Nameless Night

by G. M. Ford

  “Oops,” she said when she saw him sitting on the edge of the bed looking at her. “Gimme a second here,” she said, pulling the towel closer around herself.

  He redirected his attention to his shoelaces. He heard the towel drop and then the swish and rustle of fabric seemed to fill the room. Something in the sound warmed his innards. He attributed the sudden beads of sweat on his forehead to the hot moist air still rolling out of the bathroom. He rescued his shirt from beneath the bed, keeping his eyes averted as he buttoned up. His green Suzuki Landscaping jacket hung from a hook by the door. The black Nike bag sat on the floor beneath the jacket.

  He pushed himself off the bed and walked over to the bag, rummaging around inside until he came out with a toothbrush and a nearly flattened tube of toothpaste.

  “You done in the bathroom?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she answered. “Go ahead.”

  By the time he came back out, she was standing at the foot of the nearest bed dressed in a pair of jeans and a tight black T-shirt. A white arrow pointed upward. The bold lettering read MY EYES ARE UP HERE. She’d washed all the dye from her hair and cleaned the outlandish makeup from her face. “Whadda you think?” she asked.

  “Looks good,” he offered.

  She was picking at her dirty-blond hair. “I almost didn’t recognize myself in the mirror.”

  “I like it,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. You look pretty.”

  “I figured…you know…” She waved a hairbrush in the air. “…no sense making things any harder on the home folks than necessary.”

  “They know you’re coming?”

  “Uh-uh,” she said. “They knew I was coming, they’d probably move.”

  The joke fell flat. She looked away.

  He returned to his bag, replaced the things he’d taken out, and zipped it up. “They’ll be happy to see you,” he said.

  “Don’t bet on it,” she said, stuffing yesterday’s clothes into a white plastic supermarket bag and then tying the handles together.

  The notion of being unwelcome stopped him in his tracks. The idea had never occurred to him. Without his realizing it, his dream of returning to find his former life was wholly presupposed upon the assumption that the people he’d left behind would be every bit as glad to see him as he would be to see them. The possibility that he would be turned away at the door sent shivers down the back of his neck. What if his sudden reappearance was an unwelcome intrusion into a new and satisfying life. What if the new life was preferable to the old and nostalgic reminders were unwanted. The prospect of rejection bounced around inside his skull like a steel ball bearing, clouding his vision, reducing him to slow motion as he shouldered his way into the jacket.

  “Folks where I come from are real good at holding a grudge,” she said. She picked up the assortment of mismatched bags she’d brought inside. She raised her eyebrows. “You ready to go?” she asked.

  He nodded and picked up his bag.

  Clouds of steamy breath preceded them onto the sidewalk in front of the room. The sky was a watery blue and devoid of clouds. In the distance a jagged mountain range showed its teeth. She unlocked his door and then circled the car and unlocked her own.

  The roar of a tandem rig pulled his eyes out toward the highway and the café on the other side. She started the car. The swish, swish of the windshield wipers sounded like a jazz drummer’s brushes playing counterpoint to the rattle of the engine. On each pass, the wipers pushed aside a microthin fan of moisture. Took a full ten minutes of swooshing back and forth before they could see well enough to cross the highway.

  Rory’s Café was jammed with truckers, tiny butts and big guts, long wallets attached to their belts with chains. Down vests and soiled cowboy hats filled the dozen and a half stools running along and around a worn Formica counter. The service break was flanked by a pair of glass pie displays, where apple, cherry and pear, boysenberry and lemon meringue, coconut cream and a multitude of others competed for the gullet.

  The front wall was lined with red booths whose venerable plastic cushions had been torn and taped and torn again until they resembled modern art. At the far end of the café, down by the restrooms, a couple of guys were on their feet, scooping up the check and dropping bills on the table for a tip. Brittany pointed and they headed that way.

  It was the kind of place where everybody more or less knew everybody else and strangers were a matter of some scrutiny. The newly reincarnated Randy James heard the decibels of dialogue dim and felt the eyes poking at them as they made their way to the empty booth. Soon as they sat down, things went back to normal.

