Mobile Library (15 page)

“Don't worry,” Bobby said, the loss now enough to fade the color in his vision.

“I have nothing,” Val said, “I have nothing.” She poured water across his stomach. As soon as the wounds were flushed they filled again, a hundred bloody smiles. She pressed a towel down on the skin but it soaked up the red and made room for more. “We will have to clean you up properly,” she said, “we have to get you help.”

“No,” he said, “I'm fine.” She pulled one of his mother's hairs from a cut that ran around the top half of his navel. Dirt dangled from the end.

“They'll get infected and you'll have to go to hospital.”

“I won't,” he said.

“And the doctors and the nurses will know who you are. They will send you home.” Bobby would rather have had a lifetime of open wounds than let Val speak to Joe without him there to protect her.

“I'll be fine. Please,” he said, but she was gone before he could say it twice.

•  •  •

Gasping for breath, her lungs rusty springs, Val collapsed onto the ground outside the mobile library. Joe followed behind her, the first-aid kit a toy in his enormous arms, this giant for whom Swift might have invented the word Brobdingnagian. He knelt down beside Bobby, who took one look at the mud covering Joe's hands and saw an opportunity to assert some authority.

“You'll need to wash them first,” he said, despite the biting pain in his innards. He closed his eyes and pictured Lilliputians, stabbing their spears deeper, tightening the ropes around his waist until they cut through the flesh.

Rosa fetched a bar of soap and a bottle of water and Joe washed his hands. Now white, they seemed even bigger against his dirty fatigues.

“Relax,” Joe said. He doused clumps of cotton wool in antiseptic lotion, then cleaned and dressed the cuts with a tenderness neither Val nor Bobby had expected, leaving his midriff a patchwork of plasters, bandages and tape.

“Good job,” Val said.

“I'm trained,” he said, “by the army. They teach you to save people, after you've tried to kill them.”

Bobby thanked him, making sure reluctance registered in his voice.

“Will you let me fix you a snack to say thank you?” Val asked.

“Sure,” Joe said, “I'd appreciate it.”

Val took Rosa into the mobile library, while Bert jumped onto Joe's lap and fell asleep almost instantly.

“You really do have a mobile library, huh?” he said.

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “And I'm in charge of it.”

Joe laughed. “I don't doubt that for a second.” He took a packet of tobacco and a cigarette paper from his pocket, both miraculously bone dry. “Wanna see a trick?”

Bobby disappointed himself by agreeing so readily, but as it was just the two of them, him cut to ribbons, he figured it couldn't hurt.

“I can roll a cigarette anywhere. I've rolled them in a monsoon. I've rolled them in a gale. I've rolled them in the darkness of the desert at night, and that's a real darkness too. Not like nighttime here, with all this light pollution and residual glow. In the desert the darkness is a thick black everywhere that feels like never.” Bobby had never heard someone talk this way before, with measured pace and poetry.

“Why would you want to do that?”

“When you're in the army, no one is gonna stop for you. Learning to do anything anywhere at anytime without help is a pretty useful skill to have.”

“I mean smoking. It turns your lungs to cancer and they go black and crispy and then you die before you even get old. We learned about it at school. Did you not go to school?”

Joe had grown up in the foster care system, so had been surrounded by children more than most, but was alarmed to realize he'd forgotten how wonderfully direct they could be. “I didn't go to school enough.”

“Well,” Bobby said, “what's the trick?”

“I bet I can roll one with my hands underground.” He wrung dust from his beard while Bobby considered the stakes.

“Totally underground? So we can't even see them?”

“Yes, totally underground so we can't even see them.”

“You're on.”

“What do you bet?” Even though Joe was dirty, with dried mud matted in his hair, Bobby couldn't think of one thing he had to offer him beside books, which he was pretty sure Joe wouldn't be able to read. He preferred to think that the mobile library, and everything in it, were for Rosa, Val and him alone.

He shrugged.

“You're already getting some food. We need everything else. I have nothing to bet you.”

“How about a wash in your mobile library?”

