The Hotel Eden(18)

Ruckelbar went upstairs and knocked at his wife’s door and then, surprising himself, went into the dark room. She was in bed and he sat beside her, but could do no more. He knew she was awake and he willed himself to put his arm around her, but he could not, pulling his fists up instead to his face and smelling in his knuckles all the scents of Bluestone.

IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON, a Chevy Two convertible pulls in to the gas pumps. At first Ruckelbar thinks it is two nuns, but when the two women get out laughing in their full black dresses, he sees they are gotten up as witches. One puts her tall black hat on and pulls a broom from the backseat ready to mug for any passing cars. Ruckelbar steps over. The bareheaded witch is switching on the pump. “Let me get that for you,” he offers. “You’ll smell like gasoline at your party.”

“Great,” the girl says. They are both about his daughter’s age. “What are you going to be?” she asks him.

“This is it,” Ruckelbar says, indicating his gray overall.

“Okay,” the other witch says, “so what are you, the Prisoner of Bluestone?” They laugh and Ruckelbar has to laugh there in the sunshine. Girls. His daughter would not believe that he laughed with these girls; there’d be no way to explain it to her. The valve clicks off and he replaces the nozzle. As he does, the broom witch takes it from him and holds it as if to gas the broom.

“This, get this,” she says. “Let’s get out your camera, Paul.” She’s read his name in the patch. The other witch has grabbed her broom now and poses with her friend. Hearing his name and their laughter elates him and without hesitation, as if he’d planned it, he ducks into the station and retrieves the Nikon camera. He takes their picture there, two tall witches in the sunshine, and as he does, a passing car honks a salute. One of the witches steps out now seeing the bright blue station as if for the first time and says, “What is this, a movie set? I love it that you actually sell gas.” She throws her broom and hat back into the car. The other girl, the driver, reaches deep into her costume, here and there, to find her money. She has some difficulty. Her hat falls off and Ruckelbar holds it for her, finally exchanging it for the nine dollars she pays him.

“Happy Halloween,” she says, getting into the car. “I like your outfit. I hope they come to let you out someday.”

The other girl has been at the car’s radio and a song that Ruckelbar seems to remember rises around them. As the girls begin to pull away, she calls, “You can use that picture in your advertising!” And she throws him a flamboyant kiss.

All day long the traffic is desultory, five cars an hour pass Bluestone, the sound they make on Route 21 is a sound Ruckelbar knows by heart. He knows the trucks from the cars and he knows the high whine of the school buses. He knows if someone is speeding and he can tell if a car’s intention is to slow and turn in. Just before sunset he hears that sound and a little white Ford Escort coasts into the gravel yard of the station, parking to one side. There is something odd about it and Ruckelbar thinks it is more costumes, two people, one wrapped like the Mummy, but then he sees it is a rental, and when the man and the woman get out and the man has the head bandage, he knows it is the owners of the Dodge van come to get whatever they’d left inside. People come the week after an accident and get their stuff. He stands and waves at the young people and then goes to unlock the chainlink gate, trying not to look at the man’s head, which is swollen crazily over the unbandaged eye.

The woman strides directly for the van as Ruckelbar says, “Take your time, I don’t close until six. No rush.”

The woman calls from where she’s slid open the side door of the van, “Bring the basket, Jerry. It’s in the back.”

So now it’s Ruckelbar bending into the little Ford and extracting a huge plastic laundry basket because the man Jerry says he’s not supposed to bend over until the swelling subsides in a week. “I have to sleep sitting up.” Jerry’s about thirty, his skull absolutely out of whack, a wrong-way oval, the skin on his exposed forehead about to split, shiny and yellow. Ruckelbar can smell the varnish of liquor on his breath. When he pulls the basket from the small backseat to hand it to Jerry, the young man has already wandered out back.

Ruckelbar takes the basket around to the open side of the van and offers it there, but the woman is on her knees on the middle seat bent into the far back, trying to untangle the straps of a collapsed child seat. Her cotton shift is drawn up so that her bare thighs are visible to him. Her underpants are a shiny satin blue and the configuration of her white thighs and the way they meet in the blue fabric seem a disembodied mystery to Ruckelbar. Ruckelbar looks away and steps back onto the moist yellow grid of grass where the Saab sat for eight weeks. He can hear the woman now, a soft sucking, and he knows she is weeping. He sets the basket there in the twilight and he walks back to the office. He is lit and shaken; he feels as he did when the witch said his name. On his way he hears Jerry break the mirror assembly from the van door and he turns to watch the young man throw it into the woods and then spin to the ground and grab his head.