An elderly man in an embarrassing hat and plaid Bermuda shorts nodded at him in greeting on his way out to the patio.
I was misinformed.
The desk clerks were all cute, though. Three young women obviously chosen for their smiles and sex appeal who exuded the sort of professional demeanor that he found very attractive. The one taking care of him—Tammy, according to her name tag—offered to give him a tour of the resort after presenting him with the keys to his room, but he could think of nothing more pointless and he declined, asking instead for a map so he could find the room himself.
His car was parked out front, but, map in hand, he walked onto the patio and started down the steps that led to the swimming pool, attempting to get the lay of the land. He glanced down at the humongous pool with its fake mountain, waterfall and slide, then around at the perfectly maintained desert landscaping.
The Shining.
He didn’t know what made him think of that. This long low Ape City conglomeration of buildings bore absolutely no resemblance to the single epic-scaled structure of the Kubrick film. But the vibe was there, that lurking sense of dread, like a low-level hum, and not for the first time he wished that he wrote for Rolling Stone or New Times or some other countercultural publication so he’d be able to incorporate his impressions and experiences in a virtuosic gonzo piece that deconstructed not only the film festival but his entire Arizona trip, instead of turning in the staid linear article required by a mass-market daily.
He paused halfway down the steps. There was something about this place that made him supremely uneasy . . . but he liked it. Suddenly the thought of spending the next few nights way out here in the middle of nowhere didn’t seem quite so boring. Feeling better, almost cheery, he bounded back up the steps and through the lobby, declining the staff’s offers of help as he made his way out to the rental car.
The first thing Patrick did when he entered his room was to crank down the thermostat to sixty. The second thing was to check over the television listings to make sure he had some type of movie channel like HBO or Showtime. To his surprise, he had both—as well as IFC and Sundance. Apparently, the place wasn’t as culturally barren as he thought.
He didn’t bother to unpack but simply put his suitcase on top of the low dresser and opened it. This first day was his, there were no film festival events scheduled, so he put on his bathing suit, grabbed a Premiere magazine, his cell phone and a V8 from the minibar, and headed out to the pool. Taking a towel from the cart next to the gated entrance, he spread it out on one of the lounge chairs. To his left was a family of four, all rubbing each others’ backs with suntan lotion and talking loudly. To his right, a pair of middle-aged women raked their MIA husbands over the coals. The view across the width of the pool was of several elderly couples, their chairs pushed close together.
He wasn’t in the mood to strike up a conversation with any of these people or interact with them in any way, so he pulled his lounge chair back a few feet so that it was not aligned with anyone else’s, and sat down silently, not meeting anyone’s gaze. He closed his eyes, leaned back. From hidden loudspeakers issued a familiar song at a refreshingly audible level. The Sundays. It was followed by Jill Sobule. Darden Smith. Downy Mildew. Suzanne Vega. Alternafolkpop from the early 1990s. He loved those songs, but he hadn’t heard them for a long time and listening to them now made him feel unaccountably sad. He had loved the music of that time, the music of his college years, but all of those groups and singers had fallen by the wayside, not lived up to their potential, and the excitement of hearing something new and different and alive had turned to a melancholy nostalgia for a musical future that had not come to pass. It was an indication of how shallow he was that if he could go back in time he would not avert tragedies or prevent horrific political disasters but would work to ensure that the music of that era grew into the cultural juggernaut it should have been.
Politics changed. Art lasted.
It was why he was a film critic instead of a White House correspondent. Well, that and the fact that he had absolutely no aptitude for or interest in government affairs or current events.
His cell phone rang. It was Townsend, checking on him. The editor gave him a quick rundown of the day’s events back in the real world, then said, “So,” and he could almost hear the man’s smile. “How’s The Reata? The joint jumping? I tried to find you a hotel as close to the hub of Tucson’s nightlife as I could—”
“Oh fuck you,” Patrick told him.
“That man said a bad word!”
Patrick looked to his left and saw a towheaded boy pointing at him in shock.
“Hey!” the boy’s father said angrily. “There are kids here, mister!”
Townsend was still chattering away on the other end of the line, but Patrick ignored him and held up his hand in apology to the father, a beefy bellicose man who looked like he could have been a lumberjack or a trucker.
“Why did that man say a bad word?” the boy asked.
“Because he’s a fairy,” the man answered, looking purposely at Patrick.
Patrick didn’t know what to say, didn’t know whether he should even try to defend himself. He had used foul language within earshot of children, and while back in Chicago that would not have rated even a raised eyebrow, here it was obviously an egregious faux pas. He glanced about him and suddenly discovered that this little contretemps was the focus of attention for nearly all of the guests around the pool. Mothers and fathers were glaring at him, two teenaged bathing beauties looked at him with disgust. A group of young boys were whispering and giggling.
“I’ll call you back later,” he said to Townsend, and clicked off the phone.
He faced the father, sporting what he hoped was an appropriate look of contrition. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was talking to my boss and I got so caught up in it that I forgot other people could hear what I was saying.”
“Yeah?”
“I wasn’t thinking,” Patrick said, knowing he should give it up but unable to walk away. “I apologize.”
