His eyes closed, and his breathing deepened, and Mari could tell the medication was still working on him. She had yanked him from its hold, but now it had him back, and that was good. Let him sleep. Let him forget. It should not have happened in the first place. He had not killed her family, in spite of what he thought. He could not have. Even if he did have the power he feared, she could not see it in him, the want of setting death upon others. He was not a killer. And neither was she, she now knew.
But they were something. Together for some reason. Yes, some reason.
She left the light on and hugged her knees tight, thinking ‘some reason’, ‘some reason’, ‘some reason’, until her eyelids grew heavy and she sank into a dream where a little boy laughed and a bigger boy clapped and all the world was right like it was long ago.
Thirty One
First Light
Sound roused Jay again, this time at nine in the morning, but when he opened his eyes this time there was no wild woman atop him, just sun streaming in the window and Mari there by the chair, stuffing the envelopes back into the box. He propped himself up, and realized right then that the painkillers had worn all the way off, gasping loud at the streak of fire that zinged up his shin.
Mari turned when she heard him. She pulled her sleeves down and crossed her arms nervously, wondering how he was going to remember what had happened. How he was going to react.
“Good morning,” she said, and he nodded as he tried to get to a sit. She went to him and put a hand under each arm, helping him so his back rested against the headboard. “There.”
“Thank you.” He noticed as she stepped back, cinching her sleeves down as she seemed obsessively to do, that the front of her sweatshirt was dark with dampness. It was going to be a hot one again, telling by the box of intense yellow light slanting through the window (top and bottom windows, he saw, realizing she had let the shade all the way up), but as yet it was still pleasant. Dawn cool, his mother had always called it, that chill of early morning that faded slow as noon drew closer. The dampness could not be sweat, not yet, and besides she just ‘thought cool’, didn’t she?
Mari noticed him staring and spoke up to explain. “I washed up in the sink. I only saw one towel and I didn’t want to use it when I knew you’d need it.”
“Oh,” Jay said, understanding. Her hair was down now, not in that scrunchy kind of thing that had gathered it like a rubber band. Now that implement circled her left wrist like a bracelet. “Did you sleep?”
“A little. Listen, Jay, I want to do something.”
Her eyes seemed bright this morning. Blue bright with energy, the sadness and rage that had tinged them in the night them a distant, receding storm. “What kind of something?”
She pointed to the box. “I made sure I put all the letters back in the right envelopes, so they matched with the postmarks. That’s important to you, right? Kind of the point of mailing them to yourself?”
“Right,” Jay said. He hadn’t explained it to her in detail—at least he didn’t remember doing so, though he might have considering the way the pills had hit him—but she had put two and two together to figure out that the postmark would affirm the date of the vision inside, and his notation of the exact time on the letter itself would have to stand on its own. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it made him feel that at least he was making the record, so that one day people might know what he had done...without wanting to do any of it. Right, he thought. A question of could, not would. Right. Right?
“Well, I was wondering if it would be okay if I took these with me?”
“You’re leaving?”
“No. No. Just for a while. A few hours. I want to try to...figure something out.”
“What?”
She thought, then shrugged, cinching her sleeves down immediately. “I don’t think I’ll know what I’m looking for until I’m looking.”
“Looking at what?”
“When I was driving into town I saw this building that I thought had a sign on it that said it was a library. But there were no cars in the parking lot, so I thought maybe I was wrong.”
“No,” Jay said. “You weren’t wrong. It is a library.”
She snorted. “Is it nice?”
“I’ve never been inside it,” he answered. Just in the parking lot when the recycling truck came by. And right then he realized that the sack of bottles he’d been carrying when he was hit was probably gone. Picked up, thrown away. Then again, he had wanted to be dead not so many hours ago, so what the hell did some bottles matter now?
“So?”
“Oh.” He looked to the box, then to her. “Does this have something to do with last night?”
Embarrassment flushed her face briefly, and she nodded. “I don’t know how to apologize for doing that. For trying to...”
“So you don’t believe me?” Jay asked.
“No. I don’t believe that you killed anyone. I don’t believe you’re capable of that.”
“Am I just crazy then?”
She smiled. “You and me both, maybe. So, can I take the box?”
“Sure,” Jay told her, wondering what it mattered. Something to her, at least, and he figured that made it worthwhile. “Be my guest.”
Mari lifted the box and hugged it to her hip under one arm. “You’ll be okay here?”
“You mean where I live?”
“I’m sorry, that’s just the mother in...” And she stopped there, the unexpected path she’d taken her thoughts one she was not ready to travel. Not yet. “Listen, why don’t you come with me?”
“Me?” Jay asked, glancing down at his attire as though some strictly enforced dress code might bar his entry into the library.
“Just change your shirt,” Mari said, touching the loose flap of material torn free of the garment’s right shoulder. Her doing, she knew, and apologized with a look as her hand drew back. “Come, please.”
“I don’t know. There’s no reason for me to go, really. I mean, if you have something to do...”
Mari’s eyes swept the brightening room. “It’s going to be hot again today. That’s the way it looks. And that library looked new to me, so it’s got to be air conditioned, don’t you think?”
