together …”
“Yes. I’ll call you when I put this little trip together. I can’t do it in five minutes. But not to worry: this has been a long time coming and you’re leaving town. You
need
to leave town. You haven’t been anywhere since Gracie left. You’ve got to break the pattern.”
“Fine,” he said dully. “Call me.”
In a couple of hours, she dropped off his plane tickets and itinerary without a word. He read it with amazement. He swallowed several times but the feeling his trip gave him wouldn’t go away.
8
Frank pulled the parka up around his face and looked out at the river. Pack ice from the slow breakup of winter had crowded the river from bank to bank. The Eskimo shacks along the shore seemed to reveal no signs of life except for the old caribou hides nailed to their walls and flapping bleakly in the north wind.
Frank wandered back to the hotel to play video games with the Eskimos. The town had the appearance of a military supply dump: windowless storehouses, pyramids of fuel barrels, vehicles abandoned where they would never run again and where they would endure for centuries of refrigeration.
The hotel, like the other buildings, rested on top of the ground on blocks, out of reach of permafrost. It was a carelessly constructed building, mostly prefabricated, and was not expected to last many more winters. From its windows could be seen the endless granite landscape, streaked with snow and running water, more of a plan for country than country itself. Through this unchanging vista, hundreds of Eskimos appeared each night on hot-rod four-wheelers, heading for the hotel bar. Frank went down the first night to have a drink with them, but they took him outside and tossed him in a blanket until he passed out. He definitely avoided drinking with them thereafter, because after three or four they became sharply conscious of the injustices Frank’srace had committed against them and began to get psyched up for another blanket toss.
The desk clerk and manager was an Englishman who had come during the sixties to do good work among the Eskimos. Funding for that had disappeared and, not wanting to leave the North, he took on the hotel job. He was a stolid Yorkshireman, settled here now with his family. He said that his children were veteran smokers and drinkers by the age of ten. “Bloody little Inuit, they are,” he told Frank.
An Eskimo woman who had gone to Toronto, a three-hundred-pound crack addict who listened to rap music on her Walkman all day, wandered into the dining room to order breakfast.
“Have I had any calls?” Frank asked. “Anything on the radio?”
“Nothing at all,” said the manager. “Your vacation winding down, is it?”
“You really never know,” said Frank. He was reduced to reading the last newspaper he had bought in the airport and speculating about the life he had left behind, if only for one of the longest weeks of his life. He learned that California community planner Richard Reese hoped to produce a more “nurturing” lifestyle in his new planned communities. Reese intended to use psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to build a town that functioned as a kind of golden stairway to wellness. On the count of three, thought Frank, all will cut off their dicks on the road to wellness. Reference made to Seaside, Florida, the assemblage of playhouses on the Gulf of Mexico. Says here that business is flat in the world of bronzed baby shoes, an admittedly “schmaltz-oriented” enterprise. Frank sighed. The faster he became an Eskimo, the better off he’d be. Then he could go home, having repaid his debt to Lucy. He could chew blubber in his office like a gentleman.
Now he mostly played the video games with those Eskimos who preferred not to drink. There was a two-seated Grand Prix game with a screen revealing a pair of racing cars ready to race if you had fifty cents and a partner. Frank played this regularly and came to know many extended Eskimo
“Yes. I’ll call you when I put this little trip together. I can’t do it in five minutes. But not to worry: this has been a long time coming and you’re leaving town. You
need
to leave town. You haven’t been anywhere since Gracie left. You’ve got to break the pattern.”
“Fine,” he said dully. “Call me.”
In a couple of hours, she dropped off his plane tickets and itinerary without a word. He read it with amazement. He swallowed several times but the feeling his trip gave him wouldn’t go away.
8
Frank pulled the parka up around his face and looked out at the river. Pack ice from the slow breakup of winter had crowded the river from bank to bank. The Eskimo shacks along the shore seemed to reveal no signs of life except for the old caribou hides nailed to their walls and flapping bleakly in the north wind.
Frank wandered back to the hotel to play video games with the Eskimos. The town had the appearance of a military supply dump: windowless storehouses, pyramids of fuel barrels, vehicles abandoned where they would never run again and where they would endure for centuries of refrigeration.
The hotel, like the other buildings, rested on top of the ground on blocks, out of reach of permafrost. It was a carelessly constructed building, mostly prefabricated, and was not expected to last many more winters. From its windows could be seen the endless granite landscape, streaked with snow and running water, more of a plan for country than country itself. Through this unchanging vista, hundreds of Eskimos appeared each night on hot-rod four-wheelers, heading for the hotel bar. Frank went down the first night to have a drink with them, but they took him outside and tossed him in a blanket until he passed out. He definitely avoided drinking with them thereafter, because after three or four they became sharply conscious of the injustices Frank’srace had committed against them and began to get psyched up for another blanket toss.
The desk clerk and manager was an Englishman who had come during the sixties to do good work among the Eskimos. Funding for that had disappeared and, not wanting to leave the North, he took on the hotel job. He was a stolid Yorkshireman, settled here now with his family. He said that his children were veteran smokers and drinkers by the age of ten. “Bloody little Inuit, they are,” he told Frank.
An Eskimo woman who had gone to Toronto, a three-hundred-pound crack addict who listened to rap music on her Walkman all day, wandered into the dining room to order breakfast.
“Have I had any calls?” Frank asked. “Anything on the radio?”
“Nothing at all,” said the manager. “Your vacation winding down, is it?”
“You really never know,” said Frank. He was reduced to reading the last newspaper he had bought in the airport and speculating about the life he had left behind, if only for one of the longest weeks of his life. He learned that California community planner Richard Reese hoped to produce a more “nurturing” lifestyle in his new planned communities. Reese intended to use psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to build a town that functioned as a kind of golden stairway to wellness. On the count of three, thought Frank, all will cut off their dicks on the road to wellness. Reference made to Seaside, Florida, the assemblage of playhouses on the Gulf of Mexico. Says here that business is flat in the world of bronzed baby shoes, an admittedly “schmaltz-oriented” enterprise. Frank sighed. The faster he became an Eskimo, the better off he’d be. Then he could go home, having repaid his debt to Lucy. He could chew blubber in his office like a gentleman.
Now he mostly played the video games with those Eskimos who preferred not to drink. There was a two-seated Grand Prix game with a screen revealing a pair of racing cars ready to race if you had fifty cents and a partner. Frank played this regularly and came to know many extended Eskimo
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