It’s just loud enough that my mother hears it. Her tone changes, now wary instead of impatient. “Bobby?”
Before I can say no, or correct her, or try to explain or anything, she explodes. Her anger fills the car, bitter and bright. “Goddamn it, I know that’s you, Bobby! I want my two hundred dollars, you hear me?”
Hearing that is a punch to the throat. Bobby is her boyfriend, except when he’s not. He’s been in and out the last couple of years.
Allegedly, he’s a musician. Point in his favor: he has a guitar. Point against his favor: there’s a handwritten sign in his truck window. It says he’ll haul away anything for fifty dollars, no questions asked. I’m pretty sure Bobby’s real job is scrounging. And, apparently, borrowing.
But here’s what I wanna know: where, exactly, did my mother get two hundred dollars to lend to a dillweed like Bobby?
That question sharpens my teeth and hardens my flesh. On the outside, I feel contorted, like I walked out of a funhouse mirror. On the inside, it’s nothing but hatred and flames and gall, because last week, all my toast was stale bread from the outlet store. We didn’t have the money for groceries, she said.
“I can hear you breathing, you son of a—”
I hang up. The phone’s case is heavy in my hand. All over, I’m hot and tensed, like I’ve been running. I’m even out of breath. Flush with humiliation, I can’t stand to look over at Arden. An idiot, I dragged my stupid, ugly life right into her lap. I’m afraid if I look at her, I’ll see disgust.
“She sounds nice,” Arden says, deadpan.
It breaks me out of my shock; I even laugh a little. “Oh yeah. The best.”
Finally breathing right again, I shake the phone like it might cast the demons out. Then, I look up twine to settle the question once and for all. It turns out my mother’s a liar, and I’m a know-it-all asshole who can’t even get it right.
Reading out loud from Wikipedia, I tell Arden, “There are several claims to the world’s biggest ball of twine.”
“Oh,” she says.
“And you know what sucks?”
“What?”
Turning the ringer off, I drop the phone in the console. Anytime now, my mother’s gonna call back. She’s drawing off the air in this car. She’s going all the way to California with me, croaking on my shoulder, and it’s all my fault.
Exhausted with my own stupidity, I roll my head and tell Arden, “Ain’t neither one of ’em on I-70.”
I’m white trash, and sometimes I sound like it.
(TOASTERS, PICKLE PLATES)
Some force drags me forward, and the seat belt locks. It’s not until I wake up that I realize I was asleep. In time, my head throbs and my heart pounds. What happened? I was just gone, like that. What if I never came back? What a waste of last words, what a waste of everything—
“Take a picture,” Arden says, handing me her phone.
I clear my head with a shake and look around. There’s nothing worth shooting that I see. Then, Arden’s hand moves into my space. She pushes my wrists in the right direction. A hulking cement wall fills the horizon. It looks like the back side of a prison, or a scene from a Russian mob movie or something.
That’s when I see the looping cursive sign on top. From my vantage, it’s backward. Still legible, though. I shift the phone to make sure I get the words in there. Breezewood Motel. I wait for the right angle, my finger hovering over the button.
“Take the picture or I’ll want to stay there,” Arden says. “I love ugly, cheap motels.”
“Yeah, well you got both with that one, all right.” When I touch the screen, there’s a click. Then I lean into her side of the car to show her the picture. “I think we ought to anyway. If we wait until morning, we can rob all the vampires that live there.”
Arden’s laughter is low and warm. It teases my ear. “I think that’s where the Occupy vampires crash. They’re the ninth century and the ninety-nine percent.”
“Yeah,” I say, turning the AC vent right on me. “Yeah, why’s everybody think vampires are rich anyway?”
Arden considers this. “They never have to buy groceries.”
“Three hundred years of rent,” I counter.
“Maybe they sell their stuff. To museums.”
“Oh yeah. Everything they own is antiques.”
“My stepmom takes trips,” she says suddenly. Expressions flicker across her face, too many to count, too fast to register. “Like weekend trips, just to buy antiques.”
