A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  The waitress brought the coffee, with cream, and a glass of water.

  Pattianne said, “Thanks,” and took out her pack of Marlboros and set it on the table.

  The waitress said, “Sorry, really sorry, but it’s all nonsmoking in here.”

  “That’s okay,” Pattianne told her. “I don’t smoke.”

  The coffee at Ruby’s Roadhouse was rich, and the cream was real cream, not milk, maybe half-and-half. It turned the coffee golden. Coffee with milk was thin and gray. Coffee with cream tasted like food, and she drank it, and let it count for lunch. The waitress came back with the pot.

  “Thanks,” Pattianne said. “Can I ask you a question?”

  There was pink frosting on the girl’s overalls.

  “Do you know anything about the silver tide?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Heard of it, I guess.”

  She said thanks and the waitress left.

  She was courting danger. Two cups of coffee, maybe three, maybe three and a half, but four cups would keep her awake, and she didn’t even have anywhere to stay awake in. Although she would at least have the zip to hike eight miles down the road to Ucluelet and find the Fiat.

  As Pattianne was going out, the tall woman in the scarf was coming into the dining room. She stepped back, behind the desk, and she said, “Right there on the doormat, sleeping, so that I had to step right over him, and him never opening an eye.”

  Pattianne gave her the thick coin with the Queen’s picture.

  She handed her back some change, which Pattianne dumped into her pocket without looking.

  The woman said, “Is there something wrong with that dog?”

  “Old,” Pattianne said. “He’s an old soul.”

  Bullfrog hopped up when she opened the door, and the door bonked him on the head, a small thunk that hurt to hear. But he wagged, and they headed down the road, past the sign that said End of the Road, to the crumbling end of the pavement, to the sign that said TERMINUS.

  The firm sand squeaked in the still, cold air, and there was a fine misting rain. The beach was empty of people. Time out of time. Seagulls screeched. A huge crow made deep, gargly noises. Flocks of small surfbirds chasing the waves in and out on invisible bird legs were too far away to hear, or maybe not making any noise at all. Bullfrog trotted ahead, his tags a close, familiar sound. The sky to the west was black clouds, and the cold wind blew in, smelling of far out in the ocean. Not that she had ever been far out in the ocean.

  “What do I know?”

  She knew that this ocean smelled different from the green Atlantic at Sandy Hook. There was a big-sky smell about this ocean. It was not so close and salty. This ocean reached to mystic Russia and ancient China. It was the great weather-maker of the earth. It brought the night. The blue glass vial shifted in her pocket.

  Behind Ruby’s Roadhouse, another road, with a low, square building, and two more, three more houses, maybe more than that, led back toward the highway. The windows of the low, square building were empty, except for two, three, four with curtains hanging, one with the window open. There were places like this everywhere, all over New Jersey, all along the turnpike, even in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and all across Canada, sad little places where not just anyone can stay, only if you’re sorry enough. Only if you are truly full of despair, and forgive me, Father, I have committed the greatest sin. I have a smart mouth that gets other people in trouble. And for your penance you can drink gray highway coffee that tastes like a paper cup and lie sleepless on a mattress that smells like someone else’s cigarettes and count things that don’t matter and wait for signs that do.

  It was raining actual drops by the time they got back to Ruby’s Roadhouse, and Bullfrog headed for the welcome mat.

  The tall woman watched out the window.

  “Bad idea.” Pattianne nudged him with her foot, and he got up and went under one of the benches. He was smart that way. She went in. The woman stood there, arms crossed, looking out at Bullfrog. Except she couldn’t see him now. He was under the bench.

  She said, “Get yourself caught in the rain?” She shook her head, and the pink shells swung against her long neck, as though they should ring like bells. “An El Niño year,” she said. “All rain. Warm.”

  Pattianne took a deep breath, down to where her chest ached. “I’m looking for a place to stay?”

  “One that allows dogs?” the woman said, “There’s the Pink Dolphin out on the highway.”

  “I need to stay here. At the beach. I’m waiting for a silver tide.”

  The woman straightened up and looked at her, at least Pattianne thought she was looking at her. Pattianne looked out at the town. She was at the woman’s mercy. She was at the end of the road.

  “Check at the post office. Mr. Bleakman there, he can tell you what’s to let with dogs. There’s the cabins.”

  A small, square house like a shed leaned toward the ocean, leaning down the hill, the metal stovepipe leaning off the roof. Bullfrog peed at the scrubby bushes of bright leaves that crowded the step. The two windows were closed over with wooden shutters, and the door in the middle was locked with a padlock. Mr. Bleakman opened the padlock and yanked at the door, which was warped, wanting to stay shut. He yanked it open and handed her the padlock.

  “There you go,” he said. “Have a look. Don’t usually rent this one. But with a dog, well. Lock it up when you leave. I got to get back.”

  He went back across the grass and turned downhill toward the post office, past a huge rock, and disappeared. Mr. Bleakman was the kind of person who, after he left, you couldn’t recall his face. He didn’t seem very friendly.

  One room. The floor was long dark planks. When she stepped in, the planks were soft and giving. She walked into the middle of the one room, and the floor was not so soft and giving there. Bullfrog started right next to the door, sniffing along the wall. There was a sweet, musty smell like Grandma Anthony’s basement where the window lit shelves of colored glass jars, a rusty toy fire engine with the ladder that worked, Grandma’s gardening tools hanging in their places.

  A black woodstove sat squarely on a curling piece of gray, flowered linoleum, and a stove and a deep sink and a short squatty refrigerator all gathered in the corner. A light bulb hung down into the middle of the room. She pulled on the string, and the light bulb popped a blue flash and went out.

  A narrow door in the back wall opened to the bathroom, a toilet with a tank up above and a black chain hanging down, crowded in there with a water heater. A tap stuck out of the wall high up, above a drain hole in the floor. The floor was the same gray flowered linoleum as around the stove.

  “Not much closet space,” she said. “Good thing we don’t have any clothes.”

  Bullfrog said, No bed. Good thing we’re not tired.

  Or maybe, No bathtub. Good thing we’re not dirty.

  Or maybe, No anything. This won’t do at all.

  Back at the post office, Mr. Bleakman stood behind the counter.

  “It’s perfect,” she said.

  He shrugged and didn’t stop sorting a stack of yellow envelopes. His fingernails were long and ink stained.

  “Electric is turned on already,” he said.

  “I need to find some stuff. A bed, maybe a table. Actually, I need to find my car.”

  He stopped sorting the yellow envelopes.

  “Your car?”

  “I think it got towed.”

  He looked at her over the top of his glasses, all fingerprint smudges, and his watery eyes looked like he was about to cry.

  “Towed?”

  “It wouldn’t start. Out on the highway. When I went back to try to start it, it was gone.”

  “No parking along the road,” he said. “It’s too narrow. The tourists would just park there and go off hiking into the woods if it wasn’t no-parking.”

  “It didn’t say no parking.”

  He started sorting the yellow envelopes again, laying them into three separate stacks on the counter. It
was an old wooden counter, golden, waxy wood like in an old schoolhouse. The smell in here was comfortable, and she liked Mr. Bleakman, how some people played this little game of being contentious, and you knew the rules, you could either be contentious back at them or be sweet-tempered and irritate them even more and still get what you want.

  “So,” she said sweetly. “Where do you think it got towed to?”

  “Ucluelet. There’s a yard there. They tow the illegally parked cars to the yard there.”

  He gathered the three stacks into one stack and put a big red rubber band around the one stack and dropped it into a mailbag.

  “Down at the grocery store,” he said. “She’s got some stuff in the storeroom down there. Maybe a bed and such. One hundred eighty plus tax.”

  “For a bed?”

  “The cabin. Payable by the week.”

  The old lady in the grocery store called her dear. The bed is in the storeroom, dear. The boy can haul it up there for you. Here are some old copies of the West Island News, dear. You can use it to start your fire. Are you sure one chair is all you need, dear? Come down in the morning, dear. I have fresh cinnamon rolls.

  It made her nervous, a strange old lady saying dear.

  Finally, a long afternoon later, when there was a bed and a table and a chair in the house, Pattianne balled up sheets of the West Island News and piled them into the woodstove. She laid five sticks of kindling neatly across the newspaper, and two split logs on top of that. She touched a match to the bottom edges of The West Island News, here and there, holding her breath until the flames caught. Bullfrog settled beside her, she fed sticks to the flames, and cedar smoke and wet-dog smell blended in the damp air of the house. It was getting dark, and Nana’s basement was all around her, damp smells that anchored her.

  The beach at Tofino was layered with fog the next morning, a dense fog that seemed to drift on the wet sand and catch in the trees on the edge of the beach, up into branches and snags. It hid everything down low. Even the ocean was only sound, and the beach felt big and creepy, like anything could show up out of the fog at any moment. And then something did, a small old woman who looked at her across the foggy distance. The woman was so small that Pattianne got a little dizzy and couldn’t tell how close she was, like maybe the old woman was far away and not so small. The old woman kept walking, wide around her, toward the back of the beach, and then she was gone.

  Coffee didn’t really count for food.

  Now she didn’t see Bullfrog. She looked carefully at the smaller rocks along the back of the beach, looking for a particular brown-and-white rock, with a tail and a red collar. Walking back, the sand hard, she didn’t even see her own footprints, much less any pawprints.

  She called out, “Mr. B,” long and loud, and a big, ragged crow gave a low croak from the top of a boulder. Along the bottom of the boulder, a sandy path led up though the rocks, and the crow croaked again and then lifted off into the fog. The path led up into the scrubby pines, tree roots forming steps into the woods, and then the quiet of the woods became louder than the washing of the waves. The path went in, around a big stump, and it was dark and nothing moved.

  “Bullfrog, Bullfrog.” Her voice sounded small and useless. She tried to think of the last time she noticed him beside her or behind her, and she ran out on to the beach and looked back. The fog seemed to be lifting, but she still couldn’t see far, and she started to run and then stopped because she was running instead of looking at every small rock, at the big logs, out at the edge of the ocean where the waves washed in and out.

  Look, look, look at every rock. They appeared out of the mist, and she went along the back of the beach to see behind them. The town came into view, and surely he couldn’t have come this far back. She turned and went the other way. He was so small, and the beach was big and wide.

  She found she was crying. Odd, quiet tears that were just wet on her face.

  She said, “Please.”

  And she sat on the sand and looked one way and the other, tears just running out of her eyes, and it didn’t even hurt to cry this way, even though she wanted so badly to see his tail, hear his tags, find him. She looked back to the trees.

  There he was, tail high, nose low.

  She just got up and walked over to him.

  “Okay.” She took his ears and rubbed them. “Come on.”

  He followed her, and she went back to where the path led into the woods, stepping silently onto the path, stirring up the sharp, rotting perfume of the damp duff. His tags jingled behind her. Her heart was beating in her ears. The tears had stopped. She touched her wet cheeks. Tasted the wetness on her fingertips. Wondered if these tears tasted different from those hard, ugly tears that she always fought. The scrubby pines gave way to vine maples tangled in the undergrowth.

  “I’m going crazy,” she said to him.

  She wanted to sit in here. It felt better to be in here, out of the fog. Maybe this was a place to think.

  She whispered, “I’m sorry,” but she didn’t believe it. It sounded silly and self-serving, far off the mark, not at all close to the truth of the feeling. It seemed she had to keep it to herself.

  Tall pillars of fir trees in here, their branches starting high up the trunks, arched in the fog. She saw her then, the old woman from the beach, standing in the middle of the woods just ahead, and maybe this was her woods, maybe Pattianne was breaking another rule. The woman didn’t move, and when a crow flew low under the cathedral branches and landed on the woman’s head, she became, in truth, a small weathered snag alongside the path.

  How heart muscles could race and bang.

  As Pattianne got close to the snag, the shoulders became broken, the whole piece a jagged split stump, its parts lying around it, the inside pale and rotted. She touched it, dry dust a surprise on her fingers, and Bullfrog lifted his leg at the base, where moss grew, and thick, ruffled white fungus.

  She walked on, the snag waiting behind her, and she kept looking back. The path twisted through the woods, and it was like the snag turned to watch, and the shadows of the high branches and the drifting fog gave it a face, an old woman, a hawk, and she kept looking back until the stump was no longer in sight.

  They came out behind a burned-out building. The walls around the boarded windows were sooted black. Around front, grass and weeds grew into the gravel of the parking lot, and her feet made too much noise. Thorny vines massed around the broken wooden steps. There was a steeple, painted white, peeling gray. The roof was caved in over the front porch.

  She was not looking for signs, and there was cold air around the muscle under her ribs. At the road was a sign, Church of the Holy Family, all the letters still there, but faded, and she wondered who’d set the fire, and if they would feel bad about it forever.

  12: WALKING IN THE SAME RAIN

  Bullfrog followed her back along the highway past the Church of the Holy Family, getting wet, looking sad. At the last curve in the road heading into Tofino, a farm market sat back in a muddy lot. The wooden screen door hung slightly open, and the light inside was warm and yellow. The apples were cheap—this was apple country—so she went in. Low wooden shelves ran along inside the screened-in front porch. Red apples, green ones, and beautiful yellow ones, a lot of apples everywhere, in boxes along the floor, in baskets on the shelves, and the smell of them in the air. She picked up a yellow one, then three more.

  “Golden Delicious,” said a man behind her. “Washington State.” His red T-shirt was stretched across his chest, stretched over the muscles in his arms.

  He said, “Is that your dog?”

  Bullfrog was nosing his way in.

  “Sorry,” she said, and she had to walk close by the man, a young man, a teenager maybe, to open the door and scoot Bullfrog out with her foot.

  “What kind of dog is that?”

  “Just a mutt.”

  “Good-looking dog,” he said. “Looks like he has some Brittany.”

  He reached past her to pull the
door shut tight, and the black hair of his forearm was powdered with sawdust. She bought a bag of Golden Delicious apples, and when she went to leave, he said to come again, asked was she new in town, what’s that dog’s name, and she just said bye, thanks.

  That night she couldn’t remember the dream that woke her up, but it was still dark, and she was awake all over. Bullfrog snored under the bed, his snore interrupted, an acknowledgment, like it was him saying, it’s okay, it’s just a dream, go back to sleep. She didn’t. She lay there awake, staring at the window, knowing it would get light soon. It didn’t. The window stayed dark, and she knew she just wanted to be held. The bloody muscle inside her chest was behaving badly. She counted by twos, by fives—she had always loved counting by fives. She counted by tens, always too quick. By threes, too confusing. The gray finally came to the window.

  She hunted down the Fiat in Ucluelet. It was easy. She asked a Chinese man in a convenience store. All she had to do was say, “I’m trying to find where my car might have gotten towed to,” and he pointed down the road to a fenced-in lot. The Fiat was the only car there. It cost seventy-three dollars for the towing. The short kid in coveralls said, “Starter’s shot.”

  “What should I do with it?”

  “I can see about getting the parts. You can leave it here if you want.”

  There was a box in the back, extra jeans, a long-sleeved flannel shirt, some books. The kid gave her a ride back to Tofino with the box. Said about three words. Something about Fiats. He liked Fiats, she thought he said.

  Back in Tofino, she wandered the fifty steps down the hill to the phone booth outside the store and took out a shiny new phone card.

  Jen’s voice mail said, “If it’s you, leave a number. You know who you are.”

  “I don’t have a number,” Pattianne said, and Jen picked up and said, “Why don’t you get a cell phone like the rest of the world?”

  “The rest of the world doesn’t have a cell phone.”

  “So did you find out when the silver tide happens?”