Resume Speed, Page 3

  “What?”

  “Exactly the same thing! They looked to be having the time of their lives, and they were just as miserable as the rest of us.”

  The room was nicely appointed, with a high ceiling and plenty of room between the tables. Framed landscapes on the walls, suspended from the crown molding. But he felt they dished out better food at Andy’s diner.

  He wouldn’t have said so, but she made the observation herself as they walked from the restaurant to the movie house. “They use fresh ingredients,” he said, “and the presentation’s nice. And it goes without saying that they’re miles ahead in atmosphere. But whoever’s doing the cooking has a few things to learn and a couple more to forget.”

  “Would you like to work in a place like that?”

  “I’ve had a stint or two in fancier places. You know, upscale big-city joints with a whole crew in the kitchen. I was way down in the pecking order, but even if I’d been higher up, I don’t think I would have liked it. I’m happier behind the counter in a place like Kalamata, where nobody’s likely to send back the wine because they don’t like the way the cork smells.”

  “You can’t get wine in Andy’s, can you?”

  “There you go,” he said. “They can’t send back what they can’t order in the first place.”

  It was a weeknight, and the little theater was two-thirds empty. The film starred Jeff Bridges as a country singer who’d seen better days. There was a woman who thought she could save him, and he sat in his seat and saw himself and Carlene up there, playing out their parts.

  Twenty minutes in, he reached over and took her hand.

  He was still holding it when they rolled the final credits.

  Outside, the air didn’t feel like Montana. More like the Gulf Coast, humid and sultry. They walked toward her car, commented on the film they’d just seen, then fell silent. When they got to her car, she turned to him and sighed and let her shoulders drop.

  He said, “Before you drop me off, I’d love to see your house.”

  She turned, opened the door, got behind the wheel. Her house was on the edge of town, and neither of them spoke on the way there. She parked in the driveway, led him to the front door, unlocked it with a key.

  Inside, he waited to embrace her until she’d closed the door. They stood kissing for a long time, and then she said, “Oh, Jesus God,” and took hold of his hand and led him to the bedroom at the rear of the house.

  The double bed was made, with floral sheets and a tufted white bedspread. She drew the spread down, let it fall to the floor. Then she looked at him, her face slightly flushed, and took a breath, and pulled her dress over her head. She gave a moment to look at her, then stepped forward and turned so that he could unhook her bra.

  When she’d dozed off, he slipped out of the bed and got dressed. He had a hand on the doorknob when she said, “Wait.”

  “I’d better get on home,” he said.

  “You’ll need a ride.”

  He said he didn’t mind the walk. It would take him half an hour, she said, maybe more. And did he even know the route? She started to get up, but he put a hand on her shoulder and stopped her.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Get some sleep. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

  He hadn’t been paying close attention on the ride to her house, but there weren’t many turns and he’d always had a good sense of direction. He followed his instincts for ten or fifteen minutes, then came to a street he knew and had no trouble covering the remaining mile or so to Mrs. Minnick’s house.

  Spent the time recalling the warmth, the sweetness, the passion, the memories providing good company on the walk through the summer air, the sultry summer air.

  The thought came to him that he could stay right here forever. And he wondered what he meant by that. Stay where? On these streets, walking back to his rooming house? In this town? With this woman?

  Upstairs, in his bed, he wondered how long it would take to stuff everything he owned in the world into his carry-on. He’d bought a couple of things since he got off the Trailways coach. Would everything fit?

  Funny thought to be thinking at a time when he’d never felt so good. Everything you ever wanted, he thought. And was there anything on earth as dangerous as getting everything you ever wanted?

  As soon as the breakfast rush died down, he called her at the library. It was a brief conversation, but it served to make it clear that neither of them regretted the previous night, and both looked forward to more of the same. He suggested dinner on the following night, and she said she’d pick him up.

  He was waiting out front, and got in beside her when she braked to a stop. She asked where he’d like to go for dinner, and something stopped him from answering, and there was a moment when the silence stretched. But it was not an awkward silence.

