Hotel Paradise (12 page)

It was she whose voice cut through my mental butterfly-catching, ordering me to stop turning because the stool squeaked and it was very annoying. The other two women looked at me with crimped, disapproving lips, and though I didn’t have the nerve to keep the exercise up, I did manage to push off just once more with my foot and sail around, taking in the plate glass window. As I whizzed around, I got a glimpse of a person outside studying the window display. I had the impression of a face all shadows; then as I sailed around again, the sun struck her back and fuzzed her hair and her body. It was as if she were wrapped in a gold cocoon. Perhaps it was all that thinking about butterflies that put this into my mind.

When I finally slammed to a stop, she was turning away, but I was almost certain it was
her
, the one on the railroad platform in Cold Flat Junction. And then I saw her profile.

It was definitely the Girl.

She disappeared from the window.

I would have run for the door, but I had always been taught to restrain myself. Never jump from your chair but rise and walk slowly to wherever you’re going. I remembered years before sitting at one of the small, scarred tables in the children’s room of the library and reading in a book of poems about a girl named Jenny who always jumped up out of her chair to kiss the person who wrote the poem. I remembered my eyes filling up, my whole
body
filling up with tears, it felt like, and not being able to keep them back. My head was carefully bent over my book and the tears dripped down on the pages. I wanted to be Jenny.

Since I had already paid for my soda, I could have run lickety-split for the door. In fantasy, I jumped from the stool and rushed outside and grabbed her and asked, “Who are you? Who are you?” Inside of my cool exterior, I’m pretty much a Fourth of July fireworks person: feelings flaring, shooting, wheeling, sizzling, or just popping; or, on the down side, falling, sinking, plummeting with almost equal energy. Outwardly, though, I’m exceedingly careful to remain cool and even dry, like a person without body fluids—no spit, no sweat, no tears. What I’ve picked up is that it’s important in this life not to appear too enthusiastic about anything, as if in that way you can avoid disappointment. It was superstitious thinking. And it doesn’t work, either; the disappointment is always just as bad.

So by the time I strolled outside, she had vanished.

Desperate now, I did run. I ran in the direction she’d been aiming,
down to the corner, looked one way towards the railroad tracks, then quickly turned the other way and collided with the Sheriff.

“Did you see her?” I was breathless.

“See who?”

I was searching the sidewalk beyond him. Empty—at least empty of her. “You
must
have passed her. She couldn’t have gone across the tracks, because the barrier’s down. That freight train’s coming. So she must have gone up the street there, the way you just walked. . . .” The Sheriff just stood there like a wedge. “Maybe she went into the five-and-dime—”

“Who?”

“She’s blond and really pretty. I don’t know how old she is. Around twenty, maybe.” I was dancing up and down on the balls of my feet now, trying to look past him, right side, left side.

“Hold
on
, for Lord’s sake!” He brought his hands down on my shoulders, stilling me. “Now, what’s so important about this girl?”

I didn’t know, only that she
was
important. I dodged down under his arms and made a beeline for the five-and-dime. She could have gone in any of the stores along this street, into the dime store, the haberdashery, the hardware store on the corner, or any of the others. I figured a stranger would most likely want a dime-store item, perhaps a toothbrush or maybe a lipstick.

There were four aisles and I walked them all; she wasn’t among the two dozen people in the store. Unfortunately, the dime store had a lot of distractions. I stopped to leaf through one of the comic books hung in the metal racks; I stopped to review the latest in lipstick shades, deciding on a pale, peachy color—that is, if I wore lipstick, which, naturally, I don’t. Deflated and disappointed, I walked out into the cold sunlight and the Sheriff was still there, leaning against a parking meter. He was talking to Bunny Caruso.

Now, Bunny Caruso belongs to that mysterious band of local people I had strict orders to stay away from. Like Toya Tidewater. And there were others: there was Gummy John; there was a tall old man with silver hair whose name I could never remember; and a few others. In other words, all of the weird or fascinating people. Bunny Caruso, though, was
absolutely
to be avoided, whereas some of the others, like the Woods, got tossed in for no particular reason (and when they worked on the hotel grounds, it was all right to talk to them). It seemed to me that anyone who was different was also thought of as dangerous.
It was the boring people, the nasty people, like Helene Baum, that I was supposed to bow and scrape to. Naturally, I balked.

