Читать книгу The Devil's Dust - C.B. Forrest - Страница 8

That first night off the Greyhound he takes a room at the Station Hotel, the only real hotel in town. The old guy behind the desk is watching a hockey game on one of those black and white TVs that also has a built-in radio. The arrival of a guest seems to catch him by surprise, and he looks up from the little TV with his mouth open. A quick scan of the room keys hanging behind the desk indicates the hotel has full vacancy.

“Looking for a room, are you?” the old man asks.

The disembodied sports commentator talks excitedly through the TV’s mono speaker. You can hear the threshing crowd, this rising sea of voices joined in passion. Players are in a corner, fighting for control of the puck. Someone is winning and someone is losing.

“As long as it’s got a bed,” the visitor says, and sets his heavy duffle bag on the hardwood floor, straightens his back.

The old man reaches behind for a room key. He places the key on the desk, licks his thumb, and flips a yellow invoice pad to a new page, looks around for a pen.

“Forty-eight, tax in.”

The guest pays the night clerk with the last of his American money, having come north in a meandering way through Michigan for no other reason than boredom and the availability of time.

“You want a coffee or anything? I could brew a pot,” the clerk offers. His eyes tell the guest that he would welcome the company to pass the long hours.

“It’s been a long day, thanks,” the guest replies, and then hefts his duffle and walks over to the broad staircase with its thick wood banister.

The clerk nods. “You’re probably tired, don’t feel like talking tonight.”

A wayfarer’s hotel, the hardwood of the Station is gouged and well worn from the heavy boots and hard lifestyle of its nightly occupants over the long decades, mostly miners coming in or going out, hydro workers following the power lines ever northward, and once in a while a platoon of soft-faced geologists or engineers from the head offices down in Toronto. The four-storey hotel sits across the street from the old train station. The train comes through town just twice a week now, Tuesdays and Saturdays, but at one time, back in the 1970s, it arrived like clockwork each morning.

The only thing keeping the hotel in business these days is the one-room tavern located off the west wing of its main floor. A pool table sits out front near the big window with the faded neon sign advertising Labatt 50, four round tables and six stools at the bar, a dartboard in a dark corner. The felt on the pool table is bald and torn, and the urinal in the men’s room often clogs and overflows, sending a slow cascade of piss trickling down the hall. The place is only ever a third full at best if there is a good hockey game on, but the business is regular and can be counted on. The draft beer is cheap, and Terry, the owner and bartender and janitor, isn’t averse to letting a regular’s tab grow beyond what might be considered prudent in these tough economic times.

Room 27 is small, spare and simple. A twin bed with a handmade afghan folded over the bottom half, a desk in front of the window looking out on Main. The street at this hour is bathed in the false yellow of street lamps, still and empty. Nothing to do in Ste. Bernadette on a Friday, let alone a Sunday night. Dead of January. Dead, period. The guest sets the duffle by the foot of the bed and closes the faded curtains to mute the street lamps and the silver glow from a nearly full moon.

There is an old calendar from a tool company tacked to the wall near the bathroom, stale-dated by four months. Someone has circled October 15 and scrawled the words Out of Ste. Bernadette! It is underlined not once but twice. He figures he knows how the author must have felt in this town, in this little room: the walls closing in, the town itself shifting inward, smothering, growing smaller by the hour. It plays tricks with a man’s head.

He unties and kicks off his boots then goes and takes a long piss. The flow is uneven, and at one point he clenches his eyes to the effort. The low-watt bulb makes the stained porcelain sink, toilet, and tub appear older than they are, chipped and badly used, like his reflection in the square of mirror. Fifty-nine or a hundred and six, it’s a coin toss. He splashes water on his face and sees that he needs a shave and a haircut. Nothing that can’t wait another day, another week. There is no one to impress.

He pulls off his clothes and showers in the lukewarm water to wash away the sweat and smells from the Greyhound. Long hours of highway from Toronto, then pushing back up across the border to the Sault, the whole time sitting next to a great-grandmother who smelled of sharp cheese and eye-watering lavender. And she had wanted to talk to him about everything that was going on with her and her children, the demise of the modern family, the shame of the country as a whole, his lost generation. Pretending to sleep, eyes closed to keep the old woman at bay, his mind had fluttered with dark thoughts, the tangled briar patch of fear or anxiety that seemed to be part of coming home after a long time gone. Or it was the illness, his being sick, and the game of pretending it was not the truth.

In boxer shorts and sports socks he stands at the sink and rummages through his shaving kit for the pain pills. What are they for again? A gunshot wound or a strained oblique muscle, a broken heart, a hang nail — it hardly matters anymore. He has long since passed the destination where pain is possible to pin down with any accuracy or honesty; it is now as much a part of his biological chemistry as carbon, oxygen. He gobbles three capsules and washes them down with a mouthful of tap water. The water tastes of sulphur and smells of moist, fecund earth. The taste of Ste. Bernadette; the taste of home.

And so Charlie McKelvey crawls beneath the sheets, pulls the quilt up to his chest, and waits there in the darkness for sleep to show him a little mercy.