Free Neal Barrett Jr. by Dawn's Uncertain Light Page A

Port right on it.”
    Howie was appalled. “On top of an old city? —
    “They’re doing that a lot now. Cory. You just haven’t seen ’em. In California, they’ve brought a great many of the old places back. Not anything like they were before, of course.”
    “It don’t seem right to me,” Howie said.
    The Lansdale Hotel was a four-story building of manmade stone; each great block was patterned in intricate squares. No one could have carved them that smooth, Howie knew, but he couldn’t tell how it was done. The place inside where you stopped to get a room had a couch and two chairs where people could sit and talk if they liked. Howie tried to act as if he saw hotels every day, but it was hard not to stare. A large room nearby was brightly lit, and he could see men and women dressed up, sitting around tables with white cloths. Shiny plates and glasses caught the light. Everyone seemed to be laughing and talking, and Howie could smell the tantalizing aroma of good food. He thought about the dried-up farms on his way to Tallahassee, the hungry faces he’d seen. Eating hard corn and glad to get it, drinking from muddy creeks. Walking east, he had crossed the rivers north of here that emptied into Alabama Port. That wasn’t likely thirty miles away, but it seemed like a whole different world.
    Howie protested again and said he didn’t want to take Jones’s offer, but this time his heart wasn’t in it. The truth was, he knew he wanted to stay; the thought of a real bath and hot food was too good to pass up. And anyway, he reasoned, he had turned the preacher down several times, and Jones had kept on asking. When a person did that, it meant he wasn’t just being polite.
    Jones flipped a coin to the boy who had carried their packs. Another boy who worked for the hotel took their belongings upstairs. The rooms were four flights up, and Jones breathed hard all the way and complained about the walk.
    Howie was surprised when Jones told him he had a room all to himself.
    “Why, a man needs his privacy,” the preacher said. “It’s a God-given right. You just make yourself at home.
    Howie found that wasn’t hard to do. The room had a bed with real sheets. A chair and a table with a pitcher of water and a bowl. A chest where you could put your things away, though Howie didn’t have enough belongings to concern himself with that.
    As he was peering out the window at the brightly lit streets, a boy knocked and rolled in a great white tub on wheels. Another boy carried pails of steaming hot water, and kept going back out for more. There was soap and clean towels—enough towels, Howie figured, to dry off a couple of hundred times.
    As he sank down into the tub, he tried to recall when he’d had a real honest-to-God hot bath before. He tried, but he couldn’t remember when that might have been. And that seemed a sorrowful thing indeed.
    T he dining room was only half as full as it had been an hour before, when Howie peeked in from the lobby, That was some relief, but not a lot, Even in a fairly clean shirt and decent pants from his pack; he felt uncomfortable and out of place. Ritcher Jones seemed to know everyone in town, and they all dropped by the table to say hello. Men wearing white shirts and jackets, trousers pressed with a crease in the front. Officers in fine uniforms with polished sabers at their sides, men with their hair slicked back who smelled like some kind of flower.
    Howie had never seen so many blue officer tabs and silver braids in his life. Not a one wore the small heart cut from purple cloth to show he’d been wounded in the war. And not a one had a badge to show he’d fought in some important campaign. More than that, they were all too fat—you didn’t get that way in a war.
    A waiter handed Howie a card that listed all kinds of food. Howie asked for baked fish, and Ritcher Jones raised a brow at that.
    “They’ve got some fine steak here,” he told Howie. “You ought to try one of