by Chris Lynch
“We should help,” Adam Everly says.
“Course we’re going to help,” I say.
Chellie reaches out and squeezes my forearm. “Go away. I want everybody to just be gone.”
I look down at my arm where she has squeezed me. “Oh, ya, that was pretty intimidating. Guess I’ll run away now. How ’bout you, Adam, you scared yet?”
“I’m gonna g-g-go hide in the kitchen,” he says. He smiles big, pleased at his successful rare shot at humor. “I didn’t really need to stutter that time, Chellie. I f-f-f-faked it for you.”
Chellie covers her face with her hands, but peeks over the fingertips. Her eyes are smiling, and still weepy.
Adam Everly disappears into the kitchen to work on his specialty, cleaning things. A dish shatters. “I got it,” he calls. “Don’t worry there, I g-g-got it under control.”
Chellie drops her chin to her chest in exasperation. She starts laughing for real now.
“You don’t have to do this, guys,” Chellie says. “It’s my mess, not yours.”
There’s another smash in the kitchen. “It’s all right,” Adam calls. “I got that.”
I make a dramatic sweeping gesture toward the kitchen. Then I continue around, covering the theater, the front door, and Whitechurch beyond. “It’s our mess. Don’t worry about it, this’ll be fun. It’s gotta be more fun than the movie was anyway.”
Chellie goes and locks the door. She has sent her two waitresses home, but with her new assistants, the place is nearly clean by the time she picks up her broom. I take it away from her. “Go sit down,” I say. “Boss don’t sweep. Proprietress don’t sweep. Hostess don’t sweep. And anybody wearing a dress like that don’t sweep.”
Chellie grips the broom with both hands for a moment, while I do likewise. Then she grins, lets go, leans forward, and kisses me on the lips.
Chellie disappears into the kitchen, leaving me clutching the broom handle for support. A few minutes later she walks back into the room, which is cleaner than it has been since Nestor took care of it. She’s towing a one-gallon jug of hard cider and Adam Everly. Adam is balancing a tray of pilsner glasses.
The strain is evident on his face.
“Come on, Adam,” I say quietly, as if something serious is riding on this. “Come on, come on …”
He makes it, and this is cause for celebration.
“Come on, gentlemen,” Chellie says as Adam sets down the tray of wobbling glasses. “Quittin’ time.”
She fills all three glasses to the top, sets them down in front of the three chairs, and the cleanup crew members sit down in front of them. We raise our glasses. The glasses hang there. What, after all, are we supposed to toast, really? Chellie had a great idea, for the wrong population. She is more certain than ever to bolt town, leaving us a hell of a lot uglier and more ignorant than we already are. We probably put the final nails in the coffin of Nestor, who only ever wanted to show his people a decent flick in a class joint, make it date night all the time, but who is probably right now sitting in the middle of a technicolor bonfire in his living room with Wings of Desire and Duck Soup and The Great Escape making a blue chemical flame that will eat up his drapes and himself.
Feels like something, though. Something, probably, is happening here. A toast, then.
“To White Rabbit,” I say.
Chellie is a bit puzzled. “Um, the song?”
Adam Everly is not puzzled. “Is this really necessary?”
“No,” I say. “Not the song. The athlete. The thoroughrat. White Rabbit, son of Gray Ghost and Silver Fox. Fastest rodent ever to wear racing silks, and not too shabby with a knife and fork, either.”
“He didn’t use c-c-cutlery,” Adam Everly says. He starts out serious, then even he recognizes the absurdity and starts laughing. And toasting.
“I have no idea what you two are on about, but I’m thirsty.”
Chellie downs fully half the glass, gasps, then speaks her piece. “See, if this would have worked, I maybe could have stayed. Y’know? Stupid town needs something … Nestor’s right. It’s an ignorant place.”
“I don’t think it’s a bad place,” Adam Everly says softly.
Chellie dips her nose way down low to give him a hard down stare. “That’s it,” she says, “no more alcohol for you.”
“Same old story,” I say. “I’m talking about a champion. We could have brought glory to Whitechurch with White Rabbit. But it’s all politics, isn’t it? My rat showed just a little too much style … so they shot him down. Just like Kennedy. And you, Chelle.”
