The Graybar Hotel

by Curtis Dawkins

  I sat up on my bunk with my back against the wall, thinking about that suggestion after I’d made it. “Don’t you see how it all comes back to boxing?” I said. “That must mean it was meant to be.” He looked at me with a heavy stare, then quietly dug out a bottle of black shoe polish from his foot locker and began coating his carvings, which apparently weren’t angels, but chess pieces. I went back to reading about how Sharon Tate appeared in many episodes, beginning with “Elly Starts to School,” on October 16, 1963, five or six years before those psycho Manson hippies got ahold of her.

  * * *

  Mary’s deposit check was the third from her neighborhood. I was running out of time.

  We drove south on Interstate 5 and I sat in the passenger’s seat watching the tall pines blur past, wondering if the rain would stay away long enough to get this fire started. We ended up in a field adjacent to an elementary school named after a locally born former ambassador to Argentina, or so we read on the plaque near the school. The town was called Tualatin, and a sign on the fence read PRIVATE PROPERTY OF P.S.U. We walked a good quarter mile to a huge garage-type structure with thirty-foot-high sliding hangar doors on two sides. Inside, under the tall skeleton of steel beams, was a plain wooden house. There was an air of anticipation, as if a party were about to begin and we were among the first to arrive.

  The house smelled new: sawn wood and carpeting, wallpaper glue and paint, but the interior looked straight out of 1975. There was thick, orange shag carpeting, a green vinyl chair, a table lamp with a faded shade, and an old blue couch where a female mannequin lay. On the lamp table was a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey that Mary said was actually iced tea. An ashtray full of butts sat on the floor by the couch. The black-haired mannequin was dressed in bright green polyester. Mary said, “She’s passed out drunk. I named her Suzy. I picture her a barfly.” She realigned one of Suzy’s socks, stood back, and looked around, as if checking the scene in preparation for guests. “The students show up later, after everything’s wet and cold.”

  Three men walked through the swinging kitchen door. They could have been from 1975 themselves with their practical WASP haircuts and casual clothes. They congratulated Mary on a fine job and one of them asked my opinion of the place. “It looks real. It looks like where I grew up. Even her,” I said, pointing to Suzy. “She reminds me of my mother.” I felt weird after I said it, as if it were some arson school faux pas, like telling an actor to have a great show. I thought they might feel bad for burning the place with my mother inside it. But I couldn’t take it back, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say that would make the silence less awkward.

  Mary and I stayed out of the way after that. She said this one wasn’t going to be an arson—the drunk mannequin was going to set the place on fire with her cigarette. It was an exam equivalent of a trick question, designed to see what the students might come up with. The men checked the sprinkler system above the house and hooked up a hose to a bright yellow fire hydrant. We watched through one of the house’s side windows. One of the men lit a Winston, smoked an inch of it, then placed it strategically deep in the fibers of the carpet by the couch.

  The day was gray—in Oregon, most of them are—and the air was damp and every once in a while I had to wipe the mist off my face. But it seemed like a beautiful day. When the smoke began filling the house, Mary took my hand in hers. “I love and hate this part,” she said.

  * * *

  Robert and I were watching episode 218, “The Phantom Fifth Floor,” where the Clampetts convert the fifth floor of the bank owned by Mr. Drysdale (played by real-life jackass Raymond Bailey, who once took a swing at an ostrich that wouldn’t stick to its mark) into multiple businesses. I was lost in the show when Sergeant Baker unlocked the door, told me to grab my ID and to turn around. He cuffed me. Robert kept watching the little black-and-white TV. He began to smile and someone who didn’t know him would have thought he was laughing at Jethro’s hijinks.

  “What the hell is this all about?” I asked.

  The sarge slipped on a pair of latex gloves, like he was about to perform surgery. He held my cuffs by the small connecting chain, and with his other hand reached over and lifted the pillow from my bed, revealing what looked to be a small, semiautomatic pistol. Sarge picked it up and held it in his open palm, testing its heft, and I could smell the soap and shoe polish odor it gave off. “Wow,” I said, because there was nothing else to say. Sometimes deep inside you know that anything you say is going to sound like a lie, no matter how true it is. I had spent so much time working on lies, the truth wouldn’t have anything to do with me when I needed it.

  “I was just trying to help, Robert,” I said.

  “Um, um, um, I guess I didn’t need no help.” He never took his eyes from the TV. “So so so long, Steven.”

  * * *

  My hand was warm in hers. Smoke was rising from unseen cracks in the roof. I couldn’t see any flames yet, but I knew it was only a matter of time.

  There were kids at recess in the back of the school. They waited at the fence’s edge and some sat atop the monkey bars. I pretended they were watching us. I pretended we were famous and they were all trying to catch a glimpse so they could tell their moms when they raced in the front door from school, cheeks flushed and out of breath. Our presence would cling to them like smoke. “Guess who I saw,” they would say.

  The interior began to glow orange. “The woman on the couch would be dead already,” Mary said. “It’s the smoke. Victims never really burn to death. They just choke.”

