Suspicious River

  Mrs. Briggs hadn’t wanted to offer this special service at first, but then the cable company salesman appeared with his soft burgundy briefcase on a slow April afternoon of sleet and mud, and he showed Mrs. Briggs how much money she was likely to make. As it turned out, sixty percent of the guests were happy to have this entertainment option—though the televisions in their rooms were fifteen years old and the colors on the screen were brighter than life, hard to look at directly for very long. Lips turned flame red or hot pink, bleeding fuzzily into the screen, and each voice reverberated tinny through the sound grill, echoing like a loudspeaker in a cavern, turning all musical instruments to banjos.

  The couple from Ohio was watching Love Rides the Rails. It would be the same film shown over and over every night after 8 P.M. until October 22 and Hot Seat, when the faces would change, but, of course, the plot would stay the same.

  “Mommy, what are they doing?” their blond daughter screamed as if for her life when she opened the motel room door while Mom, Dad and Brother hauled their Samsonite from the station wagon up the long flight of concrete stairs behind her. Mrs. Briggs had to be called at home that night, and she’d been dead asleep. Her voice was full of phlegm when she answered the phone, and Millie’s future at the Swan Motel had been in limbo ever since.

  The phone rang then, and it was Rick.

  “Hey,” he said.

  I said, “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, I just thought you might want me to bring you some dinner over there. You forgot to take your sandwich.”

  His voice sounded far away—a bad connection. I could hear another conversation on the line taking place somewhere beyond his voice: a woman’s singsong rising and falling, telling a story, and I remembered a TV show I’d seen once when I was a child—was it Twilight Zone?—in which a ham radio in a man’s basement began one night to play a frantic wireless call for help from a soldier during the last bloody battle of a war that had ended forty years before.

  I wanted to listen to the voice in the distance, but Rick spoke up louder as if to block it out. “I could bring pizza, or I could just drop off the sack if you want.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll get a snack out of the vending machine and eat the sandwich when I get home.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “See you soon.”

  “See you.”

  He hung up while I was still listening for the woman’s singsong again. I heard a man laugh vaguely, and the woman, muffled, seem to say, “Jesus!” before the line was cut.

  A PHOTOGRAPH taken of my mother before she died: She wears a sleeveless white dress. A trellis of pink roses, puffy and soft as pneumonia in the late summer haze, twists and struggles behind her. Her hair is dark and down to her shoulders. A slight breeze seems to sift the loose curls lightly. There’s even a glimpse of the sky beyond her—muted blue, a fading Kodak color that looks nothing like real sky.

  My mother has just opened her mouth to say a word, and her mouth is frozen in the shape of a spoon. Silence is all that comes out.

  Over the years I come to believe, like a child, that my mother is saying my name in that aborted breath, her pink mouth matching the roses behind her:

  “Leila.”

  There it is.

  There it is, I want to believe for a long time: my name flashed forever on a glossy square of radium paper. My mother speaking to me from oblivion. But as I get older I imagine instead that what comes out of her open mouth in the moment of this snapshot is a long sweet howl like a hungry cat. Not interrupted. Even by death. A long, round sound like train brakes screeching into infinity.

  But animal.

  A hungry cat outside a white door about to be closed.

  “Smith,” he said, “Gary.”

  Sure enough, it wasn’t in the ledger.

  I looked up at him. His smile was a flinch on one side of his face—a smirk, a wink—sexy, I thought, experimental. He smoked a cigarette and the smoke weaved around his head like a web, the way an egg white, cracked, swirls and rises in a glass of water. Then he started to cough, rattling and wet, and he said through it, eyebrows raised in a question, “You don’t got my reservation?”

  “No,” I apologized, “but it’s O.K. We have plenty of empty rooms.”

