Читать книгу Flood Moon - Chuck Radda - Страница 10

Walter Trucks had a ready explanation for the previous night's dusting of snow.

"Around here winter comes all of a sudden, then it leaves real slow."

Maybe explanation isn't the right word, but he seemed pretty blasé about it, dismissing the inch or so accumulation as not worth noting.

"Of course now if you want to leave town," he said, "you have to go west. When the plows get onto Beartooth and knock down the last of the drifts, Brenda'll start driving her route again."

He looked at his watch. "That'll be in May. How 'bout some eggs?"

In his red plaid flannel bathrobe, he looked a little less emaciated than he had the previous evening, but its length, or lack thereof, accented a pair of stalk-like ankles that exacerbated that ungainly appearance—Lincolnesque, I suppose, especially in some more subtle areas: the hollow cheekbones, the skinny fingers, everything elongated and skeletal. But the facial hair that might have completed the picture was absent.

I took a pass on the eggs. I had never been told to watch my cholesterol, but I didn't feel very optimistic about the health benefits of an all-egg diet. I remembered what Mrs. O'Leary had said about Walter's not having mastered the side dishes, but I risked it.

"Just toast."

"Fine, but you're paying for eggs."

He poured me a coffee, then plunked a sixty-four-ounce jar of some generic grape jelly and a small rubber paddle on a dish towel turned placemat.

"I buy big," he said, unscrewing the lid. "How did those shoes work out?"

"They were fine, just sort of old looking, and a little small."

"I guess beggars can be choosers," he said, then filled his own mug—the wine mug I think. He pointed to a spot near the door.

"Your running shoes are dry. You're in business."

"Not with the snow. Can I get some boots around here?"

"Man, if there's anything you can get in Sage, it's boots."

"From you?"

He looked crestfallen. "I don't do boots. The lodge has 'em. Any kind, any size, any price. They got a pair in a glass case for $10,000. Interested?"

"If they come with a car I'll consider it. Are they open this early in the season?"

"It's a hunting lodge, too," Walter said. "Open all year. Hikers, backpackers, the lot. So you got Mrs. O'Leary to rent you the room?"

I nodded.

"She must have taken a liking to you."

"I lucked out. We like the same music."

"That symphony stuff?"

"Bruckner. Ever hear of him?"

"More times than I wanted to. She tried to get me interested—I couldn't do it. I mean if you listen to Beethoven at all, the difference is…I don't know…I can't appreciate all that flowery religious bullshit."

"Gee, Walter, say what you really mean."

"You asked. Anyway I've told her the same thing to her face. 'Course I'm not the one who needs a place to stay."

"I am. Next thing I knew I was hauling cartons from room to room."

Walter smiled. "We've all done that."

"Moved cartons?"

"From her previous life. Some of it belongs to her husband. She tell you that?"

"She mentioned he was gone. I guess after all this time, maybe it bothers her a little less?"

"Incredible amount of crap she has stashed away," he said. It seemed like an odd non-answer to a question I guess I hadn't asked. He didn't wait for my next one.

"Bet she was out of the house before you woke up."

"You're right. Where'd she leave so early?"

"Everyone's gotta be someplace."

Another non-answer, though this time I was pretty sure I'd asked a question. Behind his evasiveness there was some truth. At 7:00 I had taken that much-needed shower (yes, hot water on the H side where it belonged) then found a note taped to the front door. There's coffee. Pull the plug when you leave. In a spasm of unbridled hope, I looked around for a morning newspaper to read. I even peeked outside, but if there was one available, it was not being delivered to anyone's door.

"We get a weekly from Gardiner or Jackson," Walter said. "Nobody reads it—everything's on the Internet. The written word is disappearing."

"Someone still has to write it."

"Oh, I forgot," he said, feigning astonishment, "you're an English teacher—gotta protect your interests. Your running shoes, by the way. They're good ones."

"Were good ones, I guess. I don't think sloshing around last night helped them."

"They're fine. Midsole should still be good. Bet you paid over a hundred bucks for them. You must really be a runner."

"Used to be. I sort of gave it up."

"Injury, huh?"

"More or less. I just wanted to try something else."

"Taking a bus to a place like Sage—now that's something else. I don't want to see what's next on your list."

