Mr. Tall

by Tony Earley

  “Roll that window up,” he said.

  “Nope,” Cheryl answered. “I want to hear a foghorn.”

  When Darryl reached for the master switch on the console, Cheryl stuck her arm out of the car. Darryl bumped the switch a couple of times, nudging her arm with the glass.

  “Darryl,” she said calmly. “Trust me. You do not want to do that.”

  Actually, that was exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to roll Cheryl’s arm up in the car window. He wanted to jam the switch forward until it broke. Cheryl reached over with her left hand and placed it on top of his right hand.

  “If Misti lets that weasel get in her pants, it’s all your fault,” he said, surprising himself, knowing as he said it that it was the most unfair thing he had ever said to anyone.

  Cheryl lifted his hand off the console and dropped it into his lap. “I don’t know what your problem is,” she said, “but if you touch that switch one more time I will backhand you in the mouth.”

  Darryl placed his hand on the steering wheel. He felt a laugh fluttering irrationally inside his chest. Now that he’d gotten this thing rolling, he found that he didn’t want to ride it all the way to the bottom. He suddenly wanted to see Cheryl walk out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. He wanted her nipples to lock him in their transfixing gaze. He took a deep breath.

  Cheryl held up her index finger to cut him off. “Right now,” she said, “you just need to shut the hell up. All I wanted to hear was a foghorn.”

  Misti was not allowed to touch Cheryl’s scissors, either. Misti took gymnastics. Misti took ballet. Misti learned to read by climbing onto the light table and sounding out headlines. Misti joined the swim team, but she didn’t like it. Misti grew taller than the other girls in her class. Darryl put up a hoop in the parking lot and he and Misti shot baskets after school. Misti played center for the Lady Scots. She was All-Conference her senior year. Some guys from Ohio offered Darryl and Cheryl three million dollars for the Argus and they sold it. Darryl took up fly-fishing, which he wasn’t very good at. Cheryl worked part time at a fudge shop owned by her aunt. Darryl and Cheryl drove Misti to Wilmington and left her standing in the parking lot of a dormitory with her hands clamped over her mouth.

  They didn’t reach Nags Head until after dark and then had trouble finding a room in the fog. Every time Cheryl managed to identify one of the vaporous buildings as a motel, Darryl had already driven past its entrance. “If you don’t slow down,” she said, “you’re going to miss the spooks in Scotland.”

  Traffic lights swam at them out of nowhere, each as unexpected as a UFO. Darryl had no idea where he was going, only that it wasn’t toward Argyle. “About back there…” he said.

  Cheryl didn’t look at him. “I’m about starved,” she said. “Keep a lookout for a Hardee’s or something.”

  She would forgive him, just not yet. He was lucky she hadn’t knocked his teeth out. That he had kept his teeth all these years when he so obviously didn’t deserve them seemed a minor blessing. He kept his hands on the wheel at ten and two and savored the domestic missions of the moment. Find me a Hardee’s. Find me a room. Stay with me until I die. It was all the same thing, really.

  He had begun to consider turning around for another pass through Nags Head when the words “Wade-n-Sea” materialized in sizzling pink neon high above the roadway to their right.

  Cheryl leaned forward and stared up at the sign. “That’s got to be a motel,” she said.

  “Or maybe God needs a copyeditor.”

  “Just shut up and slow down, Darryl.”

  He managed to steer the car into the parking lot of an ancient red-brick motel. Three low wings of eight or ten rooms lay moored in the fog in a U around the sign, and beneath the sign glittered a small, dazzlingly bright swimming pool. Three pickup trucks with fishing-rod holders welded to their front bumpers were the only other vehicles in the lot.

  When Darryl rang the bell in the office, a desiccated old woman with skin cured the color of nicotine opened the door behind the counter. Through the doorway he saw an even older man slumped in a wheelchair, his mouth agape in what seemed to be a permanent expression of disbelief. The wet light of a muted television wavered on the wall behind him.

  The woman studied Darryl’s face with the wariness of someone who had been held up more than once. “That’s my husband,” she said. “I try to bring him home on weekends.”

  “Do you have a room available?”

  “You saw the parking lot. How many do you want?”

  Darryl smiled. “How about one?”

  “King or double?”

  He chewed on his upper lip, considering the ways the evening might go. “Double, I guess.”

  “That’ll be eighty-five for the night. Who’s the other bed for?”

  “My wife. She’s in the car.”

