Lawnboy (21 page)

We’d have killed any guest who’d tried the same thing.

“One of these days I’m getting out of here,” he said plainly.

My head emptied of thought. “It’s that bad?”

He shrugged. “It might not seem like it, but I actually care about him.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“That makes it harder. That’s why I’ve stayed around as long as I have. But, enough already. I can’t be bothered with someone like that.”

“No?”

“I’m better than that. I deserve someone better than that.”

“Haven’t you talked?”

“He doesn’t talk, period. He either shouts or shuts up.”

I nodded. I stared down at the shredded cigarette package in my lap, shuffling its pieces. He couldn’t leave. “I’d say stick it out. Give it a few more months, then see how you feel.”

“I mean, it’s hard not to take it personally. If someone had told me two years ago that I’d be involved with someone who stopped having sex with me, who had a girlfriend, of all things, I’d have said they were crazy.”

I nodded.

“But there’s something about him …”

He kept talking. The night dragged on. Whether or not I listened didn’t seem to be the issue. He might have been me at another time—I knew that worry, that quality of exclusion. But there was something unsettling about it too: we were all becoming too close. We might have been three wires, braided, intertwined, fully connected to one another. I looked up into the brightening sky, spotted a comet, some falling streak of light. I wasn’t the right person to be told these things. Or was I? I looked at my watch: 5:45. Maybe I just needed some sleep.

“So what should I do?” Hector said. “You tell me what I should do.”

I sighed. “You don’t have any money?”

“I’m broke, I’m totally broke. What savings do I have? Nothing.”

“Just like me.”

He winced. “Two brothers in poverty.”

If only for an instant, something almost unbearable drifted through my mind. I saw the two of us moving somewhere, together, New York, Seattle, London, Mexico City, changing our names, starting a life. There was nothing tying me down to this place. Peter, though upset, would eventually understand. He wouldn’t be totally bereft. He had Holly, after all.

“Maybe it’s just a sign of things ending. I should just buck up and dump him, but who wants to be the bad guy? Frankly, I’d rather be the one who’s dumped.”

The dew moistened the armrest. One by one the sprinklers sizzled on, flinging arcs of cold water across the glittering grass. I looked away from him, trying to keep the longing from my face. “I have another idea,” I said thoughtfully.

***

The three of us stood at the county landfill, tossing things into the pit. The morning was hot, windy. Wood chips sprayed from the spout of a recycling machine. Across the pit a yellow bulldozer climbed across the little hills of trash, rolling forward, backing up, rolling forward again. The machines roared and ground their gears. A spoon glinted among the mounds of used tissue. It troubled and interested me for some reason—that single instrument held up to so many mouths so many times, a little vessel of pleasure—and I was tempted to wade down the garbaged slope to retrieve it.

We were in the midst of a great cleanup. Peter had suddenly decided to empty one of the storage rooms, the contents of which had suffered smoke damage from a fire months before my arrival. The clothes, in particular, stank. Though we’d washed them in everything from Borax to bleach, they resisted our efforts, clinging in defiance to their new soiled selves. The scent nestled into their very fibers. They weren’t even worthy of the worst thrift store. I wasn’t sure why this task couldn’t have waited, especially since high season was only weeks away. I, for one, thought someone should have been staffing the desk, but I didn’t voice my concerns.

A good 90 percent of the clothes had been Hector’s. With an exaggerated flourish, he tossed each article into the pit. His sunglasses—aviators that had once belonged to me—reflected the striated clouds, the chaos around us. He behaved as if the whole experience were of great significance, an elaborate ritual. He paused to remember each piece—a sock with blue sparkles, a pink kimono, a T-shirt with a faded drawing of Mao Tse-tung—as if each one had an intricate history attached to it. Then he sent it flying out over the ledge.

He draped a worn chartreuse shirt over his arm. Its collar was pointed, its buttons huge, even silly, the size of silver dollars. I couldn’t stop looking at it.

“What?” he said to me.

“That’s an amazing shirt. You’re throwing that out?”

