CHAPTER 6
Hydroplaning

A novella by Lynn Hamilton

The next thing Belmont knew, Veronica was escorting him through the public library. She cased the joint first. It looked relatively safe. The drug dealers were minding their own business at a single table. She heard one of them, the one with the cellular phone, say, as they were joined by a fourth member, "I guess we're all here."

Well, she thought. Like every business, no doubt drugs had its unglamorous side. The glitz and money of it were probably overrated, as was everything else.

The library security guard looked, as usual, more heavily armed than he really was. He had, actually, only one gun. The other bulges were minor weapons-mace, club, walkie/talkie, and folds of fat. He looked calm which meant it was a good day in the library. It was an especially good sign when he went to a catalog computer and looked up a book on his favorite hobby. Veronica happened to know that this was English equestrianism from the days when she had chased this man through the stacks and paused to study the spines from which he had just made a selection. She had based her poem "Force and the Horse" on his private researches. She had gotten a lot of inspiration from the library in general and from the security officer in particular which explained why he got that haunted look when he turned away from the terminal and clapped eyes on her.

She also got a lot of amusement mileage, if not inspiration, from the young reference librarian. At least he had been young two years ago. He was aging badly and with preternatural speed. He had somehow escaped the pot belly and bald patch of his breed, but his Romanesque black hair was infested with silver strands, his piercing intelligent eyes showed clear warning signs of nervous strain, and the nostrils of his hawk-like nose were more or less permanently distended with anxiety and peeve. What a handsome man he would have been if he had gone into something comparatively restful like coordinating corporate mergers.

Veronica went for the shelf of Kandinsky. Actually, it was part of a shelf. Kandinsky shared a small corner of a stack with Miro and Gaugin, her two other favorites. She grabbed up seven volumes and dropped them on a table in front of Belmont who was looking around trying to orient himself. The Savannah public library had all the atmosphere and interest of a middle-aged man in plaid pants.

"I've never been here before," he admitted.

"Shame on you, Belmont," she said, undaunted in her determination to elevate him to a basic artistic literacy. "Didn't your father teach you anything?" She was opening the books to plates she wanted him to see.

"He pretty much gave up on me the day I asked why he was taking so long to finish this one statue."

Veronica arched a brow, but refrained from comment. Instead, she pointed semiotically at pictures. She defended Gaugin with the traditional art critical platitudes: "primitive," "rejection of Western refinement," "savages more noble."

"The colors in this remind me of the Sunday funnies," he said, mistaking a pause in her critique for an invitation to yield up his own opinion.

She slammed Gaugin shut with such violence that the dealers looked up from the map of Chatham County spread before them. Their cellular phone rang, perhaps saving her from being etched in their memories.

"Speaking," said their leader in a tired, mid-western voice. "Yeah, just send me a dozen bottles ferrous sulfate. Sixty each. That'll keep me for the year." He covered the receiver and addressed his colleagues. "Iron deficiency." They murmured their commiseration.

Belmont, sensing that Veronica's respect needed repair at this moment, said, "There's something I want to show you." He got up and conferred with the hawk-nosed librarian whose distress deepened measurably. They disappeared into the stacks. Veronica had leisure to remember that she herself had driven a nail or two into the librarian's youth the day, two years ago, when she had picked up one of the new computers and threatened to drop it on the floor if no one explained to her at length and in patient, repetitive detail how to use it.

"Damn, but I loved that card catalog; what did you do with it?" she had demanded in a voice which carried all the way to a shelf of Vonneguts in the fiction section half a block away.

Veronica had never suffered from this Scarlet O'Hara-like acting out. In fact, she had left the library that day an expert in the computer catalog. She was so proficient that other struggling patrons frequently mistook her for a librarian and asked directions.

While she was waiting patiently for Belmont, three extremely young street dealers, dressed in jeans and flannel shirts bedecked with heavy twisted gold chains, strutted into the library to do their tenth grade history report. She wiped the I'm-a-saint- to-endure-you look off her face and opted for blending in with the furniture.

There was a long moment in which the young sellers recognized the older dealers at the table and saluted. Only a stiffening of their backs revealed that the older business men had seen their underlings. They made no eye contact or acknowledgement.

The other reference librarians had dived into the periodical archives upon the appearance of the teens who had, by chance, stumbled upon the encyclopedias and were toying with the idea of actually handling them. Like an arctic wolf, spotting a weak caribou from a mile away, the leader of the tenth graders spotted Veronica. He strutted slowly over to her table, his body language furiously sending the message: "I know I'm moving slowly for effect, but please don't run away before I get there."