Of course I had no list. I had enjoyed running, but the break-up with Natalie took away my desire, took it away in gradual and almost indiscernible phases until, one day, I was no longer a runner and my shoes lay partially covered in the back of a small closet in my shitty new apartment. I used to run to keep fit, look good, stay healthy. With Natalie gone those reasons seemed absurd, and my weight began to rise. When it got to 190 I started looking at those insurance charts. It seemed that 190 was pretty much the right weight for a six-footer; unfortunately, I seemed unlikely to grow another three inches to achieve that height, so I started dieting. There's nothing like being miserable and then adding another form of deprivation to your day, but I got back down to 180 or so and figured I could live with being heavy. And my brand new 190-clothes still fit me at 180. Talk about good fortune!

Walter didn't know it, but when I was competing I wore those shoes only to run. I wouldn't even wear them into the house from outside. If they were on my feet, I was running. But when I gave it up, I wore them constantly for months before burying them in that closet, waiting for a night like the previous one to ruin them. I could have bored Walter with the lugubrious tale—one of many in my personal anthology—but he probably needed a confidant as little as I did. I went over and picked up the shoes. They seemed fine—dry and basically undamaged.

"Ever run a marathon, Cal?"

"Boston twice," I said. "Once in New York. I even flew to Chicago so that I could run that one."

"Thought maybe you were one of them," he said. "What was your best time?"

"You a runner, Walter?"

"Tried it. Too tall, never enough muscle, knees always sore. Even so, I know a good marathon time. What was yours?"

"Two fifty-eight and change."

Walter's eyebrows rose as if the steam from the hot coffee were lifting them. "Jesus, you were good."

"Two-thirty is good, but I was all right. I trained a lot. I thought maybe I could break 2:40 someday, but I won't now. You get to my age and improving becomes geometrically more difficult."

"Geometrically, huh? Wow, that sounds serious. What does that even mean?"

"Just, you know, it gets harder."

"Hey, you're the English teacher. I just speak the language. Maybe," he said, "if the geometry isn't too difficult, you can start running again here. Lots of flatland, a few rolling hills, not many cars to bother you. Not too many triangles either—you know how geometrically disturbing they can be."

I smiled, but just in case he had pissed me off, he pulled back again, just as he had the night before.

"There's a marathon over in Moose every spring," he said. "You could be ready."

"Moose? Is that a place?"

"Near Jackson, you'll get used to the geography soon enough. Going to train for it?"

I wanted to ask him if he had actually been listening to me when I said I had stopped running, but I had probably established myself as a runner in his mind; and like Kurt from Keene and poor Julius killed by that ceiling fan, I was either destined or doomed to remain Cal the marathoner.

"I don't know if I could run in a town named Moose. I'll think about it."

"Ever hear of a town named Buffalo?"

"Of course."

"An animal's an animal, Cal. More moose in Moose than buffalo in Buffalo."

He meant New York I think. A few nights before I had passed through a Buffalo in eastern Wyoming and I was far from convinced it lacked wildlife.

"You know," he said, moving the conversation laterally again, "once the real snow starts here, we don't plow. We just pack it down and drive on it. It's as easy to walk on as hard pavement. Easy to run on too. You think about it. I gotta go."

"Go? Where?"

"Gas station. I work there."

"What about the restaurant?"

"Closed temporarily."

"Are you a mechanic?"

"Sort of," Walter said. "Not many cars in town, but I've gotten good with snowmobiles and snowcats. Plus I help run the little convenience store in there, me and another guy and his wife. Make yourself at home here. I'll see you later."

"Wait. Wait a minute. I live at the motel."

"You can live here too, or sleep there and live here. You decide, marathon boy."

"Before you go, can you just show me around?"

"Sage? Seriously?"

"Just to get my bearings."

"Bearings," he said with incredulity. "Come on."

He opened the front door and pointed in the direction from which I had arrived the night before. "East end," he said, then pointed the other way. "West end. Any questions?"

"Boots?"

"West end. When you leave, close the door. Don't bother locking it. Once that pass is blocked, the weirdos can't get past Billings. And I doubt if you'd be stealing anything. If you did, you'd have to run away," he said with a widening grin, "and you've quit running."

