Chapter 122

Rawle Powder flew that night to Edmonton, which took about three hours, and from there took a five-hour bus to Jasper.
When he arrived, it was midnight.
He was forced to sleep on a bench in the bus station until someone came around at 3 a.m. and told him to leave.
It was early spring almost, and it was warm in Jasper. He spent the rest of the night just walking around.
The town was located inside a National Park, which meant homeless people could be arrested and ticketed for ‘illegal camping.’
It was literally illegal to be homeless in Jasper.
On his first full day in town, Rawle hung out in a small park across the street from the train station, which locals called the Patch, since basically it was just a patch of grass in the centre of town.
It was a warm, sunny day for March and the park was full of hippy-types, all sitting around smoking joints and hanging out before work.
Rawle introduced himself to some of the kids that were smoking weed. He was hoping to track Kurtis through the marijuana trade. According to Dee Lee, Kurtis was not only a drug dealer, but a chronic pot smoker. If Rawle could find the right trade routes of marijuana and hash and possibly coke, in time, he would be led unerringly toward Kurtis Missions.
A young construction guy named Michael told him that, as far as he knew, a lot of the weed and coke in town was sold by a cabal of laundry workers at a nearby resort hotel called the Gonquin Inn, one of several hotels on the east end of town.
Rawle stashed his bag in a locker at the bus station and walked to the east side, which took about an hour.
It was early yet, but already the famous Jasper elk were coming down from the forest and wandering through the streets. Rawle had never seen anything like it. They looked like a cross between deer and moose, with gorgeous mahogany red fur. Only the doe’s were in town. The stags would come down later for mating season.
Rawle visited the front office at the Gonquin Inn and tried to get a job in the laundry department. After a quick interview, the laundry manager, a short, dyke-like woman said that the laudry was one of the first places to fill up. “I’m also the head of Housekeeping,” she said. “There’s a job there, if you’re interested.”
Rawle looked at her and blushed. “Are you serious?”
She was dead serious.
He accepted the job as a housekeeper, immediately.
It sounded like a terrible job, but it paid a whopping $12 an hour, which was big money to a Nova Scotian, plus it came with a room, a bed in the “staff-accom” in the basement of the hotel for $190 a month. A row of suites had been set aside in the hotel for staff, since apartments were so scarse.

Rawle went and got his bag from the bus station and moved into a small, grungy hotel room, filled with seven horny male and female teenagers from all across the Commonwealth, who had flocked to Jasper to live for the summer in the Rocky Mountains, sniff coke and jerk eachother off in hotel hot tubs.
The staff-accom was much like the dorms at Dalhousie where Rawle went to university.
Dirt and underwear grew like puffball mushrooms in the corners of the common room and kitchenette. Beer, hot-rock burns, cigarette ashes and the brie-cheese smell of male ejaculate drizzled the carpet and the atmosphere.
All the other “bed-bitches,” as the housekeepers called themselves, had been living together in the cramped staff-accom for a week already. From what Rawle could tell, they interchangeably porked eachother.