Sometimes the other clowns would join in, hitting me with their various props. One of them, Stinko, used to just stand in the background honking his horn, and while he didn’t physically touch me, the sound of that horn was as bad as some of the blows, and I hated him as much or more than anyone except Red Butt himself.
Eventually, my dad would chuckle and say, “Knock it off,” and the clowns would retreat to the floor or the couch or the recliner, and, crying, I would go off to find my mother, who would clean my wounds, and put Bactine and Band-Aids on my cuts.
I don’t know where Red Butt is now.
But I hope he’s dead.
Stinko, too.
****
It was my mother who found my sister’s body that morning, smothered in her crib.
****
What was Suzie like? It’s hard to be like anything when you’re only six months old, but I remember her as a noisy baby, always crying. My parents used to assure me when I asked that I was a very quiet baby. “You were easy,” my mother would say, and she would pat my head. “You were a good boy.”
****
My mother was never quite right after Suzie’s death.
There was nothing specific, nothing I could point to, but she was different, quieter, and sometimes she seemed forgetful, although I don’t remember her actually forgetting anything.
Vague.
She seemed vague.
****
People talking on handless devices always remind me of mental patients talking to themselves.
****
Mother used to talk to herself after Suzie died.
Or maybe she thought she was talking to Suzie.
****
We didn’t have a house. We lived in an apartment. The apartment building was small, only four units, and located behind a much bigger house in a part of the city that had been nice at one time but was kind of rundown by the time we got to it. Looking back on it now, I think we might have lived in what were originally supposed to be servants’ quarters.
The old man and old lady who lived in the apartment next door, the Ryersons, used to be really nice to me, giving me candy every time they saw me, but they stopped talking to me sometime after Suzie was born. I remember Mrs. Ryerson trying to tell my mother a way she knew to stop a “colicky” baby from crying and my mother slamming the door in her face. Mr. Ryerson tried to tell my dad that it was just that they were old and the crying kept them up at night. He said the walls were too thin. My dad told him to blow it out his ass.
****
I didn’t like Suzie’s crying, either.
****
My sister used to puke a lot. And she always smelled like shit.
****
From the time I was three until the time I was twelve, when I stopped trick-or-treating, my parents made me wear a clown costume. I NEVER wanted to be a clown. I wanted to be a pirate one year, and a monster the next. I always wanted to be Batman. But every Halloween my parents made me go out as a clown.
My dad would paint my face so I looked like Red Butt and then cuff my head.
For “good luck.”
****
It was because my sister wouldn’t stop crying that I had to kill her.
I don’t think she felt anything, though, because I put the pillow over her head while she was asleep. To her, it was just like never waking up after a long nap.
****
My grades went down in elementary school after Suzie died, but I did pretty well in junior high, and by the time I got to high school, I was on the honor roll every semester.
****
So, while I have had to overcome a lot in my life, I think that adversity has made me stronger. I am happy, healthy, well-adjusted and able to handle anything that is thrown at me.
This is why I firmly believe I would be a productive member of your academic community and a welcome addition to your college.
POOL,
AIR CONDITIONING,
FREE HBO
(2016)
“Not exactly the honeymoon I imagined,” Heather said wryly.
He should have planned better, Todd thought. But who would have guessed that most of the small towns they’d be driving through would have no motels, and that the motels in the one decent-sized city they encountered would be completely booked. He should have looked things up, should have Googled their entire trip, but they’d wanted to be old school and analog, wanted to just pick a direction and drive, seeing what they could find, having unplanned adventures that would become great stories to tell their children and that they would remember for the rest of their lives.
Now they were stuck at this dump of a motor court outside the one-road town of Feldspar, New Mexico: a single-story, ten-room Bates Motel whose better days had been long before either of them were born.
They would definitely have a memorable story, but it was going to be one of those that was far better in the retelling than in the occurrence.
They’d reached the motor court late in the afternoon, and since the next town was an hour and a half away and there was no guarantee that it would have any place to stay at all, they made the decision to stop and check in for the night.
Todd tried to make a joke of it. “At least it has free HBO,” he said, pointing to the sign. But he felt guilty. Heather deserved more than this, and it was his fault for not planning out a more romantic honeymoon. He was always missing those sorts of social cues, and though he and Heather had always prided themselves on their unconventionality and had talked many times about a cross-country road trip, he should have figured out that the trip and the honeymoon were two different things and that, deep down, she wanted something more traditional.
They stepped out of the car. Behind windows so dusty that the glass appeared sepia-toned was the motor court’s office, so designated by a metal sign mounted above the white wooden door. Todd pushed the door open, causing a buzzer to sound somewhere in the back. The office itself was small, a narrow space between the dusty windows and a shabby counter. Behind the counter, a doorway in the wall led to what appeared to be living quarters.
The buzzer had not caused anyone to come out to the front, and Todd was looking for a bell on the counter that he could hit in order to alert the manager to their presence, when he saw that there was already someone behind the counter.
