In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  “Thanks for the grub,” he said.

  Annabelle rang up two waiting customers, then walked into the narrow kitchen and went out the screen door and onto the boardwalk in back of the motel, where the only sounds were the hum of the garage’s Lennox and the wind dusting across the fields. She pulled a loose brick from the wall and took from the hole a crumpled pack of Marlboro cigarettes and a black plastic lighter. She lit a cigarette and put the pack and lighter back and slid the brick into place.

  She stood in the brief shadow of the winged horse atop the garage and smoked.

  She saw, out in the field, the slinking shape of the cat hunting mice or grasshoppers.

  She thought about being friendly with Billy Calhoun. He had not been around in over a year. Not since Tom’s funeral. She had not smoked a cigarette since that day.

  Is smoking a sin? she wondered.

  It was a secret she had always kept from her husband and son, a satisfying thing to do with her hands when Tom was deployed, better than wringing them between making change for customers or folding bed linens. The cigarettes had helped her open how many letters stamped from his station in Cu Chi. COO CHEE, he had printed in big block capitals. HA HA. This she had read on the back stoop of the farmhouse one morning, when the sun had only just crept above the eastern hills. She had sat and smoked and read and wept.

  The day he returned, she had bought gum at a gas station near the airport, certain her smoking days were over.

  She thought of Calhoun again.

  Secrets, she thought, are almost always sins. Otherwise, why keep them?

  Out in the scrub, the cat flashed in the sun, and some small thing gave out a squeal.

  The boardwalk creaked behind her.

  Stillwell stood at the corner of the motel breezeway, near the vending and ice machines, a push broom in hand. He wore his black straw hat, and from beneath its brim he watched her through strips of white cotton that wrapped his head, only his eyes and lips visible, his mouth a crooked slit. The strips looked to have been cut from an old cotton T-shirt. They sagged here and there.

  “You gave me a start,” she said. She said it as lightly as she could, though her arms had broken out in gooseflesh. He looks like a leper, she thought, from that colony over in Plano. She tried to smile. The cigarette kept one hand steady. The other she locked on her elbow.

  “Ma’am,” he said. His lips were cracked and red.

  “Everything all right with you?” she said.

  “Sun don’t like me today,” he said. “I apologize for it.” He walked past her to the open closet just down the boardwalk. “Should be done with that pool early evening.”

  Feeling foolish and rude, she called after him: “You don’t have to call me ma’am.”

  He said nothing, just stood the mop and bucket in the closest, put the bleach on a shelf, and closed the door and walked back to his camper, hunched forward as if the sun were a whip against his back.

  Maybe, Annabelle thought, he has secrets, too.

  She glanced at the cigarette in her hand. She tossed it to the boardwalk and walked back into the cafe. Calhoun had left two bills on the table: a five for breakfast and a twenty. He had also left a note, scrawled on the corner of a page torn from his crossword book. It was folded under the sugar dispenser. For the chemicals.

  Annabelle put the five into the register.

  The twenty and the note she tucked away in her apron pocket.

  At half past five she flipped the sign in the cafe window from Open to Closed and said goodnight to Diego and Rosendo, who got into Diego’s El Camino—Diego opened the door for Rosendo and helped her ease inside, then placed a pillow behind her back—and drove west toward town. Inside the garage, while Annabelle turned up chairs and rolled silverware for the following morning, Sandy sat in a booth working math problems. Near dark, Annabelle cracked her back and stood looking out the twin garage door windows of the cafe. She saw Stillwell come up the pool’s shallow-end steps, face still wrapped in his odd coverings. He carried an empty bleach bottle in each hand. Annabelle walked through a door that adjoined the motel office—a glassed-in space where fan belts and wiper blades and air fresheners had once hung on pegboard panels along the walls—and threw the switch to light the sign out by the highway. It was an impulse. She had not lit the sign for months. When she walked back to the windows, she saw Stillwell staring up at a flickering tungsten sun setting behind neon mountains.

  She opened the cafe door and called out, “Hey.”

