by Jason Myers
Where are you?
“The Last Chance.”
Why are you at an abandoned motel, Cliff?
“Where else was I supposed to go?”
I don’t know.
“I’m in room nine.”
59.
I PULL INTO THE PARKING lot of the last chance a little bit after three in the morning. During the drive I wanted so badly to whip my car around and go back home and wait until sunrise and wait for my plane to leave.
But I couldn’t.
Something deep down in the core of my body wouldn’t let me. I kept thinking about Cliff and thinking about him being so helpless and thinking about him being alone and scared and not having anyone to turn to.
Like me after I left Hawaii.
I park my car.
Inhale. Exhale.
The building is in tatters and most of the windows are cracked or broken and some of the room doors are missing. Graffiti covers most of the crumbling structure.
I turn off the engine and cut the headlights.
Step outside.
There’s almost complete silence, the only noise coming from the distant murmurs of occasional cars and trucks driving across the interstate, and the high-pitched shrieks of crickets coming from the tall grass surrounding the lot.
The air is still. It feels dead as I stand in front of room number nine and knock.
No answer.
Leave, I tell myself. Turn around right now and leave.
I knock again.
This time the door opens a crack and Cliff jams his face into it. “Travis. Is that really you?”
Yes.
“Is it?”
Yeah, Cliff. Let me in or I’m splitting. I’ll leave right now.
“Okay,” he moans. “I’m letting you in.” He undoes the chain lock and pulls the door open.
I step inside and Cliff tosses his arms around me.
Don’t even, Cliff.
I push him off me.
It’s really dark and I can’t see anything, only the dull outlines of objects, like the desk pushed against the wall to my right and a bed frame straight to my left.
Are there any lights, Cliff?
He shuts the door and locks it.
“There’s an overhead one I jimmied in the bathroom and a ground one in the corner.”
How long have you been here?
He snorts a glob of snot back. “Like two days, man.”
Pause.
Cliff stands next to me.
Why am I here, Cliff?
“I need your help,” he says. “You have to help me.”
With what? I can’t even see anything.
I feel the clammy palm of a hand wrap around my wrist and when I try to yank it out, my arm gets snapped straight.
Cliff, what’s going on?
“If I turn on the lights,” Cliff says firmly, “will you promise not to leave?”
No.
“Promise me, Travis. Please.” His grip tightens around my wrist.
Cliff, I—
“Please,” he begs. “You’re my only friend. I’ve helped you out so many fucking times with some fucked-up shit.” His voice is trembling and shaking. And he snaps, “Just tell me you won’t freak out and split when I flip the lights on.”
Okay. I won’t freak out.
“Promise me.”
I promise you, Cliff.
“Good.” He lets go of my wrist and stumbles and falls his way toward the far corner of the room and flips on the light.
Blood is everywhere.
Big spots stain Cliff’s white T-shirt.
There are these deep fresh wounds all around his neck, all up and down his arms, like someone’s dug a blade into his skin and yanked through it.
Both of his lips are split open.
And I’m looking at a gun, the same gun Cliff showed off to me and Michael, poking from the waistline of the jeans he’s wearing.
What the hell is this, Cliff?
He pulls the gun out and goes, “You said you wouldn’t freak out. You promised, Trav.”
Whoa. I’m not freaking out. Just put down the gun and tell me what happened.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember,” Cliff stammers, a line of red spit dropping from his mouth. “But you have to help me out.”
With what? Fuck.
Cliff points the gun at me. “Bathroom.” He motions me toward the bathroom doorway with the gun. “Right now.”
I choke down the lump in my throat.
I feel sick.
I walk slowly and carefully into the bathroom, but I can’t see anything.
What’s in here, Cliff?
“Her,” he says, switching the light on.
I almost vomit. My stomach sucks back and my body thrusts forward and my eyes fill with water.
Lying in the bathtub, in a swimming pool of blood, is Katie. Her mouth is taped shut. Her right arm dangles over the edge of the tub. A knife sticks out of her chest.
Oh, Cliff. What did you do? What the hell did you do?
“I don’t know,” he barks.
You killed her, I rip, stepping at him.
But Cliff points the gun right at my face and I stop dead in my tracks. “Don’t even think about it, Travis. You’re not going anywhere until you help me.”
With what? She’s dead. You killed her.
Slamming the butt of the gun against his forehead, Cliff goes, “I know.”
What do you want me to do about it?
“We have to move her. We can put her in your car and take her somewhere and bury her.”
I raise my fist.
Fuck you.
Cliff cocks the gun. “Don’t start evil, Travis.”
Evil? There’s a dead girl sitting in a bathtub and you want me to help you move her and I’m starting evil?
“Yes.” His eyelids flicker and in that moment, I see something else in Cliff. I see the six-year-old kid who raised money for a sick classmate by going door-to-door and selling candy bars. I see the ten-year-old boy who saved every cent he earned on his paper route one year so he could buy his mother a necklace for her birthday, which she accused him of stealing at first.
Looking Cliff dead in the eyes, I see the thirteen-year-old boy who stepped in and stopped a small helpless kid from getting his ass kicked by a group of bigger boys. Staring right at him, I see the sixteen-year-old boy who was smashed in the face with a beer bottle by his father after taking the fall for me during a second pot bust.
