The Motel Life

by Willy Vlautin

  ‘It sounds boring as hell.’

  ‘I ain’t really listening.’

  He sat up. ‘Put on that Willie Nelson tape, will you? I hate when they talk on the radio. I got that song “Railroad Lady” stuck in my head again.’

  I sat up and turned on the inside light. I found the tape, put it in, and turned the light back off.

  ‘You think there’s wolves out here?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s a few mountain lions, I bet, but all the ranchers, they shot the wolves years ago.’

  ‘What about coyotes?’

  ‘I bet there’s some.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll see them.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said.

  ‘I think the only thing that will get me back to sleep is beer.’

  I reached over to the floorboards and took a beer from the sack and handed it back to him.

  ‘I just started getting antsy,’ I said. ‘I felt like I had to wake you.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said and opened the can. ‘You know what I was thinking about just before I fell asleep?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘How when you started writing those letters to the horse track in Del Mar, the track near San Diego. How you wrote them asking if you and I could have jobs down there. That we’d work for free if they’d give us a room to live in. Dear Sir, we’re only fifteen and seventeen and we’ve never seen a horse outside a parking lot, a rodeo, or a TV, but if you let us stay in a stall we’ll work for free. You could feed us too if that’s all right, or we could just eat at the concession stand. If you chose the concession stand we’ll need a few bucks or some food vouchers or we can just eat the old hot dogs.’

  Jerry Lee busted up laughing.

  ‘Shit,’ I said and sat up. ‘How did you remember that?’

  ‘Just came to me.’

  ‘I wrote those assholes every week. Them and Santa Anita, but I figured if Del Mar took us, then we could go to the beach. Maybe learn how to surf or scuba dive.’

  ‘Can you imagine if they would have written back? We’d be down in San Diego right now instead of out here in the boonies.’

  ‘I should have lied a bit more,’ I said, and in the darkness I was smiling. ‘I wrote them all year long. Maybe something like forty letters.’

  ‘The horse track, Jesus.’

  ‘It wasn’t that bad an idea,’ I said.

  ‘No, it was a good idea, it was a real great idea,’ he said. His voice still light and easy. ‘It was one of the best ideas I’ve ever heard.’

  5

  I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING and got sick out the driver’s side window. The car was covered in snow and the wind was howling, blowing snow in flurries, and at times it was almost as bad as a white out.

  ‘That ain’t much of a wake-up call,’ Jerry Lee said when he heard me.

  ‘You got chains?’ I asked him and laid back down on my sleeping bag.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Jesus, it’s snowing. Holy hell. If I do they’d probably be in the trunk, but I don’t drive when it snows so I don’t know for sure.’

  ‘I hate driving at all,’ I said.

  ‘When it starts falling,’ Jerry Lee said, ‘I walk. I don’t trust people, you’d be crazy to. Most don’t know how to drive, and then you add snow and it’s a goddamn mess. If it snowed all the time, say like you’re in Michigan or Alaska, then it’d be different. I guess I’d trust people then. But it doesn’t. Ice is worse. I just stay home if there’s ice. I won’t even walk on the sidewalk.’

  I started the Dodge and turned the heater on. I set my pants next to the floor vent, and put them on when they had warmed. Then I put on my shoes and my coat and got out and wiped the snow off the windows. We were parked on top of a hill overlooking a valley. I checked the trunk and there were no chains, nor a jack or even a tire iron. I walked down the road a while to see how it was, and the snow was deep, maybe a foot. I wasn’t sure we could get back to the highway even if we had chains.

  For a time I ate snow and looked down into a gully. The cool air and the snow helped calm my stomach, and all around me the snow was new and untouched, with no tracks coming or going. As I stared off I saw a deer appear maybe a half a mile away on the top of another ridge. I’d never seen one in the wild before. I’ve seen them dead on the highway, and on TV, but never like that.

