Part IV
I hate airports.
The long lines, the uncomfortable seats, the vending machines, the food wrapped in plastic, the impatient people, the prices, the magazines, the carpeting, the escalators and the robotic voice coming from the ceiling asking me over and over for my attention please.
I hate flying.
The seats that smell like a smoldering vacuum cleaner, the upright tray tables, the seatbacks, the air vents recycling stuffy air, the SkyMall magazines, the in-flight passenger announcements, the feeling like I’m going to puke the moment the wheels leave the tarmac, the little bastard sitting behind me, the gorgeous flight attendant that waits on the couple one seat ahead of me and the male flight attendant who asks if I’d prefer soda or juice.
I hate rental cars.
The pretentious smile at the front desk, the paperwork that comes folded in a glossy pocketbook with a picture of a family laughing on the front, and my bill tucked inside, the new car smell that’s been baking all day under the hot sun, the controls for the windshield wipers and blinkers which are on the wrong side of the steering wheel, the radio and all of it’s digital choices, the air conditioning and it’s—
Actually, the car is pretty nice. I’m just grumpy.
Part V
Kristine Lambert. She had a middle name, but I’ll be damned if I remember what it is. I probably wouldn’t have remembered her last name if she hadn’t told me. It’s odd, but the harder I try to remember my past, the fuzzier it all feels. I’ve heard of things like memory repression and amnesia, but I never really believed in it. Not until now.
It’s eighty miles from the airport to Payton County—an hour and some change by car—so I have plenty of time to get frustrated while trying to remember the inconsequential details of my childhood. It’s still hard to wrap my head around the idea that just this morning I woke up in Atlanta, and only a few hours later I’m in Michigan driving toward a place I call ‘home.’ It doesn’t sound like home, but maybe that’s okay. Atlanta doesn’t feel like home either.
“Kristine Lambert,” I say aloud. “Kristine Lambert. Kristie.”
She’s a skeleton in my closet. Kind of like my ex-wife. They’re both chapters in my life that have ended. The difference between the two is I don’t remember why I left Kristie. I remember with great clarity the reasons why I left my marriage. I remember how Heather and I fought, I remember how nothing I did was what ever good enough, I remember how our inability to conceive was my fault, how the miscarriage was also somehow my fault, and I remember feeling free the day our divorce was finalized.
Thump-thump, thump-thump.
One thing I do remember is Michigan highways. Cracks in the pavement beneath the tires will sing you to sleep until potholes jar you awake again. The slogan “Pure Michigan” does not apply to its roads.
Thump-thump, thump-thump.
The radio offers no relief. There’s nothing but country or Christian music out here. I try scanning the dial but find nothing to my liking, so I switch the radio off and return my concentration to the road that seems to stretch into forever.
Exit 110 is coming up fast. I’m exhausted, and I almost disregard the sign entirely when something at the back of my mind triggers a memory. None of the landscape looks familiar, but there’s something about that sign...
Exit 110
Route 89
1/4 Mile
Route 89 was the fastest way out of town, and since every kid fantasized about leaving, we looked at the two-lane highway stretching into oblivion like the Yellow Brick Road. We said Route 89 led all the way to the edge of the Earth and beyond, and it must have, because anyone who took Route 89 never came back.
That means I’m close.
Yanking the wheel, I swerve off the interstate and follow the exit inland, merging onto a two-lane highway that feels hidden from the rest of the world. The trees get taller, hovering overhead like cheerleaders waving pompons as they welcome me onto the playing field. The hairs on my arms stand up. Without even checking my odometer, I instinctively know I’m only five miles from town. It looks familiar. I don’t think I would have remembered it had I not seen it, but now that I’m here, it all looks vaguely familiar. I can’t remember things as explicit as street names, but still, these markers…these trees…that house…
I crank my neck as I pass an old farmhouse on my left. It’s battered and neglected, having been abandoned for decades, yet it’s still standing. So is the barn. I remember that place. The old Johnson farm—Payton’s last outpost. I hung out there a hundred times as a kid. They say it’s haunted, and I smile as I zip past, crest a tall hill and head into town. As I draw closer, I recognize the landmarks right down to the trailer park on my right. The trailers are exactly the same, just a bit worse for wear.
