The Motel Life (22 page)

‘That’s funnier than hell,’ I said and laughed.

‘It’s all right,’ he said and then paused for a time. ‘But you know what I’ve been thinking about, well, it’s just that … that I ain’t done anything yet. I ain’t done anything great or memorable or done anything that’s helped anyone else.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I haven’t done anything. I’ve never even had a girl tell me she’s loved me. You have, haven’t you? Hasn’t Annie told you that?’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘All I’ve done is fuck up. At least the last few years, anyway. I’m not complaining, really, and I don’t want you to tell me it ain’t true. It’s the facts the way I see them and that’s what I mean. I’m just trying to be honest. I’ve never really done anything. I didn’t even graduate from high school, and everyone can do that. Only real bums don’t. And I’ve never had a real girlfriend, someone that was just mine. Polly always had another boyfriend. Always. She never once stopped with just me. We never really talked about anything or gave each other presents at Christmas. I never took her out to dinner or went away with her like when you took Annie to San Francisco on the goddamn Amtrak train. I don’t know, now I got you in trouble, and I killed the kid, Wes Denny. It was me, I did that. Whether or not it was my fault doesn’t matter, it happened, and it happened to me.’ Cause I’m here.’ Cause I’m alive in the world that poor kid’s dead.’

‘You’re just getting started. Our lives, we got a lot of years.’

‘No girl’s gonna fuck a guy with no leg. A guy who’s killed a kid.’

I opened another beer and took another long pull off the whiskey.

‘This is a depressing conversation.’

‘I’m just telling the truth,’ Jerry Lee said.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. I went over to the cassette player, flipped the tape and turned up the song ‘Railroad Lady’. We didn’t talk for a long time.

‘Tell me a story,’ Jerry asked when the tape ended. You could hear the wind howl around us, shaking the old dilapidated motel.

‘Hell, I don’t feel like it,’ I said. ‘I’m drunker than hell, and all I want to do is pass out and not think anymore.’

‘Shit, Frank, I ain’t gonna sleep, I never sleep when I’ve had a few. I gave you the drawing, you owe me. Like we used to be. This might be the last time we get to sit like this for a long time. I mean, if I go to the hospital tomorrow this might be it. So tell me one.’

‘What do you want to hear?’

‘Well, I want to hear one about me, I guess. Something good, where I get married or at least get a girl. Maybe I’m famous or something. You could make me rich, if you want.’

‘All right,’ I said and thought for a while. ‘Well, I guess I could start here. It was World War Two, and you and me were pilots, fighter pilots, and we were stationed in England. We were heading over to Germany one morning when we ran into a bunch of German fighter planes and we got into a huge dogfight. “Tiger one, I’m hit,” yelled Pete Harris from Ohio, one of our good buddies. He went into a spin and crashed into the ocean, the English Channel. Martin, Lewis, Johnson, they all got hit and spun in circles and crashed into the freezing sea. We were taking out Jerry, though, one by one we were. Soon it was down to Captain Wilson, me, and you. Then you got hit, you had a Nazi on your tail, and I came zipping up behind you and I blew the bastard up. “Thanks,
Tiger five,” you said over the radio. The rest of the Germans ran, headed back over the Channel. Problem was, your plane was out of control. Set northwest with a broken rudder, you couldn’t steer. You were heading towards Iceland, Greenland, and there was nothing you could do about it. Captain Wilson, he was hit, his arm got blown off and he was heading back to base. Me, I followed you for a time.

‘“Tiger five,” you said, “I don’t have control, heading into cloud cover, ideas at a minimum.”

‘Jesus, I didn’t know what to do. I stayed behind you, but my gas tank had been hit. Gas was spewing out, my engine started smoking. “Tiger four, I’m leaking fuel, going to have to pull out and head back to base. When you find land, parachute out. We’ll regroup. You get to a radio and contact base control and we’ll do a recon-mission into wherever you’re at and pick you up. Head towards Amsterdam, over and out.”

‘“Tiger five, I copy that. Good luck, kill those Jerries for me, I’ll do the same. Happy hunting, over and out.”

‘Well, I saw your plane disappear into cloud cover and I limped my way back to England. It was rough going, I had to climb up as high as I could in order to coast down. I was on fumes by the time I saw the runway. Captain Wilson had already landed. He was drinking English tea and smoking a cigar while they sewed his goddamn arm back on. I landed all right, and I jumped out of the plane and yelled, “Get me a goddamn fighter, my brother’s up there, controls locked, I’m gonna do a mid-air transfer.”

