The Motel Life (2 page)

We emptied both our accounts but I had only $234 in savings, and Jerry Lee had less than a hundred. While we were in line I kept thinking about the kid. Maybe he had been sleeping in the warm bed of his girlfriend an hour before he died. He might have snuck out her window when he knew he had to leave. Might have been laying there next to her, and she was naked and he’s about to fall asleep; maybe it was then that he made himself get up and get dressed. Maybe he heard her mom get up and use the toilet. Maybe he kissed her before he left. Maybe he got back in bed with her one last time before he made himself go for sure. I hope it was like that, and not the other way. That he was running from something, or that he had
nowhere to go, or that he couldn’t go home ’cause things were so bad there.

Bad luck, it falls on people every day. It’s one of the only certain truths. It’s always on deck, it’s always just waiting. The worst thing, the thing that scares me the most is that you never know who or when it’s going to hit. But I knew then, that morning, when I saw the kid’s frozen arms in the back of the car that bad luck had found my brother and me. And us, we took the bad luck and strapped it around our feet like concrete. We did the worst imaginable thing you could do. We ran away. We just got in his beat-up 1974 Dodge Fury and left.

3

THE FIRST THING WE DID
was get a full tank of gas, and then we went to the store. We bought a twelve-pack of beer, a pint of Jim Beam, some ant-acid pills, a bottle of Pepto, three pre-made sandwiches, some cleaning products, a package of glazed donuts, and then we parked behind the Day’s Inn on Seventh Street. We cleaned up the blood on the back seat with a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of 409. We didn’t go home and get our things. We didn’t call anybody. I didn’t call in at work.

‘Where do you want to go?’ I asked him as I pulled us out onto the road.

‘To Montana,’ Jerry Lee said and opened a beer.

‘It’s probably snowing up there.’

‘At least it’s out of state, less people than in California. We could take the car out in the middle of nowhere, in the woods. We could buy a bunch of gas and burn it. Stack it full of wood inside
and set it on fire.’

‘I guess,’ I said but I wasn’t really thinking. I knew I was about to be sick again. I pulled the car over to the side of the road and got out as fast as I could.

My brother rolled down the window after I was done and said, ‘Jesus, Frank, you’re a mess.’

‘I can’t help it,’ I told him.

‘You want me to drive?’

‘Maybe,’ I said and he got out of the car and I got in the passenger seat. Jerry Lee put us back on the road and got us on the highway. I opened a beer and turned on the radio and found the oldies country and western station.

‘Head wherever you want,’ I told him and closed my eyes. I leaned my face against the cold glass of the passenger side window.

‘I’ll just start east, then maybe take 95 up?’

‘Okay,’ I said.

We became quiet for a while, and I fell asleep for maybe an hour or so. When I woke I opened another beer and tried to eat a donut.

‘You up?’ my brother asked me and looked over.

‘Yeah,’ I told him.

‘I’m sorry. I really am. I’m sorry for everything. I shouldn’t have come by your room. I didn’t know where else to go. I know I owe 300 bucks too. I just want to let you know that I’m damn sorry.’

‘I don’t care about the money.’

‘I’m a goddamn horrible person.’

‘No, you’re not,’ I said and looked out the window across the highway as we passed the town of Lovelock. They’d built a
prison out there, and an Indian guy I’d worked with in the warehouses was supposedly there. That’s what everyone said about him. Larry Jenkins is his name. It was just above freezing, but even still, in the distance I could make out people walking around in the yard, and I wondered if he was out there among them.

‘You mind talking, Frank? When I’m alone with my thoughts all I think about is what happened.’

‘What do you want to talk about?’

‘Jesus, I don’t care.’

‘My stomach’s getting worse,’ I said.

‘You should drink more milk.’

‘I guess.’

‘Or go see a doctor. They might have something you could take. You probably got an ulcer. You should stick to beer and drink Pepto with it.’

‘That don’t sound too good.’

‘I’ve seen guys do it, but it looks pretty horrible to me too.’

‘I read somewhere that the town of Lovelock is the home of some famous woman who was in Charlie Chaplin movies. She was Chaplin’s girlfriend for a long time. He went through the women, but he always liked her. He supported her, I think. For her whole life he did.’

‘Did she move back to Lovelock?’

‘No, she lived in San Francisco.’

‘She still alive?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘she drank herself to death in the 1940s, I think.’

‘That’s not helping, I guess,’ Jerry Lee said.

‘What isn’t?’

‘You talking,’ he said and laughed. He turned the stereo back up and so I stared out the window at the frozen desert and after a while fell asleep.

4

WE DROVE ALL THAT DAY
without hardly stopping. We’d talk for a while, then we’d listen to the radio, every now and again we’d stop at a gas station if one passed our way. Both our moods were pretty dark. We couldn’t stop thinking about the kid. For a time we were on Highway 80, and then we turned north on Highway 95 and drove until it got dark. By then we were near the Oregon border, near the small town of McDermitt. Jerry Lee pulled off the highway onto a dirt road and drove a mile or so on it and shut off the car. I went to the trunk and took out these two old sleeping bags he kept in there and got back in the car. Jerry Lee moved to the back seat and we got into the bags and tried to knock off.

