Naomi was a pretty young woman from Proverbia, a town four miles west of Junction City. She lived in a ramshackle house by the Proverbia River with her ramshackle mother. Most of the Rotarians knew Naomi, and wagers had been offered from time to time on whether the house or the mother would fall apart first.
Sam didn’t know if any of these wagers had ever been taken, but if so, their resolution was still pending.
Naomi had graduated from Iowa City Business College, and could actually retrieve whole legible sentences from her shorthand. Since she was the only local woman who possessed such a skill, she was in great demand among Junction City’s limited business population. She also had extremely good legs, and that didn’t hurt. She worked mornings five days a week, for four men and one woman -two lawyers, one banker, and two realtors. In the afternoons she went back to the ramshackle house, and when she was not caring for her ramshackle mother, she typed up the dictation she had taken.
Sam Peebles engaged Naomi’s services each Friday morning from ten until noon, but this morning he had put aside his correspondence – even though some of it badly needed to be answered – and asked Naomi if she would listen to something.
‘Sure, I guess so,’ Naomi had replied. She looked a little worried, as if she thought Sam – whom she had briefly dated – might be planning to propose marriage. When he explained that Craig Jones had drafted him to stand in for the wounded acrobat, and that he wanted her to listen to his speech, she’d relaxed and listened to the whole thing – all twenty-six minutes of it – with flattering attention.
‘Don’t be afraid to be honest,’ he added before Naomi could do more than open her mouth.
‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘Pretty interesting.’
‘No, that’s okay – you don’t have to spare my feelings. Let it all hang out.’
‘I am. It’s really okay. Besides, by the time you start talking, they’ll all be – ‘
‘Yes, they’ll all be hammered, I know.’ This prospect had comforted Sam at first, but now it disappointed him a little. Listening to himself read, he’d actually thought the speech was pretty good.
‘There Is one thing,’ Naomi said thoughtfully.
‘Oh?’
‘It’s kind of … you know . . . dry.’
‘Oh,’ Sam said. He sighed and rubbed his eyes. He had been up until nearly one o’clock this morning, first writing and then revising.
‘But that’s easy to fix,’ she assured him. ‘Just go to the library and get a couple of those books.’
Sam felt a sudden sharp pain in his lower belly and grabbed his roll of Tums. Research for a stupid Rotary Club speech? Library research? That was going a little overboard, wasn’t it? He had never been to the Junction City Library before, and he didn’t see a reason to go there now. Still, Naomi had listened very closely, Naomi was trying to help, and it would be rude not to at least listen to what she had to say.
‘What books?’
‘You know – books with stuff in them to liven up speeches. They’re like . . .’ Naomi groped. ‘Well, you know the hot sauce they give you at China Light, if you want it?’
‘Yes – ‘
‘They’re like that. They have jokes. Also, there’s this one book, Best Loved Poems of the American People.
You could probably find something in there for the end. Something sort of uplifting.’
‘There are poems in this book about the importance of small businesses in American life?’ Sam asked doubtfully.
‘When you quote poetry, people get uplifted,’ Naomi said. ‘Nobody cares what it’s about, Sam, let alone what it’s for.’
‘And they really have joke-books especially for speeches?’ Sam found this almost impossible to believe, although hearing that the library carried books on such esoterica as small-engine repair and wig-styling wouldn’t have surprised him in the least.
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know?’
‘When Phil Brakeman was running for the State House, I used to type up speeches for him all the time,’
Naomi said. ‘He had one of those books. I just can’t remember what the name of it was. All I can think of is Jokes for the John, and of course that’s not right.’
‘No,’ Sam agreed, thinking that a few choice tidbits from Jokes for the John would probably make him a howling success. But he began to see what Naomi was getting at and the idea appealed to him despite his reluctance to visit the local library after all his years of cheerful neglect. A little spice for the old speech.
Dress up your leftovers, turn your meatloaf into a masterpiece. And a library, after all, was just a library. If you didn’t know how to find what you wanted, all you had to do was ask a librarian. Answering questions was one of their jobs, right?
‘Anyway, you could leave it just the way it is,’ Naomi said. ‘I mean, they will be drunk.’ She looked at Sam kindly but severely and then checked her watch. ‘You have over an hour left – did you want to do some letters?’
‘No, I guess not. Why don’t you type up my speech instead?’ He had already decided to spend his lunch hour at the library.
CHAPTER 2
The Library (I)
1
Sam had gone by the Library hundreds of times during his years in Junction City, but this was the first time he had really looked at it, and he discovered a rather amazing thing: he hated the place on sight.
The Junction City Public Library stood on the corner of State Street and Miller Avenue, a square granite box of a building with windows so narrow they looked like loopholes. A slate roof overhung all four sides of the building, and when one approached it from the front, the combination of the narrow windows and the line of shadow created by the roof made the building look like the frowning face of a stone robot. It was a fairly common style of Iowa architecture, common enough so Sam Peebles, who had been selling real estate for nearly twenty years, had given it a name: Midwestern Ugly. During spring, summer, and fall, the building’s forbidding aspect was softened by the maples which stood around it in a kind of grove, but now, at the end of a hard Iowa winter, the maples were still bare and the Library looked like an oversized crypt.
He didn’t like it; it made him uneasy; he didn’t know why. It was, after all, just a library, not the dungeons of the Inquisition. just the same, another acidic burp rose up through his chest as he made his way along the flagstone walk. There was a funny sweet undertaste to the burp that reminded him of something …
something from a long time ago, perhaps. He put a Turn in his mouth, began to crunch it up, and came to an abrupt decision. His speech was good enough as it stood. Not great, but good enough. After all, they were talking Rotary Club here, not the United Nations. It was time to stop playing with it. He was going to go back to the office and do some of the correspondence he had neglected that morning.
He started to turn, then thought: That’s dumb. Really dumb. You want to be dumb? Okay. But you agreed to give the goddam speech; why not give a good one?
He stood on the Library walk, frowning and undecided. He liked to make fun of Rotary. Craig did, too.
And Frank Stephens. Most of the young business types in Junction City laughed about the meetings. But they rarely missed one, and Sam supposed he knew why: it was a place where connections could be made.
A place where a fellow like him could meet some of the not-so-young business types in Junction City.
Guys like Elmer Baskin, whose bank had helped float a strip shopping center in Beaverton two years ago.
Guys like George Candy – who, it was said, could produce three million dollars in development money with one phone call … if he chose to make it.
These were small-town fellows, high-school basketball fans, guys who got their hair cut at Jimmy’s, guys who wore boxer shorts and strappy tee-shirts to bed instead of pajamas, guys who still drank their beer from the bottle, guys who didn’t feel comfortable about a night on the town in Cedar Rapids unless they were turned out in Full Cleveland. They were also Junction City’s movers and shakers, and when you came right down to it, wasn’t that why Sam kept going on Friday nights? When you came right down to it, wasn’t that why Craig had called in such a sweat after the stupid acrobat broke his stupid neck? You wanted to get noticed by the movers and shakers … but not because you had fucked up. They’ll all be drunk, Craig had said, and Naomi had seconded the motion, but it now occurred to Sam that he had never seen Elmer Baskin take anything stronger than coffee. Not once. And he probably wasn’t the only one. Some of them might be drunk … but not all of them. And the ones who weren’t might well be the ones who really mattered.