A dwarf.
It was not the politically correct term, but the small man was wearing a red-and-white striped shirt that resembled something from a circus, and that was the first word that came to Todd’s mind. Trying not to act as startled as he felt, he smiled as though everything were normal and took out his wallet. “We’d like a room, please.”
“Cash only,” the manager said in a high, whiny voice.
Cash?
That was weird.
But it was just as well. Todd was not sure he’d feel comfortable supplying his credit card number to a rundown motel on the edge of a middle-of-nowhere New Mexico town. It was an invitation to identity theft.
“That’ll be fine,” he said. “How much?”
“Fifty-nine forty-eight.”
Todd took out his wallet, placing three twenties on the counter. He expected to have to fill out some sort of form with his address or phone number or, at the very least, license plate number—just in case he and Heather trashed the room—but the dwarf only took the money, put it somewhere beneath the counter, and said, “I’ll get your change. Pennies okay?”
Pennies?
Todd nodded, and the little man withdrew into the back room, emerging with a mason jar filled with copper coins. He started doling out change. “Forty-eight,” he began, then placed a penny on the counter. “Forty-nine.” Another penny. “Fifty.” Another penny. “Fifty-one…”
They stood there patiently until he reached a triumphant “Sixty dollars!”
Awkwardly, Todd scooped up the pennies. He placed a huge handful into his right front pocket, then attempted to grab the last six or seven, which lay flat on the
counter and were practically impossible to pick up. It took him at least another minute, using his fingernails, to pry them loose and put them in his uncomfortably bulging pocket.
The manager waited, and when Todd had picked up all of his change, he turned around. “You can have…” There was a long pause as his short blunt fingers ran over a section of wall on which keys were hanging from individual nails. While it made absolutely no rational sense, there seemed something ominous in the pause, and Todd suddenly wished they had continued on to another town and taken their chances.
“Room six,” the man said. He handed Todd a dull brass key attached to a ring anchored by a green plastic triangle on which the name of the motor court had been practically rubbed off by decades’ worth of fingers. He pointed out the filthy window toward the middle of the longer wing of the L-shaped motel.
“Where’s the pool?” Heather said suddenly. “Your sign says there’s a pool.”
“There used to be,” the manager answered. “Not sure what happened to it.”
Not sure what happened to it?
The feeling came again, a nagging sense that they should have passed this place by, slept in the car if it came to that.
Heather wasn’t one to let such discrepancies pass by. “What do you mean you don’t know what happened to it? Pools don’t just disappear.”
“It wasn’t a real pool anyway. It was one of those blue above-ground things. You know, with the metal sides and the rubber lining? I think the owner just put it up so he could have that word ‘pool’ on the sign. Thought it would bring more people in. Mostly it was just a tub of leaves and algae. I think someone might have hit it with their car. Or maybe the water evaporated and it blew away in a dust storm.”
Todd glanced over at Heather, shooting her a look telling her to let it drop so they could get out of here and into their room. He could tell from the expression on her face that she was as confused by the explanation as he was—how could the manager not remember whether the pool was hit by a car or blown away by wind? The two possibilities had nothing whatever in common—but she gave him a slight nod, and the two of them thanked the manager and walked outside.
Todd handed Heather the key. “It’s only about twenty feet away. Why don’t you walk there and I’ll park the car?”
She nodded, took the key and marched down the intermittent walkway while he drove the car across the cracked asphalt and pulled into a marked space just in front of their room. She beat him there and, rather than waiting, used the key to open the door.
Looking around the motel room as Todd walked in behind her, Heather tried to hide her disappointment, although “disappointment” was a mild way of putting it. For the room was, without a doubt, the smallest, most depressing place she’d ever stayed. When she was a child, her family’s vacations had always been tightly budgeted due to their permanently perilous finances, but the Super 8 Motels and Budget Inns at which they’d stayed had always been clean and well-maintained. This room looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned in ages. The brown bedspread and orange shag carpet hid a multitude of sins, and every smooth surface boasted a thick layer of dust.
In addition to being stuffy, the room was hot, and Heather turned on the light switch, looking for the advertised air conditioning. The dull yellow glow of a single bedside lamp illuminated an ancient wall unit beneath the window, but when she went to turn it on, the appliance was dead. Todd pulled open the drapes, and they both checked to see if the window could be opened, but it was sealed shut.
“Well, this is romantic,” Heather said.
Todd went back out to the car to get the suitcases, and she checked out the bathroom: small sink, rusty water in the open-lidded toilet, a shower/bath combo with a cracked fiberglass frame. On top of the toilet tank was an ice bucket and four wrapped plastic glasses. She was thirsty, Heather realized, and she washed out the bucket in the sink, then passed Todd, bringing in the snack bag from the car, telling him that she was going to get some ice.
