Hotel Paradise (7 page)

A short distance later I came to a small schoolhouse of white clapboard. It was the sort you see represented in paintings in the same way village churches are—bell tower, steeple. School didn’t seem to be in session, which was peculiar, as it was only May. I never pay much attention to school holidays, as I usually have to leave school wherever we are most winters to return to open up the hotel in spring.
There were still a few kids at the other end of the schoolyard shoving a ball through a basket and dribbling away. And there was one girl standing behind a chainlink fence, doing nothing but staring out, one hand locked in the fence and the other holding a sort of tube against her face which I recognized, as I got closer, as pick-up-sticks. She was simply staring out. I mistook her attitude as interest in me, but I was wrong, for she was looking right past me. Everything about her looked washed out: her jeans were faded; her eyes were a queer clear gray, without depth; her skin was pale; her hair looked rinsed in Clorox. There was this disturbing colorlessness to her, as if she were a piece of the Judgment sky.

Knowing pretty much I wouldn’t get an answer, I went up close to the fence and asked her if she knew where the Tidewaters lived. Her fingers moved, curling and uncurling in the webbing of the fence, but she did not reply. I leaned against the fence and put my hand up there too, curling my fingers in and around the metal as she was doing. I don’t know why I did this. But it worked almost like a secret sign, and she asked me if I wanted to play pick-up-sticks in a voice as small as any I’ve ever heard. I said sure, even though I think I am a little old for pick-up-sticks. (I have always had a secret liking for the game.)

So I walked to the end of the fence and through a gate, and we both sat down on a grassy verge and let the colored sticks fall on the concrete. She held them in a bundle and released them, letting them lie where they fell. She was very good at this game, better than I was. It’s not a hard game, but it takes concentration and patience and coordination, for you have to be careful when lifting one stick with another that you don’t touch a third. She was able to lift, without touching, half the sticks in one turn. I managed about a half a dozen, and then she picked up the rest. After a game, she put the sticks back in the tube. I left. She never did tell me her name; for all I knew, she could have been a Tidewater.

Beyond the school sat a post office. It was a gray cinderblock building with an American flag drooping high on its flagpole. I thought how stupid I’d been not to come here first off: the post office would clearly know the whereabouts of the Tidewater family. Or families, for there appeared to be more than one.

The light inside was fluorescent, unshadowed and kind of unearthly. Facing me was a wall of those metal boxes you can rent so that any mail you receive is completely secret and private. Our post office in
Spirit Lake (much cozier than the Cold Flat one) has these boxes, only ours, instead of having a metal door, are half metal and half glass; they are very old, antique probably.

My brother, Will, and I used to have the heady job of picking up the mail. We would walk the long boardwalk that started at the tennis club building and ran parallel to the highway, through trees and shrubbery, all the way down to the railroad station and the post office. We would take our time about the mail route. After we left the post office, or before we went there, we would sometimes go to Greg’s and get an Orange Crush and a Moon Pie (his friend Brownmiller’s favorite combination, and I often think we ate this in honor of him, as if he were a war hero or something, when actually he only lives a hundred miles away). Then we would set our pop on the pinball machine and Will would just about tilt it nearly to death and was good at winning free games (though not as good as Brownmiller).

But that was years ago and time past, and Lola Davidow started driving down to the post office; sometimes Ree-Jane does it, especially since she got that new convertible car. Ree-Jane, God knows, isn’t about to
walk.
So the mail route became one more Davidow takeover. It means that on the rare occasions when someone writes to me, Mrs. Davidow or Ree-Jane gets to see the letter first; worse, they get to tell me who it is that’s writing. It’s discouraging, for by the time I get my letter, it seems used; it is drained of that bewitching power unopened mail has. And, of course, if Ree-Jane picks up my mail, she is totally unmerciful. She would never just leave it at the desk or hand it over. No, there has to be a big production staged about the sender and my relationship to her or him (if “him” it’s always worse); that, or she might open it “by mistake,” thinking it’s from a prospective guest who wants to make a reservation; or sometimes she even “forgets” to give me my letter and it doesn’t turn up for days or even a week. By the time Ree-Jane gets finished with my poor letter, it’s almost as if the ink is worn away. Certainly, the excitement of receiving it is.

