At the Jim Bridger: Stories (23 page)

“It’s your car,” he said. “Isn’t it? It’s in the story as your car. I got it back.”

I sat with him. “What?”

He tapped the thick notebook in which I had written what I had written. “I’m sorry. It’s not my custom to go into a guest’s room, but in this case I needed to be sure about what I was going to do.”

I was sitting down again, dislocated, my heart lifting at my shoulders and neck. “I’ve made ten mistakes, big ones,” I said. “I had a sore love for the woman involved. It was the wrong thing.”

Mr. Cuppertino closed his hands like a book and delivered me a long hard look. “Well, my friend, this has been a good
month for me in a dismal year as shitty as I’ve known. I told you that Mickey’s death was bad news, but you should have seen the seven months before. She was an angel and she died, so I figure what I just did to reclaim your vehicle ranks as real small change.” He leaned back and pulled his old pistol from his pocket and placed it on my notebook. “When you walked up to the old El Sol a month ago, Joey Cuppertino was about giving it up.” He worked his fingers against his closed eyes and went on. “I started to figure you might want to stay on. We could paint this place and plan our trip out to California. That’d be good for both of us.” He lifted half of his sandwich and tipped it once at me before taking a bite. “You could move into Unit 12 at the end with the big kitchen. Old Globe is dusty and dry but, Eugene, there’s worse.”

So we painted our way through the old El Sol, unit by unit. We started every day right after
The Price Is Right
“You know what the toughest item in a showcase is?” he asked me.

“A boat,” I said. “I’ve seen some big-money boats.”

“A trip,” he said. “Seven days in Egypt; that could be anything.”

When I told him I was not going to jump up and down and act like an idiot, he told me to relax. “If we jump, we jump.” He’s right. You can’t really tell how you’ll react until you get there.