“Hello,” I yelled. I heard a stirring.
A man came out, a patch of wispy gray hair attached to the top of his head. He looked as if he’d just come from a nap, though I didn’t know how he could’ve slept with the din of the TV. He had on a flannel shirt and a pair of creased slacks. The shirt was buttoned to the top and above that hung a fleshy waddle. He was clean-shaven, tanned, probably in his mid-sixties.
“Didn’t hear you with the television blasting. The old lady can’t hear too good.” He smiled as if I’d been part of a long-standing inside joke. He leaned out over the counter where there was an overhanging roof. My car was parked in front of the window, my license plate in full view.
“Come up to see the canyon?” He leaned back and stood staring at me. He had a nice smile, friendly. His hands were clean, manicured fingernails. He stooped behind the counter and came up holding a card.
“Yes,” I said.
“Just so you know, Colton Point Turkey Path is closed. Had a lot of mudslides up that way.” He smiled and I could see a few of his back teeth were gone. “Too much rain this spring.”
“I Googled before I came up. I saw that it was.”
“The eastern rim’s good.” He slid the card toward me with a pen. “How long you expect to stay?”
“I’m not sure. A couple of days, maybe.”
He craned his neck out over the counter again.
“Just me,” I said. “Wife had other things to do.”
He laughed. “Usually do is my experience.” He nodded his head toward the curtained doorway as if I’d understand his meaning. I wasn’t sure I did, though it clearly had something to do with his wife and the television.
I filled out the card using a different license plate number and a different year Saab. My name was Matt Linquist, a kid I went to Columbia with. I lived in Patterson, New Jersey.
“We don’t take American Express,” he warned.
“Is cash alright?”
“The kind I like the best. You wanna pay for two nights? It’ll be 120 dollars plus tax.”
“That’ll be fine,” I said. I pulled out my wallet and slid money across the counter and he leaned down once again and pulled up a tin box. Inside there was cash and receipts. He counted out my change from two one-hundred-dollar bills. “Ice is in here along with soda. Grocery store down the road.” He pointed in the opposite direction from where I’d come. “Has beer until nine p.m. Liquor store you’ll have to go into Wellsboro.”
I scooped up the change and put it into my pocket.
“Thanks,” I said. “Any place where I can go later to get a burger and a beer?”
“Colton Point Inn’s a good place. Ain’t fancy, but good food and cold beer. Three and a half miles up the road. On the left. Can’t miss it.” I wondered if a relative owned it.
He looked at the card, studied it and then disappeared behind the counter again. He came back up with a key and a numbered tag attached. Room 207. “We close at 11:30, after Seinfeld.” He leaned over the counter again and pointed. “Take the stairs at the far end is the easiest way. And have a good stay.”
I thanked him and went out to drive to the parking spot nearest the stairs he’d pointed out. I took out my valise and walked up the stairs. I hadn’t opened a motel room with an actual key since I was in high school. The room was dark with the curtains drawn, but it smelled clean and when I turned on the lights I saw that the place was spotless. I checked the bathroom: also spotless. I’d lucked out. I pulled back the sheets. Clean coverlet, clean blankets, clean sheets, clean pillows. I could stay here for as long as it took.
The restaurant was exactly what I’d wanted. Despite the fact that there were enough pickup trucks in front to start a dealership, people at the bar didn’t turn their heads and stop talking when I entered. I assumed it was because they were accustomed to tourists. I took a corner stool at the bar and ordered a bourbon. The best they had was Old Grand-Dad and that was fine with me. I’d noticed a dining area, beyond a couple of pool tables. I was happy Hank Williams was on the jukebox. He’s one of only a handful of country western musicians I truly admire. All of the walls were pine and seasoned with cigarette smoke, grease and maybe blood. The obligatory deer head hung above a window across from the bar and, oddly, there was a stuffed coyote poised on a rock in a corner near the pool tables. He looked as if he were guarding the place. I wondered who thought of the clever idea of mounting it. Maybe he had always been into the garbage, or had killed too many local chickens or terrorized children. His presence made me a little sad. Some coyotes had even started making their way into parts of New Jersey, and I wondered if once again they would be brought to the edge of extinction in the Northeast.
The bar was crowded, but not standing room only. The bartender was attractive, and ten years ago she would’ve been very sexy in the skintight jeans and tight blouse she was wearing. She had a nice smile and a central Pennsylvania accent, hanging on the edge of southern but clinging to the hard shale that made these intractable, grit-teethed mountain people incapable of a drawl. Her voice suggested many years of smoking.
When she came back with the bourbon on ice she said, “Can I get you a menu?”
“Well, to save you time, I’d like a burger medium rare with fried onions and some fries.”
“Venison or beef?”
“Beef.”
She smiled brightly, displaying white teeth. “I didn’t think you’d want venison medium rare. But I’ve seen it done before.” She made a face and shuddered.
She started to go and then I said, “Just out of curiosity, where does the venison come from?”
