The Alligator Park branch of the Highbridge library system was a red brick building not far from the church Mister JayMac, Miss Giselle, and a few of the Hellbenders sometimes attended. It had a pot-bellied white portico and windows separated by rose trellises or well-trimmed snowball shrubs. In Tenkiller, this branch would’ve held every book in town-maybe the whole county-with space left over for a LaSalle showroom.
Mrs Hocking surprised me too. She didn’t have blue hair or a squint or blocky black shoes with ankle straps. She had a pretty face, a plumpish body with flying-squirrel flaps on her upper arms, and a smile that made my own mouth muscles ache. I guessed her age as fifty-plus. She greeted Jumbo like he was an electrocuted loved one brought back to life-I mean, she was overjoyed.
“It’s so good to see you, Mr Clerval! One of the titles you asked me to put on reserve has just come in! Now I won’t have to send you a postal notice!”
Despite being on very good terms with Mrs Hocking, Jumbo looked startled. He unpacked his books on the central desk and kept his mouth shut, a rebuke for all the fuss.
Mrs Hocking’s young assistant hovered at the far end of the desk, eyeballing Jumbo and me the way she would’ve a couple of prison escapees.
“But you’ve only had these books out once!” Mrs Hocking thumbed through her card bin. “You could’ve renewed them!”
“Yessum,” Jumbo said. “But to what end?”
“Why, to give yourself time to read them all.”
“I have read them all.”
“Oh. Then you’re an awfully resourceful reader. You must have formidable powers of concentration.”
“Which of my reserve titles has come in?”
“Why, uh, this one, Mr Clerval.” Mrs Hocking picked a small book out of a nearby stacking cart. “It’s very popular just now. Mr Salmon, its last reader, checked it out two days ago and brought it back just this morning. Perhaps you and he should meet. You have much in common, including-”
“Please, Mrs Hocking, hold it for me here until I’ve made my other selections.”
“Of course. Pleased to. Let me know if Margaret or I can be of any further assistance.”
“My friend Daniel would like his own card.”
“All right. Does he reside in Highbridge or in Hothlepoya County?”
“Like me, he’s a Hellbender,” Jumbo said. “His stay here will certainly outlast August,”
“Then he’s not a resident?”
“His mailing address, like mine, is McKissic House on Angus Road. For the next two and half months.”
“Yes, but, it appears that-”
“What length of residency entitles one to a card?” Jumbo’s voice boomed through the building. Folks in the stacks looked over at us. A little boy grabbed his mother’s skirts.
“What we must do is issue a temporary card,” Mrs Hocking said gaily. “If Margaret lists you as one local reference, Mr Clerval, whom may we designate as the other?”
“Mr Jordan McKissic.”
“Certainly. Very good. Here, Margaret. Help this young man fill out the application. Begin with his name and-”
“His name is Daniel Boles,” Jumbo said, already turning toward the nonfiction shelves. “B-O-L-E-S. Complete the form as far as possible without us.”
“Of course. Of course.” Mrs Hocking waved us away. “Browse to your hearts’ content.”
In the philosophy and psychology sections, Jumbo put his hands on my shoulders and tried to whisper:
“Inside, Daniel, Mrs Hocking feels much as her assistant Margaret does-unquiet, frightened. I realize that now. Her overfriendliness shows the truth. She hopes to hide from both me and herself the extent to which I repel her.”
Uh-uh. Jumbo needed to believe Mrs Hocking really did like him for himself.
“I’m correct in this,” he whispered. “From her behavior, I should have deduced her attitude before.” He let go of me to prowl the stacks, mouthing titles and authors’ names, tiptoeing around other patrons like a gigantic reshelver.
With our arms full of books, we returned to the main desk and spilled them out like hodcarriers dumping bricks. Mrs Hocking added Jumbo’s reserve book to the pile, and I completed the card application her assistant had started.
“Isn’t that more than ten?” Mrs Hocking stamped away.
“Eleven, with the reserve book,” Jumbo said. “But you may put that one on Daniel’s card.”
“I’m afraid we-” Mrs Hocking began to say. “Very good,” she said instead. “He may even benefit from reading it, should you finish it quickly enough to pass it on, Mr Clerval.” She bustled and stamped. “Good day, gentlemen. Give our rivals in your baseball matches glorious what-for.”
“Thanks,” Jumbo said. “You’re more than kind.” He shoved our loot into his satchel and led me out the door.
Outside, I looked at him with real disappointment. He’d just called Mrs Hocking “more than kind.” But if he’d sized her up correctly in the stacks, that was a lie.
“She desires to be a friend,” Jumbo replied to my look, “even if the natural impulse to that state eludes her. I spoke to her desire, not to the canker of her predisposition.”
That had a highfalutin ring to it, but it nailed me anyway. If Jumbo wanted to fledge Mrs Hocking’s better angel, he had to have leave to appeal to it.
At the farmer’s market, we bought pears from a pavilion vendor and sat on the concrete platform to eat them. Stacks of produce-turnip greens, unshucked early corn, plump tomatoes in bushel baskets-more or less hid us from autograph seekers. I ate my pear first, then took my notebook from my shirt pocket and wrote out a question:
What book did you reserve?
Jumbo dug through his bag and found it. He dropped it into my lap. I wiped my sticky hands on my pants so I could handle the volume: On Being a Real Person by Harry Emerson Fosdick, a self-help thing by this famous New York clergyman.
“ ‘The central business of every human being is to be a real person,’ ” Jumbo said. “Mr Fosdick’s opening sentence.”
Back then, Fosdick’s line didn’t impress me at all. All I could think of was Fearless Fosdick, the cartoon defective Al Capp had created in Li’l Abner to send up Dick Tracy. Fearless Fosdick strolled around with bullet-hole windows in him-they never seemed to bother him much. Anyway, I imagined this Harry Emerson Fosdick guy sitting at his typewriter with bullet holes in him, banging out On Being a Real Person despite looking like a wounded cartoon character himself.
I wrote Fearless Fosdick? on a notebook page and handed it to Jumbo, whose expression reminded me of the look you see on a baby’s face when it’s trying to load up a diaper.
“I believe this Mr Fosdick”-he tapped the book-“is more fearless than most acknowledge. It takes… balls to write a treatise on achieving authentic identity.”
We set out again for McKissic House. I carried the book bag, and Jumbo walked along reading Fosdick’s best-seller. In his hands, it looked no bigger than a match book.
21
In Tenkiller, mama’d practically had to drive a steam shovel into my bedroom in the mornings to chase me out of bed and off to school. In Highbridge, though, I loved the morning, especially the early morning. I got up before Darius prowled through calling, “Rise and shine!” I woke to some strange internal chime, and I moved. Maybe I just wanted to scrub my face and pull on my clothes without Jumbo’s spooky yellow eyes tracking the whole business. Maybe I just wanted to escape the killer summer heat in the brief moments before the milk wagons clattered.
Anyway, on the Tuesday morning of our road trip to Opelika, I crept downstairs and smelled bacon frying, biscuits baking, oranges set out to be halved and squoze. Kizzy’d taken over the kitchen already. With her spoons, whisks, and wood-stoked ovens, she was scraping the last fresh edge off the morning. A small price to pay-the mean-as-a-rattler heat would stick its fangs into us by ten or eleven anyway. I sat on a stool next to Kizzy’s biscuit-making counter and claimed dibs on the first biscuit out.