The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  We do not even know what brand of gas was served at the Y City station: Conoco, DX, Phillips, KM? The remaining signs hopefully promise “Self-Serve” and “Discount,” and the old prices are still up: 26¢ for regular, 39¢ for premium (actually the tacit dollar preceded both figures). The doors of the station are boarded over, grass and weeds grow up through the cracks in the cement, there is no sign of a vehicle anywhere (although Kim was expecting a green Ambassador), and the road itself is defunct, derelict, and discarded: a fragment of yellow center-stripe points toward a near mountain, but the hard-surface is missing beyond the “Gas” sign. We do not even know who abandoned this gas station first, the customers or the highway.

  The highway is in the process of change, as all highways are. Once the junction joined the gentle curves of U.S. 270 to the wild meanders of U.S. 71, the larger but more scenic of the two roads, and here at the Y the curves were especially sharp and treacherous as they negotiated babbling Mill Creek and its gorge carved between two twelve-hundred-foot hills. The Arkansas Highway Department is devoting heavy equipment and many men to straightening out these curves, converting, as it were, the Y to a T. There is nothing romantic about a T. But the new roadwork has left the gas station off to itself, forsaken except by a clump of double sycamores, which one day will overtower the last vestiges of the last pump. Kim notices, with a start, that the sycamores are in leaf. Spring is here.

  Springtime is branchtime, trillions of Y’s, and she gains the branch of the road and crosses the bridge over the branch, Mill Creek, itself a branch of the Fourche la Fave (simplified by the natives into Clear Fork Creek; “Fourche” means “fork” or “Y” in French, and there are several streams, hills, and valleys in Arkansas with that name), which itself becomes a river branch flowing into the Arkansas, which branches into the Mississippi. All of these Y branches take place at different levels of the same Ouachita Mountains that contain Bear City, sixty miles southeast by east. Right around the much-straightened curve over Mill Creek, we come to a still-attended business, a modest motel, the Mountain Inn.

  If Y City is the only one of these lost towns that has never dwindled from its former glory, for it had none, it is also the only one of these lost towns in which our heroine finds actual open-to-the-public accommodations for the night. Nowhere else has she found an inn in the town itself, at least not one with a vacancy, Prince Matlock’s folly, The Cave Court, being all booked up. The Mountain Inn, this early in the season, has several vacancies, and Kim could take her pick, though she isn’t permitted to: she is assigned to room number one, the southernmost of the units in the motel. Rooms number two and three are vacant, and remain so throughout her stay. If we look closely, as we do, we can see her entering her door. Zephyra looks happy out here in the woods, the pines, the springtime morning sunshine. Soon she will not look happy, for an uncouth green Ambassador, whom she has met briefly before, will park alongside her.

  But first, before the Ambassador, who was named Bunker after an actual ambassador, gets too familiar with Zephyra, Kim will unload her things, then return to the office for a chat with the proprietress, Pat Heinen, supposedly fifty-five but looking only half that. Kim will discover that everything in Y City is actually twice as old as it appears to be; this motel has been here for almost forty years but looks much newer, possibly because of all the improvements Mr. and Mrs. Heinen have put into it. Even these piney mountains, which actually resulted from uplifts five hundred million years ago, don’t appear to be any older than 250 million years. Kim is going to discover, the next time she looks in a mirror, that she appears the age she was before she married.

  The windows in the motel are what is known architecturally as Chicago windows, which is appropriate, because both of the Heinens, Pat and her husband, John (who is also ostensibly fifty-five), are from Chicago; they did not, however, design this motel, and have owned it for only nine years. John Heinen emigrated from the Netherlands in 1958 and met Pat in downtown Chicago, where both worked and both hated the big-city life. They have been married almost as long as they appear to be in age. To escape from Chicago, they hit upon the idea of running a wayfarers’ motel in some remote spot, and began looking for one. They had heard the usual jokes and slanders about Arkansas as a hick state, but discovered on a camping trip here that it was a very beautiful and a very misunderstood state. They fell in love with Arkansas at first sight, and Arkansas returned the affection. A newspaper ad told them there was a motel for sale in the remote Ouachitas.

