Return to green town

A short story from the collection Other Music

The ad made me gasp. 

The marketing research I was doing online (i.e., finding new ways to sell things that people didn’t need) ceased to exist. The ad had popped up in the margins of a website. Usually, those spaces were reserved for weight-loss supplements or get-rich-quick schemes. Not this one. 

It jolted me in its simplicity. The background was the color of a well-watered lawn in summer. In the center of all this green was a sketch: a half-remembered face from the back flaps of library books. A man with a nice smile and large nose, wearing glasses reserved for rocket scientists, with a sheaf of hair swept across his brow…

"Ray Bradbury.”

A mass of badly permed hair with eyeballs peeped over the cubicle wall. Steph, one of my co-workers. "You say something?"

"Me? Nope." The window was minimized on my screen, my heart a hummingbird. 

"Huh. My hearing must be going." She pointed to the ceiling. "It's those damn fluorescent lights. The buzzing. Enough years in an office and everyone goes deaf. Anyway, how's your research?"

"Fine, fine." I coughed to cover my lies. "Except I'm not feeling well."

"You do look flushed. Fever?"

My forehead and cheeks were on fire. "You could say that."

"It's Friday," she said. "Go home early and get some rest."

"Now there’s an idea." 

When the last frizzy strand of Steph's hair sunk from my sight, I pulled the window back up. My god, there he was, writ in silver—Ray Bradbury, Mr. Fahrenheit himself. 

Memories spun with colors and shadows from his stories. My love for his words bloomed in the sweet spot of my youth, ages ten to thirteen, on the cusp of adolescence, before girls and cars and even acne. Staying up late at night with the flashlight trained on the yellow, foxing pages, I pored over doomed Martian expeditions and tattooed men. There were dozens of collections, hundreds of stories overlapping like the ripples skipping stones leave on water.

And look at the reason for the ad! Above the drawing of Bradbury were the words Dandelion Wine Festival. I clicked on the ad and read the text.  

This celebration commemorates the spirit of the writer through art and music—this weekend in Mr. Bradbury's hometown! 

Did I remember that he was from Waukegan? Perhaps when I was a child, I knew. Maybe it was on the back flaps of those library books. 

The town was less than two hours outside of Chicago, where I was that very instant, where I had been for the last fifteen years, schlepping files from one digital inbox to the next. For the first time, I noticed the color of my apartment walls matched those of my cubicle. To my horror, the shirt I was wearing did too.

"Steph, if anyone asks, you know where I went." My hands were snapping off electronics and shoving paperwork into drawers. The buzzing lights were vibrating the back of my teeth. How many steps was it to the elevator? 

Up came the permed hair. "Home?" she asked. 

"Definitely.”

***

My trip had started with promise. 

I made it to my apartment in record time from the office. Ran to the bedroom to throw clothes into my duffel bag, all the while averting my gaze from the oatmeal-hued walls that had, over the years, cinched around me like a hangman's noose. 

After I grabbed my toothbrush and razor from the bathroom, a thunderclap of recollection knocked me upside the head. I was down on my hands and knees back in the bedroom, my head under the mattress. 

It's amazing how in moments of frenzy, of movement, our most hidden thoughts come to the surface. My hands seized on a plastic storage container, and I slid it out and popped the lid. 

Exhibit A? My childhood in Michigan. 

These were the things I took after my parents sold our house ten years ago and moved to Arizona. It was an even smaller box than I had remembered. To beat the outbound traffic, I shuffled through the photographs, Boy Scout patches, and knick-knacks with a fervor. Underneath a stack of crayon-scribbled drawings, I spotted what my heart had told me would be there.

My copy of The Martian Chronicles sported a cover with golden Martians looking upon a glass city. The spine was cracked and peeling, the pages dog-eared top and bottom. On the inside cover, my loopy cursive proclaimed this book to be Property of THE Last Martian. The year written after this statement put me, indeed, at twelve.   

Placing the book in my duffel with the reverence of Dead Sea scrolls, I then bounded out the door, taking two steps at a time, landing to landing, to the street. I-90 awaited me, and I was ahead of the nine-to-fivers for smooth driving.   

Waukegan was calling to me with the promise of an endless summer, if only for the weekend. The sooner I got to town, the sooner I could meet other festival-goers and share my favorite parts of Bradbury’s dreams caught between the covers of his books. I could hold up my own sacred copy and say, here is my dream, here is my love.

It would be proof that I was a boy once, alive and running.

And free.

***

Rather than rely on my smartphone, I went old school to find a hotel. The first one I spotted within Waukegan’s limits would be the one. That place turned out to be Cherry Pick Inn, a ramshackle motor lodge. 

