He took a bucket of warm water and the shaving gear down to the barn and came back half an hour later all spiffed up in his own freshly laundered jeans and shirt. When they met in the kitchen, her mouth still looked stubborn.
“I’m leaving now. How about those eggs?”
She refused to speak to him, but thumbed at the five dozen eggs sitting on the porch in a slatted wooden crate.
They were going to be heavy, but let him carry them, she thought stubbornly. If he wanted to go sellin’ eggs to the creeps in town, and learning about bees, and getting all money-hungry, let him carry them!
She pretended not to watch him heft the crate, but her curiosity was aroused when he set it back down and disappeared around the back of the house. A minute later he returned pulling Donald Wade’s wooden wagon. He loaded the egg crate on board only to discover the handle was too short for his tall frame. She watched, gratified when with his first steps his heels hooked on the front of the wagon. Five minutes later—still stubbornly silent—she watched him pull the wagon down the road by a length of stiff wire twisted to the handle.
Go on, then! Run to town and listen to every word they say! And come back with coins jingling in your pocket! And read up on bees and apples and anything else you want! But don’t expect me to make it easy on you!
Gladys Beasley sat behind a pulpit-shaped desk, tamping the tops of the library cards in their recessed bin. They were already flat as a stove lid, but she tamped them anyway. And aligned the rubber stamp with the seam in the varnished wood. And centered her ink pen on its concave rest. And adjusted her nameplate—Gladys Beasley, Head Librarian—on the high desk ledge. And picked up a stack of magazines and centered her chair in the kneehole. Fussily. Unnecessarily.
Order was the greatest force in Gladys Beasley’s life. Order and regimentation. She had run the Carnegie Municipal Library of Whitney, Georgia, for forty-one years, ever since Mr. Carnegie himself had made its erection possible with an endowment to the town. Miss Beasley had ordered the initial titles even before the shelves themselves were installed, and had been working in the hallowed building ever since. During those forty-one years she had sent more than one feckless assistant home in tears over a failure to align the spine of a book with the edge of a shelf.
She walked like a Hessian soldier, in brisk, no-nonsense steps on practical, black Cuban-heeled oxfords to which the shoemaker had added a special rubber heel which buffered her footfalls on the hardwood floors of her domain. If there was one thing that ired Gladys worse than slipshod shelving, it was cleats! Anyone who wore them in her library and expected to be allowed inside again had better choose different shoes next time!
She launched herself toward the magazine rack, imposing breasts carried like heavy artillery, her trunk held erect by the most expensive elastic and coutil girdle the Sears Roebuck catalogue had to offer—the one tactfully recommended for those “with excess flesh at the diaphragm.” Her jersey dress—white squiggles on a background the color of something already digested—hung straight as a stovepipe from her bulbous hips to her club-shaped calves and made not so much as a rustle when she moved.
She replaced three Saturday Evening Post magazines, tamped the stack, aligned it with the edge of the shelf and marched along the row of tall fanlight windows, checking the wooden ribbing between the panes to be sure Levander Sprague, the custodian, hadn’t shirked. Levander was getting old. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, and lately she’d had to upbraid him for his careless dusting. Satisfied today, however, she returned to her duties at the central desk, located smack in front of double maple doors—closed—that led to wide interior steps at the bottom of which were the main doors of the building.
Overdue notices—bah!—there should be no such thing. Anyone who couldn’t return a book on time should simply be disallowed the privilege of using the library again. That would put an end to the need for overdue notices, but quick. Gladys’s mouth was puckered so tightly it all but disappeared as she penned addresses on the penny postcards.
She heard footfalls mounting the interior steps. A brass knob turned and a stranger stepped in, a tall, spare man dressed like a cowboy. He paused, letting his eyes scan the room, the desk, and her, then silently nodded and tipped his hat.
Gladys’s prim mouth relaxed as she returned the nod. The genteel art of hat doffing had become nearly obsolete—what was the world coming to?
He took a long time perusing the place before moving. When he did, there were no cleats. He went directly, quietly, to the card catalogue, slid out the B’s, flipped through the cards and studied them for some time. He closed the drawer soundlessly, then scanned the sunlit room before moving between the oak tables to nonfiction. There were library patrons who, ill at ease when alone in the vast room with Miss Beasley, found it necessary to whistle softly through their teeth while scanning the shelves. He didn’t. He selected a book from the 600’s—Practical Science—moved on to select another and brought them straight to the checkout desk.
