Episodul 187 · The Chair by the River

On the seventh morning she came out of the hut at five past eight with her report sent and her hands in her pockets and stopped beside his chair.

— You eat, she said. It wasn’t a question.

— Sometimes.

— You’ve been eating cold air for a week. I can see it from the pontoon. Come on.

He folded the chair and leaned it against the railing at the top of the steps, where it had stood every morning, and went with her.

The bakery stood on the east bank where the bridge met the old town. Its window was steamed and its bell rang flat. Inside, trays stood to the ceiling in the smell of yeast and woodsmoke. Behind the counter Halloran had flour in one eyebrow as he slid loaves off a peel. A curtain covered the passage to the ovens.

— Mr. Halloran, Zora said, the river’s warmer than your ovens now. You’ll have to start baking in it.

Halloran laughed before she finished, bending over the counter and catching the loaves as they slid. Varren watched. Another laugh at nobody’s expense, needing nobody to join in. Before this town he could not remember one.

Halloran wiped his eyes with the back of a floury wrist and looked at Varren properly.

— So the chair’s staying.

— The man with the chair is.

— In this town that’s the same thing.

He put a bun in a paper bag and held it across the counter. When Varren reached for his pocket, Halloran shook his head.

— First one’s for believing her. After that you pay like everybody else.

Varren took the bag and searched Halloran out of habit for what was missing. The man had his ovens, his bread, and a laugh that came out whole. Varren did not know what to do with him.

Then the van came onto the bridge.

He saw it through the steamed window, a dark shape slowing where the bridge met the bank. It stopped half on the sidewalk. Two men got out, both in good coats, both bareheaded in the cold, and one of them turned to look across the water at the brick hut and the pontoon below it, at the steps where Varren had sat every morning for a week.

The other stood beside the van and waited. His weight had settled on his back heel, his hands loose and empty at his sides.

Varren had seen a man stand like that before. He had been taught by one, years ago, in the army, in a yard with no windows, how to come through a door before anyone knew it was a door. The voices stirred in his garden, and one of them, the patient one, stepped forward beside its plant and went very still. His thumb found the knuckles of his other hand.

He did not hurry. Hurrying is what people remember. He set the bun on the end of the counter and stepped past it, around the rack of trays, and through the curtain into the passage to the ovens, where it was hot and dark and smelled of burned flour.

Zora watched him go. He saw her see it.

The bell rang flat over the door.

— Morning, said one of the men, pleasantly. We’re looking for the technician from the river station. The hut said she might be here.

— That’s me, Zora said.

Through the gap at the edge of the curtain, Varren could see half of her, the notebook held against her parka in both arms, the way she had held it the first morning.

The man asked about her readings, and she told him. She told him the level and the temperature and the night it had changed, and the morning the council had sent a man with a new thermometer, in the order it had happened, without decoration. The man listened and nodded and did not write anything down.

— Has anyone else taken an interest? he asked. People coming down to the river. Asking about the numbers.

— The ducks take a very close interest.

Halloran snorted into his peel.

— People, the man said, still pleasant.

— People come down to tell me the river’s smoking, Zora said. I tell them I know.

— And no one’s asked to see the readings.

— You’re the first in a while. The council wanted to see the thermometer. Not the readings.

Every word of it was true. Varren stood in the heat behind the curtain and listened to her answer every question she was asked, truthfully, in order, and give them nothing at all. She did not look toward the curtain once.

The man put a card on the counter beside the bun.

— If anyone does.

The bell rang flat again. Through the window, Varren watched them cross back to the van. The one who stood on his back heel stopped at the rail of the bridge and looked down the river at the steps on the far bank. Then the van pulled off the sidewalk and went up into the town.

Varren came out through the curtain.

Halloran was rearranging bread that did not need it. Zora had picked up the card. She turned it over, read the back, which was blank, and folded it once and put it in the front of her notebook, beside the stamped sheet that said Instrument error.

She did not ask him why he had gone into the back. She held out his bun instead.

— They’ve been in town a week, Halloran said to the loaves. Hotel by the bridge. They tip badly.

— Thank you, Varren said, not sure which of them he meant.

Zora looked at him over the notebook. She did not laugh, and she did not make a joke, and for once he could not tell what she was going to say.

— I’ve never not lied to a man with a card before, she said. It’s much harder than lying. You have to listen to every question.

Then she went out, and the bell rang after her, and Varren stood at the window with a bun in a paper bag and watched her cross the bridge toward the hut.

It was the second time she had let him keep something. He had come to this town to find people who would need him, and in a week the only thing that had happened was that someone had done something for him he had not arranged, and he did not know yet what it was going to cost.

On the far bank, at the top of the pontoon steps, his chair stood folded against the railing where he had left it, the only one of its kind on the whole river.