by Jake Hinkson
I limped up to the bungalow and threw open the door. Easing inside, I called, “Amberly?”
The bungalow answered back with empty silence. Still, I limped through each room just to be sure. Nothing.
Back in the den, I peeked out the window at the office. The lights were still on, but no one seemed to be eavesdropping at the door. I didn’t know if Delmer and the old woman had heard our fight, but if they had they didn’t seem to care.
I plopped down in a chair and poured myself another drink. I felt like hell. I wanted to drown that hell in booze until the fire went out.
She’d come back. What choice did she have? There was nothing out there, for God’s sake. Just nothing at all.
I drank the rotgut like it was some kind of penance. I lay my head back and tried not to think.
But I did think. I thought of the women I’d known. There had been many. Some sad, some happy, some disturbed and lost and alone. I’d drifted through their lives and they had drifted through mine. Had I meant anything to them? Jesus, had they meant anything to me? Were we all just victims of each other? Or were none of us victims? I liked that idea better. It went down well. Yes, no one is really a victim.
I had another drink to celebrate, and I rubbed my throbbing knee.
“Amberly,” I said to the empty room.
Hollywood. I had to go back there and turn in the car and the film stock. And then I was on the streets. Me and Amberly were on the streets, if she came back. Would she? She had to. Where could she go? There was nothing out there but the Goddamn desert. She would come back and I would say I was sorry and that she was more beautiful than Ingrid Bergman and funnier than Carole Lombard and she could sing better than Judy Garland. If she would just come back I would tell her all of that.
I stumbled to the door and opened it and looked out at the courtyard. I closed the door and had another drink.
I had tried fooling around with a man once. It was like kissing a horse. I thought he was going to eat my face. And as for the sex – it was like trying to get that same horse to tap dance.
The first time I ever kissed a woman my whole body shook with fear, fear of a good kind. The kind of fear that comes from daring to hope in spite of all the reasons not to hope.
“Amberly …” I moaned.
She had to come back. She had nowhere to go. She had nowhere to go.
I sat up. Delmer or the old lady, one of them had said there was a town. Of course, Brittle Rock. Yes, she went to Brittle Rock.
One more drink and I was in the car. I lit a cigarette to keep me awake.
The headlights barreled through the night, dust swarming around the car like bees, a high pitched whistle coming through some dent in the car.
White figure. Amberly. Road. Swerve.
Thump.
Brakes.
I stumbled out and the dust swept over me.
No.
But she wasn’t there. I searched. Blinking in the cold, the car motor running.
I yelled her name into the darkness. I limped back down the road, calling her name.
Nothing.
She had to come back.
I called her name.
Nothing.
~ ~ ~
I woke up the next morning and leaned out of the car and vomited into the dirt. Then I stumbled out of the car and tried to stand up straight. The sun had already risen, flooding the sky with light and flooding my eyeballs until they threatened to burst.
I held onto the sides of my head like the whole thing might come apart.
I was in the desert, off the road somewhere. Ugly brush and cacti poked through the craggy dirt and rocks. I shut my eyes and tried to think.
Amberly.
I opened my eyes and ran to the front of the car.
Nothing. No blood. No new dent or shattered glass. Just dirt and grime from the road.
I almost cried at that. I got back into the car and started the engine and pulled away from my resting spot toward what I thought might be the general direction of the road.
I found it within a few minutes, and I went south, back toward the motor lodge. I’d driven for perhaps half a mile when I saw her on the side of the road.
She was laying in the ditch, down a gentle slope from the road. If you weren’t looking in that exact spot at that exact moment it would be easy to miss her. I suppose some part of me was looking, some part of me knew where I would find her.
She lay flat on her back, still unblemished from the sun or insects, the ends of the scarf floating up like wisps of white smoke. A thin layer of dirt dusted her hair and skin, but aside from a single wad of red blood in her left nostril, she looked peaceful and composed, as if she’d stopped for a rest. I almost said her name, but I didn’t.
Her eyes were closed, as if she’d been struck by the car and then crawled into the ditch to lay down and die.
I sat on a rock. I did not cry. I thought I would. I thought I should. But there were no tears in me.
I stood up and looked both ways down the road. It was early yet, but soon people would pass by and they would see her.
Unless I moved her.
Chapter Eighteen
I was miles away before I began to think. There was so much I did not want to think about. About the grave I had dug under the rising sun. About digging in the hard red earth with the lid of a film canister, digging and digging until my fingers bled and the canister was bent to hell. About the way the desert seemed to reject the offering I made it, refusing to let me penetrate the land more than a few inches down. About the shallow grave, miles away from the road, where I laid Amberly down and wrapped her head in the scarf and covered her in dirt and rocks. I did not want to think about her lying there, alone and unknown.
I did not want to think about going back to the Days And Nights Motor Lodge, about showering in the room, about watching the dirt from Amberly’s grave run down the drain with the blood from my hands. I did not want to think about the story I told Delmer and the old woman about Amberly at the café having breakfast. I did not want to think about the fake laughter I had to muster at some stupid joke from Delmer as I said goodbye.