  At length she said, “Are you hungry?”

  “Not really.”

  She waited for him to fasten his seat belt, then pulled away from the curb. Neither of them said anything for two or three blocks, and then what she said was, “The only thing I’m hungry for right now is your cock.”

  She was looking straight ahead when she said it, and she went on looking straight ahead, her eyes on the road, both hands on the wheel.

  He reached to cover one of her hands with his.

  “I said that out loud, didn’t I?”

  “Either that or I’ve started hearing things.”

  “It’s not like me,” she said, “to talk like that.”

  “Well, I’m no expert, but it seemed like a perfectly good sentence to me. Grammatically correct and all.”

  “‘She was a slut, Your Honor, but she spoke proper English.’ But, you know, it’s the truth.”

  “That may be,” he said. “Later on, though, you’ll probably feel like a sandwich.”

  Her laughter was sudden, and rich. “Oh, that was just the right thing for you to say, Bill. It really and truly was. Bill?”

  “What?”

  “It’s okay for me to be me, isn’t it?”

  In bed the novelty hadn’t worn off but the anxiety was gone, and he found her a bold and eager lover, giving and taking pleasure with gusto. Afterward, as he’d predicted, her appetite for food returned. She told him to stay where he was, and he closed his eyes for a moment and drifted off, waking up when she came back with two plates of scrambled egg and link sausages and bacon.

  “Breakfast served at all hours,” she announced. “Not as good as what you dish up every morning, I don’t suppose.”

  He assured her the meal had nothing to apologize for.

  They went back to bed, back to each other, and they talked idly while they pleasured one another. It had been such a long time, she told him, and he said it had been a long time for him, too. He answered her unspoken question by saying he hadn’t been with anybody since he’d arrived in Montana.

  “God, the responsibility,” she said. “Representing my state. You know the motto?”

  He didn’t.

  “‘Oro y plata.’ Isn’t that wonderful? ‘Gold and silver.’ Well, that’s what prompted them to settle the place, but still. It strikes me as pretty crass when the best thing you can think of to say about your state is what you can dig out of it. Bill? Am I any good at it?”

  “Good at—”

  “You know. I hardly did anything before I got married. And, you know, it wasn’t much of a marriage.”

  After it ended, she told him, there’d been nothing for a while, and then a brief affair with a married man. She’d actually liked that he was married, because it limited their meetings to brief encounters once or twice a week, which was all she wanted from him. But he never got over feeling guilty about their affair, and when he told her one time too many that what they were doing was wrong, she agreed with him and told him they ought to end it.

  “He was shocked,” she said, “although he tried to hide it. He thought it was my job to ease his conscience. But I think he was probably relieved when it was ov
er. I know I was.”

  Then there had been a salesman from Eugene, Oregon, who’d passed through, selling software to libraries. He took her to dinner and to bed, and she had a reasonably good time but never expected to see him again.

  Nor did she, but a month or so later another fellow walked into the library and stopped at her desk. Not to sell software, or anything else, but to say Ed Carmichael had said he should stop by and give her his regards. She said that was nice, and he said it looked as though he was stuck in Cross Creek overnight, he’d just booked himself a motel room, and was there a decent place to eat in town? Say, someplace where you could get a decent steak? And would she save him from having to dine alone?

  She had dinner with him, and she had a couple of drinks, which she almost never did, and then she went back to his motel with him. Afterward he was enough of a gentleman to throw his clothes on and drive her back to the library, where she’d left her car. She drove home and spent more than the usual amount of time under the shower. She didn’t feel dirty, not exactly, but she didn’t feel entirely clean, either.

