by Owen Thomas
I am an idiot. He lets go of Cait’s hand and turns to look at me. To regard in one blink all that I am and am not.
“I mean, you didn’t come out here to tell us a story about Naughty Dillon and his decommissioned police cruiser.”
Idiot. I deserve whatever I have coming.
“You don’t return phone calls.”
“Oh, shit… I’m… I’m sorry. I totally forgot.”
“MmmHmm. Well, we were out for a drive anyway. Thought we’d just drop on by.” He winks at Cait. “Remind you of basic etiquette.”
“I’ve been running all over the place today. Taking care of things.”
“MmmHmm.”
“And, you know, out on the town, skippin’ the lights fandango with CeeCee.”
I jerk my head towards Cait, not daring to look at her. Apparently I am not above the tactic of disingenuously suggesting that somehow my failure to return his phone call can be explained by romantic distraction. I have a teenager’s instinct for survival. Never mind that I am no longer a teenager. Never mind that Cait is not my girlfriend.
“Why… why did you call me?”
His face darkens, forehead almost folding in on itself. Fuck.
“You still on leave from work?”
“… yeah.”
“And that’s likely to continue?”
“Well… yeah. I guess so. Why…”
“I received a call yesterday…”
Shit. I was right. He is looking at Cait, hesitating.
“And it seems that someone – let’s just say a friend of mine – is having some difficulty with the police.”
The bottom drops out of my stomach and I can feel myself go pale. It is exactly as I had predicted and yet it feels like the last thing I had ever expected to hear him say. He may as well have said that I’m adopted. That my name is really Ishmael. His voice is measured. Calm. Which is how my father sounds after he has gotten a stranglehold on his emotions and has made up his mind about something. It is his tone of resolve. And yet he is trying to be delicate; trying not to reveal me as a criminal to Cait, this person in the decommissioned ambulance of unknown relation or interest. I am touched by his discretion; his discrimination. But my gratitude for his wholly unnecessary precaution is completely lost in the maelstrom of panic rising like water in my chest.
I glance at Cait, who sends me a sympathetic half-smile, wishing me luck. I want to scream to her to start the van as I dive in the back and slam the door. Go! Go! Go! As we lay rubber into the night leaving my father and his unspoken judgment on the driveway.
“The police?”
I sound vaguely concerned. Bewildered. Needing some inkling of personal relevance. I am an asshole, dissembling up to the last possible second, determined, apparently, to make this defining moment as awful and as damning as possible.
“MmmHmm.”
“What did… why? You mean like, Columbus police, or…”
“Phoenix.”
Full stop. My mouth opens, but there is no sound.
“It seems a friend of mine has gotten into some trouble. I need to go to Phoenix for a few days. Your mom’s still off… you know, doing her thing. I need someone to look after Ben. I thought that as long as you had time on your hands…”
“Uh… sure. Sure.”
“I could ask Martina Davis if it’s a problem.”
“Uh… no, no. I’m … happy to.”
“Good. Thanks. Let me get you some… while I’m thinking about it…”
He reaches into his back pocket and extracts his wallet and counts out six one hundred dollar bills. He folds them twice and hands them over. All I can do is stare.
“That should do it. Use what you need, keep the rest. Martina’s stayed with him before. She’s okay, I guess. Ben likes her. But she’s a little,” he returns his wallet to his pocket and then wobbles his hand in the air and wrinkles up his face. “I don’t know. Sometimes her judgment is a little… mmm… lacking.”
CHAPTER 58 – Hollis
Hollis stepped out of the restroom and back into the concourse thoroughfare pulling his bag behind him like a kid with a little black wagon. Sky Harbor Airport was nearly deserted, owing, he supposed, to the lateness of the hour. An empty moving walkway hummed along a bank of dark windows. He backtracked to the gate to the beginning of the walkway so that he could continue his day of travel without muscle movement just a little bit longer. In the course of a single plane ride, his muscles had atrophied the equivalent of six months on the couch. Seventeen hundred miles to Phoenix all on his ass and all he wanted to do now that he was off the plane was to sit down.
