Checked out

Chapter 3

Karen and Tessa hashed over the latest Marion escapade while emptying the book drop together.
“I’ll never understand that woman, you would think at her age she might learn to keep her pants on and her legs together” Karen huffed as she pulled up a handful of heavy books from the container. “Has she never heard the phrase: If it gets hot, fan it? She needs Jesus, that’s her problem.”
“Well, she’s my hero”, said Tessa, as she used a broom to swat at the swarms of fire ants milling around the their feet, “I live vicariously through her, did you know she can text message?”
Karen glanced up at her friend from her bent over position “This is a skill? What, did she learn it cruising the high school parking lot?”
“No, I just think it’s really cool that she’s learning new technology, even something as stupid as texting. You know how Marian is, she can talk to anyone and never feels stupid asking questions. She’s learning all sorts of neat things about using the Internet, setting up websites, You Tube, blue tooth, Blu-Ray, everything. She’s not afraid, that’s what I like best about her, she’s not afraid trying new things or worrying about what people think of her”, Tessa explained, “My god, what the hell is it with these ants this morning? I have never seen them swarm this bad! Do you think all this rain has them stirred up so bad?”
“It must be the time of year.” Karen pulled out a final bag from the book drop. She untied the top to dump the contents in the cart. DVD’s tumbled out as well as a rather pungent smelling paper bag. She picked it up and peered in the top.
“Shit!” she exclaimed while flinging the bag violently away. “I can’t believe the crap people drop in this book drop. What’s wrong with these damn people?”
“What is it?” Tessa poked cautiously at the bag with her broom as the ants veered off and began to scurry toward it.
“Here, give me that.” Karen reached for the broom and used it to poke at the bag. She used the tip of her shoe to open the top a little wider; then pinched the back of the bag up with her fingernails.
Several wrinkled, gray, claw like appendages fell out on the ground, bloody stumps of bone protruding like wrists from them. They were tied loosely together with a dirty piece of string. They resembled nothing more than a bundle of amputated hands, and now that they were released from the bag were starting to smell like week old road kill.
“What the hell are those nasty things?” Tessa asked, horrified. “They stink!”
“I can’t imagine, but we need to get them up and out of here.” Karen headed toward the building, “We can’t throw them in the dumpster, they’ll smell up the whole parking lot. We have a shovel, don’t we?”
“Look in the storeroom by the bathroom, the grounds committee keeps some of their equipment in there, I’m pretty sure there’s a shovel” Tessa answered her. “I better get this cart in, it’s starting to sprinkle again. The gruesome bundle on the ground bothered her. “I don’t understand why anyone would put something like this in a book drop, didn’t it bother them knowing they could have destroyed everything in the bin? What if this had been over the weekend, and it had sat for two days? We would have had to throw everything out in there; can you imagine the cost and loss? This seriously pisses me off, which of our customers do you think did something like this? It’s hard for me to think one of them could care so little about the library’s materials!” Tessa continued to rant as she pushed the cart toward the building.
Karen, having spent years in the hospitality industry and working with the public, was nonplussed. She had seen everything over the years and was never surprised by the things that drove Tessa right over the edge. She truly believed most of the people that walked through their doors were only as good as they ought to be, and not a bit better than they should be.
A dark blue older model Ford F-150 pulled up beside them while they were walking to the building. Inside was one of the town’s truly original characters, Andie Mahon. Having a colorful past was only part of Andie’s claim to fame, she was a retired IRS auditor that reinvented herself in mid-life by divorcing her staid, golf playing husband, taking up professional level cannabis smoking, and by proclaiming herself Lightsey’s first and only Druid priestess. Since there were no other Druids around the area, she could safely say she was the Head Druid and anoint her two decades younger lover, Wulf, as second in command.
“Morning ladies! Am I too late to drop these off?” She held up a handful of romance paperbacks that she devoured every weekend.
“Of course not Andie, how was your weekend?” asked Tessa, adding the books to her cart.
“Wulf and I went to the Suwannee River festival and met up with a coven from Live Oak, plus I did really well at the crystal healing booth we set up”, Andie answered, pulling up her purple tinted sunglasses. “What is Karen burying?”
“Oh Lord, some idiot dropped some dead sort of something in the book drop in the same bag as their DVD’s were in. She’s burying the things and I’m sterilizing everything.” Tessa looked over at her tall friend wielding the shovel, efficiently flipping sandy soil behind her. “I have no idea what they were, but I swear they were the claws of something, they were all gray and oozing.”
