Mari’s eyes swept the brightening room. “It’s going to be hot again today. That’s the way it looks. And that library looked new to me, so it’s got to be air conditioned, don’t you think?”
“Probably,” Jay allowed.
“Nice and cool,” Mari predicted, tempting him. “You could use some time in a cool place after yesterday. Just enjoy not sweating for a while and read some magazines while I do what I’ve got to do. What do you say?”
Coolness. A manufactured respite from the fiendish day and what it could do to the room in which he lived. How the sun above could cook this old building, yessir. There was a reason to go.
But also there was her
wanting
him to go, and in the end it was
that
that made him acquiesce with a nod and the beginnings of a smile.
Thirty Two
Promise
The death of communism had practically destroyed Plainview.
Not that the quiet town smack in the middle of America’s heartland was some center of Red sympathies gravely wounded by the sudden end of the cold war. No, quite the opposite had been the case in years prior, in fact. Plainview was as red white and blue as places came. It did it up fine on the Fourth of July, with a parade down Traction Avenue past store windows decked with bunting of the nation’s colors, and old men in VFW hats saluting each time Old Glory passed at the head of a band, or flying high from a tractor, or fixed flat and proud on the side of the town’s two fire engines. And on Veteran’s Day it was picnic time at Harry S Truman Park, where the town’s fighting men of old would be feted with a barbecue and a high school band concert that would play on into the night. On Memorial Day the town remembered fallen heroes with flowers and tears. On Thanksgiving thanks were given for life, and health, and the privilege to be living in a country so free, so grand.
Yes, Plainview celebrated and honored all things American. But she did more than that. She served in defense of her mother country. In its struggle to keep the Evil Empire at bay.
In the early forties, Whistle Creek Airfield, ten miles from Plainview, was a small Army Air Corps base used in the peacetime training of new pilots. By the end of that decade, with one war over and a new, very different kind of ‘warless’ conflict beginning, the old airfield had been expanded and renamed Whistle Creek Air Force Base. Primarily a center for the winged service’s large transport aircraft, Whistle Creek also boasted a medium size military hospital, a warehousing facility, and an Air Force research lab, all but the lab (a wholly military operation) employing over three thousand of Plainview’s citizens at the height of its operations in the mid-eighties.
And then the wall came down. The Berlin Wall. And soon the hammer and sickle was no more. And talk of something called a ‘peace dividend’ was in the air.
But a hollow dividend it was for the residents of Plainview, who watched as Whistle Creek lowered Old Glory for the last time in the summer of 1993. The base was no more, a casualty of the New World Order. Talk of converting it into a regional airport, or an industrial park, or of privatizing its hospital amounted to no more than wasted breath. The once mighty base was padlocked, its buildings boarded up.
Nothing would ever be the same in Plainview again.
The jobs were gone in a flash, and they weren’t coming back. Seemingly overnight the town’s population shrank from near ten thousand to less than half that. By late ninety-five, only a thousand or so residents remained in the devastated town. Their local representatives in government cried foul, and demanded relief for a people that had served their country so long, so well. And in Washington the people’s voice was heard. Heard loud and clear, and Plainview was given what her national leaders thought would make things right once again.
It built the near dead town a library.
And no ordinary library, mind you. A two story showpiece of resources and technology it was, twelve million dollars worth of books, and computers, and reading rooms, and a parking lot with a hundred white-lined spaces right off Route 87. A sight to behold, it was. And, best of all, the Washington boys had said as they thumped their chests, The Leland Gardner Municipal Library had brought much needed
jobs
to the town. And that it had.
Ten whole jobs. Three librarians, four clerks, a janitor, a gardener, and a night watchman. The night watchman even lived in Plainview. The others commuted from Jefferson City, and Boonville, and Marshall, and other places that were most definitely
not
Plainview. Because who in their right mind would want to live in Plainview? Let alone build a damn library there.
And so there it sat, hardly used, for who was there to use it? Most thought it a grand waste, but Mari Gates was not thinking that as she steered her sputtering Honda into the library’s lot and took a space facing the gleaming white building. No, to her this monument to government stupidity held promise. The promise of some answers.