  “Why ‘City’?” Kim asks Pat, who instantly catches the wordplay of the question.

  “The only thing I can figure out,” Pat says, “is that years ago some individual or group of individuals had a vision of a city growing here. Or else it was just meant as a tremendous joke, because this place is so remote, so far from being a city, and so lost….” Pat tells Kim that whenever she returns to Chicago, or travels to any real city outside of Arkansas, and mentions the name of the place, people are immediately struck with the ring of the name, and exaggerate it, stretch it out: “Y-Y-Y City!”

  Pat gives Kim the names of a few of the old-timers, natives who’ve lived here all their lives, and directions on how to find their houses (all of them right beside the highways—apparently nobody lives back up in the hills). But Kim is warned that she will discover Y City has no history. No one famous was born here. No battles or even skirmishes were fought here, or near here. There was never a plat map drawn for Y City, or names given to imaginative streets and avenues; the only streets were those three diverging highways and a few logging trails. Worse, there was not one single larger-than-life man or woman in the history of the place, no great personality or character or local celebrity.

  All that was ever here is what is here now; it is a timeless place for wayfarers, where nothing changes or grows old. Pat tells Kim about the crossing. At one time, before it came to be known wistfully or jokingly as Y City, there was a joining of two dirt wagon-roads and a crossing of Mill Creek—a ford when the water permitted, and, when it didn’t, a ferryman of sorts. This old gentleman, named Toish Miller, who lies now in Chant Cemetery, used to dwell beside the stream and had a team of mules to assist people in crossing the creek. This was before the first of the three bridges was erected (the third is being finished now).

  Before the motel was built, earlier travelers could stop at Midway Park, just north of the Mountain Inn, a roadside oasis that went through several metamorphoses, from wagon camp to tent camp to tourist cabins to auto court to simply the Midway Restaurant, which it is today, a family diner. The name comes from its being exactly midway between Fayetteville, in the northwestern part of the state, and Texarkana, in the southwestern part of the state. It once advertised itself as “halfway from everywhere.” Kim wonders, “Am I halfway from where I’m going?” Pat explains, “Midway Park was a rest area, a stopping place. There was always some sort of assistance here. You weren’t stranded. A stopping place for travelers.”

  A stopping place for travelers. U.S. 71 was carved through the mountains of both the Ozarks and the Ouachitas with more thought for the scenery-seeking tourist than for the farmer, trucker, or local traveler. Farther north, as it approaches Fayetteville along the ridges of the gorgeous Boston Mountains, it is lined with abandoned rustic motels that constitute a lost city in themselves. The farther south the highway plunges into the Ouachitas, the farther apart the motels sit. The Mountain Inn is sui generis, the only motel for miles in any direction. Highway “service” along this stretch was limited, in the earlier days of motor travel, to the occasional farm carved into the forests that had a gasoline station built of logs and log tourist cabins, like a modern vegetable stand, right beside the road; such a spot was illuminated at night with gasoline flares, a once-common sight unknown today.

  Did Pat and John Heinen have any problems adjusting to life in a mountain community? When they first came to Y City, there was a little general store at the Y, which had impressed Pat as the sort of old-timey co
untry store she had heard about and seen pictures of; the store has now been obliterated by the highway improvements. (Right over the mountain is Pine Ridge, Arkansas, home of the “Jot ’em Down Store” made famous by radio comedians Lum and Abner.) It was the sort of store, Pat knew, to which customers went not just to make purchases but to “set and visit.” Pat’s first visit to the store was not long after she and John had purchased the motel.