Veronica took a deep breath as his aura parked itself within an inch of hers.

"You know where can I git some book on Queen Elizabeth first?"

Just then, in the periphery of her troubled vision, she saw Belmont returning to her desk, the unsuspecting librarian in tow.

"I'll tell you," said Veronica, warm and confidential now that she knew she was safe. "I don't work here and I have no idea, but you see that man over there with graying hair? Not the younger one in the black tee; he doesn't know anything."

All three gold chains bobbed laboriously over to the librarian, unwarned and caught, as Belmont made his way happily back to Veronica.

"This was the only one I could find." He slapped down a copy of Packing for the Trip: The First Volume. He flipped through the pages. "There's this one poem I noticed. Maybe you could help me.

"Did you say this was the only one you could find?" said Veronica in a loud, crisp voice that reverberated through the whole reference section.

"Maybe the other ones are checked out," tried Belmont, guiltily. Veronica could tell he knew something. He had been a long time in conference with that librarian.

In a flash, she was at one of the computers, pulling up her volumes. There they were-all three titles-Packing for the Journey, along with Volume Three: Poems for Half-Way There, and Volume Two: Emerald Cities. None of them checked out, according to the computer. Next to Emerald Cities, there was a suspicious looking P. P? What did that stand for?

Swinging her arms high in the air, she stomped over to the hawk-nosed librarian.

"Does P stand for purged? Have you purged my Emerald Cities?"

"Excuse me?" said the librarian, casting a nervous glance at the street pusher he was helping.

Veronica took him by the elbow and pulled none too gently. "Do you mind?' she said to the 10th grader in chains. "This is important." She led the librarian prisoner over to the terminal. The tenth grader startled into stasis, was left with a reference book in one hand, exclaiming "Wha? Wha' bout the queen, man? Wha' bout dis English woman?"

"Will you please explain to me," began Veronica in a near hysterical tone that passed, so she flattered herself, for reasonable, "why three of my books are listed here, but only one of them is on the shelf?"

"They must be checked out," tried the librarian, frantically, watching to see if she would buy it.

"They're not checked out. You forget. I know how to use these fucking computers." She hit a button and the word "available" sprung to the screen.

"Another possibility. . ."

"And just what does 'P' stand for?" she barked as she hit another button and pointed at the guilty 'P." "That means purged, I bet. Have you purged my poetry?"

"No, Miss Able, P stands for paperback. As you remember, we had both a hardcover and a --"

"Now, that's what's bothering me-that verb 'had.' Why are my books in the past tense all of a sudden?"

"They're not all gone," he said, trying to calm her with pedantic accuracy. We found one-Packing for the Journey, I believe."

"Don't go trying to accentuate the positive with me. I want to know where the others have gone off to, if they're not checked out?"

"There are several possibilities-"

"One of which is that you threw them out-to make way for some hack like Adrienne Rich. Or did you sell them out of a cart, along with some unpopular Nancy Drews, for 50 cents? Maybe I should go look for them on the shelves of the Salvation Army's book section."

Belmont had joined them. "They can hear your voice all over the library," he said. "Aren't we supposed to be quiet in here?"

"Oh, shut up, Belmont." She readdressed herself to the librarian. "Now about this purge .

The librarian sighed with deep and exasperated weariness. "Miss Able, do you really imagine we have time for something as forward-thinking as the winnowing of our shelves? As you have noticed, this work is done for us. Your books could be stolen; they could be misshelved. We haven't done a complete inventory since 1958."

"Who would steal poetry?"

"There are people capable of anything you can think of, Miss Able. You spend enough time here to know that. Probably, though, they've been misshelved."

"You mean they're here and we can't find them?"

"Exactly."

"Well, don't be smug about it."

She turned to Belmont. "My books are lost in the library." She said it with the same wonder she would have used to say, "There's a caterpillar in the boiled cauliflower."

"Come here, Belmont, we're going to do an inventory."

The librarian took this opportunity to effect an escape and join his colleagues in the dead magazine catacombs.

Belmont watched his retreat wistfully. "I hope they have a stash of sedatives back there," he muttered before Veronica yanked him into the stacks.

They started at the very beginning of the poetry stacks-with Beowulf and the anonymous ballads of the Renaissance-and looked for Veronica's lost volumes.

"I bet you if they had had to buy those books, they would have been more careful with them," she said, readjusting two books that were out of order. "Well!" she let out a feminine grunt of exasperation. "What is Rod McKuen dong all the way over here? It should be hundreds of due decimal points away!"

