Travelers Rest (13 page)

“Look,” Hugh said finally. “If it's any comfort, you're not the first.”

Interesting. Not the first what? Not the first kid who'd been given free chocolate pie? Not the first kid who'd been abandoned and wound up lying in this booth? “What does that
mean?
” he asked.

“Well, let's put it this way,” Hugh said. “This is a strange place.”

Dewey sighed deeply. “That's what's called an understatement,” he said.

This apparently “cracked Hugh up,” as his dad would have said: lol, kml, ha ha ha very funny. After Hugh had finished coughing and his face wasn't so red, he began again by pointing out the obvious. “You make me laugh,” he said. “I don't know where you get this stuff.”

Of course this kind of thing was always pleasant, you couldn't deny it, and even though the Dooze Man was mindful of his mother's advice that he should “keep his head on straight,” it was gratifying to have
somebody
in this frozen wilderness acknowledge his capabilities a tiny bit, and it made him a little less exasperated with Hugh for his plodding and incomplete explanations.

“Just how smart are you?” Hugh asked.

How was one to answer this? “I'm pretty smart,” Dewey said, measuring the words carefully and trying not to let a bragging tone sneak in, because his mother hated bragging, even when it was his father bragging about him, which his mother said happened all too frequently. It was funny how much more readily he felt like doing what his mother or his father asked now that they weren't around to ask him. Thinking about it made his throat tighten so he concentrated hard on the old, dried-up gum for a few seconds. In one of the wads someone had used a pen or a toothpick to poke holes in the shape of a smiley face. The person probably never suspected that someone would actually notice it one day and feel better for a minute.

“Yeah,” Hugh said, “so we're agreed. It's a pretty strange place.” Then he was quiet for a while again and Dewey peeked up to see him staring across the street toward the hotel. “It probably wasn't a good idea to pull off the interstate here.”  

“Now we agree on two things,” Dewey said.

Hugh chuckled and then did the thing where he acknowledged the chuckling. “Very funny,” he said. “Touché.”

Off to the side of where his head rested on the cool orange cushion, the Dooze Man saw Lorraine's legs approach, presumably attached to the rest of Lorraine. Her knees were red and chapped beneath the black skirt she wore. Like Dewey's mother, Lorraine did not seem to be a person who made concessions to the weather.

Lorraine's legs stood by the side of the table. Something about how they were positioned suggested frustration, or maybe impatience. “How's it going?” Lorraine's voice said.

Hugh patted Dewey's shoulder, as if maybe that would indicate the delicacy of the subject and keep Lorraine at bay awhile longer. “Uh,” he said.

“We haven't gotten very far,” Dewey said, “if that's what you're asking.”

“Hugh,” Lorraine said.

“All
right,
” Hugh said.

“Dewey?” Lorraine said.

“Yes?”

“Can I get you anything?”

How could she help but remind him of his mother, especially when she could only be seen from the legs down, where people looked more or less the same? Dewey was quiet for a moment, thinking about his mother, about the apparition across the street in the hotel—maybe the delusion or the hallucination, if he had actually gone crazy like he thought sometimes during the night he might have—how the apparition would be there until you tried to cross the door to it. It was like going behind a mirror to search for yourself and thinking for a moment that you instead of your reflection had disappeared. He felt his mother's absence keenly. Still, there were small consolations for not having her around to tell him what to do. One had to take advantage.

“I could eat another piece of pie, I think,” Dewey said.

A short argument ensued, in which Lorraine played the part of concerned mother and Hugh played the part of indulgent father, or at least a guy who didn't want to be bothered much with dietary issues. Dewey got his pie was the outcome of the argument, and he sat up and started to eat. Hugh moved to the other side of the booth and then changed his mind and came back again. He pulled his guitar pick out of his pocket and stuck it between his teeth and started flicking it. Dewey had yet to see a guitar in all his visits to the diner, but the pick was always there.

“This is the thing,” Hugh said. “You probably ended up here because you had to.”

“I
didn't
have to,” Dewey said. “I could have stayed in Mount Pleasant at my friend Hunter's house.” He dully forked up another bite of pie and eyed it for a long second before deciding to put it in his mouth. “They even offered,” he said.

“I know it sounds weird,” Hugh said, “but people get drawn here. It has a magnetic quality.”

Dewey wondered what that meant. It sounded like something you'd read in a tourist brochure for Charleston or Saint Simons Island. “I'm not seeing it,” he said.

“Seriously,” Hugh said. “A magnetic quality. As in, like, a magnet. Like gravity.”

“We ran into a blizzard,” Dewey said.

“Blizzard, blown tire, sudden bout of fatigue,” Hugh said. “They all end up here.”

“Who?” Dewey said.

Hugh leaned in and started to say something and then thought about it and leaned back and flicked the guitar pick between his teeth and then removed it and looked out the window. He said quietly, “You.” His mouth drew up in a tight line. “You, or someone like you.”

