The Campbell Armstrong Collection Volume One by Campbell Armstrong

Author:Campbell Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

45

Jerry Metger thought it might rain because the flat washed-out sky was filling with clouds to the west, great dark masses that moved inexorably toward Carnarvon. He drove down the central strip where the big tour buses were emptying the usual herds of visitors into the street, people who’d wander from one small store to the next with all the unhurried innocence of the casual sightseer.

He stopped at the only red light on the street, staring through his windshield at two Asian women crossing in front of him. They were jabbering together, making expansive hand gestures and laughing. When the light changed to green he slid the car forward slowly, edging past the buses and the campers and the Winnebagos that crowded the curbs.

Tourism, he thought. Carnarvon’s sustenance. The thing that kept it alive, made it grow. If these people stopped coming, if the buses stopped running, if everything quit, then Carnarvon would break down and disintegrate into a ghost town the way it almost had in the past when the silver mines no longer produced and the earth had been stripped and the shafts emptied.

A ghost town. A dying place. Nothing but maybe a solitary decrepit gas station, such as one saw alongside the forsaken highways of America, and a general store where old men whittled on sticks or drank beer and traded stories of the Good Old Days.

No overpriced boutiques, no classy restaurants. No expensive real estate. He turned along Delaney Street. It swarmed with tourists, cars with out-of-state plates. Wisconsin. Nebraska. Arkansas.

All of this—the streets, the stores, the tourists, which had been familiar to Metger for so many years—now seemed completely strange to him. It was as if what he saw around him was nothing more than a surface, that there existed on some other plane a second Carnarvon, a town where prominent men zealously guarded old secrets, where they lied and cheated and obfuscated, where they distorted history and concealed truths and buried all their corpses silently and without regret.

And for what? So that Joe Smith from Hot Springs, Arkansas, could buy his kids Carnarvon T-shirts? So that Adeleine Bloggs out of Des Moines, Iowa, could spend her tourist dollars on funny little souvenirs of the old silver mines or pay top dollar for a shrimp cocktail at La Chaumière? So that the smart money could pour in from L.A. and San Francisco and Vegas and inflate the price of real estate?

Metger gunned his car hard, making the tires squeal as he turned out of Delaney Street. He glanced up at St. Mary’s Cemetery as he drove and he thought, Poor Florence Hann. Poor fucking Florence. His anger had changed now to something that resembled loathing. This whole town and those men that ran it contaminated him.

He went out several miles past the nursing home, stopped, pulled over to the side of the road. He got out of his car and smoked a cigarette and he looked up at the sky—it was about to become another rainy day and he was pricked by the tiny needles of memory.

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