Burning Garbo

by Robert Eversz

  “Nothing worse than a lippy, pushy broad,” Ben finally said. “You scared the hell out of him.”

  “Any idea who he was?”

  “Pete had some brothers. Probably one of their brood.”

  “A nephew? But Pete died over forty years ago. The guy who came in here, he wasn’t even born yet.”

  “People around here hold grudges a long time. Forty years is nothing to a small town. People don’t have much else to do. Hating fills the time.”

  I said, “It seemed a little undignified, a man your age in a bar fight.”

  “Ten years ago I could have taken a guy like that down, no problem. Now, I don’t know. I still know the moves. I’m just too old to do them anymore. Your courage starts to waver when you get old, too. I’m not as flexible. My balance isn’t as good. Speed? Forget it. And my bones feel brittle. It’s a different thing, going into a fight knowing you’ll break something even if you take your opponent down. I got to admit, though, it took guts to take his picture like that. He could have hit you.”

  We drank to that and a dozen other things, Ben’s ramrod spine softening by the fifth drink and wilting completely by his tenth. When the bar emptied out, just past 2:00 A.M., he sat hunched over the dregs of his last drink, ready to call it a night, his ghosts forgotten. He’d outdrunk me two to one toward the end. I slid off the stool to walk him into the hotel lobby. I felt high more than drunk, my mind clear and thoughts lucid, even if my tongue thickened trying to express them and my feet moved less nimbly than my tongue. We shook hands solemnly at the steps, and I waited until he’d climbed halfway to the first floor before I decided he’d be okay. Nothing I could say or do would prevent the rigors of the following morning’s hangover, but I thought fresh air might do me some good, and so I pushed out the front doors of the Gadsden Hotel to work on walking a straight line.

  It had been some time since I’d been under an open desert sky at night. The marine air obscures the stars at the beach like a thick glass bowl, dulling the edges of the bright ones and blotting out the distant, dim ones entirely. The dry desert air puts nothing between the eye and the stars except space, and even that is black and lustrous and more alive than not. Every sector of the desert sky swarms with stars, bright clusters of flickering light small and large, distant and near, as though space was a ragged curtain thrown between this world and the vibrant, pulsating energy of another. I never believed in the image of God the Father, a fable allowed to those whose lives have been blessed by a decent and caring father who, no matter how demanding or stern, would protect good children who honored and obeyed. If I believed in any God at all, it was a God of light, and I wondered, as I roamed the streets of Douglas, my head tilted toward the stars, how differently I might believe if I had a less violent and capricious father, if my father had instead been someone like Ben. I did not idealize Ben. He was chased by demons, and I’d seen him blasted by guilt and self-doubt. But he believed in a code of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, of good people and bad, and the power of redemption to bridge the two. Like most decent beings he could love others as much as himself because he didn’t hold himself or his sufferings in such high regard. No matter how hard the world hit him or he hit himself, he got back to his feet, because he believed that strength of character was a prime virtue in the world, and though it might be wise and just at times to yield, the honorable never gave up. I never asked for a perfect father, but a tough and caring one might have made all the difference. Then I began to laugh, because that was like wanting to be six foot tall and pretty as a beauty queen; no amount of wanting would make it so. Wanting what I couldn’t have was the surest route to misery I knew.

  I made sure to drink three glasses of water from the bathroom sink before collapsing onto the covers. Alcohol dehydrates the body, making a bad hangover worse, and unless I’m too drunk to care, I make a point of downing several glasses after a night of drinking. What goes in must come out, and about two hours later it flushes through my system with enough force to lift me from the ruins of sleep. I was neither awake nor asleep when a scratching sound lured me toward consciousness. I thought at first that a rodent rustled in the hollow space within the walls, and not being the type to be afraid of rats, not even the two-legged kind, this didn’t much disturb me. The tick-tick-tick of something being picked at didn’t move about the room as a rodent might, and as I woke I pinpointed the sound not in the walls, but at the door. It was Ben, of course. We’d made fun of the ghosts rumored to roam the hotel at night, and he’d joked that the only way to see a ghost was to get drunk enough to believe that your best pal draped in a bedsheet was an apparition from the spirit world. He stood on the opposite side of the door, scratching the wood, in a drunken attempt to scare a laugh out of me.