I didn’t meet Stepmom. Thinking back hard, I try to remember what Arden told me about her family. For some reason, she lives with her dad instead of her mom, which makes no sense considering Concrete Blocks can’t even deal. Seems to me like Arden said her mom was living in another state, maybe. Too far to visit, anyhow. That, I know. As for the stepmom, I don’t remember word one about her. And that’s . . . strange.
Beside me, Arden’s still fired up. If a current passed through her, she couldn’t twitch more. It’s something to watch and I want to know what kind of antiques could make her this crazy.
So I ask—how do you find anything out, unless you ask? “Like what kind?”
“Depression glass, mostly.” She flicks on her turn signal.
There’s nobody around us—it’s the hazy side of late afternoon, and there are cars, yeah. But we could weave back and forth between the lanes if we wanted to. I wonder if that’s something Arden ever wanted to try. Considering how much she likes riding the brakes, probably not. But maybe. Maybe later, I’ll ask her.
“What, sad bottles? Misery plates?” I go ahead and ask. “What the hell is depression glass?”
When Arden laughs this time, it’s vaguely annoyed. Not at me. It’s thin and bitter, rolling through her words when she finally speaks. “Dishes. Cheap dishes they made during the Depression. According to Mona, they gave away this stuff in boxes of oatmeal, or if you bought a tank of gas, here, here’s a free plate. Stuff like that. Like a toaster when you get a checking account.”
“Do they really do that?” I ask. I don’t have a checking account. Or savings. Or anything. Because I don’t have any money. My mother doesn’t either—or wait, I guess she does since there was that two hundred dollars to throw around, but whatever. There’s nothing in the account (allegedly) and they stopped taking our checks at the Red Stripe long before they stopped taking checks altogether (factually).
From the sound of her voice, Arden doesn’t realize I was asking about the toaster for real. She just goes on, her voice rising. “She rents a car, or flies out to New York or whatever, to pay a thousand bucks for a pickle dish that somebody’s great-grandmother got at Woolworth’s for free.”
A thousand might as well be a million; she’s talking about crazy numbers. Before I can ask her if she’s serious, or why we’re getting off the highway, she explodes.
“It’s a plate with handles on it that you put pickles on! And it’s not for anything! It sits in a cabinet all day, because you can’t eat from it, obviously! It’s worth too much!”
Without thinking, I reach over to rub her knee. Just to try to comfort her or something. The curve off the highway is sharp and she needs both hands on the wheel. I ask, softly, “So, we hate her, huh?”
Color tinges the curve of Arden’s ears. I see it, peeking through the dark waves of her hair. It spreads down, staining her cheeks, and then she sighs. “No. She’s fine. I spend the money my dad gives me, too.”
We coast to a turn, and then we’re on this highway that goes right through—I’m guessing—Breezewood. Everything looks sad and dingy, too much like my neighborhood, to be honest. The vampire motel was the highlight. When the quiet stretches out too long, I turn the AC up some more. “Where are we going?”
“We have to do this jog before we can get back on 70, that’s all. We’ll be in Ohio in a couple of hours.”
“We had a plan, boo! What were you doing when I was asleep?” I demand, but kidding. There was never any reason to get off 70,
but she’s wound up enough that I just want her to be happy again. And if she has to pay a couple tolls, well, that’s her fault, isn’t it?
For a second, I think Arden might break down. Then this serene calm comes over her. It’s almost like a glow; she shines from the inside. She shrugs, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Always,” I reply. I sound like a cheap trick.
Nodding ahead, Arden points out, “Close to Ohio, now.”
It’s almost embarrassing how excited I am to see that sign. In my lifetime I’ve been to DC and Pennslyvania—probably West Virginia, too, but I don’t remember it.
Ohio, though? Not ever. A new state. A new world.
“Hey,” I say, getting brave. I brush my hand against her arm, on purpose. I like it when she touches me; I like touching her back. God help me.
She replies, “Hey.”
