A Hidden Place Read Free Page B

hungry he was. He bought a dime western at a newsstand and let himself gratefully into the cool shade of the diner. There were three men at a side ‘table but nobody at the long Formica-topped lunch bar.
    He ordered himself a hamburger and a Coke. The hamburger was a slab of broiled beef and the Coke came in a big soda-fountain glass with condensation on it like dew. The waitress was young, dark-haired, small-breasted under her uniform, and she gave him a series of covert glances. When she brought over the side of french fries she said, “You must be Travis Fisher.”
    “Trav,” he said automatically, only then realizing how odd it was that she should know his name. “How did you—”
    “Relax,” she said. She put her elbows on the counter. “I’m Nancy. Nancy Wilcox. My mom knows your Aunt Liza through the Baptist Women .” She rolled her eyes to demonstrate her attitude toward the Baptist Women. “I guess just about everybody knew you were coming in today.”
    He was not sure he was pleased to hear that. But she was pretty, so he thanked Nancy Wilcox anyway and said he hoped he’d see her around.
    “Probably you will,” she said. “Mom and Liza Burack aren’t exactly close, but they move in all the same circles. High-minded, you know: church committees, temperance league. Translation: busybodies.” She winked and turned away, flipping her long dark hair out of her eyes. Travis gazed at her a moment before directing his attention to the dime western and the hamburger.
    The hamburger was satisfying, the magazine less so. He was an attentive reader, but today the heroes seemed too operatic, the violence perversely too affecting. Six-guns blazed, blood poured, justice (except in the “continued” serial) triumphed. But he could not help thinking of his mother and of the ugliness of her death and his impotent rage at it, so after a while he put down his thirty cents on the shiny Formica and left.
    Haute montagne was French for “high mountain,” his mother had told him, but whatever Frenchman named the place must have been drunk or blind. His aunt’s house, 120 DeVille, stood on the highest plot of land in town, where the prairie rose in a kind of swell for thirty or forty feet before sloping away to the bank of the Fresnel River and the railway bed. The house itself was old but had once been fine: two stories plus a small garret with oculus windows overlooking the town; but the wooden siding was textured with paint curls and the weather had got into the dormers. Yellow curtains were drawn against the sunlight.
    Travis had not been there since he was six years old.
    He knocked three times on the rim of the screen door and then Aunt Liza answered.
    Liza was his mother’s older sister, in her middle fifties now, respectable in a print sack dress, and she opened the door and looked at Travis with a mixture of pity and suspicion that he recognized instantly over the gulf of years. She had aged some. There were lines in her high pale forehead; she wore a pair of silver-rimmed glasses with a bifocal half. Her figure was undefined, rounded. But she was unmistakably Liza Burack. “Well, Travis,” she said. “Well, come on in.”
    His own reluctance to cross that threshold was surprisingly strong. But he shouldered his bag through the door and into the ticking silence.
    Persian rugs. Mantle clocks.
    In the whitewashed kitchen, an electric fan purred.
    “Creath,” Liza said, “Travis is here.”
    Creath Burack was the man Liza had married (“A steady man,” she always told Travis’s mother; he operated the Haute Montagne ice plant): immobile in an armchair, overalls riding up his big belly, hair thin, he stood up just long enough to shake Travis’s hand. His grip was huge, painful.
    “You start work tomorrow,” Creath Burack said.
    Travis nodded. Liza said, “Well, you probably want to see your room.”
    She led him up a flight of carpeted stairs to a room with naked floorboards and whitewashed walls,