  I knew I’d have to be quiet if I wanted to surprise him, and it took me a few moments, perched on the side of the bed and feeling the floor with my toes, to find my jeans. I slipped into them, buttoning just the top, and crept across the room, suppressing a laugh, because it was going to be funny when I snapped open the door and said, “Boo!” The doorknob turned as I approached. That wasn’t supposed to happen. My feet stilled as I leaned forward, listening. The door swung a wedge of light into the room when it opened. The figure slipping through the jamb preferred a black hood to a white sheet and carried a knife big enough to gut me at a stroke.

  The only weapon I had was my voice. I used it.

  I bolted forward as I screamed and rammed my shoulder into the wood above the lock. The door gave a foot and held, braced by the intruder’s body trapped against the frame. Something stung my upper arm and a violent shove from the other side of the door pushed me off balance. My legs skipped back, set, and fired forward again. The door shot closed against the jamb, my head whacked the wall, and I found myself a moment later on my knees, staring at the slice of hall light on the carpet. I pulled myself up and jerked open the door. Ben pounded down the hall, his red-checked boxer shorts flapping with each stride. Somebody tried to break into my room, I said. He pulled my hand away from my head to see how badly I was injured and asked whether I’d seen which direction he’d run. I answered with my feet.

  Adrenaline and momentum carried me down the first leg of stairs, but the knock I’d taken wobbled my legs. I slowed and grabbed the rail at the turns. Nothing stirred in the lobby, lights turned low in the hours between midnight and dawn. I jogged to the entrance. The desert air splashed cool against my face, bracing my senses. Nothing moved on the street or sidewalk either, the only sound that of car metal clicking as it contracted in the chill night air. I backed into the lobby, saw a hallway leading to the rear of the hotel, followed it past the kitchen entrance to a door that opened onto the parking lot. In the distance I heard a car accelerating at speed. I peered across the blacktop. He could still be out there, hiding behind one of the parked cars, but I wasn’t going to search for him, not in the dark and not in bare feet.

  The night clerk greeted me when I turned back into the lobby. He was a little man in a rumpled white shirt and slept-on-wrong hair. His smile was forced and his eyes groggy. “Did you see the ghost?” he asked.

  “Somebody tried to break into my room,” I said.

  The clerk chuckled. He was accustomed to drunken, terrified guests tearing through his hotel at three in the morning. “Did you hear strange noises, scratching at your door?” His eyes brightened, as though everything would be explained in just a moment.

  I turned to see Ben crossing the lobby. I must have moved faster than I’d thought. He was still in his boxers. “Get a towel, damn it!”

  The clerk blinked. He was expecting the usual explanation, the we-were-just-fooling, did-we-scare-you? of nights past. “What? Why a towel?”

  Ben gripped my arm like a tourniquet just below the shoulder. “Because the lady is bleeding on your floor,” he said.

  The cut took six stitches, administered by a sleepy-eyed ER doc who worked the needle through the wound with the speed and care of some
one lacing up a pair of shoes. The pain was a welcome respite from my head. Ben wasn’t feeling much better. He kept me company while the doc stitched my arm. We didn’t talk much. We felt too hungover, tired, and awful to talk.

  A sheriff deputy came into the emergency room while I worked out payment, Stetson in hand and cowboy boots clacking against the linoleum floor. The duty nurse greeted him by name, asked if he wanted a cup of coffee. He settled into the lobby furniture, balanced his pen and clipboard on the armrest to his right, and looking as comfortable as a man in his own living room, asked us what happened. The name on his badge read “Acuña.”

  I told him.

