Four Past Midnight (69 page)

Now that it was over, he had an urge—almost a need—to make it all over, to smooth it down like the coverlet on a well-made bed. And this was also part of the businessman's habit, he supposed ... or the businessman's protective coloration. An odd thought occurred to him—that what he should really talk about tonight was his encounter with Ardelia Lortz. It said more about the small-town heart and spirit than his whole written speech. Not all of it was flattering, but it surely wasn't dry. And it would offer a sound rarely heard during Friday-night Rotary speeches: the unmistakable ring of truth.

“Well, we got a little feisty there for a second or two,” he heard himself saying, and saw his hand go out. “I expect I overstepped my bounds. I hope there are no hard feelings.”

She touched his hand. It was a brief, token touch. Cool, smooth flesh. Unpleasant, somehow. Like shaking hands with an umbrella stand. “None at all,” she said, but her eyes continued to tell a different story.

“Well then ... I'll be getting along.”

“Yes. Remember—one week on those, Sam.” She lifted a finger. Pointed a well-manicured nail at the books he was holding. And smiled. Sam found something extremely disturbing about that smile, but he could not for the life of him have said exactly what it was. “I wouldn't want to have to send the Library Cop after you.”

“No,” Sam agreed. “I wouldn't want that, either.”

“That's right,” said Ardelia Lortz, still smiling. “You wouldn't.”

Halfway down the walk, the face of that screaming child
(Simple Simon, the kids call him Simple Simon I think that's very healthy, don't you)

recurred to him, and with it came a thought—one simple enough and practical enough to stop him in his tracks. It was this: given a chance to pick such a poster, a jury of kids might very well do so ... but would
any
Library Association, whether from Iowa, the Midwest, or the country as a whole, actually send one out?

Sam Peebles thought of the pleading hands plastered against the obdurate, imprisoning glass, the screaming, agonized mouth, and suddenly found that more than difficult to believe. He found it
impossible
to believe.

And
Peyton Place.
What about that? He guessed that most of the
adults
who used the Library had forgotten about it. Did he really believe that some of their children—the ones young enough to use the Children's Library—had rediscovered that old relic?

He had no wish to incur a second dose of Ardelia Lortz's anger—the first had been enough, and he'd had a feeling her dial hadn't been turned up to anything near full volume—but these thoughts were strong enough to cause him to turn around.

She was gone.

The library doors stood shut, a vertical slot of mouth in that brooding granite face.

Sam stood where he was a moment longer, then hurried down to where his car was parked at the curb.

It was a rousing success.

He began with his own adaptations of two anecdotes from the “Easing Them In” section of
The Speaker's Companion
—one was about a farmer who tried to wholesale his own produce and the other was about selling frozen dinners to Eskimos—and used a third in the middle (which really
was
pretty arid). He found another good one in the subsection titled “Finishing Them Off,” started to pencil it in, then remembered Ardelia Lortz and
Best Loved Poems of the American People. You're apt to find your listeners remember a well-chosen verse even if they forget everything else,
she had said, and Sam found a good short poem in the “Inspiration” section, just as she had told him he might.

He looked down on the upturned faces of his fellow Rotarians and said: “I've tried to give you some of the reasons why I live and work in a small town like Junction City, and I hope they make at least some sense. If they don't, I'm in a lot of trouble.”

A rumble of good-natured laughter (and a whiff of mixed Scotch and bourbon) greeted this.

Sam was sweating freely, but he actually felt pretty good, and he had begun to believe he was going to get out of this unscathed. The microphone had produced feedback whine only once, no one had walked out, no one had thrown food, and there had only been a few catcalls—good-natured ones, at that.

“I think a poet named Spencer Michael Free summed up the things I've been trying to say better than I ever could. You see, almost everything we have to sell in our small-town businesses can be sold cheaper in big-city shopping centers and suburban malls. Those places like to boast that you can get just about all the goods and services you'd ever need right there, and park for free in the bargain. And I guess they're almost right. But there is still one thing the small-town business has to offer that the malls and shopping centers don't, and that's the thing Mr. Free talks about in his poem. It isn't a very long one, but it says a lot. It goes like this.

Sam looked up at them from his text, and for the second time that day was surprised to find that he meant every word he had just said. He found that his heart was suddenly full of happiness and simple gratitude. It was good just to find out you still
had
a heart, that the ordinary routine of ordinary days hadn't worn it away, but it was even better to find it could still speak through your mouth.

“We small-town businessmen and businesswomen offer that human touch. On the one hand, it isn't much ... but on the other, it's just about everything. I know that it keeps me coming back for more. I want to wish our originally scheduled speaker, The Amazing Joe, a speedy recovery; I want to thank Craig Jones for asking me to sub for him; and I want to thank all of you for listening so patiently to my boring little talk. So ... thanks very much.”

The applause started even before he finished his last sentence ; it swelled while he gathered up the few pages of text which Naomi had typed and which he had spent the afternoon amending; it rose to a crescendo as he sat down, bemused by the reaction.

Well, it's just the booze,
he told himself. They would have
applauded you if you'd told them about how you managed to quit smoking after you found Jesus at a Tupperware party.

Then they started to rise to their feet and he thought he must have spoken too long if they were that anxious to get out. But they went on applauding, and then he saw Craig Jones was flapping his hands at him. After a moment, Sam understood. Craig wanted him to stand up and take a bow.

He twirled a forefinger around his ear:
You're nuts!

Craig shook his head emphatically and began elevating his hands so energetically that he looked like a revival preacher encouraging the faithful to sing louder.

