The Night Listener : A Novel (24 page)

The last sensible thing I did that night was call Wysong and reserve a room at the Lake-Vue Motor Lodge for the following day. I had hoped to reach the person I’d dealt with ten days earlier, the woman who had arranged, then unarranged, my first reservation. (Somehow it would have made me feel more welcome to hear her jolly voice.) But the desk clerk was young and male this time and deeply disinterested in my history with the motel. He took my credit card number and told me flatly that checkin time was twelve noon. That was fine with me; I could sleep late and take my time getting there, mapping out my strategy along the way.

My room at the truck stop was as basic as advertised but perfectly adequate: a second-floor niche off a common walkway that commanded a view of the whole complex. Once I’d brought in my bag and brushed my teeth, I put a sweater on under my coat and went outside to survey my surroundings. The snow had stopped, so the Oz-like minarets of the power plant had come into sharp relief against the horizon. I could smell the grease belching from the kitchen below and hear the frigid thunder of truck doors being slammed. Out toward the highway at the edge of a thicket I saw what had to be a public toilet: a small, square building with milky windows, toward which men were trudging, pilgrimlike, through the snow.

I was drawn there without a moment’s thought. It was as if some younger, more reckless version of myself had taken over, em-boldened by my solitude and the raw anonymity of the situation. I headed down the steps, then followed a newly beaten path across the parking lot, threading my way through the maze of trucks. Here and there I saw men stamping the snow off their boots or sprawled in the cabs of their rigs, their faces aglow in the phantom flare of a match. For all their big-buckled bravado, they seemed less threatening to me than those free-range teenagers back at the restaurant. The air was rife with the certainly of ritual and something else—a feeling I couldn’t quite identify—a sort of gruff, unspoken understanding.

The toilet was nearly as cold as the parking lot and had the unmistakable ferny smell of fresh semen. As I entered, there was already action in one of the stalls. I stood at the urinal for a while, pretending to pee, wondering if I had spoiled the game for someone else, but there was only a brief shuffling sound before the sounds began again.

Then a man came in and stood at the trough next to me. He was thirty-five probably, burly and balding and unremarkable, except for a fat candy apple of a cock that he shook one too many times after peeing. Returning his semaphore, I shook back at him—two or three longs and a short—as I clocked his reaction from the corner of my eye. When it seemed we were speaking the same language, I sidled closer and reached for him.

I’d done nothing like this since the early eighties, but even then I hadn’t done it for the danger, the threat of exposure that some men find so thrilling. For me, the thrilling part—beyond the sex, of course—was the tacit implication of brotherhood, the stripped-down humanity of connecting with a stranger and banking everything on his decency as he banked everything on mine. But I’d always wanted privacy once that leap of faith had been made.

“I have a room,” I told the man. His cock was plumping in my hand, miraculously warm and silken.

He cast an anxious glance at the door, then back at the stalls, then reached down and weighed my balls soberly in his palm, as if they might help to make up his mind. “Where?” he asked finally.

“Here.” I jerked my head toward the motel.

He stuffed his cock back into his trousers, which I realized (somewhat to my chagrin) were beltless and polyester. Taking his cue, I buttoned up my jeans and led the way out of that rank little room, grateful for the bite of fresh air in my nostrils. As we tramped down the path together without a word, I caught him gazing sideways at me. He’s wondering if I’m a cop, I thought. Or a serial killer.

“I’m visiting,” I offered. “From California.” He didn’t react, just kept walking.

When we reached the parking lot, he stopped and turned. “I wanna go to my place, okay?”

“You mean…you live around here?”

“Up there.” He cast his eyes skyward, as if I were about to be ab-ducted on a UFO.

I looked up and saw the cab of a truck, a metallic red cubicle with someone’s name—his, presumably—painted primly on the door in tiny silver letters. My first reaction was to smile, remembering a long-gone bathhouse in New York called Man’s Country where—somehow—the management had installed the cab of an actual big rig on an upper floor, so that horny chorus boys and ribbon clerks from Bloomingdale’s could enjoy in relative safety the vivid archetypal experience of being fucked in a truck.

“You’re kidding,” I murmured.

