Читать книгу Flood Moon - Chuck Radda - Страница 6

I had used a myriad of conveyances to get me to Billings, and only on the last leg of the trip did I opt for the bus, just to make a somewhat more traditional entrance into Sage. There's a certain respectability involved in arriving somewhere via scheduled transportation, though judging by the number of actual witnesses, I could have saved myself the $65.00 and Hanratty's abuse. I'd like to say I roughed it, but a wallet full of tens and twenties and an ATM card indicate a pretty sharp line between me and, let's say, Lewis and Clark. I wouldn't quibble over the $65.00: money was not really an issue. I certainly didn't need that $3.45 in change; in fact, I had set aside enough that I could justifiably call my own—money I had earned and Natalie didn't need. That perspective may appear a bit mean-spirited, but I came out of everything far from impoverished, and Natalie came out of it free of me and able to remarry Donald. the loser who had recaptured her heart, or if not her heart, at least the body parts surrounding it. That's as close to a happy ending as she and I were going to have, at least when it came to each other. I miss Leanne though, the daughter I sort of inherited. We got along pretty well, and I didn't even mind that she called me Cal—she told me once, without the slightest hint of unkindness, that she already had a Dad. In the end I was disappointed that she took her mother's side about Donald's return, but Leanne is a kid. I've reserved all the rancor for the adult who's old enough to have known better.

I stuffed my hands into my pockets and felt for Brenda's change. New money. The old money was back home in several banks so that one Howard Pearson Esq. could handle my financial matters. Bills would be paid and my responsibilities would be met; I just wouldn't be there to tend to them in person.

Howard Pearson and I went to college together, and he's been my attorney ever since he passed the bar exam on his fourth try. During the first three he had been a pretty heavy cocaine user, so I discount the significance of those initial failures. He's clean now, and frequently sober. I consulted him when my father got sick and my mother needed some legal advice; both my parents are doing okay now, and they actually supported my plans to go west. Not too many others did, including Howard, but he didn't share my folks' belief that Natalie was, as my dad said, a bit askew. They interpreted my distancing myself a positive step.

Howard became my lawyer by default when I had questions about long-term investments and retirement. I generally spoke with him once or twice a year, though that all changed overnight. He could probably tell you the exact night when, sometime after 3:00 a.m., I awakened him (and I presume Mrs. Pearson) with a vitriolic assessment of Natalie's future plans—the ones that didn't include me and nullified any need for those long-term investments. For nearly an hour he let me vent—that's the genteel, new age terminology for screaming obscenities at real or imagined villains over real or imagined insults—then told me to get some rest and be in his office at 9:00. And sober, he said. I tried.

I liked Howard, but even though he was on my side as a friend and legal advisor, the whole process of dividing up assets was so distasteful that I began to equate his presence with the misery itself. When it all ended and he wanted to buy me a drink, I refused. Then, before I could get five paces from him I began to weep. For a few weeks afterwards, he steered clear of me; then I called him, not so much to apologize but just to re-establish our friendship.

"Don't sweat it, Cal," he said. "Your reaction was normal."

"You mean crying?" I said.

"Yeah, that, and hating my guts."

"I don't…."

"Natalie went back to your house with your daughter and hung you out to dry. Please, feel free to hate everyone's guts."

It was Pearson who suggested my going away for a while, though his "while" was a week or two in the Bahamas. When I eventually settled on the California trip, he offered to buy my car—that 1999 Miata he always lusted after and could have bought ten times over with the money that had gone up his nose. I put it in storage instead, not to spite him, but because I didn't want to burn every bridge at the same time, no matter how bright and cheery those flames might seem.

I guess I'd burned enough of them to get me to Montana—not a direct route to California, but a route that worked sufficiently for someone not on a fixed schedule. Along the way I'd seen Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Devil's Tower, even the Custer Battlefield. I was checking off historical sites like a grocery shopper on speed; then I hit Billings.