Inside the main office, a chunky redhead took my money, pulled a brass key off a wall of hooks behind her, and handed it to me. 

"Cabin Four," she muttered. 

During this entire exchange, her eyes had not left the glowing screen of her phone. Soft meowing came from the one earbud not screwed into her head. She was transfixed by what could only be the cat video to end all cat videos.   

Still at the counter, I held my handle of my duffel with anticipation, eager to open it, if need be. 

"Have they been setting up the circus tents?” I asked. “Polishing the calliope pipes?"

"Pipes? Like half-pipes?" She screwed up her face, blanched by the light of her screen. "The X-sports show ain't comin til next month. They got big half-pipes for the skaters. Some sports drink’s paying for it."

"No, I mean the Dandelion Wine Festival this weekend." My jaw ached from smiling. "For Ray Bradbury."

"Who?"

“Ray Bradbury. He’s the reason for…” 

She still hadn’t looked up.

As a last-ditch attempt, I dangled my key in front of her, brass clinking, hoping to shift her attention from the newest cat that had gone viral. No such luck. 

“Good night, then,” I said. And shut the door firmly on the way out.

***

In Cabin Four, I stripped down to my skivvies and flopped into bed. I was tired. I was thinking too much. All of the stimulation and memories had fried my nerve endings. Finding the one person who didn’t know about the festival almost set me off. Sleep would do me just fine. 

Yet I was wide awake. 

The bedside lamp was no Boy Scout flashlight, but it was bright enough for reading. The Martian Chronicles was open on my lap, my long legs drawn up underneath the bed sheets. I flipped to a story about a space crew landing on Mars and discovering the hometown they had left on Earth. Everyone and everything these spacemen lost in their lives were on a new planet, waiting for them. The idea thrilled me now like it thrilled me then. You could find your life again. 

Halfway through the story (which felt like a new story, since I couldn't remember how it ended), I heard the distinctive ripsaw snore of my father and the hushed breathing of my mother. They sounded as they did in their bedroom next to mine in our Michigan home. I was twelve again, lying in bed and listening to the nighttime sounds of my childhood. 

But which am I now? The boy or the man? 

Before I could answer, sleep found me. 

***

The next morning, I woke up to heaven.

Actually, that’s a misnomer. One of my eyes opened first, and from that eye I saw the word heaven. I had fallen asleep with the book sitting on my face, inhaling the sweet smell of age that saturates old paperbacks. 

Lifting Martian Chronicles off my face, I focused with both eyes on the line: Mars is heaven. If that were true, then it must be hell on Earth. Evidence, you ask? The crick in my neck and the ache in my muscles from conking out in last night's reading position. 

But never mind all that! It was Saturday, a little after dawn, and I was heading into Waukegan proper today—Mr. Bradbury's Green Town, Illinois. 

I flung open the curtains, bracing myself for the sunlight and the green trees and cornfields of this magical place. And for a second, I saw it, the way you can see a scene in your head as you read the words, the right words falling together to turn the twenty-six letters of our alphabet into a breathing, beautiful animal, full of grace.

Then I blinked. 

It was raining. 

My beige car was parked right outside. Rainwater fell from the eave and plunked on the hood. Beyond the gravel parking lot was the highway. Some overgrown bushes lined the far side of the road, dotted with brightly colored trash chucked from passing cars. Everything outside was gray and wet and trashy.

The curtains bunched inside my newfound fists. 

After showering, scrubbing my body until it was pink, and brushing my teeth until the enamel was nearly stripped, I clumped out onto the porch of Cherry Pick Inn, my heels heavy on the boards. Through the main office window, I saw that the chunky redhead had been replaced sometime during the night by a gaunt man with a mustache. He was alternating his time between tugging on one end of his 'stache and flipping through a magazine. 

My spirits lightened a skosh—at least this clerk had reading material. 

"Morning," I said. "Is breakfast being served?"

The man smiled with all six of his teeth. "Eggs and coffee is over there."

A small table held a pot of coffee, a stack of Styrofoam cups, a sugar-creamer-swizzle stick unit, and a saucer of hard-boiled eggs. I took one egg, which was as hard as a river stone, for the sake of being polite. It was getting chucked into those highway bushes once I left. 

"Thank you," I said, chipper as a bluebird. 

"You a salesman?"

"Online marketing in Chicago. But I’m not here on business."

"Got family here?"

"Can’t say that I do."

"Hmm," the man said. "What you coming to Waukegan for?" 

"The festival this weekend," I said, fearing a repeat performance from the night before. Perhaps I hadn't come to the right place at the right time. 

But the man's eyes brightened. "Ah, yeah. Forgot it was this weekend. The art and crafty deal down at the park. Dandy-lion Fest."

