Collected Short Stories: Volume III

  Reese, who did maintenance and odd jobs at the motel, first met her at the clothing boutique over by the amusement park where she worked. The store sold souvenirs, cheap jewelry and sweatshirts with tacky slogans like:

  If you think I'm an asshole,

  You should meet my parents!

  "What's that?" Cassie gestured toward a card table littered with scraps of lined paper.

  "I'm writing the great American novel." He tried to sound cavalier, but the tone was decidedly apologetic.

  Cassie pointed to a wastepaper basket brimming over with crumpled sheets. "Doesn't look like the project is going so hot." She lay back on the unmade single bed throwing her fleshy arms up over her head. "Maybe you need a break to stimulate your brain… get the creative juices flowing."

  Reese didn't think the woman had his literary needs in mind when she used the word 'stimulate'. She was so blasé about sex that he wasn't quite sure how to react. "Writers need compelling plots and dynamic characters," he noted. "Unfortunately, I've got neither."

  Cassie pursed her lips suggestively. "I'm an interesting character."

  Reese smirked inwardly. How often had a flamboyant, fictional character like Cassie Moffat caused a minor insurrection, by running amok with a plot line he was struggling to write? More often than not, the Cassie Moffat characters proved more intriguing, and irresistible than the one-dimensional stick figures that populated his writing. Reese glanced at the clock. "You can't stay here."

  "And why not?"

  "The boss doesn't allow guests. I could lose my job."

  "And where’s the tight-ass boss right now?"

  "She lives over in East Biddeford."

  "Does she ever stop by this late at night?"

  "Not unless there's an emergency."

  Cassie rose up on her elbows. In one deft motion, as though she had practiced the lewd maneuver a thousand times, the girl pulled her maroon halter, what little there was of it, up over her head. Lying back down, she reached out with both hands, beckoning for him to come and lie on top of her. Strangely, there was no great sense of urgency, the gesture being more perfunctory then wanton.

  "If I take the rest of my clothes off, does that qualify as a bona fide emergency?" Reese eased down on the mattress and began kissing the side of her neck. Working the button free, he wriggled her dungaree shorts down around her knees. "Now that's better." A hand came up around the back of his neck. "You can always return to the great American novel first thing in the morning."

  Actually, he wouldn't return to the writing for another sixteen hours. One of the housekeepers, a Russian girl visiting on a temporary work visa became homesick and had to be sent away. Along with his regular chores, Reese was now cleaning rooms and changing linen until the boss could hire and train a replacement - not that he felt any great compulsion to share the Scenic View Inn housekeeping agenda with Cassie Moffat.

  "About your literary masterpiece…" It was two-thirty in the morning. Cassie pulled her sweaty body away. The claustrophobic room was never intended as an accommodation, and now, even in the middle of the night, the temperature hovered around a steamy eighty-five degrees.

  "There is no literary masterpiece," Reese explained. "I write a few pages, throw them away and start from scratch."

  Cassie plucked a crumpled sheet from the floor and began smoothing the paper with the heel of her hand. The cursive script ran to the bottom of the page but was illegible, every word eradicated by a blunt pencil. "How long has this been going on?" When there was no immediate reply, she drummed her fingers on his chest then gestured with a wag of her head in the direction of the wastepaper basket. "Your scribbling… you agonize then throw it in the trash and start over. It's no different than what I do." Cassie's lips parted in a roguish smile.

  "Your logic eludes me." He wanted to kiss her again but resisted the urge.

  "The D Street Projects where I grew up is a lovely working-class, Irish-American neighborhood," she said. The tone was self-mocking.

  "Yes, I know. You already told me." Cassie moved up to Maine from the Dorchester Heights, West Ninth Street section of South Boston. The federal government tried to integrate Boston's public schools back in the nineteen seventies by bussing underprivileged black students in from the nearby ghettos of Roxbury and Dorchester, but that didn't go over so well. Many of the schools in 'Southie' were atrocious, far worse than those in the poorest Negro sections!