  “I went in there. The residents find out about you by some unknown means of communication—I still don’t know how this happens, but it does. So everyone in the store knew who I was, but I didn’t know who anyone else was. They let me go ahead and make my purchases, and no one said anything, but then one or two of them spoke to me, calling out, ‘How are you doin today?’ or ‘Are you keepin up things at the motel?’ [Imitating their voices, Pat pronounces this “raotel,” with a strong accent on the first syllable.] There were four or five men and women there on the bench, just lounging around, a real general-store atmosphere, and they were intensely curious, so I just opened up and acted friendly. Then the flood started: they wanted to know everything about me.”

  In Chicago, Pat Heinen had been a registered nurse, and when it became known in this community that she had said she was an RN, she was called upon to do a few medical favors for the old-timers. One man with high blood pressure was given regular readings by Pat so that he could report to his doctor. Another old man she attended began referring to her as the River Nurse, and the nickname caught on.

  “Why ‘River Nurse’?” Kim asks.

  “Probably he thought that was what ‘RN’ means!” Pat says. “But also because I live on the river…”

  The river. Just out back of the Mountain Inn, Mill Creek snuggles up against the side of the craggy bluffs, and then spills over a spectacular waterfall. Did Toish Miller, or one of the Millers before him, actually operate a mill? There must have been a gristmill to give the creek its name. Later in the morning, Kim walks down the path from the back of the motel to look at the creek and especially the falls, not nearly so high as the falls she saw at Marble City (which also came from a stream named Mill Creek), but broader, as the stream is wider, and surrounded by pine trees rather than deciduous hardwoods. It is the prettiest spot, the freshest spot, she can recall ever having seen. It is a very inviting spot, too inviting: Kim learned from Pat Heinen that two sons of the family who previously owned the motel had drowned here, and during the time the Heinens have lived here another drowning has occurred. Downstream from the turbulent falls the creek deepens into a tranquil swimming hole that for many years was associated with Midway Park and known all over the county, and among tourists, for its aquatic felicities.

  The morning is hot, but Kim did not even think of bringing her swimsuit with her. She bends and tests the water with her fingers: it is icy cold. She splashes a little of it on her face. Straightening up, she has an intuition that she is being watched. She scans the woods all around for a glimpse of eyes, but sees none…except a quick glimpse of what might be a brown-plaid flannel shirt behind a tree. Though she moves toward it, she loses her way among the brush and sees no further movement. So she returns her attention to the falls and the serenity of the location, a silence broken only by the gurgling of the water, enough sound to smother any noise of traffic from the highway.

  Later, when she opens the door to her room, she feels that someone is inside. A sound comes from the bathroom. Kim is torn between running to the office or confronting the intruder; her adrenalin jumps and her heart pounds. She approaches the open bathroom door. “Hello?” she says. And then repeats it.

  No brown plaid appears. It is blue and white, and it is worn by a female. “Hi,” the woman says, and Kim realizes that she is the chambermaid.

  Chambermaid Flossie Boren is a year older than Pat and John Heinen, which would make her chronologically fifty-six, but she is slim, pretty, and full of energy, and Kim records only that she must be twice twenty-eight, her apparent age. Pat Heinen hired her seven years ago to work here, and pays her well in a community where “there’s no way to make a living,” but Flossie intends to quit after this season and devote more time to her own house and garden.

  She will regret it, she tells Kim, because she honestly enjoys being a chambermaid. She likes to “make things look nice,” and the guests of this motel are usually nice people who are pretty clean—the only ones who leave an utter mess behind are the wealthy people with expensive clothes who, Flossie guesses, “must’ve been used to havin people wait on ’em and pick up after ’em.” The less affluent people often clean up after themselves.

  Once people stay at the Mountain Inn, Flossie says, they always come back again. “Sometimes people leave me notes and say how they appreciated it being so clean, and how much they enjoyed their stay, and that they’ll be back, oh, they’ll sure to be back again sometime. That makes me feel good. Or they’ll say that this motel topped anywhere else they’d ever stayed on their trip across the whole country. And that makes me feel real good.”

  Has Flossie seen a man in a brown-plaid flannel shirt? No, but if it’s important, she’ll keep a eye out for one.