“Good afternoon,” Gladys greeted in a discreet whisper.
“Afternoon, ma’am.” Will touched his hat brim and followed her lead, speaking quietly.
“I see you found what you were looking for.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’d like to check these out.”
“Do you have a card?”
“No, ma’am, but I’d like to get one.”
She moved with military precision, yanking a drawer open, finding a blank card, snapping it on the desktop off the edge of a tidily trimmed fingernail. The nail was virgin, Will was sure, never stained by polish. She closed the drawer with her girded torso, all the while holding her lips as if they were the mounting for a five-karat diamond. When she moved, her head snapped left and right, fanning the air with a smell resembling carnations and cloves. The light from one of the big windows glanced off her rimless glasses and caught the rows of uniform silver-blue ringlets between which the warp and woof of her skull shone pink. She dipped a pen in ink, then held it poised above the card.
“Name?”
“Will Parker.”
“Parker, Will,” she transposed aloud while entering the information on the first blank.
“And you’re a resident of Whitney, are you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Address?”
“Ahh...” He rubbed his nose with a knuckle. “Rock Creek Road.”
She glanced up with eyes as exacting as calipers, then wrote again while informing him, “I’ll need some form of identification to verify your residency.” When he neither spoke nor moved, her head snapped up. “Anything will do. Even a letter with a canceled postmark showing your mailing address.”
“I don’t have anything.”
“Nothing?”
“I haven’t lived there long.”
She set down her pen with a long-suffering air. “Well, Mr. Parker, I’m sure you understand, I cannot simply loan books to anyone who walks in here unless I can be assured they’re residents. This is a municipal library. By its very meaning, the word municipal dictates who shall use this facility. Of a town, it means, thus this library is maintained by the residents of Whitney, for the residents of Whitney. I wouldn’t be a very responsible librarian if I didn’t demand some identification now, would I?” She carefully placed the card aside, then crossed her hands on the desktop, giving the distinct impression that she was displeased at having her time and her card wasted.
She expected him to argue, as most did at such an impasse. Instead, he backed up a step, pulled his hat brim low and studied her silently for several seconds. Then, without a word, he nodded, scooped the books against his hip and returned to the nonfiction side where he settled himself on one of the hard oak armchairs in a strong shaft of sunlight, opened a book and began reading.
There were several criteria by which Gladys Beasley judged her library patrons. Cleats, vocal volume, nondisruptiveness and respect for books and furniture. Mr. Parker passed on all counts. She’d rarely se
en anyone read more intently, with less fidgeting. He moved only to turn a page and occasionally to follow along with his finger, closing his eyes as if committing a passage to memory. Furthermore, he neither slouched nor abused the opposite chair by using it as a footstool. He sat with his hat brim pulled low, elbows on the table, knees lolling but boots on the floor. The book lay flat on the table where it belonged, instead of torqued against his belly, which was exceedingly hard on spines. Neither did he lick his finger before turning the page—filthy, germ-spreading habit!
Normally, if people came in and asked for a paper and pencil, Miss Beasley gave them a tongue-lashing instead, about responsibility and planning ahead. But Will Parker’s deportment and concentration raised within her regret for having had to deny him a borrower’s card. So she bent her own standard.
“I thought perhaps you might need these,” she whispered, placing a pencil and paper at his elbow.
Will’s head snapped up. His shoulders straightened. “Much obliged, ma’am.”
She folded her hands over her portly belly. “Ah, you’re reading about bees.”
“And apples. Yes, ma’am.”
“For what purpose, Mr. Parker?”
“I’d like to raise ‘em.”
She cocked one eyebrow and thought a moment. “I might have some pamphlets in the back from the extension office that would help.”
“Maybe next time, ma’am. I got all I can handle here today.”
She offered a tight smile and left him to his studies, trailing a scent strong enough to eat through concrete.
It was mid-afternoon. The only things moving in town were the flies on the ice cream scoop. Lula Peak was bored to distraction. She sat on the end stool in an empty Vickery’s Cafe, grateful when even her brassiere strap slipped down and she had to reach inside her black and white uniform to pull it up. God, this town was going to turn her into a cadaver before she even kicked the bucket! She could die of boredom right here on the barstool and the supper customers would come in and say, “Evenin’, Lula, I’ll have the usual,” and not even realize she was a goner until thirty minutes later when their blue plate specials hadn’t arrived.
