He listened to both of them—the girl who liked animals, and the one who knew why Alka-Seltzer gave you more oral bang for your buck than, like, even Altoids—dishing the dirt on the current Miss Lakeside, who had, like, everybody knew, only gotten her greasy hands on the coronet and sash by flirtin’ up to the judges.
Shadow started to tune them out, blanked everything except the noise of the road, and now only fragments of conversation would come back every now and again.
Goldie is, like, such a good dog, and he was a purebred retriever, if only my dad would say okay, he wags his tail whenever he sees me.
It’s Christmas, he has to let me use the snowmobile.
You can write your name with your tongue on the side of his thing.
I miss Sandy.
Yeah, I miss Sandy too.
Six inches tonight they said, but they just make it up, they make up the weather and nobody ever calls them on it…
And then the brakes of the bus were hissing and the driver was shouting “Lakeside!” and the doors clunked open. Shadow followed the girls out into the floodlit parking lot of a video store and tanning salon that functioned, Shadow guessed, as Lakeside’s Greyhound station. The air was dreadfully cold, but it was a fresh cold. It woke him up. He stared at the lights of the town to the south and the west, and the pale expanse of a frozen lake to the east.
The girls were standing in the lot, stamping and blowing on their hands dramatically. One of them, the younger one, snuck a look at Shadow, smiled awkwardly when she realized that he had seen her do so.
“Merry Christmas,” said Shadow. It seemed like a safe thing to say.
“Yeah,” said the other girl, perhaps a year or so older than the first, “merry Christmas to you too.” She had carroty red hair and a snub nose covered with a hundred thousand freckles.
“Nice town you got here,” said Shadow.
“We like it,” said the younger one. She was the one who liked animals. She gave Shadow a shy grin, revealing blue rubber-band braces stretching across her front teeth. “You look like somebody,” she told him, gravely. “Are you somebody’s brother or somebody’s son or something?”
“You are such a spaz, Alison,” said her friend. “Everybody’s somebody’s son or brother or something.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” said Alison. Headlights framed them all for one brilliant white moment. Behind the headlights was a station wagon with a mother in it, and in moments it took the girls and their bags away, leaving Shadow standing alone in the parking lot.
“Young man? Anything I can do for you?” The old man was locking up the video store. He pocketed his keys. “Store ain’t open Christmas,” he told Shadow cheerfully. “But I come down to meet the bus. Make sure everything was okay. Couldn’t live with myself if some poor soul’d found ’emselves stranded on Christmas Day.” He was close enough that Shadow could see his face: old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped life’s vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that.
“Well, you could give me the number of the local taxi company,” said Shadow.
“I could,” said the old man, doubtfully, “but Tom’ll be in his bed this time of night, and even if you could rouse him you’ll get no satisfaction—I saw him down at the Buck Stops Here earlier this evening, and he was very merry. Very merry indeed. Where is it you’re aiming to go?”
Shadow showed him the address tag on the door key.
“Well,” he said, “that’s a ten-, mebbe a twenty-minute walk over the bridge and around. But it’s no fun when it’s this cold, and when you don’t know where you’re going it always seems longer—you ever notice that? First time takes forever, and then ever after it’s over in a flash?”
“Yes,” said Shadow. “I’ve never thought of it like that. But I guess it’s true.”
The old man nodded. His face cracked into a grin. “What the heck, it’s Christmas. I’ll run you over there in Tessie.”
“Tessie?” said Shadow, and then he said, “I mean, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Shadow followed the old man to the road, where a huge old roadster was parked. It looked like something that gangsters might have been proud to drive in the Roaring Twenties, running boards and all. It was a deep dark color under the sodium lights that might have been red and might have been green. “This is Tessie,” the old man said. “Ain’t she a beaut?” He patted her proprietarily, where the hood curved up and arched over the front nearside wheel.
“What make is she?” asked Shadow.
“She’s a Wendt Phoenix. Wendt went under in ’31, name was bought by Chrysler, but they never made any more Wendts. Harvey Wendt, who founded the company, was a local boy. Went out to California, killed himself in, oh, 1941, ’42. Great tragedy.”
The car smelled of leather and old cigarette smoke—not a fresh smell, but as if enough people had smoked enough cigarettes and cigars in the car over the years that the smell of burning tobacco had become part of the fabric of the car. The old man turned the key in the ignition and Tessie started first time.
“Tomorrow,” he told Shadow, “she goes into the garage. I’ll cover her with a dust sheet, and that’s where she’ll stay until spring. Truth of the matter is, I shouldn’t be driving her right now, with the snow on the ground.”
“Doesn’t she ride well in snow?”
“Rides just fine. It’s the salt they put on the roads to melt the snow. Rusts these old beauties faster than you could believe. You want to go door to door, or would you like the moonlight grand tour of the town?”
“I don’t want to trouble you—”
“It’s no trouble. You get to be my age, you’re grateful for the least wink of sleep. I’m lucky if I get five hours a night nowadays—wake up and my mind is just turning and turning. Where are my manners? My name’s Hinzelmann. I’d say, call me Richie, but round here folks who know me just call me plain Hinzelmann. I’d shake your hand, but I need two hands to drive Tessie. She knows when I’m not paying attention.”
“Mike Ainsel,” said Shadow. “Pleased to meet you, Hinzelmann.”
“So we’ll go round the lake. Grand tour,” said Hinzelmann.
Main Street, which they were on, was a pretty street, even at night, and it looked old-fashioned in the best sense of the word—as if, for a hundred years, people had been caring for that street and they had not been in a hurry to lose anything they liked.
Hinzelmann pointed out the town’s two restaurants as they passed them (a German restaurant and what he described as “Greek, Norwegian, bit of everything, and a popover at every plate”); he pointed out the bakery and the bookstore (“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul”). He slowed Tessie as they passed the library so Shadow could get a good look at it. Antique gaslights flickered over the doorway—Hinzelmann proudly called Shadow’s attention to them. “Built in the 1870s by John Henning, local lumber baron. He wanted it called the Henning Memorial Library, but when he died they started calling it the Lakeside Library, and I guess it’ll be the Lakeside Library now until the end of time. Isn’t it a dream?” He couldn’t have been prouder of it if he had built it himself. The building reminded Shadow of a castle, and he said so. “That’s right,” agreed Hinzelmann. “Turrets and all. Henning wanted it to look like that on the outside. Inside they still have all the original pine shelving. Miriam Shultz wants to tear the insides out and modernize, but it’s on the register of historic places, and there’s not a damn thing she can do.”