Love Stories in This Town. Amanda Eyre Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ I was like, “You know what, Old Ralph? Relax. ‘Crazy for You’ is a dance song, not a code of ethics.” Old Ralph’s like, “Touch me once and you know it’s true. I never wanted anyone like this!” making the words sound lewd and disgusting. I almost took the new Mary Higgins Clark and beaned him, but Ralph likes to pontificate, and in a public library, that’s his right.

      So, we live in Butte, Montana. The richest hill on earth, ha, ha. They dug a pit the size of the city next to the city and now it’s filling with toxic water. It’ll overflow in the year 2000 they say, so I say, well, a year is a year. Now they’re talking about mining the water.

      My dad was a miner. He’s dying now of cancer—it’s in his bones—and all his friends are dying of cancer too. They come over to the house and drink Guinness and smoke like fiends and what’s Mom going to say? It’s bad for your health? When I get home, there’s some kind of meat or some Beefaroni, and when I get in bed, my sheets smell like Downy. In between my dad’s coughing, I can hear my mother’s soft laughter.

      They hired me at the library out of Butte High. I was the class valedictorian. At the graduation ceremony, I said, “Go forth and find your dreams.” I could have gone to Missoula and played for the Lady Griz, but my coach was like, “Annie, that knee’s going to give in less than a season.” I had to tape it for the last game as it was, but the Lady Griz still wanted me. They are the best women’s basketball team in Montana. They went to State and then to Florida to play in the championships this year. I watch them on TV. They’re all as tall as me, with their hair in little ponytails, and they were on the beach with suntan lotion all over their noses because hey, they’re from Montana and their skin isn’t used to Florida sun. One of them married the quarterback of the Grizzly football team. She wore a cowboy hat with a veil, which I think is tacky.

      So, people used to send their daughters to Butte because their skin would get pale here, and that was fashionable. The arsenic in the air will bleach your skin. Our Lady of the Rockies is white as snow.

      Our Lady of the Rockies is a hundred-foot marble statue of the Virgin Mary. Butte bought her and helicoptered her up to the Continental Divide to give the town something to be proud of, when all the copper was gone. At night, with the moon over her shoulder, she is something out of a dream. No matter what goes wrong or crazy, staring at Our Lady of the Rockies makes me calm. She’s right where she should be, and it’s a good thing, because she weighs eighty tons.

      After work, James picks me up and we go driving. Sometimes we drive over to Pork Chop John’s for sandwiches, sometimes to the flats for a beer, and sometimes we go all the way out to Deer Lodge where the prison is or to Anaconda where the smokestack of the old smelter rises up like an arm. James! He smells like hard work—a cinnamon, cigarette smell. When James started calling me, he had just dropped out of tenth grade. Butte is small; I knew who he was, of course, and that he lived with his deadbeat father in a drafty double-wide. Nobody thought it would last, the studious girl and the grocery guy with a tattoo of his dead mother on his back.

      After work, James plays saxophone for the Toxic Horns. His hair always looks messy and sticks up like a little chickadee. His tongue is the softest thing in the world.

      Back to Monday. By the afternoon it’s raining, and that’s the best time to shelve. It’s quiet and warm in the library, and the books are all organized and beautiful. I’m humming and checking out the Romance section when there’s a shriek from the second floor. It’s Pearl and she goes, “OH NOOOOO! AAAH!” and the upstairs exit slams shut and Pearl comes running down the stairs like a puppy. Her mascara is smudged and her wiglet is askew.

      “What? What?” goes Rosie, and Pearl can’t say it. She breathes in and out and finally she says, “There was a man upstairs.”

      A man? (All the librarians are spinsters or divorcées and hate men.) I was like, “Pearl, men are allowed to go wherever they—”

      And Pearl goes, “NO! You don’t UNDERSTAND!” And she starts crying. Rosie leads her by her little liver-spotted hand into the bookbinding room and Pearl’s shoes make this shuffling sound. You can hear the two of them talking quietly and then Pearl’s crying, Rosie’s soothing sounds. A few minutes later, Rosie comes out. Her mouth is drawn together tight as a prune.

      “There is a masturbator loose in the Periodical area,” says Rosie.

      By now all the regulars have dropped their newspapers. Nobody’s even pretending to browse. Old Ralph (of course) leads the way. He runs up the stairs with determination on his face for the first time since I have known him. Abe follows him and the little biddies stand at the foot of the stairs chirping encouragement.

      Nothing.

      The masturbator had escaped. That afternoon, Rosie gets the whole story out of poor (Catholic as they come) Pearl. She had noticed a strange man in the Science periodicals. (I was like, “What was he reading? Discover? Scientific American?” but Rosie told me to zip my lips.) The man was tall with brown hair combed back. He had a receding hairline and was wearing jeans, a brown leather jacket, and white penny loafers.

      So, Pearl’s organizing the magazines, maybe reading a bit as she usually does, which is why it takes her forever and a day, and she hears sounds from the man. What sounds? Grunting sounds and breaths, little short ones. (Pearl kept saying, “Like a bear, like a bear,” but nobody wanted to explore that statement.) So finally she looks up and his back’s to her. He’s hunched a bit.

      You have to understand about Pearl. She’s sixty-five, and her husband was brought over straight from County Galway. He was killed in a mine explosion, but not before he left Pearl for a stripper. She never remarried, or went on a date, or even talked a whole lot to a man after that. In short, the masturbator had to turn around, raise an eyebrow, and give Pearl an eyeful before she realized he was no regular library patron. She was paralyzed for a minute. According to Rosie, who appointed herself official psychoanalyst, he finished the job right there and then, and that is why Pearl doesn’t use the water fountain anymore. Pearl finally screamed and came galloping down the stairs, and the masturbator escaped.

      James drove past Pork Chop John’s. He had showered, and didn’t smell like his lunch-break Winstons but like Paco Rabanne. “What, did you leave work early?” I said.

      He looked at me, and put his hand on my knee. “Annie,” he said, “I did. I left work early today.” He was talking like a movie, which pissed me off. There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Usually, we couldn’t find enough to say to each other—what food must be like in foreign countries, why our parents failed, MTV. In summer, we lay in the bed of James’s truck and made up stories of our bright future, our heads cradled by James’s winter parka and snow pants.

      While James was busy squeezing my knee, he missed the light on Mercury and almost ran into a hippie Volkswagen van. “Van!” I cried, and he hit the brakes in time. “I’m hungry,” I said.

      “Darling, you shall be fed,” said James.

      “I’m in an onion ring mood.”

      James shook his head. “So, James,” I said, “a masturbator is loose in the library.” James sighed.

      “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said. He licked his lips. “Annie, if you could go anywhere, anywhere for dinner this evening, where would it be?”

      I thought for a minute. “Tower Pizza,” I said.

      “No.”

      “Yes! You said I could choose, James. What’s your problem?”

      James СКАЧАТЬ