He was hoping for an acceptance of his apology, some sort of absolution, but the man just stared at him angrily.
Why should he even care what this Neanderthal thought? Fairy? What the hell was this, the 1950s? He had a lot of gay friends, and he’d never felt embarrassed about being seen with them or worried about being mistaken as one of them during one of their frequent nights out. He didn’t care if someone did think he was gay.
But surprisingly, shockingly, he didn’t want any of the people here at the pool to think he was anything but heterosexual. For some unexplainable reason, he cared about the opinions of his fellow guests—and not just because he was hoping to bag a bim while he was here. He wanted them to respect him. More than that, he wanted the people here to think that he was like them, that he was one of them, although he had no idea how such a ridiculous aspiration had taken root. He was not and had never been a conformist, was one of those contrary people who had always taken great pride in his willingness to go against the grain, but he felt himself folding like a house of cards, and he didn’t like himself for it, didn’t like himself one little bit.
Fuck the pool. He had to get out of here, get back to his room.
The father was still glaring at him.
“Sorry,” he said again, moving away.
The towheaded boy looked up at him as he passed. “Fairy,” he said quietly.
Patrick strode purposefully toward the gate. In back of him, people started giggling. He did not turn around but continued to look forward, and by the time he had exited the pool area, everyone behind him was laughing loudly.
Eight
Rachel sat on the lounge chair watching the boys in the pool from behind her dark sunglasses. Ryan had wanted to play Marco Polo but had been overruled by the twins, who were now happily engaged in some aquatic variation of volleyball with their new friend David while Ryan tried in vain to keep up.
She felt sorry for Ryan sometimes, and
she knew that Lowell did too. The twins were a team, a unified force, and in any endeavor, play or conflict, Ryan was always the outsider. Smaller, younger, quieter, shyer, he always seemed to be at a disadvantage, and Rachel supposed that was why she and Lowell were easier on him, even favored him in some ways. Not that they didn’t love all three boys equally, but Ryan needed a little affirmative action, a leg up just to be able to stand on a level playing field with his more aggressive brothers.
Curtis purposely smacked the beach ball far above Ryan’s head and than laughed as the younger boy jumped for it and missed, splashing into the water. Rachel wanted to intervene, but then it was Ryan’s turn and he spiked the ball at Curtis’s face, causing his brother to duck and cry out in surprise. Good for you, she thought.
It was nearly noon, but she found that she wasn’t hungry. The heat made her thirsty—she’d gone through three bottles of Dasani since coming out here—but it seemed to suppress her appetite. From beneath her sunglasses, she peeked down at her stomach, at the slight bulge that was visible above her bikini bottom even while lying down. She could afford to skip a few lunches. She glanced over at Lowell. So could he.
She’d wait until the kids complained, then feed them.
Rachel closed her eyes, let the warmth of the sun hit her face. This was old school, she knew. Today’s conventional wisdom said that she should cover herself while in the sun and spend the hottest part of the day indoors, but there was something sensuous and strangely gratifying about soaking in the rays, feeling the taut sweaty heat of her skin bronzing. Lowell had on a shirt and hat, his lounge chair pulled under the partial shade of an umbrella, and the kids were slathered with 45 SPF waterproof sunblock, but she enjoyed basking in the sun in her favorite carcinogen aid, baby oil. She may have been closing in on forty, but right now she felt like a teenager again. And it felt good.
She started to doze. The clearly differentiated sounds of her kids in the pool and the conversations of the people around her and the clink of drinking glasses and the slap of sandals from servers passing by gradually coalesced into a single gently oscillating drone. The reddish tinged background behind her closed eyelids darkened into a monochromatic black.
And then . . .
Something suddenly seemed wrong.
She had no idea what it was at first, but she sat up, her eyes snapping to attention behind her glasses. Her initial impulse was to find the kids and make sure they were all right. She spotted them immediately—they were in exactly the same spot they had been minutes previously, before she’d started to nod off—and they were happily playing their game.
So that wasn’t it.
But something still seemed off. She had never really believed that cliché about being able to feel eyes on the back of your neck, had never thought it was possible to sense when you were being watched, but that was exactly the feeling she had right now, and she turned her head to the right. A gardener was pulling weeds on the small square of grass between the Jacuzzi and the cabana bar. Dark and weathered, he resembled an old bitter farmer. A resort this big had to have more than one gardener, had to employ a whole team of landscapers, but she was sure this was the same man she had seen at night, during the thunderstorm, and though she did not know how she knew it, she did.
And he was looking at her.
The man met her eyes, smiled, and that smile made her flesh crawl. It was the creepiest, dirtiest stare she had ever encountered, and she quickly looked the other way, back toward the pool. She suddenly felt naked, exposed, and wished she were wearing her one-piece. And a long shirt. In her mind, she tried to determine what he could see from his vantage point. She raised her right knee to make sure her crotch was covered and adjusted the height of her right shoulder in order to block any view of her breasts.
