Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [33]
Day shift and evening, there were two operators. Graveyard shift, one. They mostly looked like the tough young women in black-and-white detective movies. In the corner of the room, a sort of illicit sagging cot covered with a patchwork quilt for the night girl’s naps. Graveyard was an easy job, if you didn’t mind the hours. Almost nobody used the phone after ten, but you never knew. Had to sleep light. Shady business during the deeps of night. Emergencies or trysts or threats to be conveyed. Sad lonely girl sleeping with one eye open at three in the morning anticipating some sad call.
For a time, a few years after high school, that graveyard girl was Luce. She lived in a room over the drugstore, beside the movie theater, so on her way to work the daring late-night moviegoers from the second showing would be coming out onto the sidewalk under the bare glaring marquee bulbs. Main Street’s three stoplights flashing yellow. On Sundays and Wednesdays and Fridays and Saturdays, when the features changed, a guy Luce barely remembered from school would be lofting a long pole with a pliers jaw on its far end to take down the red letters saying the name of tonight’s movie and to put up the ones announcing tomorrow’s. Happy when two or three letters in a row from the previous title worked for the next, like women washing dishes getting to an unused knife or teaspoon and calling it a hallelujah. When Luce came out the street-level door to walk two blocks to work, the night owls stood yawning and checking their watches and thinking of bed, and the letter guy got to watch her walk away. Probably the high point of his evening.
Luce didn’t mind the late shift. It gave her a great deal of freedom. She usually got two or three hours of sleep after midnight, and at eight she went back to her room and slept a few more and then had the afternoon and the evening to fill however she wanted. For example, the grand little Carnegie library with steep steps to the double front door. Inside, high ceilings and tall windows and full bookshelves and a stern tiny librarian who always wore black and peered through her spectacles in judgment at your choice of book to see if it was worth anybody’s time or if you were a foolish and suspect person to be wanting to take it home with you. Those years, nearly all Luce read came from the travel section, and for a while she couldn’t decide whether Kon-Tiki or Around the World on a Bicycle was the best thing ever written.
Despite the librarian’s disapproval, Luce read a great number of westerns, such as Wanderer of the Wasteland, and planned one of these days to get on a bus and head out there. Amazingly, the one road running right through town went all the way to anywhere you wanted to go. From her study of library atlases, Hinton, Oklahoma, seemed like it ought to be a fine town for her, though that opinion was based on absolutely nothing but how well the empty spaces fell around it when you looked at its dot in relation to other dots and the web of roads spreading across the whole continent.
Then one day Luce went up the street to pay the power bill for her room and saw a government topographic map of her immediate landscape framed on the wall. It came as something of a revelation. She had to study awhile to place herself in the quadrangle. When she found the town, it was a red speck at the edge of a thin blue slice cut into great overwhelming swaths of mountain green in various shades. Thin black contour lines crowded dense in waveforms to represent how steep and complex the mountains stood all around. Below the dam, the valley lines spread wide apart and the flat farmland was a wedge of palest green. A blue