Travelers Rest (8 page)

I
t was the third consecutive day of snow, as lengthy and heavy a snow as the residents of Good Night could remember in the town's short history, and it was gumming up Tiffany's plans for the hotel's grand opening. The train had arrived at the depot all right, but it was impossible for the hired carriages to make their way up the street, which meant the senator and his wife and staff and the musicians from San Francisco with their instruments and the reporter from the magazine in Chicago and the mine owner from down in Colorado and heaven knew who else Tiffany had invited were having a disastrous time plunging through the snowdrifts in their best shoes or, in at least one case, that of the Broadway actress who was coming from Seattle, being carried to the hotel piggyback by one of the local miscreants, reportedly that Harrington boy, who didn't have the sense of a mule. Tiffany himself was a proper fool, thought Anthony Addison, seated on the sofa next to his wife, Julia (who looked handsome in the new dress she'd purchased in Spokane Falls). He, Addison, had told Tiffany that the hotel would never be completed by October, when Tiffany had first tried to entice the high and mighty for the unveiling. Tiffany was incredulous at the suggestion—the raw materials were all in place, damn it, what could possibly hold up the works? And when Addison had successfully predicted that it wasn't a question of materials but of labor—namely that Tiffany wouldn't be able to find enough steady workers among the miners, who were earning considerably better wages in the booming industry underground than they could make by waiting for Tiffany to dig the gold from his pockets—Tiffany began referring to him around town as an “obstruction to progress.”

It had all worked out in the end. Tiffany had his grand hotel with its finely appointed rooms and its internationally renowned chef and its thousand-piece glass chandelier. He now employed a staff of nearly fifty workers, including, if one believed the rumors, a half dozen of the nicer variety of prostitutes, whose services he had purchased outright from a wealthy madam in San Francisco. Yes, it had all worked out fine…just a few months behind schedule, as Addison had guessed. So he laughed to himself sitting in front of the fire, admiring his wife (what a marvelous find she had been for him, it was a pleasure just to watch her sitting there), basking in the lobby's warm glow while Tiffany bumbled back and forth behind the desk, nervously knocking over the candles he tried to place in the candelabra, cursing the snow in an audible whisper, fussing anxiously with the ends of his mustache.

“I wonder what she said to the president,” mused Mrs. Addison, referring to the actress, Miss Rose Blanchard, who had been the primary subject of discussion among most of the women for the past month, and who, if the telegraph Tiffany had received from the depot could be taken as the literal truth, was right now en route to the hotel on the back of young Harrington. Miss Blanchard had been a guest at the White House in the fall, and Mrs. Addison wanted to believe of her that she had something interesting to say. It was the principal failing of the few proper female residents of Good Night, according to Mrs. Addison, that they rarely said anything interesting. Mr. Addison tried to oblige by being interesting himself, but he was not always sure he succeeded, at least in the eyes of his wife, who had met many interesting people in her day. “I would have said to him…” Mrs. Addison continued, staring at the orange flames dancing in the fireplace. “I would have said…What would I have said to him?” she asked no one in particular, and she ran her thumbnail across her bottom teeth in a way she often had when concentrating fiercely on a troublesome idea. Addison looked at her perched there on the ottoman—her head held forward, her back as straight as a plumb line, her whole figure leaning eagerly toward something in the middle distance, perhaps there in the vicinity of the fire tongs, expressive of an energy to which he did not feel equal. This was one of those moments when he felt decidedly that he should not have brought her to this town. “That's the trouble with this place,” Mrs. Addison said, to herself more than to her husband. “After one has been here for a while, one no longer knows what to say.”

Mr. Addison sighed. Out the window nothing could be seen but the snow. If only the guests would start arriving, he could quit thinking of Mrs. Addison's evident dissatisfactions. This hotel of Tiffany's really was spectacular, no getting around it, and it was a day to be enjoyed despite the weather, a banner day for the town in this year of 1886. “Would you like to take a little turn about the place, dear?” he asked his wife.

She took his arm—why weren't the guests here already, to see how neatly she did that? “Mr. Tiffany?” she asked. “Could we take a stroll through the rooms?” And Tiffany hopped to. Mrs. Addison commanded that sort of attention, even from a man as nervous and busy as Tiffany was today. So he gave them the tour, starting with the kitchen, where he had employed a small army of help—some of them miners Addison recognized from La Mine de Rêve, the silver mining operation that had drawn him out here in the hope of earning his living and had in fact made him a fortune in a few short years, at least in his own estimation of what a fortune entailed: one of the few stately homes that had taken its place outside the mining camps and the clapboard houses of the town, a respectable two-story Queen Anne style designed by an architect from Boston; a rather princely salary negotiated with Mr. Tillbrook, the president of the operation, and a share in the company's ownership that would increase over time; the esteem and deference of his fellow citizens, people like Tiffany, who despite the little disagreement over the construction schedule of the hotel was a man with whom you could enjoy a mutual respect; and the finest wife in the Idaho territory, with her dark hair piled high on her head easily the most striking, with her East Coast education and her aristocratic pedigree easily the most admirable. Despite her petite form and delicate features, she scared Mr. Addison half to death.