And Bozeman would have been next, but I picked up some brochure in a breakfast place and read about this scenic route southward and this quiet town at the terminus. These competing influences went to work: get to where you're going but don't miss anything on the way. I was two days away from San Francisco when I bought the ticket for Sage—where I could have used that Miata, or any car with a roof and a heater. Instead I had nothing but the name Brenda had suggested: Walter Trucks. Even that sounded more like a transit company than a name, but I left the umbrella closed and sloshed up the street in the wind-driven mist until I reached a two-story wood structure that looked as though it might be a café or a sandwich shop. On a front window, which composed half the building's façade, the word LUNCH was painted in yellow-outlined black letters, curved in a small arch. The artistry did not look professional, but I didn't doubt the truth of it; after all, there was a table near the window. In the other direction was a barbershop, then a bank—almost connected as was everything else.

I slogged a little farther to the building Brenda had identified as the motel: dark, inside and out, with nothing to identify it. Could have been a motel; could just as easily have been a funeral home. By contrast, LUNCH seemed almost inviting; and so, already three dollars and forty-five cents richer than I had been only minutes before, I made a few more awkward strides in the standing water that occasionally rose over my toes, and quickly reached the overhang partially sheltering the entrance. My shoes were waterlogged past the point of usefulness, and my steps sounded like an under-inflated gym ball being dropped into a cauldron of chowder. Nobody wants to enter a building that way, even the most casual establishment, and this business seemed like someone's home, replete with a white multi-paneled door, a brass knob, and a softly glowing doorbell button. I was tempted to ring it until I noticed a smaller shingle promising "Good Food" flapping listlessly under a protective canvas awning. How could it not be a restaurant? And who rings a doorbell to enter a restaurant? I hesitated once more, stuffed the muddy hat into a pocket of my bag, then walked in, my sodden shoes a calling card for anyone inside. Small puddles marked my trail.

The ensuing welcome was less than cordial.

"Wanna get those off?"

A man stood in the lighted passage at the right, a man whose bald head fell just short of touching the top of the door frame and whose jeans cuffs stopped well above his ankles. His pale blue shirt was, by my estimate, three sizes too wide and two sizes too short. My own experience has taught me that being average carries with it certain benefits—the ease of buying clothes among the best. I can walk into any department store, pay my money, and leave with some item that fits me. This man in the shadows couldn't, not unless he shopped from the Barnum and Bailey collection.

"And leave them by the door," he added, with the same irritation.

"Yes," I said. "Sorry about the floor."

He made no attempt to disguise his annoyance. "I'll get a mop. It's not like I don't have one."

He turned and walked away, but continued speaking—louder. "I just hadn't planned on using it tonight but...gonna ruin your feet too, standing around in wet shoes. Put 'em on that mat."

To the side of the door was a remnant of grey indoor-outdoor carpeting, rough-cut but functional. By the time he returned I was standing on it while he sponged the puddle I had left.

"Now what?" he said, his voice mellowing as the floor became drier.

"I'm looking for a place to stay. The bus driver said...."

"I mean what do you want for your feet? You can't walk around barefoot. You get a sliver or something and sue me, I'll lose all this." When he spread out his arms to encompass the room and its meager furnishings, I thought he might have been kidding; but I was afraid to laugh because sometimes "all this," really is "all this." This time it wasn't.

"That's a joke, man," he said, his voice monotonic and low. "This isn't exactly San Simeone, is it?"

It might have been. I had never heard of San Simeone, a fact he probably gathered from my silence.

"The Hearst Castle. Don't you ever go to the movies? Citizen Kane. This ain't that."

He flipped on an overhead light and erased many of the unsettling shadows, revealing some thin paint and pockmarked floor molding—just a room, serviceable if unspectacular. But the man himself, removed now from those shadows, was all angles and lines and furrows of varying depths. He might be handsome in the sunlight, but not in this room, not now.

"I did see that movie," I said. "This place looks fine to me."

He dismissed my comment out of hand.

"Very safe of you. I'm Walter Trucks. And you?"

"Cal Hopper," I said as I labored with the wet laces. "Nice to meet you, Walt."

"It's Walter. People get comfortable with Walt, then it's on to Wally. I don't like Wally. Nobody called Cronkite, Wally, did they?"