"That's right!" I said. "Ray Bradbury's big day!" 

In my excitement, my hand squished the hard-boiled egg. Crumbles of yolk eked out from between my fingers. I jabbed my hand in my pocket, using it as a napkin.  

"That the writer?" the man asked. 

"Indeed he is!" I ran to the counter. Forget the egg—I reached into another pocket and yanked out my paperback. "Among many other things, he wrote this."

The man's mustache curved up with his smile. "He wrote that? I had no idea."

"Have you read it?"

"Can't say that I have," the man said. "But I just saw the movie that came out. Hell of a flick."

"Sorry?"

Propping the magazine up, the man showed me. A spaceman was on the cover, the bubble helmet holding a familiar face. "That Matt Damon sure can act, can't he?"

"No," I said.

"What do you mean? You ever see them Jason Bourne movies?"

"No, Matt Damon can act. I mean no, as in Ray Bradbury didn't write that movie."

The man checked my book again. "Says The Martian on it."

"Chronicles," I corrected. "The Martian Chronicles. The Martian is another story."

"You sure?"

My lips were drawn tight. "Positive," I said.

"Who wrote The Martian then?"

"How should I know?"

The man sucked on his teeth. "If I was on town council, I'd give that Martian writer a day here."

"You already did.”

"Come again?"

I waved my hand in the air. Bits of egg flew. "Forget it, forget it. Which way to the park?"

"Head on down the road and hitch a right on Sixth Avenue. Lead you right there." I was already heading out the door, so the man raised his voice to finish. 

"And you tell your writer that The Martian fella beat him to the punch!"

***

I sped down the highway and took a squealing turn on Sixth. The avenue was really a street, an old one at that, lined with shabby houses wet with rain. They all looked the same, the same, the same, as they would in any old suburb in any town in the Midwest. Nothing special. Nothing to write home about. Nothing to write about period. 

My forehead was dangerously close to bleating my car horn in Morse code for SOS. How could they not know Ray Bradbury? How?

The windshield fogged over from my heavy breathing. I had enough sense to stop. The car swung to the curb. The engine died. I collapsed against the headrest, my eyes closed. 

The only sound now was the rain. It kept falling all around me, as it always had. As it always would. The moment felt like forever.  

"Don't go."

The inside of the car was as steamy as a greenhouse. That didn't stop me from shivering after hearing those two words.

Mostly because I didn't say them.

"I know what you're thinking. You can't leave now." 

My eyes were still closed—squeezed shut—in fear. The voice came from the backseat. Being a tall man, I had the driver's seat slid all the way back. We were so close, the voice and I, that trying to open the car door and bolt would be useless. 

Why didn't I check the backseat? You're always supposed to check the backseat, aren't you? 

"How should I know, mister? Why are you asking me?" 

Mister? What mugger says mister?

"I'm not a mugger. You think too much, you know that?" The voice sighed. "Don't go. I know you want to leave. But you can't. You shouldn't."

I found my own voice, even though it was laced with adrenaline. "This isn't the place I thought it was. The place I wanted it to be. Because…" I bit my lip at my next thought, held it back as long as I could. 

The thought had been waiting years to be said. It wasn't going to wait any longer. 

"…Because my dreams are too big for it.”

"Geez, now that's a real sad thought, mister." Somehow, the voice got closer, a murmur in a seashell. "If I was you, I'd say you should turn that around. The world's gotta be big enough to hold your dreams. And if you got big dreams, you gotta stretch the world to make em fit. Even if the world hollers, your dreams are always gonna be hollerin louder to get in."

My skin was tingling with every word. The smell of old pages, the pattering rain, the voice. I was in a new world behind my closed eyes. 

"Who are you?” 

"Doug Spaulding." Then the voice laughed, clean and pure. "Nah, I'm just joshing you. But listen mister, you should get a move on. You're real close to where you want to go. Take a look."

I opened my eyes. The windshield had cleared enough for me to see the street dip down to a park. There were a dozen white tents nestled against a modest river. Somewhere, I heard music. 

"Finally," I said. 

Then I looked in the rearview mirror. At some point during my manic driving, I had knocked it askew. It was too cock-eyed to see the street, but from my view, it framed the backseat perfectly. 

A boy sat back there. 

Like me, he had dark hair and pale eyes. He wore a shirt I recognized on a gut-punching level. Even though they were backwards in the reflection, the words across his chest were easy for me to read.

Mars is Heaven! 

"You should take a look see, mister," the boy said. "Before it's too late."

There was a moment of awestruck wonder before I turned around. As I did, I thought of the saying objects in mirror are closer than they appear. They don't have that saying on the rearview mirror, do they? 