  The outside walls steamed and blistered. I could see wave after wave of heat flowing off the roof, and then all at once, the waves flashed into flame. “I guess you’ll be leaving town soon. I wish you wouldn’t.” She was quiet for a moment. “I feel new,” she said, watching the house. She got out a stick of gum from her back pocket and began chewing.

  “I may stick around, Mary.” She was almost double my age, but I felt much older around her and the fire. She popped her gum and smiled at me.

  The couch was going strong now and through the window I could see the mannequin’s hair torch and her light brown skin blister. Her clothes were long gone. The window shattered from the heat and I could hear the children cheering even though the flames gave off a blowtorch roar, louder than I ever thought they could be. “I guess I should tell you the truth about something,” she said.

  Fire does that to people. Look at campfire. Fireplaces too. Maybe we see our own end in the flames and want to clean the slate. Maybe it’s easier to confess without looking anybody in the eyes. “Technically,” she said, “I’m married. Technically. I haven’t seen him in ten years.”

  Pictures, clocks, ceiling tiles crashed to the floor. Flames poked through the roof, and soon the whole place was ablaze in orange flame and black smoke. Mary said the sprinklers were about to come on, but they were actually high-density, state-of-the-art water delivery nozzles, which soaked the house in a matter of minutes. Black water snaked in little steaming rivers away from the ruin.

  “Well, as long as we’re telling the truth,” I said, “I want you to know I haven’t cashed your check . . .”

  And I told her I wouldn’t. I told her that I would repay her neighbors too, and I explained to her how the Hummels made me rethink everything about my life. She took my confession as well as anyone could, though it definitely broke the spell of the fire. The flames were out but we kept staring at the wet, smoldering char. The only sound was the hiss of the dying heat. “I guess we should go” was all she said. The kids went back into school, and the fire students came out in white jumpsuits, white booties over their shoes. They wore gas masks and you could hear the rasping of the air as it pulled through the filters. They walked past with little briefcases, like they were going to work in some poison office.

  I was arrested in my room at the Knights Inn that evening.

  I’m an optimist, however, and I believe Mary saved me. I don’t dislike her in particular, or wom
en in general. I once knew a kid who dreamed of hurting women most every night. What can I say—some men end up hating women because their mothers were distant or cold, they drank or slept around, whatever. But not me.

  I love my mom.

  Born Doris Smith on September 26, 1933 (exactly twenty-nine years before the show appeared on prime time), Donna Douglas married Roland Bourgeois her last year at St. Gerard’s High School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The marriage only lasted five years. Roland isn’t my father. I don’t know who is for sure, but I tell people it’s Elvis.

  My mom is most famous, of course, for portraying Elly May on The Beverly Hillbillies—the blond bombshell, critter-loving hick from the Ozarks. I love her in that role, but it’s not my favorite.

  My favorite role of Mom’s I’ve caught a couple times on late-night TV, when they show the old reruns. It’s a Twilight Zone, and you can barely tell it’s her. For most of the episode, her entire head is wrapped up in gauze, after an operation to transform her hideous face.

  The doctors unwrap the bandages, and every time I see it, I always expect to be repulsed by what lies beneath. But her face is perfect, stunning, radiant—and still the doctors and nurses turn away, unable to look. Everyone in the hospital, everyone in that world, has the face of a pig. My mom, it turns out, is the monster. She runs through the hospital screaming, and eventually is welcomed into a colony of beautiful freaks. Though by the episode’s end, you could tell she’s learned something. I’m not sure what, but you’d have to, changing yourself to be beautiful then finding you’re the only pretty one in a world of monsters. You’d have to learn something.

  LECHE QUEMADA

  * * *

  Clyde was not surprised that she was late picking him up. Melissa was from the West Coast, carefree and unfettered, and had often criticized him for being too midwestern, too hung up on structure and schedule. They used to argue about it constantly until Clyde finally decided that nothing would change her; he just couldn’t win. So it was no surprise that he was waiting. The real surprise was that she had waited for him.

  It was just after eight in the morning, and he sat on the concrete and wood bench in front of the control center at E. C. Brooks Correctional. He’d been there for over an hour. But how could he be angry when he was free? How could anybody be angry out here? If someone had come up and cracked him in the head with a baseball bat, he probably would have laughed when he woke up. Maybe, he thought, the last twelve years had been worth what he felt at that moment. Few people in the world would ever experience this kind of warmth, this sheer love for life. The bright morning sun was a glowing, orange lozenge, and its rays seemed medicinal, blanketing him with healing warmth. The light in heaven probably felt like this.

  Two officers walked toward him across the parking lot. They wore black baseball caps with the word transportation stitched in white letters across the front. They wore gray uniforms with pant legs tucked into their black leather boots. They each carried a 9-mm Glock, and the short one carried a Taser. The taller one was finishing a cigarette and talking about a fish his brother-in-law had caught that weekend. “He thought it was a twelve-inch crappie, but after he filleted it, he realized he’d ruined a record-length bluegill.”

  “He don’t know the difference between a crappie and a bluegill?”

