by Joe Hill
“Nice analogy, but this wasn’t a metaphorical encounter with a long-gone mind. His coat was wet. I could smell it. Smelled like a sheep. And I don’t think he was dead— No, wait. I mean I know he was dead. He’s been dead for fifty years. But while he was in the Bookmobile, he was—”
“‘I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me,’” Ralph sang, and I shuddered. Joan Baez had sung that song. When it came on, my parents always sang along with her.
“He borrowed a book, and I think—I can’t know this—but I think he took it back with him. The Hunger Games. Jesus. I gave him a book that didn’t come out until fifty years after he died.”
I was surprised when Ralph’s mouth widened in a great grin. “Wonderful. Good man.”
“Good man? What if I fucked up—excuse me, messed up—the space-time continuum? Like, what if now John Lennon doesn’t get shot?”
“That would be wonderful, too, don’t you think?”
“Yes, but—obviously. But you know what I’m talking about. The butterfly effect.” He was smiling at me in a way I found mildly maddening. “What would’ve happened if I gave him a book about the Columbine massacre?”
“Did he ask for a book about school shootings?”
“No.”
“Well, there you go, then.” He must’ve seen the frustration in my face, because he softened a little, bumped his shoulder against mine in an avuncular sort of way. “Loren Hayes, who you should meet, thought they could only find their way to the Bookmobile at the end of their story and that they could only borrow books that wouldn’t hurt them. That wouldn’t scratch time’s record. This guy you met today. Did he have trouble seeing the books?”
I nodded. My arms were crawling with goose bumps. Meeting the man from 1965 had been less uncanny than this calm, reasonable conversation about it over coffee with my employer.
“He could only take one that wouldn’t threaten anything, and even then it had to be one that was right for him. When you consider that . . . well. Just imagine if you lived in the fifties and liked the twists in Agatha Christie novels. Now imagine that right before you died, you had a chance to read Gone Girl. You’d die for sure—of happiness. For all we know, that’s what happened to the man you saw today!”
“Don’t say that,” I objected, flinching. “That’s awful.”
“I can think of worse ways to go than with a good book in my hand. Especially if it was one I had no right to ever read, because it wasn’t going to be published until after I was dead. If you don’t quit on me, you’ll see others, now and then. And you won’t be able to give them anything that hurts them.”
“But what if I give them something that changes history?”
“How would you know?” he asked me, smiling again. “Maybe you did! Maybe this crap is all your fault!” He looked around the café—customers on their smartphones, a checkout girl ringing up coffees on a tablet computer—and back to me, and he looked pleased with himself. “The history you have is the only history you know. Besides. People come to the library to improve themselves or to be entertained or to discover something new about the world. How can that be bad? I believe that the late returns who visit the old Bookmobile are just having themselves a little literary dessert before the restaurant kicks them out.”
“So it’s like, what? A reward from God for living a good life?”
“Why can’t it be a reward from the library,” he said, “for returning overdue books in spite of the inconvenience of being dead? Are you going to quit?”
“No,” I said, and heard a faintly peevish tone in my own voice. “I’m listening to a Michael Koryta novel on audio, and I can only concentrate on it while I’m driving.”
He laughed. “I hope you didn’t pay for it. The library has an excellent audiobook collection.” He stood up with his pipe. “I have to step out now. They quite sensibly won’t let me smoke inside. Why don’t you come play rummy with Loren and me? I’m sure you’d have a lot to talk about.”
He started toward the door.
“Mr. Tanner?” I asked.
He looked back, his hand on the handle.
“Did you ever think of driving the Bookmobile yourself? To see who turns up?”
He smiled. “I don’t have my Class B license. Big trucks scare me. Good night, John.”
FOR THE NEXT TEN DAYS, I drove around hunched over the steering wheel, scanning the sidewalks for anyone who looked like they had stumbled out of a black-and-white movie. I could not have been more anxious or more alert if the Bookmobile had been loaded with crates of sweating TNT.