Because by the time I looked back, the boy was gone. 

***

The rain had let up, so I went down the hill on foot. In all honesty, driving the car was the last thing I wanted to do. What if the boy appeared to me in the passenger seat to point out good parking spots? My nerves were already on edge. Walking was the way to go. 

Not just walking—power-walking. Marching. One step after another, I strode down the street, my shoes squelching in the puddles. It was the only way to keep my mind tethered inside my head. 

The boy. I saw a boy in the backseat of my car. And not just any boy, but…

I started running. The edges of my windbreaker sailed behind me. It wasn't the speed of a twelve-year-old, that was for sure. But my pace was pretty fast, and getting faster with every step.     

The rain was a silver mist hitting my face. Curtains of gray were pulled back, and the festival came closer and became more real. 

The music grew louder as I passed an old gazebo. I had enough time to peek inside and spot a teenager before a wall of speakers. The glow of his laptop highlighted his acne. The music he was deejaying sounded like a garbage disposal grinding glass. 

My stomach flipped over. Where was the brass band? The trumpets and trombones playing The Star-Spangled Banner? The good old-fashioned jamboree that Bradbury had written about in so many of his stories?

Forget it!

I ran to the cluster of tents near the river. There was a sidewalk where vendors had set up shop. 

Okay, surely here, right? Here there should be tattooed men selling gunpowder tea by the pound; sideshow magicians sawing beautiful ladies in boxes; witchy women hawking herbs and potions; a man with brilliantine hair offering lightning rods against future storms. There should be popcorn and root beer and candy in cellophane twists. Shouts and whispers and laughter. The warmth of summer with the bittersweet twang of autumn lying in the shadows. 

Here should be the festival, and what a festival it should be!

Only a few brave folks dallied on the sidewalk. I dodged their umbrellas and ducked into the first tent I could. 

A dumpy woman in a rain slicker greeted me from her folded chair. "Crummy weather, huh? Always rain for arts and crafts." She shooed her hands at the gray sky. "Come again some other day, and all that." 

"No, this is a Radberry day. Day Braybury? Bur…"

"Come again?"

"Bray.” I stopped, shook my head. Panting from my run, I wasn’t making sense. 

"Not from around here, are you?" the woman asked. She held out her hands. "If you see anything you like, the prices are marked. Red stickers mean they're already sold." She paused, her voice distressed. "What's the matter?"

Plenty. Lining every square inch of the tent were pieces of shellacked wood. Painted on them were cloying clichés. 

Let go and let God. 

Dance like no one's watching. 

Unattended children will be given espresso and a free puppy. 

Not one original thought in the whole tent. And to think of the number of trees chopped up in order to say bupkis! Where was Bradbury’s poetry? The words popping like firecracker strands as you read them?   

Between my panting breaths, I found myself jerking in paroxysms. I wasn't quite sure if I was laughing or crying. Perhaps a weird species of both. 

On her table, she had propped up a board, as long as a Louisville slugger. 

Life isn't about the number of breaths you take but the number of moments that take your breath away. 

It was true, wasn't it? This was one of those moments. I was having trouble sucking in any air whatsoever. There was a red sticker on that monstrosity.   

Nearly all the signs had red stickers. 

The woman bristled at the sounds I was making. Her tone was all business. "Sir, if you're not planning to buy anything, I'd like you to leave."

I gulped enough air to speak. "What day is it today?"

"Sir, I don't know what you're trying—"

"The day. Just tell me what day it is."

The woman crossed her arms. "Saturday."

"Now, who's day is it?"

"Lower your voice, sir." The woman glanced around me to anyone on the sidewalk. From the corner of my eye, I saw umbrellas bobbing slowly towards me. Muffled voices. I paid them no mind.

"But it's a simple question," I said (or screamed). "All you have to do is give me a name. To whom do you owe this day? Who? Who?"

A hand dropped onto my shoulder. It was a large hand. The voice, which spoke behind me, matched the hand in size. "Everything okay here, Caroline?"

"Oh thank God, Frank," Caroline said. "This man here is out of sorts. How many more transients we gonna get from the city? Nuthouses must be full there."

The hand squeezed tighter. "Okay, buddy, time to go."

Without looking back, I pitched forward out of the man's grasp. My full attention was still on Caroline, she of the plywood platitudes. "Answer the question," I said. "It's just a name. All you have to do is say the name."

"Buddy, what did I say?" Two hands clamped down this time, one for each shoulder. "You have got to get outta here."

My breathing was out of control. My tongue was spastic. "Dandelion! Fahrenheit! Martians! Wicked!"