  "Half the goddamn tenants are underemployed; the rest draw welfare checks or deal drugs. Nothing ever changes. I came to Maine looking for something… I don't know what."

  "Tabula rasa," Reese offered.

  "What the hell does that mean?"

  "It's a Latin expression. You wipe a slate clean then start from scratch."

  Cassie nodded. "Yeah, that sounds about right. Every time I sleep with some Prince Charming wannabe, it's like you with your writing. The romance fizzles. I shrug it off and start over again."

  Reese considered the mixed metaphor but let it slide. "So where’s it get you?

  A guttural sound welled up in her throat. Cassie leaned forward, her sweaty breasts coming to rest on his chest. "That part I haven't figured out yet." “Your literary masterpiece,” she deflected the conversation elsewhere, “what’s it about?”

  “Historical romance,” Reese responded vaguely.

  “Which tells me nothing.”

  In a pond bordering the rear of the motel a chorus of bullfrogs filled out the bass tones in an a cappella choir of crickets and assorted nocturnal creatures. “The plot takes place in colonial times.”

  With a flick of her stubby neck Cassie indicated the discarded pages scattered about the room. “Judging by the number of failed attempts, you might do better picking a topic you actually know something about.”

  Reese felt the urge to argue the point, but his usually nimble brain balked, his thoughts congealing in a gooey mass. The hour was late and he felt too exhausted to match wits with this infuriating night owl. “If you were in my predicament, what would you write about?” he finally managed. “What’s your area of expertise?”

  Cassie laughed sharply making a gruff, snorting noise through her nose. She jutted her jaw, glanced at him impudently before rolling over and lying supine. “Rats… I have more than a passing familiarity with the filthy rodents.” She nuzzled his ear playfully with her lips. “When I was nine years old, I spotted a hairy bruiser with a leathery tail out in the snow. It was the day before Christmas, and I almost peed my panties.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Not much… just nosing around the garbage bin with his pointy snout searching for food.”

  Outside in the Maine darkness the atonal cacophony off bullfrogs and crickets continued without letup. “A noise must have startled the rodent, because he skittered off down the alleyway in zigzag fashion. The heavy tail cut a deep furrow in the snow from the garbage bin to the alley.” Cassie blew out her cheeks. “It was ugly as sin!”

  “What else,” Reese pressed. “What else do you know that’s worth writing about?”

  “My brother, Jack worked nights at O’Malley’s Pub. The dive was just down the street from where we lived, and I used to bring him dinner when he worked late.”

  As she described it, O’Malley’s was a shabby affair. The bar stunk of stale beer, pretzels and cigar smoke. For many of its regular patron bathing was a luxury at best. In the rear booth a cluster of elderly regulars played dominoes well into the night, nursing their watery drinks and ignoring the more fractious characters. Cassie shook her head fitfully and the corners of her lips drooped in a decidedly bitter smile. “The clientele was mostly local yokels, a handful of winos and assorted riffraff.”

  “Jack doubled as bouncer. Some nights when things got too rowdy, he’d grab a troublemaker like so.” She formed a tight fist with her left hand, palm facing down, then made a similar fist with her other hand, palm up. “He’d grab the offending party by the collar and seat of the
pants and rush him out the door at a gallop.” Cassie made a motion of heaving a heavy object up in the air. “By closing he’d tossed a dozen stumblebums out in the street.”

  A humid breeze snaked through the room but did nothing to relieve the oppressive warmth. A tractor trailer lumbered passed the motel in the direction of the amusement park and carnival rides. "I know it's late,” Reese prompted, “but you're gonna have to leave."

  "Yeah, the East Biddeford biddy." Cassie rose up on her hands and knees straddling him. Her full breasts hung down like udders. "I'm the town slut, you know."

  "Don't say that!"

  "Well it's true." She rolled over on her back again. "What are you doing in the fall?"

  "Studying at Boston College."

  A sliver of light from the rear window sluiced across the room, outlining her Rubenesque body in silhouette. "The snooty, Ivy League professors are going to teach you how to write like Shakespeare?"

  "More like Raymond Carver," Reese corrected.

