Читать книгу Flood Moon - Chuck Radda - Страница 11

I found the general store-library and its anachronistic thick, beveled glass door pasted over with MasterCard and Visa acceptance stickers; but it wasn't an old-fashioned we-have-everything-just-let-me-find-it general store that resides in nostalgic Americans' collective consciousness. The interior more closely resembled one of those convenience marts attached to gas stations on the Interstate—bright, clean, orderly, but seemingly unoccupied except for a clerk.

Mrs. O'Leary.

"I help out at times," she said. "Try to keep the shelves stocked. I didn't hear you this morning. Find the coffee all right?"

"And unplugged it."

"Good," she said, and started busying herself with one of the upper shelves behind her. When I reminded her I was seeking employment and asked if she wanted some help running the place, she laughed and said I probably needed steadier employment.

"So everyone around here has two jobs," I said. "Last night you were the motel owner and Walter was the restaurateur."

"Some of us have three at times, at other times, none. Nobody lays anybody off: we just shift from one thing to another. At noon when Carlene arrives—she works here too—I'm the innkeeper again. How'd you sleep?"

"Fine."

"The mattress wasn't too soft?"

"A little I guess."

"We can swap off with another room," she said.

"It's fine," I lied, reluctant to move more cartons or present the option of changing her mind. "It's pretty quiet around here at night."

"This time of year, yes, but sometimes in the summer we get cars coming through here kind of late. They've watched the sunset up on top of the pass and they're fixing to sleep in one of the Yellowstone hotels. You need to be careful then: drivers are bleary eyed and edgy from staring at the sun and driving that pass in the dark. That street out there is the first straightaway they've seen for miles."

"Walter said I wouldn't have to worry about weirdos."

"You mean because the pass is closed? He's probably right. I'd say they're dropping those gates by now. We'll get word from the highway department soon enough."

"Who do they call? I mean, who's really in charge here?"

She laughed. "We don't have a mayor or anything like that. We don't have many services except basics. We have a landfill outside town and if we ask him nicely, Charlie Wieland will drive by once in a while, pick up whatever we leave outside, and dump it there."

"He's a friend of Walter's right?"

"I guess. He has dinner with Charlie and his wife once in a while. Why do you ask?"

"Walter offered me some leftover ham from the Wielands' place."

"Should have taken it. His wife is a great cook."

"I'll remember that. So who does get the call about the pass?"

"Calvin, are you eager to have it closed, or are you worried that it might be closed?"

"Just wondering, that's all."

I was more than wondering. I wanted it closed. If Sage possessed any charm at all, it was isolation, and I didn't want that charm diluted by more VistaCruisers lumbering through town dropping off other castaways. I wanted to be the last weirdo from Billings, but I wasn't sure what Mrs. O'Leary might glean from such an admission: fugitive, criminal, miscreant. I'd already been through that with Walter.

"The call usually comes to the store here," she said, glancing at the table where the phone lay. "Nothing yet."

"Maybe they'll wait."

"They can't. A few years ago some driver who absolutely ‘had to be somewhere at a certain time' got to the pass just as the rangers were closing it. He begged them to let him through. He had a big old pickup truck and these huge tires with deep tread, four-wheel drive. You know the type—the golden boy of snow. One of the rangers made him sign a release. They found his truck the following spring."

"Did the guy die?"

"The truck did. The driver showed up back at the gate about six hours later, half dead from exposure. He had walked about ten miles, then lucked out when some lady on a snowmobile picked him up and hauled him the last fifteen back to the entrance."

"He was lucky."

"Mostly cold and embarrassed for starters, and real angry 'cause he no longer had a truck. Turns out he slid off the road and the pickup fell into a little ditch. When he tried to drive it out, it slid backwards and the rear wheels went over a bigger drop. He wasn't that high up in the pass, maybe a thousand feet, but high enough so the fall would have killed him. He dove out and left the truck there. The next clear day they sent some snowmobilers up there but they couldn't find it. Nobody did until the following May."