‘Wilson coughed, “No one can do a mid-air transfer. That hasn’t been done since the great Waldo Pepper did it in World War One.”

‘“Get me a plane, I can do it, captain.”

‘“I bet you can, you crazy bastard, get this soldier a goddamn plane!”

‘“All our planes are too shot up,” the head mechanic, Roscoe, yelled out.

‘“Don’t know what to tell you, kid,” Captain Wilson said, then passed out. In the meantime you were heading out into the Atlantic, right towards Iceland. You kept the plane up, but it was hard. “I got to hold on,” you said over and over. “Got to get back and kill more Jerries.” And you did hold on all the way to Iceland, where it’s the middle of winter and snowing like a son of a bitch. Once you see land you bail out, hit your parachute jump cord, and sail down to a goddamn blizzard. You walk for miles.’

I paused and opened a new beer.

‘This is a good one,’ Jerry Lee said. ‘Action and adventure. Keep it going.’

‘I’m not quite done yet. Almost, though,’ I continued. ‘So you walk for miles. You can barely see, it’s a whiteout and you’re almost snow blind when you see a polar bear the size of an elephant and it starts chasing you, trying to eat you. You pull out your pearl-handled forty-five and with one shot you hit it in the head, right through the brain, and kill it. But you’re fucking cold, frozen almost, so you take out your Air Force issue pocket knife and cut a hole in the polar bear and jump inside it to keep warm.’

‘That’s fucking sick,’ Jerry Lee said and laughed.

‘Yeah, but it saved your life, and in the morning the sun came out and you jumped out and started walking again. For miles you walked, covered in polar-bear blood and guts that began to freeze on you as the wind kicked in. Then finally, after almost falling into
a frozen lake, you see a house, a cabin, you see smoke coming from its chimney. Well, you beat on the door, but no one answers and so you just walk in. You can hear someone screaming, a girl, but you can’t see where. The cabin’s small, just a table with a white cloth on it, some chairs, and a fireplace with a fire going. There’s something cooking, an apple pie, in a stove. But there’s a back room and you don’t know what to do. You keep hearing the screaming and then the crying, and so you walk into the room and there before you is a guy around fifty years old and he’s got this girl tied face down on the bed naked. Goddamn if he isn’t doing cocaine off the girl’s ass. And the girl, she’s maybe twenty, dark hair, beautiful. She’s got whip marks on her back and the guy, the fat, hairy, smelly guy dressed in a red one-piece long johns outfit, snorts a huge line, the size of a deer’s antler, off her right ass cheek and then he whips her and yells at her in Icelandic. The girl lets out a scream and then you say, “Sir, I’m a lieutenant in the American Air Force stationed in England. Sir, put down that whip.” The guy he looks over and sees you, and he’s scared, you look like the devil with all the polar-bear blood on you. You pull your gun out and make the guy lay down on the floor and then you untie the girl. She grabs you and thanks you in English, then runs into the kitchen, naked, and she’s the best looking girl you’ve ever seen. You let her go ’cause you still have your eye on the guy, and she comes running back with a big kitchen knife and stabs the guy in the throat and blood comes shooting out in a stream and hits the wall.’

‘This is a good one,’ Jerry Lee says, laughing.

‘Well, the guy he turns out to be her father, and he’s laying there dying, and she begins crying and you’re not sure what to do, and
then finally the guy dies and she gets dressed. Both of you drag the man out into the snow and soon a pack of wolves come and they eat him and drag his bones away. Then the girl, the girl who’s smart as hell and knows English just from listening to the radio, helps you undress and takes you to an outdoor tub they have that is a hot spring and you jump in there, and then she jumps in too. She screams ’cause of the whip marks on her back, but she gets used to it. Then she tells you about her cocaine-addicted father, her isolation out there, the polar bear that ate her sister and her mother. You then tell her about your life as a fighter pilot, your plane that you couldn’t steer, your night in the guts of the polar bear, and your twenty-mile hike to the cabin.

