Jack thanked him, the arm withdrew, and the Monaco pulled away up the hill.
“He seemed nice enough,” Jack said, “for somebody who almost killed us.”
“Yeah. I wonder what he looked like.”
“I considered sending you a picture, but you were already so stressed out . . . ”
“Thanks.”
(You’ll remember it was one of my rules, Celia, that Jack couldn’t send me images while we were in the car. Even though I wasn’t driving, I wanted to be able to believe in whatever I saw through the windshield. Technically, since we’d stopped, I guess Jack could have bent the rule—but I’m glad he didn’t.)
He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Let’s head into town, see if we can find Mrs. Bittinger.”
#
A town at night, even a small town, should at least seem brighter than the dark forest road we’d traveled through. But there were no streetlights. All the buildings we passed were dark.
“It’s only ten o’clock,” I said.
“Yeah. Like a ghost town.”
“I wonder where the main street is.”
“Hate to tell you, but I think we’re on it.”
We followed Monaco’s directions easily enough, even in the dark. There weren’t that many places to turn.
“Some light down there.” Jack pointed to a side street, with a distant glow of neon. “Maybe a diner or tavern window. Might be worth investigating later.”
I made a mental note.
“There’s the gas station he mentioned.” Jack turned at the landmark and we followed a thin road, searching for a brown house with green shutters.
In the dark, all the houses looked the dull brown shade of old, wet wood. All the shutters appeared black.
“It’s this one. I think.” Jack turned off the engine.
Maybe it was the right house, but it was as dark as the rest of them—and no “ROOM TO LET” sign in the front window. I felt uneasy about knocking on the door at this late hour. It would be one thing if it was our usual dingy motel with a night clerk on duty. This was somebody’s home.
We had a bit of a tense “discussion” in the closed car. I said I’d rather sleep in the Beetle than disturb some stranger in the middle of the night. He countered that it wasn’t the middle of the night, I could stay in the car as long as I wanted, but he wanted a bed. We sat there in the dark, and I guess I was still tense about the near-collision on the road into town, so I blurted out more frustrations: Why are we here, anyway? What’s the point of this kind of trip? You follow some weird hunch and we end up here in a ghost town or—referring to his previous excursions off the map—one of us gets kidnapped or attacked, and I see things that nobody should ever have to see. I ended with a little whine about how we were supposed to visit Mary in Providence, and she would’ve had a nice guest bed for us.
Jack didn’t respond for a long while. I couldn’t read his face in the dark. Then he said, “I’m going in.” He left the car and walked toward the unlighted porch.
I sulked for half a minute, then followed him.
(Because I loved him, Celia. I liked being with him, no matter what.)
#
I felt vindicated when nobody answered. Jack kept trying, though, getting a decent clang from the door’s thin brass knocker, then adding knuckle raps on the door and on the panel glass.
Whoever answers is gonna be really pissed off, I thought. I was ready to head back to the car, when a latch clicked and the door drifted inward.
“Mrs. Bittinger?” Jack said to the dark interior. “We’re here about a room.”
“Give me a minute.” An old woman’s voice. Her shadowed shape struck me as peculiar, but I couldn’t entirely make it out. There was an odd roundness to her torso, and the head too small and possibly deformed. I wondered why she hadn’t turned on a light to lead herself to the door.
Her hand found a switch on the wall and flipped it. At once, I understood my mistake: what I’d taken for her head was actually a swirl of gray hair, tied up in a loose, round bun. The bun sat just above the height of her shoulders, with the head hunched beneath.
She had the worst case of osteoporosis I’d ever seen. Her neck had disappeared; her spine curved and her shoulders shrugged up, forcing her chin into the ridge between her collarbones. As she stepped aside to let us in, she had to turn her whole body to keep looking at us. “Just the one night?” she said.
“I think so,” Jack answered. “I’ll let you know tomorrow if we decide to stay longer.”
