Four Past Midnight

This was back in the days when you could sometimes still find a telephone book in a telephone booth, if you were lucky.

Then he glanced at the floor, and saw what he had been looking for. It was a wrapper. He picked it up, smoothed it out, and read what was written there in the dingy overhead light: Bull's Eye Red Licorice.

From behind him, Naomi beat an impatient tattoo on the Datsun's horn. Sam left the booth with the wrapper in his hand, waved to her, and ran into the store through the pouring rain.

4

The Piggly Wiggly clerk looked like a young man who had been cryogenically frozen in 1969 and thawed out just that week. His eyes had the red and slightly glazed look of the veteran dope-smoker. His hair was long and held with a rawhide jesus thong. On one pinky he wore a silver ring beaten into the shape of the peace sign. Beneath his Piggly Wiggly tunic was a billowy shirt in an extravagant flower print. Pinned to the collar was a button which read

MY FACE IS LEAVING IN 5 MINUTES BE ON IT!

Sam doubted if this was a sentiment of which the store manager would have approved ... but it was a rainy night, and the store manager was nowhere in sight. Sam was the only customer in the place, and the clerk watched him with a bemused and uninvolved eye as he went to the candy rack and began to pick up packages of Bull's Eye Red Licorice. Sam took the entire stock - about twenty packages.

'You sure you got enough, dude?' the clerk asked him as Sam approached the counter and laid his trove upon it. 'I think there might be another carton or two of the stuff out back in the storeroom. I know how it is when you get a serious case of the munchies.'

'This should do. Ring it up, would you? I'm in a hurry.'

'Yeah, it's a hurry-ass world,' the clerk said. His fingers tripped over the keys of the NCR register with the dreamy slowness of the habitually stoned.

There was a rubber band lying on the counter beside a baseball-card display. Sam picked it up. 'Could I have this?'

'Be my guest, dude - consider it a gift from me, the Prince of Piggly Wiggly, to you, the Lord of Licorice, on a rainy Monday evening.'

As Sam slipped the rubber band over his wrist (it hung there like a loose bracelet), a gust of wind strong enough to rattle the windows shook the building. The lights overhead flickered.

'Whoa, dude,' the Prince of Piggly Wiggly said, looking up. 'That wasn't in the forecast. Just showers, they said.' He looked back down at the register. 'Fifteen forty-one.'

Sam handed him a twenty with a small, bitter smile. 'This stuff was a hell of a lot cheaper when I was a kid.'

'Inflation sucks the big one, all right,' the clerk agreed. He was slowly returning to that soft spot in the ozone where he had been when Sam came in. 'You must really like that stuff, man. Me, I stick to good old Mars Bars.'

'Like it?' Sam laughed as he pocketed his change. 'I hate it. This is for someone else.' He laughed again. 'Call it a present.'

The clerk saw something in Sam's eyes then, and suddenly took a big, hurried step away from him, almost knocking over a display of Skoal Bandits.

Sam looked at the clerk's face curiously and decided not to ask for a bag. He gathered up the packages, distributed them at random in the pockets of the sport-coat he had put on a thousand years ago, and left the store. Cellophane crackled busily in his pockets with every stride he took.

5

Naomi had slipped behind the wheel, and she drove the rest of the way to the Library. As she pulled out of the Piggly Wiggly's lot, Sam took the two books from the Pell's bag and looked at them ruefully for a moment. All this trouble, he thought. All this trouble over an outdated book of poems and a self-help manual for fledgling public speakers. Except, of course, that wasn't what it was about. It had never been about the books at all.

He stripped the rubber band from his wrist and put it around the books. Then he took out his wallet, removed a five-dollar bill from his dwindling supply of ready cash, and slipped it beneath the elastic. 'What's that for?'

'The fine. What I owe on these two, and one other from a long time ago - The Black Arrow, by Robert Louis Stevenson. This ends it.'

He put the books on the console between the two bucket seats and took a package of red licorice out of his pocket. He tore it open and that old, sugary smell struck him at once, with the force of a hard slap. From his nose it seemed to go directly into his head, and from his head it plummeted into his stomach, which immediately cramped into a slick, hard fist. For one awful moment he thought he was going to vomit in his own lap. Apparently some things never changed.

Nonetheless, he continued opening packages of red licorice, making a bundle of limber, waxy-textured candy whips. Naomi slowed as the light at the next intersection turned red, then stopped, although Sam could not see another car moving in either direction. Rain and wind lashed at her little car. They were now only four blocks from the Library. 'Sam, what on earth are you doing?'

And because he didn't really know what on earth he was doing, he said: 'If fear is Ardelia's meat, Naomi, we have to find the other thing - the thing that's the opposite of fear. Because that, whatever it is, will be her poison. So ... what do you think that thing might be?'

'Well, I doubt if it's red licorice.'

He gestured impatiently. 'How can you be so sure? Crosses are supposed to kill vampires - the bloodsucking kind - but a cross is only two sticks of wood or metal set at right angles to each other. Maybe a head of lettuce would work just as well ... if it was turned on.'

The light turned green. 'If it was an organized head of lettuce,' Naomi said thoughtfully, driving on.

'Right!' Sam held up half a dozen long red whips. 'All I know is that this is what I have. Maybe it's ludicrous. Probably is. But I don't care. It's a by-God symbol of all the things my Library Policeman took away from me - the love, the friendship, the sense of belonging. I've felt like an outsider all my life, Naomi, and never knew why. Now I do. This is just another of the things he took away. I used to love this stuff. Now I can barely stand the smell of it. That's okay; I can deal with that. But I have to know how to turn it on.'

Sam began to roll the licorice whips between his palms, gradually turning them into a sticky ball. He had thought the smell was the worst thing with which the red licorice could test him, but he had been wrong. The texture was worse ... and the dye was coming off on his palms and fingers, turning them a sinister dark red. He went on nevertheless, stopping only to add the contents of another fresh package to the soft mass every thirty seconds or so.

'Maybe I'm looking too hard,' he said. 'Maybe it's plain old bravery that's the opposite of fear. Courage, if you want a fancier word. Is that it? Is that all? Is bravery the difference between Naomi and Sarah?'

She looked startled. 'Are you asking me if quitting drinking was an act of bravery?'

'I don't know what I'm asking,' he said, 'but I think you're in the right neighborhood, at least. I don't need to ask about fear; I know what that is. Fear is an emotion which encloses and precludes change. Was it an act of bravery when you gave up drinking?'

'I never really gave it up,' she said. 'That isn't how alcoholics do it. They can't do it that way. You employ a lot of sideways thinking instead. One day at a time, easy does it. live and let live, all that. But the center of it is this: you give up believing you can control your drinking. That idea was a myth you told yourself, and that's what you give up. The myth. You tell me - is that bravery?'

'Of course. But it's sure not foxhole bravery.'

'Foxhole bravery,' she said, and laughed. 'I like that. But you're right. What I do - what we do - to keep away from the first one ... it's not that kind of bravery. In spite of movies like The Lost Weekend, I think what we do is pretty undramatic.'

Sam was remembering the dreadful apathy which had settled over him after he had been raped in the bushes at