Five minutes later he was staggering up the main drag — the only drag — of Barrow, last home and refuge of Truman Van Brunt. Or so he hoped. If the airstrip was deserted, the street was pretty lively, considering the temperature. Snowmobiles shrieked and sputtered around him, racing up and down the street; dogs that looked like wolves — or were they wolves? — fought and snarled and careened around in packs; hooded figures trudged by in the shadows. Walter’s hand, the one that gripped the suitcase, had gone numb despite his thermal mittens, and he thought grimly that at least he didn’t have to worry about his feet. No problem there. No sir.
The wind was keen and getting keener. The hairs inside his nostrils were made of crystal and his lungs felt as if they’d been quick-frozen. He’d stumbled past three blocks of windowless shacks already, most of them with chunks of some sort of frozen meat, bloody naked ribs and whatnot, strung up on the roof out of reach of the dogs, and still no sign of a hotel, bar or restaurant. There were only three blocks more to go, and then what? He was thinking he might go on trudging up and down that icy dark forbidding street until he curled up in a ball and froze through like a side of beef, doomed like the heedless tenderfoot in the Jack London story, when finally, up on the left, he spotted an Olympia Beer sign, red neon, white script, glowing like a mirage in the desert, and below it, a hand-painted sign that read “Northern Lights Café.” Shaken, desperate, shivering so hard he thought he’d dislocate his shoulders, he fumbled in the door.
For a minute, he thought he’d found nirvana. Lights. Warmth. A Formica counter, stools, booths, people, a wedge of apple pie in a smudged glass case, a jukebox surmounted by a glowing neon rainbow. But wait a minute, what was this? The place smelled, stank like a latrine. Of vomit, superheated piss, rancid grease, stale beer. And it was filled to capacity. With Eskimos. Eskimos. He’d never seen an Eskimo in his life, except in books and on TV — or maybe that was only Anthony Quinn in mukluks on a backlot in Burbank. Well, here they were, slouching, standing, sitting, snoozing, drinking, scratching their privates, looking as if they’d been dumped out of a sack. Their eyes — wicked, black, sunk deep beneath the slits of their lids — were on him. Their hair was greasy, their teeth rotten, their faces expressionless. To a one — he couldn’t tell if they were man or woman, boy or girl — they were dressed in animal skins. Walter dropped his suitcase in the corner and shuffled up to the counter, where an electric heater glowed red.
There was no one behind the counter, but there were dirty plates and beer bottles on the tables, and a couple of the Eskimos were bent over plates of french fries and what looked like burgers. No one said a word. Walter began to feel conspicuous. Began to feel awkward. He cleared his throat. Shuffled his feet. Stared down at the floor. Once, when he was sixteen, he and Tom Crane had taken Lola’s car down to the City, to an address they didn’t know — a Hundred Thirtieth or Fortieth Street, something like that — because Tom had seen an ad for cheap jazz albums at a Hearns department store. It was the first time Walter had been in Harlem. On the street, that is. In the hour he spent there, he saw only two white faces — his own, reflected in the grimy window of the department stores, and Tom’s. It was an odd feeling, a feeling of alienation, of displacement — even, almost, of shame for his whiteness. For that hour, he wanted desperately, with all his heart, to be black. Beyond that, nothing happened. They bought their records, climbed into the car and drove back to the suburbs, where every face was white. It was a lesson, he realized that. An experience. Something everyone should go through.
Somehow, he’d never felt the need to repeat it.
How long had he been standing here — a minute, five minutes, an hour? This was worse, far worse, than Harlem. He’d never seen an Eskimo before in his life. And now he was surrounded by them. It was like being on another planet or something. He was afraid to look up. He was beginning to feel that anything was better than this — even freezing to death on the streets or being torn to pieces by the wolf dogs or run down by drunken snowmobilers, when the swinging doors to the kitchen flew open and an extravagantly blonde, heavily made-up, rail-thin woman of Lola’s age hustled into the room, six long-necked beers in one hand and a steaming plate of something in the other. “Be with you in a minute, hon,” she said, and eased past him, arms held high.
The waitress seemed to have broken the spell. She served the beers and the plate of something, and the place came back to life. A murmur of low, mumbled conversation started up. An old man, his face as dead and leathery as the face of a shrunken head Walter had once seen in a museum, pushed past him with a seething glare and practically fell atop the jukebox. And then a teenager — yes, he could distinguish them now — tried to catch his eye and Walter looked timidly away. But now the waitress was there, and Walter looked into her tired gray eyes and thought for just an instant he was back in Peterskill. “What’ll it be, honey?” she asked him.
The old man struggled with a quarter at the jukebox, dropped it to the floor and let out a low heartfelt curse, the gist of which Walter didn’t quite catch — a malediction involving seals, kayaks and somebody’s mother, no doubt. Or on second thought, had he said something about honkies? Honkie sons of bitches?
“Uh,” Walter fumbled, tearing frantically at the parka’s drawstring, “um, uh … coffee,” he finally squeaked.
Without ceremony the waitress turned to the nearest Eskimo, said “Charley,” and jerked her neck. Scowling, the man got up from his stool and lurched across the room, a bottle of beer in his hand.
“But, I—” Walter protested.
“Sit,” the waitress said.
Walter sat.
He was on his second cup of coffee and had begun to detect signs of life in his fingertips, when the old man at the jukebox finally managed to locate the quarter and feed it into the slot. There was a mechanical buzz, succeeded by the plop of the record dropping, and then Bing Crosby was singing “White Christmas,” crooning to the grim, silent, drunken men in their animal skins, crooning to the grease, the forlorn-looking wedge of apple pie, the shacks, the ice sheet, the heaps of frozen dogshit in the streets, crooning to Walter about white Christmases he used to know …
Was this a joke? A dig? Walter was afraid to look around him.
“Refill?” the waitress asked, poised above him with a steaming Pyrex pot.
“Uh, no, no thanks,” Walter stammered, putting his hand over the cup for emphasis, “but, uh, maybe you could help me—?”
The waitress gave him a big lipsticky smile. “Yes? You looking for someone?”
“Maybe you don’t know him. I mean, maybe he doesn’t even live here any more. Truman Van Brunt?”
But for Bing Crosby, the place went quiet. The waitress’ smile was gone. “What do you want with him?”
“I’m”—he couldn’t say it, couldn’t spit out the words—“I’m his son.”
“His son? He never had a son. What are you talking about?”
Nothing could have prepared him for that moment. It hit him like a shove from behind, like something immovable along the side of the road. He was devastated. He wanted to dig a hole in the dirty linoleum at his feet and bury himself till the world slid closer to the sun and palm trees sprouted outside the window. He never had a son. For this he’d come four thousand miles.
The waitress’ mouth was a tight slash of suspicion. The Eskimos were silent, watching him, the indifference in their eyes replaced all at once by a look of cruel amusement, as if now the fun were about to begin, as if Walter — big and white and with his dirty red hair and freakish eyes and feet that didn’t work — had come to town as part of some sideshow. And Bing, Bing was going on with it, warbling about days being merry and bright—