seemed to blink, studying us a bit like a general surveying a map of enemy territory.
Shortly afterward I had zipped through all thirteen of his books, sometimes cramming my hand in my mouth to stifle giggles if I happened to be reading in class. You know the books, with their exclamation points in the titles. There was Die Laughing!, the Vietnam novel about a chemical weapon unleashed by the U.S. Air Force that causes people to laugh hysterically until they keel over and for which the only cure is sex; there was Presto!, about a world where magical wands are protected by the Second Amendment and our hero is searching for the man who sawed his wife in half; and Salute!, in which Ronald Reagan wins the presidency with his running mate, Bonzo, a descendant of the monkey who starred in Reagan’s hit Bedtime for Bonzo. Are the books less funny when you know that Dolan himself was a suicide? I don’t think so, but I admit those stories carry a certain piquant sadness to them now. It’s like eating cotton candy with a broken tooth in your mouth: You get sweetness, but also the ache. A cloud of sugar, but also blood.
“No, Mr. Gallagher, we can’t bring it out to you,” said the old lady on the telephone. “I can hold the Bill O’Reilly for you here at the desk, but if you come in, you will have to return the books you already have.” She was a hobbit of a woman, with a small square face beneath silver bangs. She met my gaze with dark blue, sorrowful eyes and slowly shook her head. The voice on the other end of the line squawked indignantly. “I’m sorry, darling, I don’t like it either. The Bookmobile is off the road indefinitely, and even if it weren’t, Mr. Hennessy no longer works for the public library. His license has been revoked. . . . Yes. That’s what I said. . . . Yes, and his library card! And Mr. Hennessy was the only one qualified to drive the old—”
There was a high-pitched shout from the other end, and the librarian flinched as Mr. Gallagher banged the phone down.
“Another satisfied customer,” I said.
She gave me a resigned look. “That’s Mr. Gallagher at the Serenity Apartments. The only thing he wants to read is Bill-O and Ann Coulter, large-print editions, and goodness help us if we can’t bring him the book he’s after. He wants to know what we do with all the tax money we drain from the town budget. I’d like to tell him it pays for our subscription to Socialist Weekly.”
“I didn’t know you deliver,” I said. “Do you do pizza, too?”
“We don’t deliver anything now, darling,” she said. “The brand-new Bookmobile is a total heartbreaking wreck and—”
“Why do people keep calling it the brand-new Bookmobile?” a man yelled through a door that opened into a rear office. “Why don’t they call it the less-old Bookmobile? It’s been on the road since 2010, Daphne. It’s not old enough to be tried as an adult for its crimes, but it’s getting there.”
Daphne rolled her eyes. “The newish Bookmobile is guilty of nothing. I can’t say the same for that hapless, feckless drunk you hired to drive it. Men like Sam Hennessy make me think the death penalty wasn’t such a bad idea.”
The man in the back room called, “He wrecked a truck, he didn’t kill a child—thank God. And in my defense, Sam had all the necessary qualifications: He had the right kind of license, and he was cheap.”
“What kind of license are we talking about?” I heard myself ask. “Class B?”
A rolling office chair squeaked, and the man in the back room glided into view. He was of indeterminate age. He might’ve been seventy-five or fifty-five. His silver hair had a few threads of gold in it, and he had the striking blue eyes of an aged model, the sort of rugged gent who can be found paddling a canoe through the middle of a Viagra ad. The tie was undone. The suit was tweed, gently worn in at the elbows and knees.
“That’s right,” he said.
“I’ve got a Class B. If there’s a less-old Bookmobile, does that mean there’s also a more-old Bookmobile?”
“An antique!” the librarian announced.
“Not quite, Daphne,” said the man in tweed. “Though it’s true we only take it out for the Fourth of July parade these days.”