“I don't think you should go in there. The books are clean and so is the carpet. You'll only mess everything up. Some people make everything dirty, so there is always something to clean.”

“That so? Then I'll stay out here. Just bring me some more water and soap. And maybe a mirror so I can shave. I won't even ask for a towel.” Joe sensed Bobby softening. “Shake on it?”

“Okay.” They shook, Joe's hand swallowing Bobby's whole. Joe licked the narrow strip of gum on the paper, then held it on his open palms with a generous pinch of tobacco. He balled his hands around the precious inventory with his fingers contorting inside it. When he felt sure it was airtight he dropped to his knees and thrust them both under the dry layer of topsoil on the ground, which he had piled high in preparation.

“You look stupid,” Bobby said. Joe's lips twisted into strange shapes as he concentrated.

“I don't care.”

“This bet should have a time limit.”

“No need,” Joe said, “I'm done.” He pulled his hands to his chest, soil cascading down, and slowly opened them up. “Ta-da!” There it was, a cigarette. A little messy, but a cigarette all the same. He popped it in his mouth, took a match from the box and lit it in a single fluid motion. It smoked. Sure, there was a lot of dirt in it, now collecting round his tonsils, but not enough that he was about to choke. He sucked it right down to the stub, two big lungfuls that made his chest whistle, then slapped Bobby on the shoulder. Bobby was impressed enough to let the feeling drip slowly down his back.

Just then Val emerged from the library with a tin of glistening peach segments and a mug of strong coffee.

“Joe,” Rosa said, “what is your last name?”

“Joe,” he said.

“So your name is Joe Joe?”

“Yeah, that's right. Joe Joe.” Rosa immediately accepted his answer and began shaping the letters in her notepad. Bobby barely tried to disguise his suspicion.

Scrubbed, washed and dried, Joe assumed a different color altogether. His skin a soft, babyish pink; his hair fluffy and blond, like stuffing protruding from the head of a teddy bear. Val gave him her oversize dressing gown to wear, and he made a fire five times faster than she had managed to all week. Bobby fetched a pile of books from the library, pretended that he was going to read them to Rosa, and built a dividing wall between Joe and everyone else, except the traitor Bert.

“So this is your library?”

“I'm the librarian, yes,” Val said.

“They let you live in it?”

“I'm just driving it to its next home and we thought we'd make a little camping trip of it. Much like yourself, I guess.” Part of Val didn't like to lie, especially not to a man who had been as kind as Joe. He cleaned up well, and though clearly into his thirties she could still sense the roguish, youthful glint he'd honed in the dormitories where he'd come of age. A pinkish rash, cast in the shape of strangler's hands, appeared around Val's neck, disappearing under the collar of her shirt. This always happened whenever she found someone attractive, though it had been a while. She rubbed the skin as if chasing it away.

“Seems strange is all,” he said.

“They were closing it down,” she said. “They're closing them all down. You must have read about it in the papers?”

“I don't read the papers much.”

“No,” she said, “me neither these days.” They both smiled. “The long and short of it is that the mobile library would only have gathered dust. Books are nothing until they're opened. Stories aren't stories unless they're told. Characters might be good or bad, but until you have known them they are neither, and that's worse.”

Joe rolled another cigarette. “You're the librarian,” he said. “Who am I to argue?” Rosa closed her book with a thud.

“We're camping,” she said, “because we ran away from home.”

“Rosa!”

“We all run away from time to time,” Joe said. For a second, Val and Joe shared a look that told him whatever it was she was up to, she didn't want to be caught, not yet. That was enough. The children seemed happy enough to him. He didn't want them to be caught either. It was a desire he didn't just share. It was one he completely understood.

The broad plates of his forearms were covered in dark green tattoos, twisting like Japanese knotweed up to his shoulders. There were anchors, wizards and snakes wound round shields, swords, scrolls and hollow-eyed skulls. Words bled out. Bobby inched closer to see but the dressing on his belly came unstuck.

“What about you?” Val said. “What are you running away from?”