  “Did you remember to lock your door, ma’am? The doors at the Gadsden, it’s an old hotel, they don’t lock automatically. You forget to throw the bolt, anybody can just turn the knob, walk in.”

  “I turned the bolt,” I said.

  “Did you secure the chain?”

  I admitted that I hadn’t.

  “The Gadsden’s full up tonight, what I hear. Lots of folks in town for the funeral. Were you drinking much?” Acuña didn’t make it sound like an accusation. He was an easygoing guy. Likable. The graveyard shift had taught him that at four in the morning the simplest explanations worked the best. If he knew I was a paroled felon, he didn’t mention it.

  “Some,” I said.

  “If it was just some, you were one of the sober ones. I heard the bartender was kept hopping till closing time. Full hotel, lots of drinking, somebody might get confused which room is which, stumble into yours by mistake, don’t you think?”

  “He was wearing something black over his head.”

  “Get that a lot at the ghost hotel. You’d be surprised what people put over their heads, pretending to be a ghost.”

  “This ghost carried a knife.”

  “How much did you have to drink?”

  “Not so much I hallucinated this.” I lifted my arm.

  “That cut’s real enough, all right. But the hardware on those doors, it’s pretty old, some of the base plates have sharp edges.”

  “I don’t expect you to make an arrest. I’m the only one saw the guy, and I wouldn’t recognize him if he walked up to me on the street tomorrow morning. But I’d appreciate it if you’d take my statement without trying to make me admit to being a drunken fool.”

  Disappointment moved Acuña’s glance toward Ben and back to me. I don’t think my rejection of his version of events bothered him so much as the sharpness of my tone.

  “It’s been a tough night, Officer,” Ben said. “You want my two cents, I’d say somebody tried to break into her room, and she scared him away. But can’t prove that, so you’ll have to make your own call how to write it up.”

  Acuña said he’d do that. We all knew nothing could be done about what happened; we couldn’t even agree on the facts of what had happened. I thanked him for his trouble and wished him a safe night.

  Dawn was a welcome sight after two hours of fluorescent lights, the trailing edge of night flaring red over the distant Chiricahua Mountains. Ben drove cautiously, aware that the level of alcohol still circulating in his blood was not strictly legal. The taxi ranks in a town like Douglas were pretty thin at that hour, and neither of us wanted to walk. Cops break the law like everyone else, I’ve observed, but are less likely to be stupid about how they break it. When he pulled off the highway, he asked, “Think it was the same one broke into your apartment?”

  “Hope so. Hate to think I’ve got more than one person trying to break into the places I sleep.”

  “Doesn’t make sense though, does it?”

  “Why not?”

  “Why chase you all the way out here? Easier to kill you in L.A.”

  “Good point. Reassuring too.”

  I watched the corner of his mouth flicker, his way of smiling at gallows humor. He put his hand on my knee and squeezed it. “You get your dog back, you’ll be okay. He’ll protect you.”

  “Right. Somebody breaks in, he’ll gum them to death.”

  He parked in front of the hotel, stepped onto the street, and stretched. Morning slowly stirred in the bracing air, the town so quiet at that hour I could hear the booted clicks of a man walking to work on the sidewalk across the street. Ben was flying back to Los Angeles that morning, wouldn’t be able to sleep again until he boarded the plane in Tucson. “Something else.” He came around the hood of the car, stood with his hands in his hip pockets. “Don’t know if it’s important, but I’m the one reserved your room for you.”

  I opened my bag, pulled out my wallet. “I’ll go in and pay for it right now.”

  “I’m not afraid you’re going to stiff me. The point I’m making is that I reserved two rooms in my name; secured the reservation with my credit card.”

  I couldn’t reserve a room with a credit card because I didn’t have one. Ex-cons are bad credit risks. “Thanks for making the reservation, but I’ll pay for my own room.”

  He shook his head and rocked back on his heels, amused. “You still don’t get it.”