Andie put her truck in park and got out to see. The wind was picking up and making sails out of the sleeves of her tie dyed caftan. Tessa remembered when she was the tight laced, suit wearing head of the Lightsey Methodist Women’s Prayer Committee and briefly wondered if menopause made you go as far round the bend as the currently free spirited Andie had. The older woman greeted Karen and squatted down to get a closer look at their find. She reached in a pocket of her voluminous wrap and pulled out a pair of glasses so to get another look and frowned. “Have you girls been making enemies on the City Council again?” she asked “or has Marian been messing with someone she shouldn’t?”
“What is it Andie? Are you trying to say someone deliberately dropped those disgusting things in the book drop? I have some faith in human nature, unlike old Karen here, I was hoping it was just an accident” Tessa moved in to look over Andie’s shoulder.
“Your little bundle here are chicken feet”, Andie explained as she pulled herself up and started toward her truck. She got her bag out of the car and came back. “The way they are tied together makes me think someone might be turning roots on you.”
“What exactly is “turning roots,” supposed to mean?” Karen interjected. She was never as patient as Tessa and Marian with the strange quirks of their clientele and would just as soon get to the point this morning with the aging Druid pothead.
“Turning roots is a Southern thing”, Andie explained to the very pragmatic, Midwestern born Karen. “It’s a mixture of African and Caribbean voudoun or voodoo, and a little bit of Christianity mixed in. You see it more in coastal Georgia in some of the poorer communities, but I’m not that surprised we have a root worker here. Was there any powder in the bin or names written on pieces of paper? Did you see any scattered bits of herb in the bag? In my experience, this looks like a classic voodoo hex to me.”
Both women looked at each other in dismay. What a Tuesday this was turning out to be, more rain, more ants, dead chicken appendages, a menopausal, possibly stoned witch; and all before eleven o’clock. Since it was almost time to open, Tessa interrupted Andie’s lecture on the history of root work and Southern African Americans.
“Well, lets just finish burying this mess. We really need to get the library open” she said patting Andie’s billowy shoulder. “ I have to get these books in before the rain really comes down.”
“You ladies go on”, said Andie pulling out her cell phone. Her fingers flew over the keys of the phone. “I’m texting Wulf to bring me my travel kit” she explained “We’ll take care of this for you all. I know you don’t realize it, but this is serious heavy magic. Someone is trying to put a hex on you all or the library; I’m not sure which. He and I can do a healing ceremony to remove it and purify the space again.”
“I have Lysol” began Tessa; glancing in dismay at Karen, “really, don’t go to any bother. I know you are probably busy this morning.”
“It’s no bother at all” she replied as her phone began to buzz. “It’s a code black”, she whispered conspiratorially into the mouthpiece. “Bring the hen-bane too, and some extra charcoal. Yes, this is for real. The library is under attack!” she added dramatically before she clicked her phone shut.
Karen rolled her eyes at Tessa, and pointedly looked at her wristwatch. “What time are the children from Head Start coming this morning, Tessa?” she asked like she didn’t already know.
“Miss Eula will be pulling up at eleven thirty on the dot,” replied Tessa. “ I can’t let her see this!” She was starting to feel panicky at how to best steer Andie off her current course of action. How in the world would she explain to Miss Eula what Andie and her even odder lover were doing in the parking lot?
“He’s on the way,” Andie said, as she took Tessa’s arm. “Now you just go on in the library and don’t worry about a thing. We’re taking care of everything and will get those bones out of here in no time.”
Tessa and Karen worked quickly to get the library ready for the large group of children coming. Once a month the kids from the daycare came to the library, and they were the group of children the two women enjoyed the most. Most of them had little or no exposure to books or story telling, and Karen and Tessa planned for weeks the stories they would enact and their costumes. This morning’s book selection was “Curious George’s First Day at School”. They traditionally started every new school year with this book, and looked forward to meeting all the new children attending the program.
“Let’s just not even mention Andie and Wulf, unless Miss Eula asks directly” said Tessa, as she struggled into up her furry brown monkey costume.
Karen was zipping her yellow jumpsuit up with one hand and trying to push her hair under her yellow cowboy hat with the other. “If she does ask, let’s say they are part of our garden planning committee, and trying to get ideas for fall planting”
“You’re a good one” Tessa always marveled at her friend’s quick problem solving “We’ll just hurry the kids in and hopefully the Demonic Duo will be done by the time they need to load the bus back up. Tessa looked at herself in the mirror on the back of her office door as she adjusted the furry cap and drew the straps under her chin. “Do you think I need to whip up another suit, this one is looking a little moth eaten these days? Damn, I look fat in this.” she said, as she turned sideways. “Well look at me”, said Karen as she finished tying her lariat “I’m a six foot tall woman in a yellow jumpsuit wearing a ten gallon yellow hat and black high heel dress boots. What sort of fashion statement do you think I’m making? Don’t you dare take another picture of me this year, I haven’t forgiven you for last years candid shot”, she warned.
