hesitated and glanced back at me. He smiled uneasily. I thought he looked a little waxy, and there was a bead of sweat crawling from his left temple.

  “Hey,” he said. “Can I ask you a funny question?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Anyone ever ask you if you’re a ghost?” he said, and laughed, and touched his forehead as if he were feeling a touch woozy again.

  “I was wondering the same thing about you,” I said, and laughed with him.

  NO SOONER HAD HE STEPPED out and closed the door than a fist rapped against it. I came around the desk and threw it open and stared down at a knot of mothers and small children with snot-crusted upper lips. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at it. In the time I was talking to Fred Mueller, borrower number 1919 of Gilead Road, West Fever, that low, filthy, cold mist had dried out and burned off entirely.

  I craned my neck, peering over the small crowd, looking across the vast parking lot of gravel and potholes, but there was no sight of Mr. Mueller and his hat with the giant earflaps.

  I couldn’t say I was surprised.

  IT WAS ONLY FOUR IN the afternoon when I returned the Bookmobile to the lot between the library and Parks & Rec, but it was already dark and smelled like snow. I walked half a block to a local coffee chain, got a coffee, and sat with my phone, reading about Fred Mueller and then Fred Mueller’s son. His kid, who’d been in his early twenties when his father died, was in his seventies now, had retired to Hawaii. In the 1970s he had come up with a protocol allowing computers to talk to each other over phone lines. He was one of about a dozen guys who could claim to be the father of the Internet. His virtuosity with electronics had made him a minor celebrity in geek circles. He’d done a cameo on Star Trek: The Next Generation, been name-checked in a William Gibson novel, was the basis for a scientist character in one of the James Cameron flicks. I visited his Web page and broke into a nasty sweat. The bio photo showed a stringy old man with a patchy beard standing with a surfboard under a palm tree. He wore board shorts . . . and a Hunger Games T-shirt. In a FAQ it was listed as a favorite book. He’d even been a consultant on the film. He’d been a consultant on a lot of sci-fi films.

  I wondered if he’d read it before it was published. I wondered if he’d read it before the author, Suzanne Collins, had been born. That thought made me clammy. My next thought gave me an outright chill. What, I wondered, would’ve happened if I’d given Mr. Mueller a book about 9/11 instead? Could he have stopped it?

  I did not wonder if it had happened. I did not need to wonder. I had his late return in the pocket of my coat: that scuffed cranberry-colored hardcover of Tunnel in the Sky. Fred Mueller’s name was the last entry on the borrower card in the back. The return-by stamp said 1/13/65, and he had dropped dead on January 17 of that year, just four days later.

  Did he finish reading The Hunger Games before his heart gave out? I hoped so. For me, a lifelong bookworm, there was nothing quite so awful as the thought of dying fifty pages from the end of a good novel.

  “If I sit down with you, will I be derailing an important train of thought?” Ralph Tanner asked from over my left shoulder.

  “That train isn’t going anywhere. It’s just sitting on the tracks,
” I said, looking around.

  He had his unlit pipe in one hand and a coffee in the other. If I’d given it the slightest thought, I might’ve expected I’d run into him. It was time for his evening pipe and his last hit of caffeine, and the café was just a short walk from the library.

  “How’s bookslinging treating you?” he asked, settling onto a stool beside me.

  I considered his half smile and his pale, watchful eyes and had an unexpected, jolting thought: He knows. I remembered that first conversation and my sudden impression that he knew about my parents but was too polite to broach the subject. In time I came to feel it was characteristic of Ralph Tanner to always know a little more than he let on, to hold his hand so close to the vest you could hardly tell he had cards to play at all.

  “Not too bad,” I said. “A guy returned an overdue copy of Tunnel in the Sky by Robert Heinlein.”

  “Ah! The juveniles. Quite a bit better than Heinlein’s work for adults, in my opinion.”

  “It was very late. He took it out in December 1964. He would’ve returned it sooner, but he died in January 1965, and that kept him and his book out of circulation for a while.”

  “Ah,” Ralph said, and he smiled and sipped his coffee and looked away. “One of them.”

  I turned my own coffee cup around and around with my fingertips. “So this isn’t new?”

  “It happened to Loren Hayes from time to time. I told you that, although I admit I was happy to let you think his encounters with the dead were strictly imaginary. At first it was just once, maybe twice a year. Toward the end it happened more frequently.”

  “That why he gave it up?”

  Ralph nodded, slowly, not looking at me. “He thought . . . when he was young, and his concentration was sharper, he could mostly hold the Bookmobile here, in the present, where it belongs. But as he got older and his attention started to drift, the Bookmobile began to find its way into the past more frequently. More and more of his customers were . . . well, like whoever you met today. He calls them late returns.” He had another taste of his coffee and spoke with no urgency. We might’ve been discussing the Bookmobile’s tendency to drip oil or the way the heating system smelled like old shoes. “In one sense, you know, it’s perfectly unremarkable. It’s quite common to enter a library and find yourself in conversation with the dead. The best minds of generations long gone crowd every bookshelf. They wait there to be noticed, to be addressed, and to reply in turn. In the library the dead meet the living on collegial terms as a matter of course, every day.”