  As it got closer I could see it didn’t have any horns and it was really quite small, maybe it was just a young one or baby. It began running down a gully about a hundred yards from where I was. It was quick and ran effortlessly, and just seeing it seemed to ease my mind in a way I didn’t understand. I watched it for a long while until it turned up a hill and finally disappeared into the distance.

  I walked back to the car and got in.

  ‘The woods could be all right for us,’ I told him. I found a pre- made turkey sandwich and began trying to eat it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said from his sleeping bag. His voice was raw and cracked and I could tell he’d been crying again.

  ‘Maybe we should move out to the woods. Rent a cabin or something. Nothing weird happens out here. Nothing like a kid getting hit by a car.’

  Jerry Lee sat up. He found a beer at his feet and opened it. ‘Jesus, I don’t want to think about that, not right now. Don’t bring it up. And about the woods, there’s nothing to do out here, and what’s worse is all those kids that get their arms chopped off in farm machinery. They end up driving around town with their feet. Trees fall on people, chain saws and things like that. Horrible things happen in the woods, believe me. How about those families that get murdered out in the woods? Bears, rodents, snakes, and more bugs than anywhere else in the world, crazed Vietnam vets, hillbillies.’

  ‘It ain’t like that,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ he said and coughed. ‘You mind putting in that Willie Nelson tape?’

  ‘We been listening to it all night.’

  ‘We got to do something,’ he said.

  I put the tape back in and turned the sound down low.

  ‘What’s different about the woods is that there’s no people.’

  ‘You got a point there,’ Jerry Lee said. ‘But let’s get the hell out of here anyway. You might like it, but it’s starting to give me the fucking creeps.’

  ‘I got to sit here for a while before I do anything,’ I told him and closed my eyes.

  ‘You know what I was thinking about last night? I was thinking about when we lived at the Sandman,’ I said a while later, after my stomach had settled.

  ‘Oh hell,’ Jerry Lee said and sighed. ‘That place was horrible. That was the second place we stayed at, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was the third,’ I said and looked out the window. I saw a small black bird trying to fly in the wind all alone. It was a strange sight seeing it out there in the middle of a storm surrounded by the white of the snow.

  ‘Man,’ Jerry Lee said, ‘with that couple next door, yelling and screaming all the time, and then they’d just fuck, and you’d hear them night after night banging against the wall. And that drunk Indian from Fallon who would beat on our door in the middle of the night thinking it was his room. “Where’s my fucking key, who’s got my fucking key!” And the fucking smell of that place. I hated the smell of that place. I hated that place more than anything or anywhere.’

  ‘At least the Indian bought us beer.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s something, I guess, but I hated it all the same. Having to go to work at that warehouse and then come home to that. It was my first job after the Connelly brothers.’ Jerry Lee sat up again. ‘Jesus, Frank, I can’t keep talking like this or I’m gonna kill myself. Let’s just get out of here, maybe go find a place to eat some breakfast. Bacon and eggs or French toast. Even a waffle and coffee would do.’

  I put the car in reverse and eased us backwards down the snow- covered dirt road. I was too uncertain to stop or turn around. The wheels spun some, but the snow was dry and somehow there was enough traction to k
eep us going.

  ‘I knew we’d make it,’ Jerry Lee said and smiled when I put us on Highway 95.

  ‘I didn’t think we would.’

  ‘I couldn’t see us getting stuck. When I pictured it in my mind it didn’t fit. We ain’t gonna get caught up that easy. It’ll be something else, but it won’t be like this.’

  6

  ‘IT WAS LIKE THAT, Frank, I swear it was. Just like that, out the blue. Out of nowhere. Everything was fine, I knew what I was doing. I was scared about the snow so I was barely going twenty and then the next second everything goes to hell. If Polly Flynn hadn’t burned my pants, I probably would have stayed the night with her. If she hadn’t burned my pants we wouldn’t be here. Can you imagine that? Just her burning those pants killed a kid. Jesus, I hope they found him all right.’

