Hotel Paradise (20 page)

Without a thought for his speech difficulty, Ulub was the first to ask, “En?”

“When?” I liked it that I was expected to give the go-ahead, or not give it. That made me, for once in my life, the leader. I chewed the corner of my mouth, thinking: it was mid-afternoon, and if we went now it would only give me two hours until dinnertime. That included the traveling time from Britten’s store, which was probably a mile from the lake, and then the half or three-quarters of a mile back to the hotel, where I had to be by six o’clock at the latest, and that didn’t include time to make the salads.

I said this aloud, shaking my head. “I’ve got to make the salads and put the butter plates around.”

They all looked at me in a wondering way. Well, it must have seemed like a strange barrier to adventure—salads and butter plates. I explained as how these were two of my waitressing duties and that I had to appear by five-thirty to carry them out.

The thing was, of course, that
after
dinner it would be getting on to dark and I didn’t much want to be in the Devereau woods tangled up in trees and vines in the dark. But the days were lengthening now in May, so that it didn’t get dead dark until eight o’clock. I traded off the dark with the dinner deadline and thought I’d rather take a chance on spookiness than on the lethal looks of Vera and Lola Davidow if I showed up late.

I stood there scratching my elbows and pondering. I said, “I could leave early; I might be able to get away around seven, and that would give us time, wouldn’t it? I mean, until nighttime? I could meet you down at the lake. Say, near the boathouse.” I knew at this point we had practically no reservations for dinner and that my tables, Miss
Bertha and Mr. Gosling (a salesman and regular guest), would be in at six and six-fifteen or -twenty. I could be well away by seven. If I had to, I would just disappear.

They all looked at me and nodded.

We were a team.

•   •   •

Thus, I appeared in the kitchen that evening early for once, even before Vera. This really annoyed her, I could tell, when she finally breezed in through the kitchen screen door. I was at my salad station by five-fifteen, arranging little Bibb lettuces in individual salad bowls. I sprinkled them with chopped-up egg and black olives and striped each one with pimiento. I was in my artistic mode again.

Salad art with the Bibb lettuces annoyed Mrs. Davidow. She took the position that a whole Bibb lettuce was a display of generosity and elegance on the part of the Hotel Paradise, and nothing more should be done with the Bibb lettuces except for adding French dressing. To spend more money (egg yolks, olives) on each portion was going overboard. She’d spoken to me about this before when she’d caught me making faces on the Bibb lettuces, with olive rings for eyes, pimiento mouths, and egg-yolk curls. This sort of thing just drove her to distraction, which is why I did it. But a lot of the time, she’d made so many trips to the martini pitcher, the Bibb lettuces could have talked back to her and she’d never have cared.

I whistled as I worked, making an olive cross on Miss Bertha’s salad, hoping that might help to Christianize her. On Mr. Gosling’s lettuce I sprinkled another spoonful of egg yolk and partially hid it between two of the pale leaves, just in case Lola or Vera might come along and try to scoop it off again. He loved hardboiled eggs. Then I realized: if I was going to meet them at the lake, I would miss my own dinner! While my mother was out in the office I inspected every pot and pan on the big stove to see if I was missing any of my favorites. The big roasting pan was full of freshly fried chicken pieces, as usual (and as usual, short on white meat); two thick filet steaks were arranged on a plate, marinating in something winey; lobster tails were arranged on a cookie sheet, glazed with some exotic mixture. Only the chicken could possibly be aimed at my gullet, and not the white meat, so I’d only be missing a leg or a thigh. I sighed heavily, though, when I saw the steam rise from a double boiler of mashed potatoes, buttery, mealy
clouds of them. I took one of the tiny white porcelain dishes from the shelf, the small vegetable dishes in which the potatoes were often served, scooped out two big spoonsful, and then neatened up the surface in the steaming pot, adding a curl on top.

After making a well for a butter patty, I transported my dish back through the small kitchen, where Paul was sitting. Paul was the dishwasher’s boy. She came some nights to help Walter out when there was a dinner party. She was washboard thin, with a broad, flat face. I guess you could say Paul resembled her, except her face was so nondescript, it was hard to see it duplicated anywhere else. Paul was slapping back pages of a comic book that was lying in front of him upside down on the table. It was understood, of course, that Paul (who was seven or eight) still could not read. But I thought it was really interesting that he could not look at pictures, either. He grinned a lot, but he hardly ever talked. This was probably because his mother boxed his ears nearly every time he opened his mouth. His mother had got the idea—not really surprising—that Paul was not to speak when in my mother’s kitchen. Actually, I thought this pretty smart of her.