"What do you mean? How could they have your books if they didn't buy them?"

"For that matter, what is Rod McKuen doing in the library at all? This isn't a card shop."

"Who is Gwendolyn Brooks?" asked Belmont, blessedly easy to divert.

"Gwendolyn Brooks is overrated, that's who she is. Only real poem she ever wrote is 'We Be Cool.'

"Hey, this is my kind of poetry." He unshelved a copy of Red Fat's Romans to the Rescue, a Cassius Dog Mystery, with a small, pink skull on its spine by which readers exclusively of detective fiction could identify it as their cup of tea.

Veronica snatched it out of his hand. "WHAT is this doing here? This is in the wrong room!"

She threw it clear into the reading room where it landed almost directly beneath the cellular phone. The man above the phone looked wearily over at the security guard and gestured in Veronica's direction.

Belmont handed her another book and said, "Don't forget Gwen."

"If Able isn't on the shelves, why should Gwendolyn be?" she said as Gwendolyn Brooks went winging its way into the reading area.

"I never much liked Allen Ginsberg either," she said and threw as the security guard rounded the bookcase, a wary look on his face that bespoke his unwillingness to confront any real violence. Ginsberg went sailing over his head.

"Appropriate," she snickered.

When he saw that the perp was a woman under 5'5," he brightened measurably.

"Okay, Miss, take it out of the library." He jerked his thumb roughly in the direction of the exit.

"I'm looking for a book," she said.

"Veronica, maybe we ought to go," tried Belmont.

"Not until we've combed this place for my poetry."

The guard took each of them by an elbow. Veronica gave him considerably more of a struggle than Belmont who went quietly.

"I DONATED those books to this library. This is how they treat library donors," she yelled as she was hustled across the reference room. No one paid any attention. The dealers were studying a map of Chatham county, dividing it into business sectors. The tenth graders had opened an encyclopedia and were poking at it and dancing their fingers across its pages.

Veronica and Belmont collapsed, laughing helplessly, on the cement stairs below the Romanesque columns supporting a lintel on which was engraved "Make Books Thy Comrades."

"I knew you were the kind of woman has trouble with authority the first time I saw you," he said.

Next, they went to a movie-Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. They drank wine out of clear, plastic tumblers. The York Lane theatre was like a private wine cellar or a speak easy. The walls were painted black except for the exposed brick wall. It accommodated fifty seats, many of them purgatorially uncomfortable. The fat sisters in front of them banged their knee caps when they leaned back, and the atmosphere was one of conspiracy to enjoy. "We're chic. We like old movies. We actually know where this place is" was is the air.

Olivia Hussey flickered and flipped her timeless mane of hair as Juliet and made it seem possible that a thirteen year old might say those things.

Most metaphors were lost on Belmont, but the visual cues were so strong, you could follow the story even if the dialog had been in a foreign language, which it might as well have been where he was concerned.

Between reels, though, he tried to hold his own.

"They should tell their parents-not just run off."

"Come on, Belmont, their parents were practically at war. This isn't an after school special, where if you just behave reasonably enough, things will work out."

After the film, they traversed the cobbled alley leading back to more beaten roads where his car was parked.

"That Friar Lawrence guy wasn't so smart. If someone hands me a test tube and says 'this'll put you in a coma for 48 hours, I wouldn't take it, I can tell you."

"What else could he do, Belmont? They were in love; he was helping them out. The potion worked. They just had bad luck with the timing. That's not his fault."

"His program was too complicated. He should have known something would go wrong."

"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life, Belmont. That man is a romantic. He believes in young love."

"I wouldn't want to meet him in this alley. He is scary."

"He means well."

"He's a killer. He may as well have driven the knife into Juliet himself."

This argument got progressively more heated and vitriolic without remission until Veronica ended up on her way back to the island in a cab. Somewhere along the way to this rupture, she had said," I am going to write a poem about Friar Lawrence, and when it wins an international prize, I'm going to say, I owe it all to Belmont Mayhew, without whose asinine reflections on Romeo and Juliet, I would never have got the inspiration."

"Fine, lady. I'm going to invent a drink that'll knock you flat on your back and leave your eyes crossed for a week and call it Lawrence's Bright Idea."

And so, having survived the shoals of a near fatal driving maneuver and expulsion from a public facility for vandalism of tax payer property, Veronica and Belmont ran aground on interpretation of a fictional character.

Chapter 7