“Oh, I don’t know,” moans the elderly gentleman, letting his voice trail off mournfully, and his watery brown eyes rove around the gray steel shelves as though they are looking for a place between the battered and blasted manuscripts where he might insert himself and hide.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, thinking ‘please, please, let me get back to my writing and why do I always get these needy strange people interrupting my writing when I’m at my most crucial moments.’ He was about as welcomed as a sidewinder in the split pea soup.
“They seem too busy to help an old Dumbo like me. I didn’t go to college.” As he tells me this, his shoulders rise comically and his long white hair bends at the break of his vest in a ridiculous kind of Dutch-girl flip. The way Meredith rolled her hair on orange juice cans, when they didn’t sell rollers that big.
“That doesn’t matter, if you need help,” I say encouragingly.
He seems dubious.
“They’re here to help. That’s their job. Try the lady, though, she’s nicer. Go on.” I urge him in a coaxing voice that I would much rather use on myself to tell myself to go on with my story.
“Okay.”
He turns his body sideways in the chair, sending invisible puffs of moth ball scent in my direction, but doesn’t attempt to rise for a few moments. He talks to himself during that time.
“I’ll take anything you’ve got on smelting and the ghost town of Jericho, Arizona,” declares the old coot, too loudly, to the woman librarian at the counter when he gets there. The head of a middle aged woman at my table turns up to smile at the long-haired gentleman who almost crows the word Jericho. She grins to herself. Is it the shrill way he called out ‘Jericho’, or is she seeing in him something or someone? She taps her pencil twice on the table, looks up at him again with misty sadness, seeing in his stance perhaps a baby she once had or a grandfather or father passing again before her eyes, and I wonder if she secretly eavesdropped when I bucked up the old man.
“Mining,” says the librarian in a whisper. She drifts toward a shelf. “And I believe Jericho was a small mining community in the Perillico Mountains. If I’m thinking right.”
“More than likely. I’m going to stick my nose into my grandfather’s business. What do you think of me?” He follows her, walking on the outside balls of his feet.
She evades his unusual question. “He was a miner then?” she asks, retreating to the past rather than comment on the old man in front of her.
“Family gossip...that says something of the sort. But now I don’t. I ought to believe. Various people.”
My mistake came from sitting for days in a spot too close to the reference counter, but by the time I knew my mistake it was too late; if I had moved my seat, I might have changed what happened with the librarian, but I risked offending the dear old billy goat who would have thought I fled the scent of moth balls on him and the sweat which stinks up his suit. No matter that it would please me to move, no matter that it might eventually be a matter of life or death, I can’t face the idea of giving anyone offense. Though I’d never met this stinky old man before and would never see him again, I couldn’t possibly imagine hurting him.