A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  “Looks like a dog situation.”

  Bullfrog was curled into the other front seat. His tail wagged one wag.

  “Dogs?”

  Another wag.

  “It’s dogs!”

  Then he got his fat basset legs under him, and he sat partway up. He yawned a yawn that ended in a certain yawn squeak that he had, and he shifted his butt around so he could stick his face out the window. His nose bobbed in the wind. A gray film of perpetual dog slobber now coated the windowsill. Bullfrog was half basset, half something else. His nose was all basset.

  Pattianne cooed at him.

  “Mr. B!”

  If she cooed high and singing, Bullfrog could hear. He looked at her and shook his head, flapping his ears. That’s how she knew when he heard her. And she liked it when he heard her. She would think, I’m not alone.

  She slowed down, watching for a wide shoulder spot, slowing and listening. The dense green of the trees became black, and the sunset clouds turned copper in the long clear stretch of sky above the road. Bullfrog was curled back asleep before she found a gravel turnout to turn around to head back to the Pink Dolphin Motel. She stopped on the gravel. The air smelled rich and wet, and was full of sound, like night birds in the rain forest, or a murmuration of starlings, a covert of coots, a dule of doves. It was the same evening chirping that was in every forest everywhere, the New Jersey woods, the back yards of Minnesota, public television specials of Kalahari desert oases.

  Bullfrog snorted in the seat.

  “I suppose you wonder where we are.”

  The sky was dull silver, and the copper had gone to purple. Bullfrog bumped his nose against her elbow. A request for a dog break.

  It was not quite dark, except for under the trees. She turned off the key, and Frankie’s Fiat choked and jerked and quit.

  She opened the door and planted her feet in the gravel and let her knees straighten slowly before she stood and went around to Bullfrog’s side and opened his door. He got his long self out and standing on all four cute fat short legs, and he shook, flapping his ears and jingling his tags, and wrapping a long silver string of dog drool neatly around his nose twice. She took in a deep breath that eased the ache in her back, and she tasted the cold marine air deep. If she sniffed short little sniffs with the end of her nose, she caught sharp scents of pine and damp leaf.

  Not too long a dog break. Bullfrog was old, and short breaks seemed okay with him, and there was only so much time before the bad feeling started in her chest. Not her heart, but right around there. Driving, it was just a lot of messy thoughts. Stop, and it turned to a nameless drifting bad feeling. She’d driven across Saskatchewan, only stopping for gas and to pee and to buy more coffee for the thermos. She’d stopped to sleep in Calgary, though, after she almost sideswiped a Winnebago with two old ladies in it. She didn’t need more bad feelings in her heart. Except it wouldn’t be in her heart. In her chest maybe, but she wouldn’t say heart.

  Bullfrog peed on two tires and then they got back in. And then the Fiat wouldn’t start. Again. Every time, all the way from St. Cloud, she remembered Frankie saying something about the starter.

  She took one of the long deep breaths and put the key in her pocket next to the blue glass vial. She got her wallet out of the glove box and put that in there too, and the pack of Marlboros, and she scooped a handful of dog kibble into her other pocket. She pulled the neat stuff sack of her sleeping bag from the back. She hooked Bullfrog’s new leather leash to his collar.

  “Walk?”

  His tail wagged in wide, full circles.

  It was all the way dark before they got back to the Pink Dolphin Motel, and the birds had quieted. There were seven white reflectors along the side of the road, and one blue one, and she had no idea how many actual steps it took, because she was going to stop counting things.

  There were nine yellow lights above nine doors. The office was the door next to the Coke machine, and she looked in through the window. A very fat, beautiful woman with black hair sat in there on the couch, and Pattianne looked away because her stomach lurched like she might throw up, and then she looked back, because the woman seemed to have extra arms. She wore a long, bright dress, there was turquoise and magenta, and then two little girls climbed out from behind her, and the woman only had two arms.

  The door opened to a low counter, and there stood Mr. Patel. She guessed this because a small wooden plaque that hung on the wall said YOUR HOSTS! THE PATELS!

