Mr. Tall (2 page)

Cheryl gamely marched up to the rail and faced into the chilly breeze whipping in from the sea. “I never get tired of looking at the ocean,” she said.

Darryl turned his head slowly toward the ranger. He didn't want to make any sudden moves. “You must get tired of hearing people say that,” he said.

Cheryl shot Darryl a look over her shoulder.

“Nah,” the ranger said. “I get tired of people spitting over the side.”

While Cheryl gazed stiffly into the distance—proving for Darryl's benefit that she did not, thank you very much,
ever
get tired of looking at the ocean—he studied the half-mile-long track over which the lighthouse had recently been dragged to keep it from toppling into the Atlantic. Someday the ocean would threaten the spot where the lighthouse now stood. Eventually there would be no place left to move it to. They were all going to die and there was nothing they could do about it. Darryl edged back toward the door.

“Weather coming,” the ranger said.

“Tell me about it,” Darryl said.

Darryl and Cheryl were married in a civil ceremony in South Carolina because the idea of their families mixing at a formal wedding was simply too painful to contemplate. When they came back from their honeymoon in Myrtle Beach, people made fun of them because their names rhymed. Cheryl told them they could kiss her white ass, but she wasn't really mad. Darryl tried to explain to everyone that, well, technically, it was only a close rhyme. The hours they worked at the paper weren't any better, but at least now, late on Tuesdays, they could lock Mr. Putnam's door and clear the fog out of Cheryl's brain. Mr. Putnam, God bless him, left them the paper when his liver gave out. Darryl became editor and publisher; Cheryl promoted herself to production manager.

Real estate boomed in the mountains around Argyle. Florida Yankees moved in by the Town Car load. Golf courses spread like mold through the valleys, and gated communities climbed up the ridges. Argyle grew a bypass, and a Super Wal-Mart sprouted like a toadstool alongside it. Ad revenue skyrocketed. They hired a couple of kids straight out of J-school who didn't know anything useful and took the paper biweekly. They took out a loan that caused muscle spasms in Darryl's neck for the better part of a week. They built a bigger building and bought a new press. Cheryl had a baby. She picked the name Misti Renee and stuffed the baby into a sling and went back to work. They hired another kid from J-school and two more ad salesmen and somehow, miraculously, the
Argus
blossomed into the
Daily Argus.
Misti learned to walk by holding onto the receptionist's desk. She hummed happily underneath the light table. Darryl walked through the building and wondered, who
are
all these people?

They drove into the fog—an honest-to-God, Graveyard of the Atlantic
bank
of fog—just north of Avon. Cheryl rolled down her window. Darryl could hear the surf smashing itself into spray somewhere close by, but he could not see it, a sensation he found unnerving. He imagined a bridge out, a causeway unfinished, a flimsy barricade, the road disappearing into the sea. He wouldn't be able to stop in time. He leaned closer to the windshield. He couldn't see where he was going.

“Roll that window up,” he said.

“Nope,” Cheryl answered. “I want to hear a foghorn.”

When Darryl reached for the master switch on the console, Cheryl stuck her arm out of the car. Darryl bumped the switch a couple of times, nudging her arm with the glass.

“Darryl,” she said calmly. “Trust me. You do not want to do that.”

Actually, that was exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to roll Cheryl's arm up in the car window. He wanted to jam the switch forward until it broke. Cheryl reached over with her left hand and placed it on top of his right hand.

“If Misti lets that weasel get in her pants, it's all your fault,” he said, surprising himself, knowing as he said it that it was the most unfair thing he had ever said to anyone.

Cheryl lifted his hand off the console and dropped it into his lap. “I don't know what your problem is,” she said, “but if you touch that switch one more time I will backhand you in the mouth.”

Darryl placed his hand on the steering wheel. He felt a laugh fluttering irrationally inside his chest. Now that he'd gotten this thing rolling, he found that he didn't want to ride it all the way to the bottom. He suddenly wanted to see Cheryl walk out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. He wanted her nipples to lock him in their transfixing gaze. He took a deep breath.

