The Snow Falcon (12 page)

He sat in an empty room where once they had sat, the three of them, his mother, himself, and his dad, to eat their evening meals. He could remember that when he was young he would hear the sound of his dad’s Dodge pulling up outside the house, and his mother would fuss anxiously. They would be in the kitchen, where he would be sitting at the table doing schoolwork while she prepared dinner.

“Go outside and meet your dad, Michael,” she would say. She’d walk over to him, wiping her hands, looking nervous. She always got changed into some kind of nice dress about an hour before his dad would arrive, and put makeup on and fixed her hair. She’d quickly hug him to her, pressing his face into her breasts as he stood up.

“We have to be nice to him,” she’d say as they parted, holding his eye. “You know we have to be nice to him, don’t you?”

So he’d go outside and his dad would see him coming and give a sort of tired-looking smile. Michael always tried to do what his

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mother told him, to be nice to his dad, so he always went out to meet him; but he hung back. When his dad wasn’t around, his mother always told Michael that his father had a temper, that he could be very mean to her.

“But I can put up with it, Michael. I can for you. That’s why we always have to be nice to him. That’s why I always get dressed nicely for him when he comes home, though he doesn’t notice. Just don’t say anything to upset him.”

At dinner maybe his dad would tell them a thing or two about his day at the store, but his mother would just smile and lean over to Michael, maybe ruffle his hair. She would speak only through him.

“Ask your father if he wants more beans, Michael. Tell him if the meat’s tough, it’s because it was ready at six.” This last, said with bitter reproach, was if his dad was even a few minutes late.

In the quiet empty room, he tried to remember his dad ever raising his voice, ever raising his hand in anger. He couldn’t. When he thought of his parents, his mother was all softness and flowing dresses and his dad was just remote, a figure on the edges.

THERE REMAINED THE pressing need to earn an income. Michael calculated that the money he had left would last him for a while, but he was aware that sooner or later it would run out. Despite the experience at Wilson’s car lot and what that might signify about the attitudes he was likely to encounter, he circled several ads in the help-wanted column of the local paper. He decided to lower his sights and chose only the kinds of jobs where he might expect employers wouldn’t be so concerned about who he was.

The next morning he presented himself at a tire shop on Seventh Street dressed in boots and jeans and asked to see the manager. A short fat guy wearing greasy overalls came through a door, holding a thick cheese sandwich in one fist, his mouth full of food. When he spoke, he sprayed pieces of chewed bread from between his lips.

“What can I do for you?”

Michael gestured with the rolled-up paper he was carrying. “You ran an ad for someone to fit tires.”

The guy looked him up and down. A badge on his overalls labeled him as the manager. “You done any work like this before?”

“A little.”

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The fact was, he’d done some machine work while he was in prison, so he was used to working with his hands. He didn’t think it would be so hard to learn how to fit tires. The shop was small, with racks of tires lined around the walls, a couple of mechanic pits in the floor and some trolley jacks lying around. Behind the smeared glass pane of the office cubicle, a middle-aged woman worked on some paperwork that had an oily thumbprint at one corner. Another small and ancient desk behind her had a girlie calendar pinned on the wall above it.

“You live around here?” the manager said. He took another bite out of his sandwich and looked at Michael suspiciously, as if he didn’t look like the type of guy who normally came around looking for work in his shop.

“A couple of miles out of town,” Michael told him.

The guy grunted and sauntered over to the window, where he asked the woman for an employment form. “We start at seven here and go through until four. You get a break around noon unless it’s busy. The work comes first, that’s my rule.”

He gave a belligerent look, challenging Michael to find fault with his terms. “Pay’s eight bucks an hour to start. What’s your name?”

“Somers. Michael Somers.”

The manager started writing on the form, then he stopped and looked up. “How do you spell that?”

Michael spelled it out. The manager stopped again. The night before, he’d been in Clancys having a couple of beers and he’d heard some talk about a guy who used to live in town. It was all before his time, he’d only lived in Little River for three years, but they were talking about how this guy had shot his wife and kid and now he’d come back here to live. He looked at the name he’d written. Somers. That was the name he’d heard. He’d thought there was something about this guy that didn’t fit.

“I just remembered,” he said. “The job’s gone.”

“Wait a minute …”

As the manager started to turn away, already crumpling the form into a ball, he felt Michael grip his arm. For a moment they were both frozen there. Michael was taller and his grip was strong, and when the manager looked into his eyes, he thought they were a funny kind of blue, real dark. He was wondering if he could reach

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the wrench that was just behind him on the bench, then Michael let him go.

Michael struggled to control his anger. “A second ago you were telling me the rate for the job.”

The manager relaxed, seeing that nothing was going to happen now. “Yeah, well, I guess I changed my mind.”

Michael saw the woman behind the window watching everything that was going on and he imagined how she’d tell her friends about what she’d seen, and how she’d embellish it just a little to make things interesting. He considered trying to persuade the guy to give him a break, but when he searched the other man’s expression for something that would indicate he might find some empathy there, he could see he would be wasting his time. The manager stared at him with small black eyes that poured out what felt like hate. This was a mind closed to reason; a small mean spirit resided behind those eyes, one whose opinions and narrow reactions were set immovably in stone. Prisons were full of people like that, and Michael had learned long ago that he would search in vain for a compassionate human being behind the facade. He started to turn away without another word.

The manager called out to him. “And if you need tires, fella, don’t come around here. We don’t carry your type.”

