Chapter 12
Twelve
On the following Wednesday afternoon, Arthur reported for his usual shift at the Brooks Library. At the first quiet moment,
he left another student librarian to watch the checkout counter and climbed the winding wrought-iron staircase to the Juliet
balcony above. He let himself into a cool, shady room that had not changed much in over a century. Shelves lined walls to
either side. Unlike the rest of the library, which was organized according to the Dewey Decimal system, here the shelves were
marked fiction, biology, history, and so forth. The only windows were set three feet deep in stone embrasures. A Norman archer with a full quiver and a Bible
could hold off a band of Vikings from here. And in fact all that cold stone had defended the place well enough, not from Norsemen, but from the fire of 1840 that had reduced the rest of the original Rackham
College to a scorch mark three hundred acres wide.
With such small medieval windows, there was always something crepuscular about the Special Collection, no matter how bright
the day. There was only the one door in and out. A barred cabinet holding the most valuable rarities stood against a walnut
column in the middle of the room. The bars were thick battered iron, laid across one another in a grid. Arthur didn’t give
it a second look. He wasn’t touching anything in there. Not that day, anyway.
He had every right to be there. Indeed, he was expected to spend at least some of his working hours in there, to complete
the annual inspection and copy the updated Special Collection catalog into the IBM that sat on a lectern in one corner of
the room. He took a moment now to flip the chunky switch on the back of the computer. While the machine was warming up, he
hunted along the fiction shelf until he found what he was looking for: a first edition of Jack London’s White Fang, a little foxed on the spine, some black speckling on the back cover that might’ve been mold, and London’s signature on the
title page. A scan of sports/outdoors produced a limited first of The Compleat Angler, with an original Cosway binding. As Arthur put the books in his school bag, his gaze was fixed upon one of the embrasure
windows. A fine rain speckled the old glass. It was as if, somehow, his right hand was engaged in theft while the rest of
him was occupied elsewhere.
It was still raining when he got off work six hours later. He walked out of the library with eight thousand dollars’ worth
of books in his backpack. A cherry ’49 Cadillac convertible with the ragtop up idled alongside the curb. The passenger-side
window was down and a silky film of smoke spilled through the opening. Arthur had spied Llewellyn’s car once or twice at The
Briars, but he had never sat in it before. As he approached, Van got out of the passenger side and pulled the seat forward
so Arthur could duck his head and scramble into the back with Donna and Allie.
Van climbed back in and thumped his door shut. Colin sat behind the front seat with a fat blunt. The smoke that hazed the
inside of the car was peppery and sweet.
“Want a hit?” Colin asked him, offering the joint over the back of his seat. “It’s blue. Lovely feminized strain, one of the
sativa-heavy lines.”
Arthur had never heard of blue marijuana, and the rest of what Colin had said was like a different language, one he had somehow
never encountered. He laughed—and was surprised at himself. He had not thought there could be any laughter in him on such
a day. Colin’s breezy exuberance and his almost professorial desire to share what he knew—to recite an entry from his mental
catalog of the peculiar and profane—cheered Arthur to no end.
“I’ll pass, but thanks,” Arthur said to Colin.
Donna helped herself, leaned back into the old leather seat, and took an assertive drag.
“Straight arrow?” Colin asked him.
“Tragically. Aren’t you worried your granddad will smell it on you?”
“Who do you think I got it from? He’s my supplier . . . and he gets it straight from the US government.”
“No way,” Arthur and Donna said at the same time.
“They’re the biggest grower in North America. Granddad smokes it for his appetite.”
“Oh,” Arthur said. “Is he sick with something?”
“Yes,” Colin told him. “AIDS.”