Four Past Midnight (70 page)

“Yes you can,” he said, “and you will. You'd take a commission if you worked for me as a salesperson, wouldn't you?”

“I don't, though. I could never sell anything. When I was in the Girl Scouts, my mother was the only person who ever bought cookies from me.”

“Naomi. My dear girl. No—don't start looking all nervous and cornered. I'm not going to make a pass at you. We went through all of that two years ago.”

“We certainly
did,”
Naomi agreed, but she still looked nervous and checked to make sure that she had a clear line of retreat to the door, should she need one.

“Do you realize I've sold two houses and written almost two hundred thousand dollars' worth of insurance since that damn speech? Most of it was common group coverage with a high top-off and a low commission rate, true, but it still adds up to the price of a new car. If you don't take that twenty, I'm going to feel like shit.”

“Sam,
please!”
she said, looking shocked. Naomi was a dedicated Baptist. She and her mother went to a little church in Proverbia which was almost as ramshackle as the house they lived in. He knew; he had been there once. But he was happy to see that she also looked pleased ... and a little more relaxed.

In the summer of 1988, Sam had dated Naomi twice. On the second date, he made a pass. It was as well behaved as a pass can be and still remain a pass, but a pass it was. Much good it had done him; Naomi, it turned out, was a good enough pass deflector to play in the Denver Broncos' defensive backfield. It wasn't that she didn't like him, she explained; it was just that she had decided the two of them could never get along “that way.” Sam, bewildered, had asked her why not. Naomi only shook her head.
Some things are hard to explain, Sam, but that doesn't make them less true. It could

never work. Believe me, it just couldn't.
And that had been all he could get out of her.

“I'm sorry I said the s-word, Naomi,” he told her now. He spoke humbly, although he doubted somehow that Naomi was even half as priggish as she liked to sound. “What I mean to say is that if you don't take that twenty, I'll feel like cacapoopie.”

She tucked the bill into her purse and then endeavored to look at him with an expression of dignified primness. She almost made it ... but the corners of her lips quivered slightly.

“There. Satisfied?”

“Short of giving you fifty,” he said. “Would you take fifty, Omes?”

“No,” she said. “And please don't call me Omes. You know I don't like it.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Apology accepted. Now why don't we just drop the subject?”

“Okay,” Sam said agreeably.

“I heard several people say your speech was good. Craig Jones just
raved
about it. Do you really think that's the reason you've done more business?”

“Does a bear—” Sam began, and then retraced his steps. “Yes. I do. Things work that way sometimes. It's funny, but it's true. The old sales graph has really spiked this week. It'll drop back, of course, but I don't think it'll drop back all the way. If the new folks like the way I do business—and I like to think they witt—there'!! be a carry-over.”

Sam leaned back in his chair, laced his hands together behind his neck, and looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling.

“When Craig Jones called up and put me on the spot, I was ready to shoot him. No joke, Naomi.”

“Yes,” she said. “You looked like a man coming down with a bad case of poison ivy.”

“Did I?” He laughed. “Yeah, I suppose so. It's funny how things work out sometimes—purest luck. If there is a God, it makes you wonder sometimes if He tightened all the screws in the big machine before He set it going.”

He expected Naomi to scold him for his irreverence (it wouldn't be the first time), but she didn't take the gambit today. Instead she said, “You're luckier than you know, if the books you got at the Library really did help you out. It usually doesn't open until five o'clock on Fridays. I meant to tell you that, but then I forgot.”

“Oh?”

“You must have found Mr. Price catching up on his paperwork or something.”

“Price?” Sam asked. “Don't you mean Mr. Peckham? The newspaper-reading janitor?”

Naomi shook her head. “The only Peckham I ever heard of around here was old Eddie Peckham, and he died years ago. I'm talking about Mr.
Price.
The
librarian.”
She was looking at Sam as though he were the thickest man on earth ... or at least in Junction City, Iowa. “Tall man? Thin? About fifty?”

“Nope,” Sam said. “I got a lady named Lortz. Short, plump, somewhere around the age when women form lasting attachments to bright-green polyester.”

A rather strange mix of expressions crossed Naomi's face—surprise was followed by suspicion; suspicion was followed by a species of faintly exasperated amusement. That particular sequence of expressions almost always indicates the same thing: someone is coming to realize that his or her leg is being shaken vigorously. Under more ordinary circumstances Sam might have wondered about that, but he had done a land-office business all week long, and as a result he had a great deal of his own paperwork to catch up on. Half of his mind had already wandered off to examine it.

“Oh,” Naomi said and laughed. “Miss
Lortz,
was it? That must have been fun.”

“She's peculiar, all right,” Sam said.

“You bet,” Naomi agreed. “In fact, she's absolutely—”

If she had finished what she had started to say she probably would have startled Sam Peebles a great deal, but tuck—as he had just pointed out—plays an absurdly important part in human affairs, and luck now intervened.

The telephone rang.

It was Burt Iverson, the spiritual chief of Junction City's small legal tribe. He wanted to talk about a really huge insurance deal—the new medical center, comp-group coverage, still in the planning stages but you know how big this could be, Sam—and by the time Sam got back to Naomi, thoughts of Ms. Lortz had gone entirely out of his mind. He knew how big it could be, all right; it could land him behind the wheel of that Mercedes-Benz after all. And he really didn't like to think just how much of all this good fortune he might be able to trace back to that stupid little speech, if he really wanted to.