“Probably,” Jay allowed.
“Nice and cool,” Mari predicted, tempting him. “You could use some time in a cool place after yesterday. Just enjoy not sweating for a while and read some magazines while I do what I’ve got to do. What do you say?”
Coolness. A manufactured respite from the fiendish day and what it could do to the room in which he lived. How the sun above could cook this old building, yessir. There was a reason to go.
But also there was her wanting him to go, and in the end it was that that made him acquiesce with a nod and the beginnings of a smile.
Thirty Two
Promise
The death of communism had practically destroyed Plainview.
Not that the quiet town smack in the middle of America’s heartland was some center of Red sympathies gravely wounded by the sudden end of the cold war. No, quite the opposite had been the case in years prior, in fact. Plainview was as red white and blue as places came. It did it up fine on the Fourth of July, with a parade down Traction Avenue past store windows decked with bunting of the nation’s colors, and old men in VFW hats saluting each time Old Glory passed at the head of a band, or flying high from a tractor, or fixed flat and proud on the side of the town’s two fire engines. And on Veteran’s Day it was picnic time at Harry S Truman Park, where the town’s fighting men of old would be feted with a barbecue and a high school band concert that would play on into the night. On Memorial Day the town remembered fallen heroes with flowers and tears. On Thanksgiving thanks were given for life, and health, and the privilege to be living in a country so free, so grand.
Yes, Plainview celebrated and honored all things American. But she did more than that. She served in defense of her mother country. In its struggle to keep the Evil Empire at bay.
&n
bsp; In the early forties, Whistle Creek Airfield, ten miles from Plainview, was a small Army Air Corps base used in the peacetime training of new pilots. By the end of that decade, with one war over and a new, very different kind of ‘warless’ conflict beginning, the old airfield had been expanded and renamed Whistle Creek Air Force Base. Primarily a center for the winged service’s large transport aircraft, Whistle Creek also boasted a medium size military hospital, a warehousing facility, and an Air Force research lab, all but the lab (a wholly military operation) employing over three thousand of Plainview’s citizens at the height of its operations in the mid-eighties.
And then the wall came down. The Berlin Wall. And soon the hammer and sickle was no more. And talk of something called a ‘peace dividend’ was in the air.
But a hollow dividend it was for the residents of Plainview, who watched as Whistle Creek lowered Old Glory for the last time in the summer of 1993. The base was no more, a casualty of the New World Order. Talk of converting it into a regional airport, or an industrial park, or of privatizing its hospital amounted to no more than wasted breath. The once mighty base was padlocked, its buildings boarded up.
Nothing would ever be the same in Plainview again.
The jobs were gone in a flash, and they weren’t coming back. Seemingly overnight the town’s population shrank from near ten thousand to less than half that. By late ninety-five, only a thousand or so residents remained in the devastated town. Their local representatives in government cried foul, and demanded relief for a people that had served their country so long, so well. And in Washington the people’s voice was heard. Heard loud and clear, and Plainview was given what her national leaders thought would make things right once again.
It built the near dead town a library.
And no ordinary library, mind you. A two story showpiece of resources and technology it was, twelve million dollars worth of books, and computers, and reading rooms, and a parking lot with a hundred white-lined spaces right off Route 87. A sight to behold, it was. And, best of all, the Washington boys had said as they thumped their chests, The Leland Gardner Municipal Library had brought much needed jobs to the town. And that it had.
Ten whole jobs. Three librarians, four clerks, a janitor, a gardener, and a night watchman. The night watchman even lived in Plainview. The others commuted from Jefferson City, and Boonville, and Marshall, and other places that were most definitely not Plainview. Because who in their right mind would want to live in Plainview? Let alone build a damn library there.
And so there it sat, hardly used, for who was there to use it? Most thought it a grand waste, but Mari Gates was not thinking that as she steered her sputtering Honda into the library’s lot and took a space facing the gleaming white building. No, to her this monument to government stupidity held promise. The promise of some answers.
“God, does this bring back memories,” Mari said as she turned the engine off. The old motor hacked for a moment, then silenced. “College, late nights, cramming. The curse of the procrastinator.”
Jay nodded and opened his door. Mari came around and helped him out, getting his crutches and the box of letters from the back seat. They walked side by side up the wide bluestone path toward the building’s inviting glass entrance, Mari keeping her pace slow despite her eagerness to get inside and get to what she had come here for, Jay crutching gingerly along, though it was not his temporary disability that was retarding his gait. This place had triggered memories for him as well.
“My mother used to take me to the library,” he said, recalling the old stone building in West Porter. A depression era work project it had been, put up by men whose pre-crash trades had likely not been anything in the field of construction. Strange angles and sloping shelves populated the boxy structure, and the fools had made the minor mistake of installing mostly windows that did not open. When summers got nasty, the place could heat up like an oven and go toe to toe with the worst of days in the room he lived in now. But it had been a special place, still. ‘A window to the world’, his mother had told him, further explaining that all the mysteries of the ages could be answered in a library if one just knew where to look. “Story time when I was really little, like four or five, and then once I was in first grade I’d go once school let out in June for the summer reading program. Did they have that where you grew up?”
