The Hotel Eden: Stories (14 page)

One night, for example, she turned to me in the bed and asked, “What is it you were in jail for, Ray? Were you a car thief?”

I wasn’t even surprised by this and I answered with the truth, which is the way I’ve always answered questions. “Yes,” I said. “I took a lot of cars. And I was caught for it.”

“Why did you?”

“I took the first one to run away. I was young, a boy, and I liked having it, and as soon as I could I took another. And it became a habit for me. I’ve taken a lot of cars I didn’t especially want or need. It’s been my life in a way, right until the other week when I took your car, though I would have been just as pleased to walk or hitchhike.” I had already told her that first day that I had been headed for Yellowstone National Park, though I didn’t tell her I was planning on making Rays all over the damn place.

After a while that night in the bed she just said, “I see.” And she said it sweetly, sleepily, and I took it for what it was.

W
ELL
,
THIS DREAM
doesn’t last long. Five weeks is just a minute, really, and things began to shift in the final days. For one thing I came to understand that I was the person Mrs. McKay was painting now by the fact of the cut fields in the background. The face wasn’t right, but maybe that’s okay, because my face isn’t right. In real life it’s a little thin, off-center. She’d corrected that, which is her privilege as an artist, and further she’d put a dreamy look on the guy’s face, which I suppose is a real nod toward accuracy.

“Are these your other men?” I asked her one night after supper. We’d spoken frankly from the outset and there was no need to change now, even though I had uncomfortable feelings about her artwork; it affected me now by making me sad. And I knew what was going on though I could not help myself. I could not go out in the yard and steal her car again and pick up my plans where I’d dropped them. I’ll say it because I know it was true, I was beyond affected, I was in love with Mrs. McKay. I could tell because I was just full of hard wonder, a feeling I understood was jealousy. I mean there were almost two dozen paintings out there on the porch.

But my question hit a wrong note. Mrs. McKay looked at me while she figured out what I was asking and then her face kind of folded and she went up to bed. I didn’t think as it was happening to say I was sorry, though I was sorry in a second, sorrier really for that remark than for any of the two hundred forty or so vehicles I had taken, the inconvenience and damage that had often accompanied their disappearance. What followed was my worst night, I’d say. I’m a car thief and I am not used to hurting people’s feelings. If I hurt their feelings, I’m not usually there to be part of it. And I cared for Mrs. McKay in a way that was strange to me too. I sat there until sunrise when I printed a little apology on a piece of paper, squaring the letters in a way that felt quite odd, but they were legible, which is what I was after: “I’m sorry for being a fool. Please forgive me. Love, Ray.” I made the Ray in cursive, something I’ve done only three or four times in my whole life. Then I went out to paint the barn.

It was midmorning when I turned from where I stood high on that ladder painting the barn and saw the sheriff’s two vehicles where they were parked below me. I hadn’t heard them because cars didn’t make any whump-whump crossing that new culvert. When I saw those two Fords, I thought it would come back to me like a lost dog—the need to run and run, and make a
Ray
around the first hard corner. But it didn’t. I looked down and saw the sheriff. There were two kids in the other car, county deputies, and I descended the ladder and didn’t spill a drop of that paint. The sheriff greeted me by name and I greeted him back. The men allowed me to seal the gallon of barn red and to put my tools away. One of the kids helped me with the ladder. None of them drew their sidearms and I appreciated that.

It was as they were cuffing me that Mrs. McKay came out. She came right up and took my arm and the men stepped back for a moment. I will always remember her face there, so serious and pure. She said, “They were friends, Ray. Other men who have helped me keep this place together. I never gave any other man an apple pie, not even Mr. McKay.” I loved her for saying that. She didn’t have to. You have a woman make that kind of statement in broad daylight in front of the county officials and it’s a bracing experience; it certainly braced me. I smiled there as happy as I’d been in this life. As the deputy helped me into the car I realized that for the first time
ever
I was leaving home. I’d never really had one before.

“Save that paint,” I said to Mrs. McKay. “I’ll be back and finish this job.” I saw her face and it has sustained me.

T
HEY HAD FOUND
me because I’d mowed. Think about it, you drive County Road 216 twice a week for a few years and then one day a hundred acres of milkweed, goldenrod, and what-have-you are trimmed like a city park. You’d make a phone call, which is what the sheriff had done. That’s what change is, a clue.

S
O
,
HERE
I
AM
in Windchime once again. I work at this second series of Ray Bold an hour or two a day. I can feel it evolving, that is, the font is a little more vertical than it was when I was on the outside and I’m thickening the stems. And I’m thinking it would look good with a spur serif—there’s time. It doesn’t have all the energy of Ray Bold I, but it’s an alphabet with staying power, and it has a different purpose: it has to keep me busy for fifteen months, when I’ll be going home to paint a barn and mow the fields. My days as a font maker are numbered.

My new cellmate, Victor Lee Peterson, the semifamous archer and survivalist who extorted all that money from Harrah’s in Reno recently and then put arrows in the radiators of so many state vehicles during his botched escape on horseback, has no time for my work. He leafs through the notebooks and shakes his head. He’s spent three weeks now etching a target, five concentric circles on the wall, and I’ll say this, he’s got a steady hand and he’s got a good understanding of symmetry. But, a target? He says the same thing about my letters. “The ABC’s?” he said when he first saw my work. I smile at him. I kind of like him. He’s an anarchist, but I think I can get through. As I said today: “Victor. You’ve got to treat it right. It’s just the alphabet but sometimes it’s all we’ve got.”