“Who said I was running away?” Smoke rolled over Joe's top lip and disappeared into his nose.

“You're living in the woods.”

“Staying in the woods.”

“Why?”

“Because I have nowhere else to go. I'm just one of those people, I suppose,” he said, letting the flames warm his legs.

“Nowhere?” Bobby asked.

“Uh-huh. Been in the army since I was old enough. I quit, so that's over, and I guess I'm just a traveler now.”

“Why did you join the army?”

Joe thought for a while. “To stay out of trouble, I guess.”

“By going to war?”

Joe laughed. “Huh. By going to war.”

“Well, you needn't sleep rough tonight,” Val said. “You can stay in the cab if you like.”

“I wouldn't want to make a nuisance of myself.”

“It's no nuisance. The children and I sleep in the truck. It's fine.”

“I'm not a child,” Bobby said. Rosa copied the way he'd shaken his head.

“I'm not a child either,” she said.

“Well,” Val said, “okay. But you know what I mean.”

They talked about nothing, both intent on not probing too deeply into each other's lives. Come dusk, tired by the events of the day, they decided to call it an early night. Val showed Joe how to wind down the sun blinds on the windows and lock the doors. When he wasn't looking, Bobby removed the keys from the ignition and hid them beneath the front wheels. Once Val and Rosa were asleep, Bobby stayed up until morning—only the owls for company—with his vision turned to night mode and trained on the cab's door just in case.

Gargantuan and apparently endless, Joe's appetite saw the mobile library's stocks diminish speedily. After that first night he stuck around and became a steady fixture, or, as Bobby saw it, a black hole for food. In return he serviced the engine (he had been responsible for the upkeep of Warrior armored vehicles during his time in the forces) and helped out with everyday chores, most of which Bobby was happy to shirk so long as Val didn't notice. He had a sore belly and his files to maintain, which since he'd smashed the hair jar were in a state of disarray.

He had begun mapping the area around the mobile library. There were thirty-seven lunges across the clearing. Two routes through the woods were passable at night, one via the brook, another by the thicket. The road by the clearing averaged three cars an hour in the daytime (one, at most, by night) and beneath the mobile library there were four gaps above the wheel arches that would make decent hiding places should they ever be needed, though Joe would never fit. Bobby marked that down as a victory of sorts.

•  •  •

“Come on,” Joe said one morning a few days later, as he leaned against the untouched shelves of books in the self-help section.

“What?” Bobby jumped, dropping the battered volume in his hand. He had been engrossed in John Steinbeck's
Of Mice and Men
, which he'd found crammed behind two intimidating hardbacks under Classics. He found it dense, too dense for his tender years, but the old-fashioned language lured him in to where the sentences spiraled around one another, and that was how he found himself entranced by the relationship between George Milton and Lennie Small. How different they were. George was small, uneducated but as smart as any teacher Bobby had ever known, while Lennie, lumbering Lennie, was big as a rock and twice as dumb. Yet despite their differences, or because of them, their friendship thrived. George kept Lennie calm. Lennie protected George from harm. They had become dependent upon one another in so many different and wonderful ways. It filled Bobby with warmth, as if they existed right there, talked their talk beside his ear.

“We need food,” Joe said. “I'm going to teach you how to forage.”

“You mean seeds and berries?”

Joe shook his head. “No. Much better than that.”

“What then?”

“Come on. It'll be an adventure.”

Seeing it as a good excuse to get Joe away from Val and the mobile library for a while, Bobby agreed. Val made them promise not to go too far, but Bobby didn't want Joe to watch her mothering him that way. He made sure he rolled his eyes so that Joe could see the whites, then put on his wellingtons and raincoat and they headed out together, promising to return with supplies.

“Where will you get supplies?” Val asked, before deciding it might be best if she didn't hear the answer.

Tractor-dug trenches had made moats around the fields. Banks of mud collapsed beneath their feet. Bobby got stuck and Joe had to heave him out by his armpits, then sling him over his shoulder and free his boots from the slop holes.