The disturbing sensation that she was being watched still remained, and it was all she could do not to turn her head again and look. But she refused to give him the satisfaction. He was there, though, she could feel it, and she imagined Mr. Blodgett selling the gardener her panties, the two of them greedily and disgustingly pawing the material like wild animals.
She’d seen the gardener, but what did Blodgett look like? She hadn’t gotten a clear view of him, but she’d remember his voice for as long as she lived, that gruff angry growl unexpectedly yelling at them from inside their own room as they tried to get in. Barking orders as they attempted to remove their belongings. There seemed something odd and rather ominous about the fact that he had gone to such lengths to keep himself hidden from them.
Maybe he and the gardener were the same person.
That was hardly likely, but for some inexplicable reason, the two were connected in her mind.
That seemed ominous as well.
In the pool, the kids continued playing. Next to her, Lowell read a novel, oblivious.
She glanced up at the sky, an inverted sea of pastel blue in which were suspended great billowing clouds of white, but quickly looked away, bringing her gaze back down to earth. She did not want to recognize shapes in the contours of the clouds, afraid of encountering a fierce face filled with rage and hate glaring back at her from above. Instinctively, involuntarily, her head turned to the right.
The gardener was gone.
She did not know how that was possible. Unless he hopped the fence, the only way he could have exited the pool area was to pass by the bar and then her chair, or walk around the front of the Jacuzzi and out the side gate, which she would have seen in her peripheral vision. It was as if he had simply disappeared, and if she hadn’t seen him so clearly, if his presence had not been so concrete, she might have thought she’d imagined the whole thing.
But she hadn’t.
There was a pile of pulled weeds on the small square of grass to prove it.
Rachel adjusted the back of her chair to a full sitting position and scanned the areas both inside and outside the fence but saw no sign of the gardener—which made her feel both relieved and nervous.
“Anything wrong?” Lowell asked, looking up from his book.
“No,” she answered, putting her chair back down and closing her eyes. “Nothing.”
This time she did fall asleep, and she awoke some time later with a full bladder. Not too much time could have passed because the sun was still at approximately the same location in the sky, but it had been more than a few minutes because the kids were no longer in the pool, and next to her Lowell had a drink in hand. She scanned the now very crowded pool area and saw Curtis, Owen and Ryan crammed together with David on a single lounge chair several yards away, Cokes in hand, a bag of pretzels between them. Nutritious lunch, she thought wryly. What a good mom she was.
She turned toward Lowell. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she told him. “Watch the boys.”
He grinned. “I have been, Ms. Van Winkle.”
“Very funny.” She got up and started toward the restrooms, pulling out her bikini where it had ridden up and surreptitiously looking around for any sign of the gardener. Thankfully, he did not seem to be around. She passed by the boys, waving as she walked by, but the twins were too cool for the room and were in that phase where they liked to pretend they didn’t even have parents, so they ignored her. Ryan smiled and waved back.
The door was locked when she reached the women’s restroom, and there was a CLOSED FOR CLEANING sign on it. She could go back to their suite, but it was getting to be an emergency and at this point the lobby was much closer, so she let herself out through the iron gate, hurrying up the steps.
She found a bathroom, making it just in time, and quickly rushed into the nearest stall, pulled down her bikini bottom and sat on the toilet.
She heard voices through the wall as she peed, a man’s deep badgering baritone delivering an indecipherable lecture to an obviously distraught young woman who kept interjecting in a frightened unintelligible voice.
What was on the other side of this wall? She tried to visualize the layout of the building but could not determine i
f it was one of the conference rooms, the gift shop or an office behind the front desk.
“I’m sorry!” the woman screamed, and her voice was suddenly much louder and clearer. “I won’t do it again!”
There was a loud thump against the wall, and Rachel jumped, nearly falling off the toilet. She stood hastily and pulled up her bathing suit.
“Not me!” the woman screamed.
Rachel stood in the stall, unmoving, not sure what to do. She felt outrage, yes, and she knew she should immediately report this abuse to, if not the management, then whatever law enforcement authorities had jurisdiction over this area of the desert. But she was also afraid, and the fear kept her from moving, kept her even from flushing the toilet, an action she was sure would alert the people on the other side of the wall to her presence.
So what? she asked herself. But she already knew what. She was afraid if that angry man knew she was here he might come into the bathroom and . . . what? Hurt her? Beat her?
Yes. That was exactly what she thought. And that was exactly what she believed was happening in the other room. That thump had been the man throwing the woman against a wall. She was being physically abused, assaulted, and it was quite possible that Rachel was the only one aware that it was happening.
There was silence after that, and somehow the silence seemed more horrible than the voices and the noises had. She imagined a young woman slumping to the floor, her head bashed in, leaving a smeared trail of blood on the wall behind her while the man wiped his hands and hurriedly left the room.
What should she do? What could she do? The logical move would be to go up to the front desk and report what she’d heard, to demand that resort security find the attacker and turn him over to the police or sheriff. But for all she knew, the person behind the front desk might be the attacker, and then he’d grab her and pull her into his secret little room and throw her against the wall. Or worse.
She knew that the likelihood of that happening was practically nil, but she was still scared, and even a ridiculous thought like that did not seem nearly as ridiculous as it should.
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