Maclean Read Free Page A

her big handbag full of cleaning stuff. She lowered herself sideways down the steps and set off up the road towards town, her big bottom rolling, her fat little legs pumping away but making such slow headway that you could imagine that the road beneath her feet was a conveyer belt carrying her backward half as fast as she walked.
    Maclean watched her out of sight, and before Henry could get back to Napoleon, said he had to be on his way too and got up and followed.

2
    THE RAILROAD BRIDGE at the mouth of the creek that ran through the middle of town was three spans across—a centre span with low steel trusses at the sides and two, shorter spans at either end with nothing at their sides but the forty-foot drop down to the rocky creek bed. A couple of hundred yards upstream there was a street bridge, but Maclean didn’t have time this morning to walk an extra quarter-mile for nothing.
    He knew the times of the passenger trains well enough. It was the freights that were dangerous. He stood at the end of the bridge and listened, then got down and put his ear to the rail. Nothing. Stepping carefully on every other tie, trying not to look down between them at the the water foaming and eddying among the rocks, he made his way to the centre span. He leaned against one of the trusses, listened again, heard nothing, and, footing it as fast as he dared, went on across the last span.
    â€œI seen you, Mr. Maclean, walking on that railroad bridge again,” Miss Audrey said. “I was on the town bridge, where you should’a been, and I seen you. That railroad bridge ain’t no place for a man your age.”
    Off the end of the bridge, a line of decaying coal sheds ran beside an abandoned siding. He slowed down to scout for beer bottles, but there was nothing, only a skinny cat that started and fled away into the weeds. Another minute brought him into town beside the General Store, a great, three-storey barn of a building with another trail of sheds along the railway.
    A cluster of men in from the country had already gathered in front of the store. Even at a distance he could hear the nasal, know-it-all voices whining about the things they always whined about: the weather, the high price of feed, the low price of potatoes, school taxes, road taxes, the government.
    As he passed, he sensed their eyes following him out of sight, and he was so taken up with his black hatred of them that he almost walked right past. Three quart Moosehead bottles, standing neatly in a row against the shed wall, as if left there for him. Some soldiers had stood them there the night before maybe because they couldn’t be bothered with them. Or maybe somebody in the feed shed was drinking on the sly. Or maybe the Almighty and Most Merciful Father, who sees the little sparrow fall, had decided this morning in his whimsical and unfathomable way to dish him up a little mercy for a change.
    He cashed the bottles in at a place that bought empty bottles—and under the counter sold a few full ones as well—and came out with twelve cents. With the fourteen he had brought with him, he was already up to twenty-six. He began to think it was going to be a good day.
    Jim Gartley’s stable was on Diamond Street, which was more an alley than a street and was certainly no jewel—a kind of wooden canyon whose walls were made up mostly of the sides and backs of buildings that faced on other streets.
    Before the Great War, before Henry Ford and the god-damned motor car, Gartley’s stable had been a good business. Now it housed in any regular way only a few delivery horses and a few horses belonging to old men who hated the motor car and still drove around town in buggies. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, Jim had set up a gas pump out front and had started garaging cars for people who put them up in the winter.
    The big double doors were wide open, and Maclean walked in, not hurrying, ambling, wanting to feel things out before he tried