And eat. Sit down and eat.
The walkway finally folded back on itself, leaving him to tread on his own power across the glare of linoleum. He stopped outside a fast food concession, the only one he had encountered that was still open, thinking that maybe he should just get something to eat right here and right now. He had left Columbus distracted and in a great hurry, not particularly interested in taking time out for pedestrian concerns unrelated to the possibility of sexual gratification. Concerns like watering the plants and eating lunch.
An automated announcement, human and yet somehow robotic in the sterility of inflection, warned against leaving his bag unattended. Suddenly security conscious, Hollis reached behind and touched his back pocket. Instead of his wallet, he found only momentary panic, forgetting that at thirty-six thousand feet above Kansas City, where the soft calfskin had begun to feel like a pocket-sized chunk of granite boring into his left buttock, he had moved his billfold to the front zippered pouch of his carry-on.
He bent and retrieved the wallet and extracted a ten-dollar bill thinking that would be more than enough for a burger. Or a slice of pizza. Or a burrito. The picture signs above the service counter promised, if not quality or economy, at least variety. He did not care about quality or economy. He was too damn hungry.
He should have eaten lunch. He knew that now. But he had miscalculated the time and he had been rushed. In his mad dash for the airport, he had had time for one detour, and only one detour. He could have gone for the food, exiting the freeway to the west, for the street he liked to call Junk Food Alley. Or he could have exited east for the drugstore. He could not do both. In a last-second yank of the wheel, Hollis had opted for the drugstore, telling himself that he could always just eat something on the plane.
They would not, he knew, be handing out condoms on the plane. That much was certain. He could stave off the hunger until they were airborne, but the condoms…well, he just needed to be prepared. Not that he was actually planning for anything or hoping for anything – it was really a very silly thought, after all; nothing of serious consideration – but still, he may as well be … prepared. But again, really, that was just a bit of silliness. The drug store trip was really all about getting some decongestant, just in case the pressure changes messed with his sinuses – as had been known to happen. It was not primarily about condoms.
Of course, if there just happened to be condoms nearby well, then…
Hollis’ stomach growled. He stared across the concourse at the menu above the counter inside the little concession, immobilized by bad choices.
Condoms first, food later, he had decided. Stupidly. It might, conceivably, have been an appropriate ordering of priorities. It might have made sense, for instance, if there had been some realistic possibility of coitus with a fellow traveler at the ticket kiosk, or maybe with the TSA agent who had made him take off his shoes and empty his pockets. But none of that had happened. And now, as he stood hungrily contemplating a photo-array of the ten most wanted digestive criminals. The condoms could have waited.
For all of his trouble, he might have actually purchased the decongestant rather than carrying it around the drugstore. The descent into Phoenix had been bumpy and steep. His sinuses now felt compacted and his head hurt. And he was goddamned hungry. America West, as it turned out, did not serve any food on the seven-hour flight; unless one counts the eleven mic
ro-pretzels as food. He had been mistaken about the food. He had not been wrong about the condoms, since America West also did not dispense any prophylactics. So, while it was true that he was starving, it was also true that he was fully prepared for spontaneous penetrative sexual encounters. That he might have picked up condoms at either airport, or in the lobby of his hotel, or in a million other far more convenient places, was not a welcome realization and he chose to think of other things.
Hollis stood and stared motionless at the backlit menu. An over-weight, goateed, teenish-looking employee wearing a dirty yellow apron and a maroon cap stood behind the order counter, his eyes bleeding with boredom. He looked unflinchingly back at Hollis, standing in the middle of the linoleum stream, waiting to see if he might summon the courage to wade in across the threshold and actually order something.
A large party of travelers parted and passed around him, seven or eight of them on either side, like stream water flowing around a boulder. Someone’s foot connected with his bag. It was enough to break the spell.
Hollis turned and followed along behind the group, floating downstream away from the man-boy in the dirty apron whose eyes registered the rejection and who all-too-quickly resumed his life of quiet desperation.