Chellie doesn’t see the comparison between our personal failures. “Shut up, Oakley. I’m serious about this. We could have, if this worked, done this a lot. It’s a nice little stage up there. Isn’t it a nice little stage up there?”
“That is a great dress,” I say.
“It is,” Adam adds, then quickly buries his nose in his drink.
“Which?” I ask. “The stage or the dress?”
Adam blushes. “The d-d-d-d-d …”
“Thank you,” Chellie says. She reaches across and squeezes Adam’s hand. “We could have done the movies, then maybe, you know, a comic, maybe a play … poetry nights. Can you imagine it, a nice poetry night here, a nice, like, poetry night, with wine and cheese and like, a poet, right here?”
I probably should answer. But honestly, a poetry night …
Chellie splutters out a laugh. “Me neither,” she says.
“I keep losing Oakley’s Lotto money,” Adam Everly contributes.
Chellie jumps up out of her seat and dashes to the kitchen.
“Now look what you did, Adam. Your story was the one that finally broke her.”
He looks worried. He looks about to run after her until she comes trotting back out carrying a bag.
“This was to be the nice finish of a nice evening,” she says, handing around fortune cookies. “I was going to give one to every customer, for a laugh.”
“So, it’ll be the nice finish to a crap evening,” I say.
“Thanks, Oakley. Hope you get the death cookie.”
As we struggle with the cookies, Chellie King pounds down a whole glass of cider.
“Ignorant town,” she says, “I hate this ignorant goddamn town,” smashing her cookie more like a walnut. Her voice drops low, almost loses itself. “I don’t want to leave it.”
“What does yours say?” Adam Everly asks Chellie brightly.
“It says, ‘You live in an ignorant goddamn town with the world’s shittiest Chinese food.’”
Adam smiles. “I don’t think it really says that, Chelle.”
She relents. “‘Things are looking up for you,’” she recites.
“See now,” Adam Everly says. “There’s an omen if I ever heard one.”
I have just wrangled mine open. “‘Things are looking up for you,’” I say, tossing the cookie fragments onto the table. “Big omen. Adam Everly, you’re the last contestant.”
This, apparently, is big pressure for Adam. He gets very jittery, taking a big gulp of his drink. He works the cookie open as if he wants to just bend it, not break it, so it can be reused. “‘You will c-c-come into a sudden f-f-f-fortune.’” Adam pauses, rereads it, smiles, sips, sits back pleased.
I have, as I have had frequently of late, a sudden unkind spasm. I get unkind spasms even though I am not, really, unkind, and it is in fact one of the most important things to me, to be not unkind. To know that I am not. But the spasms do come, like a nervous disorder.
I reach over and snag the fortune from him. “Wait, it says ‘Continued on next cookie.’” I grab another, crack it, read, “‘And you will blow the fortune on a boatload of bootleg soapsuds.’”
Adam goes all righteous. He sits up proudly in his chair, sipping neatly from his drink.
“At least I try, Oakley,” Adam Everly says. “And I’m not s-s-sorry, either.”
Chellie King slides her chair right up next to Adam Everly’s and throws an ar
m around him. They look at me defiantly, as if their schemes have actually succeeded.
They are quite a pair.
“That’s the spirit,” Chellie says. “If at first you don’t succeed, and all that rigmarole.” She stands. “I like your style, Adam Everly. You win the door prize. Take me home.”
Adam Everly may yet swallow his tongue. “I, I, I, I, live the other way,” he says.
She ponders that. “Well, good for you,” she says. “Living that way is fine too.”
Adam Everly doesn’t seem to care much what she has said, as long as he is out of harm’s way.
“Will you then?” Chellie says, walking around to my side of the table. She is leaning late-night close to me. I can feel her breath on my cheek and nothing else over any other part of me.
I don’t suppose anyone is surprised when I say, “Course, Chelle. Course I’ll walk you.” Because most of the time “yes” is my word. Acquiescence my mode.
