Four Past Midnight (92 page)

Then he glanced at the floor, and saw what he had been looking for. It was a wrapper. He picked it up, smoothed it out, and read what was written there in the dingy overhead light: Bull's Eye Red Licorice.

From behind him, Naomi beat an impatient tattoo on the Datsun's horn. Sam left the booth with the wrapper in his hand, waved to her, and ran into the store through the pouring rain.

The Piggly Wiggly clerk looked like a young man who had been cryogenically frozen in 1969 and thawed out just that week. His eyes had the red and slightly glazed look of the veteran dope-smoker. His hair was long and held with a raw-hide Jesus thong. On one pinky he wore a silver ring beaten into the shape of the peace sign. Beneath his Piggly Wiggly tunic was a billowy shirt in an extravagant flower-print. Pinned to the collar was a button which read
Sam doubted if this was a sentiment of which the store manager would have approved ... but it was a rainy night, and the store manager was nowhere in sight. Sam was the only customer in the place, and the clerk watched him with a bemused and uninvolved eye as he went to the candy rack and began to pick up packages of Bull's Eye Red Licorice. Sam took the entire stock—about twenty packages.

“You sure you got enough, dude?” the clerk asked him as Sam approached the counter and laid his trove upon it. “I think there might be another carton or two of the stuff out back in the storeroom. I know how it is when you get a serious case of the munchies.”

“This should do. Ring it up, would you? I'm in a hurry.”

“Yeah, it's a hurry-ass world,” the clerk said. His fingers tripped over the keys of the NCR register with the dreamy slowness of the habitually stoned.

There was a rubber band lying on the counter beside a baseball-card display. Sam picked it up. “Could I have this?”

“Be my guest, dude—consider it a gift from me, the Prince of Piggly Wiggly, to you, the Lord of Licorice, on a rainy Monday evening.”

As Sam slipped the rubber band over his wrist (it hung there like a loose bracelet), a gust of wind strong enough to rattle the windows shook the building. The lights overhead flickered.

“
Whoa,
dude,” the Prince of Piggly Wiggly said, looking up. “That wasn't in the forecast. Just showers, they said.” He looked back down at the register. “Fifteen forty-one.”

Sam handed him a twenty with a small, bitter smile. “This stuff was a hell of a lot cheaper when I was a kid.”

“Inflation sucks the big one, all right,” the clerk agreed. He was slowly returning to that soft spot in the ozone where he had been when Sam came in. “You must really like that stuff, man. Me, I stick to good old Mars Bars.”

“Like it?” Sam laughed as he pocketed his change. “I hate it. This is for someone else.” He laughed again. “Call it a present.”

The clerk saw something in Sam's eyes then, and suddenly took a big, hurried step away from him, almost knocking over a display of Skoal Bandits.

Sam looked at the clerk's face curiously and decided not to ask for a bag. He gathered up the packages, distributed them at random in the pockets of the sport-coat he had put on a thousand years ago, and left the store. Cellophane crackled busily in his pockets with every stride he took.

Naomi had slipped behind the wheel, and she drove the rest of the way to the Library. As she pulled out of the Piggly Wiggly's lot, Sam took the two books from the Pell's bag and looked at them ruefully for a moment.
All this trouble
, he thought.
All this trouble over an outdated book of poems and a self help manual for fledgling public speakers
. Except, of course, that wasn't what it was about. It had never been about the books at all.

He stripped the rubber band from his wrist and put it around the books. Then he took out his wallet, removed a five-dollar bill from his dwindling supply of ready cash, and slipped it beneath the elastic.

“What's that for?”

“The fine. What I owe on these two, and one other from a long time ago—
The Black Arrow
, by Robert Louis Stevenson. This ends it.”

He put the books on the console between the two bucket seats and took a package of red licorice out of his pocket. He tore it open and that old, sugary smell struck him at once, with the force of a hard slap. From his nose it seemed to go directly into his head, and from his head it plummeted into his stomach, which immediately cramped into a slick, hard fist. For one awful moment he thought he was going to vomit in his own lap. Apparently some things never changed.