He would eat something at the hotel, Hollis thought, suddenly more travel weary than hungry. He would order room service.
He navigated his way through the concourse to the car rental counter. There was no line. There were also no mid-size cars. He had reserved a mid-size car. He wanted a midsize car. The bookish woman with equine nose and the laminated identification badge around her neck was unmoved. She had a prescient face; arranging itself in a cascading series of expressions each precisely communicating that she had already heard whatever it was he was about to say, had already investigated it, talked with her superiors, called the home office, written to Congress, and had personally determined that there was no hope of making the accommodation he wanted.
She handed back his OFSC retiree discount card. His discount, she told him, applied only to compact units – she called them units – and, in any event, all of the mid-sized units were gone. He could pay extra for a minivan. They had minivans.
“Compact it is,” Hollis said, too tired to argue, and handed over his credit card. She pecked sharply at her keyboard, smiled efficiently, and then handed it back to him with a set of keys.
“It’s a nice silver Civic,” she said wrinkling her nose more than actually smiling. “I think you’ll find it works just fine.”
He followed her directions outside the terminal to the rental lot and threaded the rows of cars, looking for the parking slot number she had written in red pen across the paper folder that held his receipt, his rental contract and a map of the greater Phoenix area. Hollis found the car in its designated slot, parked neatly between two white mid-sized units. He no longer cared. He opened the back door and tossed in his bag.
He closed the door and looked around, stretching his arms and shoulders through the stiffness of the trip and the residual muscle pain of his first foray back into the world of physical fitness. He rolled his neck in slow circles. Outside the cave of orange light that defined the rental parking lot, the air was dark and as still as Buckeye Lake at midnight. It smelled warm and slightly sweet. The desert was invisible, but all around him a palpable presence; an ancient, xeric ocean. A memory of its opposite. He looked beyond the towering lights. A lunar scythe the color of bone had hooked itself into the sky; right into the cheek-flesh of the great black fish that had swallowed the world. God was still playing out the line. He was letting nature take us all the way to the silty, sandy bottom of the truth before He began working the reel.
With some difficulty, Hollis found the hotel. He checked in and went up to his room and took a long, hot shower. When he was done, he did not dress, but pulled back the covers on the bed and lay down and pondered the room service menu. He reached sideways and pulled the phone off the nightstand and set it on the bed next to his bare thighs and ordered a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich with a dinner salad, a side of macaroni and a carafe of Pinot Grigio. He hung up and returned the phone to the nightstand next to the remote control.
He lay still, listening. He felt his bones soften into the sheets and his limbs merge with the bed. His ears rang in silence, his body free-falling in the sudden absence of jet propulsion. Nothing moved. No one spoke. This was alone.
He picked up the remote and turned on the television. He cycled through the channels, seeing but not particularly watching all manner of news, weather and what was supposed to pass for entertainment. After several complete and rapid circuits, he slowed his pace and began to linger here and there; first over Tiger Woods who was uncharacteristically having to work his way out of the rough; then over the plight of an over-endowed female detective losing her moral bearings as an undercover hooker; then over an episode of M*A*S*H that he vaguely seemed to remember; then, finally, over the muddy carnage of a monster truck rally, an unfamiliar spectacle that was utterly beyond his comprehension.
When the knock at the door came, he was caught unprepared. He dropped the remote and scrambled around for clothing. At the second series of knocks, Hollis was in his black socks and his white undershirt and still looking for his pants. They were hanging where he had left them, from a hook on the inside of the open bathroom door. Unfortunately, this was not a place he had thought to look, just as he had not thought of looking inside the closet which, while not containing his pants, did contain a couple of nice bathrobes. The third series of sharp knocks forced him to improvise with a wet towel, the length of which was almost exactly the circumference of his waist.