“Old boy up two mountains from Colton Point raises them. Corn and alfalfa fed.” She paused for a minute to see if I was considering the venison, but it was always too gamey for me.
By seven the bar was getting more crowded. I sat and listened to the conversations, bits and pieces of them anyway: Obama, oil prices, the Gulf oil spill, taxes, government, the Phillies, Eagles. Also there was a lot of flirting with Lois, the bartender, who liked being the cynosure. Her hair was too blonde, and her skin so tanned it was the color of copper and as leathery as a lizard’s. I liked sitting there and being slightly anonymous. The men and the few women at the bar clearly were regulars and aware I was an outsider, but they didn’t seem to mind my presence and, I think, they were showing off a bit as if I were a guest in their house.
Amy wouldn’t have liked this place. She had an aversion to people like this and their narrow view of the world outside their own limited, isolated environment, and often, when the subject came up, she’d be mystified that I found something appealing and romantic in this milieu. My God, Ethan, those are the people who live in trailers or shacks and who have no health insurance and walk around with half their teeth missing and still vote for Republicans who literally couldn’t give two shits about them except at election time. I’d tell her that they live mostly by a strict code rooted in a longstanding tradition and, no matter how spurious their attachment to skewed ideas, their devotion to those ideas was admirable. Yes, she said, while their children suffer from malnutrition and remain uneducated and stuck in the same place with the same misguided ideas as their generations of family before them.
None of these people at the bar seemed to be suffering from malnutrition. I don’t think I’d ever seen so many fat men in one place. Yes, Amy, maybe it’s because of distended livers and white bread, but none of these guys look like they’re lacking in many of the food groups. I agreed with her about so many of the people in America who should’ve been voting for a more liberal agenda, mostly for the sake of their children—people who liked George W., for instance, because he shared their own world views about things like carrying a big stick instead of crafting a foreign policy, and executing black people, including retarded ones, on the domestic front—but they were entitled to their own views and I liked that they clung to tradition. Yes, and in the meantime the environment is going to shit, children wake hungry, we
’re in two wars and the banks and Wall Street are running the country. The NRA and abortion are more important issues than healthcare for their children and education. Guns were very important in areas like this, I couldn’t argue with her there. There did seem to be a disconnect between what Middle America should believe in and what, in reality, it did believe in. I looked over at the mounted coyote.
“I’ll have a sea breeze, Lois.”
I looked to my left, toward the voice. The woman suddenly standing next to where I sat was in her late thirties, brown hair pulled back, nice profile with a slight bump on her nose. She must’ve had a different diet than the rest of the people in the bar. Her body was toned underneath a light sweater and slacks. Her voice was soft in contrast to Lois’s. She looked toward me and smiled. The smile was not forced or flirtatious, merely sociable.
“I always wondered what that was,” I said, smiling back at her.
“What what was?”
“A sea breeze.”
Her smile didn’t fade. “Cranberry juice and vodka. I guess you could call it a woman’s drink.” She nodded toward the rest of the bar where most of the customers were drinking beer with shot glasses of whiskey. “It’s refreshing and yet it still does the trick.”
I laughed. “Sounds like a commercial.”
I looked at her more closely and saw a slight flush to her face and neck, as if she’d already been drinking. Lois came back and put the drink in front of her.
“Menu?”
The woman smiled, but the smile was different. “Yes, Lois.”
I got up and offered her my seat. She smiled her other smile and said, “I need to stand. I’m tired of sitting.”
She took a sip of her drink and put the glass down. “My ass is sore from sitting,” she said, but it didn’t seem as if it was directed toward me, or anyone. Her posture was straight; she had nice firm breasts. I guessed her to be thirty-five. I didn’t smell any trace of cigarettes on her as I repositioned myself on the stool.
It’d been a very long time since I’d been in a situation like this. We drank our drinks side by side, silently.
Lois returned with my hamburger, a napkin, knife and fork, salt, pepper, ketchup and the woman’s menu.
“Would you like another whiskey?” Lois asked me. I drained what was left in my glass, held it out, smiled and nodded.
“And I’ll have the same as him, but with venison,” she said.
Lois nodded, took my glass and walked to the other end of the bar. I determined her walk, the pronounced sway of her ass, was connected to her tip ratio. I squeezed out some ketchup on my plate and dabbed and tried a few fries.
“Would you like some?”
She looked at me and smiled. She ignored my question.
“I’m Bea,” she said.
I wiped my hand with my napkin, stood again and put out my hand. “I’m Matt. Nice to meet you.” I sat. “Good fries.”
“It’s why people come here. That and the atmosphere.”
I couldn’t tell if she was being ironic. I thought she might be, which might be good, but might not.
“I wish I didn’t have to stare over at that coyote,” I said. “It wasn’t too long ago they were nearly gone from this part of the world.”
“You live near here?” she said, puzzled.
“No. Patterson, New Jersey, but I remember reading in the Times a few years ago how they were beginning to show up where they shouldn’t be showing up.”
“They probably had the same view about us at one time.”