Cheryl held up her index finger to cut him off. “Right now,” she said, “you just need to shut the hell
up.
All I wanted to hear was a foghorn.”

Misti was not allowed to touch Cheryl's scissors, either. Misti took gymnastics. Misti took ballet. Misti learned to read by climbing onto the light table and sounding out headlines. Misti joined the swim team, but she didn't like it. Misti grew taller than the other girls in her class. Darryl put up a hoop in the parking lot and he and Misti shot baskets after school. Misti played center for the Lady Scots. She was All-Conference her senior year. Some guys from Ohio offered Darryl and Cheryl three million dollars for the
Argus
and they sold it. Darryl took up fly-fishing, which he wasn't very good at. Cheryl worked part time at a fudge shop owned by her aunt. Darryl and Cheryl drove Misti to Wilmington and left her standing in the parking lot of a dormitory with her hands clamped over her mouth.

They didn't reach Nags Head until after dark and then had trouble finding a room in the fog. Every time Cheryl managed to identify one of the vaporous buildings as a motel, Darryl had already driven past its entrance. “If you don't slow down,” she said, “you're going to miss the spooks in Scotland.”

Traffic lights swam at them out of nowhere, each as unexpected as a UFO. Darryl had no idea where he was going, only that it wasn't toward Argyle. “About back there…” he said.

Cheryl didn't look at him. “I'm about starved,” she said. “Keep a lookout for a Hardee's or something.”

She would forgive him, just not yet. He was lucky she hadn't knocked his teeth out. That he had kept his teeth all these years when he so obviously didn't deserve them seemed a minor blessing. He kept his hands on the wheel at ten and two and savored the domestic missions of the moment. Find me a Hardee's. Find me a room. Stay with me until I die. It was all the same thing, really.

He had begun to consider turning around for another pass through Nags Head when the words “Wade-n-Sea” materialized in sizzling pink neon high above the roadway to their right.

Cheryl leaned forward and stared up at the sign. “That's got to be a motel,” she said.

“Or maybe God needs a copyeditor.”

“Just shut up and slow down, Darryl.”

He managed to steer the car into the parking lot of an ancient red-brick motel. Three low wings of eight or ten rooms lay moored in the fog in a U around the sign, and beneath the sign glittered a small, dazzlingly bright swimming pool. Three pickup trucks with fishing-rod holders welded to their front bumpers were the only other vehicles in the lot.

When Darryl rang the bell in the office, a desiccated old woman with skin cured the color of nicotine opened the door behind the counter. Through the doorway he saw an even older man slumped in a wheelchair, his mouth agape in what seemed to be a permanent expression of disbelief. The wet light of a muted television wavered on the wall behind him.

The woman studied Darryl's face with the wariness of someone who had been held up more than once. “That's my husband,” she said. “I try to bring him home on weekends.”

“Do you have a room available?”

“You saw the parking lot. How many do you want?”

Darryl smiled. “How about one?”

“King or double?”

He chewed on his upper lip, considering the ways the evening might go. “Double, I guess.”

“That'll be eighty-five for the night. Who's the other bed for?”

“My wife. She's in the car.”

The old woman pushed a registration slip toward him. “Well, enjoy it while you can.”

“Excuse me?”

“The Wade-n-Sea. This might be the winter the nor'easters finally finish us off. The next time we close her down, she might not open up again. New moon, we already get water up in the front rooms. Can't rent 'em anymore.”

“Will you rebuild?”

“Nah. The beach is gone. Government says whatever falls in the ocean on this side of the road stays in the ocean. I guess we'll take their money. Let 'em have it. Move to Burlington. We got a daughter there. You ever been to Burlington?”

“I've passed by it on the interstate.”

“Well, it ain't much of a place if you ask me. Shit. Computer's down again. Don't know why we even got a computer. Pay me tomorrow.” She placed a key on top of Darryl's credit card and slid the card across the counter. “Number four, two doors down, this side. No smoking. No parties. No loud music. No unregistered guests. No glass bottles by the pool. No exceptions.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I smoke in here, but it's my motel, so don't even bother complaining to me about that.”