When he was seven, Dewey had a black hamster that his dad insisted on calling Sparky, though its name was actually LeBron James. The hamster was pretty boring, mostly, but Dewey had loved to watch him run on his wheel, which Sparky-LeBron could do for hours—Dewey stopped watching only because, unfortunately, the wheel running became as habit-forming and trance-inducing for him as it was for SL. When SL's time came (which it did, two years later, from a big ugly tumor on his belly), it was his father's job, as his father had predicted it would be, to put SL out of his misery (with the Dooze Man secretly watching his father out in the backyard through the dining room window) by hitting him with a hammer. This conversation was turning out exactly the same as that—not the hammer part (no one was getting ready to hit anyone with a hammer) but the wheel-spinning part, the going on and on without getting anywhere, and also the overall predictability. And there was another, more unnerving similarity. Dewey often had a feeling, as he watched his hamster on the wheel, that there was something bigger going on, involving larger forces, and that Sparky-LeBron, behind his beady little black eye, knew it, too, that in running the wheel he was in fact marking time, that there would be only a certain number of times the tiny feet could scoot the metal wheel, propelling it backward and backward as if trying to reverse the process, until things reached their inevitable conclusion—the hammer to the head, the crushing of the tiny skull, the squeals and then the silence. This conversation was also like that, Dewey thought with unease. It was heading to some sort of ending that you couldn't come back from.

“Wow,” Hugh said, and rubbed his hand over his stubbly scalp and pinched the beard on his chin. “This is
not
easy.”

It didn't
look
easy for him, Dewey was surprised to find. It didn't look easy at all. “Just tell me,” Dewey said softly, encouragingly, and he took his last bite of pie and he put his fork down on his plate and swallowed. He was pretty stuffed with pie. “It's okay,” he said, and without knowing why he reached over and patted Hugh's big hairy arm.

And then Lorraine was standing at the table, too, with her arm on Hugh's shoulder, and Hugh covered his eyes, pausing for a second to pull himself together, Dewey realized, and right then he knew what Hugh was going to say, in that stupid infuriating way he had of always figuring things out too fast, too early, too completely, even when they were things he didn't want to know. He knew exactly positively without a shadow of a doubt what Hugh was going to tell him, and yes, it was going to change things.

“Twenty years ago, back when I was a kid,” Hugh said, “the same thing happened to me.”

A
nthony Addison and his wife, Julia, were dressed for dinner, when Tiffany's celebration would begin in earnest. Tiffany had hired a French chef from a famous restaurant in San Francisco, and all week long the Harrington boy had been driving a wagon to and from the railroad depot, unloading crates of salmon on ice, sides of beef, the exotic secret ingredients of dishes no one in the town had ever heard of and would probably not appreciate sufficiently, at least from Tiffany's perspective. Addison found it all amusing, but there was no denying that Tiffany knew what he was doing when it came to this sort of thing. Addison had, maybe without admitting it to himself, been fashioning himself as a gentleman for the past few years, since he had become one of the principal owners of Le Rêve. It was an easy enough role to carry off during the course of the town's normal operations, but it became more difficult when he was faced with the likes of Tiffany, who knew the difference between being a real gentleman and simply putting on airs. Tiffany's aplomb was effortless, achieved, no doubt, as the result of a superior upbringing, although Tiffany was evasive concerning his origins, so much so that people who had spoken with him on the subject often whispered that he was either the descendant of a disgraced European aristocrat or a criminal of the more polite variety.

Addison himself was the son of immigrant farmers who had settled in the upper Midwest, Scotch-Irish Protestants among people who were not their kind, but hardworking and fertile to such a degree that he, the seventh of eight surviving children, had not much claim to any of the family holdings in Wisconsin, and had decided to take his chances out West, setting out with a modest sum that his father thought suitable, and which Addison considered more than fair. He was a rather tall and gangly man, with large hands and feet and long arms, but he had a lean strength and an inexhaustible store of energy and patience. He had found work in the Dream Mine (as it had come to be known locally) in its early days and applied himself to it steadily, living frugally and making friends easily enough. Before long, he became a pit boss (an unusually well-liked one), and after another year he approached one of the owners with a request to buy into the operation, which he did at first on a fairly small scale. Following a series of prudent investments in other business interests in the Northwest, he found himself in a position to enter into an agreement with the ownership. From that day until now, he had not gone back down into the mine. He had a home built, the finest structure in town until Tiffany came along with his hotel, and he traveled east to find a wife, making sure he found the right one. He believed, all things considered, that he had done quite well for someone who, as Tiffany, a Catholic, was always fond of reminding him, shared his name with the patron saint of swineherds.

