Installment #7
Chapters 10 & 11
10
The man behind the counter in the cramped manager’s office at the El Ranchero Motor Court looked Native American but Walt didn’t ask his nation.
Instead, Walt took his room key attached by a keyring to a plastic diamond with the room number. He tried to listen over the din of the air conditioning as the man advised Walt not to let the screen door bang shut behind him.
The man spoke in a flat tone. To Walt he sounded the way Indians always sounded in the movies—the flatness perhaps hinting at more meaning than the pale face grasps. As he turned to leave, Walt wondered if there was something deeper to this screen door business.
Don’t let doors bang shut?
It was like a goddamn fortune cookie. Could be anything.
Leave quietly? Don’t let them know you’re leaving? Let change happen softly?
Walt stepped from the office, the screen door banging shut behind him.
Damn it.
Walt walked across the empty parking lot he, smothered between the sun burning down on him and its heat bouncing up from the gravel. Hot, hungry and worn out in spirit and in flesh.
Walt grabbed the duffle bag he’d packed hurriedly the night before from his truck and walked to his room.
Catching the screen door gently against his shoulder, Walt opened the door. As he entered the room, Walt made a point of latching the screen door with a soft click.
The room had been pitch black before Walt had opened the door to let sunlight pour in. Walt knew this because, once inside with the door closed, the room went pitch black again.
He pulled back the waxy drapes to let the midday light come through, casting a yellow haze over his accommodations. Nothing fancy. A queen bed. Bathroom with tub, toilet and sink. Round table and two chairs in front of a window with an air conditioner unit. The window unit air conditioner kicked on with a clunky whir.
Sad to say, Walt thought, but he’d slept in worse.
He sat on the edge of the bed for some time, not moving, not thinking. Just feeling himself sitting.
The room began to cool. Walt pulled off his boots, put his cowboy hat upside down on the table. He looked at the bullet hole and thought about the gun and why he brought it.
He leaned over to switch on the clock radio sitting atop the bedside table. A country station. Hank Williams cutting to the bone plainly and painfully, losing his will to live and so lonesome he could cry.
Gimme a break. On this of all days?
Walt reached to turn it off but then didn’t. He listened. He lay back on the bed. Hank sang and Walt curled into a ball with his back to the radio so that all Hank could see were Walt’s shoulders shaking.
11
The hole in Geri’s gums where her rotted tooth had been was tender and squishy. Still very much electric with pain.
She lay on the sofa, leafing through a glossy magazine. No, she told herself, even going so far as to shake her head at herself.
Don’t do it again.
She did it again.
Poking her tongue into the gap in the back of her gums. She winced. The things people do to beat boredom, she thought.
Geri had been at it all morning and into lunchtime, probing the hole, wincing, telling herself no more, then doing it all over again. She tried to focus on the pretty people in the magazine but this was her fifth time flipping through it and the celebrities’ luster had worn off for her. She bit her tongue to pin it on the good side of her mouth.
Standing to stretch, Geri tossed the magazine to the floor with the others. She walked over to turn on the old television, moving the rabbit ears in search of the signal from one of the clearer stations. The image and sound of a talking head emerged from the static.
“Sow bellies closed up a quarter while beef remained unchanged—”
She clicked off the TV, wandering over to the stereo console. It was an old all-in-one turntable, AM/FM radio and speakers built into a waist-high cabinet of maple veneer. She flipped on the radio.
“Beef ended the day unchanged while sow bellies climbed a quarter-point—”
She cut off the radio and, why not? Rammed her tongue into the inflamed nook between her teeth. It was something to do. Geri winced and laughed.
Standing in the living room of the farmhouse, she pondered what to do next. Something less painful would be good. There was always eating. But her jaw hurt and she was afraid her tummy was getting poochie from sitting around all day.
She was dying to just take a walk, get some exercise. But that was out of the question. Someone might see her. Usually, she fought boredom by counting her money. Pain was a new diversion but not necessarily a better one.
“Maybe counting my money will take away the pain,” she said to herself.
She started down the narrow hallway to the spare bedroom. Who knew hiding out could be so boring?
Once she told Vern that when she got really bored she liked to take off her clothes and roll around naked in the money. It wasn’t true but he seemed to like the idea because he kept bringing it up—Did you roll around naked in it today? Did you?
There were times over the last week when the boredom almost drove her to it, just for something to do. How, she wondered, did farm wives manage to stay sane, stranded out in the country, no one around for miles?
The farmhouse was two stories and held four bedrooms but the lone bedroom at the end of the hallway on the ground floor was the one Vern always called The Doll Room. That’s where she and Vern kept the money hidden.