A sign on my left reads Payton County Welcomes You, but I don’t feel all that welcome. People will see me. They’ll either recognize me or they won’t. Either way, they’ll stare. This isn’t exactly a town designed for tourism. There’s only one hotel, and the ‘vacancy’ sign is always lit.
5:48 p.m.
There’s my elementary school on the left, and there’s Jimmy Taylor’s house where we lit a firecracker and accidently burned the garage down. They still haven’t rebuilt, and the old charred ruins are overgrown with weeds.
There’s Janet’s house. Janet something or other. The house is in desperate need of paint or siding, but it looks like somebody still lives there. I wonder it’s her parents or someone else—maybe even Janet. We were eleven when she flashed me. She hadn’t fully developed yet, but boobs are boobs even to an eleven year old kid. She wouldn’t let Ritchie near her no matter how much he begged, but she asked me if I’d like to touch them. They didn’t feel like I’d imagined after years of silently rubbing one out from within the sanctity of my bedroom where I kept the door closed and my eyes shut while my mom watched TV from the other side of the wall.
And there’s John Fisher’s house. He was only nineteen when he got hit by a drunk driver and killed. We were only nine, so nineteen seemed like a lifetime away. All that changed when I saw the skid-marks and the blood on the road. I watched with gaping wonder while they took photographs, a tennis shoe still connected to a foot sticking out from under the tarp.
On the other side of the street is Old Man Jacob’s house. The sailboat he half-buried as some kind of weird lawn ornament is still there too. Nobody really understood why he did it, but then again, no one really understood Old Man Jacob either. There isn’t a lake within fifty miles of Payton, so why he owned a sailboat to begin with seemed to baffle everyone. Ritchie had sex with Jill White inside that boat while Mr. Jacob mowed the lawn around them, utterly oblivious. Ritchie said it was the best sex he ever had, but I think he was just trying for attention. Ritchie didn’t love Jill. He only ever loved one girl.
Today, the boat looks terrible. The mast fell over years ago, and the windows are broken out. Mud has ingrained itself into the fiberglass and moss has taken root. The roof of Old Man Jacob’s house has fallen in too, and the door is hanging wide open. The place is abandoned, and my guess is the bank was unable to sell the dump after he died.
And there it is; the old high school, though it’s not quite like I remember. It looks tired, as if it survived a war. Incredibly, however, it appears as though it did survive since the old marquee sign out front is welcoming back students for the fall semester set to begin in just under four weeks.
The baseball stadium is on my right, and I’m astounded by how small it seems. The bleachers can’t hold thousands of people the way I remember them, and the outfield is mostly brown grass. It’s odd how the memory works. When I was a kid, that place was larger than life. Today, it just looks like a high school baseball park in desperate need of some attention.
I haven’t thought of these people or these places in years, and if I weren’t here today, I never would have thought of them again. Even so, I can feel an eerie sense of wonderment as I drive thr
ough town. There’s the old gas-station, but it’s been remodeled into a bright green and yellow BP. There’s the former Pic ‘n’ Pac grocery mart, but now it’s called Apples ‘n’ Oranges. I suppose this is progress, though you’d never know it judging by the lack of cars in the parking lot. And Gerry’s Auto Sales across the street is boarded up. It doesn’t look like Gerry has sold any cars there for years.
There’s Rachel Roberts pushing a stroller for two while a little girl walks beside her. I can’t believe I remembered her name just like that. She’s put on sixty pounds or more since high-school, and she looks tired and sunburned, but it’s clearly her. I’d recognize her fire-red hair anywhere. She was a popular cheerleader while I was nothing more than a name in the yearbook, yet I had a gargantuan crush on her right up until I started dating Kristie.