  ‘Someone found him.’

  ‘Why couldn’t it have been that the kid hit me? I ain’t shit, maybe he was gonna be somebody.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I sure wish we had some Copenhagen,’ Jerry Lee said. ‘It always helps calm my nerves.’

  ‘I haven’t had a chew in almost a year.’

  ‘I still do sometimes when I’m drawing. I can chew all day and watch TV and draw.’

  ‘The only time I liked chewing was when I’d take a walk. At night. Walking through alleys or neighborhoods and chewing. Looking at all the houses and the people inside.’

  ‘Remember Larry Gardner?’

  ‘Yeah, that kid could chew a pack of Redman a day,’ I said.

  ‘He was like Clint Eastwood in that western.’

  ‘Outlaw Josie Wales?’

  ‘Yeah, that one. That guy could really chew,’ Jerry Lee said and took a drink from his beer. ‘He could do anything with it. But a guy like that, Clint, I mean, he’s got to look after his teeth. Movie stars they don’t do any of that shit. They got personal trainers teaching them how to chew, how to drive a car. Shit like that. Larry Gardner he’s the one that’s got that fucked-up arm, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s short,’ I told him. ‘They got a name for it, but I can’t remember it. It’s like you took a kid’s arm, a kid maybe three years old, and you put it on a man, a full-grown guy.’

  ‘Be hard to get by like that, I bet.’

  ‘It would be,’ I said. ‘I saw him not too long ago and he looked like hell. Saw him at the Bonanza. He worked in a warehouse. It was ten o’clock in the morning. He was drunk and smelled like he had slept in his clothes for a month. He said his shift started in an hour.’

  ‘Shit, that’s rough.’

  ‘I felt bad for him.’

  ‘Maybe we could be truck drivers.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind that.’

  ‘We could just stay on the road and never stop. They got those trucks with beds in them. They have them with TVs and fridges. And truck stops are like little cities now. They have them with movie theaters and barbershops and showers. You could just stay on the road and in truck stops. You wouldn’t have to live anywhere at all.’

  7

  THAT AFTERNOON WORE ON SLOWLY, and besides the occasional ranch, there was nothing but sagebrush and barren hills around us. Sometimes we’d go ten or twenty minutes without seeing another car. I had the old Dodge up to eighty and Jerry Lee got drunk and we fell into long spells of silence.

  As evening neared we started talking more and listening to the radio. We spoke about our father and how he himself had tried to get us all to leave town one night. The story was one our mother had told us, and although I remember little of it, Jerry Lee said he remembered it pretty well.

  I was young, maybe just five or so, when he came home in the middle of the night and woke our mother. He was frantic and loud and Jerry Lee turned on the small bedside light that sat between our two beds on an old milk crate and we listened.

  ‘What do you mean they have the car?’ she said.

  ‘They just do.’

  ‘We have the title,’ she added. ‘They can’t just take the car. We paid for it.’

  ‘I gave them the title, I had to.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Jimmy,’ she said and began crying. ‘If they have the car then why do we have to leave? It’s the only thing we have. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s worse than that. I’m still down over $8,000. The last few months have been killing me. I can’t live here anymore. I’ll kill myself if I do.’

  ‘We can’t just leave. All our things are here. Jerry Lee’s about to start school.’

  ‘Just pack your bags,’ he said and walked down the hall and opened our bedroom door.

  ‘We’re going on vacation tonight,’ he said and tried to smile. When you looked at him he looked a lot like my brother and me do today. Tall and thin with black hair and sad, hollowed-out blue eyes. He was a mechanic and even though it was the middle of the night he wore his gray work uniform. His hands were the only real distinguishing thing about his appearance. They were scarred and rough and bent from years of working on cars. He was always embarrassed by them. He’d worked full time since he was fifteen. First as a parts puller for an auto wrecker and then a few years later as a mechanic. He’d never done anything else.