Lula yawned, leaving her hand inside her uniform, absently rubbing her shoulder. Being a sensual person, Lula liked touching herself. Sure as hell nobody else around this miserable godforsaken town knew how to do it right. Harley, that dumb ass, didn’t know the first thing about finesse when he touched a woman. Finesse. Lula liked the word. She’d just read it in an article on how to better yourself. Yeah, finesse, that’s what Lula needed, a man with a little finesse, a better man in the sack than Harley-Dumb-Ass-Overmire.
Lula suppressed a yawn, stretched her arms wide and thrust her ribs out, swiveling idly toward the window. Suddenly she rocketed from the stool.
Christ, it was him, walking along the street pulling a kid’s wagon. She ran her eyes speculatively over his lanky form, concentrating on his narrow hips and swaying pelvis as he ambled along the town square and nodded at Norris and Nat McCready, those two decrepit old bachelor brothers who spent their dotage whittling on the benches across the street. Lula hustled to the screen door and posed behind it. Look over here, Parker, it’s better than them two boring old turds.
But he moved on without glancing toward Vickery’s. Lula grabbed a broom and stepped into the sun, making an ill disguised pretense of sweeping the sidewalk while watching his flat posterior continue around the square. He left the wagon in the shade of the town hall steps and went inside.
So did Lula. Back into Vickery’s to thrust the broom aside and glance impatiently at the clock. Two-thirty. She drummed her long orange nails across the countertop, plunked herself onto the end stool and waited for five minutes. Agitated. Peeved. Nobody was going to come in here for anything more than a glass of iced tea and she knew it. Not until at least five-thirty. Old Man Vickery would be madder than Cooter Brown if he found out she’d slipped away and left the place untended. But she could tell him she’d run over to the library for a magazine and hadn’t been gone a minute.
Deciding, she twisted off the stool and flung off her three-pointed apron. The matching headpiece followed as she whipped out her compact. A dash of fresh blaze orange on her lips, a check of the seams in her silk stockings and she was out the door.
Gladys Beasley looked up as the door opened a second time that afternoon. Her mouth puckered and her chin tripled.
“Afternoon, Mizz Beasley,” Lula chirped, her voice ringing off the twelve-foot ceiling.
“Shh! Read the sign!”
Lula glanced at the sign on the front of Miss Beasley’s desk: SILENCE IS GOLDEN. “Oh, sorry,” she whispered, covering her mouth and giggling. She glanced around—ceiling, walls, windows—as if she’d never seen the place before, which wasn’t far from the truth. Lula was the kind of woman who read True Confessions, and Gladys didn’t stoop to using the taxpayers’ money for smut like that. Lula stepped farther inside.
Cleats!
“Shh!”
“Oh, sorry. I’ll tiptoe.”
Will Parker glanced up, scanned Lula disinterestedly and resumed his reading.
The library was U-shaped, wrapped around the entry steps. Miss Beasley’s desk, backed by her private workroom, separated the huge room into two distinct parts. To the right was fiction. To the left nonfiction. Lula had never been on the left where Parker sat now. Remembering about finesse, she moved to the right first, drifting along the shelves, glancing up, then down, as if examining the titles for something interesting. She removed a book bound in emerald green—the exact shade of a dress she’d been eyeing over at Cartersville in the Federated Store. Classy color that’d look swell with her new Tropical Flame nail polish—she spread her hands on the book cover and tipped her head approvingly. She’d have to think up something good to entice Harley to buy that little number for her. She stuck the book back in its slot and moved to another. Melville. Hey, she’d heard of this guy! Must’ve done something swell. But the spine was too wide and the printing too small, so she rammed it back on the shelf and looked further.
Lula finessed her way through a full ten minutes of fiction before finally tiptoeing past Miss Beasley to the other side. She twiddled two fingers as she passed, then clamped her hands at the base of her spine, thrusting her breasts into bold relief.
Gladys tightened her buttocks and followed where Lula had been, pushing in a total of eleven books she’d left beetling over the edges of the shelves.