"Maybe his friends did."

"When we're friends, we can revisit the topic."

He didn't seem interested in shaking my hand. Maybe later, I thought, then decided that the custom did not require constant reinforcement. I wasn't going to forget how, and the act itself signaled nothing permanent. After all, Natalie and I had done more than shake hands—we had shaken a number of body parts—and our semi-solemn agreement had not stopped her from dumping me when Donald, fresh from his rehab engagement in the asylum, came sniffing around.

"You never answered my question," he said as he pointed at my feet, then to his own. "I'll get you some of these," he said.

Even now I have trouble describing what he wore without being unkind. They were slippers, house shoes I guess, but not moccasins, not something leathery and folksy and "Western" with rawhide laces and a comfy fur lining. These were scraps of brown cloth that had been stretched over a foot-shaped form and then stiffened somehow: they weren't quite shoes but not quite socks either. My father had once owned a similar pair of these somethings and had practically lived in them for a year or two, but only in the nonjudgmental privacy of his home. Maybe I was right: Maybe I had in fact walked into somebody's residence.

He returned quickly and handed me a pair—a perfect match for his and still sealed in plastic.

"Well, Cal Hopper, welcome to Sage." He handed me a towel. "Dry off your feet and put these on."

"These seem new."

"They are new. It's not a bowling alley."

I slid them on.

"That's another joke," he said, "or maybe a rhetorical question. Do you know what that means?"

"I used to be an English teacher."

"Does that mean you do or you don't?"

"How can anyone not know what a rhetorical question is?"

He paused for a beat.

"That's good, Cal," he said after that momentary delay, and he almost smiled. "And listen, don't worry, I ain't selling those shoes. I have another couple dozen pair in the back."

"Do you make them?"

"I'm not Italian."

"I just meant how could you have so many pairs of slippers?"

"They're stolen. What are you drinking?"

"They're stolen?"

He looked hurt. "Well I didn't steal ‘em, but they're definitely stolen. Couple three years ago a guy in a pickup came through here. He had all kinds of shit in the bed but he was hard up for cash. He had these slippers—cartons of them—handmade and imported he said. Wanted fifty bucks for the lot. I gave him twenty. They make nice gifts. They're good slippers. Are you a shoe cop or something?"

I shook my head.

"They're comfortable, aren't they? How about that drink?"

The combination of the monotone and his rapid and seemingly disparate questions kept me off balance. Usually conversations have a pace of some sort; this one was like the whip at the carnival: either you hung on or the next turn slammed you back again, or worse, hurled you into the spectators. I tried to slow down the ride.

"I'd rather eat something. I saw that sign in front."

"Which one?"

I shrugged. "Both of them. Why?"

"The "Lunch" sign is bigger. I only hung up the smaller "Good Food" sign last week. Someone said it would increase business."

"And here I am," I said. "Am I too late for lunch."

"It's dark out Cal. Nighttime. What do you think?"

"How about the good food sign?"

"Night like this I'm amazed you saw that one. Ten to one it's snowing on the 'Tooth."

"You mean Beartooth, right?"

He nodded. "Three or four thousand feet up. It's probably about fifteen, twenty degrees colder. You came in on that Boise bus. Brenda, right?"

"Nice lady," I said.

"She's all right. She's single, you know. What do you want to eat?"

I could have sworn she'd been wearing a wedding ring. Then of course, so was I.

"Come on, Cal. Something from the lunch menu?"

"If you have one, yes."

"Don't. How about the wine list? Shall I have the sommelier bring it out?"

"I thought maybe he had the night off."

"So you know what a sommelier is and you didn't know Hearst Castle. English teacher."

He feigned disgust, but he was enjoying himself.

"I don't print up a menu," he said. "Make a choice. What do you want?"

"I don't know. What do you have?"

