Most of my fellow passengers were wrapped in winter coats. I shivered across the tarmac in a cotton shirt and corduroy jacket, wishing I had carried my sweater instead of packing it. A husky young fellow with red, wind-whipped cheeks and a shock of black hair followed close behind with the luggage. I picked up my canvas bag and set off in search of a night’s lodging. Thunder Bay boasted a Holiday Inn. That sounded good enough to me. They had plenty of vacancies. I booked a room for two nights.
They told me they would send a car along for me—their regular van was broken. I waited forty-five minutes inside the tiny terminal, drinking a cup of bitter coffee from a vending machine to entertain myself. When the limo finally came, it was a beat-up station wagon which I almost missed until it was rolling away. Then I could read THUNDER BAY HOLIDAY INN painted on its side. I went racing after it, yelling frantically, my canvas bag bumping me in the leg. I longed for the gigantic, impersonal efficiency of O’Hare with its ranks of surly, illiterate cab drivers.
The car stopped fifty feet ahead of me and waited while I came panting up to it. The driver was a heavyset man dressed in a graying white pullover. When he turned to look at me, a pungent draft of stale beer swept over me. The forty-five minutes I’d been waiting he must have spent in a bar. However, if I tried to get a cab I might be there all night. I told him to take me to the Holiday Inn and I leaned back in the seat with my eyes shut, grasping the side strap. It couldn’t be any worse than riding with Lotty sober but the memory of my own accident was too fresh for me not to be nervous. We moved along at a good clip, ignoring honking horns.
It was well past eleven when my driver deposited me, intact, and I couldn’t find any place in walking distance still open for dinner. The motel restaurant was closed and so was a little Mandarin place across the street. I finally took an apple from a basket in the lobby and went to bed hungry. My shoulder was sore and the long flight had worn me out. I slept soundly and woke up again after nine.
My shoulder had recovered in the night—most of the stiffness was gone. I dressed more easily than I had for days, only feeling a twinge when I pulled the heavy wool sweater over my head. Before going down to breakfast I reassembled the Smith & Wesson and loaded it. I didn’t expect Bledsoe to jump me in front of the entire crew of the Lucella Wieser, but if he did the gun wasn’t going to do me much good with the barrel unattached to the hammer.
I hadn’t had much appetite while my shoulder was in pain and I’d dropped five or six pounds. This morning I felt better and sat down to pecan waffles, sausages, strawberries, and coffee.
I was a latecomer in the little restaurant and the middle-aged waitress had time to talk. As she poured my second cup of coffee I asked her where I could rent a car. There was an Avis place in town, she said, but one of her sons had a couple of old cars he rented out if I didn’t need anything too fancy. I told her that would be fine as long as they had automatic transmissions, and she trotted off to call her son.
Roland Graham his name was, and he spoke with a Canadian accent, a lilting drawl that sounds as if it has a trace of Scots buried in it. His car was a ’75 Ford Fairmont, old but perfectly clean and respectable. I told him I’d only need it until the next morning. The fee, payable in advance in cash, was thirty dollars.
The Holiday Inn was in the heart of town. Across the street was the largest Presbyterian church I’ve ever seen. A modern city hall faced the motel, but the street behind us had a lot of run-down stores and premises to let. As I got down to the waterfront the stores gave way rapidly to bars and girlie joints. I’ve often wondered whether seamen really have the primitive appetites port towns attribute to them, or whether they go to sleazy joints because that’s the only thing the locals offer.
Finding the Lucella turned out to be a larger problem than I’d anticipated. Thunder Bay is an enormous port, even though the town itself doesn’t have more than a hundred thousand people in it. But much of the grain shipped by water in North America passes through that port heading east and south, and the lakefront includes mile upon mile of towering elevators.
My first thought had been to stop in at each elevator to see if the Lucella was docked there, but the miles of towers made that seem like a waste of time. I did go into the yard of the first one I came to. After bumping around the mud-filled ruts, I found a tiny, green-sided office. But a harassed man inside handling the phone assured me that he didn’t have the foggiest idea of where the Lucella was; he only knew she wasn’t there.
I went back into the town and found the local newspaper. As I’d hoped, it listed the ships that were in port and where they were. The Lucella was docked at Elevator 67, the Manitoba Grain Co-op.