Hotel Paradise (4 page)

“Completely unlumbered by reality,” the Sheriff says again.

But I think he’s wrong, for I feel very lumbered by it. It plain weighs me down.

“If we had to be concerned about
reality
, there wouldn’t be much point to
imagining
, would there?” Maud said, more or less answering for both of us, on that particular day which found the three of us on the curb while the Sheriff wrote a ticket and stuck it on the mayor’s white Oldsmobile. The car was a foot over into an alley, not really blocking it, but still making it a slight obstacle for a truck to make deliveries to the five-and-dime. The Sheriff didn’t answer, since it wasn’t really a question and Maud loved to suck him into pointless arguments, I knew.

“Do you think it’s haunted?” I asked, largely of her, not him. No notion appeared too outlandish for Maud to entertain, which is one reason I like her. I was speaking of the Devereau place. I don’t believe in hauntings, but I thought it might introduce the Devereaus into our conversation.

“What isn’t?” she asked, as we stopped before a meter.

The Sheriff looked at her and shook his head. “Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Hauntedness is pervasive,” she said. “I feel full of windy places, like a flute.” She stood by the curb, holding her elbows cupped in her hands. She seemed pleased with how she’d put that.

The Sheriff made a strangling sound. He was slotting a dime into the meter where Miss Ruth Porte’s black VW was parked. “ ‘Like a flute.’ ”

“You wouldn’t understand, of course,” said Maud, as we walked on.

I smiled. I love to hear the way they razz each other, something
they don’t do with anybody else. No one talks to the Sheriff the way Maud does; everyone else was either in awe of him, like me, or a little afraid of him, like Mayor Sims and that car dealer over in Hebrides.

It was the car dealer’s baby-blue Cadillac we were standing by now; the red flag was up on the meter. The Sheriff stuffed a ticket behind the windshield wiper and we passed on.

Maud and I, on these little excursions, enjoy fitting out certain townspeople with imaginary histories, histories that the Sheriff occasionally attempts to bring in line with the reality the two of us he said were “unlumbered” by. Which is why his answer to my question about the Wood brothers surprised me.

The two of them, Ulub and Ubub, were sitting on the bench outside of Axel’s Taxis. The bench is meant for Axel’s Taxis’ customers, a place where they can wait for the next taxi to come. There are only two taxis, Axel’s and the one driven by his employee, Delbert. We’d been talking, Maud and I, about how we never actually saw anyone
taking
Axel’s. Axel would pull out with no fare in it and it would come back with nobody in it. Except for Axel, of course. The Wood brothers sometimes sit on the bench and watch Axel and Delbert come and go, and when the taxi isn’t there, they watch the rest of us come and go. They are sometimes joined by Mr. Nasalwhite, who doesn’t like to talk much either, except to tell the Woods (and passersby) that he’s the King of Bohemia. Usually, the Woods have breakfast in the Rainbow Café, then the morning stint on either this bench or the one outside Britten’s store in Spirit Lake. Then it’s lunch in the café, and the afternoon bench-sitting. The Woods report to benches the way other people report to jobs. They sit in silence (for they rarely talk) and watch the world of La Porte go by.

The Sheriff got them talking on a couple of occasions, and Maud kept after him to tell her what on earth they’d said, but he never did tell her. I had, on this occasion, asked him about their names—Ulub and Ubub. “Somebody told me they got them from license plates. But they must have
names.”

“Uh-huh,” said the Sheriff, who was searching his pockets for a dime. The red flag was up on Bunny Caruso’s pickup. “Ubub is for Useless Big Bob and Ulub is for Useless Little Bob. You got a dime, Maud?”

“What?” I asked, puzzled over these names.

“He’s making it up,” said Maud, digging in her pocket and bringing out a dime. She always had change because of the tips she got.

“No, it’s true,” he said. He slotted the coin into the meter and turned the handle.

“You’re making it up,” said Maud again, with absolute confidence in her verdict.

She’s always accusing the Sheriff of “making it up,” and once in a while I think maybe he does, with her, so that she can never be absolutely sure when he’s telling the truth.

“I could see you doing it, I could
see
your mind making it up, just in that pause while you thought up something that UBB and ULB could stand for.”

“UBB” and “ULB” are the first three digits (or letters) on the license plates of Ubub’s and Ulub’s twin pickup trucks. That’s where whoever started calling them by those names got the idea, as far as I know.

