In Springdale Town (4 page)

10

At the train station I returned the rental car, but somewhere between the rental company and the ticket machine I decided to extend my stay. I guess I was feeling sentimental about the place, especially with Caroline away. It had rained, and the morning sky was lemony and wrinkled, which I took as a sign. The train station was a block off Main, behind the town hall. Scooter and a tall policewoman were escorting some guy in as I passed. I went to the bed and breakfast and booked a room for one night, staying there just long enough to drop my bag on the bed and arrange my glasses and contact lens stuff by the sink. Back out on the street, I stood watching passersby. Mist floated on the hills behind town. I had always admired the houses up there, with their sweeping views. I liked height, liked the way this town sat in its nest of hills, with the river cutting through the middle. Maybe I would walk up that way later, after breakfast, if it didn’t start raining again.

The little café off Main was crowded, but I saw a spot at the end of the counter. As I passed these two old birds at a booth one of them glared at me. No idea who she was. There was a someone sitting on the stool next to the last free spot, and as I sat I recognized smiley woman from the wedding. She nodded a hello. I smiled, not wanting to seem rude, but seeing someone who maybe knew me, or at least knew Caroline, wasn’t the way I had intended to start this day.

The waitress came to take the woman’s order, then stared at me. “Weren’t you just here?” she asked. I said no. She gave me a funny look and handed me smiley woman’s menu.

“The pancakes here are great,” smiley woman said.

“Thanks.” I looked at the menu, then at her. She had one of those haircuts that showed off the neck, and she had a great neck. I tried to remember if I had ever met her.

“I saw you at the wedding,” she said, a flat statement implying that her noticing me signified nothing special. “I guess you haven’t been back here since the crap with Caroline.”

“Hmmm,” I said. This place...just couldn’t escape things smelling of Caroline. At least Brisbane wasn’t here too. Smiley woman–she hadn’t been Caroline’s friend back when I lived here.

“I’ve never liked her much,” she said.

Enough with all these people knowing my past. What was I thinking, staying another day? Endless prosecutorial miasmas shook me, tendrils popping and sticking like unwanted household knickknacks, objects discarded for the associations they held–the clay figurine with the twisted face, bought on a brief trip to Mexico with Caroline the summer before I entered law school, the shirts, many shirts, bought at her insistence, an attempt to remake my image into something fashionable. I had saved one thing as a reminder, not liking the idea of jettisoning my entire past, acknowledging that it existed, deserved to exist, even the unpleasantness. So I kept the footed bowl, set it on the desk in my office, where it stood holding wrapped peppermints (because Caroline hated peppermints).

“We met at a party.” The woman’s voice broke through my reverie, and I turned my face toward her. “Don’t remember whose party,” she said. “You were there alone. Caroline was off somewhere, doing something. Maybe you came with Michael and Deirdre. We somehow got into a discussion about fountain pens.”

A notebook lay on the counter near her plate, and beside it a fountain pen with a dark, enamel barrel streaked with green. Seeing the pen, I made the connection. “Right–Sammy Hidalgo.” My Uncle Omar repaired fountain pens. As a child, he used to let me play with worn out nibs and other parts on his worktable. When I graduated from high school, he gave me an antique Parker.
{note 10}

I told her that I had read one of her novels after I moved away. She said she had finished a first draft of a new story early this morning and had gone to breakfast to celebrate. We chatted for a time, reminiscing about safe subjects from my years in Springdale, until her food came. Her three pancakes were spread on the plate, overlapping. She stacked them evenly and began cutting, first in half, then fourths, then eighths. The waitress brought my coffee, and I ordered pancakes too. The coffee here was good, some kind of organic shade-grown. There had been other ownership when I lived here, and I preferred this new version. I don’t know when this up-scaling–The Change (as I called it)–had occurred or why, but it was nationwide. I liked it. Sure, there’s an air of pretension involved sometimes, but overall, the good coffee, microbrew beer, fusion cuisine, beats the crap out of blandness.

“I’m not one of these delicate women who can only order a salad,” Sammy said as she pushed a forkful of pancakes around the amber pool of syrup. “I was in L.A. last month, having dinner with some friends in a Thai restaurant, and all around me were these pretty little women with tans and tight asses, and I started speculating on how many salads are served per day out there. Greengrocer’s wet dream.”

“Is the total salad consumption in Los Angeles greater than the rest of the country combined?” I asked.

