Nashville: The Mood (Part 2)

by Donald H. Carpenter

  Sam Lilliburton heard the bell on the front door tinkle, and he looked up from his newspaper. A woman entered the front door, followed quickly by three men.

  It was just after nine-thirty in the morning at The Red Tomato, an adult bookstore in a strip mall on Nolensville Road. Mornings were the slow time, often with one customer, or group of customers, at a time. It was the only time of day that traffic to the store completely died at times.

  Many people thought of The Red Tomato as a pornographic bookstore, and Lilliburton didn’t really care if people thought about it that way, but he thought of it as more than that. It handled pornography, of course—plenty of it, and in many different styles, but it also handled intimate items that were not directly related to pornography or the viewing of it. Lilliburton had debated the term with friends of his, and a few foes as well, but it really didn’t matter to him what people thought, as long as they left him alone to operate the store.

  Lilliburton watched the group of people make their way to the far corner of the store, away from his seat behind the counter. They didn’t look at him, but he could tell they seemed to want to start their looking far away from him. He was used to that; people didn’t like the owner of the store monitoring their shopping.

  The woman was tall, well-dressed, with dark, slightly greying hair. She looked to be in her early to mid-50s, with an air of upper-class about her. The men were all well-dressed, too, in excellent suits, neatly-tailored but not too neatly-tailored. The three men clustered around the woman, each occasionally looking in her direction, as if being deferential to her view of whatever was being discussed or considered.

  After a few minutes, the group began to move up the far aisle, in the general direction of where Lilliburton was sitting, but across the store. Lilliburton kept his eye on them, but only with an occasional glance; he didn’t want them to look over and see him watching. He continued with his morning paperwork, interrupting it occasionally to check the news on his smartphone. He moved around behind the counter a bit, occasionally looking toward the door, or toward the group across the room.

  Although he wasn’t worried about it, the moment the group had entered the store, Lilliburton knew that something was going on. The group didn’t look like any particular standard group of people that came into the store. First, most people didn’t come in groups of three or four. They either came alone, or occasionally with another person. But they rarely came in groups of four. When they did, they didn’t look like this group. They weren’t as well-dressed, or at least they didn’t dress in formal clothing, not the whole group of them, and you rarely saw a group of four people in the age range of fifty or above come in together.

  Lilliburton liked to think that all types of people came into his store. In his own mind, he was merely offering what the public wanted, many different segments of the public, and he drew upon all of them. However, in reality, he knew that it was very rare for certain types of individuals, or groups of individuals, to come into his store. He may not have always known ahead of time the type of person or group who normally didn’t come into the store, but he tended to know it as soon as they walked in the door. They just didn’t fit.

  Regarding this group, he sensed it right away, and the feeling only grew stronger from the moment they entered. Something about their body language—the way they went to the far corner without really looking his way, the way they made their way up the far aisle as a group, none of them ever looking individually at anything, and other things. He could hear the sound of their voices discussing certain things, probably particular items the store carried. When they discussed them, their tones were very low, very serious-sounding, and there was never a hint of laughter in their voices. Usually, when more than one person entered the store, either as a duo, a trio, or a larger group, and they stood together looking at certain things, there was almost always a nervous laugh or two from at least one member of the party. But here there was only quiet talk, seemingly kept so quiet in order that the person attending the store couldn’t hear it.

  Lilliburton figured them to be some type of civic group, some type of decency panel, like ones he had dealt with before. Having been in business for a number of years, he had dealt with opposing viewpoints off and on, but somewhat regularly. He was used to all the arguments, but he knew he wasn’t going to change at this late date, and he knew the law was on his side. Nevertheless, he always tried to keep a civil tone to any discussion, trying to give the impression that he understood the other party’s point of view, even as he wasn’t really listening, or at least wasn’t really recalculating his own moral principles. Sometimes, he felt less patient than on other occasions, and he had to fight to keep a certain irritation from showing as he tried to patiently listen to the contrary viewpoint. He knew by now that sometimes it was better to listen to what a person had to say, to let them have their say, and to promise to consider it. His experience had been that the matter usually ended there. Angering a person unnecessarily could be very counterproductive.

  He watched the group cautiously out of the corner of his eye. Today was one of those days where he felt as if he simply didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to hear whatever this particular group had to say, so he tried to steel himself and get ready for their approach. He saw one of the men reach down to a shelf and hold something up, bringing it to the attention of the woman. The woman looked at it with a face of dead seriousness, and a change came over her face. It wasn’t so much a look of horror, as some people registered, but rather one of anger tempered by a purposefulness that gave the impression she might be able to do something about it. It was a calm, agenda-producing anger, rather than a powerless, hysterical type of anger.

  The woman turned her head sharply and looked in Lilliburton’s direction. He watched her, but he wasn’t certain she could see him looking in her direction. The woman turned away, and the group continued to make their way down the far aisle and on toward the back of the store. The back of the store had more displays of material and products, and a door leading into a back part of the building, where films were shown. There was no one back there now, but as the day progressed people began to filter in to the film area, and at night it could become quite crowded. The area was divided into little corridors that one party or more could go down and watch a particular film. There were a dozen such corridors in the room, separated by wooden partitions. It could get somewhat raucous in that area in the evenings, and Lilliburton even used an off-duty police officer to provide security.

  Lilliburton knew that sexual activity between and among customers took place in the back rooms, particularly at night, but even in the afternoons and very early mornings. He tried to keep it under control, but any adult bookstore owner around town had to cope with the issue. The activity was almost always between or among males, sometimes one male but more often more than one. Lilliburton had caught male-and-female couples there occasionally, and he had to chuckle about it when he thought about it, because he had almost become outraged about it. For some reason, he thought it was more natural that there would be furtive gay activity, but gays knew to be furtive, so he didn’t worry about them as much. He feared that if the back of the store became known as a simple lover’s lane, the crowds could get out of control. As it stood now, most of the individuals who used it knew to be relatively well-behaved, but that rule was often broken in the hours between midnight and six in the morning.

  Lilliburton sensed a presence off to his right, and turned to find the woman standing at the back of the aisle that ran beside the store counter, looking in his direction. She had apparently crossed over from the aisle next to the far wall, and made her way along the aisle along the back of the store closer to where he worked. They faced each other head-on for the first time, and Lilliburton smiled at her and nodded ever so slightly, as if to acknowledge her presence and make her feel welcome. She stiffened slightly, as if she would normally return the acknowledgement, but somehow felt uncomfortable doing so in this instance
.

  The men who had come in with her slowly caught up with her, and soon the entire group was standing at the back of the store, facing toward the front and eying Lilliburton. Lilliburton, always used to staying busy, or at least giving the appearance of doing so, shuffled some papers on the counter, bent over and straightened the columns of paper bags underneath the counter, then opened a drawer at the desk behind the counter and placed an ink pen inside of it. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the group slowly approaching him, and he took a slow, deep breath, and stood up erect and turned to face them.

  “Are you Mr. Lilliburton?”