  Out by the pool, Stillwell lifted a hand.

  “You hungry?”

  The man in the cowboy hat looked down at his dirty jeans and long-sleeved denim shirt. “I ain’t fit to come inside,” he called.

  “I’ll make you a burger,” Annabelle called back and she went about it before he could say no.

  He came inside. He hesitated just inside the door, seemingly uncertain where he should sit with all the chairs turned up on the tables. He took off his Bullhide, the whole of his head still wrapped in strips of shirt. He pulled these off, one by one.

  Sandy, his math homework forgotten, stared.

  Annabelle watched, too, through the short-order window from the kitchen, freshly patted meat sizzling on the grill behind her.

  Once the wrappings were off, Stillwell tucked a fistful of strips into the bowl of his hat. He chose a table by one of the garage doors and took down a chair. He set his hat on the table and took off his leather gloves.

  There was something different about his face, Annabelle thought. It had changed since yesterday morning. He was paler, toothpaste white, as if the light of the day had bleached him, just as he had bleached the pool. There were ashy blossoms on his cheeks and forehead. Leper, she thought. Leper from Plano. She laughed but she did it quietly.

  She had been a nurse for a time, before the motel. There had been a man in Fort Stockton, where she had worked nights at the ER, whose skin was sensitive to all light. He had kept weird, nocturnal appointments with his doctor at the emergency room, came wearing shades and a hat and scarf. The girls had all whispered about him, called him the Invisible Man.

  At the smell of burning meat, she remembered to flip the burger on the grill.

  Stillwell was about to sit when he saw the jukebox in back of the restaurant.

  Sandy saw what the cowboy was looking at and said, “It’s busted.”

  But the cowboy walked to the back and stood before the box anyway. It was a Seeburg Select-O-Matic, cabinet of wood and chrome trim, the plastic sky-blue. In back of the selector arm and carriage was a mirrored, diamond-patterned glass. He read the selections, his lips moving over the names.

  “If it worked,” Sandy said, “I’d play it all the time. You like music?”

  “I like a good box,” Stillwell said.

  “I like George Jones,” Sandy said. “‘Brown-eyed Handsome Man.’ You know how to do fractions?”

  Stillwell turned away from the box and shook his head.

  “You didn’t learn about those in school?”

  “I didn’t finish school.” He made his way back to his table.

  “How come?” Sandy asked.

  “Never much good at it.”

  “Well, I’m pretty good at it but I don’t get fractions.” The boy bent back to his homework.

  Stillwell sat down at his table, and Annabelle brought out his burger and a cup of coffee and a bottle of ketchup. He spoke a word of thanks without looking up when she set his food before him, and she caught a whiff of something at once familiar and unknown, beneath the bleach and sweat and day. A bad smell. She walked over to the booth and sat by Sandy and helped the boy with his homework but she kept one eye on the cowboy. He picked up the ketchup bottle and tipped it sideways and shook a dollop or two out, then capped it. He took his knife from its scabbard on his hip and cut the burger in half. Annabelle watched him do this and became aware that Sandy was no longer writing but staring, too, as the cowboy’s big knife went back into its scabbard.
He dipped one half of the burger in the ketchup and was about to eat it but did not. He stared at it for a very long time, until the ketchup began to drip back onto the plate. His stomach rumbled. They heard it from across the room.

  “Mister,” Sandy said, “you better eat that thing before your gut eats you.”

  Annabelle said the boy’s name to hush him. “Don’t be rude,” she said.

  Stillwell smiled, a slow but genuine smile. He took a bite.

  “We’re real pleased with how the pool turned out,” Annabelle said. “Aren’t we, Sandy?” She put her arm around her son and smoothed the back of his hair with the flat of her palm.

  “You think you could fix that jukebox, too?” the boy said.

  Stillwell stopped chewing. He swallowed, and the sound was loud and wet. He put the hamburger down on the plate and wiped his hands on the thighs of his jeans. His eyes moved from the jukebox at the back of the cafe to the woman and the boy, who sat close together in the booth, the boy waiting on an answer, his pencil bumping back and forth between his fingers. Finally, Stillwell shook his head.

