Michael Guillebeau - MAD Librarian - You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Library

“This is what you get when you come after my family, sucker,” she said under her breath.

Serenity watched a pair of legs in jeans appear. She cocked the gun, took aim, and waited until she recognized the body.

SERENITY SAID. “I could have shot you.”

Doom put her hands on her hips. “Why on earth would you do that? I’m helping you.”

Serenity put the gun back in her purse.

“How exactly does sneaking around my house qualify as help?”

“I just wanted to see if you were all right.”

Serenity sighed. “Doom, I don’t need your help. And right now, I’m kind of tired of dealing with your idea of help. Go home now. Go back to being a librarian.”

“Like you? I saw you take a gun out of your closet. You’re not just shelving books yourself.”

“Joe needs help.”

“Did Joe ask for your help?”

Serenity hesitated. “He’s a man. They don’t ask for help. It’s up to us to figure out when they’re carrying a load that would be better carried by two than one.”

“So hard-headed people sometimes need other hard-headed people to step in and not take no for an answer?”

“I don’t need your kind of help.”

Doom’s eyes were wet and shining in the glow of the streetlight. “You don’t know. Try me. If I can’t convince you I can help, I’ll go back to shelving books.”

“Joe’s chasing a drug dealer, and I need to find both of them.”

Doom brightened. “Friday night in late August in a small Alabama city. Anyone my age knows there’s only one place to find him on a night like this. If you take me along, I can show you.”

Serenity waved her hand toward the car, and Doom squealed as she scrambled into the passenger seat.

“Buckle up,” Serenity said. “And I don’t want to know how you know about drugs.”

“Librarians,” she said, “know evvvverything.”

LATE SUMMER FRIDAY NIGHTS in Maddington—or anywhere in Alabama—meant crowding into uncomfortable concrete bleachers with five thousand of your best friends, some of whom you only saw on those nights. Then you screamed at your children and your neighbor’s children to kill somebody, anybody. This all followed an opening prayer that asked Jesus to reward their noble efforts, hopefully with a victory. The fact that Jesus had never been seen in the stands screaming for the Maddington Rebels, or even at the concession stand waiting for a corndog, was not taken personally, nor did it prevent the same ritual from being optimistically repeated every week at the Maddington Veteran’s Memorial Stadium—except for visiting weeks when everyone drove hours to try to ruin other people’s Friday night prayers.

The VM, as the stadium was called, was also the place to go for drugs on a Friday night. Kind of one-stop shopping for God, violence, high-fat food, altered consciousness, and good neighborhood fellowship.

“I wish,” said the ticket taker to Serenity, “that your son Joseph was here on the team. Big ole boy like that could sure put a hurt on that arrogant prick who’s playing quarterback for Riverside.”

“Yeah.” Serenity didn’t want to point out that when Joseph was in high school, big as he was, he never had played football. Instead, he had chosen to take out his aggressions by hitting a small sphere of stuffed horsehide with a baseball bat in springtime rituals. On a night like this, though, it felt like admitting that Joseph was either a conscientious objector or a socialist. “Two tickets, please, Joyce.”

“Standing room only this late.” She made change.

“Have you seen Joe down here tonight?”

“Didn’t buy a ticket from me,” she said it like that was a personal insult. “But I thought I saw that big hat of his floating in the crowd a while ago.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Out there.” She waved a hand at the sea of faces. “Somewhere.”

Serenity looked out and saw a couple of dozen cowboy hats floating in the crowd. None of them immediately fit Joe’s height or hat color.

She grabbed Doom as they walked through the gate, just before they were swallowed up by the mob.

“Okay, this was your idea. Let’s split up and find Joe. Have you got your cell phone? Go over that way. Climb up to the top of the stands and if you see him anywhere, call me. I’ll check the concession stand. First place Joe’ll go.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Serenity pushed, shoved and apologized her way through the crowd to the concrete concession stand in the south end zone. The lines stretched across the front of the open counter, winding so far back that they sometimes wound up colliding with players and officials in the end zone. She went to the edge and tried to push through.

A big hand landed on her shoulder and she was turned around to face a good ole boy in overalls towering over her.

“No cuts, lady. I come here for the hot dogs, and you ain’t a’gonna get betwixt me and the last dog.”

When Serenity had volunteered at the concession stand during Joseph’s high school days she had spent many afternoons making a run to Walmart with other team moms. Buy as many of the cheapest hot dogs as she could, red sausages with so much gristle and so little quality control that she was horrified to carry the cooler. She always left a few in the fridge at home, but Joe refused to eat them there because they didn’t taste as good as the ones at the VM.

But anytime they went to see a game, two steps past the gate he always turned, zombie-like, to join his buddies in the packed crowd waiting for dogs. Somehow, on warm fall nights in a concrete stadium, a combination of boiled gristle, fat, rat excrement and less than 2 percent of something called “other” wrapped in a plastic casing that had probably been banned by the FDA for ten years would transubstantiate into a substance that was irresistible to American males. Catholics had their communion miracle, and worshipers of the southern football religion had theirs. Maybe Jesus did answer their prayers.

Serenity should have known better than to try to interfere.

“Sorry,” she said. She went around to the side door of the concession stand; it was propped open to let at least some of the steam escape. She wedged her way in.

The inside looked like any other sweatshop, which technically it was since the women and one poor man inside were packed cheek-to-jowl, sweating through their clothes, with customers screaming through the window and order runners trying to wedge past scrambling workers to put orders together.

“Serenity! Thank God you’re here. Get on the shake machine.”

“Dottie, I need to talk to you, just for a minute.”

“And I need someone on the shake machine.”

“I’m not here to volunteer.”

“And I’m not here to talk. Give me ten minutes on the shake machine and I’ll talk to you. At the counter.”

Serenity picked up an apron that was crumpled next to the shake machine and went to work. Chocolate shakes came out as fast as she could make them and were snatched out of her hand before she could set them down. After what seemed like a few hundred shakes, a skinny teenaged boy walked by the door with his head consciously turned away.

Didn’t work. “Harry!” Dottie yelled. “Get your ass in here and take over the shake machine from Ms. Hammer.”

Dottie glanced back and a runner nodded and started filling a sack. Dottie turned to Serenity while the sack was being filled.

“Okay, what you need?”

“You seen Joe tonight?”

“Twicet.” Dottie reached back without looking, took the bag, and handed it to a man at the counter. Money was passed, change was made. “He came in about fifteen minutes before kickoff, when it was just getting crowded. Got two dogs. Came back to the side door and got two more dogs about ten minutes before you showed up.”