I guess just to be ornery, I reached over and turned the comic around, telling him (in a superior way) that it was upside down. He grinned. When Paul grinned, he looked exactly like the boy on the cover of
Mad
magazine, eyes dopily close together, face splattered with freckles. He grinned and turned the comic upside down again, and kept on slapping the pages back. I knew Paul wouldn’t tell about my dish of mashed potatoes.

There was an extra party of six (the Baums) scheduled for seven o’clock, and my heart sank when my mother said I’d help serve. But Vera did not really want me to help and insisted she could “handle” the table by herself. She knew Dr. Baum was a good tipper and had no intention of sharing with me.

They sailed in early, just as I’d finished clearing off Mr. Gosling’s table, Helene Baum in her butterfly eyeglasses and bright yellow chiffon dress, the doctor in a black turtleneck, and all six of them drunk as lords. Seven of them, really, for Mrs. Davidow was steaming in at their head, rouged and corseted and reminding me of those carved ladies riding high on the bow of a ship, like the one in the John Wayne movie I’d seen not long ago. Mrs. Davidow often more or less invited herself to sit down with guests she’d been having cocktails with, wedging in her own filet and chair to make one more at the table.

Vera was looking really disapproving, her nose rising nearly off her face because they were too far gone to appreciate her superior table waiting—mostly, though, because Dr. Baum might forget to leave an extra-large tip. I was afraid she’d change her mind, seeing that I was free, and press me into service.

So, to make sure that didn’t happen, I disappeared.

It was seven o’clock by the time I drew close to the boathouse, and the three of them were standing there, waving at me. The Woods had on their heavy black peacoats. Mr. Root was wearing only a thin denim jacket, but I bet he had on long johns underneath his clothes. Up here in the mountains at five thousand feet it could still get cold after the sun went down.

Ulub had a flashlight and a pair of rusty old scissors, for some reason. Mr. Root was carrying one of those old oil lanterns that had me imagining him walking along railroad tracks, swinging it to signal a train. Both flashlight and lantern reminded me that night would fall. I looked up at the sky, as if looking up there would somehow change the quality of light nearer the ground. It looked to me like daylight, though I would have to say not like full daylight. Gradations of light were pretty much lost on me; I was more attuned to ham pinwheels than to nature. Mr. Root also showed us the box of kitchen matches he’d brought, in case we ever wanted to make a fire—another unpleasant reminder that we could be out after dark. He also had one of those curved knives that I think is called a Bowie knife; it was pushed down in a leather holder which he wore rather importantly on his belt. Ubub was wearing a backpack. I wondered what he had in it. Before we set out, we all turned and looked reverently at the house over there, mist-colored, black windows like eye sockets.

We walked the rutted dirt road to the spring, passing the boathouse with its narrow wooden boardwalk and peeling white paint. We passed the grove of maples and that single birch tree I love. This little spring
is about a quarter of a mile around the lake, and here we stopped for no particular reason except that the spring is usually the final destination for anyone walking by the lake. It always has been for me, and Will, and for my father, when he walked us down here. There’s an old metal pipe jutting out from a little rock alcove. And someone at some time made a large, round, shallow pool in this resting place and lined it with quite beautiful tiles, glazed and brightly colored and painted with fish. The pool is fed by the spring and the spring by the lake.

We four sat down on the low stone balustrade and passed around the tin cup that is always left in the alcove, which looks as if it had been fashioned especially for this cup. Anyone who wants a drink can place it beneath the pipe to catch the water. I wonder a lot about this cup: I wonder who put it there, and if that person meant to hide it; I wonder how it could stay here year after year and nobody steal it; I wonder if it has rested there the whole length of people’s lives, and if it will be here after I die. We passed the cup along, one to the other, until we’d all had a drink. When it came round to me, I hurriedly wiped the rim before I put it to my lips. As we were passing the cup, I asked them about what we might expect in there among the trees and in the dense brush. On my way here, I had turned many possibilities over in my mind, rejecting bears and panthers, but not at all sure about snakes, spiders, and wolves.

