The Hotel Eden: Stories by Ron Carlson Read Free Book Online Page A

eighteen-year-old virgin? That pajama bit was great; I’ll remember it.” Now people were deplaning, entering the gate area and streaming around the young couple. Barbara felt Keith begin to tremble, and she closed her eyes. “It wasn’t a joke. There’s this: I made love to you too. You were there, remember? I’m glad for it.” She pulled back slightly and found his lips. For a moment she was keenly aware of the public scene they were making, but that disappeared and they twisted tighter and were just there, kissing. She had dropped the valise and when the mock ticket slipped from her fingers behind his neck, a young woman in a business suit knelt and retrieved it and tapped Barbara on the hand. Barbara clutched the ticket and dropped her head to Keith’s chest.
    “I remember,” he said. “My memory is aces.”
    “Tell me, Keith,” she said. “What are these people thinking? Make something up.”
    “No need. They’ve got it right. That’s why we came out here. They think we’re saying goodbye.”
    S IMPLY PUT , THAT was the last time Barbara Anderson saw Keith Zetterstrom. That fall when she arrived in Providence for her freshman year at Brown, there was one package waiting for her, a large trophy topped by a girl on a motorcycle. She had seen it before. She kept it in her dorm window, where it was visible four stories from the ground, and she told her roommates that it meant a lot to her, that it represented a lot of fun and hard work but her goal had been to win the Widowmaker Hill Climb, and once she had done that, she sold her bikes and gave up her motorcycles forever.

THE PRISONER OF BLUESTONE

    T HERE WAS A camera. Mr. Ruckelbar was helping load the crushed sedan onto DiPaulo’s tow truck when an old Nikon camera fell from the gashed trunk well and hit him on the shoulder. At first he thought it was a rock or a taillight assembly; things had fallen on him before as he and DiPaulo had wrestled the ruined vehicles onto the tiltbed of DiPaulo’s big custom Ford, and of course DiPaulo wasn’t there to be hit. He had a bad back and was in the cab working the hydraulics and calling, “Good? Are we good yet?”
    “Whoa, that’s enough!” he called. Now Ruckelbar would have to clamber up and set the chains. DiPaulo, he thought, the wrecker with the bad back.
    It was a thick gray twilight in the last week of October, chilly now with the sun gone. This vehicle had been out back for too long. The end of summer was always bad. After the Labor Day weekend, he always took in a couple cars. He stored them out in a fenced lot behind his Sunoco station, getting twenty dollars a week until the insurance paperwork was completed, all of them the same really, totaled and sold to DiPaulo, who took them out to Junk World, his four acres of damaged vehicles near Torrington. Ruckelbar was glad to see this silver Saab go. It had been weird having the kid almost every afternoon since it had arrived, sitting out in the crushed thing full of leaves and beads of glass, just sitting there until dark sometimes, then walking back toward town along the two-lane without a proper jacket, some boy, the brother he said he was, some kid you didn’t need sitting in a totaled Saab, some skinny kid maybe fourteen years old.
    Ruckelbar cinched the final chain hitch and climbed down. “What’d you get?” It was DiPaulo. The small old man had limped back in the new dark and had picked the camera up. “This has got to be worth something.”
    “It’s that kid’s. It was his sister’s car.”
    DiPaulo handed him back the camera. “That kid. That kid doesn’t need to see this. I’d chuck it in the river before I let him see it. He’s nutty enough.” DiPaulo shook his head. “What’s he going to do when he sees the car is finally gone?”
    “Lord knows,” Ruckelbar said. “Maybe he’ll find someplace else to go.”
    “Well, that car’s been here a long time, summer’s over, and that camera,” DiPaulo poked it with one