  Luckily he didn’t seem to care. Some people will get upset that you don’t have their names even if the whole motel is empty. They’ll stand around fretting long after you’ve checked them in, room key safely in their hands, wanting to know exactly what went wrong, looking as if some piece of themselves had been lost, like a greasy playing card disappeared from the deck without which the game could not go on. It seemed to be proof to them of an insecure universe, proof that they might barely even exist if they didn’t insist on it. I’d want to comfort them, to say It’s just Millie, she writes nothing down, but I couldn’t.

  “I called last Saturday,” he said. “Morning.”

  His leather jacket was thin, a starched white shirt under it, and there was rain on the shoulders and the slick sleeves. He was small, but nice-looking. Thin. His hair was brown and short, wavy—sparse on top, and he had a scruffy beard that might have been new, accidental, or both. He scratched at that stubble as if to make sure it was still on his chin.

  “Hmm,” I said, looking at the open book again, though I knew his name wouldn’t be in it—Saturday morning, Millie’s shift. “Well,” I said, trying to change the subject, “Fortunately it’s not a problem at all. How many nights?”

  “One for now,” he said, and I noticed his accent then. East Texas. Or Tennessee. And thick. A little like humidity between us.

  I took a check-in card out of the drawer under the adding machine and began writing the date on it, then Smith, Gary. He flipped his wallet open onto the counter and handed me his Visa—small slice of plastic silver like a homemade knife. But the name on it was Jensen, Gary.

  I glanced back then at the guest book, still open on the counter. And there it was, in Millie’s handwriting—Jensen, G.

  He’d lit another cigarette and leaned, smoking it, with his elbow on the counter. He was watching me write. I picked his credit card up off the counter between us with fingernails painted shell pink, and ran it. A long string of numbers and Jensen, Gary—smudged and permanent imprint on a piece of paper.

  I wrote $60.00 under Payment. $2.40 under Tax. $62.40 under Total. Then I turned the paper toward him and watched as he signed his name: Gary W. Jensen. Then he looked up.

  “Forgot my own name,” he laughed. “Forgot I wasn’t gonna use the credit card, and then I forgot whether or not I’d put the reservation in my real name. Sneaky guy, huh?” He tugged on his shirt collar and smiled. “Guess you caught me,” he said. His eyes were brown and clear. Forty, I guessed. He smelled like soap mixed up with smoke.

  “Guess so,” I said, and I held his eyes in silence until he started to look nervous.

  It works every time. They think they’re bigger than you, bigger than some girl behind a motel counter, that God made them that way. But if you don’t flinch, and it’s sex that’s being negotiated, they wither under it like a hot light and start to sweat.

  “Well.” He looked behind him, and I could see the inch of neck exposed between his hair and the collar of his coat. The skin looked just shaved, a bit naked, scraped. There was no one behind him, and he looked back at me with his eyebrows raised and his face seeming younger for a moment than forty, with a teenage boy’s shy deception, charming and inept, and he said, “Reason for all the shenanigans is I was looking for a girl my buddy told me about. In addition to needing a room, of course. You wouldn’t happen to be her?”

  I leaned forward, wrist close to his fingertips. “Might be,” I said, singsong.

  He cleared his throat and straightened a bit. His voice was scratched. “So, I guess you know where my room is, don’t you?”

  I reached under the counter then and took 42 off the rack of plastic hooks and tossed it to him gently acr
oss the counter. It landed at his elbow.

  “42,” I said.

  Maybe he looked worried then, like a man in a restaurant who wasn’t sure how to eat what he’d ordered for dinner.

  Here’s your flaming rack of lamb, sir, I might have said.

  I could see him swallow. He had the cigarette burning a small orange eye in one hand and with the other he smoothed the thin brown hairs on top of his head.

  “How much?” He opened his eyes wider when he asked it.

  “Sixty.”

  “Now?”

  “I’ll give you some time to get settled in your room, Mr. Smith,” I said, teasing him, feeling powerful and innocent as a child lying straight to your face.

  He forced a smile, but it wasn’t easy for him.

  As he was leaving, I could see he was wearing blond cowboy boots, his nearly new blue jeans tight around the ankles. The boots made a sharp sound on the linoleum, and the bells on the office door jingled tinny and cheap as he stepped out.