Tiffany took them strolling through the kitchen and into the spacious dining hall, where there would be dancing and revelry later on this evening, and where, undoubtedly, some of the miners would burst in and break something expensive. But it couldn't be helped, and Addison wasn't the sort to look down his nose at people anyway, having come from common stock himself.

They were led up a back stairway to the third floor, where Tiffany said the finest rooms were, and Mrs. Addison asked questions in the silky voice she saved for such occasions, and Mr. Addison soon grew bored. Tiffany showed them the room where they would be staying, room 306, and Addison lingered at the window staring at the snow, turning a snow globe around and around in his hand. And then he saw something very curious—out in the street was a small boy, lifting his legs as high as he could to wade through the drifts of snow, which were almost up to his hips by now. The boy had apparently just come out the front door of the hotel, as he was now making his way straight across the street to the other side, but Addison had certainly not seen him downstairs. First, the boy wore an unusual-looking sweater that Addison would have noticed, never having come across one of that sort before. Second, the boy's head of tousled blond hair was of the type that Addison had always imagined his own son might have, were he ever to have a son. Something about the boy and his bare head of golden hair and the cloud of his breath and the vigorous effort with which he lifted his feet, grimly determined to surmount the ever-growing hills of snow, clutched at Addison's heart, and he found himself, inexplicably, overcome with strong emotion. He stepped toward the window and, loudly enough that it must have been heard by Tiffany and Mrs. Addison, he rapped on the glass. But the boy did not hear.

C
ould you believe a town this size had so many stairs? They ran from building to building, hidden from the street, a world of ruined planks and crumbling masonry and musty smells. The stairs never seemed to empty out anywhere, never led outside, just wended through forgotten corridors above or below or in between the stores and bars and restaurants, occasionally revealing glimpses of the public spaces—a kitchen where a white-hatted, dirty-aproned cook stood flipping an omelet in a greasy pan, a furniture store where a lone employee sat in a recliner reading a magazine and pulling the lever on the chair up and down—that lay between the stairways and the street. Occasionally, as the troop led Robbie racing up and down and around, they would pass a window through which he could see again the endless snowfall and the grayish-white sky.

“How can a town this size have all these fucking stairs?” he asked Rusty, the guy in front of him.

“Everything's connected,” Rusty said, racing up another flight, huffing and puffing his way down a narrow passage scattered with paint cans and an assortment of discarded power tools. There were other people above them—he could hear the clunking footsteps, the occasional laughter—but they'd passed out of sight, and he was tired of following Rusty's back.

A window appeared just up ahead, and instead of chasing the group to the next floor, Robbie stepped toward the little landing that contained the rectangle of dim light. A massive spiderweb drooped from the corner of the ceiling, and the remains of a potted plant, long dead, hung in the window frame. He pushed aside the plant with one hand and held his other hand in front of the windowpane, where a thin line of cold air crept through a jagged crack in the glass. Outside the streetlamps winked on and there was a half-light over the hills and he didn't know whether it was dawn or dusk. There had been many, many times in the past when he hadn't known whether it was dawn or dusk, and generally he hadn't cared. Right now, though, releasing the plant so that it swayed back and forth on its creaky chain, staring out the window at the line of pencil-thin fir trees that formed the outline of the hills, everything beyond enveloped in a blanket of snowy white, he had a gnawing feeling that he should know the time of day, as if the time of day were of vital importance to him somehow, and a kind of irritation grew in his brain, the irritation that almost always came from some distant connection to the world of times and schedules and responsibilities, came whenever he felt it incumbent upon him to do a thing in the way that other people did it.

