Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [116]
“What happened was that somebody crossed a palm with some money,” Oliver said. “Somebody needed a bed and the clerk fixed it. If you hadn’t appeared, he’d have got away with bedding me down in the hall.”
“But where will we bed down? Can we go on to Leadville?”
“Not a chance.”
They reached the corner, turned left, found the boardinghouse. A man sitting in his undershirt, drinking coffee, said yes, they had a bed. It wasn’t much for the lady–just curtained off. Oliver looked at her once and took it. The undershirted man picked up his lamp and led them up bare stairs and along a hall whose blue muslin walls waved and crawled with the wind of their movement, to a door that had no key. After she was inside, and sinking down on the bed, Susan saw that the room had no walls, either–only that same blue muslin, called Osnaburg, nailed to a frame that went no more than six feet above the floor. Under the one broad roof every eight-by-ten cubicle in the place shook to the same cold drafts, and glared the same sick blue in the lantern’s light. She could hear the sounds of sleeping all around. It was so cold she could see her breath.
Oliver knelt at the bedside and took her in his arms. His lips were on her cold face. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, echoing the clerk. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. I think I could sleep anywhere.”
“I wish we were already home.”
“So do I.”
“In this place we can’t even talk.”
“We can talk tomorrow night.”
He kissed her, and she clung to him, tired and tearful. Right at her ear, it seemed, a man cleared his throat. Oliver let her go and blew out the lantern.
Too tired to be appalled at this thing called a room, but too tired to be amused by it either, she got out of her dress and crawled into bed in her shift. If she had literally carried sixty pounds all the way from Denver, and had been driven along the road with a club, she could not have ached more. Oliver’s weight sagging into the other side gave her something to cling to and warm herself by. For a while they clung and whispered, then she heard that he was asleep.
But she could not sleep. After a while she rolled away and lay on her back with her scratchy eyelids stretched open. Beside her Oliver breathed evenly. The sounds of communal slumber murmured and sighed through the cloth walls. Someone had a persistent, wracking, helpless cough that went on for minutes, and quit out of pure weakness and lack of breath, and in a little while broke out again. Supporting that sound of debility and failure there were orchestrated snores. For a while a man ground his teeth horribly, only feet away. Later still a voice cried out, cracking with fear or menace, “Fred! God damn you!” She froze, expecting shots or the sounds of struggle, but the crisis tailed off into a sigh, the groaning of springs. Still later there was an unidentifiable noise like a dog biting and snorting at an inaccessible itch.
She lay tensely listening and interpreting, refusing her attention and willing herself to relax, only to find herself in ten seconds tight with alert awareness again. Phantasmal adjustments to the road lurked in her muscles.
It seemed a week since she had awakened in the berth and pulled the curtains to see dawn on the peaks of these mountains. It seemed a month since she had embraced her parents and Bessie and kissed her son’s sleeping face. She felt swallowed and lost; her mind kept bending back to the room where Ollie might now be beginning another fever cycle. She tried to imagine Augusta and Thomas in this crude place, their fastidiousness cheek by jowl with all this coarse humanity, and couldn’t. The very effort made her laugh. For a time she lay phrasing the day’s experience in colorful and humorous fashion, as if for the pages of Century, and almost persuaded herself that under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of