Travelers Rest (27 page)

It was much later, he knew, when he opened his eyes again. He stretched out his legs, which were stiff more from the cold air in the room than from the position he'd slept in, and he pushed himself up against the wall. He rubbed his eyes and focused out the window. Snow.

He went back downstairs and the woman was gone. The greenish light of the TV drifted out into the corridor, but she was no longer on the sofa. Dewey called out tentatively—“Hello?”—flinching at the possibility of a response, but no one was there. He was too tired and dejected to think about anything so he got a blanket from the bed and lay down on the sofa where the strange woman had been and watched the TV to see if he could figure out what she'd seen.

A curious thing—there appeared to be an actual show on the TV, one with actors and a director and a script. Definitely it wasn't what the woman was watching before. There wasn't any sound but you could see the picture really clear. The show looked like it cost maybe five dollars to make—it had this totally fake tropical island with a bunch of people who had been shipwrecked, apparently, only everyone had clean clothes and the women were pretty and wore lots of makeup. There was a fat man in a blue shirt who chased a skinny guy in a red shirt and hit him with his hat. Dewey guessed it was supposed to be funny. If you were an actual castaway, though, not so much. He'd learned that in the last week. He fell asleep again.

When he woke up, the TV had gone back to its usual greenish-gray light. It was like it was diseased or something, a sick TV that needed a visit to the emergency room. He squinted and focused the best he could on the grainy image the TV presented to him. A hole, a cavity. It was the opening to the mine shaft—a throat trying to swallow him, and he was ready to go down, down, down. Why not? Everything was hopeless. He would die. He, the Dooze Man, would die. This was what it looked like, on the TV. The mouth like a breathing tube that sucked you into the earth. Everything in the whole world was just a dream anyway, or at least to people like him, Dewey, who thought too much. Hugh had said his own mother was “dreamy,” but Dewey's mother wasn't. Whose fault was it, then? Who was to blame for all this? He, Dewey, who lived his life in a dream.

The greenish light of the TV screen, the yawning chasm attempting to pull him under—he could feel himself entering the zone he couldn't escape from, the place where he went and stayed gone, and everything was worn down to elements, the cold, the dark, the
snow,
which right now, in his mind, fell so softly and peacefully. Everything was like an icy, burning dream, and he was in it now, on the inside and all alone. Time passed.

The next thing he became aware of was a figure on the TV screen, orbiting the edges of his consciousness. It was a human being, tired and cold, limping a little, hunched over, lost. A tall figure, strong but weakened by circumstance, shuffling into the mine entrance. The green light made the character weirdly fluid, as if it were moving underwater, but Dewey began to make it out now, see something familiar. A tall man wearing glasses, urgently searching, seeking someone he loved, someone he was desperately missing.

Y
ou didn't see many kids in this town, but here one was, at the diner, with what was probably his grandpa, feeding a quarter into the gumball machine. The kid had some kind of fucked-up haircut that looked like it had been done with a lawn mower, and snot pumped out of his nose in copious streams. Robbie was glad he hadn't ordered anything to eat. His stomach felt even worse when he realized what the gumball machine was—an actual replica of the maze of stairways and passages connecting all the buildings in the goddamn town, a miniature version of the torture chamber he'd been trapped in.

“For fuck's sake,” he said.

The grandfather paid up and gave Robbie the evil eye for no reason he could figure or at least admit and he and the kid shuffled over to the door and headed out into the snow, the grandfather pulling his old coat tight around his neck and the kid hacking and coughing and swallowing snot. Robbie walked on over and had a look. There it was, inside the transparent plastic shell, the whole network of stairways and doors and tunnels, like a game of Chutes and Ladders for the eternally damned. There was the biggest building, the hotel, dead center, with its mass of stairways and passages. A long stairway descended below the ground and then tunneled across the street and came up a set of stairs and branched out in several different directions, and he could see the way he'd gone and the stairs that led to the door at the back room of the bar where Stephanie worked. That's where he'd been stuck,
right there.

“Where the hell did you get this?” he asked Hugh, who had walked over to stand next to him. He was flicking the guitar pick between his teeth. Robbie recognized him now as the guitar player of the crappy band that was playing the night they'd arrived.

“I made it,” Hugh said.

“You
made
it?”

“Yeah,” Hugh said. “I found it in a novelty shop up in Cranbrook. It had these metal tracks that the gumball traveled down. I thought it would be cool to have this instead so I cut the top off and made the model out of balsa wood and cardboard and toothpicks and Popsicle sticks. Then I painted it and put the top back on with a hinge.” He stood there breathing in and out like a horse and regarding the gumball machine in a proprietary way. “It's folk art, I guess you'd call it.”

“Yeah,” Robbie said. “That's what I was thinking of calling it.”

Hugh looked at him unfondly. “A lot of people around here make stuff like this. It's kind of a local hobby.”