  “It’s been a long day, so forgive me if I’m a little slow.”

  “What makes you think he was after you?”

  “I see what you’re saying.” I closed my eyes, remembered how quickly the guy had backed out the door at the sound of my voice, “You think he was trying to break into your room, made a mistake?”

  “I’m the one with enemies in this town, not you,” he said.

  I looked forward to a sounder sleep, thinking Ben had been the target of the attack and not me. He’d be safe enough back in Los Angeles, and if he was right, I could enjoy the kind of sleep that lets you wake up at the end. I bolted and chained the door and wedged the back of a chair against the knob just to make sure. I banked six hours’ sleep before a firm and persistent knock woke me. I thought it was the maid and told her to go away. The knocking settled into a consistent rhythm. I stumbled to the door. Arlanda’s voice called my name. I pulled the chair from beneath the knob, turned the dead bolt, and unlatched the chain.

  “You just knocked me up,” I said.

  Arlanda laughed. “That must have been some dream. Sorry I woke you.”

  I let her into the room.

  “It’s an expression I learned from my English husband. It means when somebody wakes you by knocking.”

  “I get it. Knocked up, out of bed. Must have been interesting, being married to somebody from a foreign country. The only expression my husband taught me was Gimme another beer, bitch.”

  “Have you heard from him? Since your aunt died?”

  I left the bathroom door open so we could talk while I washed.

  “He called a couple times, talked to the boys. Wanted to talk to me, too, but I told him to go sit on a rattlesnake.”

  “You think he wants to come back to you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because you’re now one of the richest women in town.”

  Arlanda thought that was funny. “That’s like being called best looking in an ugly-dog contest. The woman who owns this hotel, she’s got some money, but that’s about it for Douglas. And me? Maybe I’ll see something in six months or so, but I haven’t quit the day job. I’m on lunch break right now. The kids are in school and Baby’s in the car. So put a little more speed on your toothbrush.”

  We ate in the hotel restaurant, El Conquistador, where the Spanish colonial decor was almost as heavy as the food. Word of the altercation in the Saddle and Spur had come to Arlanda from the friend of a friend, who’d been there drinking with somebody else’s boyfriend and seen it happen. That’s how news traveled in Douglas.

  “There are no secrets in a small town,” Arlanda said. “But what happened between Ben and Aunt Angela’s biological father, Pete, that’s as close to a secret as this town has ever had. I started hearing rumors about it in high school, about how Aunt Angela’s ‘real’ dad died. But nobody seemed to know for sure, and then I didn’t hear anything else until about five years ago,
after my youngest was born. That’s when a stranger showed up in town, asking questions of the old-timers.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Said he was a journalist at the time, or so I heard, but now I think he was somebody hired by Aunt Angela. People started to talk again.”

  “Why? What happened, it was a long time ago.”

  “What else do people have to talk about here? The weather? When it’s either hot or boiling hot and dry or bone-dry, you soon run out of conversation. Angela Doubleday was about the only thing people had to talk about. And Ben, he was the victim of that.”

  “People know what happened, then.”

  “Some do, some don’t, everybody gossips. But I think he has a point when he says the person who attacked you last night was looking for him. He has enemies here. You don’t.”

  “Troy Davies doesn’t like me much.”

  “Troy Davies doesn’t have a reason to attack you, not like that. He’s already going to inherit what’s left of my aunt’s money, the bastard. Wish I could hate him.” She laughed, her voice cracking on the high notes. “But he’s too damn cute.”

  “Your aunt seemed to think so, too.”

  “Good taste in men doesn’t run in the family. The fact that I think he’s cute doesn’t mean I trust him. If anything, makes me trust him less. If I stop to think about it, I mean, what a sleazebag. He drives for my aunt for a year? And he gets all her residuals? He’ll have money coming in for the rest of his life. The way he talks, they were artistic soul mates. You heard him talk about their so-called special relationship?”

  I nodded.

  “You know what I say?”

  I shook my head.