"He didn't call for help?"

"Would have if his cellphone weren't in the truck. I guess he was a big strong guy, and the walk was downhill. Probably the only way he made it till he got the ride."

"What happened to the ranger who let him through?"

"Reprimanded. That waiver wouldn't have saved his job if the guy had died. Anyway, no one gets through now. Once the snow starts up there, it doesn't stop."

"How deep does it get?"

"Fifteen, twenty feet will fall. Some of it melts and the wind knocks some of it down. It's not unusual to have ten feet on the ground at any given time."

"How about down here?"

"You'll find out soon enough," she said smiling. "Last night was a preview. The depths aren't too dramatic; it's the relentlessness that gets you. Do you like snow?"

Before I could rein it in, my New Hampshire story was spilling out in an only slightly condensed version. It's probably an indication of how busy the store wasn't that I went from beginning to end without interruption. Her reaction was typical.

"How awful," she said when I finished. "So you feel guilty?"

"Should I?"

She smiled. "I can tell you do, but Calvin, you'd be dead now and I can't imagine it's that much fun being dead. The other boy, the one who survived. Are you still friends?"

"We're not enemies, but we don't keep in touch."

"Maybe you should," she said. "Maybe it bothers him too. He's more to blame."

She wasn't handing out any approval, not that it mattered: I'd heard enough approval before and seldom believed it any more.

I left her to her shelf-stocking and walked out into the gradually warming daylight. I wanted to find a place called the Wind Drift and see about working there. It was some distance out of town though, and I was pretty sure that a town like Sage had no public transportation. Even though every Podunk community in the world boasts at least one taxi, I just didn't want to give in, not when I had been so frugal all the way from Boston.

But frugality has its downside. I slept in the cab of a semi twice, then napped once in the back seat of a van some kids were driving from Minnesota to a college in Gillette, Wyoming. They thought it was amusing (or maybe just weird) to have an old guy with them, and when I told them I had been a high school teacher for twenty years, they groaned en masse—that good-natured groan I had become accustomed to over time, the groan that assured me that they were not a murderous pack of teenagers making a video in which a hitchhiker was disemboweled or decapitated with some ceremonial scimitar. They needed gas money more than they needed a bloody victim for some YouTube project, and I was willing to part with twenty bucks—twice. On that leg of the journey I ate incredibly well: their mothers had packed food enough for an entire dorm—it may actually have been intended for the entire dorm—and if so I owe a lot of hungry college kids an apology. But God it was good! We used a microwave in the van (I didn't know that could be done!) to heat up everything from lasagna to pierogi to some Thai noodle concoction which burned off a layer of skin from the roof of my mouth, a condition that didn't stop me from shoveling in more.

Mostly they had beer and boxes of wine: the food seemed only a complement. They didn't want to exclude each other from drinking and they didn't want a drunk driver running off the road on some isolated stretch of I-80. So I—the old guy who could not possibly have an appreciation for alcohol—got to drive a van, immediately adding the experience to my mental database of things I never want to do again. The boxed wine, which I was allowed access to at the end of my shift, was surprisingly good, though the plastic hose dangling off the end like some shrunken phallus detracted from the aesthetics of the experience.

Not every day was splendid. Before the mobile restaurant wagon picked me up, I rode with a New Yorker named Everett. I think it was his first name—I never really found out. Neat, clean-shaven, perfect reddish-brown hair gooped up to make it look slightly askew, he gave me my first ride ever in a Lexus coupe. That experience now resides in a different database from the one where I drove a van, though Everett didn't actually afford me the opportunity to drive.

Everett was no more than half my age but had accumulated ten times my net worth. Since teachers have historically been underpaid, accomplishments like Everett's don't really bother me much...unless I think about them...as I am right now. Plus he was a shit.

