The Hotel Eden(15)
“I remember,” he said. “My memory is aces.”
“Tell me, Keith,” she said. “What are these people thinking? Make something up.”
“No need. They’ve got it right. That’s why we came out here. They think we’re saying goodbye.”
SIMPLY PUT, THAT was the last time Barbara Anderson saw Keith Zetterstrom. That fall when she arrived in Providence for her freshman year at Brown, there was one package waiting for her, a large trophy topped by a girl on a motorcycle. She had seen it before. She kept it in her dorm window, where it was visible four stories from the ground, and she told her roommates that it meant a lot to her, that it represented a lot of fun and hard work but her goal had been to win the Widowmaker Hill Climb, and once she had done that, she sold her bikes and gave up her motorcycles forever.
THE PRISONER OF BLUESTONE
THERE WAS A camera. Mr. Ruckelbar was helping load the crushed sedan onto DiPaulo’s tow truck when an old Nikon camera fell from the gashed trunk well and hit him on the shoulder. At first he thought it was a rock or a taillight assembly; things had fallen on him before as he and DiPaulo had wrestled the ruined vehicles onto the tiltbed of DiPaulo’s big custom Ford, and of course DiPaulo wasn’t there to be hit. He had a bad back and was in the cab working the hydraulics and calling, “Good? Are we good yet?”
“Whoa, that’s enough!” he called. Now Ruckelbar would have to clamber up and set the chains. DiPaulo, he thought, the wrecker with the bad back.
It was a thick gray twilight in the last week of October, chilly now with the sun gone. This vehicle had been out back for too long. The end of summer was always bad. After the Labor Day weekend, he always took in a couple cars. He stored them out in a fenced lot behind his Sunoco station, getting twenty dollars a week until the insurance paperwork was completed, all of them the same really, totaled and sold to DiPaulo, who took them out to Junk World, his four acres of damaged vehicles near Torrington. Ruckelbar was glad to see this silver Saab go. It had been weird having the kid almost every afternoon since it had arrived, sitting out in the crushed thing full of leaves and beads of glass, just sitting there until dark sometimes, then walking back toward town along the two-lane without a proper jacket, some boy, the brother he said he was, some kid you didn’t need sitting in a totaled Saab, some skinny kid maybe fourteen years old.
Ruckelbar cinched the final chain hitch and climbed down. “What’d you get?” It was DiPaulo. The small old man had limped back in the new dark and had picked the camera up. “This has got to be worth something.”
“It’s that kid’s. It was his sister’s car.”
DiPaulo handed him back the camera. “That kid. That kid doesn’t need to see this. I’d chuck it in the river before I let him see it. He’s nutty enough.” DiPaulo shook his head. “What’s he going to do when he sees the car is finally gone?”
“Lord knows,” Ruckelbar said. “Maybe he’ll find someplace else to go.”
“Well, that car’s been here a long time, summer’s over, and that camera,” DiPaulo poked it with one of his short stained fingers, “is long gone to everybody. Let you leave the sleeping dogs asleep. Just put it in a drawer. You listen to your old pal. Your father would.” DiPaulo took Ruckelbar’s shoulder in his hand for a second. “See you. I’ll be back Wednesday for that van. You take care.” The little old man turned one more time and pointed at Ruckelbar. “And for god’s sakes, don’t tell that kid where this car is going.”
DiPaulo had known Ruckelbar’s father, “for a thousand years before you came along,” he’d say, and Ruckelbar could remember DiPaulo saying “Leave sleeping dogs asleep” throughout the years in friendly arguments every time there was some sort of cash windfall. The elder Ruckelbar would smile and say that DiPaulo should have been a tax attorney.
After DiPaulo left, Ruckelbar rolled the wooden desk chair back inside the office of the Sunoco station and locked up. The building was a local landmark really, such an old little stone edifice painted blue, sitting all alone out on Route 21, where the woods had grown up around it and made it appear a hut in a fairy tale, with two gas pumps. The Bluestone everyone called it, and it was used to mark the quarry turnoff; “four miles past the Bluestone.” It certainly marked Ruckelbar’s life, was his life. He had met Clare at a community bonfire at the Quarry Meadows when she was still a student at Woodbine Prep, and above there at the Upper Quarry, remote and private, one night a year later she had helped him undo both of them in his father’s truck and urgently had begun a sex life that wouldn’t last five years.