  ‘Just put some clothes in a bag. I know it doesn’t make sense, but you got to do as I say. Be dressed and ready in a half-hour, and no talking. We got to be quiet,’ he said and left the room.

  By the time the cab came we were all sitting outside in the driveway of our small house. My mother sat on her suitcase and my father stood there, trying not to pay attention to her. The driver and my father loaded our things into the trunk and we drove to the Greyhound bus station.

  We stood in the rundown lobby surrounded by our luggage and my father talked to her about where to go. He began listing places to her in the most optimistic way he could.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ she said finally and stood up to him. ‘We can’t just leave, what’s that do for anyone? Can’t we just straighten everything out? I’ll meet with whoever you owe money to. I’ll set up a payment schedule and pay them myself.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said and shook his head.

  ‘Where are we gonna get money to leave on? I cut up the new credit card and we’re overdue on the rest.’

  ‘I have money,’ he said and took his wallet from his pants and showed her. ‘I borrowed it from Ray Porter.’

  ‘I’m not using Ray Porter’s money,’ she said. ‘Look, Jimmy, what kind of people are we if we just run? Really, what kind? We’ll get you help, we will, and we’ll pay everyone off. You just got to stop gambling. If we’re gonna make it you have to. We’ll get you some help.’ She went to him and put her arms around him.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘the diner here is open, let’s just go in and eat breakfast and talk about it. We’ll figure out what to do. We don’t have to just get on a bus. We don’t just have to run out like criminals.’

  She then picked up her bag and led us to the small diner. My father stood there and watched us slowly make our way across the lobby before he finally picked up his suitcase and followed.

  We all ate breakfast there at that diner and by the end my mother had my father smiling and talking and eventually we took a cab back to our house. It was just past dawn when we arrived and my father laid down on the couch for a quick nap while my mother began to get ready for work.

  That night in the bus station lay heavy on us as we drove down the highway. Neither of us said it, but we were both wishing we could have left that night, that if we had, then maybe everything would have been different, maybe we would have been different.

  8

  WE PULLED OVER in an abandoned campground later that night. The entrance had been plowed so we drove as far as we could, stopped where the road ended and the snow began, and slept in the car. In the morning we drove to a town called Council and bought gas and chains. The chains were over fifty dollars.

  It was snowing again by then, falling down hard, so I put them on in fr
ont of the gas station, and when I got us going I had to slow down to ten miles an hour. I couldn’t see much of anything at all.

  We made it to Riggens by five p.m. and decided we’d have to stop for the night. The weather was still going, and although we now had the chains, we didn’t want to risk the chance of going off the road and having to get the police or a tow truck to get us out.

  They had a store there that was open and we bought some beer and a loaf of bread and some lunchmeat. We pulled the car behind a closed auto shop and waited. There was no one around. I could barely see across the street it was snowing so much. Jerry Lee was in the back seat and I was in the front.

  ‘I think we’re getting close to running out of money,’ Jerry Lee said.

  ‘We still got over $150. I got fifty or so in my pocket, and there’s a hundred in the glove box.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  I looked at him in the rear view. ‘I don’t know if you should go back home.’

  ‘You think I should stay away?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Where would I go?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ve never really been anywhere.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘I guess I could go to Hawaii.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Lay on the beach and eat bananas and coconuts.’

  ‘Sounds all right,’ I said.

  ‘You know he didn’t even have a coat on. There it was snowing and I wasn’t wearing any pants and he wasn’t wearing a coat. Why wouldn’t he have had a coat on? That’s weird, isn’t it? Riding a bike in the goddamn snow with no coat on? You think it hurt him?’

  ‘You mean with the car?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I don’t know. If it did, it didn’t hurt long.’

  ‘I don’t know why I put him in the car. It was just instinct, I guess. I just wish it would have happened with people around. Maybe someone would have known what to do. I feel horrible about the kid, I really do. They’ll send me to prison now.’