I SLEEP. A beautiful dreamless sleep, all the way to the edge of the mountains, where Devil makes his goodbyes.
“Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to get pulled over anywhere west of here,” he tells me.
He gives me a fresh boxed cellular phone out of his trunk, a brotherly slap on the back, and a scrap of paper with Bowmont Livingston’s instructions on it.
I’M ALONE AGAIN, but I feel more confident than I have in my whole life. I feel in my pockets as I board the bus, making sure I have the paper, the phone, my wallet . . . the jade figurine.
I take a seat in the back, against the window, gazing out at the mountains as they pass. The smoke is still thick from the forest fires here, but it hovers around the lakes, deflected somehow to wrap around the mountains like sepia-tone skirts that flow and dance in the sun, swallowing up the light and glowing from within.
I’ve never seen the mountains like this before. Well, I guess I must have, but I don’t remember it. All I can remember is the city. The noise, the smells, the lights. A constant barrage of sensory overload. A constant misery of strange places and strange people and, in all that time, the only thing that was ever silent was the judgement on their faces. The mountains were always just a mirage in the distance, a pretty background painting behind glass.
Here, in the back of a Greyhound bus, cutting tiny tracks across these colossal mountains, there was nothing but silence. Calm and natural beauty rising up from the earth. Green and blue and gold. No flashing neon. No screaming tires and no wailing horns. No roaring airplanes overhead. No screaming radios and crying babies in the street. No concrete gods, and no glass temples.
From the south, three sisters fair.
From the East, Finn the hero.
MORE THAN A few times, as we weave our way up and around the mountains, the smoke swallows us whole, sucking us through the haze, lost and unaware, creeping along until we’re popped out the other side, fog lifting into daylight again, soft and quiet, as if nothing had happened.
The last of these patches carries us into Pitamont, where heavy rain is pouring down in a torrent, turning everything around us two shades darker. I am deposited, unceremoniously, next to an abandoned Dairy Queen in that strip of highway that I imagine every town must have, the one that runs just parallel to the places where people actually live. It’s a ghost town out here on the fringe, in the thru-lane full of gas stations and doughnut shops.
Devil has briefed me extensively on the nature of the town. The population statistics. The ethnic make-up. The various industries that feed the town’s coffers. Unlike most of these mountain towns, there isn’t much of a tourist trade, there’s the odd hiker and cabin vacationer, but the lakes are too hard to get to for the motorboat crowd, and the beaches too rocky for lounging. Likewise, the winter sports are hampered because the trees are too thick and the mountains too rocky for skiing. There’s some kind of forestry company that makes up most of the industry. I don’t see any bare strips of trees or rough logging roads, but I imagine they’d be further away from the town proper. Now, heading into the fall, it would be quiet. Nowhere more so than here beside the highway, apparently.
The rain has erased the smoke and the fog, but the dark sky and the reflecting sheets of rain make the handful of flickering signs glow with preternatural light. I turn and look through the dark windows of the restaurant behind me—vacant and locked down, the empty tables standing like ghosts behind the tinted glass.
There’s a McDonald’s across the way, with a blazing red and white sign offering cheap coffee and half-price egg sandwiches. I pass it and wander down the only road that leads inward, presumably into town. No one passes me. Eventually the woods give way to scattered houses and side roads, before I reach what must be Main Street. Every town has one, right? I don’t tangibly recall ever being in a place so quiet, so small, and so quaint—but there’s something about this place, this street.
There’s a block-long Army & Navy store, with the same backlit plastic sign that they must have opened the place with sometime in the seventies. It seems oddly familiar, as does the storefront of the restaurant next door. I don’t recognize the name, or even the sign, but I get a flash of memory, a medium-rare burger, thick and smothered in ketchup, on a huge Kaiser bun. A chocolate milkshake in an amber plastic tumbler, the kind of milkshake made with chocolate ice cream out of a bucket, mixed with milk and ice cubes, where the foam at the end has little granules, tiny sandy bits of ice. I can taste it, spooning out foam and chocolate grit with the straw, licking it clean. I know that if I go inside, there will be a black chalkboard on one wall, and a long bar, with wooden stools, like in an old western movie.
It looks like a Swiss ski chalet, a log cabin with a wide, heavy roof, sloping down to overhang the sides of the building almost to the ground. I step through the thick oak door as a little bell tinkles overhead.
The place is dead quiet, outside of the sound of tinny pop-country coming softly from speakers echoing somewhere inside of the ceiling.
I sit in a corner, give the place the once-over. Everything is decorated in gingham check and rustic farmhouse kitsch. Paintings of pies and twee messages of faith dot the walls. Not exactly as I was picturing. If I had been here, it was much changed from my memory.
Pleases and Thank Yous Keep the Lord Alive
Love is a Fresh Baked Pie
Happy is as Happy Does
Jesus Loves Us All Equal
I’m pretty sure if there is a Jesus, were he to arrive here on the edge of Pitamont-by-the-lake, this is the kind of place he’d set one foot in, and then head back to the McDonald’s. Which is what I’m contemplating when the waitress waddles out of the back, through a swinging double-cowboy door. She’s like a troll doll version of Loretta Lynn playing Barbie dress-up at the ’50s Dream Diner. Short, fat, and stuffed like a sausage into a frilly, pink, poly-acrylic uniform straight out of a bad TV sitcom. Her hair is teased high and thick, bangs curled down onto her forehead. She stops for a breath, waves to let me know she’ll be a minute. She reaches under the counter and comes up with a plate of fries and the world’s biggest presumably-cherry Coke. I can smell the sweetness of it, the syrup is in the back of my throat. She leans in, obviously spent, and munches a dozen or more fries, then takes a long sip through the bendy straw before she draws another ragged breath and finally makes her way over to my table.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. Blood sugar. You know how that can be!” she laughs, as if I have any idea what she’s talking about. “But the good Lord has spared me from the dia-beet-us. Yes, he has. Every year they check, and every year I am just fine.”
