Where more light fell, diffused through plastic, shadowed by the jackstraw country suspended above, shacks that were no more than boxes, catwalks in between, sails of wet laundry that had gone back up with the dying of the earlier wind.
Young girl, brown eyes big as the eyes in those old Japanese animations, handing out slips of yellow paper, “BED & BREAKFAST.” He studied the map on the back.
He started walking, bag over his shoulder and the GlobEx box under his arm, and in fifteen minutes he’d come upon something announced in pink neon as the Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl. He knew the name from the back of the yellow flyer, where the map gave it as a landmark to find the bed-and-breakfast.
Line up outside Ghetto Chef, a place with steamed-up windows, prices painted in what looked like nail polish on a sheet of cardboard.
He’d only ever been out here once before, and that had been at night in the rain. Seeing it this way, it reminded him of some gated attraction, Nissan County or Skywalker Park, and he wondered how you could have a place like this and not have security or even a basic police presence.
He remembered how Chevette had told him that the bridge people and the police had an understanding: the bridge people stayed on the bridge, mostly, and the police stayed off it, mostly.
He spotted a sheaf of the yellow flyers, thumbtacked to a plywood door, in a wall set back a few feet from the front of Ghetto Chef. It wasn’t locked, and opened on a sort of hallway, narrow, walled with taut 113 vhite plastic stapled over a framework of lumber. Somebody had drawn nurals on either wall, it looked like, with a heavy black industrial narker, but the walls were too close together to see what the overall ksign was about. Stars, fish, circles with Xs through them. . . He had t hold his bag behind him and the GlobEx box in front, to go down the bllway, and when he got to the end he turned a corner and found him-elf in somebody’s windowless kitchen, very small.
The walls, each covered in a different pattern of striped wallpaper, eemed to vibrate. Woman there, stirring something on a little propane cooker. Not that old, but her hair was gray and parted in the middle. ame big eyes as the girl, but hers were gray.
“Bed-and-breakfast?” he asked her.
“Got a reservation?” She wore a man’s tweed sports coat, sleeves vorn through at the elbows, over a denim jean jacket and a collarless lannel baseball shirt. No makeup. Looked windburned. Big hawk nose.
“I need a reservation?”
“We book through an agency in the city,” the woman said, taking the vooden spoon out of whatever was coming to boil there.
“I got this from a girl,” Rydell said, showing her the flyer he still held, ~lutched against his bag.
“You mean she’s actually:handing them out?”
“Handed me this one,” he said.
“You have money?”
“A credit chip,” Rydell said. “Any contagious diseases?” “No.”
“Are you a drug abuser?”
“No,” Rydell said.
“A drug dealer?”
“No.”
“Smoke anything? Cigarettes, a pipe?”
“No.”
“Are you a violent person?”
Rydell hesitated. “No.” 114 “More to the point, have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”
“No,” Rydell said, “I haven’t.”
“That’s good,” she said, turning down the propane ring. “That’s one thing I can’t tolerate. Raised by ’em.”
“Well,” Rydell said, “do I need a reservation to stay here or not?” He was looking around the kitchen, wondering where “here” might be; it was about seven feet on a side, and the doorway he stood in was the only apparent entrance. The wallpaper, which had buckled slightly from cooking steam, made the space look like an amateur stage set or something they’d build for children in a makeshift day care.
“No,” she said, “you don’t. You’ve got a handbill.”
“You have space?”
“Of course.” She took the pot off the cooker, placed it on a round metal tray on the small, white-painted table, and covered it with a clean-looking dish towel. “Go back out the way you came. Go on. I’ll follow you.”