  Brittany slipped out of her jacket and tossed him a menu. Before he could set it down on the table, a short Hispanic man appeared. He smiled and then wiped everything on the table, plates, glasses, cups…everything into a gray plastic tub. A final swipe with a damp rag and he was gone for as long as it took to find and deliver two fresh glasses of water. From behind the counter, a voice promised, “Be right with ya.”

  In the booth behind Brittany, a quartet of what appeared to be locals erupted in gales of laughter and prolonged table slapping. The water giggled in the glasses. From the sound of it, they were drunk. Either again or still, it was hard to tell which.

  “You’re not eating?” he asked when things quieted down and she’d made no move toward a menu of her own.

  She made a face. “I’m not much on food in the morning,” she said. “But coffee…man, I got to have me some coffee.”

  And she did…most of a pot, if he had to guess, sipping away contentedly while he put down eggs sunny side up, bacon, hash browns, and toast. He drank one cup of coffee and washed the rest of it down with water.

  The new Randy picked up the check.

  “I’m gonna hit the loo,” she said as they got to their feet. “I’ll meet you outside.”

  He stood for a moment watching the sway of her hips as she pushed her way through the doors, then got in line to pay his check and was on his way back to the table to leave a tip when Brittany came out sauntering through the swinging door. She smiled at the sight of him, and he got that same feeling the sight of her wearing a towel had given him. She put a hand on his arm and was about to speak when a flannel-clad mountain blotted out the view.

  One of the drunks from the adjoining booth had wobbled to his feet. Fifty maybe, running hard to fat, his narrow red eyes nearly closed. Big wet lips hid a collection of brown rotted teeth. “Butcha see, honey,” he announced with a glance over toward his friends, “…my eyes are right there…right there on them nice titties of yours.” He reached out for her nipple with his thumb and forefinger as if to give her a pinch. His lips were pursed and making sucking sounds.

  She slapped his hand away. “Get lost,” she told him.

  From behind the counter, the waitress jumped in. “Stop it, Morris, you hear me?”

  His friends in the booth were yakking it up, pounding on the table and spitting all over one another with glee.

  “Oh, come on, baby,” Morris slurred. “Doan be that way.”

  She tried to force her way past him, but he reached out to stop her. She tried to brush his arm aside but couldn’t budge it.

  The waitress was leaning across the counter now. “I’m telling you, Morris. I’ll call the sheriff on the whole bunch of you. Don’t you think I won’t.”

  “Shut up, Donna,” he slurred without looking her way. She headed for the kitchen at a lope. Morris reached again for Brittany’s nipple. His lips were making sucking noises again. That’s when the newly christened Randy hit him square in the mouth, sending a cascade of spittle, blood, and brown teeth arching out over the three mounds of mold still sitting in the booth.

  The place was quiet enough to hear the sickening sound Morris’s face made when it hit the floor on a fly. Needless to say, Morris stayed down, his eyes closed, his ruined mouth agape, drooling blood onto the tile floor. After a moment he began to snore.

 
His pals, however, had other ideas. Unfortunately for them, the story of their lives, once again, intervened. As usual, their timing was atrocious. They struggled to their feet just in time to confront reinforcements from the kitchen. Five guys wielding an assortment of kitchen utensils, the cadre led by a bald fellow in a stained apron clutching a metal baseball bat with both hands. “Get outta here,” he shouted. He waggled the bat at the curled figure on the floor. “Take him with you and get the hell out of here,” he ordered.

  The drunks made a brief show of manliness before two of them slung Morris’s limp arms over their shoulders and lifted him off the ground. The third ran ahead and opened the doors. The toes of Morris’s boots slid along the floor as he was half dragged, half carried toward the door.

  The guy with the bat wasn’t finished. He followed them out, pounding the head of the bat into his palm as he shouted, “You guys learn how to behave like civilized human beings, maybe you come back. Till then, I don’t want to see none of you in here no more. You hear me?”

  The one holding the outside door shot him the finger on his way out. Brittany slipped into her jacket and zipped it to the throat.