On Everett's back seat, lying flat and open so that I could read the label, was the jacket half of his navy blue Oxxford suit. The name meant nothing to me, but I know where Oxford with one "x" is located, and I figured the trip over along with the extra letter likely added to its cost. He seemed blasé about the suit, the car, everything. He was "in insurance," out of New York, heading for Des Moines, and more than happy to have some company. He required no gas money—some mogul somewhere had anticipated his needs and expensed everything out. Still, it seemed like a long drive. I asked him why he didn't fly.

"With a car like this? Why would I?"

Like most of what Everett said, that was bullshit, but for quite a while we talked about the sedan and its features. To his credit, when I told him I drove an old Miata, he continued to treat me like a near equal. I didn't mind the slight condescension: I was mesmerized by the bells and whistles and levers and buttons and the movie-theater-sized screen that fed him information on traffic and weather and route options while he picked up and responded to voice mail and texts—all of which proved more entertaining than any mega-watt stereo, though he had one of those too with a playlist of grunge. I hate grunge, but I hated standing by the side of the road thumbing a ride even more.

He was an amiable enough companion until I noticed the more or less constant N and NE on the car's compass. I wanted W, though I'd have settled for NW. When I called him on it, he confessed rather breezily that he had a fiancée in Chicago and he was going to visit her for a day or two before continuing on to Nebraska. The warm and fuzzy story didn't jibe with the wedding ring on his left hand. Worse, Des Moines didn't jibe with Nebraska. At least I knew why he wasn't flying—pilots tend to follow pre-established routes.

When I questioned the ring, he admitted the woman wasn't exactly a fiancée but more of an old friend. When I pointed out his geographical miscalculation, he said that Des Moines was a stopover only. Omaha was his destination. When I told him I needed to go west, he insisted I would love Chicago. That brought the cordial portion of the journey to a close.

I told him to drop me off.

He said his friend had a divorced mother I might like to meet.

I told the little shit I'd use his global positioning system to call the police.

It was a bluff—I would never have figured out how to work the goddam thing, but he let me out at the next rest stop, one that was overrun with Indiana state troopers warning drivers about giving rides to strangers. A college student had been assaulted and nearly killed near West Lafayette by a man who had finagled his way into her car. It wasn't me, despite the withering glance from one of the troopers who then warned me not to hitchhike and told me that if he saw me doing so, he'd pick me up for questioning. He concluded his list of warnings and admonitions with the seemingly obligatory but contextually meaningless have yourself a good day now. I wasn't having one at that point, hadn't had one up until then, and aside from not being arrested, didn't have one afterwards either. While Everett was screwing his "old friend" on the Lakeshore, I was retracing my path southward with a trucker who hated cops and picked me up to spite them. Thank God for blind prejudice.

To give in after all that—to fork over cash for something as simple as a ride—well, I wasn't doing it. This Wind Drift two miles west? Walking distance. I looked back for a moment just to get a different perspective of Sage, and I noticed a car parked in front of Mrs. O'Leary's motel, a four-door sedan, maybe a Buick or a Cadillac, either black or a very dark blue. Aside from my laptop, I had nothing of value in my room, but as soon as the thought entered my head that I might not have locked the place, I knew I hadn't. I tried to find an unhurried stride between nonchalance and panic, but when I got to within a hundred feet of the car—a dark blue Cadillac—I saw its headlights come up. Slowly, almost listlessly, it pulled away from the curb and came toward me. One driver, a man, bald or close to it, no passengers I could see, a plate that was not Montana. I waved my arms at him, he slowed the car, rolled down his window.

"Were you looking for somebody?"

"Nope." He stared straight ahead.

His voice was not unfriendly, but the curt response put me off. Usually someone will offer a rationale—just passing through, checking directions, doing some sightseeing. But nothing from this guy, so he got nothing from me other than my traffic-cop wave which accompanied him out of town. I felt like a resident keeping an eye on things, but even so I hurried over to lock the motel room, which, of course, I had locked after all…it was the iron we're always sure we left on but never did.

It wasn't until a few weeks later that I thought about that car again, and by that time I knew what a Wyoming license plate looked like.