  "Never heard of him." Cassie smelled of rancid sweat and some equally pungent musk oil she slopped on like deodorant. She wasn't bright, had no class whatsoever. But Reese felt drawn to her. For no good reason and, against his better judgment, he had a soft spot for the chunky girl with the questionable morals.

  "Raymond Carver…he publishes in the New Yorker. Everybody wants to write like Raymond Carver."

  She reached down and flicked his limp genitals playfully with a poised thumb and forefinger. "And what about Reese Donaldson - does he want to write like Raymond Carter?"

  "Carver," he corrected, "and, no, not particularly."

  In the neighborhood around the motel the foot traffic had grown quiet. All the vacationers were bedded down for the night. A solitary light burned in the main office where the night clerk was hunkered down watching late-night TV or playing video games. "You can't stay the night," he repeated a bit more forcefully. Cassie clearly was in no hurry to leave the Scenic View Inn. Reese, who had been drifting into a netherworld of sleepiness, lifted up on his elbows. “I'm giving you the bum's rush. You got to go home now."

  Cassie crawled off the side of the bed and threw her clothes on in less than a minute. Then she came back and kissed him on the lips in that breezy, unhurried, infuriatingly distracted manner that made Reese's head spin and let herself out without another word.

  * * * * *

  In the morning, Mrs. Fitch, the owner of the Scenic View, stopped by Reese's room before breakfast. "Another Russian's flown the coop… ran off with a Canadian guests." She was a dour woman, emaciated with pale skin and platinum-colored hair so light that it made her look as though she had gone prematurely white at forty-five. "For the next week or two, I need you to clean rooms full time. My daughter, Felicia, will be helping out until we set things right."

  Set things right… Did that mean sending away for more Slavic girls on work visas or would she try her luck with the Cassie Moffats of the world? Reese wasn't sure which was the lesser of two evils.

  "What's with the mess?" She gestured at the overflowing wastepaper basket.

  The question caught Reese off guard. "I'm trying to write something."

  "Which tells me nothing at all." The tone was abrasive - tactless and dismissive all in the same breath.

  "Creative fiction."

  "And how's that going?"

  "Not well."

  She glanced about the room in a distracted manner. Mrs. Fitch was always rushing off to impromptu staff meetings or cloistered away in the office with motel suppliers. "Why don't you use a computer?"

  "I don't own one."

  "Well, at any rate," the older woman noted shifting gears, "until further notice, you’re working housekeeping with Felicia. My daughter has a list of rooms to be cleaned first. Also, the pullout sofa in suite seven is broken and needs replacing." Without bothering to say goodbye, she spun around on her heels and rushed off.

  Mrs. Fitch’s daughter, Felicia, who was married and had a young son, was nothing like her mother, neither physically nor in temperament. Tall and lanky, she wore dark-framed glasses. A mop of jet black hair was styled in a page boy. The girl's face was pleasant, but the economical features seemed thrown together in such haphazard fashion that there was nothing terribly distinctive.

  Between the relentless heat and drudgery of cleaning dirty apartments, the day proved brutal. They vacuumed beach sand off forty-three rugs, changed upwards of a seventy-five beds and hauled away a mountain of soiled linen. Another housekeeping crew, what remained of the Russians, was working its way towards Reese and Felicia from the opposite end of the motel.

  A strange thought occurred to Reese. The shrimpy Russian girl with the pallid complexion had run off with a Canuck, a French Canadian from the Province of Quebec. If the star-crossed lovers left Maine and crossed over into Canada, then the girl's legal status was now in jeopardy. What would she do in a few short weeks when the temporary work visa expired and she was supposed to fly home?

  Reese and Felicia finished work late into afternoon and then a scheduling glitch surfaced. The receptionist inadvertently placed a newly-arrived party of five in the room with the damaged pullout sofa. When they opened the bed the bottom portion flopped down on the floor like a maimed animal. Reese had to scare up a replacement sofa from a vacant room. By the time he switched furniture, the sun had dropped below the horizon.

  "Come with me." It was the insufferable Mrs. Fitch gesturing imperiously with a crooked index finger.