“God, does this bring back memories,” Mari said as she turned the engine off. The old motor hacked for a moment, then silenced. “College, late nights, cramming. The curse of the procrastinator.”
Jay nodded and opened his door. Mari came around and helped him out, getting his crutches and the box of letters from the back seat. They walked side by side up the wide bluestone path toward the building’s inviting glass entrance, Mari keeping her pace slow despite her eagerness to get inside and get to what she had come here for, Jay crutching gingerly along, though it was not his temporary disability that was retarding his gait. This place had triggered memories for him as well.
“My mother used to take me to the library,” he said, recalling the old stone building in West Porter. A depression era work project it had been, put up by men whose pre-crash trades had likely not been anything in the field of construction. Strange angles and sloping shelves populated the boxy structure, and the fools had made the minor mistake of installing mostly windows that did not open. When summers got nasty, the place could heat up like an oven and go toe to toe with the worst of days in the room he lived in now. But it had been a special place, still. ‘A window to the world’, his mother had told him, further explaining that all the mysteries of the ages could be answered in a library if one just knew where to look. “Story time when I was really little, like four or five, and then once I was in first grade I’d go once school let out in June for the summer reading program. Did they have that where you grew up?”
“I didn’t go to the library unless I
had
to,” Mari admitted with a wistful chuckle.
“You missed out,” Jay told her. “The summers were great. I mean, it was hot as hell in the place sometimes, and my mom was a busy lady, helping my dad with the farm and all, but she still got me down there, and saw that I picked out good books to read, and helped me once we got home with words that were too hard.” They moved up the path for a moment in silence, Jay recalling the time. Savoring the memories. The good time. “At the end of the summer the library would give out awards depending on how many books you read, and I always made myself read ten books, because you got this really impressive certificate with a big gold seal on it for that many. It probably cost a dime a dozen at some stationary store in Madison, but let me tell you, my mom had every one of those certificates framed and she hung them in the front hallway so anyone coming in would see them. And she’d point them out, too.”
Mari was smiling, and had been all the while Jay talked. “It sounds like she really loved you.”
He nodded somewhat sadly and looked up at the building whose entrance they had almost reached. He could feel Mari’s hand on the back of his arm, helping him along, and he flashed right then on his mother’s hand wrapped ‘round his, walking him into that old and crappy and wonderful box of a building in his hometown where there had been books, and magazines, and the hushed tones of children sounding out words. And on occasion the wet rustle of the night watchman snoring as he napped with an open paperback held limply on the bulge of his gut. It had been a good place, in a good time. A good and finite time.
“They’re not around anymore, are they? Your parents?”
Jay shook his head, and Mari’s touch moved up his arm a bit to the curve of his shoulder.
“We don’t have to talk about that,” she said, and Jay looked to her, realizing that she, of all people, could understand. He felt good and sick at that all at once. “Let’s just get inside.”
“Okay,” he said, and entered first as Mari held the door for him.
Thirty Three
Answerland
A woman of maybe fifty and a man likely half her age stood behind the main checkout counter just inside the library’s front entrance, both practically gaping at what was coming their way—patrons.
“Hi,” Mari said as she and Jay reached the counter, her voice hushed down in that way that all people were compelled to speak when visiting what her husband used to jokingly call the ‘abused book store’.
“Hello,” the woman said, lowering a pair of smallish bifocals from her gray eyes and letting them hang from the chain around her neck. She smiled at Jay and Mari, eyeing them curiously, their bedraggled appearance maybe drawing her attention, or possibly the good sized box held on the scant shelf of the young lady’s hip. But at least she could speak; the young man next to her seemed frozen in place, astounded by what stood across the counter’s fine dark wood from him—people.
“Yes, do you have old newspapers on microfilm?” Mari asked, hefting the box up each time it threatened to slip from where she’d wedged it between her arm and body.
The woman behind the counter nodded and pointed slowly upward. “We have the major dailies before this year on microfilm. Any others you can probably access using the computers.”
“Great,” Mari said.
The woman smiled wide at them. One of her hands fiddled with her glasses where they hung against her bosom. “Paul here can show you how to use the computers, if you need. If you’re not familiar with the Internet.”