I did not want to think about any of it.
Instead, I drove. I drove just to get away from what I’d done, to put miles between me and the dead woman lying in her lonely desert grave.
But I saw death everywhere now. Eventually I had to stop to eat, and at a restaurant in Arizona I looked down at my plate and realized that everything on it was dead. Plants and animals had been plucked and slaughtered and I was feasting on the corpses of once living things.
The men and women I saw at the other tables, the children I saw playing in front of the courthouse as I walked back to my car, all of them would die, would rot in the earth like Amberly and would one day be as unknown as if they’d never lived at all.
The history of the world was the history of death. It was the end result of every life. It was the end result of life itself. We’d just come through a war that had killed millions of people and for what? So that we could wake up one morning to find that we might all die in an atomic fire from the sky. And if the fire didn’t fall, if we managed to avoid that fate indefinitely, what of it? Annihilation only lay a little further down the road. We’re all born to die.
~ ~ ~
Exhausted, I stopped somewhere in California and bought a bottle and drank myself into unconsciousness in a cheap hotel room. I awoke hours later in the dark and stumbled to the washroom down the hall and drank water from the faucet. I threw up. I drank more water. Then I fell asleep on the floor.
Daylight came and I bought another bottle. I drank it. I passed out. I woke up and drank water. I ate some food. I bought another bottle and some cigarettes. I drank and smoked. I passed out.
I woke up in the dark. A man and a woman fought outside under a lamp. The woman said the man was a bum. The man said the woman was a whore. Someone up the street yelled down that they were both right. People laughed. The woman began t
o cry. I drank what was left of the bottle and passed out.
Daylight again. I threw up. I drank water. I hobbled to the liquor store. Closed. I waited until it opened. Children stared at me while their mothers averted their eyes. The store opened. The man there called me sweetheart and tried to talk me out of buying another bottle. I railed against fascism and the destruction wrought by cruel men. I claimed to have been a nurse in the war, to have held dying men as they cried for their mothers. I demanded a bottle for the memory of those young men. The man sold me the bottle and told me to never come back.
I climbed the stairs to my room. I drank. I passed out.
Sometime in the early evening, a skinny young man came to the door. He had a plump red pimple on the tip of his nose, like a tiny clown nose. He told me I had to pay more money or leave. I told him I did not have any more money. He told me I had to leave. I told him he could have sex with me if he let me stay. He got mad and said he was a Christian Scientist and that I would have to leave immediately.
My brain seemed to be trying to force its way out of my head as I gathered my things and stumbled out to the car.
I drove to the next town and pulled up to a roller skating rink. The place was packed with families and couples and youngsters. I walked around. Leaning against the rink in her skates, a chubby young woman wore jeans and a red checkered work shirt. I walked up to her and said hello.
She looked me up and down without saying hello. Finally, she asked me if I had a cigarette. I gave her one.
I asked her name. She told me her name was Samantha but that her friends called her Sammy. I asked if we were friends.
As I did, an older man came up. Tall and thin, with dark, sunken eyes, he looked like a mortician. He asked me why I was talking to his daughter. I said I was just saying hello. He told me to scram. I told him to fuck off. He turned red and started shouting. People were looking at me now. I told them all to fuck off. The police came. I slugged one. They dropped me on the ground and put cuffs on me.
They threw me in the women’s drunk tank with three other misunderstood ladies. One was black, and the other two were Mexicans. The Mexican girls weren’t together. No one said anything. We all sat in different corners. We were in there for a couple of hours, but then a big ruckus started. There had been some kind of free-for-all at one of the honky-tonks in town, and the police needed overflow for the men. Me and the other broads were all booted out and told to go home and dry out.
I walked two miles back to my car, got in, and drove home to Los Angeles.
~ ~ ~
I parked in the garage, and the night man – a friendly fellow named Leroy – was polishing one of the cars. Leroy would polish up a car for two bits, and just about everyone who lived in the Chateau Michel paid him to do so. As a result, the man was always polishing a car. I don’t think I’d ever seen him without a rag in his hand.
As I pulled into my spot, he walked over.
I’d just opened my door when he said, “Howdy, Miss Dixon. Back from your trip?”
“What?”
“Your trip to…” he stopped to look me over. He was a middle-aged man with an alcoholic pallor to his skin that I’d never noticed before. “You been drinking, miss?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. It was so forward, it stunned me a little.
He smiled. “Sorry if that seems like an abrupt question. You just don’t look so swell. And you…well, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you smell pretty strong of whiskey.”
“You thirsty, Leroy? You want some?”
It was the first time I’d ever snapped at him, and he shrunk back a little, aware now that he’d overstepped. He put up his hands. “I’m just concerned is all. Didn’t mean anything by it. Just came over to see if you wanted me to wash your car.”
I stared at my car. The rolling instrument of death was filthy, caked in dirt and mud.