  One week later somebody called her at the library. He was a friend of Ed’s, or maybe he was a friend of Ed’s friend, whose name she’d managed to forget. And he was in town, and Ed or Ed’s friend had been talking about this fabulous steak dinner he’d had, but nobody could remember the name of the restaurant, and he wondered if maybe she was free that evening and—

  “And I don’t know what got into me, but what I said was his friend gave me the world’s worst dose of gonorrhea, and if he really wanted, I’d be more than happy to pass it on to him. And I’ll never know what he would have said to that because I hung up on him.”

  “He’s probably still trying to come up with a good line.”

  “All I knew,” she said, “was I didn’t want to be that girl. The one you call if you find yourself stuck in Cross Creek, Montana, and you buy her a steak and a couple of drinks, and you’re home free. There may not be anything wrong with that girl, and she’s probably having as good a time as the girl next door who collects Hummel figurines or the one down the block who rescues cats, but all the same, I just knew she wasn’t what I wanted to be.”

  “And here I am,” he said, “stuck in Cross Creek, Montana.”

  “Here you are,” she agreed, and laid a hand on him, as if to make sure of his presence. “First time I saw you, I thought, well, he’ll wind up with the waitress.”

  “Who, Helen? I don’t think—”

  Helen was an aunt of Andy’s who’d started waiting tables for something to do after her husband died. Carlene rolled her eyes, said, “I was thinking of the other one.”

  “I figured you meant Francie. Not my type, and you’re just asking for trouble if you start up with a waitress.”

  “I think you’re right. You’re much better off with a librarian.”

  Besides, Francie was taken. He’d stood behind enough counters to know when a waitress was sleeping with the boss, and the first time he saw Andy and Francie make a point of not looking at each other, he’d put two and two together. He never said anything, or let on that he knew anything, and one night after he’d been at Kalamata a few months, it was just him and Andy putting the diner to bed for the evening, and Andy felt like talking.

  He almost said something now, to Carlene. Decided not to.

  End of the week, Andy had an unusual expression on his face when he handed him his pay envelope. Not quite a smile, but close to it. He raised his own eyebrows, and Andy’s smile widened.

  “Better check it,” he said. “Felt a little heavy to me.”

  He counted, and it was heavier by twenty-five dollars. He’d got a raise earlier, around the same time he started paying his rent by the month, and Andy had explained it as a sign of appreciation. It was, he assured him, no more than he deserved.

  And now another raise. “Very generous,” he told his boss. “Thank you.”

  “You’ve been good for the place, Bill. The goulash was your idea and your recipe. You rang it in as a daily special, and within a week we were getting requests for it, and now it’s on the daily menu. People like it, and I can understand why.”

  “It’s better now that we’ve got the right paprika.”

  “Maybe so, but there was nothing wrong with it in the first place. And the rhubarb pie. Not just thinking of it, but charming Mrs. Parkhill into trying her hand at it.”

  Hilda Parkhill was a rawboned widow who’d delivered two pies a day to the diner. One was always pecan and the other was usually apple.

  “I just told her how much I missed my mother’s rhubarb pie.”

  “Now she’s selling us two pies one day and three the next, so it’s good for her, and we’re selling more pie than we used to, and you know what else? There’s an interesting thing about the rhubarb pie, and I bet you know what it is.”

  “People usually order it à la mode.”

  “Like, nine times out of ten. And if it doesn’t occur to them, all it takes is a suggestion. ‘You want a scoop of vanilla with that?’ And they always do.”

  “Well, the rhubarb’s tart, and the ice cream sets it off nicely.”

  “It’s good from a food standpoint, and it’s even better from a business standpoint. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did your mother really make rhubarb pie? I didn’t think so. Bill, the raise is for the goulash and the rhubarb pie and all those scoops of vanilla, and if you keep on fattening up the population of Cross Creek, the next thing we’ll do is open up a Weight Watchers chapter. Make money both ways, coming and going.”

  The first time he spent the night at Carlene’s was on a Wednesday. She’d always offer to drive him home, and more often than not he’d choose to walk, but sometimes the weather or his own tiredness would lead him to accept the ride. This time she pointed out that he didn’t have to be anywhere in the morning, so why not stay? He said he’d been thinking that himself.