And there’s the Payton Inn, owned by Jim and Sherry Loren. They were always nice folks, though I once told Sherry a knock-knock joke that she never did get, and I think she held it against me for embarrassing her. All the high school kids liked the Lorens because they’d rent rooms by the hour and wouldn’t ask any questions. It’s not like they approved of teenage fornication, but owning a hotel in a town that doesn’t need one isn’t exactly a gold mine. They needed the money. Nobody visits Payton on purpose, so the only customers they could count on were horny teenagers. Prom night was their biggest night of the year. All the parents knew what was going on, but nobody said anything because they had done the same thing when they were the same age. It was a Payton tradition. Half of the children born out of wedlock were conceived in one of those 26 rooms.
The Payton Inn is now a Days Inn. The difference is the sign. The fountain isn’t working, but it never really worked right anyway, so I guess that’s not much of a surprise. Sadly, the pine trees the Lorens had planted and nurtured from saplings are now dead, just skeletons poking at the sky. The neon light that always reads ‘vacancy’ now only reads ‘ancy,’ and even those letters are blinking on and off as though they are moments away from burning out for good.
Pulling into the parking lot, I hit another pothole and realize the nostalgic dream of Payton County has ended. Shutting of the engine, I climb out. The parking lot is empty, but the smells, the humidity, and the sounds of my hometown are exactly the same as I remember them as a kid even though the overall feeling has changed. Everything is quieter, slower, emptier and weedier. Shrugging off my disappointment, I walk under the enormous overhang that was once used for curbside pickup. There just isn’t enough traffic to necessitate anything quite so fancy, and as if to validate my assumptions, the hotel shuttle is parked out front, but its front tire is flat, and looks to have been so for some time.
Discouraged by the notion that my own cynicism has tainted the perception I have of my hometown, I step forward, pointedly reminding myself that all things change over time, age forgets no one, and I should expect less while doing more. It’s then that I feel something crunch under my shoe. Lifting my foot, what remains of a cockroach sticks to the underside of my Sketchers, its wiggling legs not yet aware that the body they’re attached to has died.
Part VI
There is no bell as I enter the hotel, but the door squeaks as though it’s straight out of a horror movie where the bellhop is some dead guy with birds eating his face. The girl at the front desk looks up and snaps her gum. She’s just a kid. “Help you?” she asks as she sets down the Vogue magazine she’s reading.
“I wasn’t sure you were open,” I answer with a half smile.
She just snaps her gum. “We’re always open.”
It was clearly a joke that she clearly didn’t understand.
“I need a room.”
She frowns and starts typing on her computer. “Just you?”
“Me, myself and I.”
She looks up, chews with boredom, and looks back down. “Smoking or non-smoking?”
“Non.”
“One night?”
I frown. “I’m not really sure. Does it matter?” I look around. “I mean…does it matter?”
“For my computer.”
I shrug. “It’ll probably be a few days. How about through Sunday?”
She stops chewing and looks up. “On purpose?”
I frown.
She snaps her gum again, rolls her eyes, and starts typing.
The silence is awful, and I feel compelled to fill it. “I used to live here.”
“I’m sorry.”
I chuckle. “You love your job, don’t you?”
“More than life itself.” She types some things into the computer that looks straight out of the 90s, clicks her mouse, and chews on her lip. “Cash or credit?”
I hand over the plastic followed by more typing. Finally she sends something to a dot matrix printer. I haven’t seen a dot matrix printer since high school, yet there it is, sliding back and forth, chirping and hissing as it tediously prints one line after another. She tears the page off, circles the ‘X’ next to ‘Customer Signature’ and slides it across the worn countertop.
I sign.
She hands me a key. Not a keycard. An actual brass key. “Room 16,” she says. “All the way at the end. Past the ice machine.” She sniffs, wiping her nose on her wrist. “The maid comes at ten, so if you don’t want her in your room, hang the sign on the knob.”
I take the key and I’m about to turn when I wonder aloud, “am I the only customer here?”
She’d already picked up her magazine again. She doesn’t even look at me. “No.”