Why he should feel that particular form of irritation right now was a bit of a mystery—he had just been hanging out with some people over at a house, and there had been a young woman of malleable temperament and soft breasts and hardly any scruples, right? And then those guys had come outside and they had carted him off and they had gone in a door somewhere and run up and down a lot of stairs and…that had been less than a minute ago. And yet he could barely remember it, as if it were something he'd done yesterday or last week. And hadn't the light out the window changed rather abruptly? The hills had sunk into darkness, so that it was almost impossible for him to make out their silhouettes against the backdrop of cold, gray clouds. Could he have gone into some weird trance? Of course—after all, that too had happened before. But he hadn't really had a whole lot to drink, comparatively, and he felt pretty goddamn sober, if you wanted to know the truth, and in fact a little bored, and now maybe even a little bit alarmed because…huh.

He heard something, and hearing something brought to mind the fact that he had been hearing almost nothing for quite some time, just the whistling of wind through the windowpane and the steady sting of snowflakes on the glass. It had been a long time since he'd heard voices or footsteps, for instance, and yet now he was hearing both, only he couldn't tell whether the footsteps were above or below, or what the voice was saying in the air around his head, except that it was one distinct word being repeated over and over. Then someone was breathing in his ear. “Robbie?” a familiar voice said.

It was Julia. His eyes closed, though he didn't mean for them to, and inside his head there was a whirl of light and sound, and the air turned bitter cold, and then he was again in one of the long corridors, one of the infinite passages that you came across every minute or two in this insane place, came to after running up and down more flights of broken stairs, finding yet another locked doorway, and he couldn't tell if he was physically passing through this haunted landscape or merely dreaming it.

There was Julia's voice again, coming to him from somewhere else, a place far away or a time in the past, as if the voice had been suspended in the air forever, floating on a breeze, waiting to reach him. He seemed to be floating, traveling through some unknown dimension, some space between who he was and once was, an in-between place in which he still heard Julia's voice, but different now, muted and wispy, coming from someplace he recognized. Tangled white sheets, an open window, twirling curtains, brisk air with a watery feel. The ceiling turning, turning, turning above him. And Julia laughing. She was in his parents' kitchen, it was morning, and he was in his room upstairs. He listened to the voices—his father's carefully modulated tone, his mother's brightly false chatter, Julia's voice, appealingly straightforward and calm. He put his leg over the edge of the bed and his foot touched the cold floor and the room slowed down and stopped spinning. Julia's laughter again, disturbing to him on some level, disruptive to his basic assumptions about the world. Tonio had just brought her home for the first time. Robbie was seventeen, already a fuckup, already written off in some subtle, unstated way by everyone, or at least everyone who
counted,
like his high school teachers who'd endured his years of underachievement and his lackadaisical attitude and his failure at this and his inability to see that, etc. He had long since quit imagining Tonio as anyone he wanted to emulate. It puzzled him, observing his brother when he came home for Christmas, or vacations, or breaks in the academic year—what had he ever seen to admire? In fact he had almost quit noticing his brother until he showed up at home with Julia. Now
there
was a puzzle to consider. How had Tonio, he of the apishly long arms and the heavy shuffling footsteps and the outsize cranium, the collared shirts with coffee stains, the boat-size running shoes and huarache sandals, the cowlick wetted down carelessly and unsuccessfully, the nose always in a book or a set of field notes—how had
that
guy convinced this woman to marry him?

Julia's voice again, floating up from the kitchen. He could hear everyone but Tonio, who he guessed wasn't there, which made it worthwhile to go downstairs, maybe. He descended quietly, his head throbbing, balancing himself against the wall, to find all the major characters (excepting Tonio) in the family drama assembled. Addison mater and pater were in their usual morning gowns and pajamas, and Julia had apparently made them breakfast, a weird rite of passage, when everything was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Robbie, stumbling down the last two stairs in an obvious state of post-drunken dishevelment, attempting to procure a box of cereal from the pantry without dislodging the pantry door, trying to pour the milk without spilling it all over the table. “Aaah,” he said as he sat on the vinyl-covered chair in the breakfast nook, the chair making that sound like a polite fart.

His parents' immediate situation was interesting. On the one hand, there was a reputation to uphold, an understood but unstated superiority to Julia, a need to show that she was somehow being granted undeserved favor, exalted over the normal run of humanity based on Tonio's selection of her as a wife, but now there was this additional difficulty, which was how to work Robbie into the equation, because if you were so superior, an appellate court judge like his father, aligned with all things intellectual and progressive, why did you have a screwed-up kid like this living in your house, part of your family, who was flunking chemistry and calculus and making everyone's life miserable? What a difficult tightrope to walk so early on such a fine day, birds chirping, sun shining, the scent of Mother Addison's roses floating on the breeze. Plus there was the whole issue of being nice, decent people, how you had to feel good about yourself when you went to bed at night. This was true, basically, Robbie knew—his parents were trying their best to do what they thought they were supposed to do on planet Earth. An admirable project, all things considered, but one that required a certain facility for lying to yourself in the dark at the end of the day, a way to smooth and finesse your prejudices and your shortcomings.