But this day had unsettled him a bit. First, there was the hotel itself, which Tiffany had guarded jealously during construction, allowing only the workmen inside and threatening them as best he could to keep them from divulging details. It hadn't worked—the town buzzed with descriptions of the opulent interior taking shape, of the plans for the opening, and of course you couldn't hide the installation of pipes for the gas lighting, or the arrival of the chandeliers, or the veritable forest of oak cabinetry, or the glass tanks for exotic fish. It was as if, after having so often treated Tiffany as an amusing and somewhat absurd inferior, Addison's own nature had been exposed by Tiffany's triumph, by the revelation that Tiffany was indeed a man to be reckoned with, and that, in all likelihood, his knowledge and experience of the world not only far outstripped Addison's but also might be of the sort to result in a greater fortune for its possessor.

And there was the matter of the incident in the mine. It had been a mere six weeks since the first multiple fatality in Le Rêve. Addison had, as a kind of natural liaison between the miners and the ownership, been one of the first to speak with the only survivor of the accident, a man named Diamond, who had arrived in Good Night not long after Addison himself, and who had worked under him during his time as pit boss.

Diamond reported that he and four other members of his crew had struck a new vein in the lowest depths of the main shaft, the one that reached down into the earth like a throat. They were exhuming silver in nuggets as large as apples, so large that they had never seen the likes of it before, when, one by one, they had begun to sweat intensely. Addison knew what this meant, why Diamond paused significantly in the telling of the story at this point. The temperature that far down was not dependent on the weather, and only a little on the seasons, so that any change in the condition of the air that came about so rapidly was cause for alarm. The five of them, in considering the situation, had sat down to rest along the wall of the shaft when they felt the heat at their backs and a pressure building in their ears. Diamond moved quickly back toward the lift and away from the wall, while the others, he said, tried to investigate. As soon as they determined that they were all experiencing the same feeling—the heat, the pressure—a portion of the wall simply slid down, and there was a high shrieking or whistling that obliterated everything—Diamond's eardrums were in fact burst, according to the doctor in Spokane Falls—and, Diamond said, it was as if the explosion and the eruption of air, the swift wind about his head, filling his ears, had transported him to some strange place where everything was white, where it was as if he'd stepped through a door and come out beside himself, where he could see and hear the explosion that killed his companions but not be killed himself, and when it was all over he was surprised to find that he was still there in the mine shaft, amid the rubble and the bodies. He had thought he'd gone for good to the white place—and in fact he could still see it in the corner of his vision.

On the day Addison spoke to him, it had been only a week since the accident, a fact that Diamond, when reminded of it, found surprising but was ultimately willing to accept, given Addison's assurances; personally, he felt that he had been recollecting the incident for many, many years. It was Mr. Addison's turn to be surprised. Suddenly, he also seemed to remember the incident as if it belonged to his own distant past, as if he had carried the knowledge of it with him for a very long time. For a suspended moment, the two men looked at each other as if they had stumbled upon the answer to a question that neither of them had asked. But in the next moment both the answer and the question were forgotten, and Addison assured Diamond that he was mistaken, and suggested that he take a long rest, which Diamond admitted, with a smile, he was more than ready to do. That was the end of the matter, other than the completion of official reports and the notification of kin. But the interview had lingered in Addison's mind ever since, and today the memory of it felt particularly sharp. This was, he supposed, the result of his warm fellowship with the miners, the men who had been lost, and his feeling that, on this day of celebration, there was something slightly amiss in the general enthusiasm following so closely in the wake of such a tragedy. But that wasn't all—the accident itself seemed to loom very close for some reason just now, as if the heat of the mine shaft and the whistling sound that Diamond described had crept into his own consciousness. Probably this was due to his immediate situation—the discomfort of his starched shirt collar, the awkward position he had chosen in sitting on the bed.

“Mr. Addison?” his wife called from the lavatory, where she was making her final preparations for the evening. “Would you please ring for a needle and thread? The hem needs adjusting.”

It was a little discouraging that, after having been married for nearly a year, his wife still referred to him, unfailingly, as “Mr. Addison.” He did not expect, exactly, to be called by terms of endearment at this early stage—he did not expect “darling” or “dear”—but he didn't quite expect, or feel he deserved, “Mr. Addison” either.

He did not think that his wife referred to him this way out of obstinacy or spite. He did not think it was her way of punishing him for the position in which her father found himself, that of a formerly successful shipping agent in a river town of declining importance, so that the notion of sending his daughter across the country with a man of very new money and no family or education, which would have been unthinkable ten years before, was not so unthinkable now.

From what Addison could tell thus far, his wife was as fair-minded as any man, if not more so, and as capable a judge of character. He believed that she had a passable degree of respect for him, though this was not an opinion she would share with him, nor one that she would suspect he felt needed sharing. She was, Mr. Addison concluded with a measure of disappointment and even self-pity, deficient in feminine “softness,” the enlarged sympathies one thought of in connection with women. But he could not fault her for anything else—she was perhaps a little vain about her looks.