Then Cliff’s eyelids close again. But this time, when they open, the only thing I see is a scared kid with blood on his hands, pointing a gun at me.
I start for the door.
I’m leaving, Cliff.
But he steps in front of me. “No you’re not.”
What are you really gonna do, Cliff? Are you gonna shoot me?
“Yes.”
Fuck you.
“Help me.”
No. I’m going. I have to go and you’re gonna have to shoot me if you don’t like it.
And for a few long seconds that feel like hours, I stand there and I wait. I wait to hear the sound of a gunshot. I wait for Cliff to pull the trigger and end my life.
I wait to feel nothing ever again.
But it doesn’t happen. Instead of Cliff shooting me, he begins to cry, and falls against the wall, sliding down it, sobbing, “What happened to me? Fuck. What happened?”
And overcome by this sudden burst of emotion, I walk over to Cliff and I kneel down beside him.
I say, You’re gonna have to do the right thing, man. You’re gonna have to turn yourself in.
“I can’t,” he sobs. “I can’t go out like that.”
Placing my hand on his shoulder, I tell him, Cliff, you have to.
“Why, Travis?”
’Cause if you don’t, I will.
Cliff turns to me. “Leave,” he orders, pointing the gun at me again, poking it right between my eyes. I stand up and I back away slowly.
&nbs
p; “Get the fuck out of here!” he snaps.
I turn around and run my hands down my face and walk out of the door, back outside.
Halfway to my car, this is when I hear it—
BANG!
And Cliff, he’s dead. And everything in this city, it’s all fucking over.
But for real this time.
afterword.
I DROVE BACK TO MY parents’ house that morning and walked into my room and grabbed my bag. I looked around the room one last time, the bed unmade, CDs still all over the floor, the top left corner of my Vincent Gallo poster undone from when the tack fell out of it, and I didn’t feel anything, even though somewhere down inside of me I think I wanted to, so I walked out and headed back for my car. And as I moved slowly through the long hallway that connected the house to the garage, with my bag strapped to my back and my plane ticket in my pocket, I noticed that the family pictures that had been taken down at one point had been put back up, replacing the two odd-looking metallic pieces of art, and for a moment I thought about who might’ve hung them up, but none of that ended up mattering, because they’d been taken down in the first place, and I continued moving and drove away.
At the airport I parked my car and checked in for my flight, and when it was time to board the plane, I didn’t hesitate at all, and I fell asleep right away and dreamed not about Autumn Hayes, and bathtubs full of blood, but instead, I dreamed of nothing, and when the stewardess woke me, telling me that we had arrived, I got my things and told her thank you, then walked off the plane and into the Maui airport, where I took a taxi straight to the nearest police station.
When I walked inside, I told the desk sergeant that I had information pertaining to the death of a girl in a motel room last December, and I was promptly placed under arrest and taken into an interrogation room, where I offered up everything I could remember to the police and was then left alone inside the room for almost an hour before finally being charged. Only I was not charged with first- or second-degree murder or even manslaughter. I was charged with criminal negligence and failure to report criminal activity, because in the end, I hadn’t killed Autumn. Autumn Hayes died, the police said, of asphyxiation in her sleep due to an overdose of multiple drugs that made her vomit while she was passed out, which she ultimately choked on and died.
But even though I was cleared in the actual wrongdoing of her death, I still felt no better and I still felt no relief. Two people’s lives had been destroyed, and her family had suffered. And even though I would never meet or talk to anyone in that family, it was relayed to me that they were grateful I had come forward and filled in the blanks of the final hours of her life.
As far as my own family was concerned, my father and a top criminal defense lawyer flew to the island and tried to talk me out of pleading guilty. They wanted me to fight the case instead, but after two days of my not going for it, my father looked at me and told me that I was never his son, and then he left Hawaii, and I plead guilty in a court of law, my mother seated in the front row of the courtroom in tears, and was sentenced to eighteen months in a state correctional facility, where I still sit today, writing this story the only way I know how to.
And I’m not sure what I will do when I do get out. The future, while not unlimited with possibilities as it once had been, will still hold many opportunities for me. But the thing is, my slate will never be wiped clean—this will never fade into the background and become some sort of learning experience or bump in the road. The shit that happened in my life and this book is real. And because I finally woke up to that whole realization much too late—the realization that life really happens and there is always a consequence for your actions—I lost everything, in some sense, but in a weird kind of great way, if you flip it all around, I may have gained the most important thing of all: the truth. I can live with that.
Travis Wayne
Hawaii State Correctional Facility
January 2007
about the author.
Jason Myers has lived the exit here life. This isn’t a memoir, but Myers has lived close enough to guys like Travis to know how to tell this story right. This is his first novel. He lives in San Francisco.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2007 by Jason Myers
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Designed by Steve Kennedy
The text of this book was set in ITC Tyfa Book.
First Simon Pulse edition May 2007
Library of Congress Control Number 2006940468
ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-1748-9
ISBN-10: 1-4169-1748-9
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0400-2 (eBook)