  “You okay, honey?” the waitress wanted to know.

  Brittany assured her she was all right. Her shaking hands told another story, but nobody wanted to prolong the incident by asking twice. By the time the guy with the bat returned, a couple of the kitchen crew were swabbing the floor and resetting the table. The conversational level of the place was beginning to return to normal.

  “Sorry,” bat said. “Those guys are a bunch of drunken idiots. Sorry you had to—” He stopped talking and pointed to the floor. “Over there,” he said to the guy with the mop, pointing out the jagged remains of a tooth hiding under the nearest stool. The guy picked it up and slipped it into the pocket of his apron.

  The same hushed scrutiny that had ushered them in now ushered them out. Outside, the temperature had risen five degrees or so in the past half hour. Once they’d descended the three steps to ground level, Brittany thrust her arm through his. They ambled arm in arm toward the car. “Thanks,” she said briefly, leaning the side of her face against his arm. “I appreciate what you did in there.”

  He shrugged. “What else was I going to do?”

  She laughed. “And while I’m at it…I want to thank you for being a gentleman last night.” He frowned and opened his mouth. She took him by the elbow and pulled him along. “…not that I’m God’s gift to men or anything…” she continued, “but half the guys on the planet would have tried to jump my bones soon as we took off our clothes in the room last night. The other half would have waited till morning. Thanks for being nice about it.” She shook her head and made a disgusted face. “It’s a hell of a world when the only guy you know who isn’t weird doesn’t know who he is or where he came from.” She sighed as they walked along. “Probably shouldn’t surprise me,” she said. “These days nobody wants to fuck anymore anyway. Everybody wants to hang you upside down and paddle your ass or something weird like that.” She slashed the air with her free hand. “Everybody’s so jaded.”

  He felt blood rising in his body again. He looked straight ahead and nodded.

  They were at the car now. She opened his door. His eyes followed her around the car, watching intently as she slipped the key into the lock and pulled open the driver’s door. She looked up and captured his gaze over the top of the car. She’d gotten over her rant and was smiling now. “I’m against violence, you know.” He waited for the lecture. “I’m always telling people violence doesn’t solve anything,” she continued. Her eyes twinkled in the slanted light. “But it sure as hell solved that little problem, now, didn’t it?”

  They shared a hearty laugh as they got back into the car and drove the fifty yards to the Texaco station next door. “I’ll get the gas,” he said. He handed her a twenty-dollar bill and stepped out onto the asphalt; he twisted off the gas cap and pulled the nozzle free of the pump. He waited. Finally, twenty bucks and Brittany convinced the attendant to turn on the pump.

  Brittany returned and began running a dripping squeegee back and forth across the windshield, pausing here and there to use a little extra elbow grease on particularly stubborn bug carcasses. He watched as she leaned against the glass, smiling to himself and settling against the side of the car. The morning sun warmed his face as he waited for the pop of the handle to signal full. What his ears caught instead was the pop of gravel under a tire. He turned toward the sound.

  A Dodge pickup truck jerked to a halt just outside the pump area. Great splashes of yellow mud nearly obscured the copper-colored paint. He heard the rasp of the emergency brake and watched as the front doors swung open together, bouncing on the hinges as the two flannel mounds stepped out onto the tarmac, one carrying a heavy open-end wrench, the other hefting a three-foot length of tow chain with a big brass lock decorating the end.

  They hadn’t come to chat. They moved at him together, raising their respective weapons as they closed the distance between themselves and their imagined antagonist. The brass lock made a whirring sound as the guy twirled it around his head. Above the low shuffling of their boots, he heard Brittany drop the squeegee, heard the fear in her voice, and she ran his way, chanting, “Come on. Come on,” and hurrying along the side of the car.

  Instead of retreating to the car, however, Randy walked the other way, moving directly at his attackers as if determined to hasten his own demise.