It was hard to control the temperature in the cab. The heat came on full blast, smelling like old socks, and soon I’d be tacky with sweat, my shirt sticking to my sides. But if I turned it off, the temperature would plummet in a handful of minutes, and soon it would be so cold that my toes went numb in their shoes and my sweat froze against my skin. My thoughts ran the same way, hot and cold, careening between eagerness and anxiety, between hoping I would see someone who didn’t belong in my time and dreading it.
Thing is, nothing happened, and after another couple weeks of making my rounds I realized that nothing was going to happen and it took the heart out of me. Not all at once. It snuck up on me, an emotion stronger than simple disappointment, a numb, dull lethargy. At the time I blamed my depression on what had happened when I tried to clean out the garage, but looking back, I can see I was going down hard even before then.
I’d finished cleaning out the master bedroom and my mother’s home office. Boots and scarves went to Goodwill. I emptied a filing cabinet, shredded what wasn’t important, collected together what mattered into a pile to deal with later. I filled trash bags and recycling bins.
Finally, on a brilliant Sunday morning, I decided to have a look in the garage. The whole house was flooded with sunshine, and brightness glinted off the shriveled islands of snow under the trees. On a day so full of light, I felt I was ready to tackle the place where my parents had died.
Only in the garage, the sunlight hit the grimy, cobwebby windows and turned to dull milk. Although the Caddy was gone, towed away by the cops, the plaster ceiling was black from exhaust. I drew a breath and reeled back out, gagging at a stink of exhaust and rank meat. I am now reasonably sure that odor was mostly in my mind, but so what? Imaginary or not, it made me feel I was going to be sick every time I inhaled.
I forced myself back in there with a rag tied over my mouth and ran the automatic garage-door opener. The motor thrummed, but the door rose only a quarter of an inch before making a banging noise and refusing to rise any further. It was bolted shut. I struggled with the bolts, but it seemed to me they had impossibly rusted in place, and I couldn’t force them free. I turned in a circle, looking for something I could hammer against the bolts to free them up, and that’s when I saw one of my father’s blue, flat-soled boat shoes. Perhaps it had dropped off his foot when the EMTs pulled him out from behind the driver’s seat. I picked it up, and a spider crawled out onto the back of my hand. I shouted and threw it, shook the spider off my knuckles, and got the fuck out of there. That was enough for me.
After that I stopped working on the house. I had found the old Sega in the living-room closet. I hooked it up and played NBA Jam, sometimes for five, six hours straight. I played Sonic the Hedgehog 2 until I made it to the end. I played in the dark while headaches intensified to migraines. Then I played some more. When I was fed up with gaming, I watched whatever was on TV: reality shows, cable news, I wasn’t picky. I felt like I was recovering from a stomach bug—only I never actually recovered.
I’d always been a reader, but I lacked the mental energy to force my way through a book. Everything looked too long. Every page had too many words on it. In that whole stretch, I read just a single novel, Laurie Colwin’s Another Marvelous Thing, and then only because it was so short it could be read in one sitting, and only because she didn’t clutter up the page with a whole mess of words. It was about a young woman, just marr
ied, just pregnant, who falls in love with and has an affair with a much, much older man for reasons she hardly understands herself. You hear about a woman sleeping around on her husband, you’re automatically inclined to be judgmental. But everyone in the book was kind, everyone wanted the best for one another. In the end it seemed to me it was really about one generation saying good-bye to another, and I had an ugly cry about it on the couch. It made me glad to think my mother had carried such a happy, romantic heart in her.
I had meant to read it and slip it into the returns pile at the library, but I wound up just putting it back in the shoe box with my mother’s unpaid parking tickets. By the time I was done reading it, that book felt like it belonged to me.
I only ever left the house to drive the Bookmobile, and I went through my routes automatically, hardly seeing the people who entered the book car to find something to read. The next time I met someone who was dead—the next time a Late Return paid me a visit—I barely saw her face until she began to weep.