“Commemorate the fucked-up nature of your town with toothpicks and balsa wood and model airplane glue. Why not.” He stood there studying the model, which was actually pretty astonishing.  He wondered how much time it would take to craft such a thing.

“Do you get the shit beat out of you a lot?” Hugh asked him.

“Surprisingly rarely,” Robbie said.

“Here,” Hugh said, and handed him a quarter.

Robbie put it in the coin slot and turned the handle. An orange gumball rose up in a little bucket that dumped it over the top of the diner, where it bounced off the roof and rolled down the stairway to the bar, where it plunged down into the basement and rolled under the street to the hotel and dropped down a hole and landed in the tray. Robbie took it out and put it in his shirt pocket to give to Dewey later, when they found him.

“It had a deal where you could use these levers to guide the gumball along and if you got it in a certain slot it would give you an extra gumball,” Hugh said. “But I couldn't figure out how to make it work.”

“That's okay,” Robbie said. “It's pretty impressive just how it is.” Hugh eyed him with mistrust. “Seriously.”

“Thanks,” Hugh said. “You'd be surprised to see how many of us here make stuff like this. You just take something old about the town and turn it into something new.” He gazed out at the street and craned his neck to see up to the windows in the hotel. Stephanie had gone in there over an hour ago. Robbie and Hugh had been trying not to mention it for a good half hour now. “I know exactly how things look to you here. I'm not an idiot. And believe me, I've tried to leave. I went to Seattle for a while.”

“Really,” Robbie said. His old home in Seattle seemed about a million miles away. It was almost incomprehensible that, theoretically, you could drive there from here in less than six hours.

“I worked at a restaurant on Capitol Hill,” Hugh said. “But there didn't seem to be any reason to live there, so one day I just left and came back here.”

“Did Stephanie ever move away?”

Hugh shook his head. “She's hardly ever been anywhere since our mother disappeared. Once a souvenir, always a souvenir. So they say.” He went on to tell Robbie about all the times you'd see somebody, could be a person of any age, old, young, male, female, black, white, staring at the hotel, snapping pictures, hanging around the street—people who had left, moved on, sometimes started whole different lives, but finally couldn't stay away. “You always think you can find the person you lost somehow, bring them back, that there must be some way…and maybe there is. I'm still looking. Why do you think we bought this diner? So I could be right across the street. So I could keep some kind of connection between this world and that world.” His gaze drifted around the walls of the diner, as if he were surprised to find himself in the same place after all these years, and then out the window to the hotel sign—Travelers Rest—the letters partly obscured by snow.  “When my mother went to develop that film, I could have been standing right here watching the street. There's always a chance.”

Robbie inspected the interior of the diner: rather nondescript, clean enough, serviceable, old prints of the mining town decorating the walls. It could be a diner just about anywhere. The kid in the kitchen dinged the bell and Lorraine took the order from the window and set it in front of an old man with sunken gums and eyes who sat quietly at a back table.

“What about her?” Robbie asked. “Your wife—is she a…souvenir?”

Hugh shook his head. “It was her family that took in me and Stephanie after we got left here. You kind of get stuck with whoever the town picks out for you. They were nice enough till Lorraine decided to marry me. Now not so much.” Hugh stood there stolidly, his hands in the front pockets of his jeans, utterly unperturbed. He looked like he might start whistling in a minute.

“Amazing,” Robbie said. He scanned the place once more—the kid washing dishes in the kitchen, two old ladies in a booth, Lorraine scratching down an order on a pad, everything as normal as it could be—and then turned back and faced the street and the hotel windows. “Why doesn't anybody say anything? Why aren't the cops crawling all over this place?”

“People make reports sometimes,” Hugh said. “It's not unheard of. But most of the time they don't say anything.” He looked at Robbie. “I mean, what would the police find? How exactly would you explain what happens here?”

Two people fucking disappeared—that's how he would explain it. And he intended to, as soon as Stephanie found Dewey. Or at least that was what he'd been telling himself, although it was becoming a less effective story the longer Stephanie stayed in that hotel. Because what the deeper part of him suspected was this: that Tonio and Julia had gotten lost in the labyrinth the same way he had. That would explain a lot of things—why he remembered hearing Julia's voice when he was lost in one of the passageways, for instance. Why the thing had happened between him and Julia—maybe they'd both just been confused. He had been lost in the maze for what he guessed was a period of several hours. How disoriented would you be if you'd been wandering around that hotel for several
days?

And while he knew that Stephanie was looking for Dewey, he also knew that on some level what Stephanie was always doing when she set foot in the hotel was looking for her mother, and that in some very strange ways —like the picture—she kept on finding her, or pieces of her, or evidence of her, at least. And if Hugh had gotten her hopes up with the picture this time, who knew how long the journey could take? There was an even deeper fear that assailed him now while he stood by the gumball machine and stared silently with Hugh out the window, waiting for something, anything to move: what if, this time, Stephanie went so far into her own memories and fantasies and desires that
she
got lost in there? What if Tonio, Julia, Dewey, and Stephanie were all lost in there? Almost his whole life at this point, in other words, because what else did he have right now? His parents? The people he'd met this last time in rehab? A bunch of fucked-up loser friends in his hometown who would only get him in more trouble as soon as he returned? Everything he had was now in the hands of Stephanie, who, with every passing second, had been in there too long even longer. And way, way down at the bottom of himself, in the nether regions where he harbored any sense of obligation, there was something he also knew.

