Hotel Paradise (35 page)

“You sure that’s the
name
?” he asked of me. “You sure
Abel
’s the name? We got Stemples living here”— and he rounded up a lot of head nods and people saying yes, they did, and that’s right— “but no Abel, I don’t think.”

So I pretended to uncertainty. I scratched my head and squinted up my eyes in an effort of remembrance. “Well, I
think
it’s Abel. I must be wrong. Maybe it was . . . Abner?”

Billy shook his head decisively, sure of his ground now, sure that I was asking after Stemples that had never been seen to walk this earth, and I was dead wrong.

“Only Stemples I know lives down a ways on Lonemeadow Road,” said the thick woman sitting between Billy and me at the counter. Light reflected off the lens of her glasses, so that I wasn’t sure she was looking at me. There was that same road again, and I hoped it wouldn’t remind them I’d also been asking about the Tidewaters. Funny, but I’d all but forgotten completely about Toya Tidewater.

That started a disagreement, just as it had over the Tidewaters. But that was all right, for it took attention away from me. No one had asked, or seemed to care about, why I wanted to know. Even though this was eating up precious time (it being now a quarter to three), I let them argue. There were, I thought, plenty of Stemples to go around. Another bunch of them lived, according to the man and wife sitting in the booth, over at Red Coon Rock. Then there was a family often (Louise thought) on a farm just off Sweetwater Road, and she talked about most of the ten as she wiped and wiped the counter. But it was Billy who put his foot down that I most likely wanted the Stemple that had the place in Flyback Hollow.

Well, he was right, for in another second he said, “Jude Stemple. At least, Jude can tell you if there’s an Abel, but take my word there ain’t and never was. Not in Cold Flat Junction, there ain’t. Maybe it’s a Stemple packed up and left. Still, I been living in Cold Flat all my life and I expect I’d of knowed if there ever was an
Abel
Stemple.” His look at me was hard and narrow, as if I’d called his memory into question.

Again, I pretended to consider. “You know, maybe that’s the name. Where’s Flyback Hollow?” (Billy had pronounced it “Holler,” which
momentarily confused me.) I hoped no one would perk up and ask me why I wanted to know.

But they were all too interested in giving directions, and all disagreeing as to where this Flyback Hollow was. I thought, good heavens, with Cold Flat Junction being as small and depopulated as it was, I couldn’t imagine everyone in it not knowing every square inch. Finally, though, Billy commanded them all to be quiet and told me that I was to go along Windy Run out there, down past Rudy’s bar and right along to where the school was and then to go off in a kind of westerly direction until I saw Dubois Road, and to keep on that for a ways until I came to “the Holler.”

I balled up my paper napkin and thanked them all very much and slid off my stool.

“Where you from, dear?” asked the woman in the booth. I was afraid someone would. I couldn’t remember what I’d said before, so I told the truth and said La Porte, and that kind of brought down the house.

“You
are
?” said the heavyset woman at the counter. “Why, Billy, that’s where they found that dead woman!”

“I guess I know where they found that woman, God’s sakes. I happen to know the po-lice over there. That sheriff you got—DeGhyne?—I knowed him for years.”

“Oh, stop talkin’ just a minute, Billy, and let the girl speak,” said the heavy woman.

Louise’s eyes had gotten really big. “Go on, sugar, and tell us whatever happened over there. I mean, did they find out if that woman got murdered, or what?”

Again, I screwed up my eyes and looked blank. “What woman’s that?”

I was glad that I had my money out with my check, so that I could simply slap it down by the cash register (the cashier was the same one, and he was still reading a comic book) and bang out the door calling back “Thank you, thank you,” for they all looked a little dumbstruck to hear a person, even a kid (since kids were generally supposed never to know what was going on around them)—to hear that
anyone
who was living around where a body was found (maybe murdered) would not have heard about it. I could see, in my hurry to leave, that mouths were beginning to form questions and hands were beginning to motion to me.

I couldn’t understand this. La Porte was, after all, only fifteen or twenty minutes away, and why, if this was so fascinating to them, didn’t they just all pile on the Tabernacle bus and go there?