"You see, Frank? Total gibberish." Caroline shooed her hands again as she did with the bad weather—this time in my direction. "Ruining a perfectly nice craft fair, if you ask me."

"Nice? Nice? You call these nice? These are abominations!" I felt the hands pull me back on my heels. One of my legs knocked down a sign (Children are angels in disguise). 

"Say his name!” I yelled. “Don't you know it?"

By now, the entire festival crowd had gathered around to watch. Many of them were the craft people who were selling other tchotchkes from their tents: the lawn gnomes, the craft jewelry, the knitted cat sweaters. Umbrellas had gathered like storm clouds as the few customers came closer. From the gazebo, the deejay had killed his scratchy music to see what all the fuss was about. 

"That's quite enough," the man holding me said. "You're a step away from public disturbance, do you hear me?"

"You don't know his name, do you?" I said.  

Caroline had picked up her fallen sign before glaring at me. "Do you even know who you're talking about?"

That did it.

"The man who will live forever!" I yelled. 

My body took over, just as it had when I found my childhood under the bed. I plunged my hand deep into my jacket, felt the pages underneath my fingers, a warm ghost. I wanted her to see. I wanted all of them to see. This was why I was here. Why Waukegan had this day. Take a look see. Remember. 

But when I tried to yank the book out, my hand got stuck in the pocket. There was something gooey in there, making my hand sticky. Then I remembered the hard-boiled egg from this morning. What was left had congealed into paste. I kept trying to pull the book out, to show them, but only succeeded in lifting the flap of my jacket. The corner of my book poked through the fabric. It thrust in Caroline's direction. 

Caroline, meanwhile, had gone pale. I had no idea why. Someone shouted from the crowd, and then I understood. Too late.  

"He's got a gun!"

Frank tackled me to the sidewalk. The rain puddle on the concrete reflected my face as I hurtled towards it. The perfect O of my mouth, my hair flying back from my temples. Then I met my reflection. 

And that was when things went dark. 

***

"I've seen people use a banana to hold up a bank. Or their finger, if they're in a pinch. They still do that, you know." 

"Guh." 

"Then again, we got kids bringing squirt guns painted black or, hell, even the real thing, and we have to deal with it."

"Guhhhh."

"Acourse, this day and age, everyone has a camera phone taking video. Good thing for you, seeing as how you were a little ballistic. I was a tad too touchy with taking you down, but we won't press charges if you don't. All good." 

Frank shifted his bulk in the driver's seat. He spoke to me through the metal grate separating us. "Though you may be the first to go viral for assault with a deadly book." 

"Guhhhh." 

I leveled my head and tested my nose. It had stopped bleeding, which was good. It still throbbed like a leech in the middle of my face, which wasn't so good.

"Nothing a couple of days on ice won't fix," Officer Frank said. His cruiser's radio crackled with static. He turned it down. "Where's your car? I'll drive you to where you need to go."

"Gyou know wha?" I swallowed what was dripping from my nose and down my throat before speaking again. "To be honest, gyou can just let me out here. I'll walk. I need it."

"You sure? Station's on the other side of town from the highway." He gestured through the windshield. The squat Waukegan PD was right outside. "It'll be a walk."

"This place is smaller than you think," I said. 

Frank shrugged. "No skin off my nose." He grimaced at my schnoz. "Sorry."

He opened up the back of the cruiser and helped me out. "No hard feelings between you and me," he said, "though I don't think Caroline will be doing any business with you."

"Agree to disagree," I said—which was probably carved on one of her signs. "Just point me where I need to go." 

"It's easy. You see that building down there? That's the old library. Go past it to the next major intersection, and that'll be Sixth Avenue. Hitch a left and it's the long walk back to the park." Real concern washed over Frank’s face. "You concussed or something?"

I was, in truth, swaying on my feet. "You said the old library?"

"Ayuh. The first one Waukegan called its own. You sure you ain't concussed?"

"Been a pleasure officer, but I best get going." 

If Officer Frank said anything, it was lost in my tailwind, swallowed by the rain.

***

The former Waukegan Public Library was a gray, regal stone building floating in clouds of rainy mist. I stood on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Evergreen Terrace looking at it. The traffic light behind me was flashing yellow for precisely no traffic. The light sent my shadow out and up the library's steps. I crossed the street to follow it.

Beyond the library, down the slope of Sixth Ave, was Lake Michigan. Through the grayness, there were glints and flashes of the its dark blue waters. People who had never seen the Great Lakes are surprised at how much they look like freshwater oceans. How vast they are. How limitless they can feel.