  “Hi,” she said. “Um. How much are your rates?”

  “Fifty-five dollars plus tax,” he said. “No car?”

  “It wouldn’t start. Do you allow dogs?”

  Mr. Patel looked past her, at the open office door, to Bullfrog, sniffing along the edge of the doorstep, about to sniff his way in.

  “Oh, yes,” Mr. Patel said. “Oh, yes, please sign your name here, et cetera, all the blanks. You have been walking along this road?”

  Mr. Patel was small. There was the ease of a small person looking across a small distance instead of down from even a slight height. He had dark circles in the dark skin around his eyes.

  “Just since I turned around to come back.” She was too tired to explain that the Fiat would start again in a couple hours, or in the morning, that it was maybe a sign that they should stop here for the night.

  “Oh, yes?” he said. He had a musical accent, and she wanted to listen, instead of having to understand, and respond, and know what he said, that beautiful sound, a surprise of syllables that jumped to odd registers. “Of course,” he said. “Yes, please just fill this out. Mrs. Patel, number eight? Where is a daughter, Mrs. Patel?”

  Mrs. Patel on the couch was watching a television that was turned up loud in another language. Pattianne could hear it, not see it. What she saw was the light of it lighting up Mrs. Patel and all the colors in the room. Mrs. Patel laughed with gold teeth and dangled a baby by its arms. The baby screamed, laughing too. There were more little girls now, four of them maybe, on the couch with Mrs. Patel. There was a lot of pink. And orange and purple and magenta and bright yellow.

  Mr. Patel said, “Yes, I think number eight will do very well,” and he held out a key on a metal ring. “There are nine doors. Number eight is the eighth one to your left.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “A daughter will bring an extra blanket.”

  She started to tell him that it was okay, she had her sleeping bag, but he had turned back to the bright mass of people in the room behind him.

  Squares of cement formed a walkway along the wall. Part of her didn’t know how many squares, and part of her knew there were fourteen. She pushed open the door to number eight, and let the yellow light over the door shine into the room. Bullfrog headed on in, sniffed as far as the bedside table, went under it, curled up, laid down his head, and watched her. Her move. She turned on a light in the bathroom. Toilet, sink, shower. Smell of soap, mildew, ammonia cleaner. No Bible in the drawer by the bed.

  The daughter knocked one knock on the open door. She was thin and flat except for small new breasts under the word Princess in glitter across the front of her lavender T-shirt. She held out a pink blanket.

  “Cool,” she said.

  “Yes,” Pattianne said. “And damp.”

  “No,” the girl said. “Like, your dog. Dogs are cool. We have a cat.”

  “Well. Cats are nice.”

  “What kind of dog is that?”

  “He’s a St. Francis Hound.”

  “Cool,” the girl said. “If you want anything else? You can ask my dad. He stays up late.”

  That’s okay, she wanted to say, I have my sleeping bag, but the girl was gone, ponytail bouncing.

  Then came rain, falling down straight into the clearing, and Pattianne sat on the step with her eyes closed, and remembered, way back where remembering was safe. Early in spring, the year she was ten, her parents moved from a brick building in Newark to the small old house in Cranbury. Fruit trees lined
the backyard, and beyond them the woods, and a creek, overgrown with someone’s dark red roses tangled along the deep bank. Goldfinches lived down in the roses. Grandma Anthony taught her to listen for the dropping notes of their call in-flight.

  In the morning, there was fog outside the Pink Dolphin, and a path that led away to the trees. Bullfrog headed along the path and she followed, to where the path stopped at the leaning stalks of last summer’s foxgloves, and then the thick woods, tangled vine maples and salal crowding underneath fir trees and ragged alders and no more path except back through the fog to number eight and then on down the road to the Fiat.

  Which was gone.