“It’s a fight between New York and Los Angeles. The winner is awarded a bronze sculpture of iceberg lettuce to display in city hall. The rest of the country is irrelevant.”
{note 11}

My pancakes arrived and I drizzled maple syrup over them. Her talk of salad-eating made me self-conscious about it–I didn’t want to use so much syrup that she thought I was horsely, or so little that she sneered. Though why did I care? I didn’t have to impress anyone in this damn town.

Sammy gave me an incomprehensible look (and I could usually interpret facial expressions–had to for my lawyering).

“High fructose corn syrup,” she said. “That’s the other thing that sends me on a rant. We’re given these competing and contradictory models to follow. Processed high fat corn syrup food is pushed at us all our lives, but at the same time we’re bombarded with images of skinny asses and sculpted bodies.” She waved her fork at me, and a ribbon of syrup slid toward her fingers.

“If I followed the model that women are given, I would need to apologize to you for my eating pancakes and tell you I’ll have to spend all afternoon at the gym to work it off. Well fuck that.”

~

After finishing our food, we remained at the counter. The place had cleared out, and neither of us appeared to be in a rush. I tried to remember what, if anything, I had heard about Sammy. Besides her jacket copy. When I changed plans at the train station, I had been thinking how important it would be to spend some solitary time in the town, sorting out my memories of Springdale, which as the weekend progressed had slowly shed its malevolence. Sitting here with Sammy helped, though I still needed to be alone.

“Dee and Michael must be on their way to Barcelona by now,” she said. I left some money on the counter and stood. She left with me. “What are your plans for the day then?” she asked. “Now that you’ve decided to be brave and stay a little longer in this terrible place.” She smiled when she said that, an open, cheery expression that I found touching.

“Nice out now,” I said, looking at where the sun burned through a few remaining skins of cloud. “If it had stayed rainy I would have probably caught the next train out. Maybe I’ll take a taxi to the Josephine Rodgers House
{note 12}
and see the gardens. It was great talking to you.” I extended a hand to shake, and she gripped it with both of hers.

“Why not let me show you what’s new around here since you left?”

Despite my desire for solitude, I found myself unwilling to cleave myself from her company.

“I know a place Caroline never would have taken you.”

11

When had Shelling last eaten? His stomach was a shrunken, leathery thing. He found himself in a narrow room facing two square windows set high, near the ceiling. No furniture but the wooden chair on which he sat, cushioned by a piece of folded burlap. A vent on the wall behind him blew air across the top of his head. Spiders had crafted nests in all the corners. From the windows, the entering light radiated a pinkish glow.

Lethargy gripped him. Shouldn’t he demand to see a lawyer? He had acted in cop and lawyer shows–you can’t shut someone up like this. Must be something in the atmosphere that kept him from fighting, the white air of the narrow room. The vent stopped blowing. At first, the quiet pleased him. Each molecule of silence emerged, one after another. He pictured them waltzing in loose swirls of air, forming patterns more intricate than snowflakes. Untouchable they swam, free of the clinging spiderwebs.

But after a time, Shelling grew tired of observing the dancing silence. He found himself longing to hear Mozart, a piano sonata to fill the empty spaces.

Now restless, he rose and paced the room, measuring it with his steps: seven steps wide and twenty-eight deep. Did it mean something that the room’s depth was divisible by its width? He stopped in a corner to examine the spider webs, whorls of filament rising from floor to ceiling. When he had moved into his farmhouse, he found it full of webs–in corners, doorways, along the base of the kitchen cabinets–and he eradicated all as he encountered them. These, he left undisturbed, for they gave him something to observe besides the white walls and the door, a slab of heavy metal with no knob.

Lost in his examination of the webs, Shelling needed several repetitions of a hollow clanging thump to register the sound. Suddenly filled with nervous energy, he rushed back to his chair, turned it to face the door and sat, trying to calm his heartbeat. Another clang, then a scraping sound from a mechanism inside the door, and it swung outward. A man in a dark blue uniform came into view outside the door. The top of the jamb obscured his face, and he had to dip his head and turn sideways to enter.

The man straightened. He had a russet potato of a face, and a dark blue helmet hung low over his forehead. “Come on now,” he said in a rumbly voice. Though obviously some sort of policeman or jailer, he wore no visible gun.

“Where am I? What do you want from me? I won’t be–” The policeman-jailer’s unresponsiveness stifled Shelling’s protests, and he decided to stay in the chair–would not go anywhere until the man answered.

Once, in fifth or sixth grade, Shelling’s teacher had tried to send him to the principal’s office, but he had refused to go. Despite her command, he remained at his desk, and when she tried to pull him away, he had gripped its sides so firmly she couldn’t dislodge him.

