Free House of Prayer No. 2 by Mark Richard Page B

windshield creases into the dashboard. The only exit for you both is through the driver’s side window, the snake’s body now holding itself out firmly as a hurdle you must somehow with your skeletal legs superhumanlyleap over to escape. Bracing your back so hard against the rusty springs of the backseat cushion in advent of your escape that you can feel them cut into your skin, you supernaturally fly out the driver’s side window, your right kneecap rapping the snake’s head with a bone-woodenish comic knock as you fly past.
    After that your haunts are the library and the movie house. The library is in the old Pace family house, large enough so that the nine children roller-skated upstairs where the school board offices are now. There are hidden staircases and several sunporches. The place is haunted, not just by you or Miss Cutchins. Miss Cutchins knew your father didn’t allow you to watch television when you were in your body cast, so she helped your mother select books for you to read by the grocerybagful. She will never deny you a book, though when you check out your books,
signing your name so that she can read it
, she will hold your book as if she can gauge its merit by its weight. Then she will inspect its spine, and if she is unfamiliar with the title, she might thumb through it while you lean on creaking crutches, if you are still on them, in front of her desk. She might read a few pages. She might deny a friend of yours a book until he is older, but never you, maybe because she knows you will slip off to one of the sunporches and read it anyway. She also knows that you will wait until
she
slips into one of the sunporches for her afternoon nap, that you will sign your name on the card so that she can read it, leave it on her desk, and swing your legs quietly out the door.
    There had long been rumors of
Playboy
magazines in the closet behind Miss Cutchins’s desk. One afternoon when Miss Cutchins is resting on the sunporch, and you could hear her restingout there, not quietly, you screw up your courage and open that closet door but all you find are years of your town’s telephone books and Miss Cutchins’s plastic rain bonnet.
    When you confide to your best friend about your unsuccessful attempt to find a
Playboy
magazine, he tells you the solution is simple: all you have to do is go down to the bus station behind the queer real estate guy’s office and steal one. The long afternoon you stand across from the bus station on your crutches you learn an important lesson: there are many great protections against temptation, and cowardice is one of the best.
    The other person who haunts the old library is a Pace sister. She died a long time ago, and people think she is the reason books fall from the stacks, the broken clock in the main reading room chimes, and the front door sometimes opens and closes by itself. The librarians take the Pace sister’s presence for granted. The people in the school board office upstairs aren’t so sure, until in the middle of one of their meetings a woman came into the room, someone they thought at first must have been homeless and looking for the welfare office, her clothes were old and odd. When the secretary asked the woman if they could help her, the woman turned and disappeared into a wall.
    Since then, they think they’ve identified the woman from an old photograph that is one hundred and forty years old. To this day, if you ask people who work in that building about the Pace sister, they usually say,
I don’t know, I just know she seems to hang around that front parlor
.
    Your other haunt is the movie theater owned by the alcoholic gay musician from Indiana who arrived first in a small Carolinatown just over the border in a raccoon coat to play the enormous pipe organ they had installed in their movie house and nobody could get much music out of. People say he played at Radio City Music Hall and with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.