So I have always wanted to rent one of those little metal boxes; that way I could receive my mail in total privacy, for my eyes only. It was always a high point in Will’s and my day when we could look through the glass and see the white envelopes slotted in there, along with the occasional blue or official-looking tan one. My brother and I would take turns spinning the combination.

Sometimes we would be given money to buy stamps, and I thoroughly
enjoyed that, for it allowed me to talk to the postmistress, Miss Crosby, through the arched window opening, which is the only vantage point for seeing into the “back” room and the great swell of letters and parcels on the table. Through this window, which has a flat wooden door she can slide down, Miss Crosby dispenses stamps and change and, up to a point, information. When she is “off” for lunch (tea and a tuna sandwich and some selection of Hostess cake) or has to go out on an errand, she can shut the window—bang the window, sometimes, when I was asking too many questions. Actually, Miss Crosby will sometimes keep the window shut if she does not feel like exposing herself to the outside world; no one has any way of knowing if she’s back there with her cup of tea and Hostess cupcake, hiding. I think hers must be the most enviable job in the world, back there with tea and Twinkies and all of that mail.

But here in Cold Flat Junction, the post office was a more efficient-looking and businesslike affair. The counter that ran half the length of the small room would leave whoever was behind totally exposed. Except there was, this day, no one behind it. No sounds came from the inner room, and nothing moved except the ceiling fan, making its slow, faintly whistling rounds.

I supposed the person could be using the toilet, so I waited. I read the Most Wanted posters and mused about the lives of the two men pictured there. One of them was named Drinkwater, which definitely caught my eye. The other was named Waters. But they must have been related, probably brothers, for they looked so much alike, and one or the other of them had simply shorn a syllable off or added a syllable in some infantile attempt to change the name. They really did look alike. Then I dimly remembered having seen other posters and
they
all looked pretty much alike, too. I made a mental note to ask the Sheriff why this should be. Why did all Most Wanteds seem to have dark hair and spidery little mustaches that slanted down to the corners of their mouths? And small, beady eyes. I stood with my hands clasped behind me, rolling on the balls of my feet, reading about these men. Armed robbery, both of them. Robbery was pretty boring, except if you went armed, which I guess made it more interesting. I shot both of them with my thumb and finger.

Still, no one appeared to take my order. There was a rack of postcards of places like La Porte and Cloverly and the Cold Flat station and the church. I selected the station and the Tabernacle ones. My
plan was to buy two stamps to make my presence here reasonable and then to ask casually about the Tidewaters. The Drinkwaters (I was sure they were brothers) made this even easier, for I could laughingly tell the postmistress (or -master) that I had nearly died looking at the poster, thinking the name was
Tidewater.
This wasn’t, but could easily have been, true. But clever as this story was (cleverer, I was sure, than the Drinkwaters would be when they got caught), I was unable to put it into action, for no one appeared, even though I hung around for another ten minutes. It was no way to run a country. I put two dimes on the counter and pocketed my postcards and left.

Then I stopped on the walk outside and pulled out the postcard, wondering once again how I could be so dumb. The First Union Tabernacle, of course! The minister or reverend or whatever he was would not only most certainly tell me where the Tidewaters lived, but also what they were like. Just from reading his expression, I would probably know if they’d all gone to hell, or were regular churchgoers, or whatever.

A church steeple rose in the distance, and since I saw no other churchlike building, I hurried towards it. Just then, a bell tolled. I took this as a sign that I was on the right track. I walked on and listened to the tolling and then realized what it had tolled: four o’clock. That didn’t give me much time until the only train I could take came through. It would be impossible even to walk as far as the church and get all the way back to the station.

Defeated, I turned and trod back.

And never a Tidewater had I seen.

When the First Union Tabernacle bus was letting off its passengers on this Sunday, I looked for the girl I had seen on the station platform. Ever since I had seen her there, it had bothered me the way she seemed not to fit in Cold Flat Junction. It was like suddenly being pulled out of a fantasy in a movie house when someone walks in front of the screen and casts his shadow over the actors there. But I did not see her, so I guess she wasn’t of the First Union Tabernacle faith.