He went off to get dressed before I could formulate some clever reply, then left just as I was finishing the coffee, so I poured another coffee and gave myself a tour of his place. I don't know why I was surprised by the cleanliness—I had no reason to think Walter Trucks was a slob except that he was a guy living alone—a situation that practically defines disarray and clutter. Not Walter. Even little decorative items—the ones that don't get moved very often—even they were dust free: a brass horse on a black faux marble stand, a small copper ashtray like a miniature frying pan with a flip-up cover, a bookmarked and dog-eared copy of Great Expectations, even a gold cigarette case with the monogram R.E.L. emblazoned on it. Walter had mentioned someone named Laughton the night before, and that fact quickly squelched any excitement that it might have belonged to Robert E. Lee.

I washed the cups, laced up my perfectly dry running shoes, and sidestepped all the slush on my way back to the motel. I was half expected to see Mrs. O'Leary moving the cartons back into the room, having had a change of heart. But because she wasn't there, and because "my" room was still inhabitable, I did something I had seldom done in my life: I put my clothes, what few there were, into drawers. It used to drive Natalie distracted the way I would check the two of us into a classy hotel, then live out of my suitcase. I guess lots of things I did drove her distracted. I often wonder which one of them pushed her over the brink, what specific gaffe convinced her there was no place in her life anymore for Cal Hopper.

One afternoon shortly after we had split, I met her by chance in a Trader Joe's, a place she never went and never liked. I thought I was safe there; I wasn't. She called my name while I was concentrating on some sort of dry cereal expiration date. Our relationship had ended so contentiously that my first reaction was to use the carriage as a shield, but we eased into a benign conversation. I was on my best behavior—didn't light into her for showing up at my store—and I even walked her to her car afterwards. We waited a few minutes, then said a kind of casual goodbye and drove off in the same direction. I kept seeing her in my rearview mirror and I wanted to signal for her to follow me home, to follow me anywhere; but even in my desperate loneliness I knew the thought was ludicrous. After about a half mile she turned right and I turned left. By that time I had begun crying. I pulled over and sat on the shoulder of the road and prayed that some runaway eighteen-wheeler would hit me full force and send me to hell—a different hell from the current one. It didn't happen, and when the self-pity had evolved into mere dejection, I drove the rest of the way home. I never went back to that store; to be there without Natalie would simply have been more torture. And to see her there with Don would have killed me.

At least in Sage I was safe. And two thousand miles away, where crisp October breezes swirled those oversized oak leaves into drifts, Natalie was safe from me. Still, the trade-off was tough. I had grown up with cobblestoned sidewalks, rare book emporia, and little tea shops—and had now exchanged them for muddy thoroughfares, a two-table restaurant, and a one-room motel. Months before, when I told my colleagues of my plan to retire and go west, they thought I was nuts, but I invariably tried to justify it as some sort of simplification process; and I did what everybody else without a tenable position has done for the last century and a half—cited Thoreau. Nowadays I'm usually too morose to read anyone with that rosy an outlook. I'm more apt to glance at a few passages from Nietzsche just to assure myself that the God who doesn't exist still doesn't give a damn what happens to me.

Walter was right about the snow. Though there remained a fairly even covering where the shade of the buildings afforded it some protection, whatever lay in the sunlight had grown thin and patchy, its whiteness already flecked with mud. The wintry landscape owed more to Jackson Pollack than Currier and Ives; but I was aware of its significance. Snow so early in the season gave credibility to Walter's warning that soon enough the sheer volume of it would make plowing impossible, transforming the streets into hard-packed tracks. Not yet though—I could explore with ease.

And I did have to explore, if for no other reason than to find work. Walter had not intimated the need for anyone at his service station, especially a person with no appreciable mechanical skills. As for his "restaurant," the preparation of eggs seldom requires a sous-chef. And a motel without guests probably has no real use for a greeter or a bell captain. I could perhaps be a valet at the hunting lodge, where the tips alone would permit me to starve to death by Christmas.