“C’mon, no funny stuff,” the jailer said. He moved behind Shelling’s chair and tipped it forward, forcing Shelling to stand. The jailer was huge, well over a foot taller than Shelling–so large that Shelling couldn’t see all of him without stepping back. He flattened against the wall, facing his jailer. He couldn’t fight, not this...human monolith. The jailer motioned for Shelling to precede him. They entered a narrow hall filled with a reddish light; twenty feet or so farther they reached another metal door, which swung open.

“Right turn,” the jailer said.

This new passage ran straight, with the same red light and a worn, asbestos tile floor. Shelling tried to estimate the corridor’s length, but the featureless passage numbed him. No other doors appeared, and they continued without pause. From behind, he could sense the bulk of his escort, and he labored to remain ahead of the man’s heavy stride. The jailer’s breathing echoed from the walls and ceiling, a living, writhing sound that encircled them as they walked, formed a path for them through the center of the hall.

Disconnected thoughts and observations flooded Shelling’s mind. No other doors here, no rooms. Lost. Subterranean passage...ending where? This man, this jailer, his steps, his stride deliberate, each identical to the ones preceding...giant robot man...maybe only the one speed. Run? Can’t run. Viscous atmosphere pressed, like the oatmeal in the movie theater. He longed to be back in his farmhouse bed. This passage bore through the heart of the planet. The walls closed over him, suffocating, so heavy with the weight of earth overhead, all the cities rivers mountains....

~

Gasping, Shelling stopped, unable to take another step along the limitless path. Behind him, the jailer also stopped. The man’s broad hands pushed against Shelling’s back, and he cried out as he tumbled forward. Rough stalks pressed against his face. He heard a door clang shut, but when he sat up, he found himself alone in a cornfield.

12

“You ever have flying dreams?” Sammy asked. She pointed to the east, where a wave of passing rain clouds hung. “I become lost in the clouds every time. Can’t tell up, down, whatever.”

“So where are we headed first then?” I asked, though I was thinking of telling her I had changed my mind again.

“I grew up around here,” she said. “I was gone a while, Waterloo College in Austin, stayed there several years after graduating. I got my first book published when I was in Austin. I guess I didn’t want to come back here till I had some success. It’s the kind of town that draws people back.” She smiled. “So you better be careful.”

I followed her into an alley between the rug shop and the Japanese restaurant. I had never noticed the alley before, but figured that it led through to the next street, the train station, fire house, movie theater. I was feeling kind of detached, and willing to be led. I had begun the day expecting to go home. Changing my mind about that led to meeting Sammy, so allowing her to guide me on an adventure seemed right. My whole point of staying was to face my past, prove–to myself anyway–that a town, this town, couldn’t control me.

“Springdale is a great place,” she said, somehow picking up on my thoughts. “I guess you weren’t allowed to see the best of it though. In a way, it’s two towns. There are the bored would-be socialite types. Like Caroline and her friends. And an artistic and intellectual side, related to the college of course but not only people on faculty. It’s more like an attraction anchored by the college, but extending beyond it.”

“Well, I never saw any of that. Unless you would call Skippy Brisbane an artist. I think she has a computer program that assembles her romance plots.” Sammy laughed and, walking close to me, slipped a hand between my bicep and my side. I asked her if she was working on a new novel. “Not to insult you by following a comment on Brisbane with a question about your writing, of course.”

She laughed again and squeezed my arm, and my whole body tingled. “I’m doing something quasi-historical,” she said. “I’m more after mood than historical accuracy. It’s about Diogenes of Lesbos.”
{note 13}

~

It seemed like we had been going for some time. The walls on either side remained a uniform red brick, but the surface beneath our feet had changed from pavement to hard-packed earth. The alley darkened, and I shivered, though the air didn’t feel any cooler. I looked up. Despite the gloom down here, blue sky filled the space between the buildings, and sunlight reflected off a low cloud, but the light couldn’t seem to reach us. It reminded me of that Magritte painting, the one where the street is dark even though a daytime sky hovers over it.
{note 14}

Maybe twenty yards on, the light increased, but when I looked up again, the sky had vanished, replaced by a domed ceiling painted in abstract shapes of color, shades of red and orange, with black streaks. Somehow, we had entered a vast, circular space, illuminated by recessed lighting. A railing ran around the diameter of the dome at about second-story level.

I stopped. “Hey,” I said. Sammy turned to face me. “Where the fuck are we?”