Well, when I was a child, our liberry was a
bookmobile. And, it wasn't real regular 'bout its runs,
neither. One time, the driver overstayed his welcome at the bar in the next town, and that bookmobile didn't move
for 30 days. 'Nother time, though, we were lucky--he had a flat tire right up the street, so we got to borrow books till the tow truck finally showed up five days later--and then he had to go back and get the right size tire.
'Course, there wasn't just a real big choice of books,
'specially if you were a kid. The kids' books were kept
away up on the top shelf. Gee, you'd'a thought we were
gonna tear 'em up or somethin'! You might have thought
he'd have gotten tired of us leavin' our muddy footprints
on the lower shelves, but no, they stayed up on that high
place. We learned to be careful not to bang our heads on the ceiling. We had to be quick, too--climb, look, and grab, all in however long our co-conspirators could keep the driver occupied. Once we had the books in our hands, we were safe. All we had to do was tell him we found them
on the floor, because we really did find books on the floor,
all the time: young Bobby Joe used to make a killing--he could time it down to the second, practically, how long the
driver could keep it up on two wheels as he came around into the courthouse square. The rest of us lost our money
every time.
We had to be careful with what we picked out, too.
"Charlotte's Web" had a page missing where Billy Sam's
6-year-old brother tried to eat the spider. We all knew to
avoid "Misty of Chincoteague"--Betty Lou's baby sister
threw up on it. A shame, too--we all loved Misty.
None of us minded all the crayon scribbles and animal
footprints across the pages. The occasional dead bug was
no problem, either, though I didn't much care for finding
the live baby snake in the nature book. Somebody'd put it
there for added learning, I reckon.
We used to ask the driver why he always began to shake, even before he shut the motor off in our town, but he just
turned away and drank something from a paper sack and never answered.