Mari nodded gratefully. ‘Paul’ could only still stare.
“Excuse me.”
The woman looked to Jay. “Yes?”
He adjusted his stance on his crutches, trying to keep his cast off the carpeted floor, even that comparatively mild surface strumming the ache that was raging once more. “Is there a water fountain I could use?”
Mari seized on this quickly. “Your leg?”
Jay nodded.
“You took a pill when we left. It still hurts?”
The woman behind the counter set her glasses upon her nose again when she heard the word ‘pill’.
“It comes and goes,” Jay told her. On the ride out to the library it had been mostly gone. Now it was coming, and coming good.
Mari turned to the woman. “It’s pain medication for his leg. Do you have a drinking fountain?”
The woman’s head bobbed high in a nod of realization. “Oh, yes. Of course.” She pointed toward a back corner of the ground level. “Just past the reading lounge and outside the restrooms.”
“Thanks,” Mari said, then touched Jay about the arm. “I’ll take you back there.”
He shook his head. “No, you go do what you have to do. I’ll take my pill and flip through some magazines.”
“We have a fine periodicals section,” the woman told them, and Mari nodded a thanks for the info.
“You sure?” Mari asked Jay.
“I am. Go.”
She considered it still, even after his insistence, but finally acquiesced and hefted the box high once more. “All right.”
“Paul will show you to the research section,” the woman told Mari, and Paul finally made moves approximating a real, live human being, coming all the way around the counter and leading Mari to the wide staircase that stepped up to the open landing of the second floor. She looked back once there, but the woman below was standing all alone.
The water fountain was right where the woman (was she the librarian? or a clerk?) had said it would be, just beyond an open circular space that was dotted with wide, comfortable chairs and long, downy couches, side tables next to some and plenty of footstools to go around. A triangular sign suspended perfectly from the ceiling branded it the Calvin Callanan Reading Lounge, and a small plaque affixed atop a permanent stanchion heralded the achievements of the late county bureaucrat who had worked so hard to bring this ‘place of learning’ to the people of Plainview. Right, Jay thought as he passed it, thinking that maybe some other chest thumping civil servant might want to bring some people to the town of Plainview. Now there would be a trick.
But the real trick for him now was getting a small white pill down his throat to douse the fire building below his left knee, and to that end Jay crutched his way through the landscape of comfortable furniture and partly down a wide and open hall to the dull steel drinking fountain mounted on the wall. He popped a Darvon into his mouth and bent awkwardly forward on his crutches to get a good swallow of cool water. With a fast gulp relief was on the way—he hoped.
That done he dropped the pill bottle into his shirt pocket and made his way back to the reading lounge named for good ol’ Cal. He had his pick of the litter, and chose a big, cushy chair to settle into, letting his crutches lean low on the square wooden table separating it from a couch. A couch, Jay thought, giving the long and inviting sofa a good look, but deciding that even in a place as deserted as the Leland Gardner Municipal Library it would not be proper to just stretch out. Though in a while he was fairly certain he would be wanting just such a place, with one Darvon in his already and another one on its way. The chair would just have to do, he thought, feeling the firm fluff of its leather-(leather?!)-covered arms. Well, do it would he figured, and took a deep breath of the cool, almost chilly air, and lifted his cast to the footstool just in front of his—
“Damn!” he swore—softly, he hoped—and reached with both hands for his left knee. No reason to make a grab any lower, as he couldn’t scratch through the plaster to get at the hot throb that had spiked right then as he clumsily let the hard wrap over his heel down just that much too forcefully onto the stool. Jesus, it hurt, and all he could do for a moment was squeeze hard on his knee until the pain ebbed back to a state of mostly annoyance. Once it had he let his upper body flop back in the chair. Into the embrace of the spongy cushions and their stiff, slick skin. He sat there, just sat there, waiting out the pain. Waiting for pill number two to take hold and drag the hurt all the way down, and maybe him with it. Well, if that happened, so be it. Who was there to mind if he drifted off and ripped a snore or two through ol’ Cal’s reading lounge? No one, and Mari would get him when she was done. Finished with whatever she was driven to do.