17) A Fundraiser

The town’s library needed a new roof and no one on the library board wanted to ask Mona Felderhoff for a hefty donation. “She has already given so much,” Dan Whitehouse declared at the monthly business meeting. “We have to show a little initiative, find other ways to raise funds. Mona can’t be our only means of support.”

“We can have a poetry night for the whole community,” Blonde Belinda said as she raised her hand.

Dan Whitehouse looked confused. “You’re off-topic, Belinda.”

“We’ll have one keynote poet and then everyone who reads their poetry will ask for donations. It will be wonderful. Everyone in the community can be involved.”

Walker Bugh couldn’t see how everyone in Bilton would come out of the closet with dusty poems in hand, but she and Dan were a minority at the final ballot.

“No one had a better idea,” Dan Whitehouse said the next afternoon as they shelved and sorted books, but Walker Bugh could see his volunteer optimism was drooping.

“I think Blonde Belinda got mostly “run-away groom” sympathy votes. She did perk up quite a bit at the end of the meeting.”

“Yeah,” agreed Dan. “But who’s going to show up?”

“We definitely need free food and a 50-50 drawing. Maybe we can display some poetry books at the checkout desk,” Walker Bugh suggested. “It beats the bottom shelf in aisle three.”

“We need an established poet like Natalie Diaz to fill the room,” sighed Dan.

“In our dreams. I doubt she’ll fly in from Phoenix for a ‘meet the author’ afterglow and a good meal but I would love her to sign my copy of Postcolonial Love Poem. But realistically, how about Adrian Link? I know he’s a bit of a maverick, but that may be the draw.”

Dan threw a pile of paperbacks into the recycle bin. “I just threw out his last chapbook. It hasn’t been checked out in seven years.”

Walker Bugh retrieved Adrian’s slim volume from the wastebasket. “Eternal Darkness may not have been checked out, but he’s done public readings all over the area. He may have sold so many of his books, no one needs to check them out. He’s the closest we’ve got to a local established poet.”

Walker Bugh knew she was grasping at straws. Adrian lived in a cabin outside of town and the place probably should have been torn down. It was rumored he had no electricity, used a hand pump, and an outhouse. Adrian dressed in a dark cape and black beret pushed on a wild mass of gray hair. Despite his eccentricities, his poetry was quite good, although his anti- establishment comments between poems bordered on the limits of free speech.

“It’s not Natalie Diaz,” Dan said.

“It’s the best we can get.”

“I guess you’re right. But who gets to take him to dinner?”

Dan and Walker stared at each other, then smiled. And with a high-five they both cried, “Belinda”!