  “Wish I could,” he said. And when their only response to this was silence, he added, “I was never much good with moving parts.”

  Annabelle smiled. “You’ve done so much already.”

  “It was a lot in there,” the cowboy said. “In your pool.”

  “It was,” Annabelle said.

  Sandy went back to his math, his pencil scratching on paper.

  Stillwell picked up the burger again, and suddenly his hand was shaking. A piece of lettuce and a pickle and a ring of onion came loose and fell onto the plate. He put the burger down and pushed back from the table, chair legs scraping across the concrete floor, the sound startling in its violence. He picked up his gloves and hat and said, “Beg pardon, but I’m sick.”

  “You’re deathly pale,” Annabelle said. She got up out of the booth and took a few steps toward him, but he quickly turned away for the door.

  “It’s the sun,” he said. “Overdid it out there’s all.”

  “Can I at least get you some aspirin?” she asked. She folded her arms around herself and looked over her shoulder at Sandy, who was watching the cowboy with concern.

  Stillwell held his hat by the brim, wrappings and gloves tucked in the bowl. “No,” he said. “But thank you.” He put one hand on the door and did not move after that for a while.

  Beyond the glass, night had fallen, and the neon sign out by the road was shining in the door, the cowboy’s own reflection faint.

  He stared at the glass so long Annabelle wondered what he saw that she did not.

  “It’s a nice place you’ve got, Miss Gaskin,” he finally said. “I’m grateful for the meal. And the kindness.”

  He left the cafe.

  “You’re welcome,” Annabelle said.

  She went back to the booth and sat by Sandy, and as the boy took up his fractions once more, scratching his head, she imagined how the two of them, she and Sandy, must have looked from somewhere out there in the dark, across the highway and the broad open fields that sloped up into the hills. How theirs must have seemed to any unseen watchers the only light left in the world: a small, warm glow inside a cafe, where a mother and her boy sat quietly in a booth with no jukebox to listen to.

  Travis made it to the rear of the motel before the hamburger came up. He bent over and puked into the wiry grass between the boardwalk and the motel office. He put one hand on the concrete wall to steady himself and puked again, and this time a gout of blood shot out of him like someone had primed a pump in his guts. His legs went aquiver, and he took a knee on the boardwalk, where he retched a third time. He waited for the nausea to pass, and when it had left him cold and shivering, he stood up and kicked dirt over his mess like a dog and staggered on to the camper, turning back as he opened the door, sensing movement behind him. The orange cat stood over his sick. It smelled the dirt and dropped its jaw in a stupid fashion, then slunk away beneath the boardwalk.

  Travis all but fell into the padded dinette, where he put his head in his arms on the table. He was shaking all over, the tremor that had first rustled through him in the cafe now a raging wind. Something warm began to spread at his crotch. To seep through his jeans. The wound in his thigh had torn open. Another wave of nausea hit, and something thick and hot sputtered up his throat and out, down his chin, a ribbon of blackish-red. He was making a noise, harsh and ragged, something between words and gasps.

  There was a creak behind him, as of wood and hinges, and the woman’s voice came softly from the dark: Look here, Travis.

  He turned his head.

  What do you see now?

  What he saw was the shape of a long and bony thing, crawling out of the cabinet beneath the berth on all fours. Its eyes glinted black in the light that shone from a pole outside. Skeletal and pale and naked, bits of long hair clinging to a knobby skull, it rounded and climbed the short ladder to the berth, slow and insect-like, pausing midway to glare at Travis over its shoulder, and when it did its eyes burned a sudden, smoldering red before guttering to black, and Travis thought he saw the shapes of breasts swinging beneath it, each curved and sharp as a sickle. The white dress he had found in the cabinet had caught like a shed skin on a single toenail and dragged after it. It turned in the narrow berth, kept low on hands and knees.

  Do you like what you see?

