Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather by Willett Jincy

Author:Willett, Jincy [Willett, Jincy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2010-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Then I took Stanley with me, and I threw up in the parking lot, and we went to the Blue Moon, and then to another place off Route 10, and I threw up in front of a statue of King Philip of the Wampanoags, and somehow we ended up back at the First Unitarian Church, and Stanley punched out a stained-glass window.

Time Out

My Library

Squanto Library is a brick building the size and shape of a single-family dwelling set down on two acres of land on the Miracle Mile, otherwise known as the Massasoit Trail. Right across the street you’ve got your Frome Plaza, with your Star, Frome Job Lot, Bastinado’s, Zeno Discount, and Tile World. To our left, facing the Plaza, are Mr. Meat and the Ottoman Empire; to our right Sippy’s Pizza (the only nonfranchise holdout on the Mile) and Mr. Clam, and a little farther east, rising big as Atlantis in an asphalt sea, the mammoth Food Land, a bag-it-yourself, rip-open-your-own-carton-of-black-olives kind of place, with a produce section twice the size of the Star and thirty-foot ceilings. Everyone in Rhode Island, everyone actually From Around Here, shops at Food Land once a month, many at three in the morning. (Not a few academics shop here too, for the “interesting ethnic vegetables.”)

Squanto Library sits on two acres, then, of solid gold, for which we could receive, from teeth-gnashing Italianate developers, enough money to pay for a building three times this size, not to mention quintupling our volume count. But on the board are no fewer than three Yankees, two false, one almost real, all of whom claim to remember when the Massasoit Trail was a horse pasture or some damn thing, which is horse poop because the oldest member has only ten years on me, and the Trail looked like hell in 1948. There weren’t franchises then, of course, but aesthetically there’s not a whole lot to choose between your Atomic Cleansers and your Mr. Clam.

But according to the Yankees the Mafia ruined the Trail. (They always call it “the Trail,” in tones which encourage you to imagine, if you will, sure-footed Narragansetts, fleet Wampanoags, gliding soundlessly down the overgrown forest path with their maize and bags of wampum.) And even though they admit that the ruin is permanent, they keep us here out of spite, and every other year or so they plant another row of those goddamn ornamental cherries, just to “get” those “Italian bastards.” In late spring you can’t even see the library building for the rioting pink and white blossoms. Sometimes people drive in thinking we’re a nursery, or a festival.

Squanto himself, the noble Indian for whom the library is named, was a wonderful man who greeted the Mayflower colonists in their own tongue and saved their necks that first deadly winter. He’d been abducted by an English sea captain as a boy and sold into slavery in North Africa. Somehow he’d escaped and made it to Europe, worked as a servant in a number

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