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It was snowing when they reached Spokane, a swirling snowfall of tiny crystalline flakes that glittered in the streetlights and muffled the upper floors of the buildings. The traffic on the white-covered streets was sparse, and dark, ill-defined automobiles loomed, bulky and ominous, out of the swirling white with headlights like smeared eyes.
The bus pulled under the broad roof that sheltered the loading gates at the terminal and stopped. “Spokane,” the driver announced, and opened the door of the bus.
The trip had been exhausting, and toward the end had become a kind of tedious nightmare under a darkening, lead-gray sky that had spat snow at them for the last hundred miles. Raphael waited until the bus emptied before attempting to rise. By the time he had struggled down the steps and reached the safety of the ground, most of the other passengers had already joined family or friends, reclaimed their luggage, and left.
The air was crisp, but not bitterly cold, and the Muzak inside the depot came faintly through the doors.
There was another sound as well. At first Raphael thought it might be a radio or a television set left playing too loudly. A man was giving an address of some kind. His words seemed to come in little spurts and snatches as the swirling wind and intermittent traffic first blurred and then disclosed what he said.
“If chance is defined as an outcome of random influence produced by no sequence of causes,” he was saying in an oratorical manner, “I am sure that there is no such thing as chance, and I consider that it is but an empty word.”
Then Raphael saw the speaker, a tall, skinny man wearing a shabby overcoat of some kind of military origin. He was bald and unshaven, and he stood on the sidewalk at the front of the bus station talking quite loudly to the empty street, ignoring the snow that piled up on his shoulders and melted on his head and face. “For what place can be left for anything to happen at random so long as God controls everything in order? It is a true saying that nothing can come out of nothing.” The speaker paused to allow his unseen audience to grasp that point.
“These your bags?” a young man in blue jeans and a heavy jacket who had been unloading suitcases from the bus asked, pointing at Raphael’s luggage sitting alone on a baggage cart.
“Right,” Raphael said. “What’s with the prophet of God there?” He pointed at the skinny man on the sidewalk.
“He’s crazy,” the young man replied quite calmly. “You see him all over town makin’ speeches like that.”
“Why don’t they pick him up?”
“He’s harmless. You want me to put your bags in the station for you?”
“If you would, please. Is there a good hotel fairly close?”
“You might try the Ridpath,” the young man suggested, picking up Raphael’s suitcases. “It’s not too far.”
“Can I get a cab?”
“Right out front.” The young man shouldered his way into the station and held the door open as Raphael crutched along behind him.
“If anything arises from no causes, it will appear to have arisen out of nothing,” the man on the sidewalk continued. “But if this is impossible, then chance also cannot-”
The door swung shut behind Raphael, cutting off the sound of that loud voice. Somehow he wished that it had not. He wished that he might have followed the insane prophet’s reasoning to its conclusion. Chance, luck-good or bad-if you will, had been on Raphael’s mind a great deal of late, and he really wanted to hear a discussion of the subject from the other side of sanity. His thoughts, centering, as they had, on a long series of “what-if’s,” were growing tedious.
A few people sat in the bus station, isolated from each other for the most part. Some of them slept, but most stared at the walls with vacant-eyed disinterest.
“I’ll set these over by the front door for you,” the young man with the suitcases said.
“Thanks.”
The Ridpath is one of the best hotels in Spokane, and Raphael stayed there for four days. On the first morning he was there he took a cab to a local bank with branches in all parts of the city and opened a checking account with the cashier’s check he had purchased in Portland. He kept a couple hundred dollars for incidentals and then returned to his hotel. He did not venture out after that, since the snowy streets would have been too hazardous. He spent a great deal of time at the window of his room, looking out at the city. While he was there he had all of his pants taken to a tailor to have the left legs removed. The flapping cloth bothered him, and the business of pinning the leg up each time he dressed was a nuisance. It was much better with the leg removed and a neat seam where it had been.
On his third day in Spokane it rained, cutting away the snow and filling the streets with dirty brown slush. It was when he checked his wallet before going to the dining room for supper that a rather cold realization came to him. It was expensive to be disabled. Since the disabled man could do very little for himself, he had to hire other people to do them for him. He skipped supper that night and sat instead with pad and pencil adding a few things up. The very first conclusion he reached was that although the Ridpath was very comfortable, staying there was eating up his funds at an alarming rate. A man of wealth might comfortably take up permanent residence at the Ridpath, but Raphael was far from being a millionaire: The several thousand dollars Uncle Harry had given him in Portland had seemed to be an enormous sum, but now he saw just how small it really was. “Time to pull in the old horns,” he said wryly. “I think we’d better make some other arrangements.”
He took the phone book and made a list of a half dozen or so nearby hotels and apartment houses. The next morning he put on his coat and went downstairs to the cabstand at the front of the hotel.
The first hotel on his list was the St. Clair. It was totally unsuitable. Then the cab took him up Riverside to the Pedicord, which was even worse. The Pedicord Hotel was very large, and it looked as if it might at one time have had some pretensions about it. It had long since decayed, however. The lobby was filled with stained and broken couches, and each couch was filled. The men were old for the most part, and they smoked and spat and stared vacant-eyed at a flickering television set. There were crutches and metal-frame walkers everywhere. Each time one of the old men rose to go to the bathroom, a querulous squabble broke out among those who stood along the walls over who would get the vacant seat. The smell was unbelievable.
Raphael fled.
“Just what are you lookin’ for, man?” the cabdriver asked when Raphael climbed, shaken, back into the cab again.
“A place to live.”
“You sure as hell don’t wanna move in to that dump.”
“How can they live that way?” Raphael looked at the front of the Pedicord and shuddered.
“Winos,” the driver replied. “All they want is a place that’s cheap and gets ’em in outta the cold.” He stopped and then turned and looked at Raphael. “Look. I could drive you all over this downtown area-run up a helluva fare-and you’re not gonna find anyplace you’d wanna keep a pig in-not if you thought anything about the pig. You’re gonna have to get out a ways-outta this sewer. I’m not supposed to do this, but I think I know a place that might be more what you’re lookin’ for. How much do you wanna pay?”
Raphael had decided what he could afford the previous night. He rather hesitantly named the figure.
“That sounds pretty close to the place I got in mind. You wanna try it?”
“Anything. Just get me away from here.”
“Right.” The driver started his motor again. They drove on back down Riverside. It was raining again, a misty, winter kind of rain that blurred the outlines of things. The windshield wiper clicked, and the two-way radio in the front seat crackled and hissed.
“You lose the leg in ‘Nam?” the driver asked.
“No,” Raphael replied. “I had a misunderstanding with a train.” He was surprised to find that he could talk about it calmly.
“Ooog!” The driver shuddered. “That’s messy. You’re lucky you’re still around at all. I saw a wreck like that out in the valley once. Took ’em two hours to pick the guy up. He was scattered half a mile down the tracks.”