“I didn’t,” Ralph said. He twitched his mouth back and forth to move his still-unlit Liverpool pipe to the other corner of his mouth. “A local fellow, Sam Hennessy, got out of full-time trucking to focus on the two things he loved best, reading and making homebrew. He kept his Class B valid and offered to drive the new Bookmobile, just for something to do. Alas, Sam didn’t only enjoy making homebrew. He relished drinking it as well and took to enjoying a few on his lunch break. Well, he was out a month ago in our newish Bookmobile and began to worry he was a little crocked. He decided he could use some coffee and turned in to the nearest McDonald’s. And I do mean right into it. He put the front end straight through the wall and into a booth. No one sitting there, thank God. When you think of all the kids that eat in McDonald’s.” He shuddered, then asked if I wanted to look in the cab.
On the walk around the front, he pointed to a panel on the side of the truck. There was a diesel generator behind it that ran the lights and the heat in the book car. “The nearly new Bookmobile had a pair of computers for the patrons, but I wonder if tablets could serve the same function. Checking out the books is easy enough—it’s done through an app on your phone.” He had started to sketch the job out for me as if I’d already put in my application.
I climbed onto the running board and peered into the front seat. The gearshift protruding from the center of the floor was as long as a gentleman’s cane, with a polished walnut ball on the top. Dead leaves had drifted onto the floor. The radio looked like it was AM only.
“What do you think?” he asked.
I opened the door, turned around, and sat in the driver’s seat with my feet hanging out.
“Are you asking what I think of the truck? Or what I think of the job?”
He pushed his thumb down into the bowl of his pipe and lit it with a match from a small box, took some time drawing on it to get it going. Finally he tipped his head back and blew gray smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “You ever hear the one about the guy who went to England and came back complaining about the meals? Not only was the food awful, but there was so little of it! That’s kind of like the pay we’re offering and the hours we can guarantee. It’s not even close to a full-time job. Six hours on Tuesday and Thursday, eight on Wednesday. And the money? You could make much more driving a school bus.”
“But then I’d have to get up before dawn. No thanks. Besides, like I said—I have some family affairs to deal with here.”
“Yuh,” he said, and his gaze was kind and sensitive, and I wondered if he knew. Kingsward is a big town, fourth-biggest in the state—but still not that big when you come down to it. “Can you pass a background check, Mister—?”
“John. John Davies. I think I’d squeak by. I had five years on the road for Winchester Trucking and never put a single one through the wall of a fast-food restaurant. Am I qualified, though? Wouldn’t I need to have a degree in, like, the library sciences? The library arts?”
“Sam Hennessy didn’t have a degree. Loren Hayes, who drove this very Bookmobile for almost thirty years, worked in a technical library for the air force before he came to us, but he never acquired any formal certification.” Ralph lifted his eyebrows and cast his gaze lovingly over the truck. “Won’t he be surprised to see this old thing on the road again.”
“He’s still knocking around?”
“Oh, yuh. He’s at Serenity Apartments, same as our friend Mr. Gallagher, who’ll read anything and everything as long as it was written by someone who works at Fox News.” Ralph thought for a bit, then said, “Loren loved this truck. Handed me the keys and gave it up for good in 2009.” Ralph turned a wry, wistful look upon me. “We were getting ready to retire it, and he decided to retire with it. He had a bad experience behind the wheel and scared the hell out of himself. He was driving around and suddenly didn’t know where he was