He shrugged. His face feigned indifference. “I was wearing this shirt the night I went out with Jonas Pike. We were walking down the aisle of the St. Mark’s Theater, and everyone, I’m serious—I mean, fucking Joe Dallesandro was there—
everybody
was staring at me.”

“How come?” I said.

He shrugged again. “I don’t know. I might have looked fierce. Or I might have looked like a street person.”

I glanced over at Peter. His face was drab, pensive. He made a point of extracting himself from our conversation.

“Could I have it?” I asked.

Peter exhaled, as if he’d reached his limit with us.

“What’s wrong with keeping one thing?” I said to him.

Peter said, “It’s ruined. It smells. What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, then stared down at the muck on my shoes.

I watched a truck dump a fresh load onto the desolate slope. The gulls were screaming above it. The truth was I didn’t want to rile him anymore. He didn’t deserve it. All morning I’d convinced myself that his mood had been prompted by seeing Hector and me by the pool. It was ridiculous, but it preoccupied me, threading in and out through my thoughts. Not to mention that I wasn’t fully myself. We’d gotten in at six, and I’d had but two hours of sleep. I imagined circles, the deep violet of bruises, beneath my eyes.

“Maybe you’re right,” Hector said, still clutching the shirt. “Maybe I should hold onto it for a while.”

“That’s it,” Peter mumbled.

We both looked at him, utterly blank.

“Do you want to see what I think of my clothes? I’ll show you what I think of my clothes.” And with that, he dumped out his garbage bag, watching its contents sliding down the slope.

“I’m impressed,” Hector said, deadpan, with raised brows.

I didn’t know how to react. He was more bothered than I’d imagined.

“He doesn’t have a fleck of fun in his body.”

“Let’s go,” I mumbled.

“Come here,” Hector said to me. He stepped closer to the edge of the pit. The marl loosened beneath his shoes. “Just come here for a second. This is amazing. There are twenty different versions of the same blue chambray shirt.”

I did as I was told. Hector was right. The shirts lodged against the side of an old washing machine.

“We don’t like to be creative,” Hector instructed. “We don’t like to take risks or exercise our imaginations. And when we go out to replace our clothes, we go straight to the Gap and say, ‘Six stonewashed chambray shirts. Size Large, please.’”

Peter’s eyes were shot through with an enormous sadness. I wondered whether he was going to start yelling. Instead, he strode toward the van in silence, waiting for us to finish up.

“Oops,” Hector mumbled.

“Now we’ve done it,” I said.

Back at the King Cole, we immersed ourselves in the most taxing assignments, a penance of sorts: Hector attended to the twenty blinks on the answering machine, while I helped replace the charred wood of the storage room. I couldn’t stop thinking about Peter, though. I couldn’t stop thinking about his reaction to the shirt. Didn’t he understand that things could be more than themselves? Wasn’t that why we honored them, hoping to reclaim them: little emblems of change, loss? Why else was he putting so much effort into running this pit of a motel, a motel with its clerestories and tinted terrazzo—all of which embodied something that was new during the era of his childhood, when the world still seemed ample with possibility?

Or maybe his feelings were about something else entirely.

He watched me working. In truth, my skills were less than stellar. I’d bent nearly eight out of every ten nails I’d tried to drive into the plywood. They littered the floor, making a wreath around my shoes, tokens of my distraction.

“Could you hold the hammer right?” he said finally.

“I am holding it right.”

“Come on,” he said. “Grip the base, not the neck. That’s it. Swing back, then aim.”

I followed his instructions. Once more, the nail bent, splitting the wood.

“God-
damn,
” he cried.

I wouldn’t look at him. It was the first time he’d actually raised his voice to me alone, and the sheer force of his outburst, the pent-up pressure behind it, scared me, caught me off guard.

“Maybe if you started behaving like you dressed,” he said, “you’d get it right.”

501s, black T-shirt with cutoff sleeves. My leather motorcycle jacket lay crumpled in a heap beside me. There it was: the issue of my look again. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t say that. Forget that I’d ever said anything like that.”

