"In it. There's a room off to the side. Stop in and see the librarian. Maybe she can use you."
"God, Walter, you even have a librarian?"
"Part-time. Let me know how you make out. Now, I don't want to be rude, but I need to get this ignition system straightened out or this here sucker ain't gonna start until March. Buy your boots. Go explore."
"I don't have a map."
Walter laughed. "Only one street—even an Easterner can figure that out."
•••••
Sage actually comprises two parallel streets running east to west: the wide and adequately-paved Hayden Street where the bus had dropped me the evening before, and the narrower (and on this day muddier) Bridger Street to the north. There're actually some connecting streets too, but the locals call them alleys because, well, that's what they are—maybe seven or eight feet wide, looking more like mistakes in city planning than means of access. The east end of Bridger dead-ends in what appears to be a neglected field, though its being well past the growing season, I couldn't tell if it was workable farmland or not. But Hayden was a Parisian boulevard compared to Bridger, which lacked even a boardwalk. If there had been a sign warning of quicksand, I'd have thought it perfectly appropriate. Back in my classroom I used to hype The Jungle by telling my students about the scene where a child runs out into the muddy street, trips, falls, and, in the middle of town(!), drowns in the quagmire. It piqued their interest, but only those who subsequently read the novel believed it could happen. Showing them Bridger Street after a rainstorm would have eliminated a good deal of their skepticism.
Maybe everything looked different when summer parched the landscape to dust or winter locked it down; but in mud season—and there would have to be one when the Absaroka glaciers succumbed to the spring sunshine and started releasing water into the valleys below—Bridger Street must simply have been off limits.
And yet people lived there. On one side stood a group of forlorn but not deserted residences. I saw deep-lugged tire tracks in a few of the driveways and some smoke curling out of one of the aluminum stacks. On the more barren north side, one immense structure predominated. It might have been a factory at one time, though now its façade was crumbling and the erstwhile windows—at least fifty on each of its two stories—were glassless and gaping. It looked like London after the blitz—a wartime casualty of a well-aimed rocket that hadn't quite knocked it down, but should have. Like most such buildings it had a depressing quality to it—not just abandoned, but forgotten. Back in New England someone with resources would buy up an eyesore like this, renovate it, then open it as a brew-pub, a performance-art coffee house, a trendy restaurant, or some other pop culture attraction with apartments on the second floor. Here in Sage, it wasn't going to open as anything, just continue to disappear brick by brick and shard by shard.
More perplexing than depressing was Elizabeth Circle at the southern end of Hayden—a paved cul-de-sac comprising a dozen or so homes, all of which seemed minor variations on the six-room-colonial theme—even sided in what I guess were colonial colors: warm yellows, a cinnamon brown, and a green so deep that it appeared black from my somewhat distant vantage point, except where the sun tipped one of the peaks. With their meticulous landscaping and underground wiring, they might have been part of an opulent and attractive subdivision in one of Boston's northwest suburbs. But here, resting on the southern perimeter of Sage, the incongruity was jarring. It would have been easier believing that the homes had been dropped out of the sky by aliens than trying to imagine a developer actually intending to build a subdivision of colonials in the ranch-crazy West. Later, I would learn that every one of them lay unoccupied and a plan to raze two of them for some wetlands violations was still in litigation. And there was more—there was a story behind that development, a story that would underscore some of the complexities of this seemingly simple town, but it would be a long time before I became privy to it.
Chapter 8
I found the general store-library and its anachronistic thick, beveled glass door pasted over with MasterCard and Visa acceptance stickers; but it wasn't an old-fashioned we-have-everything-just-let-me-find-it general store that resides in nostalgic Americans' collective consciousness. The interior more closely resembled one of those convenience marts attached to gas stations on the Interstate—bright, clean, orderly, but seemingly unoccupied except for a clerk.
Mrs. O'Leary.
"I help out at times," she said. "Try to keep the shelves stocked. I didn't hear you this morning. Find the coffee all right?"
"And unplugged it."
"Good," she said, and started busying herself with one of the upper shelves behind her. When I reminded her I was seeking employment and asked if she wanted some help running the place, she laughed and said I probably needed steadier employment.
"So everyone around here has two jobs," I said. "Last night you were the motel owner and Walter was the restaurateur."
"Some of us have three at times, at other times, none. Nobody lays anybody off: we just shift from one thing to another. At noon when Carlene arrives—she works here too—I'm the innkeeper again. How'd you sleep?"
"Fine."
"The mattress wasn't too soft?"
"A little I guess."
"We can swap off with another room," she said.
"It's fine," I lied, reluctant to move more cartons or present the option of changing her mind. "It's pretty quiet around here at night."
"This time of year, yes, but sometimes in the summer we get cars coming through here kind of late. They've watched the sunset up on top of the pass and they're fixing to sleep in one of the Yellowstone hotels. You need to be careful then: drivers are bleary eyed and edgy from staring at the sun and driving that pass in the dark. That street out there is the first straightaway they've seen for miles."
"Walter said I wouldn't have to worry about weirdos."
"You mean because the pass is closed? He's probably right. I'd say they're dropping those gates by now. We'll get word from the highway department soon enough."
"Who do they call? I mean, who's really in charge here?"
She laughed. "We don't have a mayor or anything like that. We don't have many services except basics. We have a landfill outside town and if we ask him nicely, Charlie Wieland will drive by once in a while, pick up whatever we leave outside, and dump it there."
"He's a friend of Walter's right?"
"I guess. He has dinner with Charlie and his wife once in a while. Why do you ask?"
"Walter offered me some leftover ham from the Wielands' place."
"Should have taken it. His wife is a great cook."
"I'll remember that. So who does get the call about the pass?"
"Calvin, are you eager to have it closed, or are you worried that it might be closed?"
"Just wondering, that's all."
I was more than wondering. I wanted it closed. If Sage possessed any charm at all, it was isolation, and I didn't want that charm diluted by more VistaCruisers lumbering through town dropping off other castaways. I wanted to be the last weirdo from Billings, but I wasn't sure what Mrs. O'Leary might glean from such an admission: fugitive, criminal, miscreant. I'd already been through that with Walter.
"The call usually comes to the store here," she said, glancing at the table where the phone lay. "Nothing yet."
"Maybe they'll wait."
"They can't. A few years ago some driver who absolutely ‘had to be somewhere at a certain time' got to the pass just as the rangers were closing it. He begged them to let him through. He had a big old pickup truck and these huge tires with deep tread, four-wheel drive. You know the type—the golden boy of snow. One of the rangers made him sign a release. They found his truck the following spring."
"Did the guy die?"