Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, Lydia Millet [top romance novels .txt] 📗

They were polite men, Yoshi meek, Ben quiet, both of them eager to please.

She was thinking about this when Mr. Hofstadt came to her desk with one of his reference requests. Mr. Hofstadt was a man in his early fifties with thinning red hair and thick bifocals and liver spots on his trembling hands. He was partial to Ann, whose shyness he saw as a welcome. For months he had been coming to Reference every other day. His questions had become increasingly arcane, in fact it seemed to Ann that they were arbitrary. He had sought information on the natal chart of one of the lesser Marx brothers and on volcanism along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge; once he had told her he was studying the life cycle of hermaphroditic gastropods. On that occasion he had rested his elbows on the counter, leaned in and confided in her, in a wheedling voice, —In, for example, Lymnaea stagnalis, the pond snail, the penis is located immediately adjacent to the vagina. Not so the apple snail!

Ben had suggested more than once that Mr. Hofstadt was desperate to keep her by his side and encouraged Ann to deflect Mr. Hofstadt’s questions. He saw sinister possibilities. But she was a reference librarian and in general she did not mind humoring a patron, though sometimes, when there were other patrons waiting, she would concede defeat early and tend to them.

As the rain pattered on the roof and windows Mr. Hofstadt interlaced his fingers, leaned forward to place his elbows on the counter as usual, and asked her how to find out how many children with blond hair had been born in 1983.

—In this city? she asked. —Across the country? Or globally?

But before he could answer another man burst through the front doors, drenched. He was a long-haired man, darkly tanned with a weathered face; he wore a green Hawaiian-print shirt blaring with leaves and parrots, canvas shorts, and flip-flops on his broad feet. Her first thought was that he must be chilled by the rain. She noticed his calves were muscular but his midsection was flabby. Finally she saw he was holding a weapon, which she took for an instant to be a plastic toy. It looked absurd to her, a boxy gray thing in relief from the world around it.

In fact it was not a toy, or at least it was not in the category of toy that graced the aisles of children’s stores, but, as Ann would later learn, a Heckler & Koch submachine gun.

When the long-haired man waved it, and Mr. Hofstadt dropped out of sight in front of the counter, she decided to give the gun the benefit of the doubt, though it struck her as ridiculous. She raised her hands tentatively and waited for instructions, feeling awkward and somehow guilty of her own awkwardness. The man with the gun was muttering something, but she could not make out the words.

He looked around, not aiming the gun purposefully; it drooped in his hand, pointing down at the floor. Mr. Hofstadt was moaning a prayer that went No-no-no-no-no-not-me. Ann’s heart raced and her face felt cold and separate from her head. When the man began to walk toward the counter she stretched her hands a little higher and, fluttering and hiccuping inwardly, resolved to try to be serene. She thought Death be not proud and also Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. The man’s wet rubber flip-flops squeaked and slapped against his wet heels. Then he stopped in front of her and she could hear Mr. Hofstadt warbling in fear at his feet.

—You know that they’re arriving, right? he said. —They’re arriving today!

—Who?

The man looked to his right and left and then leaned toward her and whispered. There was garlic on his breath.

—The old ones.

Quickly he turned to Romance Paperbacks, which were on a revolving rack, and let loose a volley of bullets.

The rat-tat-tat was loud and shocking, and she forgot her vow of serenity, knees shaking, and dropped to the floor like Mr. Hofstadt before her.

It was silent for a few minutes after that, and when she rose hesitantly from her crouch the man with the gun had run off. She leaned forward to peer down over the counter edge and saw he had left his wet flip-flops behind. Dirty water pooled in the shallow hollows left in the rubber soles by the balls of his feet and his heels.

Mr. Hofstadt, squatting beside them, was staring up at her, his hands shaking uncontrollably. From the trail of gasps and shrieks she could tell where the man with the gun had gone: he had run past Romance Paperbacks and past Mystery, past the shelves of General Fiction and into the children’s books section. Luckily, she thought reflexively, all the children were in school.

She called 911 and said, —A man with a gun is in the library. He has fired several rounds.

Then she went around the counter and kneeled down beside Mr. Hofstadt, who was panting and gasping. Her own mouth was dry, drier, she thought, than she recalled it ever being in the past. She was afraid Mr. Hofstadt had suffered a heart attack.

And while she was fanning his face with her hand, urging him to tell her how he felt, there was another round of gunfire.

At this time Ben was digging a ditch for an irrigation hose, yet he, in contrast to her, was not thirsty. Santa Fe was seven thousand feet above sea level, and in the summer in particular, working at elevation, the sun could drain him of what felt like life itself but was more precisely water. So he had made a concession to this and underneath his plain work shirt, usually a cotton T-shirt, white or drab or gray, without logo or design, there hung against his hard and bony back a flattened water bottle with long, thin tube extruding, actually less a bottle than a bladder slipped inside a black foam sleeve. In the store they had called