The Bridge Trilogy Part 119

"Smart cookies," he said and scratched his soul patch with the tip of the driver. "Because they understand that all that really happens, these days, is that ancient software is continually encrusted with overlays, to the point where it's literally impossible for any one programmer to fully understand how any given solution is arrived at."

"I still don't see why this stuff would be any help."

"Well, actually," he said, "you're right." He winked at her. "You got it, girl. But the fact remains that there are some very smart people who like to have this stuff around, maybe just to remind themselves where it all comes from and how, really, all any of us do, these days, is just fixes. Nothing new under the sun, you know?"

"Thanks for the screwdriver," Chevette said. "I gotta go see a little black boy now."

"Really? What about?"

"A van," Chevette said.

"Girl," he said, raising his eyebrows, "you deep."

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27. BED-AND-BREAKFAST.

RYDELL sees it's dark, down here on the lower level, the narrow thoroughfare crowded and busy, greenish light of scavenged fluorescents seen through swooping bundles of that transparent plumbing, pushcarts rattling past to take up the day's positions. He took a flight of clanging steel stairs, up through a hole cut unevenly in the roadbed above, to the upper level.

Where more light fell, diffused through plastic, shadowed by the jackstraw country suspended above, shacks that were no more than boxes, catwalks in between, sails of wet laundry that had gone back up with the dying of the earlier wind.

Young girl, brown eyes big as the eyes in those old j.a.panese animations, handing out slips of yellow paper, "BED & BREAKFAST." He studied the map on the back.

He started walking, bag over his shoulder and the GlobEx box under his arm, and in fifteen minutes he'd come upon something announced in pink neon as the Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl. He knew the name from the back of the yellow flyer, where the map gave it as a landmark to find the bed-and- breakfast.

Line up outside Ghetto Chef, a place with steamed-up windows, prices painted in what looked like nail polish on a sheet of cardboard.

He'd only ever been out here once before, and that had been at night in the rain. Seeing it this way, it reminded him of some gated attraction, Nissan County or Skywalker Park, and he wondered how you could have a place like this and not have security or even a basic police presence.

He remembered how Chevette had told him that the bridge people and the police had an understanding: the bridge people stayed on the bridge, mostly, and the police stayed off it, mostly.

He spotted a sheaf of the yellow flyers, thumbtacked to a plywood door, in a wall set back a few feet from the front of Ghetto Chef. It wasn't locked, and opened on a sort of hallway, narrow, walled with taut

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vhite plastic stapled over a framework of lumber. Somebody had drawn nurals on either wall, it looked like, with a heavy black industrial narker, but the walls were too close together to see what the overall ksign was about. Stars, fish, circles with Xs through them. . . He had t hold his bag behind him and the GlobEx box in front, to go down the bllway, and when he got to the end he turned a corner and found him-elf in somebody's windowless kitchen, very small.

The walls, each covered in a different pattern of striped wallpaper, eemed to vibrate. Woman there, stirring something on a little propane cooker. Not that old, but her hair was gray and parted in the middle. ame big eyes as the girl, but hers were gray.

"Bed-and-breakfast?" he asked her.

"Got a reservation?" She wore a man's tweed sports coat, sleeves vorn through at the elbows, over

a denim jean jacket and a collarless lannel baseball s.h.i.+rt. No makeup. Looked windburned. Big hawk nose.

"I need a reservation?"

"We book through an agency in the city," the woman said, taking the vooden spoon out of whatever

was coming to boil there.

"I got this from a girl," Rydell said, showing her the flyer he still held, ~lutched against his bag.

"You mean she's actually:handing them out?"

"Handed me this one," he said.

"You have money?"

"A credit chip," Rydell said. "Any contagious diseases?" "No."

"Are you a drug abuser?"

"No," Rydell said.

"A drug dealer?"

"No."

"Smoke anything? Cigarettes, a pipe?"

"No."

"Are you a violent person?"

Rydell hesitated. "No."

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"More to the point, have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

"No," Rydell said, "I haven't."

"That's good," she said, turning down the propane ring. "That's one thing I can't tolerate. Raised by 'em."

"Well," Rydell said, "do I need a reservation to stay here or not?" He was looking around the kitchen, wondering where "here" might be; it was about seven feet on a side, and the doorway he stood in was the only apparent entrance. The wallpaper, which had buckled slightly from cooking steam, made the s.p.a.ce look like an amateur stage set or something they'd build for children in a makes.h.i.+ft day care.

"No," she said, "you don't. You've got a handbill."

"You have s.p.a.ce?"

"Of course." She took the pot off the cooker, placed it on a round metal tray on the small, white- painted table, and covered it with a clean-looking dish towel. "Go back out the way you came. Go on. I'll follow you."

He did as she said and waited in the open door for her to catch up with him. He saw that the Ghetto Chef line had gotten longer, if anything.

"No," she said, behind him, "up here." He turned and saw her hauling on a length of orange nylon rope, which brought down a counter-weighted aluminum ladder. "Go on up," she said. "I'll send your bags."

Rydell put down his duffel and the GlobEx box and stepped up onto the ladder.

"Go on," she said.

Rydell climbed the ladder to discover an incredibly tiny s.p.a.ce he was clearly expected to sleep in. His first thought was that someone had decided to build one of those j.a.panese coffin hotels out of offcuts from all the cheapest stuff at a discount building supply. The walls were some kind of light-colored wood-look sheathing that imitated bad imitations of some other product that had probably imitated some now-forgotten original. The tiny square of floor nearest him, the only part that wasn't taken up by wall-to-wall bed, was carpeted with some kind of ultra-low-

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pile itility stuff in a weird pale green with orange highlights. There was dayli1ht coming in from the far end, by what he supposed was the head of tIe bed, but he'd have had to kneel down to make out how that was possble.

Do you want to take it?" the woman called up.

'Sure do," Rydell said.

Then pull up your bags."

lIe looked over and saw her loading his duffel and the GlobEx box into rusty wire hamper she'd hung on the ladder.

Breakfast at nine, sharp," she said, without looking up, and then she vas gone.

~ydell hauled the ladder, with his luggage, up on its orange rope. When he got his stuff out, the ladder stayed up, held by its hidden counterwright.

-le got down on his hands and knees and crawled into his bedroom, over the foam slab made up with one of those micro-furry foam-core blanets, to where some sort of multi-paned, semi-hemispherical plastic bibble, probably part of an airplane, had been epoxied into the outer wall, It was thick with salt, outside, looked like; a crust of dried spray. It lel light in, but just a featureless gray brightness. It looked as though you lept with your head right up in there. Okay by him. It smelled funny but ~ot bad. He should've asked her what she charged, but he could do that later.