At any rate, there he was in the breakfast nook forcing the recalibration of the extended family dynamic, yawning, wiping away crusty stuff from his eyelashes. “Aaah,” he said again. He seemed to be eating some sort of granola out of a bowl, the other family members staring at him.

“Julia made omelets,” his mother said. “They're wonderful. Try one.”

Robbie performed reconnaissance, sipping orange juice with one eye open over the glass rim. The night before, he'd been at a kegger at a campground and done four beer bongs in twenty minutes on a dare, after which he'd thrown up on himself and jumped in the Sammamish River with his clothes on.

“That's all right,” Julia said. “He doesn't look like he's hungry.” And she laughed.

It was the laugh that did it, that declared some secret alliance with Robbie and all his fucked-up-ness, that made them outlaws where the parental units were concerned. And there was another thing. When Julia laughed, she locked eyes with Robbie. “Are you okay?” she asked, and he said, “What, yeah, okay,” but he wasn't okay, of course not, the whole fucking stream of human life and his participation in said stream bothered him and somehow Julia's question had tapped into this bothersome problem and somehow his answer had been an inadequate defense against it and suddenly everybody—even his parents—knew that there had been a moment when all these things escaped from under their usual cover. And ever since that moment there had been an awareness that Julia was her husband's brother's keeper.

It was that same voice he heard right now, from long ago, Julia that morning in the kitchen, but still repeating just that one word,
Robbie,
as if joining the two syllables often enough could convey some critical message—Julia's voice echoing, receding, faintly calling his name.

And then he was somewhere else, staring up at a dead plant hanging in a dirty window. It was the same dead plant he'd seen when he started his lonely sojourn. He sat on the stairs and watched his breath clouding out, dimly visible in the half-light of the snowy sky through the window. Had he been sitting here for hours? He must have been sitting here for hours. There had been footsteps at some point, the sound of a hand sliding on a banister. Julia had called his name. He had felt himself transported elsewhere. But here he was, still sitting, and he couldn't even be sure whether he'd slept, really. In some way it seemed that he'd been conscious of the dusty floor and the flat yellow light of the infinite hallways and the broken stairway the whole time. It took him a while even now to understand that he was shaking. He was
freezing
to death here. Somewhere out there on the verge of himself this almost made him laugh, the idea of freezing to death on a stairway in some shitkicker ghost town in Idaho. It wasn't all the drugs that had taken down Robbie Addison in the end—no, it was a snowstorm, like he was some old-timer who'd gotten lost on his way to the gold mine, some pioneer of fucking yesteryear. This was only humorous for a moment before it became kind of terrifying.

He had pissed his pants. That much seemed clear. Or whoever's pants these were. That had happened before, and it was generally a bad sign. He was all alone and he couldn't find his way out of this goddamn place and he hadn't had a drink or even so much as a beer for several hours now and there were no drugs readily available and, first and foremost, nobody seemed to care. He couldn't even quite believe, despite having heard her voice calling out to him, that Julia was searching for him or interested in his whereabouts. Or the Dooze Man. And who gave a fuck about Tonio. But Julia…Although he had thought at the time that he clearly heard her voice, he was now prepared to write it off as the front edge of hallucination, the shades of the various demons creeping up on him, into his imagination.

For a minute or two he watched the flakes fall in a lazy circular motion, appearing at the top of the window frame and drifting down and out of sight, and soon it looked to him as if the snow itself were stationary and the building, the one in which he was sitting, rocketed up into space. And he did have a feeling of being lifted, but he recognized it as the woozy drama of nerves and empty stomach and muscles asked to do work to which they were no longer accustomed. In short, he was fucked up here, and not in a good way.

He suspected that he was no longer in the hotel, though he knew that was where they had started out, Ruby and the others finding it hilarious that they had managed to lead him to the one place he didn't want to go, tricking him inside through some back entrance. Before he knew it, he was standing in the lobby. But then there had simply been too many corridors in too many directions and too many stairways and too many romps through cluttered attics and dark basements for one building to contain. He actually thought that he had at some point crossed
underneath the street,
and that he was now on the side with the bar and the diner. Everything in this town, apparently, was part of a giant labyrinth. And Robbie guessed he'd been ditched in it intentionally.

Well. Not much incentive to do much of anything. Feel the twitching cheeks, the buzzing teeth, the clamping jaw, the constricted chest and airways. In addition to frostbite, the joys of dependency.