by Lorraine Ray
“I don’t know where to begin,” says the same old man who walked out with me yesterday, not speaking to me directly, but gazing at a waving strand of ivy wending its way toward the screen of the open window behind me; he speaks his words quickly and his voice makes a happy gravelly sound; he twiddles his thick fingers together in front of him, not exactly as though he is nervous, but conveying excited bewilderment; the wrinkles around his knuckles are like the dried slices that I have seen across the surface of certain Arizona salt playas.
“They’ll help you,” I say cheerfully. A flap of my hand in the direction of the counter indicates that I mean the librarians, a blue-eyed staring gentleman and a tall Mexican lady with hair so tightly bound in a bun that her penciled eyebrows are dragged upward.
“Is there any book up here which you know about which is about Tucson rattlesnakes?” I ask shrugging, grunting in the general direction of the woman at the desk when I believe the male librarian is comfortably trapped with a patron far across the room.
She takes a long, thoughtful breath and taps her pencil twice. “You need to know about local rattlesnakes? Not just a general description of rattlesnakes?”
“I’ll help her,” says the goggle-eyed librarian, coming up from nowhere and crisply taking over. “You help this gentleman.”
I wonder if either of them see the sinking horror on my face.
“All right,” says the woman librarian, casually switching patrons.
“Oh, it’s all right,” I suddenly exclaim, “Never mind. I won’t need it after all. On second thought. It was just a whim.”