‘I go,’ Dave said, ‘but it’s hard, Mr Peebles. I got more white chips than Carter has got liver pills. I’m good for a month, sometimes two, and once I went sober almost a whole year. But it’s hard.’ He shook his head.
‘Some people can’t never get with the program, they say. I must be one of those. But I keep trying.’
Sam’s eyes were drawn back to the woman with her platter of chicken. The picture was too detailed to be a cartoon or a sketch, but it wasn’t a painting, either. It was clear that Dirty Dave had done it in a hurry, but he had caught a kindness about the eyes and a faint slant of humor, like one last sunbeam at the close of day, in the mouth. And the oddest thing was that the woman looked familiar to Sam.
‘Is that a real person?’ he asked Dave.
Dave’s smile widened. He nodded. ‘That’s Sarah. She’s a great gal, Mr Peebles. This place would have closed down five years ago except for her. She finds people to give money just when it seems the taxes will be too much or we won’t be able to fix the place up enough to satisfy the building inspectors when they come. She calls the people who give the money angels, but she’s the angel. We named the place for Sarah.
Of course, Tommy St John spelled part of it wrong when he made the sign, but he meant well.’ Dirty Dave fell silent for a moment, looking at his poster. Without looking up, he added: ‘Tommy’s dead now, a course.
Died this last winter. His liver busted.’
‘Oh,’ Sam said, and then he added lamely, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. He’s well out of it.’
‘Chow-de-dow!’ Lukey exclaimed, getting up. ‘Chow-de-dow! Ain’t that some fuckin chow-de-dow!’ He brought his poster over to Dave. Below the orange squiggles he had drawn a monster woman whose legs ended in sharkfins Sam thought were meant to be shoes. Balanced on one hand was a misshapen plate which appeared to be loaded with blue snakes. Clutched in the other was a cylindrical brown object.
Dave took the poster from Lukey and examined it. ‘This is good, Lukey.’
Lukey’s lips peeled back in a gleeful smile. He pointed at the brown thing. ‘Look, Dave! She got her a Slim Fuckin Slim Jim!’
‘She sure does. Purty good. Go on inside and turn on the TV, if you want. Star Trek’s on right away. How you doin, Dolph?’
‘I draw better when I’m stewed,’ Rudolph said, and gave his poster to Dave. On it was a gigantic chicken leg with stick men and women standing around and looking up at it. ‘It’s the fantasy approach,’ Rudolph said to Sam. He spoke with some truculence.
‘I like it,’ Sam said. He did, actually. Rudolph’s poster reminded him of a New Yorker cartoon, one of the ones he sometimes couldn’t understand because they were so surreal.
‘Good.’ Rudolph studied him closely. ‘You sure you ain’t got a quarter?’
‘No,’ Sam said.
Rudolph nodded. ‘In a way, that’s good,’ he said. ‘But in another way, it really shits the bed.’ He followed Lukey inside, and soon the Star Trek theme drifted out through the open door. William Shatner told the winos and burnouts of Angle Street that their mission was to boldly go where no man had gone before. Sam guessed that several members of this audience were already there.
‘Nobody much comes to the dinners but us guys and some of the AA’s from town,’ Dave said, ‘but it gives us something to do. Lukey hardly talks at all anymore, ‘less he’s drawing.’
‘You’re awfully good,’ Sam told him. ‘You really are, Dave. Why don’t you – ‘ He stopped.
‘Why don’t I what, Mr Peebles?’ Dave asked gently. ‘Why don’t I use my right hand to turn a buck? The same reason I don’t get myself a regular job. The day got late while I was doin other things.’
Sam couldn’t think of a thing to say.
‘I had a shot at it, though. Do you know I went to the Lorillard School in Des Moines on full scholarship?
The best art school in the Midwest. I flunked out my first semester. Booze. It don’t matter. Do you want to come in and have a cup of coffee, Mr Peebles? Wait around? You could meet Sarah.’
