Hotel Paradise (6 page)

The bench sitters’ outlook, from the front of Britten’s, is over the highway, where they can watch the cars and trucks race by, watch the
whole excited world going about its business. Also, the bench is near the spot where the First Union Tabernacle bus stops to let off people coming in from Cold Flat Junction. It makes two stops, one at Britten’s and one across the highway and up on a rise where there is a camp meeting tent. There, the First Union Tabernacle members gather to sing songs and (I guess) spread the word. Anyway, when the people get off, I can sit and watch with as much interest as the others, for I’m always on the lookout for a Tidewater.

Cold Flat Junction is eighteen miles from Spirit Lake, and that’s where the Tidewaters live. I have strict orders from my mother to have nothing to do with the Tidewaters, which means I’m fervent in my bench-sitting on the days when the Tabernacle bus drives in. I hoped for at least a look at Joleen or Toya Tidewater, or perhaps one of their brothers, because my mother is so determined I shouldn’t. It’s another mystery, except in the case of the Tidewaters it’s more of a case of lips sealed, not a lack of knowledge. I think it’s Toya who is supposed to be the worst (which means, for me, the best) girl in the family, so I know sex must have a lot to do with it, as it does with everything else.

The La Porte police spend a lot of time over in Cold Flat Junction, so Sheriff DeGheyn knows all about the Tidewaters. Not that the calls necessarily have to do with them, for Cold Flat Junction is home to a lot of off-limits people, and my mother knows about them all. I am to stay away from it altogether.

Toya Tidewater (nearly thirty by this time) had waited tables at the Hotel Paradise ten years ago, when I was but one or two years old, so, of course, I don’t remember her. (I often wonder what my baby eyes and ears took in.) My mother would sometimes drive her home. Even now, Lola Davidow goes to Cold Flat to get eggs; that’s what a number of the families do there—they keep laying hens or make rag rugs. There’s nothing else to do in Cold Flat except go to the one bar, Rudy’s (which provides the Sheriff with most of the phone calls), or sit in the one diner.

Cold Flat Junction does have one thing, though—its railroad station. For the town is just what its name says it is: a junction. Yet why Cold Flat Junction is home to this truly beautiful and elegant structure, I don’t know. There are vague guesses at the reason. It was once an important intersection, people say. But that’s like answering the question with the original question. Why was Cold Flat Junction an important
intersection? La Porte, only fourteen miles and one stop away, is a much larger town with a nice old station. But it’s no match for Cold Flat Junction.

There is nothing there that would cause people to get off, and, consequently, to get on. It’s just that sort of wrack-and-ruin place that people always want to escape from but never have the means to do it—Cold Flat being what it is. There’s not much money in chickens or rugs. So it all goes around in a circle. And Cold Flat Junction
is
cold, away out in nowhere, unprotected by mountains or surrounding trees. The temperature drops and the winds get high and howl out there.

Marge Byrd guesses that the reason for the handsome railroad depot was that the biggest and most elaborate of the hotels in Spirit Lake was owned by the railroad company, and that once it had been thought that Spirit Lake would expand for miles around, back when it really invited business. But Marge’s reasoning does not really solve the mystery of the railroad station, for it looks as if it went up long before this hankering after expansion on the part of the railway people. And how was Spirit Lake going to expand for eighteen miles, anyway?

On egg-buying days, I never get to go to Cold Flat. I sometimes hint around to Lola Davidow, saying I’d be happy to help with carrying the eggs, or anything else. But Lola (usually delighted to say I could do what my mother said I couldn’t) never takes me up on it. Ree-Jane gets to go, however. And the only reason Ree-Jane wants to go is because she knows it sticks in my craw. She knows how interested I am in the station and the Tidewaters and comes back talking about both (though I know she doesn’t give a damn about the station and wouldn’t know a Tidewater if she fell over one). And she leaves the car and walks in that careful way she has of showing herself off, up the front steps of the hotel, and there’s never an egg in sight. Her mother has to carry the eggs.

