his chair to study me from around the door. “You’re a commercial trucker?”
“I was,” I said. “I’m taking the fall off to deal with some family business. What kind of truck are we talking about?”
“Wanna see it?” said the man in tweed.
“WHAT DOES IT RUN ON?” I asked after I’d stared at it for a few moments. “Unleaded? Or bong water?”
Ralph Tanner contentedly mouthed the stem of his Liverpool pipe. “It got pulled over once. The cop said he wanted to arrest whoever painted it for disturbing his peace. The chief of police tells people he has a solemn duty to impound drug paraphernalia and that’s why he keeps it locked up in this carriage house.”
The library shared a vast expanse of parking lot with the town office, the rec department, and an old carriage house. This last hadn’t kept horses in almost a century, but it still smelled like them. It was a rickety, barnlike structure with gaps between some of the planks and pigeons cooing in the rafters. Public Works kept the street sweeper and a little golf-cart-size plow for the sidewalks and parking lots in there. The older Bookmobile was parked at the back.
It was a modified panel truck on a 1963 International Harvester chassis, a three-axle twelve-wheeler. The sides had been painted with a garish psychedelic mural. Over on the passenger side, Mark Twain’s head opened like a teapot and a rainbow-colored Mississippi River frothed out. Huck and Jim and the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland rode a raft toward the back end. The caterpillar blew a long thread of smoke that billowed around the corner to become an ocean roiling over the rear bumper. Moby-Dick erupted from the waves with Ahab bound to his side and harpooning him in the eye. The Nautilus lurked in the garish depths. A gush of ocean foam melted into clouds drifting across the driver’s side of the truck. The rain poured down onto Sherlock Holmes, who did not see Mary Poppins sailing through the thunderheads above.
“Who did you say drove it back in the day? Cheech or Chong?” I asked. Then I gave Ralph Tanner the side eye. “Or was it you?”
He laughed. “I’m afraid I sat the sixties out. The Age of Aquarius was something that happened to other people while I was watching Gilligan’s Island. I missed out on disco, too. Never owned a single pair of bell-bottoms. Instead I wore bow ties, lived in Toronto, and worked on a groundbreaking dissertation about Blake, which my thesis adviser returned to me with a can of lighter fluid. I wish my twenties had looked a little more like this. Peek inside?”
He gestured to the door into the rear. When I opened it, two rusty corrugated steps unfolded, ushering me into the Bookmobile.
The steel shelves were bare, and a veil of cobweb hung from one of the ceiling’s fluorescent lights. I was surprised to see a handsome mahogany desk with a dark leather surface, bolted to the floor behind the cab. A runner carpet, the color of chocolate, ran up the middle. I smoothed one palm along a cold steel shelf, and my hand came up wearing a mitten of dust.
“This did for forty years,” he said from just behind me. “I suppose it could do for a few more. If we had a driver.”
I already knew I wanted the job. I had known before I was sure there even was a job. There was the practical side: I was out of work, and a low-paying job was better than none. Besides, whatever hours they were offering, it had to be substantially less than I would’ve worked if I were back behind the wheel of a long-haul rig, where sometimes I might be on the road for ten or twelve days without returning home.
In truth, though, the practical side didn’t cross my mind until later. I was spending all day every day in the place where my parents had died and felt, from that first instant, that they’d sent me a set of wheels to escape in—like sending a truck to take me away from the world’s most joyless and dismal summer camp. Your ride is here, I thought, and my arms pebbled with gooseflesh. I could not help thinking that my mother had specifically avoided returning Another Marvelous Thing so I’d have to return it for her and in such a way be led back to the place where her story with my father began.