butter, potatoes fried in butter, toast slathered with butter — bacon strips allowed to simmer in their own pool of fat — you chose a place like Minnie’s Café, which was a cozy little log cabin of a place with smoke drifting happy-happy out of a stone chimney on one side.
Such were the pleasures of Calamity.
Looking back through my rearview mirror at the plastic onion atop Delbert’s, I remembered the county fair when I was a kid; the crafty Lions Club or American Legion always saw to it that a pile of onions was kept frying on the grill, the wonderful smell luring customers across the sawdust.
Calamity behind me, I continued upriver on the Lewis — that is, to the east — for a half mile until I arrived at the dilapidated Kokanee Vacation Cottages where I was to plant the flag of Boogie Dewlapp.
The Kokanee was so named because of a fish that looked like a large trout but which was technically a land-locked salmon and which, I assumed, was to be found in a nearby lake or one of the reservoirs on the Lewis.
My stomach began to growl when I checked into unit number nine to stow my gear.
The cottages were artifacts of the early fifties; they had been repainted over the years but probably never remodeled. The single small room in number nine contained a diminutive refrigerator with a motor that growled; a two-burner gas stove; a card table with a warped top; four folding chairs; an open closet; a television set; a bureau with cigarette burn marks on the top; a dilapidated double bed with a suspect mattress; and a complicated metal contraption in one corner that was actually a fold-out bed. A beige throw rug had been flopped over the linoleum floor, and there was a small bathroom with a toilet and metal shower. The air smelled of mildew and pine oil. The floor sagged dangerously in the middle.
And it was cold, oh, so cold. I turned the thermostat up to sixty-eight degrees, wondering if it was still connected to the old-fashioned baseboard electrical heater. The top drawer of the bureau contained an extra blanket, which I flopped on the bed.
In my experience, a hot shower was essential after an exhausting day on the road, and I peeled ’em off to go for it. Unfortunately, this shower, a metal-walled cubicle, was crudded up with what I took to be mold, but which could have been killer ooze from a science fiction movie. Owing to mineral buildup, the shower head was only about one-fourth functional, but the water was hot, and by gyrating nimbly to catch the few errant squirts that made it through the crud, I managed to get wet.
Feeling invigorated if not exactly cheerio, I stepped out, checking my feet for clinging yuck. I dried off on a threadbare towel, and as I was sitting on my bed lacing my shoes, an inch-and-a-half-long cockroach started cruising across the floor like a happy dinosaur; I lunged at him and speared the son of a bitch with my shoe. Dumb Fu John Denson. No bug fucks with him.
My stomach growled. I was hungry. I cranked up my bus and headed for Calamity, deciding I’d check out Delbert’s Awful Onion and come back and hit the sack early.
Chapter Seven — He Meets the Wonderful One
At Delbert’s Awful Onion you had your druthers; you could order your food through a little window or go inside and sit at a booth. There were those who declined for aesthetic reasons to eat in one of these theaters of the mundane, preferring to dine in their cars with coffee dripping on their stomach and Thousand Island dressing on their crotch.
I was neither timid nor a snob; no, sir, I was an adventurer! I strode manfully inside and stood, thick-witted, humbled by Delbert’s vast menu on the wall. I resolved not to be intimidated.
How sweet life must be to have so many options, but I couldn’t decide. I could have had a chicken burger if I had wanted, or a taco burger or bacon burger or barbecue burger or mushroom burger or whatever-the-hell-I-could-possibly-want kind of burger, but apparently only an out-and-out prole ever ordered an ordinary hamburger or cheeseburger.
I listened to the sizzle and pop of boiling fat as I considered the least harmful and best-tasting options among the artery-clogging choices. Perhaps it was the case that ordinary hamburgers and such items as chocolate malts were rarely ordered, archaic offerings, pleasing to