She waves her arms in the air, praising this Lord Doctor of Diabetes, then plants her pudgy hands down on the table.
“Now. You’re not from around here, are you? Never seen you before. You just come in on the bus? It’s not tourist season, you know. No skiing around here anyways. And nobody’s coming out for the nature this year, on account of the forest fires and all this yucky smoke, hmmm? Maybe you’re new in town. No. I would have heard about that. Maybe your car broke down, is that it? Maybe you’re visiting someone. No, would have heard that.” She’s breathing hard and sweating. There’s a scent to her that I don’t like. Cigarettes and tuna fish, but something else.
“Blood sugar,” I explain with as polite a smile as I can muster. “Just need a sandwich. Maybe some coffee?”
It’s obviously the wrong answer. I must not be worthy of praying at the altar of the dia-beet-us saviour.
She sits down in front of me and continues her guessing game, as if I was some strange thing she found on the sidewalk, and not a hungry customer in her greasy spoon.
“Well, that won’t do, will it, mister smarty-pants? Come in here and tease a lady about her blood sugar, now will you?”
She glares at me, looking more and more like a troll, and less like Loretta Lynn.
“We don’t care for smarty-pants answers here. The good Lord tells us to suffer the fools, and the Jews, and the little children . . . Doesn’t say nothin’ about smarty-pants answers.”
The scent gets stronger. Something sour and sickly-sweet. It’s on her breath like a curdled milkshake.
“You can go and get on out of here, if you’re not going to be nice.”
I just want her to stop breathing at me.
I lean back in my seat and put my hands up in resignation.
“I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I was feeling faint is all. I honestly haven’t eaten in a long time. Like, since yesterday.”
She looks me up and down. I guess she’s trying to discern if I’m a Jew or a fool, or something even more offensive to her sensibilities. She heaves herself up out of the seat and waddles back to the counter for another sip of her drink. She finishes it, keeping her eyes on me the whole time. I want to leave, but I’m afraid she’ll throw a knife at me, or damn my mortal soul if I try to make a break for the door.
She doesn’t bring me a menu. She doesn’t take my order. She goes into the kitchen and comes back out almost instantaneously with a cup and a plate.
She drops them unceremoniously on the table in front of me, with a wheeze.
The pie is brown and syrupy. It smells like flies and sugar water. The coffee seems about the same. I’m afraid to touch either one.
“Raisin. All we got left.”
She’s staring at me, scrutinizing my face. I imagine she’s looking for a reason to throw me out into the rain.
“I think I’ll just be going.” I smile again, as polite as I can muster, and try to slide out of the booth.
She pens me in with her big, pink belly. She leans in close, looking for something in my face. I’m hoping she’s not considering it for a snack. Her brow is furrowed, her face twisted into an old man’s prune-faced grimace. She’s breathing her sour milk stare straight into my ear. I freeze up, looking back at her from the furthest corners of my eyes.
She reaches out a pudgy hand, still sticky with raisin syrup, and grabs my face, twisting my head toward her to examine my eyes. She looks like she wants to pluck them out.
“You’ve got those eyes, don’t you? You one of them? From up the mountain? One of those freaks? Dirty gypsy freaks. Mother lovers and sister fornicators. And those filthy godless Indians, sending their whores up there for those beasts. Drugs, and devil-worship, and fucking in the woods.”
The words are shocking coming from her pudgy little face. All the talk of Jesus and put-on hominess is gone. The look of disgust twists her face up even more until she has completely transformed into some kind of apple-face demon, shrivelled and terrible. She’s a dried-out mummy stinking of ancient dust and spoiled strawberry milkshake.
I nudge her out of the way and step out, carefully, keeping her in front of me as I back toward the door.
“Thanks?” I manage, fumbling the door open and falling out into the driving rain.
She’s still staring at me through the foggy glass of the window. She’s just standing there, watching me, standing guard against whatever devils she thinks I might unleash on her miserable little pie shop. We’re standing there, like gunfighters in the street, separated by a log cabin wall and a deluge of rain.
I RUN ACROSS to the opposite side of the street and duck under the overhang of the roof at the front doors, hoping for a few seconds out of the rain. I fish the scrap of paper out of my pocket. Devil’s tightly looping script.
Bob
Vargas Brothers Garage
Pitamont, B.C.
No address, no directions. Fucking Devil. All the answers in the world, except the one thing I need.
I strain to see through the rain and get my bearings. I don’t see anything resembling a garage out here in the outskirts. When I look up towards the diner, she’s there, at the window, glowering at me. Jesus.
I hustle down the street, despite the rain, hiking my collar, as much to escape her damning eyes as to stop the rain running down my neck.
Still, I feel her eyes on me, and her rancid whipped cream whisper seems stuck to me. Athwart the gloom.