I help Chellie into her long wool coat. The three of us exit together quietly, walking tentatively across the room after Chellie kills all the lights. We stand on the sidewalk out front for an extra minute, looking at the breath misting out of each other.
“See that,” Chellie says to Adam Everly, pointing across the street at Missus Minnever’s Bed and Breakfast, which has been closed for the two years that Missus Minnever has been dead.
“I see it,” Adam Everly says.
“Everybody sees it,” I add. “How could you miss it? Biggest eyesore in town.”
“I hear it’s coming up for auction,” she says, winking at Adam Everly. “Prime location. Massive possibilities, for the right syndicate …”
Adam Everly turns away from Ms. King, toward Missus Minnever’s again, then back once more to Ms. King. He winks. I am certain it is the first time he has ever attempted this maneuver. He rubs his eye.
“We’ll talk,” Chellie King says. “We’ll lunch on it….”
I start tugging her down the sidewalk as Adam Everly waves excitedly, visions of B&B success dancing in his head.
“Well, then, good night,” I say, heading off with Chellie, east. Adam Everly continues walking backward, west.
“See, this is the thing,” Chellie says as she lifts my arm and wraps it like a stole around herself. She leans hard against me, so that I have to lean equally hard to keep us balanced as we walk. “The thing, the thing is …”
I wait, walk listen and wait. But that is it, Chellie is finished. Which is just as well. It’s late. We pass the Laundromat, which is unlighted, which means nobody is fondling Whitechurch’s unmentionables unless it’s going on in the darkness. We pass the empty coffee shop beneath my apartment. Chellie looks up while I look straight ahead. We pass Chuck’s International Auto Parts and Holly’s House of Fine which is a beauty parlor and the library and the town hall and the Texaco which looks like a modern big-time gas station because Texaco forced Jason Gilmartin to build that twenty-foot-high lighted hooded island for the pumps or lose his franchise, so he built it and now it looks like Whitechurch’s little piece of Vegas, screaming yellow light over the town center through the night.
We pass the burger place and the pie place and the donut place. “It’s a good thing,” I say, finding myself now giving Chellie a tight squeeze, then backing off, “that all these places sell only one item apiece. ’Cause if it was just one normal-size joint instead of all chopped up like this, Whitechurch would be an awfully dull place. Couldn’t have that now, could we?”
“Christ!” Chellie roars at the thought. With the dead stop of the town this late, the sound of it rings, rolls, back west, down the main street, up the rise outbound at the far end of town. You could hear it come to a stop, pong, in the bell tower of First Unitarian.
We have stopped to listen to it. She smiles. She stops smiling. I do it this time. “Christ!”
We can still hear it just slightly as we walk the walk to Chellie King’s sky-blue clapboard house, on the easternmost lip of the bowl that is Whitechurch. We stand on her spongy bowed rotting porch, which Mr. King will fix when he retires or when Edgar the mail carrier steps through and breaks his leg.
“My room is right there,” she says, pointing at a spot right above us. “Right at the top of the stairs, away from anybody else.”
“Ah,” I say, nodding, looking up at the spot as if I’m a building inspector.
“You want to come up and trade stories of wishes, hopes, and desires?”
For a minute, I am thinking about it. I like Chellie King a lot. I like her dress a lot too. Liking her and considering what I might do about that, this is not a new thought for me. And now she’s liking me too. And we have the cider in us, which covers a lot of the rough edges that would appear, tonight and tomorrow.
But I am a good guy. Sounds like crap, don’t it? Sounds like crap to me too, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it is, despite the occasional spasm, true. And there are probably a good fistful of reasons why a good guy would at do this, if he looked at it closely.
I don’t much want to look at it closely, though.
“Now’s the part, you know, Oakley, where you come in and make me forget all about the bad and the boring stuff. Y’know, like that.”
Ah, Chellie King. There you go, Chellie King, you went and did it. There was something proposed a minute ago that I maybe could have one. This, though, is something I can’t.
I step as close as I can to her—without touching her, because as I am finding out the gulf between being a good guy and being a real good guy is a mighty gaping gulf, oh boy.
“You know what?” I say, with a loaded wet sigh. “I can’t make that trade. I’d be ripping you off.”