Lula found the left side arranged much as the right, a spacious room with fanlight windows facing the street. Bookshelves filled the space between the windows and the floor, and covered the remaining three walls. The entire center of the room was taken up by sturdy oak tables and chairs. Lula sidled around the perimeter of the room without so much as peeking at Will. She grazed one fingertip along the edge of a shelf, then sucked it with studied provocativeness. She turned a corner, eased on to where a bank of shelves ran perpendicular to the wall and moved between them, putting herself in profile to Will, should he care to turn his head and see. She clasped her hands at the base of her spine, creating her best silhouette, watching askance to see if he’d glance over. After several minutes, when he hadn’t, she grabbed a biography of Beethoven and, while turning its pages, eyed Will discreetly.
God, was he good looking. And that cowboy hat did things to her insides, the way he wore it low, shadowing his eyes in the glare of the afternoon sun. Still waters, she thought, taken by the way he sat with one finger under a page, so unmoving she wished she were a fly so she could land on his nose. What a nose. Long instead of pug like some she knew. Nice mouth, too. Ooo, would she like to get into that.
He leaned forward to write something and she ran her eyes all over him, down his tapered chest and slim hips to the cowboy boots beneath the table, back up to his crotch. He dropped his pencil and sat back, giving her a clearer profile shot of it.
Lula felt the old itch begin.
He sat there read
ing his book the way all the “brains” used to read in school while Lula thought about bettering herself. When she could stand it no longer she took Beethoven over and dropped it on the table across from him.
“This seat taken?” she drawled, inverting her wrists, leaning on the tabletop so that her breast buttons strained. His chin rose slowly. As the brim of the cowboy hat lifted, she got a load of deep brown eyes with lashes as long as spaghetti, and a mouth that old Lula had plenty of plans for.
“No, ma’am,” he answered quietly. Without moving more than his head, he returned to his reading.
“Mind if I sit here?”
“Go ahead.” His attention remained on the book.
“Watcha studyin’?”
“Bees.”
“Hey, how about that! I’m studyin’ B’s, too.” She held up her book. “Beethoven.” In school she’d liked music, so she pronounced it correctly. “He wrote music, back when guys wore wigs and stuff, you know?”
Again Will refused to glance up. “Yeah, I know.”
“Well...” The chair screeched as Lula pulled it out. She flounced down, crossed her legs, opened the book and flapped its pages in rhythm with her wagging calf. “So. Haven’t seen y’ around. Where y’ been keepin’ yourself?”
He perused her noncommittally, wondering if he should bother to answer. Mercy, she was one hard-looking woman. She had so much hair piled onto her forehead it looked as if she could use a neck brace. Her mouth was painted the color of a chili pepper and she wore too much rouge, too high on her cheeks, in too precise a pattern. She overlapped her wrists on the table edge and rested her breasts on them. They jutted, giving him a clearer shot of cleavage. It pleased Will to let her know he didn’t want any.
“Up at Mrs. Dinsmore’s place.”
“Crazy Elly’s? My, my. How is she?” When Will declined to answer, she leaned closer and inquired, “You know why they call her crazy, don’t you? Did she tell you?” Against his will, he became curious, but it would seem like an offense against Mrs. Dinsmore to encourage Lula, so he remained silent. Lula, however, needed no encouragement. “They locked her in that house when she was a baby and pulled all the shades down and didn’t let her out until the law forced ‘em to—to go to school—and then they only turned her loose six hours a day and locked her up again, nights.” She sat back smugly. “Ah, so you didn’t know.” Lula smiled knowingly. “Well, ask her about it sometime. Ask her if she didn’t live in that deserted house down by school. You know—the one with the picket fence around it and the bats flyin’ in the attic window?” Lula leaned closer and added conspiratorially, “If I were you, I wouldn’t hang around up there at her place any longer than I had to. Give you a bad reputation, if you know what I mean. I mean, that woman ain’t wrapped too tight.” Lula sat back as if in a chaise, letting her eyelids droop, toying absently with the cover of Beethoven, lifting it, letting it drop with soft repeated plops. “I know it’s tough being new around town. I mean, you must be bored as hell if you have to spend your time in a place like this.” Lula’s eyes made a quick swerve around the bookshelves, then came back to him. “But if you need somebody to show y’ around, I’d be happy to.” Beneath the table her toe stroked Will’s calf. “I got me a little bungalow just four houses off the town square on Pecan Street—”