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Wants to be a golf pro.
Heads for Princeton.
Hopes to be rich.
Charles Woodley Nesbitt.
The same goofy teeth, ears, and multitudinous freckles!
I placed the two annuals to study these seeming “twins.”
Seemed? No! Absolutely the same!
Rain drummed the high tin roof.
“Hell, Charlie, hell, Winton!”
I carried the books up front where Mr. Lemley, as old as his books, peered at me over his Ben Franklin specs.
“Found those, did you? Take ‘em. Free.”
“Mr. Lemley, look …”
I showed him the pictures and the names.
“I’ll be damned.” He snorted. “Same family? Brothers? Naw. Same fella, though. How’d you find this?”
“Just did.”
“Give me the collywobbles. Coincidence. One in a million births, right?”
“Yeah.” I turned the pages back and forth, over and over. “But what if all the faces in all the annuals in all the towns in all the states, hell, what if they all look alike!
“What’d I just say?” I cried, hearing myself.
What if all the faces in all the annuals were the same!
“Outta the way!” I shouted.
Tearing up the cabbage patch is how Mr. Lemley told it later. If the God of Vengeance and Terror was Shiva with many arms, I was a small but louder god, with a dozen hands seizing books, cursing at revelations, frights, and elations, alone, as witness to a big parade marching nowhere, with separate bands and different choirs in towns strewn across a blind world. From time to time as I leaped through the stacks, Mr. Lemley brought coffee and whispered: “Rest up.”
“You don’t understand!” I cried.
“No, I don’t. How old are you?”
“Forty-nine!”
“Act like a nine-year-old running up the aisle at a bad movie, peeing.”
“Good advice!” I ran and came back.
Mr. Lemley checked the linoleum for wet spots. “Continue.”
I seized more annuals:
“Ella, there’s Ella again. Tom, there’s Tom who looks like Joe, and Frank, a dead ringer for Ralph. Ringer, hell, spittin’ image! And Helen who’s a twin to Cora! And Ed and Phil and Morris to fit Roger and Alan and Pat. Christ!”
I had two dozen books butterflied, some torn in my haste. “I’ll pay, Mr. Lemley, I’ll pay!”