  “Well for one thing, he’s a dipshit—he married my sister after all. And he’s always caught bass—never fished for panfish.” The officer shook his head and flicked his cigarette, then turned to face Clyde, including him in the story. “So the next morning he calls the DNR, and sure enough, the record for a bluegill in Michigan is eleven and a quarter. Dipshit goes in the trash and digs out the skin, puts it in a plastic bag, and tries to get a DNR officer to piece it together and measure it, but they won’t do that. They just confirmed it was a bluegill. He’s going to pay three hundred bucks to have a taxidermist build him a new fish from the scraps.”

  Clyde smiled. The only things he had with him were the clothes he wore and the ten-inch black-and-white television on his lap. “Wow,” he said, “that’s a big bluegill. I used to catch them about the size of my hand. I can’t even imagine one twelve inches.”

  He wondered if the officers thought he was lying—he didn’t look like a typical fisherman. He had twelve years’ worth of hair tied in a ponytail and the anemic look of a man who doesn’t go outside. But he had fished a lot as a boy: catfish, bass, bluegill, once for Wisconsin salmon. He didn’t care what they thought.

  The short one walked into the control center. The tall one stood there. “So you’re taking your TV home with you, huh?”

  “I wanted to bring something to remind me.”

  “Think you’ll ever watch it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll retire it.”

  The officer looked up at the clear sky. “Nice day to go home. Don’t come back. Too many of you do.”

  “I won’t,” Clyde said. “Thanks.” He thought the officer might shake his hand, but he didn’t. He walked into the control center too and Clyde watched the cigarette butt smoke and smolder on the sidewalk.

  * * *

  He’d gone to the classes, but nothing can prepare you. No one ever told him that a steak and shrimp dinner at Applebee’s may nearly cause him to have an emotional breakdown, or that riding in a car would make him nervous and a little ill. No one told him he would want to hug everyone he met at the gas station on the way home, or that the smell of gasoline as he filled the tank would cause him to blink back tears. No one had told Clyde he might buy a seven-dollar bag of beef jerky with Melissa’s money and cradle it in his arms like a baby.

  Back in prerelease class, Miss Ruttinger had spoken about the traps that awaited them: mostly falling back in with old friends and the frustration that would come from trying to do the right thing, always with the label ex-con dogging their every step. It would be hard, she told them, which was why—no matter what she said or how they all felt then—more than half of them would return.

  People from the outside came to the class to give pointers on everything from balancing a checkbook to conflict resolution. He went every Wednesday for three months and no one—not even the successful ex-inmate who called himself Duck—had told him that when he walked into his house he would hear again the tiny voices of his children, though they were grown, in college, and wouldn’t be home to welcome him for two more days. No one told him he would be afraid to slide back the glass door to the patio and step into the yard. It seemed too open somehow.

  Clyde stood at the glass door watching the dog he’d never met, barking, apparently, at the fence. She would run to the other end, wait a few seconds, then return to the spot where she’d barked. It was hopeful, how the dog desperately wanted something to be there to bark at, but even if there wasn’t, she barked anyway. The dog did this over and over again until she suddenly took off at full speed around the yard twice, then began the routine again. He watched Melissa’s reflection come up behind him. He could see the bright teeth of her smile, her shiny hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a bright black leather belt around a blue tie-dyed shirt that hung to the middle of her thighs. Under the shirt were red leggings. His life in prison had aged her—she had streaks of gray in her hair now and grooves fanning from the outside corners of her eyes—but she was still very pretty. She looked happy, healthy, and as lithe as a runner in marathon form. In the glass, she looked like the same girl he’d met twenty-one years ago. She wrapped her arms around his waist. “Her name’s Margo,” she said.

  “She looks like a Margo. She’s gorgeous.” The dog was black and sleek, muscular, young, and energetic. She barked for a spell, ran a lap around the yard, then continued barking again. The dog had done this so many times it seemed to be her job. “What’s she barking at?”

  “Nothing,” Melissa said. “That’s where I shine the laser pointer at night—from the door and back again—to wear her out, otherwise she’s up and down off the bed all night.”

  “
What’s a laser pointer?”

  She squeezed his waist. “I love you, Clyde. Welcome home.”

  “I love you too,” he said, and they watched the dog run, then bark, and run, then bark.

  * * *

  Melissa had always seemed to attract the strangest of strays. She named them whatever came to her mind during yoga, the same way she’d named all three of their children: Ocean, Azure, and Malachi. He loved the names because they belonged to his children, but where he was from, names were more traditional, less oddball and bohemian. Oddly, all the dogs she ever named had more reasonable, human names, always beginning with an M for some reason: Mitch, Missy, Misty, Michael—among the twenty or so he had once known.

  It wasn’t only dogs either. Neighborhood children, always looking slightly underfed and unwashed, gravitated toward her. She talked to them like valued citizens, gave them small jobs to do around the house, taught them how to draw colorful cat faces on paper plates, and loved them in her way. All of the stray animals and wandering kids had been nerve-racking to Clyde at times, and at times he’d been jealous of her endless supply of patience and love for others, but he had always returned to the obvious, essential question: how could you not love a woman like that?

  Melissa held him there by the back glass door, watching the dog repeat her loop. “Would you like to see the womb?” she asked.