What I did, then—and this was extremely daring—was to go to La Porte one day and hop on the 1:53, whose final destination was so exotic I didn’t even bother longing to go there. I only wanted the next stop. “Hop on” was the right phrase because I had to make a quick jump while the conductor’s back was turned and he was looking down the line of cars. For the fifteen-minute ride, I walked the aisles, moving from one car to the next, searching intently for my seat beside the
adult who had paid my fare. That’s what the conductor must have thought, for he didn’t question my expense-paid trip. There are advantages sometimes to being really young. People ignore you.

The Junction was the next stop, and there I hopped down. No one got on and no one except for me got off.

I stood for a moment in the rush of wind stirred up by the train rumbling off down the track and looked around at the depot. It was huge and constructed of winey-colored brick with a cupola-like tower. Despite the years of exposure to coal dust and cinders, it seemed incredibly clean, and so did the platform. And I could see its dark and cool interior was also unblemished, or appeared to be. A lot of polished mahogany and maybe oak or pine benches, all unlittered.

As I was debating entering the station to inspect it more closely, a girl—a young woman, really—came out. Her look slid right off me as if we met like silk and satin, and was perfectly indifferent in a place where there’s probably so little going on you’d think a stranger might cause a look to snag, at least. It either goes to show how uninteresting my presence is, or that she was mightily preoccupied with her own mission. I wondered what it was. She had no suitcase and was not dressed for travel, at least not for far. She wore a cotton dress, sleeveless, except for the small wings of material that hung off the shoulders in little gathers. The dress was a washed-out blue, so pale it was almost white, the color of dawn. It had a heart-shaped neck and ties at the side that pulled the waist in when tied in the back. I guessed she was twenty, or nearly, but not more than that. After standing awhile, looking up and down the track as if she were wondering where the train was, she turned and sat down on one of the platform’s benches. She was carrying nothing except what looked to be a small purse.

I didn’t want her to see I was staring at her, so I pretended to be studying the train schedules with some fascination where they were tacked up under glass. I knew the La Porte-Cold Flat Junction run, and knew there wouldn’t be another train until late afternoon (4:32, to be exact) for I naturally had to plan my return trip. So what was she doing here? After a few moments of schedule reading, I just looked at her quite openly, for she obviously didn’t care that I was there. I didn’t exist for her; she didn’t care about anything but what was out there along the horizon.

The reason I noticed all of this was because she was so pretty.
Beautiful, I guess, with hair so fine and pale blond it looked like milkweed in the sun and eyes the color of Spirit Lake itself, dark gray that I knew would shift around depending on the slant of the light.

I wondered what such a girl was doing in Cold Flat Junction. In type, she resembled none of the people I’d seen getting off the First Union Tabernacle bus, for they all seemed heavy in the face—“coarse” is what my mother would say—as if some potter had stopped the wheel too soon and left the features a little rough and lumpy, unfinished and unrefined. They all looked, no matter what the age or sex, as if they were in need of a potter to finish the job—even the kids. But maybe they weren’t really representative of Cold Flat; maybe that’s just what the First Union Tabernacle does to you after a while. Anyway, this girl with the milkwood-colored hair sat quite still, her feet flat on the platform, her head turned and looking down the line, down the tracks, off to that horizon from which I had just come.

I remember the sky. It was especially, well,
white
, a thick, milky kind of whiteness with nothing at all suspended in it. It was like a giant page from which the print had faded, unreadable and opaque. I am not a very observant person; I do not note the barks of trees or patterns of leaves or wings—stuff like that. My mother knows every flower that ever bloomed, and Marge every bird that ever warbled. I myself am flower-blind and bird-deaf and it’s a good thing Nature doesn’t depend on me to write it down. Yet, I will never forget that sky. Nothing moved up there in that vast whiteness, no shred of cloud, no drifts of swallows, no sickly stillborn moon left over from the night before. The horizon was a blurred gray line and that was where she looked. The sky was like a judgment, but I could not think upon whom.

In the other direction off to the right there looked to be a few businesses. I made out a big red-and-white Esso sign, what looked like a general store, and another I thought that said “Diner.” It was there that I made for. It wasn’t as short a walk as it looked, because the emptiness of the landscape played tricks on the eyes. I was inside the Windy Run Diner within another ten minutes and letting the metal and glass-louvered door suck shut behind me on its tight spring.