The Sheriff didn’t answer Maud; he just went on inspecting and then kicking the tires of Bunny Caruso’s truck, and I could tell Maud was really irritated because he wouldn’t say anything. Indeed, she looked so frustrated, I thought she just might cross over to the bench and ask Ulub and Ubub.

“Well, they are kind of useless,” I said.

“Don’t listen to him; don’t pay any attention to him at all. He makes up half what he says.” She spoke as if the Sheriff might be some wayward playmate who could lead me astray.

We walked on down Second Street, and Maud seemed to be in a snit, which I thought was really funny, since the last person in La Porte I could imagine being in a snit with was Sheriff Sam DeGheyn.

I decided to break into this mild fuming of hers by reintroducing my topic. “Do you believe a place can be haunted?”

“No.” “Yes.”

They answered in unison; I don’t know if Maud said yes because she believed it or if it was just to get his goat.

“Nobody’s lived in the Devereau house since Mary-Evelyn died, have they?”

“Not that I know of,” said the Sheriff.

The thing was, though, that he and Maud hadn’t been around then, and anything they said was guessing.

“Marge Byrd said she heard really weird noises coming from the house one night.”

“Probably vagrants. Some people don’t pay attention to No Trespassing signs. Donny said he had to chase some people out of there once.”

Donny is deputy sheriff. He isn’t very smart or good-looking, but he thinks he’s both in his uniform. Ree-Jane hangs around the courthouse to impress him, too, when the Sheriff’s not there.

“A person who dies in a state of misery has been known to come back and haunt the place where he dies.” Maud looked as if she were about to.

“I think you mean a person who’s suffered a violent death,” the Sheriff said.

She stopped walking. “No, I mean a
miserable
person, like me. And you.”

The Sheriff’s beeper had buzzed just a stroke before she said “And you,” which I bet was an afterthought, that she wanted to make him hesitate and wonder just before he had to answer his beeper. (I always think a person must be very important to have a beeper, anyway.)

“Me? Just because you’re—oh, never mind. . . . Donny?” he said into the beeper.

Donny’s voice rasped over the beeper, saying something about an accident out on Route 6—the Lake Road, we called it, although I think its official name was Splinter Run Road. It sounded like Donny was talking about the Silver Pear Restaurant, but since he always got a little hysterical over police business it was hard to tell. Also, it was hard to hear; it was private police business, but I cocked my ear anyway. Maud was looking off towards the railroad tracks as if she couldn’t care less.

I asked the Sheriff what a “domestic” meant and he said it generally had to do with a quarrel—altercation, fight, trouble—inside a house. He left, and I asked Maud who lived at the Silver Pear. She said it was owned by Gaby and Ron von Gruber, but she couldn’t imagine them having an altercation. They both wore silver pompadours and were tall and thin like pussywillows.

We were walking back to the Rainbow Café, Maud having taken her lunch-break time to walk up and down Second Street with me and the Sheriff. I asked her if she’d ever eaten at the Silver Pear and she said yes, a couple of times with Chad. Maud was divorced and
Chad was her son and she told me this rather sadly. Chad had gone off to school and I knew she missed him. But at that point, the sadness of adults was a subject I did not want to think about too much; I didn’t want to believe, I think, that they actually suffered. Their world was supposed to be different.
If
they suffered, they must have efficient ways of dealing with suffering that were totally unknown in my world. That was one of the advantages of being an adult: you could neatly package unpleasant and painful feelings, wrap them up, toss them on a delivery truck, and send them to be dropped off here and there along Misery Mile. Not like me. Not at all. I had to endure my bad feelings.

“Was it good?” I asked, after this turnover of thoughts of Maud’s possible unhappiness. I meant her meal at the Silver Pear.

“No. The food was good, I guess, but the portions were minuscule. They have this
nouvelle-cuisine
type of French food. ‘New’-cuisine isn’t really food, it’s the illusion of food. A carrot curl, a sprig of escarole, a triangle of smoked fish in a puddle of pink sauce. Your mom’s such a much better cook it hardly bears mention.”

I filed that compliment away to tell my mother, as the Silver Pear is always being held up as the smartest restaurant within fifty miles. “But it’s the favorite place with the lake people,” I said, hoping she’d continue talking about how bad it was, so I could amplify the compliment.