‘No, I better get back. I’ve got an errand to run.’
He did, too.
‘All right. Are you sure you’re not mad at me?’
‘Not a bit.’
Dave stood up. ‘I guess I’ll go in awhile, then,’ he said. ‘It was a beautiful day, but it’s gettin nippy now. You have a nice night, Mr Peebles.’
‘Okay,’ Sam said, although he doubted that he was going to enjoy himself very much this Saturday evening.
But his mother had had another saying: the way to make the best of bad medicine is to swallow it just as fast as you can. And that was what he intended to do.
He walked back down the steps of Angle Street, and Dirty Dave Duncan went on inside.
2
Sam got almost all the way back to his car, then detoured in the direction of the Recycling Center. He walked across the weedy, cindery ground slowly, watching the long freight disappear in the direction of Camden and Omaha. The red lamps on the caboose twinkled like dying stars. Freight trains always made him feel lonely for some reason, and now, following his conversation with Dirty Dave, he felt lonelier than ever. On the few occasions when he had met Dave while Dave was collecting his papers, he had seemed a jolly, almost clownish man. Tonight Sam thought he had seen behind the make-up, and what he had seen made him feel unhappy and helpless. Dave was a lost man, calm but totally lost, using what was clearly a talent of some size to make posters for a church supper.
One approached the Recycling Center through zones of litter – first the yellowing ad supplements which had escaped old copies of the Gazette, then the torn plastic garbage bags, finally an asteroid belt of busted bottles and squashed cans. The shades of the small clapboard building were drawn. The sign hanging in the door simply read CLOSED.
Sam lit a cigarette and started back to his car. He had gone only half a dozen steps when he saw something familiar lying on the ground. He picked it up. It was the bookjacket of Best Loved Poems of the American People. The words PROPERTY OF THE JUNCTION CITY PUBLIC LIBRARY were stamped across it.
So now he knew for sure. He had set the books on top of the papers in the Johnnie Walker box and then forgotten them. He had put other papers -Tuesday’s, Wednesday’s, and Thursday’s – on top of the books.
Then Dirty Dave had come along late Thursday morning and had dumped the whole shebang into his plastic collection bag. The bag had gone into his shoppingcart, the shopping-cart had come here, and this was all that was left – a bookjacket with a muddy sneaker-print tattooed on it.
Sam let the bookjacket flutter out of his fingers and walked slowly back to his car. He had an errand to run, and it was fitting that he should run it at the dinner hour.
It seemed he had some crow to eat.
CHAPTER 6
The Library (II)
1
Halfway to the Library, an idea suddenly struck him – it was so obvious he could hardly believe it hadn’t occurred to him already. He had lost a couple of library books; he had since discovered they had been destroyed; he would have to pay for them.
And that was all.
It occurred to him that Ardelia Lortz had been more successful in getting him to think like a fourth-grader than he had realized. When a kid lost a book, it was the end of the world; powerless, he cringed beneath the shadow of bureaucracy and waited for the Library Policeman to show up. But there were no Library Police, and Sam, as an adult, knew that perfectly well. There were only town employees like Ms Lortz, who sometimes got overinflated ideas of their place in the scheme of things, and taxpayers like him, who sometimes forgot they were the dog which wagged the tail, and not the other way around.
I’m going to go in, I’m going to apologize, and then I’m going to ask her to send me a bill for the replacement copies, Sam thought. And that’s all. That’s the end.
It was so simple it was amazing.
Still feeling a little nervous and a little embarrassed (but much more in control of this teapot tempest), Sam parked across the street from the Library. The carriage lamps which flanked the main entrance were on, casting soft white radiance down the steps and across the building’s granite facade. Evening lent the building a kindness and a welcoming air it had definitely been lacking on his first visit – or maybe it was just that spring was clearly on the rise now, something which had not been the case on the overcast March day when he had first met the resident dragon. The forbidding face of the stone robot was gone. It was just the public library again.