The bench outside Britten’s store was occupied on this particular day by the same old man, who always had a wad of chewing tobacco he pulled at the way I do at taffy and who always wore a faded blue railroad cap. After I’d left Britten’s with my box of jujubes, I sat down at the other end to wait for Ubub and Ulub. The old man looked over at me, probably thinking that something really interesting might be happening today since there was this new person on the bench. Of course he’d seen me, as I had him, a hundred times before, going in and out of the store, but this seating arrangement must have struck him as novel. He said, “Evenin’,” though it was still afternoon. I imagine he probably had his dinner around four o’clock, like so many old people who tend to get up really early—dawn, I’d’ve bet—and go to bed the same way. I smiled at him and said “Hello” and that was our conversation.

We sat there counting cars, me eating my jujubes, him chewing his tobacco, until finally the Woods came along down the narrow gravel path beside the store. They went in, but came out soon, both with bottles of Nehi grape. They both nodded and smiled, and I did
too, getting up to give them their regular seats, but Ubub told me, “Knit dow, knit dow,” which I guess was “Sit down,” for he patted the air downward with his palm. I sat next to the man in the railroad cap, and Ubub sat next to me with Ulub on the end.

Now we were four. I offered my jujubes around and they all took only one—not much if you know jujubes. Ulub waited to see what Ubub was going to do with his jujube, and when Ubub put it in his shirt pocket, Ulub put his away too. The man in the railroad cap had not put his teeth in that day, but he gummed the jujube around, mixing its fruity taste with the Mail Pouch tobacco. You’ve got to be careful of jujubes if you’ve got teeth, for once one gets stuck in a crevice it’s like cement. I once told Marge that the dentist in town should use jujubes for fillings.

The three of them seemed very pleased I was there, as we sat with our candy and pop and Mail Pouch, and I did fit in pretty well, I thought. I have always been rather unusual in this regard—that I take on the coloring of whatever I’m experiencing at the moment and blend in with it. Sometimes I think I could be used to plug up holes in things with this way I have of becoming where I am. I like to think this is a compliment to myself, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, it was nice to know that just my presence created an enjoyable novelty for them. The Woods knew who I was, because they lived in a frame house in a muddy quarter-acre across the road from the back driveway of the hotel. They had also done a few odd jobs around the grounds. Our regular handyman, Wilton Macreedy, doesn’t like them and calls them “retards” and “idiots.” As far as I’m concerned there is no bigger idiot than Wilton Macreedy, who’s a drinker and spends a lot of time over in the El Lobo Bar and Grille that the Sheriff wants Ree-Jane to stay out of. It’s located between Hebrides and La Porte, and Wilton Macreedy drives his ancient Ford pickup over there and starts fights. He’s mean and has a jealous nature. You’d have to be really poor in spirit to be jealous of the Woods, but that’s what Wilton is.

I didn’t want to call them “Ulub” and “Ubub,” for I wasn’t sure but what it might offend them. I didn’t think they were both named Bob, so I sat there trying to figure out how to address them. Well, of course: “Mr. Wood” would be the proper way. So I asked Mr. Wood (Ubub) if he could think back forty years or more, and was it true he and (I nodded towards Ulub) the other Mr. Wood there had worked
for a family named Devereau that lived in that house out on the lake. The house where no one lives anymore.

“Len seh,” Ubub said. “Duen-rwoh.” He knit his brow with the effort. I would like to have told him that the way he pronounced the “reau” in “Devereau” made me want to take him right along to the hotel and have him say hello to Ree-Jane. He was made to order for pronouncing that crazy French name just the way she said. Imagine, Ubub Wood, the only person who could really pronounce “Réjane”! I tucked that away to tell her.

When Ubub was saying this, Ulub was watching him intently and making lip movements in imitation of Ubub’s. Then Ulub nodded several times, and Ubub nodded, too. Ubub expanded on what he’d said: “Wuhwr da aw un suahmu.”