She gives me a quizzical look, but she probably understands better than that. In fact, I’m sure she knows. I back away over the soft surface of the porch.
“Go inside now,” I say. “A gentleman isn’t supposed to leave a girl out in the nighttime.”
“I can’t believe, of all the rats around here, I had to pick the gent.”
I like that, even if it isn’t totally true. Especially because it isn’t totally true. I wave her into the house anyway. I wait while she fumbles around in her coat pockets, pulling out crumpled Kleenex, dropping it onto the porch, pulling out a half pack of Hall’s Mentholyptus, dropping it on the porch, pulling out the house keys. The door is open.
“Hey,” she says, “all you did was confirm my faith in this dump anyway. So there.” Chellie is waving, blowing a soft undramatic kiss that I’m sure I can feel land on the tip of my chin.
The door shuts, and I quick-step away, shaking my head.
Some people are hopeless.
Everyone’s Turned Out
EVERYONE HAS TURNED OUT. That’s what they say, isn’t it? Everyone’s turned out for the funeral. She was such a fantastically well-regarded person that the whole town is turned out, plus relatives and pen pals and college chums from all over. Because that’s what people do, I suppose, is they turn out. For funerals. Especially here. They turn out in droves here, tribes and columns and gangs here, because we do beautiful funerals, for beautiful librarians, in Whitechurch.
But the truth is I wouldn’t know who has turned out for the funeral of Ophelia Lennon and wouldn’t give a shit who has either. Don’t notice. Don’t care.
The library has been closed for four days leading up to and including the burial day itself, Saturday. Today. Would have been closed today anyway because it never opens on Saturday but if it did open Saturdays it wouldn’t open on this one. Because Ophelia Lennon’s not here. Ophelia Lennon was the library.
She was other things too. Right, everybody is other things too. Mr. King is the owner of the diner and he’s Chellie’s dad. The Reverend is the Reverend, god’s assistant and all that and he’s also father of that kid Lilly minds who can sometimes be a brat. And the Rev is a gun aficionado. And like that, so really everybody is more than they are, aren’t they.
They should have opened it an
yway, I think. The library is really the nicest place in town, and what better place to sit and think and pay, like, a tribute to Ophelia Lennon than the library? The funeral home? Chomskys’ Funeral Parlor? Right, where the brothers Chomsky can follow you around and look sad because looking sad and asking if there’s anything they can do is their job so you can be sure if you ask one of the professionally sad Chomsky brothers to do something seeing as they feel so bad and all they will do it for you and put it on your fucking tab. We are one big extended family here in town after all.
Or the church. The famous white Whitechurch church. Ophelia Lennon was never comforted by the place, so why would her fans be?
No, the library makes sense. That’s a thing, isn’t it, making sense of death? Aren’t people always going on about “making sense” of death, or coping with “senseless” deaths? Well the library would do that. Open up the beautiful mahogany-crammed warm open-plan reading room where every single person was always comfortable and welcome before, where you could just sit and do nothing or nap or browse or write and you didn’t have to know books or even like looks or even know how to read in order to get it about the whole library thing. I heard it myself plenty of times, Ophelia Lennon sitting there reading to somebody too blind or lost or lonely to do it for himself. The only building in town where grown adults could get themselves read to, other than the church. And at the library you didn’t have to be read to about the blackness of our soul.
Could’ve just opened it up and not worried about it at all, left the windows up and the lights on and I would just bet you that not a single person would cause trouble, that all the books would be refiled according to the Dewey decimal system or at least to the best of Whitechurch’s ability—which was always fine enough for Ophelia Lennon who I think enjoyed the challenge of not only filing books properly, but of unfiling what we had done.
That would be the extent of the filing. No filing past the casket to view the body. No filing somberly into and out of church, no file of cars with orange flags following each other to the cemetery, as if we couldn’t every one of us find our way there privately. What we would do that would make more sense would be to enter the library, browse, pick out an old favorite like Winesburg, Ohio or Leaves of Grass, read a short passage, and then be on our way. Would that not be a fair tribute to a librarian? Would that not make a librarian happy?