‘All night long you two keep talking, and she’s funnier than hell. The next day she washes your clothes and feeds you seal steaks and apple pie and coffee. For weeks a blizzard ensues and all you can do is sit in the tub and eat her good food and talk to her. You’ve never been able to talk to anyone the way you do with her. You end up falling in love, she tells you you’re the greatest man she’s ever met. She wakes you up one night and crawls in bed with you naked and for the next month you stay there in that bed. Eating and fucking, fucking and eating. Then as the storm finally breaks you snowshoe into town, and you get married to her. And in celebration you go to the local tavern and you’re getting loaded with her when on the radio you hear news that the war’s over, that we killed the Jerries and soon the Japs will be done too. You and your wife, you go back to the cabin for your honeymoon, and you’re laying out there in the hot spring and she’s sitting on top of you talking to you in her Icelandic accent and she’s happier than hell, and you’re happier than hell, and then a goddamn meteor
comes flying out of the sky and hits a half-mile from the cabin.

‘“That is most beautiful thing I see,” she says in her broken English.

‘You both get dressed in your brand new polar bear winter suits that you got as a wedding present and you snowshoe out to the meteor and Jesus Christ if there isn’t oil shooting a hundred yards into the sky.

‘“Honey,” you ask her, “you own this land?”

‘“We own this land,” she says and hugs you.

‘“We’re gonna be millionaires,” you say as you watch the shooting crude.

‘“I not care, I got you,” she says.

‘“Goddamn,” you say and look at her Icelandic face and kiss her.

‘The end,’ I say and take a long drink off my beer.

‘That’s a good one,’ Jerry Lee says and laughs. ‘Maybe the best ever. What’s her name?’

‘Maybe it’s Marge’s long-lost sister Helen, her sister that got stranded in that near catastrophic shipwreck,’ I said.

When I woke the next morning Jerry Lee was already awake. I looked over and his face had a film of sweat on it. He was as pale as I’d ever seen him.

‘I think there’s really something wrong with my leg,’ he said. ‘I ain’t sure, but I think there’s a smell to it, and it doesn’t smell like anything I’ve smelled before.’

‘Let me see,’ I said and got up. I went over to him and pulled back the covers and even from there, where I stood, I could smell something foul, something not right.

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘It didn’t smell like that earlier, did it?’

‘No, not like that,’ Jerry Lee said worriedly.

‘We got to go to the hospital.’

‘I don’t want to go to jail,’ Jerry Lee said.

‘You won’t go to jail, and even if you do, it probably won’t be for that long.’

‘I can’t even hardly raise my arms today, either. You don’t think I’m gonna die, do you?’ he said and looked at me. Tears began leaking down his face. ‘I guess maybe we should go to the hospital.’

‘Don’t worry, you’re going to be all right,’ I said and got dressed and helped him into some clothes. I carried him out to the car, and as I did I could feel how much weight he’d lost.

There was snow on the ground, but the roads were okay, and we didn’t say anything on the ride over, but as I parked the car in the hospital lot he said, ‘Is it wrong for me to want to live even though I killed that kid?’

‘No,’ I told him.

‘I want to fall in love and have someone fall in love with me,’ he said quietly. Then he cried so hard you could barely understand him. ‘Do you think that’s wrong to want? I mean, after what’s happened?’

‘No,’ I said.

I put him in the wheelchair and pushed him up the ramp and into the main lobby. The nurses came then and took him. I waited for days and I sat with him as I had before, but each time I came he was worse. He would barely talk and just slept most of the time. They had to do another surgery to remove the infected part of his hurt leg, and when they did that, he died. He was in that
hospital for just over a week, and then he was gone. I remember the day they told me, and I left that horrible building with nothing but a bag of his things. They asked me what I wanted to do with his body and things like that, and I told them that I’d need a day or so to think about it. But I knew that I’d never go back there, that his body and where it ended up didn’t matter to me anymore. With my mother we’d had a funeral and a wake, and neither of those things had meant anything to me. She was just gone, and now my brother was too.

I remember after they gave me the news I sat there for a long time outside that old hospital. There were people coming in and going out, and I guess that’s just the way of things.

Then I walked around, me and the dog did. Up and down the streets of that small town. I’d look in windows, but there was no reason to it. I didn’t know what else to do. In the end I just waited outside the hardware store where Annie James worked. I hoped. Because hope, it’s better than having nothing at all.

Written by Frank Flannigan December 10–29 at the Terrace Park
Apartment Building, Elko, Nevada
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Drawings and sketches by Jerry Lee Flannigan
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