I wasn’t told
why
I was to stay away from Bunny, and because of this I of course assumed it had something to do with sex, that subject I knew even less about than I did God and puffballs. My notion of “sexy” was pretty foggy, but Bunny never did strike me that way, for she’s kind of thin in build, though her face is extremely pretty. I heard that there were always men hanging around her little place on Swain’s Point, and I was never, never to go near her house. This was a commandment I broke at the first available opportunity, which was one day when I helped her carry her groceries from Miller’s to her beat-up pickup truck and she invited me home to have lunch with her. I had seen the little delicatessen cartons sticking out of the bag, and I was only too happy to accept. Miller’s cole slaw is almost as good as my mother’s.

We bumped along in the pickup for several miles with Bunny chattering away amiably, and for the life of me I just couldn’t imagine what was supposed to be so dangerous about her. She had an innocent-looking face, completely absent of makeup, and goldish russet hair cut boy-short, except in back, where it curled over her collar in a little switch. If anything, Bunny struck me as being a farm girl, someone I could easily picture out in the fields in a broad-brimmed hat, picking something—corn, maybe. But then I preferred the vision of acres of waving wheat and the sound of threshing, and so she threshed.

Bunny has a strange accent—strange, that is, because I can’t place it. It isn’t southern, nor is it mountain. The
a
’s draw out and the
u’
s disappear, so that “I can’t figure” becomes “I cain’t figger.” The harshness of the accent is softened by her voice. She has the softest and most musical voice I think I’ve ever heard. Her voice makes me think of the low winds rippling the sea of wheat, a sowing sound, a threshing sound.

That day was the first time I’d ever seen her house, and it was really interesting. It was full of mirrors; whole walls were mirrors. And there were a lot of candles; there must have been more than two dozen bunched around. I asked her if the house had been done by Miss Flyte, and she said no, she couldn’t afford Miss Flyte, but she’d gotten some ideas from the candle shop. The mirrors, she’d said, were to make the room look bigger, since the house was quite tiny. We ate all of the cole slaw and tuna fish and stuff and then went down to sit on a rock
that was only slightly above one of the lake inlets and stuck our feet in the water. Bunny liked to talk and I liked to listen, mostly to the sound of her voice. She also had a butterfly net and sometimes we chased butterflies, or, rather, because we were too lazy to move from the rock, we’d just sweep the net in the air if one happened to fly by. I visited several times after that.

One of my fantasies after my visit was to have, one day, a farm where Bunny and I would live. Perhaps this farm would be in the miles of fertile land called Paradise Valley (a name that I think had to do with God and Heaven, and not Aurora Paradise). I pictured Bunny out there in our fields in her big straw hat and blue gingham, picking whatever needed picking, and, of course, threshing. (My knowledge of crops and livestock went the way of God, puffballs, and sex.) In my fantasy, Bunny and I would spend a lot of time with our feet in the stream, skipping stones and watching dragonflies and swooping down on butterflies.

And out in the fields, I would wander through the stalks—of corn, perhaps—followed by farm dogs. Occasionally, cats would leap up out of the tall grass and bat at butterflies. Bunny worked the wide fields, but I do not know what I contributed to the farm running. Not much, apparently. After all, I was in the hotel business.

“You scoured that place pretty well,” said the Sheriff, nodding towards the dime store.

I didn’t answer him; I said hello to Bunny and included her in our search for the Girl. “You must’ve passed her,” I said to the Sheriff, letting him know that he was, after all, the Sheriff and should know about strangers in town and what they might be up to.

“Who?” asked Bunny, looking from me to the Sheriff. I think she really likes the Sheriff, but then who doesn’t? I felt a twinge of jealousy.

I told her about the Girl, but not everything, not about me being in Cold Flat Junction. She frowned a bit, shook her head slowly. “I cain’t remember seein’ no’un like that.”