She’d entered after a small parade of children and their mothers had worked their way through the car in a noisy, milling line. I was in Quince, a country hamlet south of Kingsward, parked in the lot between an elementary school and a baseball field. The field was churned to frozen mud and smelled like thawing dog shit. The day was like my mood: hazy, buried under a low mass of icy cloud. At some point I became aware there was a single woman in the car, a skinny little thing in a salt-and-pepper man’s overcoat that was three times too big for her. I ignored her and went on scanning in returned books until I heard her take a small gasping breath. She clutched a battered reddish book with a brown binding, open to the back. Her delicate nose was bright red from weeping. She looked at me and smiled weakly and wiped at the tears on her face.
“Carry on,” she said in a chipper tone. “Just my allergies.”
“What are you allergic to?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, and looked up at the ceiling while the tears streamed down her pretty, pale face. “Sadness, mostly. Also lavender and bee stings, but mostly I’m allergic to feeling miserable, and when I am, this always happens to me.”
I picked up the box of Kleenex on the desk, got up, and came around to offer her one. “I hope this isn’t because we’re missing the book you want.”
She laughed—a miserable-grateful kind of sound—and snatched a tissue. She gave her nose a great honk. “No. Plenty to read here. I was thinking I’ve never read Sherlock Holmes and that maybe a few nice little mysteries in an English accent would go well with tea and Nilla wafers this afternoon. I looked in the back and saw my son’s name. Of course he took this book out. I think I even remember him reading it one weekend when he was home sick.”
She opened The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to show me the cardboard sleeve in the back, with the borrower’s card stuck into it, and the skin on the nape of my neck crawled. That was when I knew she was one of them, a Late Return. Because those cards aren’t in modern library books. They’ve been replaced by bar codes.
There were half a dozen names written in pencil on the borrower’s card. The first was Brad Dolan, 4/13/59. She shifted the card, and her fingernail pointed to the name Brad Dolan again, lower down: 11/28/60. I felt as if I had drunk down a whole glass of ice water, in a hurry. My insides went ill and cold. One of Brad Dolan’s last great novels had been called Investigations! about a detective named Sheldon Whoms who deduces impossible facts from minor clues—looking at a woman’s chewed fingernails, Whoms determines that she had her first period at eleven and once owned a cat named Aspirin. I vaguely recalled Dolan telling my eighth-grade class that he’d always loved the Sherlock Holmes stories because they told a comforting lie: that the world made sense and that effect followed cause. In contrast, Vietnam had taught him that the army would napalm naked children to stop a political ideology based on people sharing what they have with one another. He said why they would do such a thing was a mystery that no detective, no matter how brilliant, could fathom.
I knew she had wandered into the Bookmobile from the past—knew from that icy chill sinking through my insides—but to be sure, I asked to see the book. She gave it to me, and I turned slightly away and closed it.
When it had been in her hands, it was an old, almost featureless hardcover, with a fraying binding. When it was in mine, it was a lurid crimson paperback that depicted Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman dashing across a red, impressionistic background. A Study in Scarlet, with an introduction by Steven Moffat.
“Brad Dolan?” I said. “I feel like I know his name.”
“Maybe he used to deliver your paper,” she said, and laughed.
“Maybe you used to deliver it,” I said. “While he slept in the passenger seat.”
I turned and handed the book back to her. By the time she took it, it was a battered brownish red hardcover again, with a gold Meerschaum pipe stamped on the front. She smiled, her face blotchy from crying.
“Thanks for the tissue,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“What’s he doing these days? Your son?”
“He’s over there,” she said. “He volunteered. His father died in Korea and . . . he wanted to do his bit. He’s very brave.” She smiled a moment longer, and then her face wrinkled and she put a hand over her eyes and her shoulders began to twitch. She took short, gasping breaths. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I haven’t done this before.”