The ensuing process of admitting the short-haired, pixie-faced bellhop, directing her to unpack his food onto the small round table by the window, calculating the tip, and signing his receipt, all had to be conducted, literally, single-handedly. The bellhop, a model of restraint in her little uniform, placed the receipt on the table so that he might be able sign it without having to let go of the towel.
She looked away, towards the blaring television, as he bent over the table. A semi-edentulous woman with mustard on her chin and beer spume on her lips drawled excitedly into the room about how great it would be if this was the year that Mighty Sasquatch actually took down Godzilla in the Hell Pit.
‘Cause that damn truck has got it comin’ I tell you that!
Hollis ate his food at the table in his socks and his undershirt, drinking his Pinot Grigio and watching Mighty Sasquatch lose itself in the mire, again. When he had finished, he slid the tray of mostly-eaten food out into the hall, took off his t-shirt and his socks, turned out the lights and went to bed. Several times he picked up the remote to turn off the television and just as many times he put the remote back down on the tangle of sheets. The closest he ever came to turning it off was to mute the sound. He closed his eyes to the flickering, flashing spectral glow. He lay still on the empty king – on the same side of the bed that he slept on at home – trying to identify the feeling in his chest.
He thought of Susan and then tried not to think of Susan and thought of Beth instead. He opened his eyes suddenly, in a shock, feeling the adrenaline like a spear of lightening, seeing her body in a flash of illumination and then losing her again, letting her skin fade into the ceiling pattern, dissolving in a wash of watery blue light.
He closed his eyes. He wondered where Minnie Watson was today. Tonight. This very instant. He wondered if she was still with Naughty Dillon. He wondered what might have been.
He tried to open his eyes. Just a crack. Just enough to check on the hooker with a badge. But his lids, like thick, wet burlap tarps, were suddenly too heavy. The remote was there, he could feel it, but the muscles in his arm and hand had turned to unresponsive gelatin. He could sense the bone-white hook of moon stuck in its black fleshy sky; could sense the dark, ancient fish swimming; could sense himself being carried… down, down, down, away from the bright surface of his life where everyt
hing was so clear.
* * *
Dawn had pulled a new day in over the sand and had set it up right outside the eastern windows of the Airport Sheraton. Hollis opened his eyes to a single cloud floating in a bright blue desert sky. A small cactus wren was chirping somewhere nearby, out of the frame, popping in and out of a steady river of traffic sounds from off in the distance. A low, rhythmic humming of a vacuum cleaner seeped through the wall behind him. A jet roared to life and quickly died away.
Hollis blinked and yawned and pushed himself into a seated position, propping himself up with his hands. Whatever emotional confusion he might have felt the night before, no doubt simply a symptom of fatigue, was now utterly gone. He felt refreshed. He felt light. He felt free.
He looked at the nightstand. Almost 10:30. He could not remember the last time he had slept so long. In another life, he might have felt a pang of regret about sleeping in – things to do, people to see. He might have judged himself for having let his standards drop, carelessly courting the leading edge of personal corruption. But not today. Not in this life. The feeling dissipated before it could coalesce into anything lasting.
He padded into the bathroom and shaved and then brushed his teeth, turning left and right as he did so to inspect his profile. He sucked his stomach up into his chest, pulling his shoulders back and pushing for the ceiling with the top of his head. He held out his penis, still soft and sleepy, resting it across the backs of his fingers. He turned to face the mirror and laid it on top of the vanity. Against the cool porcelain, it began to take on new life, pinking up and stretching out towards the water spilling from the faucet.
Like it wanted a drink.
He pulled on a fresh pair of khakis and a short-sleeved madras shirt and piled his old clothes in a heap on top of his carry-on, which he then pushed with his foot into the back of the closet. He closed the closet door and then fussed a little with the bedspread, which was mostly on the floor, and the sheer inner curtains, which had bunched up unattractively on top of the air conditioner. He turned and took a last, appraising look around the room. It would be better after the maid service, he thought. It would look better tonight. Grabbing his wallet and his keys, he stepped out into the hallway, flipped the plastic sign on the doorknob, and headed down to breakfast.