And Bozeman would have been next, but I picked up some brochure in a breakfast place and read about this scenic route southward and this quiet town at the terminus. These competing influences went to work: get to where you're going but don't miss anything on the way. I was two days away from San Francisco when I bought the ticket for Sage—where I could have used that Miata, or any car with a roof and a heater. Instead I had nothing but the name Brenda had suggested: Walter Trucks. Even that sounded more like a transit company than a name, but I left the umbrella closed and sloshed up the street in the wind-driven mist until I reached a two-story wood structure that looked as though it might be a café or a sandwich shop. On a front window, which composed half the building's façade, the word LUNCH was painted in yellow-outlined black letters, curved in a small arch. The artistry did not look professional, but I didn't doubt the truth of it; after all, there was a table near the window. In the other direction was a barbershop, then a bank—almost connected as was everything else.
I slogged a little farther to the building Brenda had identified as the motel: dark, inside and out, with nothing to identify it. Could have been a motel; could just as easily have been a funeral home. By contrast, LUNCH seemed almost inviting; and so, already three dollars and forty-five cents richer than I had been only minutes before, I made a few more awkward strides in the standing water that occasionally rose over my toes, and quickly reached the overhang partially sheltering the entrance. My shoes were waterlogged past the point of usefulness, and my steps sounded like an under-inflated gym ball being dropped into a cauldron of chowder. Nobody wants to enter a building that way, even the most casual establishment, and this business seemed like someone's home, replete with a white multi-paneled door, a brass knob, and a softly glowing doorbell button. I was tempted to ring it until I noticed a smaller shingle promising "Good Food" flapping listlessly under a protective canvas awning. How could it not be a restaurant? And who rings a doorbell to enter a restaurant? I hesitated once more, stuffed the muddy hat into a pocket of my bag, then walked in, my sodden shoes a calling card for anyone inside. Small puddles marked my trail.
The ensuing welcome was less than cordial.
"Wanna get those off?"
A man stood in the lighted passage at the right, a man whose bald head fell just short of touching the top of the door frame and whose jeans cuffs stopped well above his ankles. His pale blue shirt was, by my estimate, three sizes too wide and two sizes too short. My own experience has taught me that being average carries with it certain benefits—the ease of buying clothes among the best. I can walk into any department store, pay my money, and leave with some item that fits me. This man in the shadows couldn't, not unless he shopped from the Barnum and Bailey collection.
"And leave them by the door," he added, with the same irritation.
"Yes," I said. "Sorry about the floor."
He made no attempt to disguise his annoyance. "I'll get a mop. It's not like I don't have one."
He turned and walked away, but continued speaking—louder. "I just hadn't planned on using it tonight but...gonna ruin your feet too, standing around in wet shoes. Put 'em on that mat."
To the side of the door was a remnant of grey indoor-outdoor carpeting, rough-cut but functional. By the time he returned I was standing on it while he sponged the puddle I had left.
"Now what?" he said, his voice mellowing as the floor became drier.
"I'm looking for a place to stay. The bus driver said...."
"I mean what do you want for your feet? You can't walk around barefoot. You get a sliver or something and sue me, I'll lose all this." When he spread out his arms to encompass the room and its meager furnishings, I thought he might have been kidding; but I was afraid to laugh because sometimes "all this," really is "all this." This time it wasn't.
"That's a joke, man," he said, his voice monotonic and low. "This isn't exactly San Simeone, is it?"
It might have been. I had never heard of San Simeone, a fact he probably gathered from my silence.
"The Hearst Castle. Don't you ever go to the movies? Citizen Kane. This ain't that."
He flipped on an overhead light and erased many of the unsettling shadows, revealing some thin paint and pockmarked floor molding—just a room, serviceable if unspectacular. But the man himself, removed now from those shadows, was all angles and lines and furrows of varying depths. He might be handsome in the sunlight, but not in this room, not now.
"I did see that movie," I said. "This place looks fine to me."
He dismissed my comment out of hand.
"Very safe of you. I'm Walter Trucks. And you?"
"Cal Hopper," I said as I labored with the wet laces. "Nice to meet you, Walt."
"It's Walter. People get comfortable with Walt, then it's on to Wally. I don't like Wally. Nobody called Cronkite, Wally, did they?"
"Maybe his friends did."
"When we're friends, we can revisit the topic."
He didn't seem interested in shaking my hand. Maybe later, I thought, then decided that the custom did not require constant reinforcement. I wasn't going to forget how, and the act itself signaled nothing permanent. After all, Natalie and I had done more than shake hands—we had shaken a number of body parts—and our semi-solemn agreement had not stopped her from dumping me when Donald, fresh from his rehab engagement in the asylum, came sniffing around.
"You never answered my question," he said as he pointed at my feet, then to his own. "I'll get you some of these," he said.
Even now I have trouble describing what he wore without being unkind. They were slippers, house shoes I guess, but not moccasins, not something leathery and folksy and "Western" with rawhide laces and a comfy fur lining. These were scraps of brown cloth that had been stretched over a foot-shaped form and then stiffened somehow: they weren't quite shoes but not quite socks either. My father had once owned a similar pair of these somethings and had practically lived in them for a year or two, but only in the nonjudgmental privacy of his home. Maybe I was right: Maybe I had in fact walked into somebody's residence.
He returned quickly and handed me a pair—a perfect match for his and still sealed in plastic.
"Well, Cal Hopper, welcome to Sage." He handed me a towel. "Dry off your feet and put these on."
"These seem new."
"They are new. It's not a bowling alley."
I slid them on.
"That's another joke," he said, "or maybe a rhetorical question. Do you know what that means?"
"I used to be an English teacher."
"Does that mean you do or you don't?"
"How can anyone not know what a rhetorical question is?"
He paused for a beat.
"That's good, Cal," he said after that momentary delay, and he almost smiled. "And listen, don't worry, I ain't selling those shoes. I have another couple dozen pair in the back."
"Do you make them?"
"I'm not Italian."
"I just meant how could you have so many pairs of slippers?"
"They're stolen. What are you drinking?"
"They're stolen?"
He looked hurt. "Well I didn't steal ‘em, but they're definitely stolen. Couple three years ago a guy in a pickup came through here. He had all kinds of shit in the bed but he was hard up for cash. He had these slippers—cartons of them—handmade and imported he said. Wanted fifty bucks for the lot. I gave him twenty. They make nice gifts. They're good slippers. Are you a shoe cop or something?"
I shook my head.
"They're comfortable, aren't they? How about that drink?"
The combination of the monotone and his rapid and seemingly