The manager had not told them where the ice machine was, but she’d spotted a protruding “ICE” sign at the far end of the building, and she walked down there with the bucket. Most of the rooms she passed appeared to be empty, and only three had cars parked in front of them. All of the cars looked old and junky.
She reached the end of the building. The ice machine was around the corner, and though the sun had not yet gone down, the area was in shadow. It made her nervous to be out of sight of the rest of the motor court, and she quickly walked over to the machine, placed the bucket in the recess beneath the ice spout and pressed the red button.
Nothing.
No ice came out. There was not even that churning gravel sound ordinarily generated by empty ice machines. The device appeared to be dead.
She pulled the bucket out of its niche. On the ground to the right of the ice machine, she saw, was the desiccated corpse of some type of rodent, and it made her wonder how long it had been since anyone had been out here. She hurried back around the corner and down the length of the building to their room.
When she returned, Todd was just closing the door, planning to go to the bathroom, and she told him that she was going to go up to the office and tell the manager that the ice machine wasn’t working.
“Go ahead,” he said.
Closing the door behind her, she cut cattycorner across the lot to the manager’s office, walking inside—
—where the dwarf stood on top of the counter, naked.
With a penis as long as his legs.
“Jesus!” She turned and ran back to the room, startled and frightened. She’d left the key inside, and she started pounding on the door, hoping Todd was out of the bathroom. “Todd!” she cried. “Open up!”
A woman from the room to the right came out, drawn by the sounds of tumult. She was thin, older and wearing a multi-colored muumuu. “Everything okay?” she asked.
Todd opened the door.
“It’s fine,” Heather told the woman, trying to move past Todd into the room.
“Are you two staying here?” the woman asked, coming over.
That was obvious, and Heather did not even bother to answer. She wanted to get safely inside the room. She glanced nervously over her shoulder at the motel office.
Todd, apparently, was in the mood to chat. “Yes, we are,” he told the woman. He put an arm around Heather. “We’re on our honeymoon.”
The woman shook her head. “Shouldn’t have done that.”
“Gotten married?”
“No. Come here. You shouldn’t have come here.”
“Why?”
“Because he won’t let you leave. The manager,” she clarified.
Heather shivered as she thought of the small man and his huge appendage.
Todd frowned. “What do you mean he won’t let us leave?”
She gestured toward the green T-Bird parked in front of her room. “He comes out at night and steals parts from your car. Then he says ‘kids’ did it. You call a mechanic to repair your car, and once it’s fixed, it happens again. He steals some other part until finally you run out of money and you can’t get it fixed anymore.”
“Why would he do that?” Todd asked.
“I think he’s crazy.”
She was crazy, Heather thought, and she could tell from Todd’s glance that he thought so, too.
“How long has this been going on?” Todd asked, patronizing her.
“Five years. I’ve been here for five years.”
“We’ll be careful,” Heather said and ushered Todd into the room, closing the door behind her.
He laughed, though quietly, not wanting the woman to hear. “She’s a character.”
She was something, Heather had to admit. She looked over at her husband. She’d run back here to tell Todd what had happened in the motor court’s office, but the encounter with their neighbor had thrown the timing off, and now the idea of bringing it up seemed weird and awkward. It seemed easier all of a sudden to just let it li
e. They’d be gone in the morning, and that would be the end of it. She’d never have to think about this place again.
They drove back into town for dinner. The closest thing to a restaurant in Feldspar was a hamburger stand called Lucky’s, and they sat on plastic stools and had greasy burgers, soggy fries and watered-down soft drinks.
It was fully night by the time they returned to the motor court, a much deeper night than she had ever experienced in Southern California. Others seemed to have checked in during their absence. There were more cars parked in front of the rooms than there had been before, although she wasn’t sure where they had come from since the highway had been almost completely empty and they’d seen only one or two vehicles on their way into town.
The single bulb outside their room created a pyramid of radiance that illuminated the walkway and a section of the asphalt in front of the door, but the darkness and shadows were so close to the border of the light that they gave the impression they could engulf it anytime they chose. Not that darkness and shadows had sentience. Or did they? It was an odd thought, but one that seemed somehow appropriate in this place.
They got out of the car and went into the room, Todd still carrying his Coke cup. Like the land outside, the room was darker than it should have been, even after Heather turned on the bathroom light. There was nothing about this place she liked. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she turned on her phone, intending to call her mother, her sister, someone, anyone who could tether her to the real world, but the phone was dead.
How had that happened? There was a charger in her purse, and she took it out, plugging it into the wall socket in the bathroom.
Todd had turned on the television, but the only channel that came in was HBO, and the only thing on HBO was Sesame Street. Several minutes into the show, the picture froze on a shot of Big Bird. They left it on, hoping it would unfreeze, but the yellow smiling face of the oversized puppet remained onscreen, and after a while the permanent smile and blank plastic stare grew uncomfortable and then creepy. Todd picked up the remote and shut off the TV.
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