I knew something about menial jobs, having been through several of them after I resigned from teaching. In mid-June I sold appliances in one of the few stores that had not yet become affiliated with a large chain. I was terrible at it. It wasn't that I didn't believe in the products: I was convinced beyond question that every range on the floor would heat something and every washer would spin out clean clothes. But I just didn't care, and the customers knew it. When after a month my supervisor realized it too, I moved on to the lofty field of package delivery. Before you visualize me flying a FedEx jet with Tom Hanks, let me describe my position more accurately: I drove a seventeen-year-old greenish-gray rusted out Chevy panel truck with the front bumper missing and "Parcel's Delivered" shabbily stenciled on the side. It was not an awful occupation, despite my language sensibilities recoiling at the unnecessary apostrophe. Nobody bothered me, people were generally glad to see me, and it wasn't my vehicle so I could beat the crap out of it if I wanted to—though I was quite sure that, over the first 191,000 miles, a host of like position-holders had already disposed of most of that crap. In mid-August when the transmission on that, the company's only vehicle, stopped simply skipping gears and ceased transmitting entirely, the company folded and someone else delivered all those "parcel's."

Before I lit out for Sage, I was scheduled to begin the second week of my third job, ferrying a lazy and listless group of lawn care workers to their various autumnal assignments, then retrieving them again at some predetermined time. It kept me sane, and idle—in the first week I had so much leisure that I read half of You Can't Go Home Again, a novel for which I'd never found the time. I always loved the title and I thought, with Natalie gone and my life in shreds, it would all be more meaningful. I was wrong: Wolfe wasn't writing about me; he was writing about Wolfe, and I didn't care much if he could go home or not.

All those years of one job, now I was suddenly seeking my fourth. Objectively this was a good morning to look—a brilliantly clear day in the Mountain West with the wind barely a whisper and the air holding just the hint of a chill. The starkness disappointed me a little though. I had hoped to witness what I had seen in photographs—a sea of aspens in their fall splendor—but that splendor had been blown from the branches a month before, leaving the surroundings bereft of color—of both summer green and autumn gold. Unlike the previous evening, though, the town itself wasn't dead. As the morning wore on, the traffic on the streets and boardwalks became more and more vigorous; and even though people looked askance at me, I didn't perceive any hostility or suspicion, just a normal curiosity.

When I finally found the gas station—it was neither of the two I had seen on my arrival—I found Walter leaning over a table full of oily metal parts. His overalls were large enough to have held another similarly skinny Walter Trucks inside, but already I was growing accustomed to the way his clothes didn't fit.

"Snowmobile," he said. "Always get one in here after the first snow. Someone goes out to start it and it don't start. Or it starts and they screw it up running it on the rough ground. They tinker with it for an hour, can't get it right, then haul it down here and I get something to do."

I looked to my left and saw the rest of the machine, long, sleek, and painted the brilliant cherry red of custom cars in my childhood memories. "What's one of those go for?" I asked.

"More than the boots, probably more than you can afford," Walter said, "unless you're an eccentric of some sort. Are you an eccentric? A millionaire scrounging a room at old Mrs. O'Leary's?"

"She's not old."

"So you noticed. Don't go thinking about dating her now."

"Where would I take her, the bus stop?"

"Plenty of places—a few bars, lodge outside of town with a nice restaurant."

"I'm just saying she's not old, and while we're at it, I'm not a millionaire."

"So you don't have millions? What do you have, Cal?'

"Got thousands."

"Shit, today ain't nobody doesn't have thousands. Can't buy a goddamn car for less than twenty. You can't get one of these here snow machines for less than ten. Interested?"

"In a snow machine? Probably not."

"Ever ridden one?"

"No. They're all over the place in New Hampshire, but I never owned one, never knew anyone who did. I always found them noisy and obnoxious."

"Plenty of people like that," he said, "but we cut some space for 'em. Besides, out here it's about the only way to get from A to B in the winter. I'll take you out as soon as we get some real snow cover. Plenty of trails around. I'll try to keep the obnoxiousness to a minimum."

"You own one of these?"

"Couldn't afford it, but there's a company that tests the new ones here every year. They move in, set up shop for a couple of weeks, run those things all over the place, then pack up and go. They generally leave behind a few they've tested, kind of like a courtesy for scaring the wildlife and stinking up the air. We become post break-in testers, at least that's what it says on their books I suppose. Occasionally they pick up the old ones and leave a few new ones. So I guess yes, I have one."

"Who gets to use them?"

"Whoever needs to. If someone wants one for a weekend or something, they usually sign it out here. 'Course by then they're everywhere. Want to sign one out?"

I laughed. "Not yet, I need to find something to do."

"Oh yeah, like a job. Being an English teacher and all, you might want to work at the library."

"You have a library?"