“Thanks for this.”
Everything dark burns away when she smiles.
(ROAD CONVERSATIONS)
“So, this boat we’re looking for,” Arden says.
Her hands must be tired, because now she’s steering with her knees. It’s kinda cracked out how comfortable she is, driving when she’s doing sixty things besides driving. If she’d quit hitting the brakes at random, I’d probably be that relaxed, too.
Me, I’m touching all the shiny things on the dashboard. “It’s not a boat; it’s a galleon.”
With a smirk, Arden says, “I’m Muggle-born, what do I know about galleons?”
“Ha ha ha,” I reply, making a face at her. “What about the ship, Arden?”
“You mean the—” she cuts herself off, fighting back laughter. “Okay, seriously though, okay. The captain steals the pearls, he gets lost up the river, now they’re in the desert. All that part, I get. How do we know?”
“What do you mean, how do we know?”
“If he sailed out there and got stuck, then how do we even know the story? Wouldn’t it just be some ship that got lost at sea? I mean, we wouldn’t even know about the pearls; there wouldn’t have been anybody left to tell that part of the story.”
“They didn’t die because they got stuck,” I insist. “They walked out of the desert . . .”
“Because they were prepared for that. Sounds fake, but okay.”
“They just were,” I insist. “They walked out, and they had to go back to Spain and get the money to try to come back and recover it. It takes a whole year, but when they get back, the sand swallowed it.”
“All right, so at this point, have they realized California is not an island? Or did they sail another ship up the same river that got them stranded in the first place?”
She’s laughing, and I’m laughing—it’s just the way she’s asking the questions. You have to be here, I guess.
I press a hand to my chest, “It’s not my story. I’m just telling you what happened. He sailed on in, took a wrong turn at Albuquerque . . .”
“That’s in New Mexico,” Arden says sagely.
“Jesus, it’s an expression!” Now I laugh, my smile fixed as I boggle at her. In the game, she talks plenty. But because we have all our conversations in text, she can’t interrupt. Sometimes we wander off topic (weird things that scare you, go: Arden says blue jays, I say helium balloons), but the back-and-forth goes, well, back and forth. This is interesting . . . it’s different.
Finally putting her hands back on the wheel, Arden takes a deep breath and then slumps when she lets it out. “Okay, go on.”
Then—as fast as I can—I retell the story and put in as much logic as I can. How the river was too shallow, how Iturbe abandoned his riches thinking he could come back to it, how wrong he was, all of it. By the time I spit it all out, I’m lightheaded. I’ve never talked this fast in my life. My ears are seriously ringing, and my throat’s a little sore. But I’m pretty fucking puffed-up because that was a world-record monologue, and Arden was there to hear it.
“That sounds like an urban legend.”
“Did it end with a hook in your car door?” I demand. “Or the call coming from inside the house?”
Shrugging, Arden grins. “I never really got that one. I call my dad from inside the house all the time.”
“Listen,” I say, officially distracted. “The people in the story have a landline. So if the call came from inside the house . . .”
“Then the killer has a cell phone, and the operator wouldn’t know that.”
Huh. I roll that over in my head a minute, and come to the conclusion that the pretty girl who doesn’t let a guy finish his stories is, in fact, right. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Pleased, Arden leans her head toward me. “This ship of legends, then . . .”
“It’s real. People have seen it.”
“Friend of a friend?” she teases.
“It’s real,” I tell her, and I grin when she hits the brakes yet again.
(2484.69)
Hills and high banks of trees darken an already dark road. It feels like sliding out of a coat when we cross the state line—too hot before, but too cold now. I’m tired, nothing new. Arden’s flagging, though. We done crossed state lines, on a road trip she didn’t realize she was taking.
“You wanna stop?” I ask.
Changing lanes, mostly for the variety I think, Arden shakes her head. It slowly turns to a nod, and she looks to me. “Important question time. Boring-but-decent or no-tell motel?”