Naomi
did
think her leg was being pulled; she knew perfectly well who Ardelia Lortz was, and thought Sam must, too. After all, the woman had been at the center of the nastiest piece of business to occur in Junction City in the last twenty years ... maybe since World War II, when the Moggins boy had come home from the Pacific all funny in the head and had killed his whole family before sticking the barrel of his service pistol in his right ear and taking care of himself as well. Ira Moggins had done that before Naomi's time; it did not occur to her that
l'affaire Ardelia
had occurred long before Sam had come to Junction City.

At any rate, she had dismissed the whole thing from her mind and was trying to decide between Stouffer's lasagna and something from Lean Cuisine for supper by the time Sam put the telephone down. He dictated letters steadily until twelve o'clock, then asked Naomi if she would like to step down to McKenna's with him for a spot of lunch. Naomi declined, saying she had to get back to her mother, who had Failed Greatly over the course of the winter. No more was said about Ardelia Lortz.

That
day.

Sam wasn't much of a breakfast-eater through the week—a glass of orange juice and an oat-bran muffin did him just fine— but on Saturday mornings (at least on Saturday mornings when he wasn't dealing with a Rotary-inspired hangover) he liked to rise a little late, stroll down to McKenna's on the square, and work his way slowly through an order of steak and eggs while he really
read
the paper instead of just scanning it between appointments.

He followed this routine the next morning, the seventh of April. The previous day's rain was gone, and the sky was a pale, perfect blue—the very image of early spring. Sam took the long way home following his breakfast, pausing to check out whose tulips and crocuses were in good order and whose were a little late. He arrived back at his own house at ten minutes past ten.

The PLAY MESSAGES lamp on his answering machine was lit. He pushed the button, got out a cigarette, and struck a match.

“Hello, Sam,” Ardelia Lortz's soft and utterly unmistakable voice said, and the match paused six inches shy of Sam's cigarette. “I'm very disappointed in you. Your books are overdue.”

“Ah,
shit!”
Sam exclaimed.

Something had been nagging at him all week long, the way a word you want will use the tip of your tongue for a trampoline, bouncing just out of reach. The books. The goddam books. The woman would undoubtedly regard him as exactly the sort of Philistine she wanted him to be—him with his gratuitous judgments of which posters belonged in the Children's Library and which ones didn't. The only real question was whether she had put her tongue-lashing on the answering machine or was saving it until she saw him in person.

He shook out the match and dropped it in the ashtray beside the telephone.

“I explained to you, I believe,” she was going on in her soft and just a little too reasonable voice, “that
The Speaker's Companion
and
Best Loved Poems of the American People
are from the Library's Special Reference section, and cannot be kept out for longer than one week. I expected better things of you, Sam. I really did.”

Sam, to his great exasperation, found he was standing here in his own house with an unlit cigarette between his lips and a guilty flush climbing up his neck and beginning to overrun his cheeks. Once more he had been deposited firmly back in the fourth grade—this time sitting on a stool facing into the comer with a pointed dunce-cap perched firmly on his head.

Speaking as one who is conferring a great favor, Ardelia Lortz went on: “I have decided to give you an extension, however; you have until Monday afternoon to return your borrowed books. Please help me avoid any unpleasantness.” There was a pause. “Remember the Library Policeman, Sam.”

“That one's getting old, Ardelia-baby,” Sam muttered, but he wasn't even speaking to the recording. She had hung up after mentioning the Library Policeman, and the machine switched itself quietly off.

Sam used a fresh match to light his smoke. He was still exhaling the first drag when a course of action popped into his mind. It might be a trifle cowardly, but it would close his accounts with Ms. Lortz for good. And it also had a certain rough justice to it.

He had given Naomi
her
just reward, and he would do the same for Ardelia. He sat down at the desk in his study, where he had composed the famous speech, and drew his note-pad to him. Below the heading
(From the Desk of SAMUEL PEEBLES),
he scrawled the following note:

Sam read the note over while he fished a paper clip out of his desk drawer. He considered changing“... returning your books” to “... returning the library's books” and decided to leave it as it was. Ardelia Lortz had impressed him very much as the sort of woman who subscribed to the philosophy of
l‘Etat c'est moi,
even if
l‘état
in this case was just the local library.

He removed a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and used the clip to attach it to the note. He hesitated a moment longer, drumming his fingers restlessly on the edge of the desk.

That might be true, but Sam didn't care. He knew what was behind the Lortz woman's arch little call this morning—behind
both
arch little calls, probably. He had pulled her chain a little too hard about the posters in the Children's Library, and she was getting back at him—or trying to. But this wasn't the fourth grade, he wasn't a scurrying, terrified little kid (not anymore, at least), and he wasn't going to be intimidated. Not by the ill-tempered sign in the library foyer, nor by the librarian's you're-one-whole-day-late-you-bad-boy-you nagging.

“Fuck it!” he said out loud. “If you don't want the goddam money, stick it in the Library Defense Fund, or something.”