  He heard her alarm clock but decided to give himself a few more minutes, and fell back asleep. It was almost ten when he woke a second time, and she was long gone. A note on the kitchen table said there was fresh coffee in the pot, and invited him to help himself to breakfast.

  All he wanted was coffee, and he drank two cups of it, sitting at the kitchen table and feeling both at home and out of place. He pictured himself going through the rooms, opening dresser drawers, checking the closets. But he never left the kitchen, and when he’d emptied the coffee pot he took it apart and washed it, washed his cup.

  He started walking home, then changed his mind and walked to the library. It was far enough from her house that she always took her car, and on the way he decided it was time to go ahead and get that Montana driver’s license. He had a good job, he had a girlfriend, it was about time he got himself a car.

  Her face lit up when he entered the library, and he liked that the sight of him could elicit that sort of response. She put a lid on it, greeting him as Mr. Thompson. He neared the desk, and she dropped her voice and said he was sleeping so nicely she couldn’t bear to wake him.

  He moved away to look for a book, then eased over to the computer station. Only one of the four units was taken—a young mother consulting a medical website—and he seated himself diagonally opposite her and hit a few keys. All he knew about the Internet was you used Google and went where it led you, and that’s what he did.

  He Googled “William Jackson” and got a few million hits. He made the search more specific—“William Jackson + Galbraith North Dakota.” The first item that came up told him that Rear Admiral William Jackson Galbraith was born on September 15, 1906, in Knoxville, Tennessee, and he could have read on to find out how North Dakota entered into it, but that was already more than he needed to know about the man.

  This was more complicated than he thought.

  But he pressed on and got the hang of it. The two cities of size near Galbraith were Fargo and Grand Forks, and it was a bus from Fargo that
had brought him from Galbraith to Cross Creek. Galbraith didn’t have a daily paper, but both those cities did, and both papers had subscribers in Galbraith. Both papers had websites, too—for Christ’s sake, even the Cross Creek Public Library had a website—and he checked to see what he could learn from the Grand Forks Herald and the Fargo Forum.

  Not much. You could enter a search, but it wasn’t like going to their offices and looking through back issues of the newspaper.

  He’d figured out the date, the day he got on the bus, and he entered that, and he didn’t really get anywhere. You’d think it would show him the newspaper for that day, but it didn’t, and what it did show him was about as useful to him as the fact that Admiral W. J. Galbraith was born in 1906 in wherever it was. Nashville? No, Knoxville, and wasn’t his life richer for knowing that?

  It would be easier if he knew what the hell he was doing. But he had to figure it out for himself, because it wasn’t something someone could help him with. I want to know if anybody was murdered in Galbraith, North Dakota, on the 24th of April. I want to know if they know who did it, and if it’s a guy named Jackson.

  No, better not.

  ‘North Dakota Murders.’

  That was better, better still when he added the year to the search term.

  He scrolled through the entries, clicked on some and scanned them quickly, then returned to the list. Nothing in Galbraith, nothing about a man named William Jackson.

  He thought about his last morning in Galbraith. Waking up suddenly, flung abruptly into consciousness. Sprawled facedown on his bed, still wearing all his clothes, even his shoes.

  His shirt torn, ragged at the cuffs.

  Scratches on his hands.

  And ten or twelve hours gone. Some of them would have been passed in sleep, or whatever you wanted to call the unconscious state he’d been in. But the last thing he remembered—

  The last thing was walking into a bar. He’d already been to two bars. First to Kelsey’s, where he dropped in for a drink more days than not, and then to Blue Dog, where he went now and then, when Kelsey’s failed to take the edge off. During all his time in Galbraith, he’d made no more than four or five visits to Blue Dog, and he’d never made it out of there without having a drink too many. Once he’d been asked to leave, but whatever he’d done couldn’t have been too bad, because he’d been welcome enough on his next visit.