Crossing Evergreen Terrace, I tried taking a deep breath to catch the tangy whiff of the lake…and came up short. My nose was swollen shut. I couldn't smell my own armpits let alone the lake beyond the library. I had to imagine the smell, and imagining gave me comfort. It made everything more real. 

There were only a few stone steps, and I took them two at a time. Corinthian columns framed the front door. Cupping my hands against the glass, I peeked in. 

Inside the main hall, there was only one window that wasn't covered up. The weak light coming through it cast a gloomy pall. Inside, the bookcases looked like ribcages picked clean. There were no books. It was a husk of a library.

I tested the door handle—locked, of course. That didn't stop me from rattling the handle hard enough to make the door shudder.

It just couldn't be. Ray Bradbury had walked up these very steps as a child and found his first books here. He discovered his love here. And though there was some new library elsewhere in town, one with a plaque commemorating him (or maybe even a statue), it wasn't the same. It happened here for him, his love of books. This was where he should be remembered…

"You can't get in that way."

Behind me, through the mist, I saw the silhouette of a boy. He stood on the Sixth Avenue side of the library, on the grassy slope that led to the lake. He took a step closer and he grew a few inches. His dark hair came into view. Then his pale eyes…

"Whoa, easy!" he said. "You okay? I didn't mean to scare you."

"I'm fine," I said. "It's just been a day." 

"I can tell.”

Now in full view, he was older, I saw. The angle and the fog had played tricks on me. His cheeks sported scuff on his cheeks nearly as dark as his punk rock hairdo. Colorful tattoos spilled from his t-shirt down both of his arms. One on his right forearm caught my attention: a horse from an old-fashioned carousel, leaping on its brass pole. He pointed at me, and I saw splotches of color on his hands.  

"Like, what happened to your nose?" he said. 

"I was in an altercation with one of Waukegan's finest.” 

"Lemme guess," he said. "Was it Frank Stanley?"

"How did you know?"

He tapped his nose, which had a slight kink. "Oh, I know a signature Stanley Slamley when I see one. You could say him and I have a history," he said, smiling. "Why do you want in the old library?"

"You wouldn't understand. I'm not sure I understand myself."

"Try me." 

"All right, here goes," I said, bracing myself. "Did you know about the festival this weekend?"

"Sure," he said. "I've lived here my whole life. It's totally sucked for the last coupla years."

"You're right about that.” I licked my lips and went with this teen's vibe. "But do you know why it, like, really sucks?"

A light swept across his eyes. He saw my look and knew. Just like two people in a crowded room can catch each other's glances and be reassured they're not the only ones who are crazy or in love or have a fire burning them up inside. 

With a touch so tender it surprised me, he placed one confetti-colored hand on the library. "I do," he said. "Most of the town's forgotten."

"I haven't," I said. "I've chased him from Chicago all the way here. And someone…something…told me I would find him." I gripped the wrought iron railing. "Now I'm not so sure."

The kid took his hand away from the wall. Specks of green, pink, and blue were left there, a constellation of a hand. "Come down here and lemme show you something," he said. He started walking down the slope. 

I thought for a second about taking the steps, but then didn't. With my hands still on the railing, I leapt up and over the top bar, landing on the wet grass. I was more than just young at heart. 

The path descended into the misty fog. It was hard to judge where the library was in it, though I knew it had to be close. Every now and then, there was a spark of red or yellow or purple floating by like the debris left from a comet. It was the kid's fingerprints. His specks of color on the wall kept me in perspective. 

After about a hundred paces, the hill leveled out. The back half of the library was below the heaviest band of fog. I could see the weeds and old trees now through a thin scrim of silver. Everything had a moonshine to it. There was a chain link fence hemming the alcove in. Beyond that was the lake. 

"Over here." 

He stood next to a row of overgrown bushes. At his feet was a backpack, one of those big black messenger bags I saw kids wearing in the city. The flap was open. Paper spilled out of it—heavy paper, folded and cut. They looked like the snowflakes you would cut up as a kid, the moment before you opened it up to see the pattern you made.    "You want to see him?" 

I squinted at him. "How?"

He showed me the can of spray paint in his hand. He shook it with an experienced flick of the wrist. The ball bearing rattled inside it. "I was just about to finish before I heard you tugging on the door. Thought it was Slamley." He pointed to the bushes. "Shall we?"

We slipped through the shrubs, some type of topiary gone mad. He pushed the last of the bushes away.

And I saw Ray Bradbury. 

Etched in silver paint as shiny as a rocket ship, his face was a story tall. He smiled out at us. His eyes looked out to the lake. To the sky.

The beautiful thing was that there was a sky on the library wall too, a night sky with stars. A massive streak of purples and blacks and blues caught them. The stars shined in silver constellations. Lions. Dinosaurs. Dandelions.