“I didn’t go to the library unless I had to,” Mari admitted with a wistful chuckle.
“You missed out,” Jay told her. “The summers were great. I mean, it was hot as hell in the place sometimes, and my mom was a busy lady, helping my dad with the farm and all, but she still got me down there, and saw that I picked out good books to read, and helped me once we got home with words that were too hard.” They moved up the path for a moment in silence, Jay recalling the time. Savoring the memories. The good time. “At the end of the summer the library would give out awards depending on how many books you read, and I always made myself read ten books, because you got this really impressive certificate with a big gold seal on it for that many. It probably cost a dime a dozen at some stationary store in Madison, but let me tell you, my mom had every one of those certificates framed and she hung them in the front hallway so anyone coming in would see them. And she’d point them out, too.”
Mari was smiling, and had been all the while Jay talked. “It sounds like she really loved you.”
He nodded somewhat sadly and looked up at the building whose entrance they had almost reached. He could feel Mari’s hand on the back of his arm, helping him along, and he flashed right then on his mother’s hand wrapped ‘round his, walking him into that old and crappy and wonderful box of a building in his hometown where there had been books, and magazines, and the hushed tones of children sounding out words. And on occasion the wet rustle of the night watchman snoring as he napped with an open paperback held limply on the bulge of his gut. It had been a good place, in a good time. A good and finite time.
“They’re not around anymore, are they? Your parents?”
Jay shook his head, and Mari’s touch moved up his arm a bit to the curve of his shoulder.
“We don’t have to talk about that,” she said, and Jay looked to her, realizing that she, of all people, could understand. He felt good and sick at that all at once. “Let’s just get inside.”
“Okay,” he said, and entered first as Mari held the door for him.
Thirty Three
Answerland
A woman of maybe fifty and a man likely half her age stood behind the main checkout counter just inside the library’s front entrance, both practically gaping at what was coming their way—patrons.
“Hi,” Mari said as she and Jay reached the counter, her voice hushed down in that way that all people were compelled to speak when visiting what her husband used to jokingly call the ‘abused book store’.
“Hello,” the woman said, lowering a pair of smallish bifocals from her gray eyes and letting them hang from the chain around her neck. She smiled at Jay and Mari, eyeing them curiously, their bedraggled appearance maybe drawing her attention, or possibly the good sized box held on the scant shelf of the young lady’s hip. But at least she could speak; the young man next to her seemed frozen in place, astounded by what stood across the counter’s fine dark wood from him—people.
“Yes, do you have old newspapers on microfilm?” Mari asked, hefting the box up each time it threatened to slip from where she’d wedged it between her arm and body.
The woman behind the counter nodded and pointed slowly upward. “We have the major dailies before this year on microfilm. Any others you can probably access using the computers.”
“Great,” Mari said.
The woman smiled wide at them. One of her hands fiddled with her glasses where they hung against her bosom. “Paul here can show you how to use the computers, if you need. If you’re not familiar with the Internet.”
Mari nodded gratefully. ‘Paul’ could only still stare.
“Excuse me.”
> The woman looked to Jay. “Yes?”
He adjusted his stance on his crutches, trying to keep his cast off the carpeted floor, even that comparatively mild surface strumming the ache that was raging once more. “Is there a water fountain I could use?”
Mari seized on this quickly. “Your leg?”
Jay nodded.
“You took a pill when we left. It still hurts?”
The woman behind the counter set her glasses upon her nose again when she heard the word ‘pill’.
“It comes and goes,” Jay told her. On the ride out to the library it had been mostly gone. Now it was coming, and coming good.
Mari turned to the woman. “It’s pain medication for his leg. Do you have a drinking fountain?”
The woman’s head bobbed high in a nod of realization. “Oh, yes. Of course.” She pointed toward a back corner of the ground level. “Just past the reading lounge and outside the restrooms.”
“Thanks,” Mari said, then touched Jay about the arm. “I’ll take you back there.”
He shook his head. “No, you go do what you have to do. I’ll take my pill and flip through some magazines.”
“We have a fine periodicals section,” the woman told them, and Mari nodded a thanks for the info.
“You sure?” Mari asked Jay.
“I am. Go.”
She considered it still, even after his insistence, but finally acquiesced and hefted the box high once more. “All right.”
“Paul will show you to the research section,” the woman told Mari, and Paul finally made moves approximating a real, live human being, coming all the way around the counter and leading Mari to the wide staircase that stepped up to the open landing of the second floor. She looked back once there, but the woman below was standing all alone.
* * *
The water fountain was right where the woman (was she the librarian? or a clerk?) had said it would be, just beyond an open circular space that was dotted with wide, comfortable chairs and long, downy couches, side tables next to some and plenty of footstools to go around. A triangular sign suspended perfectly from the ceiling branded it the Calvin Callanan Reading Lounge, and a small plaque affixed atop a permanent stanchion heralded the achievements of the late county bureaucrat who had worked so hard to bring this ‘place of learning’ to the people of Plainview. Right, Jay thought as he passed it, thinking that maybe some other chest thumping civil servant might want to bring some people to the town of Plainview. Now there would be a trick.
The Donzerly Light Page 24