"I can make you some eggs, I can grill you a hamburger, I got hot dogs, I got some baked ham that's been in the fridge for a while but it ain't turned green. I got some leftover pork chops I took home from the Wielands' a few nights back. I got cereal, all kinds, hot and cold. I got spaghetti I can cook and a few jars of sauce I can open. I can make eggs, any kind. We got coffee, hot chocolate. I have beer and a half-opened bottle of red wine. Anything sound appealing?"

The wine did, mainly because I felt that drinking enough of it might make the entrées palatable, might even make Walter Trucks seem congenial. Still, partly for the company, partly to stay dry, and partly because I knew they were difficult to mess up, I worked up some artificial enthusiasm at the prospect of fried eggs. He had mentioned them twice—maybe that was his understated specialty. When Walter said he had forgotten to mention the bacon, the offer actually seemed appealing, providing the bacon, like the ham, was not yet green.

"You can sit at either table," Walter said. "One of the wait staff will be with you shortly,"

I sat at the closest table. "You'll find me here."

"You catch on fast for an Easterner. Sit down. Food will be up in a minute. Did you say coffee?"

"Wine. How did you know I was from the East?"

He pointed at my jacket "That Bean label is a giveaway."

"I could have mail-ordered it."

He shook his head. "You probably did. But I doubt the accent came in the same package. Fifty miles either side of Boston. Maybe twenty-five. I'm guessing south shore."

Actually Chatham, at the "elbow" of Cape Cod, is closer to eighty miles south and east of Boston, but I gave him some leeway and tried not to look too impressed.

"I opened a merlot this afternoon," he said. "How's that sound?"

"Sounds good."

His clothes flapped noiselessly behind him as he slipped through a doorway to—well to whatever room the food came from. To the left of that passageway were carpeted steps and an ornate balustrade leading up through a wallpapered stairwell. Some of the paper had curled a little at the edges, but I have always been taken by the idea of wallpaper. My parents (and I, when I became a homeowner) had been satisfied to slop paint on any room that began to look ratty. Wallpaper was for those living in some other universe—one into which I had suddenly been deposited.

So this was, in fact, the place where Walter Trucks lived, an old, but far from decrepit building that, a long time before, had been constructed and furnished with great attention to detail. The wainscoting, the scalloped woodwork, the swirled ceiling, the valances—everything was a throwback to the time when, as my father would say, workmanship meant something. It reminded me of the house where I grew up—a saltbox, battered season after season by nor'easters, but with an interior built and maintained by people who knew their craft, if not their wallpaper. No wonder Walter Trucks was so quick with those slippers: he was far less concerned with my feet than he was with those hardwood floors.

"You want them fried eggs over easy?"

"Yes," I said, "that would be fine."

"How about the wine? Want to give that a shot? It's a merlot. I opened it this afternoon."

"You asked me already."

"You didn't sound enthusiastic. I can give you coffee."

"I'm excited by the prospect of merlot," I said and Walter Trucks smiled.

"Now that's enthusiasm," he said. "Do you like merlots?"

"My ex often said to me I would not know a merlot from a mermaid."

"You're divorced?"

"Never married. Live with someone long enough and you've earned the right to call her your ex."

"No argument here. The bottle even has a cork in it."

"Must be good," I said, and took some napkins out of a chrome dispenser on my table—a card table really, one of two in the main dining room. Like mine the other was draped with a stiff white tablecloth and then covered with that thin plastic that's marketed these days as a "drop cloth" in home improvement stores. The material has the heft of a moth's wing, with a lot less visual appeal. But then aesthetics had probably not been a consideration when Walter decided to open a "lunch" or whatever this place was.

On a shelf nearby was a photograph, a brushed metal-framed monochromatic shot of several people and a fierce-looking Samoyed, all standing near a snowdrift. In the background was the building I had just entered, though I needed to see the place in the daylight to know for sure. The picture looked old and, even from a distance, seemed contrasty and grainy. But it was essentially unfaded, and when I looked more closely I saw traces of red in some of the clothing. Like so many winter pictures, the snow had overwhelmed it and sucked out the color: it only appeared black and white. I was pretty sure I could pick out a younger Walter Trucks looking a lot thicker in heavy winter clothing.

