Read Online Light Action in the Caribbean by Barry Lopez - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Barry Lopez
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two-story hotel, the Essex, stood in good repair and it was suppertime so I went in to eat, and then took a room when I learned from the clerk where I was, and where I had to go to get back on the road for Glasgow and U.S. 2 on in to Williston.
The town was an oddity in eastern Montana. Barely a sign of ranching and none of mining. No railroad. No Indian faces. It was agreeable country, the short-grass prairie appealing with its seasonal creeks and woody draws. It might have been homesteaded early on, but the sign of constancy in it was its flocks of crows calling, the pale sky and the short grama grass.
The meal was good and well served, the room comfortable, without a phone or television, without advertising or promotional circulars. The mood in the hotel was akin to that at some resorts, each thing perfectly tended to but the overall atmosphere undisturbed. Any inchoate threat of retaliation one might have experienced, or the weight of indifference known from moments lived out in airports and buildings among strangers, was absent here. I opened the sash-weighted windows and abandoned myself to a deep and dreamless sleep.
My obligations in Williston, attending to some details of my father’s will, were not pressing. I remained in Gannett for three days.
The single store in town, a kind of mercantile, had much to covet in the way of antiques—old carpenter’s tools, some well-preserved harness, equipment I recognized for candle-making, and about fifty running feet of old paperbacks. The first morning I went through the books title by title and bought two, but when I stepped outside again I realized that was where I wanted to be, out, on foot and looking up north past the orchard where the road didn’t go, where the land dipped into a swale and then rose into low curving hills and fell away again. If, in fact, it hadn’t been farmed it could have been for stones in the soil, some rock like flint that tore the plows apart. Standing in the street that morning I saw her for the first time, walking in from the hills and up to a white house with dark green trim, which she entered.
Who can say why a person or a place is attractive? I found Gannett and the hotel and the cant of the girl’s stride to be so, and stayed on the extra days to know why. I read one of thepaperbacks on the hotel porch, hoping the why of it would come over me, but it didn’t. A few people passed in and out of the store. Someone drove away south out of town. In the afternoon, I watched five children at play. They might have spent the morning in class together in someone’s home. Remembering those days now, it occurs to me that outside of ordinary noises—a door closing, an engine starting, the ticking of wood cooling in the hotel’s walls in the night—one sound hummed beneath it all, the streaming down of light from the empty sky.
I drove off early that last day and went on to Williston. It was a year before I returned, backtracking the roads from Glasgow. I had no other idea but to eat at the hotel and read. It was on that trip that I saw the girl wading through the waist-high grass in her black frock, like another sort of bare-limbed, rain-darkened tree, a cogitating body. The clerk at the Essex told me she’d lost her hearing in a shooting accident, but I guessed there was more than this and let our conversation go into awkward silences until he gave me the rest, that she ‘d been hit in the head by a stray bullet one night in Long Beach, that it had eclipsed the hearing in both ears, and the day she got out of the hospital her father moved them, straight to northeastern Montana from south L.A. The same day I saw her crossing the hillside, I passed her on the street. Her blue eyes were fierce as black jet; the determination in her face approached a leer. She didn’t even glance toward me.
The first time I returned to Gannett—and I came back only once after that—I was having an evening cigar on the hotel porch after a day of wind
The town was an oddity in eastern Montana. Barely a sign of ranching and none of mining. No railroad. No Indian faces. It was agreeable country, the short-grass prairie appealing with its seasonal creeks and woody draws. It might have been homesteaded early on, but the sign of constancy in it was its flocks of crows calling, the pale sky and the short grama grass.
The meal was good and well served, the room comfortable, without a phone or television, without advertising or promotional circulars. The mood in the hotel was akin to that at some resorts, each thing perfectly tended to but the overall atmosphere undisturbed. Any inchoate threat of retaliation one might have experienced, or the weight of indifference known from moments lived out in airports and buildings among strangers, was absent here. I opened the sash-weighted windows and abandoned myself to a deep and dreamless sleep.
My obligations in Williston, attending to some details of my father’s will, were not pressing. I remained in Gannett for three days.
The single store in town, a kind of mercantile, had much to covet in the way of antiques—old carpenter’s tools, some well-preserved harness, equipment I recognized for candle-making, and about fifty running feet of old paperbacks. The first morning I went through the books title by title and bought two, but when I stepped outside again I realized that was where I wanted to be, out, on foot and looking up north past the orchard where the road didn’t go, where the land dipped into a swale and then rose into low curving hills and fell away again. If, in fact, it hadn’t been farmed it could have been for stones in the soil, some rock like flint that tore the plows apart. Standing in the street that morning I saw her for the first time, walking in from the hills and up to a white house with dark green trim, which she entered.
Who can say why a person or a place is attractive? I found Gannett and the hotel and the cant of the girl’s stride to be so, and stayed on the extra days to know why. I read one of thepaperbacks on the hotel porch, hoping the why of it would come over me, but it didn’t. A few people passed in and out of the store. Someone drove away south out of town. In the afternoon, I watched five children at play. They might have spent the morning in class together in someone’s home. Remembering those days now, it occurs to me that outside of ordinary noises—a door closing, an engine starting, the ticking of wood cooling in the hotel’s walls in the night—one sound hummed beneath it all, the streaming down of light from the empty sky.
I drove off early that last day and went on to Williston. It was a year before I returned, backtracking the roads from Glasgow. I had no other idea but to eat at the hotel and read. It was on that trip that I saw the girl wading through the waist-high grass in her black frock, like another sort of bare-limbed, rain-darkened tree, a cogitating body. The clerk at the Essex told me she’d lost her hearing in a shooting accident, but I guessed there was more than this and let our conversation go into awkward silences until he gave me the rest, that she ‘d been hit in the head by a stray bullet one night in Long Beach, that it had eclipsed the hearing in both ears, and the day she got out of the hospital her father moved them, straight to northeastern Montana from south L.A. The same day I saw her crossing the hillside, I passed her on the street. Her blue eyes were fierce as black jet; the determination in her face approached a leer. She didn’t even glance toward me.
The first time I returned to Gannett—and I came back only once after that—I was having an evening cigar on the hotel porch after a day of wind
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