I put a hand on her back and let her bump her head against my shoulder. In her time maybe men could casually hug strange crying women, but a hand lightly resting between her shoulder blades was all I felt comfortable with. “What haven’t you done before? Cry? First time? It does pass, usually when your eyes start to feel sore.”
She laughed again. “Oh, I cry plenty. It’s just my first time in a public place, except church, and no one minds if I cry there. I’m all one tender spot these days. Like a bruise, only it’s my whole body. Everything makes me feel weak and weepy. I haven’t had a letter from him in two months. That’s the longest it’s ever been. I sit in the front room tingling all over, watching for the postman. It’s like I’m holding my breath, but for hours. Then the postman comes, and there’s no letter.”
I’m all one tender spot these days, she had said. Something about that line gave me a twinge of anxiety. Fred Mueller had shown up to take out one last good science-fiction novel in the week before he fell dead in his sister’s front yard. Ralph seemed to think that was part of it—that the Late Returns could find their way to the Bookmobile only when they were close to the end. I recollected something else now from that day in eighth grade when Brad Dolan came to talk at my school. He’d mentioned that his mother had died alone, of uterine cancer, while he was trying not to get killed in Vietnam. He said it was the great regret of his life: that he had to go get rich after she was dead, when his money couldn’t do her any good. She had wanted to go to Paris, or at least Fort Lauderdale, but she’d never left New England. She never had a vacation. She never owned a car or a new coat, since she always shopped for her clothes at the Salvation Army. She gave 10 percent of her salary every year to her church, and later, after she was dead, it turned out the priest who ran the place molested little boys and had drunk away most of the church’s savings.
“Is he going to come home?” she asked, and looked up at me, smiling weakly.
My insides flopped, like a fish hauled up onto a dock.
I turned away from her. I didn’t want her to see my expression.
“I . . . I believe he will, Mrs. Dolan. I’m sure of it. You can have faith in that.”
She said, “I’m trying. Though I feel more and more like a little girl who’s overheard there’s no Father Christmas. Have you seen the films on Cronkite? Have you seen what’s happening over there? I want to believe he’ll come back and he’ll still be himself. Just as good. Just as kind. Not broken inside. I pray every day that I’ll die before him. That’s the only happy ending us humans can have, isn’t it? For the pare
nt to die before the child?”
If she hadn’t said that, in precisely that way, I wouldn’t have done it. But I had read a line almost exactly like that only five months before, in my father’s final letter.
Ralph was sure I couldn’t give them anything that would hurt them. But then Ralph couldn’t drive the old Bookmobile and he’d never met any of the Late Returns.
I reached for Dolan’s first novel, Die Laughing! It was the movie edition, the one with Tom Hanks and Zachary Quinto on the cover, but when I turned and put it in her hand, it was a first edition. No . . . even that is not quite right. It was someone’s idea of what the first edition could’ve been. The SF pulp artist Frank Kelly Freas had done the original cover, and he’d done this one, too, which showed a sweating GI laughing maniacally while he rode his M16 like a child’s wooden pony. The actual cover (I looked it up later) was all but identical, except with another soldier in the background, weeping with laughter while he juggled grenades.
She stared down at the thin, raggedy book in her hands (25¢ ACE PAPERBACK across the cover and “War is no laughing matter . . . except when it is!”). Then her gaze found the author’s name and snapped back up at me.
“What is this? A joke?”
I didn’t answer right away. I wasn’t sure what to say. She searched my face with a rigid smile that expressed no humor at all.
“Take it home,” I said. “It’s good. One of his best.”
She gave it another searching look. When she glanced back at me, her smile had become thin indeed. “I suppose there’s some humor in finding a book by a writer who shares my son’s name, but I also feel a little like you’re making fun. Maybe I asked for it, getting emotional over Sherlock Holmes. Still. Not a nice thing to do, mister.” She dropped the book and turned to leave.