  There are different kinds of men, I thought then, but not many different kinds. There are men who aren’t as strong as they think they are, trying all the time to prove something. And there are men who are stronger than they think they are, trying all the time to prove something. It all adds up to the same thing in the end, until all men seem the same. But, I thought, Gary W. Jensen Smith looked like a man who was stronger than he thought he was, though he would never find it out for himself. He had the body of a boy—and the boots, the leather jacket, the jeans. Rascal, I imagined his mother saying under her breath about him until he turned forty and was still a boy.

  When I left, I set a plastic sign on the front desk that said RECEPTIONIST WILL BE RIGHT BACK.

  The rain had stopped, but it was dark. Only five o’clock. But the days were getting shorter, and this one had been dark to start. The air was damp, and it gave me a chill that began in my hair and crept down my back as I stepped over the puddles of rain, which were shallow and swirled with peacock colors from old oil. They smelled like tarnish, like the inside of an empty tin can. Iodine, or was it indigo, in the dusk.

  A cool steam rose ghostly from the hoods of the few parked cars, and I thought the silver Thunderbird must be his. Nice. Florida plates. I passed it on my way to 42 and touched the hood briefly with the palm of my hand. It was warmed from within, like an electric blanket, or a big cat.

  The metal railing vibrated, and it felt solid, heavy, but hollow under my hand as I walked up the stairs. Mrs. Briggs had hired a blond high school boy the summer before to paint it aqua blue, and the paint had already begun to peel, leaving ovals of rust like elbow patches where the smooth gloss was gone. My shoes were red—they matched my purse, back in the office, but they looked too bright to me on my feet that evening against the gray slab stairs.

  Gary Jensen’s door was open about an inch.

  This is common. Maybe they’re afraid you won’t wait if the door is closed tight and locked, but they don’t want to leave it gaping open either, especially in the evening, especially if it’s damp. I knocked.

  The week before, I’d walked in, and the man was already naked. Hard. Pumping his thing with one hand, a little plastic glass of whiskey and ice in the other. A big celebration. He must have wanted to shock or impress me, I thought, but he did neither. I just wondered to myself how it was I hadn’t noticed that he was fat back in the office, and bald. Maybe he’d been wearing a hat, I couldn’t remember. I just looked at him, blank. His own expression was wide-eyed and full of crazy hope. When I sighed, he frowned and stopped pumping. He put his drink down on the chest of drawers. When I held out my hand for the money, he said, “What?”

  “The money,” I said.

  His jaw dropped a bit and then he covered himself up with a towel—suddenly shy—while he fished through the pockets of his black pants, which were laid out carefully on the bed, to find the money for me.

  “Here.” He shoved the three twenties toward me like a disgruntled tenant. He wouldn’t look at me.

  I didn’t ask him what he wanted, just got on my knees and took it in my mouth. He whimpered when he came but never touched me. His arms were straight down at his sides, fists gripping and ungripping nothing, and I kept the soft cash in my own left hand the whole time.

  Remembering him, I wondered if that man might have been Gary W. Jensen’s buddy, the one who’d told him about me.

  Probably not.

  Maybe the trucker from Milwaukee. He’d left real happy and said he’d send his friends.

  “Come in.” Friendly.

  Gary W. wasn’t undressed, though it seemed to me he’d changed his shirt. This shirt was starched stiff and light blue. Hadn’t the other one been white? He was sitting on the edge of the bed, smiling, a bottle of Rolling Rock in his hand, and now that he had his leather jacket off, I could see that his shoulders were no wider than my own. He was only a few inches taller, couldn’t even have weighed much more, but he looked solid, scrappy—a thin tough man.

  “Here,” he said, holding the green bottle toward me. I saw another one, then, between his knees, and I thought he must have mistaken this for some kind of date—strangers getting to know each other better, something like that. But that’s not what this was about.

  “I can’t,” I said, gesturing behind me, “I’m working.”