Sometimes it’s hard to carry on a conversation, the two of us, but questions like that prove we are who we are. Who we always have been together. Before, our quests took us up mountains speckled with fire elementals. Now it’s along a dark path in Ohio, speckled with McDonalds (McDonaldses?) We quest on, pillagers of the Pearl Ship, in search of an inn for the night.
“You like the weird motels,” I say. It’s a new fact about her, shiny and bright. I roll it on my tongue, and it tastes so sweet when she smiles in recognition. I kinda wanna hold her hand, but she doesn’t act like she wants me to, and it’s different, in skin. In the game, when we flirt with each other, come on to each other with emotes and gestures, it can’t lead anywhere. It’s safe, I guess.
My body, next to her body—it’s confusing. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t into guys; even in preschool when you just love everybody and have special friends, I wanted to sit next to boys. And that’s not Arden, no matter what she got assigned at birth. Wanting to hold her hand makes me feel like I’m lying—to her? To me?
But it goes around again; we’re inseparable in the game, but this isn’t the game, but you kinda have to love somebody you spend every night with, but did we really spend that together, when we were made out of nothing but electricity and light?
It’s not solvable; I keep my hand to myself.
We pass a couple of chains, lit up bright and parking lots full. Every time, Arden shakes her head and laments—too much tell in that motel.
You should see the way she lights up when we find the Baytes Motel—I’m not kidding. That’s really the name. It’s a cousin to the cinderblock sadness that was the Breezewood—a narrow brick building, single-story, punctuated by a door, a window. Space, then a door, and a window. On and on, all the way down the gravel lot.
Somebody tried to plant flowers around the motel’s sign, but the blooms are exhausted. Daffodils lay on the thin grass, too tired to stand.
“I got this,” Arden says, barely parked before she’s rolling out of the car. I try to follow her shape in the dark. At the right angle, I see her standing at the front desk. She rubs the back of her neck with one hand, talking and talking to a clerk I can’t see.
When she comes back, she drives us three doors down and hands me the key. Hanging from a thick plastic disk, the key is grungy. Even the key, yes. The lock it fits into feels . . . insubstantial. If I wanted to, I could bust through this door. What’s to stop malcontents and bad guys from doing the same?
We’re waving a big red flag, parking a Mercedes right outside #4.
It�
��s not like the bad guys even need that much incentive. My mother got a refurbished flat screen from one of her friends, put the box out at the corner with the rest of the trash. Next day, broken window in the back of the apartment and no TV.
Lynne stood in our dining room, an ash trailing off her cigarette as she sighed. “People just can’t have nice things anymore.”
“It’s probably those High Point honor students,” my mother replied. That’s what she always says so she doesn’t get caught saying something racist, which is what she means.
We didn’t call the police, because they wouldn’t come. Or if they came, they would just write some stuff down and then disappear. No fingerprint dust in Village Estates. None of that eerie blue glow spray they use with the black lights. If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one to hear, does it make a sound? If a television goes missing on the shit side of town, does anybody care?
This is why I sleep with my laptop between my mattress and box spring. And I don’t even know why I’m thinking about this, except, I guess, the Baytes Motel reminds me of home in the worst way.
Our room seems like a good place to die in a vintage porn movie. One wall is wood-grain panels, the other three? Yeah, baby, concrete block. Painted a faint shade of yellow, or maybe they were white once. It’s hard to say. The TV here is bolted to the dresser, and maybe that’s something we should have tried back home.
The remote is bolted to the side table, along with the lamp. It never would have occurred to me that a lamp might be worth stealing. But who knows? We had a couple kids last year breaking into empty units and stealing the plumbing. Zinc and copper is worth something at the scrap yards, and Lynne said it was the landlord’s fault that they hadn’t updated to plastic pipes like the rest of the world.
“This is . . . ,” Arden says.
She doesn’t finish. Is it because a room like this is more than her brain can process? All that talk about loving the low rent, it could have just been talk.
The quiet goes on too long, so I offer up a word. “Terrifying?”
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