She had sharp, deep green eyes and I wondered if the flush was not alcohol but shyness. She took another sip of her drink. She had long, elegant hands, fingernails painted a soft hue of pink.
“Chuck Farman shot that poor creature. They call him ‘Farmer’ around here. Said the coyote had no right trespassing on his land. Signs all over the place, he said.”
“How’d it end up here?”
“This is Farmer’s second home.” She nodded toward the other side of the bar. “He’s the one with the red beard and the stupid look. Well…more stupid than the other two he’s sitting with.”
I looked over and saw what she meant. He had the obligatory flannel shirt, a beard covering most of his face, two eyes hidden mostly by flesh and hair. He looked mean, but who was I to judge? There are probably lots of people in the world who would shoot a coyote if they had the chance. Mean is when you beat a boy to death.
I looked back at Bea, probably short for Beatrice. I thought about the toughness of these people, cultivated in this harsh, rocky landscape, but couldn’t it be the opposite, too? A gentle toughness in a naturally gentle person? Maybe.
“You better eat that burger before it gets cold.”
I looked down at my plate, and then I looked up at her. She had the kind of looks that sneak up on a person, like a road sign that you don’t see until it’s right upon you. She was damn pretty, I realized now.
“I thought I might wait for you.”
She gave me a studied look, the way someone might look at an object not quite in focus. Then she smiled. She had different stages of a smile, I’d noticed. The one she wore now was incredulous.
“People from Patterson always this polite?” I saw her look down at my hands and the wedding ring. I’d decided to keep it on. It would’ve shown after twenty years anyway.
“Only with pretty women.”
“How does your wife feel about that?”
“Yeah, well, that’s another story all together. We’re going through some hard times right now.”
“‘Right now’ sounds temporary.”
I laughed. She was pretty and smart. “It’s a complicated story I’d rather not get into at the moment. But it would be nice to eat together. For me anyway.”
She took another sip of her drink and looked at me intently. I could tell she was weighing whether to stop whatever was happening right now or take it a step further. “Wanna get a booth?”
“Yeah, one where I can’t see the coyote. I feel a certain kinship to that trespassing critter.”
She waved toward Lois, who came over reluctantly. “Ain’t done yet,” she said, any charm gone with Bea’s presence.
“I know. We’re going over to a booth. When it’s done give me a wave.”
Lois looked at me and then at my food. “Anything wrong?”
“No,” I said. “Just waiting.” She nodded and walked away, her sexy strut gone also.
We made our way over to a booth and I drained my whiskey as we sat down. “I forgot to give a tip, plus I need another. How about you?”
“I wouldn’t complain.” She drained her own glass, and handed it to me. I walked back to the bar and put the glasses down. Lois was talking to a guy with a beard and a hat with CAT written on the front. She finally looked around at me and I raised the two glasses. She looked over at the booth and then back at me.
“I’ll bring them over,” she shouted over the din of the conversations. I took out some cash and put a five on the counter and pointed to it and then to her. She smiled.
Bea was checking her cell phone when I slid into the booth. The seats were low and I felt small in it. I wondered if part of that was the fact that I was across from a woman who was not Amy. I ate a few more fries. She put the phone back in her bag and looked at me, again, intently. Her green eyes had something behind them.
“So what do people do around here to make a living?”
“Same thing people do most anywhere, I guess. Work.”
“At what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I mean, in town there are merchants, banks, stores. Outside of town there’s the big chains, Walmart, Home Depot, those kinds of places. And then there’s the gas money.”
“What gas?” I was puzzled.
“Gas deposits in the shale. People sell the gas rights on their land.” She stopped talking and looked at me. She smiled. “You look like an informed guy. The Marcellus Shale? You must’ve heard of it? The fracturing process?”
“I didn’t know it was in this area.”
“This is one of the richest areas of gas in Pennsylvania.” She looked over at the bar. “Most of those guys over there can afford steak now instead of venison. In fact, most of them can come here and sit and have a beer and a shot and a steak and not have to wait for the end of the month to pay the tab.”
“So that’s why all the trucks are on 15.”
She nodded but her face lost its smile. “It’s done something to this area. Some of it good, mostly bad.”
“Why bad?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The roads are awful, people are divided on the results of money versus the environmental damage. Things have changed around here. I imagine that’s what it must’ve been like when oil was found in Texas. Money mostly corrupts, in one form or another.”
“What about you?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lois heading over with a tray. She set it down on the edge of the table and put out Bea’s food and her drink. She put down my whiskey and then stood straight, hands on her hips. “Anything else for you?”
“Not right now, thank you,” I said.
Lois looked at Bea. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, thank you.”
Lois turned and left. I watched her walk away.
“She sees every woman as a threat,” Bea said. “She was that way all the years we grew up together.”
“You’ve been here all your life?”
“Except for college, yes. My father and mother had a beautiful dairy farm that slowly died like all the farms around here.”
“What do you do now?”
“I’m a pediatrician in Wellsboro. Mostly I work out of the hospital. What about you?”
Beneath the Weight of Sadness Page 27