Here I did excite a little bit of interest, for the row of heads at the counter turned and there were a couple of nods, a few vague little smiles. Probably they assumed my parents were getting the car filled up over at the Esso.

When the waitress slapped down her book of checks on the counter
(a signal for me to order, I guessed), I said I’d have a Coke, really wishing like anything that I could order coffee instead with some authority, even though I didn’t much like coffee.

If I had any plan at all in mind, it was vague. I must have thought that if I sat amongst the townfolk, they’d all be jabbering away about the people who lived there and I’d surely overhear something about the Tidewaters. But they didn’t and I didn’t. Sitting to my right were two old men as silent as the grave; the only sound coming from there was the click of glass against china as they shook enormous amounts of sugar into their cups. The woman on my other side was chewing gum with short breaks to puff in on her cigarette and push her thick glasses up her short nose.

The waitress (who wore a little badge like Maud’s, only hers said “Louise Snell” and “Prop.”) was pleasant and asked me, “Where you from, sugar?” and I lied I was from over in Comus, another thirty or forty miles beyond. I figured Comus was big enough that she wouldn’t be surprised she’d never seen me. Besides the Tidewaters, I really wanted to know who that girl at the railroad station was, but had no idea how to set about finding out. It was fairly easy to introduce the Tidewaters into the talk, though, since I knew their name. So I said I had a friend who lived in Cold Flat and that her name was Toya Tidewater.

Now, given my mother’s fearsome look and compressed lips whenever she mentions the Tidewaters, I was prepared for wild eyes and sharp, intaken breaths all along the counter. Nothing like this happened. The old man at my right brought up some phlegm in a disgusting way, but just kept right on looking at his mirror reflection as if he found himself tantalizing.

Louise Snell called down the counter to a truck-driver type named Billy and asked where Toya lived, and was it that little gone-to-ruin place along Swansdown Road, and Billy answered back, nah, that was the Simpsons’ place, and the Tidewaters lived out Lonemeadow way. Well, this was immediately contradicted by the woman on my left, who said there wasn’t no Tidewater lived there, least not now, and Billy must be thinking about old Joe and he was dead. Billy got kind of surly, probably because this woman was telling him he was wrong, and yelled up the counter that maybe old Joe was dead, but that don’t mean none of his
folks
didn’t live at the end of Lonemeadow. At one of the chrome-and-Formica tables marching in a row down the length
of the place a man and woman were sitting and they jumped right into this argument, telling both Billy and the woman they were wrong, that the Tidewaters moved last year over to Dubois—or at least
some
of them did (the man said to the woman, rather timidly). The argument over where the Tidewaters lived pretty soon expanded into guesses about all of the Tidewaters themselves, and who was whose kid, and which one went off to work in Comus, and which girl married someone named Mervin. Names broke and crested atop the waves of conversation (“Mattie Mae” . . . “Abraham” . . . “Joleen”) and on and on, so that the original question about Toya got completely forgotten and so did I. I just picked up my check and walked over to the cashier, a thin boy reading a comic book and muscling his nose around a bad cold, and obviously not a Tidewater fan, for he barely looked at the money, and at me not at all.

Outside on the narrow walk beside the highway, I wondered what to do. I could, I supposed, take a look at this Lonemeadow Road (if I could find it), but I still wouldn’t know if the people living in the end house were Tidewaters, since no one in the Windy Run Diner had agreed upon that point.

The diner, as I said, is one of the few businesses at the Junction; the train tracks ran at an angle a little farther past, cutting across one of the two “highways” (not much wider than wide roads), and as I stood there, looking off in the direction away from the station, I could see and hear the next train (probably a freight train) coming along. I walked up the road a bit, a little closer to the tracks, for I have always loved trains, the mournful sound of them, and guess everybody does. As it clattered on by, the conductor looked out, saw me and waved. I waved back. I felt strange, for I would imagine he took me for a resident of Cold Flat Junction, assigning to me a new place, a new identity.

I walked back up the road, aimlessly, seeing no one except a woman coming out of the door of a house set quite far back from the road, coming out and tossing dirty water from a pail and going back in.