He had been in the hotel room for some time now, and although the steam heat was marvelously efficient, the room did begin to feel a little close if you stayed shut up in it for too long. He decided he would get the needle and thread himself.

Truthfully, he could find no fault with Mrs. Addison whatsoever. It was only that something might be lacking, he felt, in the arrangement between the two of them, as perceived by a man like Tiffany, for instance, who, being a good bit older, likely knew more about marriage and the manner in which one should be properly conducted (although it was worth considering that Tiffany, to Addison's knowledge, had never been married himself). The suggestion of a smile on Tiffany's face when he had left them in the room together an hour ago said as much—there was the expectation of some intimacy that Addison knew did not exist. The several minutes following Tiffany's departure had been filled with a leaden silence, Mrs. Addison seated primly, hands clasped, at the foot of the bed, while he sat in the armchair attempting to smile pleasantly. He wanted to say something to her about the boy he had seen from the window, and about how he had been moved to tap the glass. He had noticed his wife's surprise at the urgency of the gesture. He had tapped hard on the glass but the boy had not turned toward him, and he'd grown conscious then of his wife's and Tiffany's stares, and he had straightened himself at the window and brushed a bit of moisture from the cuff of his shirtsleeve. “Young fellow out the window there,” he said, grinning awkwardly. He had no other explanation to offer, and he reddened as Tiffany pointed out to Mrs. Addison the delicate design of the room's crown molding, which had been chosen and carved specially for the hotel by a company in Kansas City.

Once Tiffany had gone, he knew his wife wanted to ask him about it, the incident at the window, but there seemed to be no mechanism for broaching the subject. In a room with other people, the way it had been with Tiffany in the lobby earlier or how it would be in the dining room less than an hour from now, his wife conversed with him as lightly as if she had known him all her life. But when they were alone, the gleam left her eyes, the rosy color faded from her smooth cheeks, and the soft smile she presented to the outside world evaporated without a trace. The face she presented to him was a mask that seemed to mask nothing, a fixed advertisement of disinterest. This was, he supposed, a sort of intimacy in itself, but not one that offered much comfort. It would have to do for now.

Out in the hall, he shut the door behind him and proceeded down the corridor toward the stairs, hearing the sound of guests and activity from the lobby below and voices up ahead from one of the other rooms.

It might do sometime to ask Tiffany for a bit of advice—if Tiffany could be trusted. Addison had as little experience with women as he did with society. He had, with about equal parts guilt and fear, made his way to the local prostitutes, just like all the other young miners in the early days of the town. There were few other temptations and even fewer opportunities. These encounters had been interesting enough in their own way, but unfulfilling to the part of Addison that, even when he was as young as he was then, wished for a companionship that went beyond desire to a place he could not recognize or imagine. The only marriage at which he'd had a firsthand look was that of his own parents, who lived a hard life and had little time to devote to each other. In the small house his family occupied there was no room for privacy—five boys, three girls, Anthony the youngest of them all but one—and he had been aware all his life of the scuffling in the dark, the nighttime noises, the grunting and puffing that interrupted his sleep on occasion. It was not until his oldest brother, Andrew, explained to him, much later, the true nature of the disturbance that Anthony had any idea of his parents' actions, and afterward he would listen hot with shame, imagining that his father was no different from a baboon in the nature of his attentions, and he felt an aching pity for his mother, whose voice he never heard. His partnership with Mrs. Addison so far had not been as horrible as that, but it had been awkward and quiet, and had not sufficiently put these painful memories to rest.

He moved down the corridor with his long-legged gait and thought for a moment of nothing more than the request for needle and thread—to whom should it be addressed, was there a certain color? His wife hadn't said. As he passed by an open door on his left, his movement was arrested momentarily by a strident voice, the flash of a hand…He looked round to see Tiffany and Miss Blanchard framed in the doorway, the snow falling in the window behind them, as if they were two characters posed in exaggerated form on a stage. Tiffany bent toward the actress and spoke to her urgently, his face red, the cords of his neck tight, extending his hand as if demanding something. Miss Blanchard's eyes flashed at him angrily, her mouth was set in a perfectly straight line, but she held out her closed hand and Tiffany grabbed it. For a moment the two of them were frozen there, and Addison himself had halted almost midstep. Slowly, though, Tiffany's head turned toward the door, and as he saw Addison a frown took shape on his face. Miss Blanchard, however, lifted her head and turned to Addison directly, so that he noticed the perfect shape of her white throat and rounded shoulders. Her eyes glowed in the lamplight, brimming with some sort of mischief, and the smile that turned up the corners of her mouth spoke to Mr. Addison, and only Mr. Addison, of secrets she would soon reveal.