But then I thought no: They wanted news; they sat around and waited for news; they
hoped
for news. But that didn’t mean they were going to go out and
get
news. They did not leave the Windy Run Diner to search out news, no matter how fascinating. It was like what we called, or used to call, Living Pictures. As I scuffed along the road called Windy Run, kicking up pebbles, I was thinking this. It was such a strange notion, I stopped in front of Rudy’s Bar and Grille and frowned over it. Living Pictures was something we used to do in school when I was little and in the first or second grade. What would happen was, a child (or even two, depending on the picture) would be dressed up in costume, for instance, to look like the Blue Boy or some other famous subject in a painting. The child would sit or stand inside a
huge box, which was supposed to be the picture frame. This box was covered on one side (the audience side, for it was an entertainment) with some sort of gauzy material that you could see through, but as if you were seeing through smoke. Living Pictures was quite effective.

What I thought now, though it was a strange notion, was that all of the people inside the Windy Run Diner might have been in one of these Living Pictures. It was all like what is called, I think, a “tableau.” They talked and moved, that’s true. But there was this strange feeling I had that whatever they did, they didn’t do in the outside world, that being the world beyond the Windy Run Diner. And so they would not leave the diner to go out and get some “news,” no matter how interesting it might be. I thought about this staring at the plate glass window of Rudy’s.

Rudy’s was a clapboard house with a tilted front porch and signs in the window advertising “Dogs—Burgers—Suds,” another big sign about the county fair in Cloverly (a much bigger town with a fairground), and a blue neon tube formed into writing that said “Beer—Eats.”

I walked on down the road, then, and noticed a sign on my left that had an arrow pointing the way to Red Coon Rock (home, I understood, to some branch of the Stemple family). I looked off in that direction, past square houses, and beyond them, across the flat, beige landscape. Where in that land would there ever be an outcropping of rock, at least enough to earn it a name? Near home, we had a place called Chimney Rock, which was farther up in the mountains and was a great, huge slab of rock surrounded by other huge rocks. But for the life of me, I couldn’t imagine more than stones and pebbles out there where I was looking now.

Soon I came to Schoolhouse Road and saw the place where Mrs. Davidow must come for the Hotel Paradise eggs. Henhouses sat in rows in the backyard. From this distance they looked like plantings in furrowed earth. I could hear the hens, too; warm clucks wafted on chilly wind, kindly clucks, slow and easy like old people over tea, like Miss Flyte and Miss Flagler (who probably wouldn’t appreciate the comparison).

Not very far from the henhouses was the schoolhouse where I had played pick-up-sticks with the silent girl, the pick-up-sticks champion. The playground ran along the side of the school, and in it now stood a boy, maybe seven or eight, alone there, his arms wrapped around
a basketball or volleyball. Since he was standing near the high-up hoop, I guessed he must have been trying to toss it through, but not now: he stood perfectly still there with the ball hard against his narrow chest, looking at me.

In another moment, a woman in a dark dress came out of the door at the rear of the school and stood at the top of the stone steps. She was too far off for me to make out anything about her, except for the black dress that looked out of place against its background of white school and pearl-colored sky. With her hand shading her eyes, she looked all around, as if searching for someone. I thought she must be looking for the boy, but she gave no sign of it as she looked in his direction, and he, anyway, was looking still at me. At last she dropped her hand, but still stood there looking around; and then, finally, she turned and walked back through the door, which I could hear shut softly behind her.

And it was like that as I walked farther—I mean, as far as the few people I saw were concerned: I didn’t see any of them up close, but rather sitting on stoops, or walking, or maybe by their cars, or a child here or there playing with something I couldn’t make out. But they seemed to be people always holding you at a distance, like the dark blue line of the woods, far off.

I came to the end of Schoolhouse Road and walked along one that didn’t seem to be marked. The only house I passed was a big one with yellow shutters sitting on a large lot and with flowerbeds, which was unusual for Cold Flat Junction. There were climbing roses growing up one side of the door and ivy half-covering the other side. Some flat boxes of tomato-plant seedlings sat on the porch.