So Sam stood up and was amazed when they actually
cheered
him.

After a few moments, Craig approached the lectern. The cheers at last died down when he tapped the microphone a few times, producing a sound like a giant fist wrapped in cotton knocking on a coffin.

“I think we'll all agree,” he said, “that Sam's speech more than made up for the price of the rubber chicken.”

This brought another hearty burst of applause.

Craig turned toward Sam and said, “If I'd known you had
that
in you, Sammy, I would have booked you in the first place!”

This produced more clapping and whistling. Before it died out, Craig Jones had seized Sam's hand and began pumping it briskly up and down.

“That was great!” Craig said. “Where'd you copy it from, Sam?”

“I didn't,” Sam said. His cheeks felt warm, and although he'd only had one gin and tonic—a weak one—before getting up to speak, he felt a little drunk. “It's mine. I got a couple of books from the Library, and they helped.”

Other Rotarians were crowding around now; Sam's hand was shaken again and again. He started to feel like the town pump during a summer drought.

“Great!” someone shouted in his ear. Sam turned toward the voice and saw it belonged to Frank Stephens, who had filled in when the trucking-union official was indicted for malfeasance. “We shoulda had it on tape, we coulda sold it to the goddam JayCees! Damn, that was a good talk, Sam!”

“Oughtta take it on the road!” Rudy Pearlman said. His round face was red and sweating. “I darn near cried! Honest to God! Where'd you find that pome?”

“At the Library,” Sam said. He still felt dazed ... but his relief at having actually finished in one piece was being supplanted by a kind of cautious delight. He thought he would have to give Naomi a bonus. “It was in a book called—”

But before he could tell Rudy what the book had been called, Bruce Engalls had grasped him by the elbow and was guiding him toward the bar. “Best damned speech I've heard at this foolish club in two years!” Bruce was exclaiming. “Maybe five! Who needs a goddam acrobat, anyway? Let me buy you a drink, Sam. Hell, let me buy you two!”

Before he was able to get away, Sam consumed a total of six drinks, all of them free, and ended his triumphant evening by puking on his own WELCOME mat shortly after Craig Jones let him out in front of his house on Kelton Avenue. When his stomach vapor-locked, Sam had been trying to get his housekey in the lock of his front door—it was a job, because there appeared to be three locks and four keys—and there was just no time to get rid of it in the bushes at the side of the stoop. So when he finally succeeded in getting the door open, he simply picked the WELCOME mat up (carefully, holding it by the sides so the gunk would pool in the middle) and tossed it over the side.

He got a cup of coffee to stay down, but the phone rang twice while he was drinking it. More congratulations. The second call was from Elmer Baskin, who hadn't even been there. He felt a little like Judy Garland in
A Star Is Born,
but it was hard to enjoy the feeling while his stomach was still treading water and his head was beginning to punish him for his overindulgence.

Sam put on the answering machine in the living room to field any further calls, then went upstairs to his bedroom, unplugged the phone by the bed, took two aspirin, stripped, and lay down.

Consciousness began to fade fast—he was tired as well as bombed—but before sleep took him, he had time to think:
I owe most of it to Naomi ... and to that unpleasant woman at the Library. Horst. Borscht. Whatever her name was. Maybe I ought to give her a bonus, too.

He heard the telephone start to ring downstairs, and then the answering machine cut in.

Good boy, Sam thought sleepily.
Do your duty—I mean, after all, isn't that what I pay you to do?

Then he was in blackness, and knew no more until ten o'clock Saturday morning.

He returned to the land of the living with a sour stomach and a slight headache, but it could have been a lot worse. He was sorry about the WELCOME mat, but glad he'd offloaded at least some of the booze before it could swell his head any worse than it already was. He stood in the shower for ten minutes, making only token washing motions, then dried off, dressed, and went downstairs with a towel draped over his head. The red message light on the telephone answering machine was blinking. The tape only rewound a short way when he pushed the PLAY MESSAGES button; apparently the call he'd heard just as he was drifting off had been the last.

Beep! “Hello, Sam.” Sam paused in the act of removing the towel, frowning. It was a woman's voice, and he knew it. Whose? “I heard your speech was a great success. I'm so glad for you.”

It was the Lortz woman, he realized.

Now how did she get my number?
But that was what the telephone book was for, of course ... and he had written it on his library-card application as well, hadn't he? Yes. For no reason he could rightly tell, a small shiver shook its way up his back.

“Be sure to get your borrowed books back by the sixth of April,” she continued, and then, archly: “Remember the Library Policeman.”

There was the click of the connection being broken. On Sam's answering machine, the ALL MESSAGES PLAYED lamp lit up.

“You're a bit of a bitch, aren't you, lady?” Sam said to the empty house, and then went into the kitchen to make himself some toast.

When Naomi came in at ten o'clock on the Friday morning a week after Sam's triumphant debut as an after-dinner speaker, Sam handed her a long white envelope with her name written on the front.

“What's this?” Naomi asked suspiciously, taking off her cloak. It was raining hard outside, a driving, dismal early-spring rain.

“Open it and see.”

She did. It was a thank-you card. Taped inside was a portrait of Andrew Jackson.

“Twenty dollars!” She looked at him more suspiciously than ever. “Why?”

“Because you saved my bacon when you sent me to the Library,” Sam said. “The speech went over very well, Naomi. I guess it wouldn't be wrong to say I was a big hit. I would have put in fifty, if I'd thought you would take it.”

Now she understood, and was clearly pleased, but she tried to give the money back just the same. “I'm really glad it worked, Sam, but I can't take th—”