“I won't,” Darryl said. “I promise.” He turned toward the door.

“So what are you going to do?” the old woman asked.

Darryl frowned. “About what?”

“Tomorrow. While you're here.”

“Oh,” he said. “I don't know. Wright Brothers Memorial, I guess. The beach if the fog clears out. I don't know what else there is.”

The old woman put her hands on the counter and leaned toward him. “Jockey Ridge,” she said. “Now, that's a thing worth seeing.”

“What's Jockey Ridge?”

“Sand dunes. Big as mountains. You climb to the top and run down 'em.
Whee.
”

“Thank you. We'll take a look.”

“Check-out time's eleven, but go ahead and sleep late if you want. What the hell. Soon as we sell this place I'm gonna sleep a long time.”

The walls of their room were paneled in knotty pine, but the wood had darkened so much over the years that it absorbed most of the light emitted by the forty-watt bulbs in the lamps. The green carpet smelled vaguely of mildew overlaid with mothballs. The pink tile and fixtures in the bathroom looked original, but the toilet didn't flush properly. At least everything seemed reasonably clean.

“Which bed do you want?” Cheryl asked.

Darryl waited to see if she was joking, then pointed at the one by the window. The blinds glowed softly with diffuse pink light.

Cheryl plopped onto the other bed and reached for the remote. “Sorry, Slick. No haunted castles tonight.”

“But it's
Scot
land.”

She turned on the television. “Boo,” she said. “How's that?”

When he started awake, he heard the shower running. It was after midnight. On television the haunted-castle psychic, wearing a headlamp, stooped through a low doorway followed by the haunted-castle cynic, an attractive but bitter little woman in a black turtleneck.

Darryl smiled.

“Do you feel that, Shelia?” the psychic asked. “That cold air. My God, the temperature's plummeting like a stone. Do you feel it?”

“How do you know it's not a draft?” Shelia asked, wrapping her arms around herself. “I don't think castles are insulated very well.”

The psychic strode farther into the room. “William?” he called out. “William, are you here with us? Can you make a sound, William? We mean you no harm.”

When the water stopped running in the bathroom, Darryl hopped up and found the remote and turned off the television. He took off his shirt and T-shirt, then his pants. He looked at himself in the mirror, then put his T-shirt back on. He lay down on Cheryl's bed and propped his hands behind his head.

When Cheryl came out of the bathroom, she was wearing sweatpants and socks and the long T-shirt she normally wore over her swimsuit. Her eyes were dangerously bloodshot.

Darryl swung his legs off the bed and reached for his pants.

“I can't believe what you said to me,” Cheryl said. “Nobody's ever said anything like that to me before, not ever.”

“I'm sorry,” Darryl said, looking desperately around for his shoes. “I tried to apologize but you just wanted me to find you a Hardee's.”

“You think just because I lived in a trailer for a year and a half I'm a slut?”

“What?”

“You think Misti's gonna screw every boy in Wilmington because I like to go to Gatlinburg to see the Christmas lights?”

“I don't know what the hell you're talking about,” Darryl said. “What
are
you talking about?”

“You do, too, know what I'm talking about. You think because I like to, what else, listen to the race on the radio, that I don't have any morals.”

“I didn't say that. I didn't say anything like that. Do you know where I put my shoes?”

“That's exactly what you said. Well, let me tell you something. The race is a hell of a lot better than that classical PBS shit you pretend you like and make everybody else listen to, and I've only had sex with two people in my whole life and I married both of them so you can just stick your shoes up your Carolina-blue Episcopal ass.”

“Cheryl, you're not making any sense, and, for the record, you don't have to bring Donnie into this.”

“Don't you dare tell me I'm not making any sense, and, for the
record,
I'll talk about Donnie Payne if I want to. I know you think I'm stupid. I know you think my armpits smell bad and my boobs are too big. I know you laugh at my clothes behind my back. You always have.”

“I have never laughed at your clothes.”