Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

one eye, then let it fall shut of its own weight. The young man looked at Tully’s sign, a piece of cardboard tacked above the shelf by the door, PLEASE DEPOSIT BOOKS AND PACKAGES HERE—THE MANAGEMENT, glanced down at his canvas bookbag, and then, as if the bookbag were a bomb, or infected with plague germs, slid it, touching it with only his fingertips, onto the warped gray shelf below the sign. He shot a look at Craine and Dr. Tummelty as if the offense were theirs—whatever the offense: the sign, the increasing smell of winter in the air, the tall, stopped clock—then ambled, hands in pockets, rear end rolling, toward the stacks.

They had arrived at Tully’s desk now, and Craine again stepped back to let Tummelty go first. The bulldog looked up mournfully, then down with a weary groan. “Opera,” he seemed to say. Craine slightly widened his eyes. Out on the street a truck passed, making the door rumble. “Oh! Oh, thank you!” Dr. Tummelty said, glancing at Craine as if he’d spoken. He laid the dictionary on the desk in front of Tully, who opened it without bothering to look up, read the price written in red pencil inside the cover, and wrote it down on a sales slip.

“Lovely weather,” the doctor said, holding out a twenty-dollar bill.

Tully frowned and continued to frown; chewing hard, as if thinking it over, checking the truth of the statement from various angles, by various calculations, including Scripture.

“The magnifying glass is my own,” the doctor said.

Now Tully did look up, the creases growing darker around his button chin. Light sparked off his spectacles, and his mouth pursed more tightly, still chewing. Again Craine’s mind tricked him, for it seemed to him that Tully said, just audibly, “Ye think my damn place looks like a pawnshop? Ye think I’m in the Goddamn antique bidness? I’m in books and maps, mister, or doctor, whatever ye call yerself. I’m in the readin bidness. History! Works of the soul, doctor!” But Tully’s mouth wasn’t moving, except to chew. Craine bent closer, making sure. No, no question about it. Whatever he was thinking, Tully was keeping it to himself. Craine should have known, of course. They rarely spoke, these old crocodiles. “Warm ott,” they’d say, or “Little cooler today,” to show they weren’t downright opposed to speech; but that was the end of it—even as they spoke their eyes drifted leftward in their milky slits, then right again, slowly, as if reading the horizon—and then back they sank into their sullen, raging silence. They were born furious, the people of southern Illinois. You could see it in the babies at the hospital. Beef-eaters, hyperglycemics. Red, round faces, as round as the bone-white electric clock that stared inhumanely from the white wall behind them, the clockface dazzling, the white wall dazzling, designed to blind them or anyway to teach them to observe the world asquint, and squint they did, squint they would, from the cradle to the grave. Sternly, gingerly, the nurses held them up like blanketed dolls that might have bombs inside them, which in fact they did, hearts tick-tick-ticking toward the hour appointed, hardly seconds away as astronomers count time—held them up to the wide, glinting window—he’d been there with a client just a week ago—and red-faced, rolling-eyed, the newborns shook their fists and showed the hell-pit blackness inside their wailing mouths, Southern Baptists already: Time is Misery.

Tully took the twenty and looked down once more, scowling, still chewing, though as always he had nothing in his mouth but the taste of the injustice of things. He opened the desk drawer, took out change, put in the twenty-dollar bill, paused, slowly and carefully making sure he’d done everything right—Craine could see him as a schoolboy, rechecking his columns of addition in panic—then counted one more time, pulling at each bill, and at last gave the doctor his change and the gray, scribbled sales slip. Craine laid the book on Sanskrit on Tully’s desk and put a dollar on top of it. Tully took the dollar, opened the book to hunt nearsightedly for the price—50¢ in red—wrote the sales slip, furiously chewing, and reopened the cash drawer.

“It has fascinating implications, this new split-lobe psychology,” Dr. Tummelty murmured confidentially. “You know what I mean, the left lobe governing one set of faculties—reason, logic, mathematics, language—the right lobe governing a different set—emotion, our feeling for melody and color, all that’s ‘feminine,’ so to speak—”

“Yes, right,” Craine said quickly, almost gruffly, edging toward the door, pocketing his sales slip and change. The vague sense of dread had flared up in him, much stronger. He could feel the eyes on him, some angry young woman, he’d swear to it, though there was no young woman in sight. Something flashed in his mind, white as snow, too brief to catch. Dr. Tummelty came after him, part of his attention on dusting the dictionary with his handkerchief—the magnifying glass was in his pocket now—then folding the hankie, dust in, to keep his suit coat clean. The suit coat was elegant, silvery gray, as soft and thick as a rabbit’s coat. He must have gotten it up in St. Louis or, more likely, Chicago. There were no such suits for sale here in Carbondale, much less Murphysboro; checks and plaids were what the crocodiles wore, though maybe at Sohn’s you could find a suit fit for a student.

Beyond Dr. Tummelty, in the dimness of floor-to-ceiling stacks, the young man who’d just come in stood poking his head out, watching Craine. He wasn’t the one who’d been spying on him, such was Craine’s opinion. Electricity was different. The moment Craine’s eyes met his, the boy looked down and, like a groundhog, drew his head back. Two-heads Carnac was nowhere to be seen, though Craine seemed to sense him everywhere, as if he’d turned himself into the ceiling, the floor, the walls.

“You’re familiar with the idea of complementarity in physics?” Dr. Tummelty was asking. Gently,