The house seemed cozy enough. Hardwood floors with fringe rugs in the entryway, and a small sitting room to the left, just visible in the foyer light: a long couch and two wingback chairs, a coffee table with magazines. A staircase led upward, slight depressions visible on the left half of each wooden step. The oak railings were thick, with patches of the wood-stain scratched and darkened. The old woman had clutched this railing to guide her to the door, I figured—that’s why she didn’t need a light. A service bell sat atop one of the flat newel posts. Mrs. Bittinger tapped at it, and three sharp dings sounded.
“Flora, my daughter, will fix up the room,” Mrs. Bittinger said. “I hope you fellows don’t mind sharing a double bed. The cot’s a nuisance to set up.”
“Sharing a bed will suit us fine,” Jack said. There was a kind of wink in his comment, which I guess only I was supposed to notice, although it seemed a bit obvious.
“We’re pretty worn out from travel,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll fall right asleep.”
Slow footsteps sounded above, then a silhouette appeared at the bend in the staircase. The daughter leaned close to the banister as she descended, both hands on the same rail.
Then I realized Flora wasn’t exactly leaning. She was a hunchback, like her mother. It wasn’t osteoporosis after all, but some congenital defect.
(I suspected maybe this was Jack’s doing, to get back at me for my little rant in the car. It fit his dark sense of humor, to hobble the daughter to create a matching set with the old woman. But the clomping of Flora’s steps confirmed the image. Jack couldn’t transmit sounds.)
I guessed the daughter was about thirty-five or so. Her face would have been pretty, if it hung a litter higher. As it was, she wore the depressed mask of a spinster, with no hope of romantic prospects in this secluded, unambitious town. She’d live at home, waiting to inherit the paltry business of her family’s bed-and-breakfast.
Flora nodded at both of us, then ambled up a side hallway to our room at the back of the house. Jack gave Mrs. Bittinger forty dollars in cash for the room, then stepped out to gather our luggage from the car.
“Not a lot of rules here,” Mrs. Bittinger said. “Bathroom’s down the hall on the right: no shower, but a nice enough tub. Breakfast is at eight o’clock tomorrow, if you want it. Please don’t lie on top of the bedspread: lie underneath it, or take it off and set it in the chair.”
(I never could make sense of the bedspread rule, but I swear she repeated it verbatim when Jack returned with our suitcases. Places have arbitrary rules like that—you know, like how Aunt Charlotte is with her bath soaps.)
Flora was smoothing the corners of this precious bedspread when we brought our luggage into the room. I unpacked my suitcase right away, filling the top two drawers of a thin wooden dresser. Jack dropped his case on the floor, asking what people in Garora did for excitement on Friday night.
“Nothing much,” she said.
“I thought I saw a bar or something on the way in.”
“Oh, I never go there.” At the thought, she shook her head back and forth; the shoulders pivoted along with it.
“We should call it a night,” I said. “We don’t want to wake the house to get back in.” Mrs. Bittinger hadn’t given us a key to the front door.
“You didn’t wake us. My mother hardly ever sleeps.” She smoothed out one pleat in her dress with the same attention she’d given to the bedspread. “You could leave the front door unlocked, if you�
�d rather.”
“Thanks,” Jack said. “And thanks for fixing up the room, Flora.” His kindness produced an appreciative smile. Then her eyes fluttered to the ground, a motion typically accompanied by a shy lowering of the head—unnecessary, in her case. I got the impression nobody had ever spoken to her with any degree of tenderness. Her mother had been officious and abrupt, ringing the bell for a servant and barely acknowledging her daughter’s slow descent to the foyer. Perhaps Mrs. Bittinger resented this ever-present reminder of her own condition. And the men in this town—how did they treat her? I assumed the best she could hope for was their indifference, rather than active cruelty. Was it any wonder that she never visited the local tavern? I hoped her recent years were better than what she must have experienced growing up.
(Here, I was thinking back to my own troubles in high school. We didn’t have anti-bullying initiatives, or Days of Silence to encourage tolerance. Even before I’d accepted my sexual orientation, I was teased about it—almost on a daily basis—to the point where I tried to hide whatever it was that made me different. Of course, Flora Bittinger didn’t have that luxury.)
“What was it like growing up in this town?”