This lake I spoke of is an entirely different lake from Spirit Lake. It’s on the other side of La Porte, and the lake people are a race apart: rich, handsome, tan all year, living in fabulous houses, and when they’re not swimming and boating they’re skiing. Maud herself lives in a little house by the lake, but on the near side, the unfashionable edge.

Maud said, “If the Hotel Paradise were just five miles closer to the lake, you’d be overrun with business.”

Business, our business, has not been good. Spirit Lake is pretty much a has-been resort, a little village that once depended on its railway station for tourists and has seen a lot of them. Now Spirit Lake suffers a lot because people no longer depend upon trains; they drive automobiles and can whiz right through Spirit Lake on their way to somewhere else. There used to be over a half-dozen hotels; ours is the only one left now.

As Maud and I walked past the window of Prime Cut, we could see Shirl in there looking like a drowned rat. Since she hadn’t gone
under the dryer yet and still had to have her hair rolled by Alma Duke (the owner-operator), I knew she wouldn’t be back in the Rainbow for at least another hour. Often she got a manicure too. We stood outside the window and waved at Shirl. She pretended not to see us, as she probably didn’t want to let on anyone had seen her in this state.

I mentioned to Maud she’d probably be in there another hour and asked if I could sit in a booth. She said yes, of course, and that she’d have a cup of coffee with me, since she hadn’t had her lunch yet—that is, she added, “if I won’t be interrupting your writing.”

Now, that’s what I like about Maud and the Sheriff. Neither of them assumes that because you’re twelve years old you have nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs until the movie opens. I was, actually, going to the theater on First Street after this hour in the Rainbow. I loved movies. I especially love the Saturday matinee, when they always try to show a western, like those spaghetti westerns, they call them, with Clint Eastwood; or an adventure, or a comedy—in other words, something not overlumbered with sex scenes.

The Orion movie theater is where you can find me any Saturday afternoon at the two o’clock matinee. Mr. McComas, who owns it, is a nice, middle-aged man who pinch-hits for any one of his employees if the person gets sick. A lot of the time, he takes tickets inside the door. There’s an official ticket seller and taker, but I think Mr. McComas likes to do it so he can hang around the theater, for I have a suspicion he just loves movies, and that’s why he runs it in the first place. Other times, he shovels popcorn into the thin, tissuey cylinders that are stacked inside the machine in all of their different colors. This popcorn is popped right there and is the freshest, hottest popcorn around. It’s sometimes hot enough, having jumped right out of the metal popping canister into the cone, that it just misses scorching my fingers.

There are two aisles and one screen that slants in slightly, to the left. The screen has always been a puzzle. It doesn’t interfere with the viewing, really, once your eyes get used to it, but the customers do seem to favor the left-hand seats that put them into a squarer relation with the screen. As for me, I like that slanted look, and will usually sit on the right side, eating my hot buttered popcorn from one of those blue or pink cones and thinking life really might be worth the trouble.

All I knew about sex was that to have a baby, you had to get “poked” by a man (someone I knew told me that in third grade), but the nature of the “poking” was very cloudy in my mind. I at first
thought it had to do with “cowpokes,” which made it interesting, though even more puzzling. I ate my popcorn more slowly and thoughtfully, thinking this over.

Except there really wasn’t anything to
think.
And there certainly wasn’t anybody to ask. It would be impossible to ask the Sheriff; I’d have been mortified. Maud would have been a possible informant, only I was so embarrassed by a
lack
of knowledge that I couldn’t ask. God only knew it had been bad enough when I’d started my periods, and although I suspected that had something to do with the whole picture, I still didn’t know what. All I knew was that
that
was painful to the point of screaming, and if that was what sex was like, forget it.

My favorite store sits next to the Orion movie theater. It’s called Candlewick and sells nothing but candles and candleholders. Before Miss Flyte took it over, it was a hardware store. Now, instead of rakes and leaf bags and fertilizer, its big plate-glass window holds large displays of candles on a dark velvet cloth. The candlesticks are brass, marble, wood, ceramic; tall, short, squat, square. Metal ones soldered to hold a dozen candles, and pottery ones from Mexico painted in astonishing colors. I can stand before this window for long stretches of time, amazed that candles and candlesticks can be so fascinating.