Michael walked out onto the street. For a second he had to stop and take a few deep breaths before he could walk on. He could hear the manager’s voice still ringing through his head, the malice and derision that rippled within it. He felt the curious looks people threw him as they moved around him, and when he met the eye of a woman walking a dog, he saw the flicker of recognition in her expression before she hastily turned away. She went on by and glanced back, stopping at the side of the road, then crossed, looking back again as she neared the other side. He felt a dull kind of acceptance that was crossed with anger. She avoided him the way somebody might avoid a drunk weaving along the sidewalk, with distaste and slight apprehension, as if at any moment he might act in some violent and unpredictable manner.

He tried a few more places, but it was the same story with differing reactions wherever he went. After the tire shop he expected it and didn’t stop to argue. Once or twice he thought he saw a glimmer

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of something approaching regret or maybe embarrassment in the way a person’s look slid away from his own and hands became suddenly busy shifting around pieces of paper, but he was probably imagining it.

At noon he went into the diner, feeling the eyes of the other customers following him as he slid into a booth by the window. The waitress who approached to serve him smiled unexpectedly.

“What can I get you?”

“Just coffee, thanks.”

“Nothing to eat? The food’s pretty good here, if I do say so myself.”

He looked up at her, thinking she hadn’t recognized him, waiting for her attitude to abruptly change. She had red hair, which he guessed was dyed, and was in her middle to late thirties. The hands that held her pad and pencil were reddened from the heat and constant cleaning, and the lines around her eyes showed her age. Her expression, however, remained friendly.

“What would you recommend?” he asked. Beyond her, a guy at the counter looked over his shoulder and then away again, saying something to his buddy, who looked over briefly.

“How hungry are you?” the waitress responded. “The broiled bacon and tomato bagel is good, or we have a homemade vegetable soup with fresh foccacia bread on the side.” Her smile became a grin, and she nodded back toward the counter, beyond which a man in a white apron worked at the grill. “My husband is kind of a gourmet. He makes the bread himself. I think he’s trying to educate his fellow citizens, though between you and me, I think he’s wasting his time.”

“The soup sounds fine,” Michael said. He felt a sudden surge of warmth toward this woman. Just in the simple fact of not being treated like some kind of pariah, he was reminded of how life had once been, what it felt like to walk in the flow of society. He watched the waitress walk away, and felt other eyes returning to their plates, the quiet hum of conversation resuming, though more subdued than when he’d come through the door.

The waitress brought over the soup and bread and placed it in front of him with what he felt was slightly more care than a customer might ordinarily have expected. A napkin was neatly folded on the side of the plate.

“Enjoy,” she said, and he thanked her.

Though he hadn’t felt hungry when he’d entered the diner, and

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though he still couldn’t muster any real enthusiasm to eat, the food was undeniably good. After he’d finished, he sat drinking his coffee and wondering if coming back to Little River had really been such a good idea. He had a house and a store that had both stood empty for years and needed work if he was to stay, and yet he felt no attachment to either of them. The prospect of staying also presented practical problems, aside from the fact that he’d be resigning himself to estrangement from the people of the town. He wondered what the point was. He had a dwindling money supply and little chance of finding work. He pondered the alternatives: Perhaps he should go down to Vancouver, or maybe, as Carl Jeffrey had suggested, to the States. In a city he would at least have anonymity. But then he reasoned that he’d escaped from this town and his past once before, or thought he had, and it hadn’t done him any good. He knew he’d stay—for the time being, at least.

Across the street, a woman emerged from the real-estate office and walked toward the diner. He watched her absently, and then, as she moved, he noticed her in more particular detail. He saw it was his neighbor, the woman from the house next door to his own. As she approached, he studied her. He guessed her to be in her early thirties; she was slim, with high cheekbones, and as she walked, her hair, shot through with deep reds and mahogany, caught the sunlight as it bounced around her shoulders. She came though the door, and as she took a seat at the counter, she smiled to the man at the grill and said something he couldn’t hear. Maybe it was her smile that struck him then, perhaps because it lit her features in a way that was in marked contrast to the way she’d looked when he’d taken her dog back and she’d come onto the porch. Then he’d felt only coldness from her, but now he glimpsed that there was another side to her, what he guessed was her everyday nature. She stood out from the few other women in the room—and would stand out in any crowd in this town, he thought. He saw the flash of white teeth in a generous mouth and all at once he was thinking about Louise. It was an old memory, from a long time ago when she had put her hands softly to his face and rested her head against his chest, his arms encircling her, feeling the warmth and smoothness of her skin. He felt as if a hole had opened up in him that he stared into, seeing only emptiness and everything he’d lost. Without knowing how it happened, he felt his coffee cup shatter in his hand.

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The waitress came over with a cloth. “Don’t worry about it,” she told him when he apologized. “We got plenty more of those old things.” She peered at him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” He stood up, aware that people were looking over, muttered his apology again, then dropped some notes on the table to cover his bill and quickly left.

“So WHAT DO you make of him?” Susan asked as Linda put the broken pieces of Michael’s cup in the trash. She watched him through the window as he crossed the road until he was out of sight, aware that when he’d broken the cup, the noise of voices in the diner had hushed but was now rising again in volume. The atmosphere had changed suddenly as he’d left, a release of slight tension.

“He seems like a guy with things on his mind.”

Susan raised her brows. “Wouldn’t you be if you were him?” She gestured around her. She could hear Rudy Pearce talking to John Helsinger from the auto-repair shop on Sixth and Barker.

“I read just the other day about some crazy son of a bitch who went into a Pizza Hut with a shotgun and started blasting everything all to hell,” Pearce was saying. “Couple of people got themselves shot up before the cops came and took this guy away.”

“Uh-huh.” Helsinger stuffed half a cheeseburger into his mouth. Mayo dribbled down his chin, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.

“Well, what’s to say this fella won’t get it in his head to go and do something like that? You see the way he looked just then?”