The Wind Chill Factor Read Online Free PDF Page B

forever, doomed to spend his own eternity watching the sleepy world of Cooper’s Falls from the grassy corner of the park.
    Not really conscious of what I was doing, I walked past Brill’s Drugstore, the Cooper’s Falls Cafe, past the imposingly somber Cooper’s Falls Hotel, which looked exactly the same as it had in my youth: rich, opulent, more like a club, reflecting the money which hallmarked the town. And there was the tiny frame library, trimmed in gingerbread, a miniature example of the curlicued sort of wooden structure which was so big in Mother Goose’s day. The Cooper’s Falls library was her “A material,” as we used to say when I was in the network television business. I had never been able to resist it.
    Almost reflexively I went up the steps and into the library. A gas heater in the middle of the room was working much too hard: the room was stifling. There was no one behind the rolltop desk, but after I’d slipped out of my coat and draped it across a chair I heard sounds from the back of the building, from behind the racks of Cooper’s Falls Leaders, which I knew dated back to the very first issue, midway through the nineteenth century.
    “Well, John Cooper, how are you?”
    I turned around, the voice vaguely familiar, and saw Paula Smithies, a very pretty girl who had one summer gone to bed a great deal with my brother Cyril.
    “Why, Paula, for God’s sake,” I heard myself saying, knowing I was smiling at the sight of her. I hadn’t seen Paula in nearly fifteen years and she was not only recognizable but far prettier as a woman than she’d been as a teen-ager. And she’d been pretty then. “How are you? What are you doing here?”
    “I’m fine, John, just fine.” Her face was pale, hair very dark and long and straight. She wore black framed glasses which were squared off and looked fine. “Would you believe I’m the librarian here now? I’ve come back to Cooper’s Falls in my old age.” She grinned openly, looking into my eyes.
    “I thought you went off to California, was it California? Married a newspaperman. …” I was searching. She picked up a stack of antique National Geographics.
    “That’s right. And he went off to Vietnam for the L.A. Times and stepped on a land mine in Laos when he was supposed to be back in Saigon resting and I was a widow all of a sudden.” She set the magazines down on a packing crate, pushed her glasses back with a forefinger. “That was three years ago and I stayed in L.A. for a while, working in a branch library but, God, have you ever lived in California, John? It’s some sort of updated Dantean inferno—highways, overpasses, underpasses, cars, cars, cars, sunshine, smog, the Dodgers and the Rams, and the Lakers, drugs, and just unbelievable isolation.” She reflected for a moment and flashed a nervous little smile. “Unbelievable. People do very peculiar things because they’re so insanely lonely. Things you’re ashamed of afterward, things that eat away at your sanity when you think about them. …”
    She asked me what I’d been doing and I told her that I’d been up to my ass in all the normal things: marriage, infidelity, writing books, working for the network, occupational alcoholism, divorce, too many pills, a long struggle back. Just the normal things. She laughed, shaking her head.
    “Would you like a cup of coffee? Can you stand the heat in here? This damned thing has no idea of the meaning of restraint.” She glared at the heater. “I was trying to open the windows in back when you came in.”
    I picked my way among the cartons of books and opened the windows overlooking the deep drifts between the library and a low stone wall.
    “Cream and sugar?”
    “Both,” I said. It was nice, comfortable. We sat by her desk with a carton propped against the door holding it open. She lit a cigarette, gestured at the cartons, the stacks of file cards. “I’ve been back since last fall, living at home with Mother. It’s very