Nonetheless, he continued opening packages of red licorice, making a bundle of limber, waxy-textured candy whips. Naomi slowed as the light at the next intersection turned red, then stopped, although Sam could not see another car moving in either direction. Rain and wind lashed at her little car. They were now only four blocks from the Library. “Sam, what on earth are you doing?”

And because he didn't really
know
what on earth he was doing, he said: “If fear is Ardelia's meat, Naomi, we have to find the other thing—the thing that's the opposite of fear. Because that, whatever it is, will be her poison. So ... what do you think that thing might be?”

“Well, I doubt if it's red licorice.”

He gestured impatiently. “How can you be so sure? Crosses are supposed to kill vampires—the blood-sucking kind—but a cross is only two sticks of wood or metal set at right angles to each other. Maybe a head of lettuce would work just as well ... if it was turned on.”

The light turned green. “If it was an
energized
head of lettuce,” Naomi said thoughtfully, driving on.

“Right!” Sam held up half a dozen long red whips. “All I know is that this is what I have. Maybe it's ludicrous. Probably is. But I don't care. It's a by-God symbol of
all
the things my Library Policeman took away from me—the love, the friendship, the sense of belonging. I've felt like an outsider
all my life
, Naomi, and never knew why. Now I do. This is just another of the things he took away. I used to love this stuff. Now I can barely stand the smell of it. That's okay; I can deal with that. But I have to know how to turn it on.”

Sam began to roll the licorice whips between his palms, gradually turning them into a sticky ball. He had thought the smell was the worst thing with which the red licorice could test him, but he had been wrong. The texture was worse ... and the dye was coming off on his palms and fingers, turning them a sinister dark red. He went on nevertheless, stopping only to add the contents of another fresh package to the soft mass every thirty seconds or so.

“Maybe I'm looking too hard,” he said. “Maybe it's plain old bravery that's the opposite of fear. Courage, if you want a fancier word. Is that it? Is that all? Is bravery the difference between Naomi and Sarah?”

She looked startled. “Are you asking me if quitting drinking was an act of bravery?”

“I don't know
what
I'm asking,” he said, “but I think you're in the right neighborhood, at least. I don't need to ask about fear; I
know
what that is. Fear is an emotion which encloses and precludes change.
Was
it an act of bravery when you gave up drinking?”

“I never really gave it up,” she said. “That isn't how alcoholics do it. They
can't
do it that way. You employ a lot of sideways thinking instead. One day at a time, easy does it, live and let live, all that. But the center of it is this: you give up believing you can
control
your drinking. That idea was a myth you told yourself, and
that's
what you give up. The myth. You tell me—is that bravery?”

“Of course. But it's sure not foxhole bravery.”

“Foxhole bravery,” she said, and laughed. “I like that. But you're right. What I do—what
we
do—to keep away from the first one ... it's not that kind of bravery. In spite of movies like
The Lost Weekend
, I think what we do is pretty undramatic.”

Sam was remembering the dreadful apathy which had settled over him after he had been raped in the bushes at the side of the Briggs Avenue Branch of the St. Louis Library. Raped by a man who had called himself a policeman. That had been pretty undramatic, too. Just a dirty trick, that was all it had been—a dirty, brainless trick played on a little kid by a man with serious mental problems. Sam supposed that, when you counted up the whole score, he ought to call himself lucky; the Library Cop might have killed him.

Ahead of them, the round white globes which marked the Junction City Public Library glimmered in the rain. Naomi said hesitantly, “I think the real opposite of fear might be honesty. Honesty and belief. How does that sound?”

“Honesty and belief,” he said quietly, tasting the words. He squeezed the sticky ball of red licorice in his right hand. “Not bad, I guess. Anyway, they'll have to do. We're here.”

The glimmering green numbers of the car's dashboard clock read 7:57. They had made it before eight after all.