Mr. Root bit off a plug of tobacco and offered the rest around as he pondered my question. Ubub accepted some tobacco, but Ulub preferred a stick from the packet of Teaberry that I usually carried around for the Sheriff. I decided to chew a stick myself, as everybody else was chewing. After turning his tobacco into black spit, he said, “Ain’t no wolves, no. Fox, maybe. Rabbits, most likely.” He scrutinized the narrow road beyond us, where it disappeared into the dark. “Milk snakes, for sure.”

I wondered what a milk snake was, but didn’t want to stay on the subject of snakes. I assumed it wasn’t dangerous, or Mr. Root would have said so.

Ulub was nodding. “Uh cah,” he said, snapping the rusted shears as if they were crocodile jaws.

Everyone looked at him, frowning. And he repeated the word, straining to add the final sound. “Cah-aa-aaa-ud.”

Cahd? Cud? “Cat!” I exclaimed triumphantly.

Ulub looked at me happily, nodding.

“Ah, he means one of them feral ones,” explained Mr. Root, probably a little annoyed I’d beat him to “cat.” “Feral, yeah. I seen one a them.”

I had a feeling he was guessing. Actually, I was a little disappointed that they weren’t full of knowledge of what might lie ahead in the woods. I guess I figured the Woods’ talking problems and the way they lived alone would have improved their relations with animals and nature. As far as I knew, Ulub and Ubub had no family at all; it was only themselves who lived in a ramshackle wooden house on a road up beyond the hotel. Mr. Root, I think, lived on the other side of the national highway that bisected Spirit Lake. There was some idea that the people on the other side from the Hotel Paradise were higher on the social ladder and had more money than the people on the hotel side. This was not a view my mother held to, of course. Though there might have been a few more big Victorian houses on the other side, it was true, there were also a lot of crackerbox houses and trailers. So it looked all one to me, the ramshackle rich and the ramshackle poor. I thought most of us were really ramshackle middle-class. Spirit Lake was definitely way above Cold Flat Junction with respect to upper-classness, though.

We all sat there chewing and looking at the road ahead where it burrowed in among the trees and tall grasses, with nobody making a move to get up and follow it. No matter which way you approached the Devereau house—by the spring side or by the dam side—the way became what I’d told myself looked to be impassable. But then, I asked myself, how would the Girl ever have turned up on the other side of the lake? I did not like to think of the alternatives. Especially the one that said she hadn’t—that she hadn’t been there at all.

Maybe that’s why I said nothing to them about the Girl, or about her appearing over there, for it would just mean a lot of questions that I couldn’t answer, and didn’t want to, anyway. It was something I seemed to want to keep to myself. I was gripped by a feeling I could not name. It wasn’t fear, for there was no rush in my veins or sudden dropping of my stomach. It was more like a terrible sadness. It was not deep dark at this time in the evening, not even movie dark, for light tunneled through the dense black pines, filtered through the leaves of the maples. Light’s gray dust sifted across the dead black leaves of more than one autumn. Rainwater lay pooled in old tire tracks, and the road narrowed even more where it was hemmed by bracken and
spongy mosses and overrun with vines and dead branches. We all made a single file, me being sure I was between two of them. All the while I kept my eyes peeled for signs of the Girl. I honestly think I must have expected she would drop bread crumbs behind her. Sounds, tinny rustlings in the dead leaves, the short, cut-off bird calls—all of them came at me sharp as a knife edge. Something flashed above and Ubub tried to tell us what it was; something dashed away and Mr. Root said, “Rabbit.”

It was Ulub who we had decided should lead the way, since this had been his route on the night in question. This route was a little bit shorter than the one around the other side of the lake, where the stone dam had been built. It was nothing but a small rubbishy pile of cemented bricks and flat stones worn smooth from people walking across it. At one end was a crumbling gray stone pillar.

So Ulub led, occasionally snapping his shears. From his backpack, Ubub had taken out a small axe with a broken handle and used it to flail away at dead limbs and hanging vines. Mr. Root seemed to enjoy thrashing through undergrowth. But, raising my hand against some tangled vines before me, I thought the axe and scissors might really not have been necessary, for in many cases the growth was so old and fine and brittle it took little more effort than sweeping away spiderwebs. It was deceptive. You’d see before you this intricate drapery of vines and twigs that from a distance looked impregnable, and yet, once upon them, you could push them back with a stroke.