I didn’t have the time, really, to be dawdling about this way, lingering before schools and houses. Already it was three o’clock, which gave me only an hour or so before I’d have to be getting back to the station. I found the Dubois Road sign a little farther along and just kept walking its dusty, unpaved length until what few houses there were fell away, to be replaced by a couple of rusty mobile homes with rusty tricycles overturned in the front yards. After that there was nothing for a while except, ahead of me, trees and undergrowth. I was surprised by the trees, for in my gaze across toward the horizon, the trees surrounding all of this flat land appeared to have been much, much farther away. Here, though, was a little pocket of them—oaks and maybe sumacs (I knew nothing about trees)—that stretched back
and got thicker, with branches overhanging the narrow road that got harder and more rutted. It must have been difficult for cars to go back and forth. Finally, I came to a hand-lettered sign in the shape of an arrow, whose whitewashed paint had mostly worn away. It said Flyback Hollow. So this was it.

Billy had mentioned that not many people lived in this part of Cold Flat, and I didn’t come to any house at all in another five minutes of walking. Then off to my right I saw a small gray shingle house, and in another three or four minutes came on a queer place that had originally been a log cabin and now had a shingled wing added on to it. It stood on what must have been an acre or more of land, but it was hard to tell where the land ended, what with the trees behind it. On the sinking porch lay a mongrel dog, who looked up when I came along and perked its ears, but made no sound. It was probably old. There was a lot of junk out in front—two-by-fours, boxes of building stuff—and I thought this must be Jude Stemple’s, as it looked like a lot of carpentry might be going on. I heard the slow, regular
thwack, thwack
of wood being chopped, and followed the sound, and the picket fence, around in back. And there was Jude Stemple, chopping firewood.

It always looks to me as if men are really angry with the wood they’re chopping, and hate it. The way he brought the axe down on the stump, with his face red and frowning, you’d think everything horrible that had ever happened to Jude Stemple had collected itself here in this block of wood on this stump.

The fence was between us, but it was a low one that I could easily see over and talk over. I stood there for a moment, watching. Then he looked up and saw me and wiped his forehead on his checkered shirt sleeve, and went right back to chopping again, as if anybody my age must be invisible.

I called out, “Excuse me!”

Again, he wiped his face, this time taking out a big handkerchief. “Yeah?”

“Is this Flyback Hollow?” I took a slip of paper from my pocket, which was only an old check from the Rainbow Café, but I pretended to be studying it, as if information were written there. When he answered yeah, it was Flyback Hollow (like Billy, he said “Holler”), I went on: “Where do the Queens live? A family name of Queen?”

He shook his head, studied me for a moment, then came a few sullen steps closer to the fence. He was still holding the axe, so I was
just as glad the fence was there. “Queens don’t live in the Holler no more.”

“Really?” I frowned over my scrap of paper. “I was told they did.”

“There’s a couple of Queens live back there”— and he nodded toward the road I had just traveled—“on Dubois Road. Big house with yellow shutters to it.” He went back to whacking at wood.

I could hardly believe it! I’d found the Queens! A couple of them anyway. I forgot to be cool and casual and asked in a rush, “Which Queens are they? Which ones?”

My question must have sounded too eager, for he came closer to the fence. Biting off a plug of tobacco, he asked suspiciously, “Who wants to know?”

I thought it was obvious I did; but being only twelve, I didn’t rate as a person. I considered. I said, “My grandmother.”
Great-aunt
was just too complicated. “Her name’s Aurora Paradise.”

He stopped in his chewing. “You mean from Spirit Lake? You mean from over there to the Hotel Paradise?”

I doubted he would know Aurora enough to go checking up. “That’s right.” All I had to do now was work around to Ben Queen.

“What’s she want to know for?”

Actually, I thought that was kind of nosy, but couldn’t say so. “Well, I’m afraid I’m not prepared”— now, where had I heard this expression?—“to di-vulge that information.”

“No?” He drew himself up and mimicked my voice. “Well, I ain’t prepared to di-
vulge
where the Queens is, neither.” He turned and started back to his block of wood.

Oh damn, oh damn. I had taken the wrong tack and didn’t know how to go back and wipe out what I’d said. Someday, I was going to get the Sheriff to give me lessons in getting things out of people. I thought about him for a moment. Then I said, almost gaily, “Okay, thanks anyway, I’ll just tell the Sheriff and I guess he’ll come and talk to you.” Quickly, I almost skipped away from the fence, casting a glance back over my shoulder.