Jack’s question was the exact one I’d been thinking about, but didn’t have the nerve to ask. Then I realized why he did: it was a potential interview, gathering anecdotes for a human-interest story. He was being nice to Flora, yes, but that was also a common interviewer’s strategy: flatter the subject, flirt a bit, in the hopes that she’ll reveal details about her personal life. I worried that he might exploit her for the sake of a story. “Small Town Misfit Yearns For Normal Life and Love”—that sort of thing.
She glanced up at me first, then at Jack. “Same as anywhere else, I expect.”
“You’ve been here your whole life?”
“Yes.”
Good, I thought. Stick with short answers. Don’t give him a story.
Jack pressed onward. “The people here. What are they like?”
“Like people everywhere,” she said. “Some decent folks. Some not so.” That was an opening. Jack would follow up with, Tell me about some of those indecent folks, would you? But she cut him off with a question of her own. “Tell me why you’re here, Mr. Jack, you and your friend. What do you expect to find?”
“We’re traveling,” I said. “We got a bit lost tonight.”
“I wouldn’t say we’re lost,” Jack told her. “I’m always interested in new places. New people. I’m a writer.”
“I wouldn’t mention that to anybody,” Flora said.
“What, they don’t like writers? They don’t read?”
She rubbed a finger across her upper lip, thinking about how to respond . . .
(And I don’t want to keep harping on her appearance, Celia, because it’s not like I stared rudely the whole time. But it’s hard to convey how strange she looked. Sometimes, a person might have a scar or a patch of discoloration on their cheek, and you notice it when you first meet. But the more you get to know the person, that physical detail becomes unimportant. You grow used to it. It becomes almost invisible.
With Flora, the physical deformity got more obvious the more I looked. As I mentioned, she was pretty: nicely pronounced cheekbones, a soft pale complexion, and beautiful blue eyes; although her hair was an unremarkable brown shade, it had a thick wavy texture that gave it life. I figured that her beauty was part of the problem, seeming so . . . misplaced. This isn’t nice to say, but her head reminded me then of one of those hunting trophies—a deer’s head mounted on a wooden plaque.
And there’s this other awkward matter: when a man speaks to a grown woman, he’s supposed to look directly into her eyes and never, um, beneath her shoulders, because that meant you were staring at her breasts.
Yes, Celia, gay men worry about that, too.
Subtle details had a similar effect—like the fact that, when Flora touched her hand to her mouth, she barely had to raise her arm. Little things like this were very disconcerting. It’s hard to explain.)
. . . her hand dropped to her chin, cupping it. I had this crazy idea that she could push up, hard, and lift her head to where it belonged, simple as raising a jar of pickles to a higher shelf.
“Maybe Mr. Shawn is right,” she said. “Maybe you should stay inside tonight.”
#
Well, that as much as sealed our fate. Whenever somebody advised Jack not to do something, it was a sure bet he wouldn’t listen. So, less than an hour later we began a late-night stroll to the tavern we spotted during the drive into town.
Aside from the lack of streetlights, Garora wasn’t much different from other small towns we’d visited. Mostly two-story, single-family homes, big yards with lots of trees, wooden fences here and there, an occasional “Beware of Dog” sign next to a metal mailbox on a post.
“Hey, that car’s familiar.” Jack pointed to a Dodge Monaco parked in a driveway to our right.
“Different roof,” I said. A lush maple shaded the driveway, masking the car’s color, but the car that nearly side-swiped us earlier had a leather roof. This one was metal, its paintjob matching the rest of the vehicle.
We saw a few other cars in driveways. They were all Monacos.
“Must be a Dodge dealership in the next town,” Jack said.
“They need extra horsepower for that steep hill out of town.”
“Good point.”
From behind we heard the soft rumble of one of those luxury engines. How ironic that a powerful car could practically sneak up on you, whereas our weak little Bug puttered loud as an eighteen wheeler. We stepped out of the main road and onto the curb, giving the car room to pass. It beeped on the way, a kind of greeting I guess, rather than a complaint. Monaco number three, I’ll call it, followed down the road then turned left, and I figured the driver was heading to the tavern.
