Stan Soames looked at them, eyes wide. ‘Come again?’
‘Pell’s -‘
‘I know Pell’s,’ he said. ‘New books out front, old books in the back. Biggest Selection in the Midwest, the ads say. What I’m tryin to get straight is this: you took me away from my garden and got me to fly you all the way across the state to get a couple of books?’
‘They’re very important books, Mr Soames,’ Naomi said. She touched one of his rough farmer’s hands.
‘Right now, they’re just about the most important things in my life . . . or Sam’s.’
‘Dave’s, too,’ Sam said.
‘If you told me what was going on,’ Soames asked, ‘would I be apt to understand it?’
‘No,’ Sam said.
‘No,’ Naomi agreed, and smiled a little.
Soames blew a deep sigh out of his wide nostrils and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his pants. ‘Well, I guess it don’t matter that much, anyway. I’ve owed Dave this one for ten years, and there have been times when it’s weighed on my mind pretty heavy.’ He brightened. ‘And I got to give a pretty young lady her first airplane ride. The only thing prettier than a girl after her first plane ride is a girl after her first -‘
He stopped abruptly and scuffed at the tar with his shoes. Naomi looked discreetly off toward the horizon.
Just then a fuel truck drove up. Soames walked over quickly and fell into deep conversation with the driver.
Sam said, ‘You had quite an effect on our fearless pilot.’
‘Maybe I did, at that,’ she said. ‘I feel wonderful, Sam. Isn’t that crazy?’
He stroked an errant lock of her hair back into place behind her ear. ‘It’s been a crazy day. The craziest day I can ever remember.’
But the inside voice spoke then – it drifted up from that deep place where great objects were still in motion –
and told him that wasn’t quite true. There was one other that had been just as crazy. More crazy. The day of The Black Arrow and the red licorice.
That strange, stifled panic rose in him again, and he closed his ears to that voice.
If you want to save Sarah from Ardelia, Sam, forget about bein a hero and start rememberin who your Library Policeman was.
I don’t! I can’t! I … I mustn’t!
You have to get that memory back.
I mustn’t! It’s not allowed!
You have to try harder or there’s no hope.
‘I really have to go home now,’ Sam Peebles muttered.
Naomi, who had strolled away to look at the Navajo’s wing-flaps, heard him and came back.
‘Did you say something?’
‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’
‘You look very pale.’
‘I’m very tense,’ he said edgily.
Stan Soames returned. He cocked a thumb at the driver of the fuel truck. ‘Dawson says I can borrow his car.
I’ll run you into town.’
‘We could call a cab -‘ Sam began.
Naomi was shaking her head. ‘Time’s too short for that,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much, Mr Soames.’
‘Aw, hell,’ Soames said, and then flashed her a little-boy grin. ‘You go on and call me Stan. Let’s go.
Dawson says there’s low pressure movin in from Colorado. I want to get back to Junction City before the rain starts.’
7
Pell’s was a big barnlike structure on the edge of the Des Moines business district – the very antithesis of the mall-bred chain bookstore. Naomi asked for Mike. She was directed to the customer-service desk, a
kiosk which stood like a customs booth between the section which sold new books and the larger one which sold old books.
‘My name is Naomi Higgins. I talked to you on the telephone earlier?’
‘Ah, yes,’ Mike said. He rummaged on one of his cluttered shelves and brought out two books. One was Best Loved Poems of the American People; the other was The Speaker’s Companion, edited by Kent Adelmen. Sam Peebles had never been so glad to see two books in his life, and he found himself fighting an impulse to snatch them from the clerk’s hands and hug them to his chest.
‘Best Loved Poems is easy,’ Mike said, ‘but The Speaker’s Companion is out of print. I’d guess Pell’s is the only bookshop between here and Denver with a copy as nice as this one … except for library copies, of course.’
‘They both look great to me,’ Sam said with deep feeling.
‘Is it a gift?’
‘Sort of.’
‘I can have it gift-wrapped for you, if you like; it would only take a second.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Naomi said.
The combined price of the books was twenty-two dollars and fifty-seven cents.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Sam said as they left the store and walked towards the place where Stan Soames had parked the borrowed car. He held the bag tightly in one hand. ‘I can’t believe it’s as simple as just … just returning the books.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Naomi said. ‘It won’t be.’
8
As they drove back to the airport, Sam asked Stan Soames if he could tell them about Dave and the baseballs.
‘If it’s personal, that’s okay. I’m just curious.’
Soames glanced at the bag Sam held in his lap. ‘I’m sorta curious about those, too,’ he said. ‘I’ll make you a deal. The thing with the baseballs happened ten years ago. I’ll tell you about that if you’ll tell me about the books ten years from now.’
‘Deal,’ Naomi said from the back seat, and then added what Sam himself had been thinking. ‘If we’re all still around, of course.’
Soames laughed. ‘Yeah . . . I suppose there’s always that possibility, isn’t there?’
Sam nodded. ‘Lousy things sometimes happen.’
‘They sure do. One of em happened to my only boy in 1980. The doctors called it leukemia, but it’s really just what you said – one of those lousy things that sometimes happens.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ Naomi said.
‘Thanks. Every now and then I start to think I’m over it, and then it gets on my blind side and hits me again.
I guess some things take a long time to shake out, and some things don’t ever shake out.’
Some things don’t ever shake out.
Come with me, son … I’m a poleethman.
I really have to go home now … is my fine paid?
Sam touched the corner of his mouth with a trembling hand.
‘Well, hell, I’d known Dave a long time before it ever happened,’ Stan Soames said. They passed a sign which read AIRPORT 3 MI. ‘We grew up together, went to school together, sowed a mess of wild oats together. The only thing was, I reaped my crop and quit. Dave just went on sowin.’
Soames shook his head.
‘Drunk or sober, he was one of the sweetest fellows I ever met. But it got so he was drunk more’n he was sober, and we kinda fell out of touch. It seemed like the worst time for him was in the late fifties. During those years he was drunk all the time. After that he started going to AA, and he seemed to get a little better
… but he’d always fall off the wagon with a crash.
‘I got married in ’68, and I wanted to ask him to be my best man, but I didn’t dare. As it happened, he turned up sober – that time – but you couldn’t trust him to turn up sober.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Naomi said quietly.
Stan Soames laughed. ‘Well, I sort of doubt that – a little sweetie like you wouldn’t know what miseries a dedicated boozehound can get himself into – but take it from me. If I’d asked Dave to stand up for me at the wedding, Laura – that’s my ex – would have shit bricks. But Dave did come, and I saw him a little more frequently after our boy Joe was born in 1970. Dave seemed to have a special feeling for all kids during those years when he was trying to pull himself out of the bottle.
‘The thing Joey loved most was baseball. He was nuts for it – he collected sticker books, chewing-gum cards … he even pestered me to get a satellite dish so we could watch all the Royals games – the Royals were his favorites – and the Cubs, too, on WGN from Chicago. By the time he was eight, he knew the averages of all the Royals starting players, and the won-lost records of damn near every pitcher in the American League. Dave and I took him to games three or four times. It was a lot like taking a kid on a guided tour of heaven. Dave took him alone twice, when I had to work. Laura had a cow about that – said he’d show up drunk as a skunk, with the boy left behind, wandering the streets of KC or sitting in a police station somewhere, waiting for someone to come and get him. But nothing like that ever happened. So far as I know, Dave never took a drink when he was around the boy.