  "I'm off-duty," he muttered.

  "This won't take long." Without elaboration the gaunt woman hurried off. In the rear of the motel was a storage shed. Mrs. Fitch undid the security bolt and threw the double doors open. A heap of broken computers lay in a corner along with an Epson, continuous feed, dot matrix printer and mishmash of decrepit furniture that even the Salvation Army would have rejected. Further toward the rear and nesting on top of rusting propane tank was a black laptop computer.” The woman grabbed the device and thrust it into Reese's arms. "It's an older IBM Thinkpad model… Window's Millennium edition. You can't run Microsoft Office on it, because the operating system is too primitive." The gaunt woman averted her eyes as she spoke. "But it contains a decent word processing software with spell-check."

  "I can borrow it?"

  "Keep it," the older woman said harshly as though delivering a reprimand rather than a gift. Scurrying back out of the shed, she fixed the padlock in place. "It's yours to keep," she repeated with such brutal finality, that Reese didn't quite know whether to thank the woman or ask what was behind her uncharacteristic generosity.

  * * * * *

  Three days later, the nightmare began.

  Reese woke up Sunday morning with blotchy yellow stains soiling the front of his jockey shorts. Reaching out tentatively with a poised finger, he tapped the moist cloth. "Cripes!" There were two ugly blotches, one to the right and the other directly below his male member. It wasn't urine. He never dribbled or wet himself during the night. Reese examined his privates. A viscous, yellow discharge was oozing from the tip of his penis, but he felt no discomfort. Maybe it was just a strain from lifting the sofa bed the previous day. As a precaution, he washed his privates with soap - not just any soap but an antibacterial, Phisohex scrub that the office provided the housecleaning staff.

  When he peed earlier, Reese had noticed a dull burning sensation, but the urine passed freely and the discomfort went away almost immediately. Funny, he mused, how a person never gave his body a second thought when it functioned properly. He could go days without even being marginally aware of the unassuming appendage languishing unappreciated between his legs.

  There was a knock at the door. "Reese, are you there?" Felicia asked. "I'm going to Len Libby's to buy chocolate, if you want to come along for the drive." Len Libby's was a famous tourist attraction on route one a few miles up the road in Scarborough. Back in 1997, the owner of the candy store commissioned an artist to fashion a seventeen hundred
pound, life-size moose. Sculpted from milk chocolate, the antlered beast was constructed on site in four weeks. From when they opened the doors at nine a.m. until closing, the store ran a video showing visitors how the chocolaty animal came to life.

  "Yeah, just give me a second." Now what? He would need to change underwear and switch to heavy dungarees just in case the unthinkable happened. But then maybe it was all in his head. Reese felt himself. No, everything was perfectly dry now. False alarm! It was just a strain.

  "I almost forgot to tell you," Felicia blurted as they pulled out of the Scenic View parking lot. "A girl, Cassie Moffat, came by to see you last night, but you were out."

  Reese cringed. "Was there any message?"

  "No, but she's stopping by again later today."

  At Len Libby's a clerk was handing out samples of homemade fudge. Felicia grabbed a piece but Reese waved the salesgirl off. "She had a very nice way about her."

  "Who did?" he replied absently.

  "That girl who came to see you. She has the loveliest smile!" Reese shrugged. Cassie Moffat certainly had a very engaging way about her, the lovely smile quite possibly her greatest asset. "Is she your girlfriend?"

  "What's that?" Reese couldn't organize his thoughts for more than two seconds back to back.

  "The Moffat girl… are you dating?"

  "Not in this lifetime." Felicia stared at him confusedly but let the matter drop.

  Len Libby featured dark chocolate prepared with pure butter and heavy creams. The display case held a huge selection of truffles stuffed with real fruit. There was marzipan honey almond, pecan buds, butterscotch squares, peanut brittle and a butter cream concoction laced with brown sugar. The girl behind the counter recommended the toffee molasses chips and Bordeaux dark nougat. Felicia bought an assortment of chocolates, taffy and fudge.