And there were more photographs, too, most of them leaning atop a mahogany armoire whose spherical feet and cornices had been worn away as randomly and efficiently as the wooden floors. The piece may have been an antique, but of the many topics of which I am absolutely ignorant, antiques would rank high. Still, given its familiarity and condition, I'd guess it was worth closer to a hundred dollars than ten thousand. Other photos, hardly bigger than wallet-sized in little matted frames, were scattered about the shelves of a breakfront so massive, it seemed the house would have to have been built around it.

"Me and some friends in that picture," Walter said when he came back with the wine. "I was visiting at Christmas, 1980. Right outside here, long before I bought the place."

"I thought the exterior looked familiar."

"See that tree in the background?"

I had noticed it—a decorated Christmas tree behind a multi-paned window.

"See the lights? Unusual, ain't it?"

"Looks like a regular Christmas tree."

"It's a Fraser Fir if you really want to know. How old are you, Cal?"

"I'm in my forties."

"I'm sixty," he said. "I'll be sixty-one next March. Now, how old are you?"

"Fifty."

"A little fuzzy on the math, aren't you? Fifty isn't exactly ‘in the forties,' is it?"

"Fifty."

That's better. All right, so in the seventies you were barely alive. Remember Nixon's energy crisis?"

"Read about it. My father said there was some fifty-five mile an hour speed limit nobody obeyed."

"It was Nixon's energy crisis. And it was a national speed limit. Come on, Cal, what did you do, vote for the guy?"

"I wasn't old enough to even..."

"But you would have, right? Bet you were a Young Republican in elementary school."

"In Massachusetts? Not likely."

In truth all I remember from my teens was finagling ways to drink beer and trying to figure out what was going on under Claudia Jennings' halter top in Truck Stop Women. Those kinds of activities left little time to fritter away on politics. Later, when I did register, I voted Democratic like my parents. I seldom won, but it gave me the opportunity to bitch and moan in four-year increments, and that's almost as good as winning.

"Nixon," he said. "Alternate days to buy gas. Lowered thermostats in the winter."

"And no Christmas lights. My father told me that. But Nixon was long gone by '80."

He showed me the picture again, pointed to a man in a knit cap.

"The guy with the dog. Bobby Laughton. He owned this place. Laid back, easy going, but let some Washington crook tell him what to do and he'd just go off. Atheist—wouldn't put a light on a pine tree if you paid him—until Nixon told him he couldn't. Then the trees went up—Thanksgiving to Valentine's Day. No matter how brown it got, he'd leave it in the window for spite. You can't see it but he had a lighted manger too. It was his homage to the memory of Nixon. Try the wine."

He left, then came back with a filled plate, gave me a paper napkin and some utensils that looked clean enough, then walked away again. "Bon appétit."

Oddly enough, with him out of the room I felt disoriented. As much as he wanted me to think of the place as a restaurant, it just wasn't one. And when he left I felt as though I had been invited somewhere for dinner, then abandoned by the host.

I could hear him moving things around in the kitchen.

"Walter, why don't you join me."

"Already ate," he yelled

"Have some wine then."

"Already drank. I try to have one glass a day; much more than that and I'm pretty useless."

"And you have a lot to do tonight? Setting up for a bar mitzvah? Senior prom?"

There was a brief silence while he mulled the possibilities, then came back to the table.

"All right, Cal. I will have another half glass of this MER-lut."

He poured some into a large coffee mug. Natalie would have railed at him for drinking wine out of something ceramic: I felt a growing admiration for the guy.

"So whatever happened to this Laughton guy?" I said.

"Oh," Walter said, "he passed a few years back."

"He was quite a bit older than you, seems like," I said, "at least in the picture."

"I guess," he said. "Never thought about it much."

He held up the mug and I thought we were toasting the memory of his old friend, but instead he just shook his head. "I'm going to have to buy a few more wine glasses," he said. "Must have broken a few over the years. Of course, the mug holds more."

"And it tastes just as good," I said, a little slap at Natalie wherever she was and an agreement that we were finished talking about Bobby Laughton.

I started in on the eggs.