Below the sky was a swath of green grass, each blade painted in perspective. The only difference between the grass on the wall and the real weeds at my feet was the color. 

"My god," I said. "How did you do this?"

He walked past me and hunkered down. "Practice, man. I saw it in my head and needed to get on the wall." 

He pulled out a piece of that heavy paper from his back pocket and put it against an unfinished section—a block of dark green that looked flat compared to the rest of the mural. He aimed his nozzle and shot bright green plumes of paint. When he pulled the paper off the wall, the texture of grass popped like the rest of the lawn. 

"You are the illustrated man," I said. 

"Represent," he said. "That's my tagger name, bee-tee-dubs. See?" He pointed to a spastic signature in the corner. I took his word that it was his nom de plume because I couldn't read a single letter of it. 

He stood back, looking over his work. "It's done," he said. 

"It's incredible."

"My mind was blown every time I read his stuff. Least I could do is pay tribute to him. He even got me into tattoos." 

He pushed back his t-shirt and bared his bicep to me. My skin broke out in gooseflesh when I saw the spires of a glass city. The Martians were golden. They looked up at a rocket scratching fire across his shoulder. "It's my favorite book of his.”

"Mine too," I said, reaching into my jacket. 

Here is my dream.

Here is my love. 

***

In the last twenty-four hours, my paperback had been plastered on my sleeping face, covered in egg, warped with rainwater, mistaken for a firearm, and manhandled by an officer of the law. But I'd be damned if the pages weren't in working order and every word was accounted for. 

Joe Keller (a.k.a. Da Illuztrated Man) showed me where it belonged. 

At the far end of his mural, Joe had painted a remarkably realistic house on that green, green grass. It was modeled after Bradbury's home or, at the very least, the home he describes in Dandelion Wine and other stories. Everything from the wraparound porch to the lightning rod was so detailed and proportioned I could have sworn its painted front door was real. 

In this case, it was. 

Joe took out the wedge of stencil paper in the jamb and pulled open the door. We both walked inside. 

The basement of the Waukegan Library was in the same state of disuse and dust as the main floor. Stacks of old wooden desks and chairs created a maze we wriggled ourselves through. They trembled and creaked, threatening to tip over. 

Soon enough, claustrophobia washed over me. I was back at my office in Chicago, looking at endless cubicles, lost forever in the buzz of fluorescent lights. I left one desk only to be buried under an avalanche of them here. 

"Are you sure about this?" I said. 

When I hopped over the last desk, I saw Joe smiling at me. "Absolutely," he said. There was a sign on the wall above him: RESERVES. He jumped up to high-five the sign and went around a corner. A light clicked on. I looked in and gasped.

While the rest of the library was a haunted house, someone had forgotten to clean out the reserves. 

A nook of shelves held the last books the citizens of Waukegan had requested from their old library. Index cards stuck out from the books, the handwriting too faded to read dates and names. My eyes ran across the spines of the books. I didn't need my nose to smell the buttery must of old pages in my mind. 

Joe sat at a desk situated in the nook. The lamp he had turned on made the colors of his tattoos even more vibrant. "They were alphabetized by borrowers' last names," he said. "The more I looked, though, the more I saw something pretty awesome. So, I did some rearranging." He pointed to a shelf on my right. 

I read the row of books at my eye level. Then the row above and below the first. My shoulders hit the shelves behind me as I read all of Joe's new section. Every title had words I knew quite well. Words like Dandelion and Fahrenheit and October and Wicked.

"They're all his books.” I was twelve again, turning pages in the lamplight.

"He is a hometown boy. Represent, you know?" Joe lifted his chin in my direction. "It's a tight fit, but I see some space at two o' clock there."  

It took some finagling, but I managed to fit my book on the least jam-packed shelf. On it was every possible printing of The Martian Chronicles I could imagine. Now I wasn't the last Martian after all. It felt good seeing my book among friends. 

"What do you plan on doing with all of these?" I said. "From the looks of it, these books are orphans."

"To be honest," Joe said, "I was thinking about doing a Bradbury book exchange. 'Give a Ray, take a Ray' sort of thing. What do you think?"

"I think I want in."

***

What I thought was going to be my only visit to Waukegan turned out to be the first of many. So many, in fact, that I've lost track of the details from each visit. 

Should I tell you about the time I met Joe's girlfriend Erin (a.k.a. Clarisse-451), who gave Da Illuztrated Man his own tats? When she showed me her Instagram and the photos of Joe's Bradbury murals in the nooks and crannies of Waukegan? 

How about when we started blogging about the old library and its reserves—and got responses from folks in a flash? 