In this way, she’s like the Sheriff, and like Maud Chadwick, too. She gives things her deep consideration and doesn’t brush you off or ignore you. I ponder this sometimes: how three people who are so different can be so much alike. And then I ponder: but
are
they so different?
Are
we all so different from one another? For I naturally include myself in this little band of my favorite people.

When the Sheriff suggested stopping in the Rainbow, Bunny took
a step backward, as if it weren’t for her to be included in the likes of such festivities. I told her come on, but that only made her more anxious, clutching her tiny shoulder bag to her waist.

I asked the Sheriff, after she’d walked off to her pickup truck, why people seemed to object to Bunny Caruso.

“They don’t like the way she lives, I guess.”

We were doubling back towards the Rainbow Café. “But she just lives with her cat in a little house on Swain’s Point. It’s neat and perfectly respectable.” (“Perfectly respectable” was a favorite phrase of my mother’s, usually meaning the person didn’t have much else going for him.) “It’s just like other houses, except for the mirrors—”

The Sheriff suddenly stooped to tie his shoelace, so I couldn’t read his expression when he said, “Sounds like you’ve been there.”

He rose from his kneeling position and we walked on. Things just slipped out of me when I talked to him or to Maud. I certainly never intended to tell anyone I’d visited Bunny’s place. “Once I was. Or twice.” I sighed and told him, “I’m not supposed to even
talk
to Bunny. My mother told me not to. I think it’s silly. Bunny’s really nice.”

We were nearing Souder’s again, and I saw Helene Baum’s Cadillac parked one door down in front of Betty’s dress shop. Naturally, she drove a Cadillac, maybe thinking that car was better than the mayor’s Oldsmobile. Hers was buttercup-yellow. I supposed she was still in Souder’s, telling the other two how to live their lives. As we drew abreast of the Cadillac, the Sheriff stopped, and I was hoping the red flag was up in the meter. But it wasn’t. What he was looking at was the front end of the car, nosed a foot or two across the alley entrance. The Sheriff considered this for a moment and then (I liked to believe as a result of the power of my inward urging) he drew his book of tickets from his rear pocket, clicked his pen, and started writing.

I danced a little jig by the meter and grew even more excited to see Mrs. Baum marching fumily out of the drug store and bearing down on us. She must have seen what was going on through the plate glass window. Me, she ignored, of course.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Afternoon, Helene,” was his only answer, as he politely touched his fingers to his cap.

“I
said
, what are you doing? I’m not overtime!” She rapped her knuckles on the meter as if bidding it to verify this.

The Sheriff just kept writing. “No, but you’re blocking the alley there.”

Elaborately, she measured the distance with her two hands. “Don’t be silly. Even a truck could squeeze through there.”

The Sheriff ripped the pink ticket from his book and held it out to her, smiling. But she brushed his hand aside. So he placed the ticket securely under the windshield wiper, saying, “You know, if Doc Baum was doing bypass surgery on me and didn’t open up the artery all the way, but just shrugged and said, ‘Oh, well, there’s room enough so the blood can
squeeze through,’
I guess I’d be kind of upset.” His smile was dazzling. “See you around, Helene.”

And the two of us walked off. I should say I
danced
off, heady with delight, drunk with the Power of the Sheriff’s Office! I looked back and Helene was standing there going up in smoke.

“How about that Coke, now?” the Sheriff asked.

The chocolate soda was lying heavy on my stomach, or heavy on the ham roll and cheese sauce and a side order of baked beans. My mother made no bones about the beans coming out of a can, which surprised everybody, for they tasted homemade. “Doctored” was what my mother called these vastly improved canned vegetables. As far as I was concerned, my mother should have run a vegetable hospital, the way she took hold of limp, pale, unhealthy-looking green beans and peas and cabbage and with her seasoning and a little wrist action had them walking through the swinging doors looking like they’d spent all their days in the sun and never even seen the inside of a can.

Now, standing in front of the Rainbow with the Sheriff, I decided, no, I couldn’t get another thing down on top of all the things I’d eaten in the last two hours. Even I had my limits. And there was also my recent brainstorm about Dr. McComb and his butterflies and wildflowers. I was eager to go to the library.