  After Flossie has replaced the Cashmere Bouquet in the bathroom, or whatever she was doing, and leaves, Kim stretches out on her queen-size bed for a while and talks alone to her tape recorder.

  “You know,” she tells the tape, “I think I am tired. I am now in my eleventh lost city. Eleven is a magic number for me. My first two names both begin with the eleventh letter of the alphabet. Eleven is a pair of bigeminal ones. Is this, just in time, my eleventh hour?”

  We could explain to her that the word “eleven” comes from the Anglo-Saxon endleofan, meaning literally “one left”; this means one left over after counting to ten, but clearly it is also now one remaining, one last town, one left to go. But we do not explain this. We could allude to the “one left” as meaning she is in Room 1, to our left as we face the motel. But we do not. Instead, we knock on the door.

  Kim hears a knock at her door. She sits up on the edge of the bed and calls out, “Who is it?,” but then realizes that if it is who she thinks it is, he would not hear her asking. She wonders if Flossie locked the door on her way out. The night chain is not, of course, engaged. “Kim, girl, keep calm,” she whispers to herself. The knock comes again. She would like to run to the bathroom for a quick look in the mirror and maybe a touchup or to comb her hair at least, but there isn’t time. When she has moved to the door she engages the night chain, just in case it isn’t who she thinks it might be. It could be one of those highway workmen who ogled her as she drove in and watched to see which room she was in. The knocking comes a third time, more insistent.

  She turns the knob, releases the lock, and lets the door open as wide as the crack and chain affords.

  Brown-plaid flannel shirt. Doesn’t he ever wear anything else? Very tall; pewter-haired but, like everyone else around here, looking only half his age, which must be late-fortyish. Though he is in the full daylight now, he was in the half-darkness when she saw him in the Bump chair factory. In light his eyes are even kinder, and he is, of course, smiling.

  She asks him, “How do you say ‘Excuse me’ in Latin?”

  He hears her. His smile broadens. “Excusatio non petita fit accusatio manifesta.” This means, however, not “Excuse me” but, rather, “An excuse given when unasked betrays clear guilt.” And he adds, “Kim,” which means, “You lovely thing, you.”

  “You’re excused,” she says, “almost. Why did you meet me at Bear City without telling me who you are?”

  “Pardon?” he says. She has to repeat her question until he gets it. “Well,” he says. “It was too soon.”

  “Too soon for what?”

  “May I come in?” he asks.

  She removes the night chain from its catch and opens the door, floating between an impulse to hug him and a determination to keep her proper distance. As he comes into the room, she looks around for places for them to sit. Sh
e does not intend to sit on her bed. Suddenly she notices a sofa in the room. She had not seen the sofa before. The typical motel room does not have a sofa. How did it get here? “Well,” she says, and gestures for him to sit at one end of it. It is not a long sofa, but there is more space between them as she sits than there was on the bench in the Bump shop.

  He lights a cigarette and asks her after it is lighted, “Mind if I smoke?”

  She puts an ashtray between them on the sofa. “You know,” she remarks, “you don’t look nearly as old as I expected you to.”

  He laughs. “Nor do you, child. Everything in Y City is only half its age.”

  “So you’ve noticed it, too? How was your trip from South Dakota?”

  “Uneventful,” he remarks, offhand, as if making small talk. “Boring country all the way until I reached Kansas City and got on 71, which is this highway.” He gestures toward the road outside. “All that’s worth reporting is that in Iowa I picked up a guy hitchhiking to Kansas City. Soon I had a flat tire and a couple of breakdowns, but he stayed with me and helped, because the tire tools were missing, and my old car…” Giving up the effort of trying to explain how decrepit Bunker is, he takes a folded-up sheet of paper out of his pocket, unfolds it. “Anyway, when we reached Kansas City he thanked me, and then he gave me this. He said it would be my ‘emergency poem.’ That’s what he called it, as if it would be a necessary tool for my car, ‘emergency poem.’ It’s called ‘Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,’ and it goes: