RESUME SPEED
By Lawrence Block
Copyright © 2016 by Lawrence Block
In Galbraith, the Trailways bus station was a single room with a pitched ceiling, where a clerk dispensed hunting and fishing licenses and tobacco products in addition to bus tickets. There was no place to sit, so he waited outside, feeling exposed. As soon as his coach pulled up, he walked to the curb to board it, his bag in one hand, his ticket in the other. The bus was no more than a third full, and he found an empty pair of seats in the rear. He hoisted his bag into the overhead rack, dropped into the window seat, and let out a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding.
And then there was a small series of similar exhalations, of knots dissolving and tensions giving way. When the driver closed the doors and pulled away from the curb. When a sign announced the town line, and another said Resume Speed.
Minnie Pearl’s hometown, he thought. Years since he’d recalled the line. Years since he’d even thought of Minnie Pearl.
Another town, and another, and if they had Resume Speed signs of their own, he never noticed them. And, finally, the state line—and he drew a deep breath and let it out, and looked down at his hands, folded neatly in his lap.
Thoughts came, pointless thoughts, questions without answers. He blinked them away and breathed them away, and the bus stopped, and somebody got off and somebody got on, and the seat beside him remained empty, and the bus started up again. And, with or without a sign to prompt it, resumed speed.
His eyes closed. He slept.
When he opened his eyes, he was in a town and the bus had stopped moving. Were they at a bus stop? No, they were idling at a traffic light, waiting for it to turn. He looked out the window, and two doors up the street was a diner. Neon spelled out its name: Kalamata.
And there was a hand-lettered sign in the window. He squinted at it and couldn’t swear what it said, but he had a fair idea.
And it felt like the right size town, big enough to have a traffic light and far enough down the line from where he’d boarded. When they reached the station, he’d get off.
Unless they’d already stopped at whatever passed for a bus station in whatever town this was. He could have slept through it. Well, there’d be another town, and another diner. His ticket was good clear through to Spokane. If it stopped here he’d get off, and if it didn’t he’d ride on, and either way it made no never mind.
Then the bus braked again, and he heard the driver say “Cross Creek,” which was evidently the name of where they were. He’d never heard of Cross Creek, but it pretty much had to be in Montana, and on balance it made a better name for the town than Kalamata.
The seat next to his was still empty, so there was no one to disturb as he got to his feet and retrieved his carry-on from the overhead. When he reached the driver, the fellow told him they were just stopping to load and unload passengers. If he wanted a smoke break, he’d best wait until they got to Billings.
“I’m gonna leave you here,” he told the man.
“Thought you was ticketed clear to Spokane.”
“Somebody here I been meaning to see,” he said. “Spokane can wait.”
“Spokane ain’t going nowhere,” the driver agreed. “That all you got, or do I need to open up the luggage?”
He shook his head. “Just this.”
“Like the song.” He must have looked puzzled. “You know. ‘Traveling Light.’”
“Always,” he said.
He hadn’t been counting the blocks, but he figured he couldn’t be more than half a mile from the diner. A straight shot back the way he’d come. The bus hadn’t turned off, just pulled up in front of the station—which happened to house a lunch counter of its own. He thought about stopping for something, maybe a grilled cheese sandwich, maybe a side of fries. But what kind of fool has a meal on his way to a restaurant?
Kalamata. Could be a Japanese tourist trying to say calamity. He thought of Calamity Jane, who’d hung out a ways east of here, in Deadwood, if he remembered correctly. Pretty sure it was Deadwood. Although it could be that she’d gotten around some.
His watch said 3:18, but maybe it was an hour earlier, maybe they’d crossed into a different time zone. So it was a little after three or a little after two, which amounted to the same thing in restaurant time. Past lunch and a ways to go until dinner, which made it downtime, which was how he wanted it.
One foot in front of the other, and maybe it was a little more than half a mile, but it had to be there, and sure enough it was. Kalamata, all in neon. And the hand-lettered sign, black block caps on a sheet of ruled paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook. EXPERIENCED / FRY COOK / WANTED.
He opened the door, walked in. Booths, tables, a counter along the wall on the right. Checkerboard tiles on the floor. Formica counter and tabletops. Pennants on the wall—Cross Creek High, Montana State University. Two women sat over coffee at a booth in the back, smoke from their cigarettes drifting toward the ceiling. He’d smelled smoke in the air right away, against an overlay of cooking smells.
Pretty typical, really.
The Fry-Cook sign was fastened to the inside of the door with clear tape, and he removed it, tape and all, and carried it to the man planted behind the counter. Stocky, jowly, black hair, thick moustache. Dark eyes that said they’d seen it all.
He handed the sign across the counter. “You can put this away,” he said. “I’m your man.”
The eyebrows went up a half-inch. “Just get to town?”
“Does it show? Oh, this.” He set his bag on a stool. “Just got off the bus.”
“Where you worked?”
“Just about everywhere, one time or another. Some white-table joints, but mostly short-order. I could give you references.”
“What for? Work a counter and a griddle, a man can do it or he can’t. Grab that apron off the hook there, then come on back and make me an omelet.”
“What kind?”
“What kind you like?”
“For myself, I tend to keep it simple. Just cheese.”
“You get a choice. Swiss, cheddar, feta.”
“I like feta on a salad,” he said, “but my first choice for an omelet is Swiss.”
“So make a Swiss cheese omelet. We do three eggs, serve toast with it. White or whole wheat?”
“Whole wheat.”
“And a side of fries.”
“Got it,” he said.
He got to work. He thought: feta cheese in the middle of Montana, and the guy looked like a Greek to begin with, so it wasn’t a Japanese trying to say Calamity Jane, it was some kind of Greek word, and hadn’t he heard it before?
Right.
He put the omelet on a plate, added the fries, set it on the counter. He’d already buttered the two slices of toast and put them on a smaller plate.
“Why give it to me?”
“I thought you might want to taste it, see if it’s okay.”
“No eggs for me, no fried food either. Doctor’s a pain in my ass. No, I don’t need to taste it, I watched you make it, I know what it’s gonna taste like. No, it’s for you. Just off a bus, you gotta be hungry, unless you went and made a mistake and ate at the bus station.”
“I didn’t.”
“Good, ’cause you’d be taking your life in your hands. Sit down, dig in. You want coffee? No, stay there, I’ll get it for you.”
He started eating, and forced himself not to wolf his food. This was breakfast and lunch, his first meal since an early dinner the previous evening, and he always liked his own cooking.
Halfway through, he paused for a moment and said, “Olives.”
“How’s that?”
“Kalamata,” he said. “Rang a bell and I couldn’t think what, but it’s olives,
isn’t it? A fancy kind of olives.”
The man smiled. “Big purple bastards. When I got ’em in stock, we put three in the Greek salad. Otherwise it’s black olives from the Food Barn. It’s not like anybody around here knows the difference. My father named the place, and it’s not for the olives. It’s a city in Greece, and he got the hell out as soon as he could. So you got to wonder why he stuck the name on the restaurant.”
“You’ve never been there.”
“And never will. If I was gonna fly somewhere, well, I wouldn’t mind seeing Paris. But it’d be a miracle if I ever got out of Montana. It’s not bad here, Cross Creek.”
“It seems nice.”
“And that leads to my question, which is, will you stick around a while? Because you know what you’re doing and I could for sure use you, but if you’re just saving up for your next bus ticket, you know, it’s not doing me much good if you take off just about the time you get the hang of how we do it here. You know what I’m saying?”
He nodded. “I’m not planning to go anywhere.”
“All your life, you dreamed of making a home for yourself in Cross Creek, Montana.”
“I never heard of it until I got off the bus,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t have any dreams.”
“No?”
“Maybe once,” he said, “but not in years. What I’ve learned, one place is as good as the next.”
“You know that, you know plenty.”
“I don’t need much. A job where I get to eat my own cooking, a change of clothes, a place to sleep.”
“You didn’t get a room yet.”
“No, not without having a job first.”
“Well, you got a job. I been close to two months now since I let the last guy go. He was okay behind the stick, nothing special, but he missed too many days. And some mornings he came in with the shakes, and you knew right away what was making him miss those days. That a problem of yours?”
“No. But if it was, I’d probably say it wasn’t.”
“Yeah, soon as I asked, I wondered why I bothered. You got a name?”
“Bill,” he said. “Last name’s Thompson.”
“Good solid American name. Mine’s Andy Page.”
“Another solid American name.”
“Well, I can say it’s the name I was born with, but it wasn’t Page until my father got off the boat. You’re hired, Bill. Now let’s figure out hours and money.”
That didn’t take long. They came quickly to terms and shook hands on it.
“So you got a job,” Andy said. “You want another cup of coffee? Piece of pie? The pecan’s real good.”
“Not now, thanks.”
“No, what you want is to get a room and settle in. There’s a hotel a block the other side of the Trailways that’s not too bad. Or there’s a couple of places that rent rooms.”
“I passed a place about two blocks back.”
“Other side of Main? Big yellow house, got a hairdresser on the ground floor? That’s Mrs. Minnick, and if she had a sign in the window, you want to get there before she takes it down. Her place is decent and she keeps it clean, and if you’re a good tenant—”
“I’m a good tenant.”
“Yeah, I expect you are. Tell her you’re my new fry cook. I think you’ll like it there.”
“I think I’ll like it here.”
“Well, I hope you do, Bill. I hope you do. Go ahead, get your room, get settled. Then come in tomorrow morning and you can start cooking some breakfasts.”
There were things Andy had his own way of doing, but it was always like that, and it wasn’t as though Bill Thompson was wedded to his own routine. He got the hang of it right away, and he remembered things. You didn’t have to tell him twice.
And he was as much at home behind the counter as he was on the grill, and had a nice easy way with the customers. Not too easy, because an excess of familiarity could put people off. Especially the women, and Kalamata was a place where a woman by herself was comfortable sitting at the counter, and some of them liked to be flirted with and some didn’t, and you needed to be able to size them up and read the signals they gave off. You didn’t hit on them, that wasn’t part of the deal under any circumstances, but some would think you were standoffish if you didn’t flirt a little, and others would think you were overstepping boundaries if you did, and it wasn’t a logic problem, you couldn’t sit down and work it out with pencil and paper. You needed the right instincts, and he had them.
His room at Gerda Minnick’s was as nice as any he could recall. Some years back he’d had a house of his own, a living room and kitchen in front, two bedrooms in back, on an eighth of an acre on the edge of town, and what town was it? He could picture the house, he could have drawn the floor plan, but he had to think to come up with Fort Smith, Arkansas. Little scrubby lawn, little spindly birch tree in the middle of it, and the bank that foreclosed on the house had been happy to rent it to him for less than he generally had to pay for a furnished room. The agent told him how the lease included an option to buy the property at the end of the year, and explained how it would be to his advantage to do so, and he considered it off and on. It was okay, it had to be a step up to have a whole house all to yourself, but the construction cut all the corners and the basement was damp, and what did a fry cook want with a home kitchen?
Moot point, as he’d left the city and the state with five months left to go on his lease.
At Mrs. Minnick’s he had two flights of carpeted stairs to climb, and he shared the bathroom down the hall with another tenant, but the room itself was large and well proportioned, and the furniture was sound and serviceable, and there were windows looking north and west.
There were rules. There was a TV in the parlor, but if he wanted to bring in a set of his own, he’d have to shut it off, or at least mute it, between the hours of eleven in the evening and 7:30 in the morning. No radio playing during those hours, either, and no loud music any time of the day or night. No running the shower between midnight and six. No guests, same sex or opposite, in the rooms. No smoking anywhere in the house. Spirits were not prohibited, but drunkenness was.
That was all fine with him.
She quoted him a price. “Or you could pay by the month for four times the weekly rate. That’ll save you a few dollars every month, except in February it won’t save you a nickel.”
Was he supposed to laugh? He couldn’t tell, she delivered the line in the same toneless tone that she’d used to tell him when he could and couldn’t take a shower. He thought of saying something about Leap Year and decided against it.
There was a week of April left. He handed over a week’s rent, said he might switch to a monthly basis on the first of May.
He unpacked his bag, put his clothes in the dresser drawers. There was a lace doily on top of the dresser, positioned to cover the scar where someone’s forbidden cigarette had burned itself out.
The only surprise to come out of his bag was his drinking glass, a cylindrical tumbler with six marks along the side to indicate volume from one to six ounces. He couldn’t say when it had come into his possession. He hadn’t bought it and he rather doubted anyone had, not as a drinking glass, because he thought it had started life as a jelly glass; whoever had used the last of the jelly had evidently decided the container was too useful to discard. And he’d evidently made much the same decision himself, finding room for it when he’d hastened to stuff a few things into his bag.
He put the glass on the doily, then sat at the window until the sky began to darken. He walked down the hall, towel and dopp kit in hand, showered, shaved, made sure to leave the tub and the sink as spotless as he’d found them. He returned to his room, found a place for his shaving gear, propped his toothbrush in the six-ounce drinking glass, hung the towel Mrs. Minnick provided on the bar where he’d found it, and picked out a T-shirt to sleep in.
When he’d filled his suitcase that morning, he’d fastened a money belt around his waist, underneath his clothes. He�
�d taken it off to shower, put it on again after he’d dried off. It held all his cash, except for a couple of hundred dollars in his wallet. Where to stash it? He looked around, decided it could wait until morning.
He got in bed, arranged the pillow the way he liked it. Closed his eyes, felt sleep moving in on him, took just the briefest moment to think about where he was. He’d done this before, he thought, and he could do it again. Hell, he was doing it again.
His life in Cross Creek became a life of regular habits. Six days a week, he worked a full shift at the diner, and the hardest part was figuring out what to do with himself on his days off. If the weather was good he might go for a long walk, might take in a movie. On rainy days there was no reason to leave the house, and barely reason to leave his room.
Once, maybe twice a week, after his shift at Kalamata was done, he’d stop in the downstairs sitting room and pass an hour in front of the television set. The two top-floor tenants were almost always there, one an elderly man who wore plaid shirts and got them buttoned wrong more often than not, the other a retired schoolteacher who always had a book with her to read during the commercials. Mrs. Minnick watched two shows every evening, the network news and Jeopardy!, and disappeared for the night after the Final Jeopardy segment.
The tenant on his floor, whom he’d barely laid eyes on, never appeared in the TV room. She was morbidly obese and used two canes when she made her way to the bathroom and back. As far as he could tell, that was the only time she ever left her room.
He didn’t need much in the way of diversion. The diner kept him busy from seven in the morning to seven at night. That was a long work week, but it wasn’t all work, with fallow stretches between breakfast and lunch and again from mid-afternoon until five. And the work was work he was good at, work he enjoyed.
Anything he wanted to eat, he cooked it and ate it. Nothing wrong with that.
He stayed week-to-week at Mrs. Minnick’s through May. On the last Thursday in the month, he finished his shift, walked home, and continued past his rooming house and down to the next block, where the sign was a braided rope coiled to spell out The Stockman. He went in, took in the familiar smell of a tavern, and walked up to the bar. He ordered a glass of beer and drank it, then looked over the bourbons and bought a pint of Old Crow. The bartender took his money and handed him the bottle in a brown paper sack.
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