  It spoke without moving its jaw or lips.

  Memories, monsters, they are in our blood, and theirs are the faces we find staring back at us in broken mirrors. Come here, Travis, my love. Come to me and let us peer into one another.

  The voice, so feathered, so sensual, so unlike the crooked shape from which it came, drew him. He pushed himself out of his own sticky blood—

  not your blood, now, but our blood, Travis

  —and swayed.

  Come, the woman-thing spoke. Come. It leaned forward into the blue shaft of light and he saw its face, gray and desiccated and crumbling, and then its tongue fell out of its mouth and rolled obscenely around its lips. Come, my blood, my life, my kin.

  He climbed the ladder, hauling himself into the perch and collapsing on the bed, wet with sweat and blood, and the woman-thing slid over him and put its arms around his head, moved its brittle hands over his shoulders. It stroked his cheek. Kissed him. It smelled of booze and smoke and rotten meat and he felt its corn-husk skin against his own, hands groping at his belt, loosening his buckle, sliding it free. T-R-A-V-I-S, it said. It laughed, and the whole of its body above him was rot and filth, and when it opened its mouth wider he saw old, jagged teeth, row upon row of them like a shark’s mouth. Its red eyes burning.

  Who do you see now, Travis? Who?

  Its voice became another’s, she who had asked him a question—

  Travis? Is that your name?

  —just before he had wrapped his belt around her throat, a woman with dark hair and a scar above her lip where an ex-boyfriend had cut her, her eyes flashing like some animal’s in the lights of an oncoming truck, and now the thing’s voice was another’s, dark-haired, so like the last—

  I like that name, Travis

  —lips small and red and perfect and then a third—

  Oh Travis, please, please, yes Travis

  —and this one so much like the girl he remembered who had bought him the belt at the fair, when he was sixteen, and he had cupped her breast and she had bled in his father’s truck, on the seat—

  Tighter, TIGHTER, can’t you remember me, say my name, Travis, say it, say

  —“Rue,” he gasped. “Rue.”

  The thing smiled, and he heard a sound like the squirming of fat brown worms in moist earth, and now he did remember.

  The stars spinning.

  Hands steepled on the dinette, the rest of her in shadow.

  His belt cinched around his leg, just above the knee.

  And she, the creature Rue, slithering down his body, his knife out of its scabbard and in her hand and the bl
ade parting the flesh of his thigh and he, crying out—

  in the dark, in bedsheets soaked with his own blood, dying, the life ebbing out, this is the way of it now to see your true face, no stranger’s, no thief’s, but yours, everything you ever lost

  —and now he woke, the taste of blood in his mouth.

  Still seated at the dinette, head down in his arms, the smells of bleach and hamburger grease and bile and blood and something else—ripe fruit?—clinging to him. He lifted his head from his arms and saw he had been cheek-down in the slick of blood he had vomited. It had grown tacky on the table. Some had run into his shirt and dried over his chest. He staggered up and went into the toilet and looked at himself in the broken mirror. A mess of his own gore. A creature stared back at him, fractured in the three shards of remaining glass, a ghostly thing with small black eyes like knobs of rubber, at the center of which were tiny pinpricks of yellow. Its cheeks sunken and cracked like dried mud. Snaggleteeth, gums pulled back from the roots. My true face, Travis thought. He made a hoarse cry and slammed his fist into the last bits of glass until they littered the sink and floor, his knuckles bleeding. He lunged out of the bathroom and punched the nearest pine-paneled cabinet door, and the cheap wood split cleanly. He crumpled to his knees and wished that his whole terrible life had been a bad dream he would soon wake from, his existence little more than a flame without heat to be snuffed between two fingers. On waking those same fingers would touch a pair of lips and press his cheek, warm and alive and real, and his mother’s voice would ask him, “Do you want to dance with Mommy now? Let’s go, baby. Let’s go dancing.”

  A body—hard and sharp—pressed suddenly against his back, soft breath against the bare flesh of his neck.

  You’re mine now, Travis. And I am yours.