What
was
this crap about my clothes again? Was it jealousy, a projection of his fears? Or was he still hearkening back to the drag of a few nights ago? Outside, the sun lay burning, trapped behind a curtain of dirty clouds.

Maybe if you had it in you to fuck—

“Are you upset?” I said after a while. I’d had enough of this shit.

“I’m not upset. Why would I be upset?”

“You certainly sound like you’re upset.”

“You’re way too sensitive,” he murmured. “Here,” he said, passing a Coke bottle to me. “You must be thirsty. Drink some of my soda.”

I shook my head, declining.

“Drink it.”

“I’m not sensitive.”

“No, no, you’re not at all.” He smiled, attempting to diffuse the tension in the room. “My God, you’re still that touchy little boy.”

I went back to work. I gripped the hammer like he’d told me, this time driving the nail straight through the plywood without splitting it. I resisted the urge to say,
“See.”

But I didn’t have to. To my surprise, his eyes held within them a sadness, a regret.

“Listen,” he said, stepping closer to me. There was a new smell about him: pine, citrus, shards of burnt wood. He exhaled. “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. I’m under a shitload of stress right now. Florida tourism’s down 40 percent from last year. If I don’t have a good season, I’m going to lose the place.”

He had a point. In the last month, our regulars, many of whom were from England or Germany, had been canceling left and right after the murder of a British couple at an I-4 rest stop. It was as if the very name of Florida had instantly become the most fraught of metaphors: a brutal, ruthless jungle where innocent tourists were hacked to death.

Was this what all his tension was about?

“How have things been between you and Hector?” I asked.

The mere mention of his name, the mere yoking of them together in the same sentence, aroused a perceptible change in him. He might have been a cat: I actually saw his pupils shrink, then swell.

“What has he said?”

“Nothing,” I answered immediately. I’d done it now. What was the matter with me? My face flushed hotly.

“Everything is fine with us,” he assured me. “We’ve had some troubles, but everything is generally fine.”

“Great,” I said dully.

He smiled at me. I brought the hammer firmly down on another nail.

Already I knew it was going to be one of those days. Sometimes you know it the second you wake up, if only by the feeble slant of light on the furniture, the smell of mildew in the room. Other times you know exactly what’s wrong.

For the past day we’d hosted Fulvia Diaz, editor of a widely read travel guide. As a rule I hated these people. A tiny woman in tennis whites with a nasty helmet of hair, she seemed to be completely at home in her role as a walking irritation, expecting, even demanding me to be exasperated with her. Not only had she asked to use the desk phone for six personal calls, all of which were of a half hour’s duration, but she’d ensconced herself in the lobby, holding court as it were, asking leading questions of our guests (“Was
your
shower hot enough this morning?” “And what about that continental breakfast?”).

I’d had about as much as I could stand when Peter phoned from another line.

“Still there?” he murmured.

The TV blared. On The Weather Channel, Vivian Brown described a developing winter storm off Cape Hatteras. I whispered, “Yeah, but she’s going to check out the beach in a few seconds.”

“Tigertail?”

“Yes, yes.”

“You told her about the shortcut?”

“No, I told her to crawl on her hands and knees through the swamp.”

“What?”

“Peter—”

I stepped back behind the desk. She walked across the parking lot, head down, chugging her arms. She opened the door to her rented Lexus.

“So I take it everything’s going well.”

“Oh, she’s just as pleased as pralines. She’s got the nicest suite in the place, all the free gin she can drink, and she’s tied up the line for hours.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “A lot’s riding on her. At this point we need all the good press we can get.”

The storm swirled on the TV weather map, a furious, spinning comma. Meanwhile, it couldn’t have been any more hot and torporous here. The liriope wilted in the heat. Even the motors of the air conditioner felt sluggish.

“I, on the other hand, think the Vatican should start canonization proceedings on me.”

He started laughing.

“I’m serious. She’s been relentless, a real pain in the butt.”

“Come on now.”

His laughter only sparked my aggravation. “Why did you give me the desk, today of all days?”

“What did she say?”

“Oh, some crack about hospitality management. It doesn’t matter, it’s just—”

“I apologize.”

“It’s—”