We were quiet for a long time. I had the radio going to help me sleep, but the night was hard, and after a time I could hear Jerry Lee crying. It was real quiet, the way he cried, like he was whimpering. Like a sick dog might, or maybe a dying old man. I didn’t say anything to him ’cause I didn’t know what to say.

But that night even when I did get to sleep, it wouldn’t last. The wind began to blow and it started snowing in flurries. I got worried about getting stuck, about cars passing us, or the police noticing us and thinking we were stranded or broken down.

I got so nervous after a while that I woke Jerry Lee. I yelled at him, but he just lay there in the back like he was dead. Finally I sat up and leaned over the seat and shook him until he woke.

‘What do you want?’ he said in the darkness.

‘I can’t sleep.’

‘Jesus, why not? It’s too fucking cold out to do anything else.’

‘We should get back on the road.’

‘Let’s wait ’til morning.’

‘You think so?’ I asked.

‘I’m too tired to drive and you can’t see worth a shit at night,’ Jerry Lee said and coughed.

‘What station you been listening to?’

‘It’s out of Redding, California,’ I said. ‘It’s a talk show about business or something.’

‘It sounds boring as hell.’

‘I ain’t really listening.’

He sat up. ‘Put on that Willie Nelson tape, will you? I hate when they talk on the radio. I got that song “Railroad Lady” stuck in my head again.’

I sat up and turned on the inside light. I found the tape, put it in, and turned the light back off.

‘You think there’s wolves out here?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s a few mountain lions, I bet, but all the ranchers, they shot the wolves years ago.’

‘What about coyotes?’

‘I bet there’s some.’

‘Maybe we’ll see them.’

‘I hope so,’ I said.

‘I think the only thing that will get me back to sleep is beer.’

I reached over to the floorboards and took a beer from the sack and handed it back to him.

‘I just started getting antsy,’ I said. ‘I felt like I had to wake you.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said and opened the can. ‘You know what I was thinking about just before I fell asleep?’

‘What’s that?’

‘How when you started writing those letters to the horse track in Del Mar, the track near San Diego. How you wrote them asking if you and I could have jobs down there. That we’d work for free if they’d give us a room to live in. Dear Sir, we’re only fifteen and seventeen and we’ve never seen a horse outside a parking lot, a rodeo, or a TV, but if you let us stay in a stall we’ll work for free. You could feed us too if that’s all right, or we could just eat at the concession stand. If you chose the concession stand we’ll need a few bucks or some food vouchers or we can just eat the old hot dogs.’

Jerry Lee busted up laughing.

‘Shit,’ I said and sat up. ‘How did you remember that?’

‘Just came to me.’

‘I wrote those assholes every week. Them and Santa Anita, but I figured if Del Mar took us, then we could go to the beach. Maybe learn how to surf or scuba dive.’

‘Can you imagine if they would have written back? We’d be down in San Diego right now instead of out here in the boonies.’

‘I should have lied a bit more,’ I said, and in the darkness I was smiling. ‘I wrote them all year long. Maybe something like forty letters.’

‘The horse track, Jesus.’

‘It wasn’t that bad an idea,’ I said.

‘No, it was a good idea, it was a real great idea,’ he said. His voice still light and easy. ‘It was one of the best ideas I’ve ever heard.’

5

I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING
and got sick out the driver’s side window. The car was covered in snow and the wind was howling, blowing snow in flurries, and at times it was almost as bad as a white out.

‘That ain’t much of a wake-up call,’ Jerry Lee said when he heard me.

‘You got chains?’ I asked him and laid back down on my sleeping bag.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Jesus, it’s snowing. Holy hell. If I do they’d probably be in the trunk, but I don’t drive when it snows so I don’t know for sure.’

‘I hate driving at all,’ I said.

‘When it starts falling,’ Jerry Lee said, ‘I walk. I don’t trust people, you’d be crazy to. Most don’t know how to drive, and then you add snow and it’s a goddamn mess. If it snowed all the time, say
like you’re in Michigan or Alaska, then it’d be different. I guess I’d trust people then. But it doesn’t. Ice is worse. I just stay home if there’s ice. I won’t even walk on the sidewalk.’

I started the Dodge and turned the heater on. I set my pants next to the floor vent, and put them on when they had warmed. Then I put on my shoes and my coat and got out and wiped the snow off the windows. We were parked on top of a hill overlooking a valley. I checked the trunk and there were no chains, nor a jack or even a tire iron. I walked down the road a while to see how it was, and the snow was deep, maybe a foot. I wasn’t sure we could get back to the highway even if we had chains.

For a time I ate snow and looked down into a gully. The cool air and the snow helped calm my stomach, and all around me the snow was new and untouched, with no tracks coming or going. As I stared off I saw a deer appear maybe a half a mile away on the top of another ridge. I’d never seen one in the wild before. I’ve seen them dead on the highway, and on TV, but never like that.