  She had broken some rule. There were none of the neat little red and white signs that said NO PARKING AT ALL EVER. But still, the Fiat was gone. She could take a train back maybe, if they allowed dogs on trains. She knew they didn’t allow them on buses. She tried to imagine hitchhiking. She and Bullfrog walked back through the fog to the Pink Dolphin, trying not to get melodramatic. The Fiat was somewhere. She had money for a while.

  The television set was on, and two little girls sat facing each other on the floor, clapping their hands together and singing a clapping song. Laughter came from back beyond the television, laughter in another language. At the desk, Mr. Patel had the telephone to his ear.

  “My car is gone,” she said.

  On a shelf was a small radio playing a sitar version of “Moon River.” A sign, but she didn’t know of what.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, smiling whitely.

  She waited and then he covered the phone with his hand and said, “Please, I will drive you in to town! Was it parked along the road? I believe it may have been towed to Ucluelet. That is just south of Tofino!”

  “Tofino.”

  And so they arrived, at the end. “Ruby’s Roadhouse—at the End of the Road.” That’s what it said on the hanging wooden sign, and right under that, it said “No Dogs,” and right past that, the Pacific Ocean took up all the rest of everything that wasn’t sky. She wasn’t ready for the end of the road. Days and days and miles and miles to get here, but she wasn’t ready.

  Bullfrog got his fat front feet under him, got up and sat next to her on the seat and sniffed. His nose bobbed in the air.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Very much.”

  “Please,” Mr. Patel said. “You are so welcome. But what about your car? Ucluelet would be just south of here.”

  She opened the door and slid out, as if she hadn’t heard him.

  “Please,” he said. “I would be happy.”

  She thanked him again, and Bullfrog wiggled out the door after her. She slammed the door. The windows were fogged up, and she could see Mr. Patel’s hand waving goodbye as he pulled away, turned around down by the TERMINUS, and drove back past her. Still waving.

  “Ocean,” she said.

  “End of the road,” she said.

  “No dogs,” she said.

  Bullfrog couldn’t read. She didn’t think he could read, anyway, but then she used to think he couldn’t talk either. She thought, I am not crazy. Not even a little weird really. Foolish. Guilty. Exhausted. Her thoughts weren’t connecting.

  It felt like a long story. Driving across Canada, from Minnesota, starting at International Falls, it kept trying to gather in her head, all flying around in there, words, sentences, feelings, facts, memories, lies, all in a big leaf pile on a windy day. She counted miles, llamas, women truckers, yellow cars, vehicles bearing dogs, and license plates from Florida. She counted seventeen different things in four days and sixteen hours.

  She was going to stop now. Stop counting. Stop driving. Stop looking for signs that the universe thought she was doing the right thing. Or not.

  She would go into Ruby’s Roadhouse and get a cup of coffee. She’d write a postcard to Jen, which would simply say, Dear Jen — Love, Pattianne, and it would make Jen laugh. She’d write another chirpy postcard to her parents, which they would hang on the refrigerator as proof that everything was fine, and that they shouldn’t worry. Taking a little travel time is normal for a person getting a divorce, or breaking up, or whatever it was they thought she was doing. As if they would ever even wonder what she was really doing, as long as she didn’t make too much of a fuss about anything. But now she was getting in a bitchfest in her head. She pushed it all away and sat on the wooden bench along the wide front porch, by a small table with a checkerboard painted on the tabletop.

  “Or maybe chess,” she said to Bullfrog.

  The bench was wet. The buildings of the town were here and there on the hillside that sloped down to the beach. She started to count them, got to seven, and stopped because she thought she’d counted one twice. They weren’t in straight rows, and she was going to stop counting things anyway. Grass-lined dirt tracks wound around on the hillside, and some of the buildings were houses, with curtains, and smoke came out of one rusty metal chimney pipe. A lot of the buildings seemed to be sheds, three for sure. One of the buildings was actually a large, gray rock.

  She closed her eyes and could still see the grass-lined tracks, the sheds, the large gray rock, the chimney pipe, the dark smoke. There was an empty ache in her stomach, a calm spot right below her ribs, where there was a heart that beat, not calmly, and tried to claim some duty other than beating. But it was a muscle. It had no nature of its own. A dog may speak before a bloody muscle does.