As she advanced toward the spare room, she tasted blood in her mouth. With her pinky, she delicately inspected the hole in her gums. Pulled out her finger to discover a watery little smear of scarlet on her fingertip. Not as bloody as it was before. She bit her tongue on the good side of her mouth again to keep it from roaming into the sore.
Geri opened the door to a small, clean room with a bed, a highboy dresser and white walls. A single shelf mounted about three-quarters of the way up the walls ran along all four walls. The shelf was lined with dolls.
Each doll was the size of a toddler and with a head the size of grapefruit. All of them were dressed in handmade clothes—crocheted shawls and hand-stitched jumpers, lace bonnets and yellow raincoats fashioned from rubber scraps.
There was a doll in a sailor suit. Another dressed for safari. Several wore gingham petticoats and patent leather shoes on their tiny doll feet. All were propped upright on the shelf, their backs against the wall and their eyes shining down.
Walking into the spare room at night or after an especially stir-crazy day, Geri had the sensation of being watched.
She took down a nurse doll. The doll’s eyes rolled shut in its smooth, flesh-tone head as Geri laid it back flat. She pulled it upright again; the eyes, blue and lifelike, opened wide. Geri tilted the doll, its eyes rolling halfway open as if it were stoned. She wrenched the doll back and forth quickly, sending the eyes into a seizure-like flutter.
When she was a little girl, she had never owned a doll with rolling eyes. Geri recalled a short period – she must have been age five because it was around the time her mother was in the hospital – when she wanted to be a nurse. Later, when her mother never came home, she gave that up. She had decided there was no use being a nurse if nurses couldn’t fix people.
Slipping her fingers under the nurse doll’s sleeve, she rubbed the crepe uniform. Double-stitched. Vern’s grandmother was quite the seamstress. Geri knew it took practice and patience and time to sew with such quality. The quality of the work reminded her of a young schizophrenic named Becky. They’d met in occupational therapy. Becky was only in her twenties and had spent much time in institutions and could sew, crochet, knit and cross-stitch like a grandmother.
Geri scanned the gallery of dressed-up dolls above her. Guess that’s how Vern’s grandma kept her marbles in her head out here in the boonies, she thought. Kept her hands busy. Basic occupational therapy. Idle work, devil’s hands and all that.
The dolls sat in a line along the shelf, broken only where the shelf abutted the window, the doorway and the closet. The closet was where she and Vern kept the roles of cash tucked away behind some ugly sweaters.
Geri tossed the nurse doll on the bed and moved toward the closet. She reminded herself to put the doll back on the shelf before leaving the room. Vern always had a fit when he found a doll off the shelf or a chair out of place or a picture of his dear Grandma and Grandpa Mason knocked crooked. Geri couldn’t care less about Vern’s fits but she wasn’t up for a lecture.
Kneeling in the closet, she reached behind a stack of neatly folded sweaters. She felt only the wall at the back of the shelf. She pulled out the sweaters and found only the wall.
Had she gone behind the wrong stack of sweaters?
Carefully she pulled out another stack of sweaters and put them on the floor of the closet next to the first stack. She felt around at the back of the shelf for the rolls of money. Again she touched only the wall.
Ripping out a third stack of sweaters, Geri frantically peered into the back of the unlit shelf. Empty. Money gone. She kicked the sweaters across the room.
Standing, she stood and thought for a moment. She snatched the nurse doll off the bed, whipping it around, its eyes flickering. Calmly and repeatedly, Geri bashed the doll’s rubber head against the highboy until the head finally split open, sending the eyes ricocheting off the walls.
With all her strength, she yanked on each section of the shelf until it came crashing to the floor. With a doll in each hand, she danced around the room, bashing the heads against the walls and the dresser. When one head tore open, she let it fall and scooped up another doll. Her jaw hurt and she could taste the full flavor of blood on her tongue.
When she had successfully bludgeoned every doll, she made her way back down the hallway to the living room, spitting red saliva on the hardwoods as she went. She kicked at the pile of magazines, scattering them over the rug. She went over to the telephone but hesitated. Calls were risky. A call to Vern at work from Vern’s farmhouse would leave a trail somewhere. A needle in a haystack but a needle that could be found nonetheless.
She was due to see Vern later anyway, around ten or so. Bringing her supplies, groceries, magazines and lots of ice. But he had something coming; she couldn’t let this slide. Her one advantage was that he didn’t know that she knew he’d taken the money. Her money.
Geri paused to consider the living room. As if it had a mind of its own, her tongue prodded her gums before she could stop it, making her flinch.
As the pain lingered in her mouth, Geri set about rearranging the furniture.