“No,” I said. “You just leave it alone. I like it this way.”
“Okay,” he said. “I hope you have a pleasant evening.”
I nodded and he backed away, returning to whatever sweet simplicity is found in wiping down hubcaps.
I left my luggage in the car and rode up the escalator. It hummed quietly. When it released me onto my floor, I was happy to find that my neighbors didn’t appear to be home. I walked to my door and dug out my key. I unlocked it and stepped inside.
The first thing I noticed was that there was no mail piled up. The second thing I noticed was that Lucy and Eustace Harington were standing in my den.
Part Three:
The Woman From Arkansas
Winter, 1947
Chapter Nineteen
Lucy wore jeans, boots, and a blue checkered shirt. Her hair was pinned back. Her hands were at her sides.
“Eustace, go stand by the door,” she said.
Eustace moved much more quickly than I would have thought. In a couple of steps, he was beside me, his hand easing the door shut. He didn’t crowd me, but he smelled of old sweat.
I just stood there looking up at him. Finally I said, “Howdy, Eustace.”
He grinned and nodded at me and then looked to his sister for guidance.
“Want to sit down, Billie?” Lucy asked. “You’ve had a long ride.”
“So have you,” I said.
She grinned. “We’ve been here a little while. You took the long way home.”
“Yeah,” I said. I walked into my apartment. It felt very distant from me. The furniture, the pictures on the wall – none of it seemed like it belonged to me. It was odd, but at that moment somehow the only part of the apartment that felt familiar were the Haringtons.
I walked past her to the window. “Actually, I don’t feel like sitting down,” I said. “I’ve been sitting for hours.”
I looked down on some trees below my window.
Lucy waited. For a while, the only sound in the apartment was Eustace breathing through his mouth.
I said, “I don’t suppose you’re on vacation.”
“No.”
“Just came to visit Hollywood and decided to drop in and see me?”
“No.”
“Why are you here then?”
“We’re here to take you back to Stock’s Settlement to stand trial for the murder of Obadiah Henshaw.”
I nodded. “Yeah. That will be a bit of a problem since you can’t arrest me in California.”
“I didn’t say we were going to arrest you, Billie. I said we were going to bring you back.”
I turned around and felt the cool glass of the window against my back. “That’s kidnapping, Lucy. From this spot where we’re standing all the way to the Arkansas state line, you’re just kidnapping me.”
She shook her head, smiling. “You’re giving us too much jurisdiction, Billie. Eustace is just the sheriff of Connor County. We won’t be on legal ground until we hit the county line.”
“But you still think you can do it?”
“We didn’t drive all the way to Los Angeles to see the palm trees. Which are very lovely, by the way. We’ve had quite a remarkable journey.”
I walked over to the couch and sat down. My head throbbed and my body was depleted. All I really wanted to do was go back to sleep.
“You look bad,” Lucy said.
“You know, you’re the second person to tell me that in the last few minutes.”
“Who was the other?”
“The night man in the garage.”
“Not Amberly?”
I let that sink in. I looked up at her. “I haven’t seen Amberly since I left Arkansas.”
“Is that a fact?”
She walked over and sat down on the divan across from me. She looked natural in the jeans, but she still crossed her legs in a ladylike fashion.
“You’re not as inconspicuous as you think, Billie. Two women travelling alone on Route 66. Driving a big car. Amberly is very pretty. People notice her. You’re also pretty in your way, and you wear pants. It draws attention. People
make note. People remember. A waitress. A motor lodge owner.”
I stared at her. My head hurt worse. I rubbed my temples. Eustace hadn’t moved from beside the door, and I could hear him breathing behind me.
“I didn’t murder Obadiah Henshaw,” I said.
Lucy looked at the space between us as if she were watching my words float in the air like fairies. “I see,” she said. “Well, you sure did take a long time to say that. Instead, you went right to the ‘you can’t arrest me’ defense.”
“They already held an inquest and said I killed him on accident.”
“They’ve changed their minds.”
“How did that happen?”
“I changed their minds.”
“Why?”
“Because I know you killed him.”
“How?”
Lucy pondered the purpose of my question. I saw her debating whether or not she wanted to show me all her cards yet. I suppose she came to the conclusion that it couldn’t do any harm, because she said, “After you left with Amberly, the whole town started talking. It was a mistake, Billie. Of all the things you could have done, you chose the very worst one. You ran off with the preacher’s wife.” She shook her head. “I must admit, I was stunned. When I heard – when old Mrs. Whittle from the church came to the office to tell me – I just sat there with my mouth open. The thing that stunned me the most is that you would be so brazen about it. That’s almost the greater sin in the eyes of the good people of our town. To kill a man and steal his wife, that’s a sin as old as David and Bathsheba. Granted, you put your own feminine spin on the story, but it was doing it so audaciously…that’s the thing people won’t forgive.”
I leaned back into the cushions of my couch, shut my eyes and rubbed my temples. “I’m sorry you’re offended, Lucy.”
“The thing that offends me is that you murdered a man.”