  There were seagulls and the low rhythm of breakers, the rhythm missing every few beats, and then a crack like far-off thunder. Bullfrog’s tags jingled as he sniffed around on the porch, and the air was wet and kelpy. Inside Ruby’s Roadhouse a phone rang and was answered: “Hello, Ruby’s Roadhouse,” a singsong, British-sounding voice.

  Pattianne opened her eyes. It was not a dream. It was like everything else was a dream. St. Cloud, Minnesota, in the rearview mirror was a dream. Driving four days and sixteen hours was a dream. The intersections and horns and red lights and green lights of Vancouver, the ferry to Nanaimo that cost a fortune, the black water, the road up the Inside Passage, tall snags of Douglas fir with two bald eagles on each snag, eighteen bald eagles in twenty-three miles, all of it a dream. The Pink Dolphin. Now even the Fiat was a dream.

  The door opened behind her and the musical British voice said, “Well, what’s this then?”

  It was a woman, with a white scarf twisted around her head and earrings of pink shells, and jeans that were folded high above her bare-boned ankles. She stood tall, holding a broom in one hand and a white piece of cloth in the other, the cloth very white, and her skin very black, almost blue.

  “Can I help you, young lady?”

  “Oh,” Pattianne said, standing up too fast, a little dizzy, and she leaned against the bench. “Maybe just a cup of coffee for now.”

  Bullfrog sniffed at the woman’s shoes, big, polished penny loafers with no pennies.

  “Is this your dog?” she said, and Pattianne loved her voice, but it was not happy, and the woman pushed her broom at Bullfrog, saying, “No dogs at Ruby’s Roadhouse. Says so there on the sign.”

  Bullfrog ignored the broom and sniffed on past her shoes to the welcome mat.

  “Just on the porch? Can he just stay on the porch while I have some coffee?”

  “Well.” That’s all she said, and she leaned the broom against the wall by the door, and went to the railing at the edge of the porch, her steps coming through the floorboards, through the wooden bench, through Pattianne’s bones. She ran the clean white cloth along the railing, her hand large-fingered and bony, the knuckles big. At the end of the railing, she snapped the cloth out over the bench at the far end of the porch. She stopped there and looked up.

  “Go on now, why don’t you?” she said. “Or is it out here you want it, cause there’s a pot on the sideboard with take-away cups if that’s it. There’s a jar for quarters.”

  Pattianne wanted her to say more, but she didn’t. “I’ll just go on in then.”

  The woman was looking at Bullfrog, who had
plopped down in the middle of the welcome mat, sniffing at himself, and Pattianne went in before he started licking himself, which was what he seemed to have in mind.

  Inside was a wide room, floors of rough wood worn smooth, with blue braided rugs. There was a desk, with a rack of postcards. Empty shelves lined all the walls below the windows and either side of the open stone fireplace at one end of the long room, where a fire burned. It was a small, quiet fire.

  She was in this big room all by herself with the Pacific Ocean right outside, and it was time out of time, how everything stopped and started as human beings came and went. She didn’t seem to really be there when she was alone in a place, it seemed like no one was anywhere.

  A wide archway near the desk opened to the tiny coffee shop, and the smell of coffee, and five small tables in a tight cluster. In a pastry case in the small counter, with quiches lined up, and seeded bagels, and pink frosted doughnuts. The windows all looked out at the gray ocean and the gray sky.

  “Sit anywhere you like.”

  The waitress, a girl in a blue apron over overalls.

  She said, “I’ll be right with you, you want coffee?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  Five tables, each set with two careful placemats and coffee cups and a spoon and napkin. On the placemats was a map of Vancouver Island, with a compass rose in the bottom corner. The only direction marked on the compass rose was West, like it was penned on by a scribe, serif, bold, and only West. It said to her, You Are Here. It said, You Are Somewhere.