  He started to laugh at that. His eyes were true brown. “Oh,” he said. “You can come up here and give blow jobs to total strangers, but they won’t let you drink a beer.”

  It wasn’t angry, the way he said it, just honest—pointing out a contradiction, sharing an absurdity. I wasn’t offended. I laughed, too. I liked his smirk, his accent, which seemed sarcastic, consciously a little stupid.

  “Well,” he stood up and put the two bottles of beer on the dressing table, which was blond and shiny, made of wood pulp and sawdust pressed into boards—fake, like everything in the motel room. The drywall was smooth and freshly painted, and the partition that separated the bathroom from the rest of the room was covered with metallic wallpaper that reflected the light from the window. It all seemed identically, eternally, fresh and sterile from room to room.

  He hadn’t closed the curtains.

  “Well, here.” He fished through the pockets of his jeans and handed me the money politely, then stood facing me, seeming happy, not nervous at all, just excited in a shrugging, boyish way.

  I looked at the money in my hand. Two twenties. Two tens. I slipped my foot out of my shoe and bent a bit to slip the bills in under my heel.

  The slap surprised me as I was standing up again, lifting my eyes back toward him.

  We were both still smiling.

  Just the flat surface of his hand made contact with my face, and it knocked me off balance. He stood in the same place, looking.

  I hadn’t wanted to gasp, but I knew I had by the way he laughed, that smirk, at my shocked face. It stung. It must’ve gone very red, burning, or drywall white. Then he hit me again, leaning into it more deeply this time, taking a step toward me as if he were pitching a baseball game, and then he pulled me forward onto the floor, onto my back.

  I closed my eyes and heard a jet pass over the Swan Motel. Someone going somewhere fast. It took him a long time, a lot of scrambling, to get my skirt up and himself between my legs, and after he did, he kept one hand pressed at my neck the whole time, one on my wrist. I opened my eyes, and he stared into them while I stared out. It didn’t hurt at all, though I supposed from the look on his face that he was hoping it would.

  Gary Jensen lowered himself over me until the side of his jaw was against my mouth, and I could feel the sparse dark beard, a bit of sweat beading between the whiskers. I could have bitten him then, but I closed my eyes again instead.

  I supposed he was hoping I’d fight, or whimper. But I wouldn’t: Smelling his neck I realized without surprise that I’d been wrong about what he was, completely wrong—the skin there smelled like boots. And whatever he’d expected of me, I wanted him to hav
e the opposite of it, too. For instance, what’s the point of hurting someone who doesn’t mind being hurt?

  I only worried about the curtains being open. I worried someone might be waiting at the front desk for me. There were six other guests on their way to the Swan Motel in the fog and tinny drizzle that night, if Millie’s calculations were anything close to correct.

  But the office was empty when I got back.

  I slipped the sixty dollars out of my shoe and into my red purse behind the counter. The bills were warm and moist from my skin. Maybe I counted them one more time before I put the purse down again, beside my jacket.

  SHE SOBS, “You don’t love me.”

  My father turns his palms up helpless and empty toward her—a salesman with nothing to. sell. “I do,” he says. “Bonnie, I just don’t like you flirting with my brother, that’s all. What’s wrong with me saying that one thing? I’m not even mad.”

  She buries her face in her hands, then turns to the wall.

  “Bonnie, I love you.” He presses up against her back, slips his arms around her waist, kisses her black hair. “Bonnie.”

  His hands shake when she’s angry.

  He’s tall and thin as a scarecrow.

  My mother turns on him fast, and I can see her lips are dead pale pink. “Get the hell away from me,” she screams, going toward his face with her fingernails, “Get the fuck away from me,” slapping, clawing.

  He crosses his arms over his forehead and ducks—a man in a shirt with gray stripes like a prisoner’s uniform, pursued by a large bird.

  Feathers, claws, shadows.

  We are in the kitchen, which smells warm and salty as a ham, and I’m still small enough to crawl into the cupboard under the sink.