Phantom Strays

Like a victim searching a mug book for a criminal’s face, I flip the brittle pages in front of me carefully between my two favorite entries; Centruroide, Hadrurus; Hadrurus, Centruroide. But death for a baby, I assure you, assumes far too many shapes in the desert; other scorpion varieties, the description of which cram the worn pages with fine print, attract my attention and soon I’m considering half a dozen other possible antagonists, the loving way they carry their teeny babies on their back, their interesting eating habits.

  The churning grind of the library clock gears draws the small hand slowly to four, and suddenly a memory of a certain rainy July afternoon takes me away from my book. I can hear Mother claiming–was she simply being capricious as she swiped our kitchen counter with a soapy dish cloth?—that the beast under my toes that day was not a scorpion after all, but a centipede!

  I return to the librarian, lining up politely in front of his great goggling blue eyes and asking him–may God forgive my stupidity—for help. Like an absolute fool, I wonder if that lonely librarian, risking you will ultimately know what reaction, can find any rare books about scorpions. A sort of knowing triumph, a grand goad to his obsessive nature, shows in his great goggling eyes when he tells me to return to my seat and then, minutes later, manifests over my shoulder with a sweeping motion the enormous black, deteriorating folio “Scorpions and Their Habits: Species of the Western Americas.” I go to work reading about the squiggling, circuitous path legs and stinger and antennae and imagine one of them, years earlier, hunting and hugging the ground, too busy to have noticed my foot.

  Perhaps a request of the librarian will produce another book that tells me that the city of Tucson has twelve different varieties of rattlesnakes, spread about the different mountain ranges and each preferring certain arroyos and slopes. All of them are living in separate sections of the city, in districts well known to the professional herpetologist like the adrossiments of Paris, but when I get up to move I discover to my amazement that the tables in the small rare books room have emptied, of people, and of their barriers of books, except for myself and the white-haired nut who is lingering and laughing over a volume; I see the title which is “Mineral Wealth of Old Arizona” and with the ivy vines drifting through the open windows of the second floor sway in the breeze making toward the book with long fingers as though the ivy wanted to read and then in perspective I could see that the ivy made a gauzy film over the glimmering palm trees. A female librarian sets and straightens the sign “closed” on the counter and starts from the far corner of the room banging down window frames. The smelting man packs his papers into his briefcase, dons his suit jacket, picks up his helmet and saunters over to slip the smelting book on the library counter. Before I can zip my pen into its rubbery pencil case and gather my things, the male librarian glides between the tables, and slips his bottom onto the table close beside me.