The children filed past the women in a more or less organized way led by the formidable Miss Eula. Having headed the daycare program for a quarter of a century, the older woman had mentored a lot of their county’s children and would no doubt mentor another generation before she retired. Karen and Tessa worked hard to keep the group engaged, most of them came from homes where nightly reading was nonexistent and their attention spans showed that.
The children’s eyes were wide as they entered the cheerfully decorated children’s area.
“Are you a dog? Hey, Miss Library lady, are you a dog?” the children asked as they passed Tessa, reaching out to pull and tug on her fur.
Karen quickly got the children calmed down and sitting relatively still as she began to read the story aloud to them. With her melodious voice and dramatic gestures she was a natural storyteller. The children were totally absorbed in the story about the mischievous monkey.
Curious George jumped and scratched and pretended to disrupt a classroom on his first day of school. The Man in Yellow showed up to get him from school, and Tessa felt the children’s hands tugging at her long tail to see if it was real. The far off sounding sirens suddenly became very close as the story stopped and everyone turned toward the back door of the building. “Miss Eula, it’s an ambulance” yelled out several of the children excitedly. They were learning about community helpers that week, and had met the county’s paramedic team the day before. Karen walked to the back of the room and looked appalled at what she viewed through the little window in the metal door. Tessa hurried behind her with the keys and pushed the door open, securing it with the large brick they propped it open with.
They stared in horror as they watched the Lightsey volunteer fire department tackle the blaze around the book drop. Andie was talking excitedly to a paramedic as he checked the burns on her forearms. Poor, scrawny Wulf was sitting on a concrete parking stopper, glasses askew with his black tipped hands wrapped around an asthma inhaler, looking even more dazed than he usually did. Tessa couldn’t figure out which was his bigger problem, his mother fixation or his Magic the Gathering view of reality. His purple rayon choir robe was about ten sizes too big for his skinny frame, and it looked like he had stuck gold sticky paper stars all over it in a random pattern. His prematurely thinning mouse colored hair straggled down his back in oily dreadlocks and his struggling goatee looked more like stray pubic hairs had migrated to his face. “Lord, I know John Mark was dull as a week of PBS” thought Tessa, “but why would anyone take up with this un-hot mess?”
“Trying to burn down the library for some insurance money, Tessa?” teased Mark Headly, Lightsey’s volunteer fire chief and Tessa’s one house over neighbor. “Who are the two hippies dancing around out here in the flames? You better be glad Miss Madeline over at the Post Office saw the smoke and phoned it in to 911. The fat lady had caught her dress on fire and the hippie boy in his bathrobe was fanning it up even worse. Was that a book burning? Are they protesters?”
“No, no, Mark” Tessa desperately tried to think of a decent explanation and signaled Karen with her eyes to step in.
“Andie is the head of our gardening committee” Karen lied smoothly “She and her assistant were burning some yard debris for us so that we can plant around the book drop. She thought this would be a perfect day since we’ve been getting so much rain lately.”
Mark squinted at the burned soil and scorched sides of the book drop. “It would have been better if they had raked the pile away from any structures to burn it. Also, you might let them know just to throw one or two matches on the pile to get it started; surrounding it with candles can be a little dangerous. You all are lucky the wind wasn’t blowing harder than it was today; you could have taken this whole neighborhood down. Does the library have a burn permit?” he asked as he finished filling out his report form.
“I have one at the house.” Tessa answered and then stopped herself from elaborating.
“Is it for your property or the library’s” asked the fireman asked sternly; looking over the tops of his glasses at her as he stopped writing for a moment.
“My property” she admitted.
“Well, I’m going to have to write you a citation up then. You can pay your fine at the City Hall by the 26th or you can contest it in front of the judge. Get a permit and make sure you burn far from the property. You have the Head Start kids in there today, don’t you?” he said while glancing at the bus “can’t be too careful”.
Karen and Tessa herded everyone back on to the sidewalk. Their time was up with the kids and it was time to help load the bus. They waved as they watched the kids talking about their visit to the library, that sure was an exciting place!
“Well that was a total cluster fuck” Tessa said without losing her big smile as she mechanically waved her arm back and forth. “I feel like a total ass and I am standing here in front of God and everyone else in a smelly, shedding monkey costume.”
“I thought it went rather well actually” Karen replied while twirling her huge hat on a finger, “none of the little darlings pissed themselves this time and I believe nose picking was actually suspended for the majority of the story telling. The witches sabbat was a brilliant touch of the unexpected, whatever will you think of next?”