He looked right and left, checking for witnesses, then scrambled up and unlocked the door. “C’mon,” he whispered, and I obeyed without a word, curiously flattered but sane enough to feel anxious.

A headline formed in my head—GABRIEL NOONE FOUNDDISMEMBERED IN WISCONSIN WOODS—as I reminded myself that this was the state that had given us Jeffrey Dahmer. Not to mention Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for Norman Bates.

But once inside the cab I found comfort in the prosaic: a cardboard air freshener shaped like Santa Claus, a dog-eared copy of
Field and
Stream
, a photo of a woman and several children tucked into the visor. It was almost cozy up there, pristine and well padded and lofty enough to be private. Behind the seat lay a rectangle of foam rubber onto which we spilled in a ridiculous jumble of limbs.

We kissed longer than I’d expected, sparring with our tongues as we lapped the warmth from each other. I reveled in everything: his flat little nipples (as inexpressive as his dick was eloquent), the musty pucker of his butt, the satiny slap of his meat against my face. We ended up side by side, jerking off together, and I found myself laughing out loud as I came, a guttural volley from the back of my throat that shoved out my last ounce of breath. He smiled at me sleepily, then swiped at my come with his forefinger. “Daddy,” he murmured, and slid the finger into his mouth.

I lost track of time. I was already in that place where just the heat of someone’s leg across your own seems to contain everything extraordinary that came before. I was struck by the sense of relief I felt, the feeling of having come home again to my own body. I’d been sleeping alone for less than two months and would never have guessed how deeply I’d missed the sound of another heartbeat so near, this warm, entangled, animal reassurance. What I had here wasn’t a disembodied voice on the phone or a distant building winking in the fog; this was the real goods, however casual or anonymous. Everything seemed possible again—or at least redeemable.

“Should I be going?” I asked.

“That’s okay.”

“To go or to stay?”

He chuckled quietly, lumbering to his knees, his tackle dangling clumsily between his legs. Then he pulled a paper bag from the corner and began—rather earnestly—to search for something. For one blood-chilling moment those headlines started up again, predict-ing a grisly end for our visitor from California. Then Mr. Dahmer-Gein exhumed a couple of family-sized Snickers bars and handed one to me.

“Hey,” I said. “Dinner
and
a movie.”

“No…sorry. I don’t have a VCR.”

I didn’t bother to explain my flimsy metaphor, just tore into the candy bar as he slid in next to me, warming my side again.

“Is that your family?” I asked, nodding toward the photo on the visor.

“Yeah.”

“Nice-looking.”

“Thanks.”

One of the kids in the picture was in his early adolescence. His head was partially in the shadows and covered with a baseball cap, but there was something about the line of his cheekbone and the light in his eye, something about that crooked little Bart Simpson smile…It was impossible, of course, and utterly absurd, but the more I studied the picture the more I toyed with the creepiest idea: What if that actually
was
Pete up there? And what if somehow—through the wildest of flukes—I had stumbled across his real father, stumbled across him and sucked his cock in the back of a truck?

Oh, give it a break, I thought. You will
not
write an ironic end to this, no matter how much it might distance you from your emotions. Pete’s father had been a foreman in a hosiery factory, and Pete had testified against him, for God’s sake. The monster was in a prison somewhere, locked up for life, not cruising toilets in his tractor-trailer. I also knew that my imagination had a way of turning feral after sex, roaming the landscape like some ravenous snuffling beast. This had sometimes proved useful in my work, in fact, when the beast didn’t get out of hand. When it didn’t turn on me with a slobbery yellow grin and start to weird me out…

“Do you live around here?” I asked.

The man shook his head as he polished off his candy bar. “Florida.”

I checked the photo again. There was even a ragged palm tree as proof. I let go of my nasty reverie with a sigh.

“What?” said the man.

“Nothing. Florida’s nice.”

“Lots nicer’n this.” He rolled on his side and gripped my leg between his furry thighs like a bear shinnying up a tree. “Too goddamn cold here.”

He’s really nice, I thought. Just a regular guy who needs the comfort of other guys sometimes. I was certain he was a closet case—that eternal bane of my existence—but I forgave him everything for holding on to me, for needing my warmth that night as much as I needed his.