In the darkness I couldn’t give full credit to my clarity of vision, but when I squinted through the rear windshield, I once again got the impression that a moving car didn’t have a driver.
#
When we got to the Tavern, its modest parking lot was half-full. Pretty much all Monacos, though I noticed one or two other cars—older, but still luxury models. Probably quite a few people walked, too, as Jack and I had. The town was small, and it would be easy enough to stumble home after too much drink.
When we stepped through the door, it was almost like that scene in a classic horror movie when the visitor enters an English pub—all the locals stop what they’re doing, glasses raised frozen to their mouths, and they turn their heads to look at the stranger.
They turned their heads all right. Their shoulders moved with the heads.
To some degree or another the people in their booths or at the barstools, or playing a friendly game of pool or darts, all displayed a version of the spinal affliction we witnessed at the Bittinger home. A few had merely a slight stoop and drooping of the head; most heads hung as low as Flora’s, with maybe a slight tufting of hair reaching above the shoulder line.
A mounted deer’s head hung above the rack of bottles along the back wall. The bartender apparently stood on a platform so he could see over the bar. The top buttons of his white dress shirt were open, allowing his bald head to fit through; an Oxford collar fit loosely above his ears, roughly in the position of a classical laurel wreath.
“What can I get you?” His voice had a smoker’s rasp. I considered how smoke might travel through a bent esophagus, getting stuck the way hair and grime clog the elbow pipe of a bathroom sink.
Luckily, Jack stepped up and ordered us each a beer. I’d stood frozen, trying too hard not to telegraph the shock of my observations. Legends told of small towns cut off from the rest of the world, their inhabitants marrying with neighbors or even within their families, the gene pool growing stagnant, spinning out a signature mutation: a Neanderthal ridge above the eyes in one town; another where webbed skin stretched between the fingers and toes of each inhabitant. But this was 1985.
Such isolated towns, if they ever existed, were part of a distant past.
And yet, we’d stumbled into a community of hunchbacks.
“Thanks,” Jack said, accepting our beers and placing some bills on the bar. He leaned close, the only way to be heard in a crowded bar with loud music. “Keep the change.” When he pulled away from the bar, he didn’t stretch to his full height. Jack was about 6’3”, so he must have felt even more out of place than I did. Or maybe it was that phenomenon that often occurred during travel, where you unconsciously mimic local behaviors—developing a slight stoop in Garora, same way you’d slip into a Boston or Baltimore accent.
Jack handed me a beer, the glass cool against my fingertips. The bar was pretty much packed. I wished there was an open booth where we could sit privately. The other patrons mostly stopped staring at us, but I still felt uncomfortable.
“This is a pretty interesting place,” Jack leaned close to talk. “Let’s stand against the wall over there. I need to scope out some locals to interview.”
“Be careful.” I thought about Flora’s comment, that he shouldn’t mention to anyone that he’s a writer. They probably mistrusted strangers, certainly wouldn’t appreciate the publicity and gawking tourism a magazine article would attract.
“I’m always careful.”
I took a quick sip of beer and handed it back to him. “I gotta find the restroom.”
“That beer works pretty fast.”
“Ha ha,” I said, deadpan. “Wait for me before you start any trouble.”
Kind of a wishful-thinking comment, but I wasn’t planning to be gone too long.
#
Two things I hope for in any public restroom: that it be reasonably clean, and that it be empty.
I got one of my wishes, at least.
The men’s room was behind the bar, in a tight corridor that led back to another, darker section of the tavern. The music played louder from back there—some classic rock tune, in the days before they called it classic. Either Free or Bad Company, I think.
The restroom was empty, but the floor was wet—water, one would hope. The lone toilet stall had a loose door, covered with smudges of greased fingerprints. There were two urinals on the same back wall. One was a standard model with a small pool of filthy water at the bottom. In typical bar fashion, it would never flush completely—if your own stream stirred too vigorously in the soup, you’d smell several weeks’ worth of visitor waste.
Odd Adventures with your Other Father Page 5