“Maybe we better wait and make sure everybody's gone before we go around back,” she said.

“I think that's a very good idea.”

They cruised into an empty parking space across the street from the Library's entrance. The globes shimmered delicately in the rain. The rustle of the trees was a less delicate thing; the wind was still gaining strength. The oaks sounded as if they were dreaming, and all the dreams were bad.

At two minutes past eight, a van with a stuffed Garfield cat and a MOM'S TAXI sign in its rear window pulled up across from them. The horn honked, and the Library's door—looking less grim even in this light than it had on Sam's first visit to the Library, less like the mouth in the head of a vast granite robot—opened at once. Three kids, junior-high-schoolers by the look of them, came out and hurried down the steps. As they ran down the walk to MOM'S TAXI, two of them pulled their jackets up to shield their heads from the rain. The van's side door rumbled open on its track, and the kids piled into it. Sam could hear the faint sound of their laughter, and envied the sound. He thought about how good it must be to come out of a library with laughter in your mouth. He had missed that experience, thanks to the man in the round black glasses.

Honesty
, he thought.
Honesty and belief.
And then he thought again:
The fine is paid
.
The fine is paid, goddammit.
He ripped open the last two packages of licorice and began kneading their contents into his sticky, nasty-smelling red ball. He glanced at the rear of MOM'S TAXI as he did so. He could see white exhaust drifting up and tattering in the windy air. Suddenly he began to realize what he was up to here.

“Once, when I was in high school,” he said, “I watched a bunch of kids play a prank on this other kid they didn't like. In those days, watching was what I did best. They took a wad of modelling clay from the Art Room and stuffed it in the tailpipe of the kid's Pontiac. You know what happened?”

She glanced at him doubtfully. “No—what?”

“Blew the muffler off in two pieces,” he said. “One on each side of the car. They flew like shrapnel. The muffler was the weak point, you see. I suppose if the gases had backflowed all the way to the engine, they might have blown the cylinders right out of the block.”

“Sam, what are you talking about?”

“Hope,” he said. “I'm talking about hope. I guess the honesty and belief have to come a little later.”

MOM'S TAXI pulled away from the curb, its headlights spearing through the silvery lines of rain.

The green numbers on Naomi's dashboard clock read 8:06 when the Library's front door opened again. A man and a woman came out. The man, awkwardly buttoning his overcoat with an umbrella tucked under his arm, was unmistakably Richard Price; Sam knew him at once, even though he had only seen a single photo of the man in an old newspaper. The girl was Cynthia Berrigan, the Library assistant he had spoken to on Saturday night.

Price said something to the girl. Sam thought she laughed. He was suddenly aware that he was sitting bolt upright in the bucket seat of Naomi's Datsun, every muscle creaking with tension. He tried to make himself relax and discovered he couldn't do it.

Now why doesn't that surprise me?
he thought.

Price raised his umbrella. The two of them hurried down the walk beneath it, the Berrigan girl tying a plastic rain-kerchief over her hair as they came. They separated at the foot of the walk, Price going to an old Impala the size of a cabin cruiser, the Berrigan girl to a Yugo parked half a block down. Price U-turned in the street (Naomi ducked down a little, startled, as the headlights shone briefly into her own car) and blipped his horn at the Yugo as he passed it. Cynthia Berrigan blipped hers in return, then drove away in the opposite direction.

Now there was only them, the Library, and possibly Ardelia, waiting for them someplace inside.

Along with Sam's old friend the Library Policeman.

Naomi drove slowly around the block to Wegman Street. About halfway down on the left, a discreet sign marked a small break in the hedge. It read

A gust of wind strong enough to rock the Datsun on its springs struck them, rattling rain against the windows so hard that it sounded like sand. Somewhere nearby there was a splintering crack as either a large branch or a small tree gave way. This was followed by a thud as whatever it was fell into the street.

“God!” Naomi said in a thin, distressed voice. “I don't like this!”