"I think I take umbrage at that," he said, intentionally pronouncing the word with an extra syllable in the middle, "just because we're not one of your big east coast cities doesn't mean we can't read. Didn't you see my Dickens collection?"

"I saw Great Expectations on the table. Is there more?"

"In the library there is. Where do you think I got that one? At Barnes & Noble? Oh, I'm sorry, I guess I'm not supposed to have heard of a place like Barnes & Noble."

He started moving parts around, but it was just for show.

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?" I said. "All I meant..."

"I know what you meant—a town without a Starbucks shouldn't have a library. But we do. And we have almost a thousand books. If you want to put that in perspective, a medium sized library like the one up in Bozeman has about 100,000."

"What about Moose?"

"Well, Cal, you got me there. Don't know if I ever saw a library in Moose."

"Then, culturally, you're probably ahead of the curve. Where is it?"

"In the general store."

"In it?"

"In it. There's a room off to the side. Stop in and see the librarian. Maybe she can use you."

"God, Walter, you even have a librarian?"

"Part-time. Let me know how you make out. Now, I don't want to be rude, but I need to get this ignition system straightened out or this here sucker ain't gonna start until March. Buy your boots. Go explore."

"I don't have a map."

Walter laughed. "Only one street—even an Easterner can figure that out."

•••••

Sage actually comprises two parallel streets running east to west: the wide and adequately-paved Hayden Street where the bus had dropped me the evening before, and the narrower (and on this day muddier) Bridger Street to the north. There're actually some connecting streets too, but the locals call them alleys because, well, that's what they are—maybe seven or eight feet wide, looking more like mistakes in city planning than means of access. The east end of Bridger dead-ends in what appears to be a neglected field, though its being well past the growing season, I couldn't tell if it was workable farmland or not. But Hayden was a Parisian boulevard compared to Bridger, which lacked even a boardwalk. If there had been a sign warning of quicksand, I'd have thought it perfectly appropriate. Back in my classroom I used to hype The Jungle by telling my students about the scene where a child runs out into the muddy street, trips, falls, and, in the middle of town(!), drowns in the quagmire. It piqued their interest, but only those who subsequently read the novel believed it could happen. Showing them Bridger Street after a rainstorm would have eliminated a good deal of their skepticism.

Maybe everything looked different when summer parched the landscape to dust or winter locked it down; but in mud season—and there would have to be one when the Absaroka glaciers succumbed to the spring sunshine and started releasing water into the valleys below—Bridger Street must simply have been off limits.

And yet people lived there. On one side stood a group of forlorn but not deserted residences. I saw deep-lugged tire tracks in a few of the driveways and some smoke curling out of one of the aluminum stacks. On the more barren north side, one immense structure predominated. It might have been a factory at one time, though now its façade was crumbling and the erstwhile windows—at least fifty on each of its two stories—were glassless and gaping. It looked like London after the blitz—a wartime casualty of a well-aimed rocket that hadn't quite knocked it down, but should have. Like most such buildings it had a depressing quality to it—not just abandoned, but forgotten. Back in New England someone with resources would buy up an eyesore like this, renovate it, then open it as a brew-pub, a performance-art coffee house, a trendy restaurant, or some other pop culture attraction with apartments on the second floor. Here in Sage, it wasn't going to open as anything, just continue to disappear brick by brick and shard by shard.

More perplexing than depressing was Elizabeth Circle at the southern end of Hayden—a paved cul-de-sac comprising a dozen or so homes, all of which seemed minor variations on the six-room-colonial theme—even sided in what I guess were colonial colors: warm yellows, a cinnamon brown, and a green so deep that it appeared black from my somewhat distant vantage point, except where the sun tipped one of the peaks. With their meticulous landscaping and underground wiring, they might have been part of an opulent and attractive subdivision in one of Boston's northwest suburbs. But here, resting on the southern perimeter of Sage, the incongruity was jarring. It would have been easier believing that the homes had been dropped out of the sky by aliens than trying to imagine a developer actually intending to build a subdivision of colonials in the ranch-crazy West. Later, I would learn that every one of them lay unoccupied and a plan to raze two of them for some wetlands violations was still in litigation. And there was more—there was a story behind that development, a story that would underscore some of the complexities of this seemingly simple town, but it would be a long time before I became privy to it.