I
WAS FILING
deeds, or rather, I had been filing deeds all day, and now I was taking a break to rest my head on the corner of my walnut desk and moan, when there was a knock at my door. My heart kicked in. People don’t come to my office. From time to time folders are slipped under my door, but my clients don’t come here. They call me and I copy something and send it to them. I’m an attorney.

Still and all, I hadn’t been much of anything since Lily, the woman I loved, had—justifiably—asked me to move out three months ago. Simply, these were days of filing. I didn’t moan that often, but I sat still for hours—hours I couldn’t bill to anyone. I wanted Lily back, and the short of it is that I’m not going to get her back in this story. She’s not even
in
this story. There’s another woman in this story, and I wish I could say there’s another man. But there isn’t. It’s me.

And now the heavy golden doorknob turned, and the woman entered. She wore a red print cowboy shirt and tight Levi’s and under one arm she held a tiny maroon purse.

“Wrong room,” I said. I had about four wrong rooms a week.

“Jack,” she said, stepping forward. It was either not the wrong room or really the wrong room. “I’m Lynn LaMoine. Phyllis told me that if I came over there was a good chance I could talk you into going to the ball game tonight.”

Well. She had me sitting down, half embarrassed about having my moaning interrupted, overheard, and her sister, Phyllis, Madame Cause-Effect, the most feared wrongful death attorney in the state, somehow knew that I was in limbo. I steered the middle road; it would be the last time. “I like baseball,” I said. “But don’t you have a husband?”

She nodded for a while, her mouth set. “Yeah,” she said. “I was married, but … maybe you remember Clark Dewar?”

“Sure,” I said. “He’s at Stover-Reynolds.”

She kept nodding. “A lawyer.” Then she said the thing that sealed this small chapter of my cheap fate. “Look, I just thought it might be fun to sit outside in the night and watch the game. I’m not good at being lonely. And I don’t like the lessons.”

It was a page from my book, and I jumped right in. “We could go to the game,” I told her. “The Gulls aren’t very good, but I’ve got an old classmate who’s coach, and the park organist is worth the price of admission.”

At this she smiled so that just the tips of her front teeth showed and stood on one leg so that her shape in those Levi’s cut a hard curve against the door behind her. I heard myself saying, “And the beer is cold and it’s not going to rain.” I explained that I didn’t have a car and gave her my address. As a rule I try not to view women as their parts, but—as I said—my moaning had been interrupted and the whole era had me in a hammerlock, and as Lynn turned, her backside involuntarily brought to mind a raw word from some corner of my youth: tail.

T
HAT NIGHT
as I eased into her car I realized that this was the first time I had been in a car alone with a woman for four weeks. For a moment, nine or ten seconds, it actually felt like a date. Ten tops. Though I hadn’t accomplished anything with my life so far, I was showered and shined and the water in my hair was evaporating in a promising way, and we were going to the ball game.

I looked over at Lynn in her black silky skirt and plum sweater. She looked like a lot of women today: good. I couldn’t tell if this was the outfit of a woman in deep physical need or not. The outfit didn’t look overtly sexual, or maybe it did but so did everything else. And then I realized that in the muggy backwash late in this sour month, I felt the faint but unmistakable physical stir of desire. I’ve got to admit, it was a relief. I took it as a sign of well-being, possibly good health. It was a feeling that well-directed could get me somewhere.

As we arrived, turning onto Thirteenth South under the jutting cement bleachers of Derks Field, I smiled at myself for being so simple. I glanced again at Lynn’s wardrobe. You can’t tell a thing anymore by the way people dress; it only helps in court. No one dresses like a prostitute these days, not even the prostitutes. And besides, in my eight-year-old Sears khakis and blanched blue Oxford-cloth shirt from an era so far bygone only the Everly Brothers would have remembered it, I looked like the person in trouble, the person in deep, inarticulate need.

I
N THE AMBIGUITY
in which American ballparks exist, and they are a ragtag bunch, Derks Field is it. It is simply the loveliest garden of a small ballpark in the western United States. The stadium itself is primarily crumbling concrete poured the year I was born and named after John C. Derks, the sports editor at the
Tribune
who helped found the Pacific Coast League, Triple A Baseball, years ago. Though it could seat just over ten thousand, the average crowd these days was a scattered four hundred or so. This little Eden is situated, like most ballparks, in a kind of tough low-rent district spotted with small warehouses and storage yards for rusting heavy equipment.

As a boy I had come here and seen Dick Stuart play first base for the Bees; it was said he could hit the ball to Sugarhouse, which was about six miles into deep center. And my college team had played several games here my senior year while the campus field was being moved from behind the Medical School to Fort Douglas, and I mean Derks was a field that made you just want to take a few slides in the rich clay, dive for a liner in the lush grass.

Lynn and I parked in the back of the nearby All-Oil gas station and walked through a moderately threatening bevy of ten-year-old street kids milling outside the ticket office. When the game started, they would fan out across the street and wait to fight over foul balls, worth a buck apiece at the gate.

I love the moment of emerging into a baseball stadium, seeing all the new distance across the expanse of green grass made magical by the field lights bright in the incipient twilight. The bright cartoon colors on the ads of the home-run fence make a little carnival of their own, and above the “401 Feet” sign in straight-away center, the purple mountains of the Wasatch Front strike the sky, holding their stashes of snow like pink secrets in the last daylight.