Or, maybe, would you like to know about the legal thicket we had to tear through in to claim those reserves for our organization, Someone Reading This Way Comes? 

Perhaps how Officer Frank “Slamley” Stanley swayed the vote in the town council by becoming a supporter of S.R.T.W.C.—especially when my concussion from a certain incident started flaring up? 

No, those are scenes from other stories, ones that other members of Someone Reading could tell much better. What I'd like to show you is our first anniversary as Bradbury enthusiasts the following summer. The summer the town woke up again. 

The summer of the re-launched Dandelion Wine Festival.

***

It is a cobalt blue sky this June weekend, and the tents reaching up to the clouds are calico patches from every circus you wished you had gone to as a kid. Joe and Erin's clan of punk performers are dressed up as characters from Bradbury's books, some broad and others obscure. They've all read several pounds of short stories from our reading groups. Plus, they are wild about causing a town-sanctioned ruckus.  

Walking through the rows of tents, you see Vesuvio the Lava Sipper literally breathing fire. There are astronauts in silver suits bouncing in slow motion. Firemen with soot-covered smiles recite Shakespeare. Joe Da Illuzstrated Man performs his namesake in one tent with Erin. Both of them paint the faces of wide-eyed kids who keep peeking around at the passing wonders.

Amid the audacious performers, the local artisans from festivals past are reinvigorated from the energy. Their tents display paintings and drawings of rockets and Ferris wheels and haunted houses. A local metal smith has welded whimsical lightning rods. Even Caroline has a new batch of wooden signs, all quotes and lines from the writer himself. A great plank of driftwood sits on the table, the red Sold sticker having a former nutcase’s initials. The plank has a great line on it, one about how good friends stick their fingers in each other's clay, making wondrous, new shapes. 

She's a good one, Caroline. She's come around about doing business with me. 

And what about me? Where am I in all of this joy? 

Walk a little farther. 

***

The summer afternoon has grown long. The light is turning to the gold that autumn does so well. It is a bittersweet light, filling you with anticipation for what's to come. Feeling it in the moment, though, you are keenly aware about enjoying this weather now, because it only lasts for so long. It is beautiful right now. 

After the sideshow freaks, the local artists, the food stands of popcorn and root beer and Dandelion Wine soda (bottled by a brewery in Chicago); past the gazebo where a pimply-faced kid plays trumpet with a full brass band; beyond the gimcrackery and good noise and laughter of the crowds, you see a tent has been set up. 

The sign says it is The Green Town Book Exchange. The shelves of paperbacks and hardcovers proclaim it to your senses—these are books! See them, smell them, read them! Running your eyes across the covers, you see vintage Bradbury novels, short story collections, poetry, biographies. He's all here, every word of him, but you don't know where to start. 

That's when you see the man arranging books on a table. He is dressed in blue coveralls like a janitor. When he stands up, you see the name Will H. stitched in red on his chest. He is a tall man, older, though he has a glint in his eye like a kid wanting to run a footrace on a summer day. He explains it's a costume like the others on the midway—except his is a little subtle. He was a boy in his Bradbury story, and now he has grown up. 

He explains that all the books are on loan eternal. Take a book, but be sure to bring it back—or leave another one in its place (that is the one rule indeed). That way, everyone keeps reading. Mr. Bradbury would have loved it.

Will—that's his name as far as you're concerned—looks at you and asks if you have any questions. 

You do. Any recommendations for a first-time reader?

And Will beams the happiest smile you've ever seen on a grown man. For a moment, he really does look like a kid. Maybe the kid this man once was. The kid he always will be, no matter how much time may change his face. 

He plucks a book from a shelf and hands it to you. It is a yellowing paperback with strange figures on the cover. It smells a little like eggs, but mostly of age and warmth. It's a rich smell. Despite yourself, you find the smell very comforting. You even tell Will so, and he nods with approval. 

"From the last to the first," he says, "let me tell you that Mars can be heaven. Enjoy it."

You want to ask him what he means. But before you do, he wishes you a good evening, smiling and waving. Then he turns to look down the slope of Sixth Avenue, past the old library to Lake Michigan. The water is living gold in this light, capturing the glow of the long summer day like embers from a fire, flashing and flashing until dusk. 

You've lived here all your life, and you never took the time to see how beautiful the lake really is. How vast. 

Turning back to the heat and music of the festival, you walk with your new book and a lasting image of the man… 

A shadow casting a shadow, waiting for the first stars to appear. 

Author’s Note: In December 2017 the city of Waukegan, Illinois, announced plans for the opening of the Ray Bradbury Experience Museum. The museum is set to open in August 2020. Learn more about the museum and its important role in preserving the legacy of Ray Bradbury here.