“I can tell you this,” he said to Hugh, both of them standing there with their arms crossed, staring at nothing, the only sound the scraping knife and fork of the old man and the subdued chatter of the old ladies in the booth. “As soon as I find somebody to talk to, I'm going to do a lot of talking. I'm going to tell somebody
everything.
”

Hugh unfolded one arm and put the guitar pick, which he'd been twirling with his fingers, in the pocket of his shirt. “Well,” he said, “I don't mind that. I really don't.” He checked out the tables, peeked back toward the kitchen. “I wouldn't say that too loud, though. There are some people who would be upset to hear you say that, but not me.” He appraised Robbie one last time and shuffled back toward the kitchen. “But you haven't been through the whole thing yet. We'll see.”

There it was again, that rock at the pit of his stomach, that little voice that told him what he didn't want to hear, what he didn't want to do. He knew what would make it go away: a drink. He started to feel that electric pull in his feet, and while Lorraine was asking the old guy if he needed anything else and Hugh was telling the kid in the kitchen that he could go home now, Robbie escaped the diner and made his way to the Miner's Hat, a few doors down the street.

It was cozy in the bar and he didn't mind that people stared at him. The only window onto the street was the small square one in the front door, so he didn't have to feel compelled to look out the windows every second in hopes of seeing Dewey and Stephanie. The rock in his gut—the dry, nagging voice—was beginning to disappear already, and he hadn't even had a drink. This had been a good decision. Still, there were plenty of things happening, the evening promised to be eventful, so he decided it was best to order a beer instead of whiskey. One problem that he had forgotten—he didn't have a dime to his name. He didn't even have ID.

The bartender stood in front of him. Robbie ordered a beer and looked at him pleasantly. “Stephanie said to put it on her tab,” he said.

It worked. He drank one beer and ordered another and he even found that there were ten unused selections on the ancient jukebox in the corner and he chose seventies rock songs with all of them and he ordered a third beer and sat on a barstool contentedly listening to the Eagles. The world was just fine. He could forget there was anything unusual going on at all.

Then a swift blast of cold air came through the door and Robbie turned to see some of his buddies walking in—there was Ray, and there was Ruby, and there were a couple of other guys he didn't think he knew.

“Hey, Ray. Hey, Ruby,” he said, but they said nothing in return. “Good to see you again.” Robbie saluted them with his beer can. The four of them kind of ranged themselves around him at the bar in a none too neighborly way.

He considered whether it would be a good idea to bring up his newly formed friendship with Hugh at this point, but he decided that probably wouldn't accomplish much. He turned to ask for another beer but the bartender had mysteriously disappeared. There were two old codgers at the bar and a middle-aged couple smoking cigarettes and nursing drinks in a booth near the back—no one that was going to be of any help. The one thing that could help would be if Stephanie walked in the door right about now—she'd set these assholes straight in less than a minute.

Robbie nodded at the new guys. “Who's your friends?” he said.

Ruby looked down at the guy nearest the front entrance, to Robbie's right. “There on the end, that's Rusty,” he said. “You met him before.”

“Rusty, Ruby, Ray,” Robbie said. “Readin', writin', 'rithmetic.”

Nobody even tried to smile. It was possible, he supposed, that they didn't get the reference.

“Next to him,” Ruby said, “is Miles.”

Miles offered him a slight head bob but nothing verbal in the way of a response.

Ruby stepped a little closer to Robbie's barstool. “You may be interested to know that Miles”—Ruby nodded in Miles's direction, as if Robbie might have forgotten who he was in the past two seconds—“was going out with your friend Stephanie until about a week ago.”

Robbie checked out Miles briefly—on the tall side, sandy blond hair, a bit listless, shoulders a tad slumped. Not much to speak of in any respect. “That
is
interesting,” Robbie said, getting up from his stool. Before Miles had a chance to react, Robbie snuck up and shook his hand. “That's great,” he said. “Good to meet you.”

Miles peeked sideways at Ruby and the others, as if seeking direction. Possibly he was a halfway decent guy—it didn't seem like this whole thing had been his idea.

“Come on, Miles,” Ruby said, and nudged him toward Robbie.

Right then the bartender reappeared. He walked out from behind the bar to the front door and locked it. Son of a bitch. The two old guys had swiveled on their barstools to face Robbie. One of them was missing his right eye. Both of them looked like they were willing to give this whole thing a go. The couple in the booth leered grotesquely. The Eagles sang “Life in the Fast Lane.”