“My name’s Gabriel,” I ventured without offering my hand, which would have felt foolish, since I’d already offered everything else.

“Named after the angel?”

“No. My father. And my grandfather.”

“Oh.”

“They weren’t angels. Still aren’t.”

“Your grandfather’s still alive?”

“No. But the old man is.”

“You get along?”

“We don’t talk that much,” I explained. “He’s a banker, and…I’m not.”

“What are you?”

I hesitated, fearful of forfeiting this peaceful anonymity. “I’m a writer,” I said at last.

“What kinda writer?”

“Novels. Stories.”

“Like what? John Grisham or something?”

“No. Not exactly.” My postcoital confidence was slipping by the second. Why, I wondered in an ugly spasm of self-betrayal, had I never written a novel like John Grisham? A novel that a regular guy like this might have read? Had I been preaching to the choir all my life? “My stuff is on the radio, too,” I said, trying another angle.

“Ever listen to NPR?”

The guy just frowned at me. “What’s your last name?” he asked.

“Noone.”

“Gabriel Noone?”

“Yeah.”

The frown deepened as he shook his head. “No. Sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

“I don’t read much, I guess. And I mostly just play tapes in the…”

“So what does your wife think?”

The guy drew back. “About what?”

“You know…sucking dick in the back of your truck.”

“Hey, man!” My partner in passion scrambled to his knees, his eyes narrowing in anger and alarm. “What the fuck is this?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering what—”

“If you’re a cop or something, you was the one who grabbed
my
dick!”

“I know, I know. Stay cool.”

He remained there on his knees, breathing heavily, distinctly Neanderthal in his panic.

“I’m not a cop,” I said quietly. “Or anything like it.” I offered him a faint, peacemaking smile. “I’m just another queer like you.”

“Fuck you. I’m not a queer.”

“Okay. Sorry. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

“It fuckin’ matters to me. What was that shit about my wife?”

“Nothing, man. I was just curious. I didn’t mean to give you grief.

Really.”

This was a lie, of course. I
had
meant to give him grief. I’d meant to make him squirm for a moment, to punish him in some small but palpable way for not recognizing my name. And here was the kicker: if he were to beat me to death with a tire iron and dump my body in a snowbank, I’d have only my vanity to blame.

He was still breathing heavily, still glowering at me. “My wife is a goddamn saint, all right?”

“I’m sure. I’m sure she is.”

He picked up my jeans and flung them at me. “Get dressed and get the fuck outa here.”

I accomplished that in record time, scrambling down the side of that gleaming red mountain without attempting another word. But I misjudged the distance and fell hard against the icy asphalt, skinning my palm in the process. I staggered to my feet, ignoring my newfound stigmata, and strode briskly away, pausing only once to look back at the truck. I remember finding irony—if not exactly amusement—in the sign I saw emblazoned on its bumper.

It said: WIDE LOAD.

Back in my room, I collected my wits as I dabbed at my bloody hand.

My first instinct was to call Jess. Not because I’d had a scare and feared briefly for my life, but because I’d had a bona fide adventure.

Oh, Jess, I wanted to say, you would be so proud of me. I’ve braved the undiluted world of men again, where dicks are king and sex is everything and nothing. If you were here tonight, I’d tell you all about Mr. Wide Load. I’d lie in your arms and laugh about the postures of the closet and the sad, silly demands of my own unwieldy ego. I’d give you every last juicy moment, then tell you how little it had meant, how little it would always mean when weighed against the age-old certainty of Us.

But I didn’t call him; I’d had enough of telephones.

TWENTY

THE SHOCK OF RECOGNITION

I SLEPT SOLIDLY but not as long as usual. I awoke just after six and hauled my bag down to the car, noticing how radically the configur-ation of the parking lot had changed. Mr. Wide Load’s love machine was gone, and the maze of trucks I had followed the night before was no longer the bustling village lane of memory. The gypsies had all but vanished, leaving only black rectangles on a white plain as proof of their encampment. Even that distant men’s room seemed different now: lustless and one-dimensional, hammered flat by the sharp halogen light of dawn.