  For her part, Brittany was sufficiently transfixed by the bone-crunching potential of the chain to fail to notice the hose and nozzle trailing from her companion’s hand. Wasn’t until the hose ran out and the safety cable began to hiss from of the gas pump that she slid to a stop and closed her mouth. Might have been better for the guy with the chain if he’d done the same thing. Instead, he opened his mouth to sneer just as Randy sent a high-powered river of gasoline directly at his face.

  The effect was staggering. The power of the stream pushed the gas down his throat. He first bellowed and then whinnied through his nose like a horse, before tossing his breakfast onto the ground. The puddle of puke failed to break his fall. He collapsed and began to roll around in his own discharge, retching and choking and hacking, writhing in agony.

  The other one took just a second too long to process the information. When he looked up, the whole world was the pressurized stream of gasoline flying toward his face, sending a wave of brown liquid over and around his head, filling his eyes and mouth, soaking his clothes, sending him reeling, separating him from the wrench as he brought his hands to his face.

  He fell to his knees, threw his face into his cupped hands, and howled. The third guy poked his head around the side of the cab. He was still holding Morris’s head in his lap. Looked like he was deciding what to do next. Whatever it was apparently didn’t include getting out of the truck.

  Randy turned on his heel, replaced the hose and nozzle. He dusted his hands and walked along the driver’s side of the car. “Get in,” he told her over the car.

  She stood there with her mouth open. Looking back and forth between Randy and his attackers. “Get in,” he said again.

  He didn’t have to tell her a third time. The attendant appeared in the doorway carrying a fire extinguisher. Randy started the car.

  “Keep the change,” she shouted out the window.

  The guy smiled and gave the okay sign.

  Randy popped the clutch and floored the accelerator. They went roaring onto the highway in a dusty whooosh.

  18

  The VW’s front tires bounced off the curb. She blinked herself back into the moment and looked around. Dumbfounded, she pulled up the emergency brake and shut off the car.

  “What day is this?” she asked.

  “Wednesday, I think,” Randy said.

  “What in hell has happened here?” She checked her watch. “Ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning and the place looks like Ground Zero.”

  Randy suddenly recalled an old sci
ence-fiction movie. One of those scenes right after the aliens have killed just about everybody in town except the handsome young football star and his cheerleader girlfriend. He could see their faces and hear the eerie organ music, but try as he might, neither the title nor the circumstances under which he had seen the film would come readily to mind. When the movie ended, so did his recollection, as if the memory was a solitary image floating in a sea of ebony ink.

  He blinked and looked around again. Reese’s Hardware, for rent. Dixie Diner, for lease. South County Auto Parts, NAPA, available. Pack and Pay, make offer. New Price. It went on and on. The once-prosperous main street of this backwater town had been reduced to a quarter-mile stretch of empty storefronts, both sides of the street, desperate, dusty, and decaying right before your eyes. At the southern extremity, an American flag flapped in the front of an ancient Texaco sign. Directly in front of the VW, a red-and-white circle of neon glowed: OPEN. Hadley’s Sweet Shop. That was it. Everything else was closed up tight.

  Brittany stepped out into the street. She bumped the door closed with her hip and then turned herself in a long slow circle. By the time she took it all in, Randy stood across the car from her, stretching his arms toward the sky and groaning.

  “Damn,” she said. “When I left…this here was the big time, the bright lights.”

  “We in Airhart?” Randy asked.

  “This here’s Thurston.” She pointed in the direction of the gas station. “Airhart’s five miles that way. Nothing there except another gas station and Millie’s Market.” She made eye contact. “Millie’s doubles as the post office.” She pointed to a red brick building on the other side of the street. Randy nodded his understanding. The sign had long ago been removed, but the outline of the cursive script remained etched on the bricks. TRAILWAYS, it read.

  “Everything’s gone,” she said.

  “Wal-Mart.” A deep, booming voice pulled their attention back toward the sweetshop. An elderly black man in a starched white apron leaned against the doorway with a broom in his hand. “Come in here about seven years ago. Took ’em about a year and a half to run everybody off. Ain’t no competing wid them for price, and as bad as things around here is, they’s no blaming people for buying on the cheap neither. Y’all get behind in your payments, you start living offa inventory, and next thing you know you got no inventory.”