“No?”
“There’s another.”
I look around at the dilapidated interior before bending down and picking up my bag. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”
This time she does smile, but it’s an ironic smile ebbed with little humor. “Enjoy your stay.”
I nod with a smirk and walk out. I park the rental outside 16 and unload. The room smells like carpet shampoo, so I open the drapes and prop the door open to let fresh air in. Then I switch on the AC, which grunts and groans before finally leveling off and spewing cool air into the tiny room. I flop down on the bed, kick off my shoes and wiggle my toes inside my sweaty socks. The cool air feels good, and as I lay sprawled across the bed, I figure things could be worse. I haven’t been back home in so long that maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. I’m actually somewhat curious about seeing Kristine again. After all, she was my first. Suddenly curious, I scrounge around until I find a phonebook tucked in the bedside drawer. Sure enough, she’s listed under ‘Lambert,’ which means she’s not married. The number is local, indicating she moved from Lawton to this side of the crick. I recognize the street name she’s listed on, but I don’t remember where it is.
The open door seems to be inviting me outside, and as I stare beyond the interior of this tired room into the world out there, I begin to wonder what lies beyond, what’s changed, and what’s still the same. I put my shoes back on, pocket the key, lock the door and hesitate.
Home.
I could drive, but I’d rather walk. Besides, my legs need stretching, and it feels good to walk the same sidewalks I walked as a kid. After awhile I even start to feel better despite the clouds rolling in overhead. The air is saturated with moisture. It was always humid here in the summertime, but that was part of the charm. Freeze in the winter, sweat in the summer. It’s all so familiar, and it’s all good. Small-town good. The people, the smells, the lawns, the shops, the houses. I remember all of it. The cracks in the sidewalk, the cracks in the roads—my town. It’s not beautiful or even quaint. It’s a dump that should be bulldozed, but it’s still my home.
And me? I am the epitome of Payton County. They say no one leaves; no one gets out. But I did, and now I’m back, reaffirming all those hand-painted signs that hang in the spotless windows of eccentric tourist shops proclaiming ‘Home Is Where The Heart Is.’ If Atlanta isn’t ‘me,’ then maybe Payton is. I’ve got savings. I could sell all my stuff I left back there and start over here. I could b
lend in quite easily, perching myself on that bell-curve, getting wrinkled and going gray until everything I forgot either comes back or I ultimately disappear.
Two
Yesterday
“Tony? You comin’?” He has to holler to get his voice to carry. I look up, squinting against the glare of the noonday sun before waving him off and returning my attention to the clear brook beside me. Sunlight reflects off the water as though from a mirror. Ritchie is about a hundred paces up the path from the other side of the stream, hands on hips, his pale face snow white against the bright sunlight. He’s my best friend, but this is one of those moments that I’d rather he’d do me the courtesy of using his indoor voice so I can enjoy the simple solitude of the gurgling stream.
“Tony?”
I ignore him, running my fingers through the chilly water, the sun warming my shoulders. When I look closer at the liquid glass rolling lazily past, I can see the minnows hovering in space. They’re still—as if waiting, appearing almost hypnotized, moving only slightly now and then to dodge a twig or something flowing downstream. They’re frozen in time without much on their little zombie-like minds, and in many ways I envy them. Nothing is simpler than black on white.
“Yo, Triple A,” Ritchie calls, clumsily retracing his steps.
I really don’t feel like talking much. Four beers under the hot sun will do just about anyone in, and now that I’ve had an hour to revel in the artificial buzz that’s beginning to morph into a headache, I’m feeling somewhat introspective and not terribly social. But Ritchie is trying to drag me back to reality by poking at my mounting headache with nagging persistence, and I can’t help but wonder if my melancholy has something to do with Kristie Lambert.
“What’s goin’ on?” Ritchie asks from the other side of the stream. “You comin’ or what?”
“I don’t feel like it anymore,” I answer, just wanting to sit.
Payton Hidden Away Page 2