  The old woman pushed a registration slip toward him. “Well, enjoy it while you can.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Wade-n-Sea. This might be the winter the nor’easters finally finish us off. The next time we close her down, she might not open up again. New moon, we already get water up in the front rooms. Can’t rent ’em anymore.”

  “Will you rebuild?”

  “Nah. The beach is gone. Government says whatever falls in the ocean on this side of the road stays in the ocean. I guess we’ll take their money. Let ’em have it. Move to Burlington. We got a daughter there. You ever been to Burlington?”

  “I’ve passed by it on the interstate.”

  “Well, it ain’t much of a place if you ask me. Shit. Computer’s down again. Don’t know why we even got a computer. Pay me tomorrow.” She placed a key on top of Darryl’s credit card and slid the card across the counter. “Number four, two doors down, this side. No smoking. No parties. No loud music. No unregistered guests. No glass bottles by the pool. No exceptions.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I smoke in here, but it’s my motel, so don’t even bother complaining to me about that.”

  “I won’t,” Darryl said. “I promise.” He turned toward the door.

  “So what are you going to do?” the old woman asked.

  Darryl frowned. “About what?”

  “Tomorrow. While you’re here.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I don’t know. Wright Brothers Memorial, I guess. The beach if the fog clears out. I don’t know what else there is.”

  The old woman put her hands on the counter and leaned toward him. “Jockey Ridge,” she said. “Now, that’s a thing worth seeing.”

  “What’s Jockey Ridge?”

  “Sand dunes. Big as mountains. You climb to the top and run down ’em. Whee.”

  “Thank you. We’ll take a look.”

  “Check-out time’s eleven, but go ahead and sleep late if you want. What the hell. Soon as we sell this place I’m gonna sleep a long time.”

  The walls of their room were paneled in knotty pine, but the wood had darkened so much over the years that it absorbed most of the light emitted by the forty-watt bulbs in the lamps. The green carpet smelled vaguely of mildew overlaid with mothballs. The pink tile and fixtures in the bathroom looked original, but the toilet didn’t flush properly. At least everything seemed reasonably clean.

  “Which bed do you want?” Cheryl asked.

  Darryl waited to see if she was joking, then pointed at the one by the window. The blinds glowed softly with diffuse pink light.

  Cheryl plopped onto the other bed and reached for the remote. “Sorry, Slick. No haunted castles tonight.”

  “But it’s Scotland.”

  She turned on the television. “Boo,” she said. “How’s that?”

  When he started awake, he heard the shower running. It was after midnight. On television the haunted-castle psychic, wearing a headlamp, stooped through a low doorway followed by the haunted-castle cynic, an attractive but bitter little woman in a black turtleneck.

  Darryl smiled.

  “Do you feel that, Shelia?” the
psychic asked. “That cold air. My God, the temperature’s plummeting like a stone. Do you feel it?”

  “How do you know it’s not a draft?” Shelia asked, wrapping her arms around herself. “I don’t think castles are insulated very well.”

  The psychic strode farther into the room. “William?” he called out. “William, are you here with us? Can you make a sound, William? We mean you no harm.”

  When the water stopped running in the bathroom, Darryl hopped up and found the remote and turned off the television. He took off his shirt and T-shirt, then his pants. He looked at himself in the mirror, then put his T-shirt back on. He lay down on Cheryl’s bed and propped his hands behind his head.

  When Cheryl came out of the bathroom, she was wearing sweatpants and socks and the long T-shirt she normally wore over her swimsuit. Her eyes were dangerously bloodshot.

  Darryl swung his legs off the bed and reached for his pants.

  “I can’t believe what you said to me,” Cheryl said. “Nobody’s ever said anything like that to me before, not ever.”

  “I’m sorry,” Darryl said, looking desperately around for his shoes. “I tried to apologize but you just wanted me to find you a Hardee’s.”

  “You think just because I lived in a trailer for a year and a half I’m a slut?”

  “What?”

  “You think Misti’s gonna screw every boy in Wilmington because I like to go to Gatlinburg to see the Christmas lights?”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Darryl said. “What are you talking about?”

  “You do, too, know what I’m talking about. You think because I like to, what else, listen to the race on the radio, that I don’t have any morals.”

  “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything like that. Do you know where I put my shoes?”

  “That’s exactly what you said. Well, let me tell you something. The race is a hell of a lot better than that classical PBS shit you pretend you like and make everybody else listen to, and I’ve only had sex with two people in my whole life and I married both of them so you can just stick your shoes up your Carolina-blue Episcopal ass.”

  “Cheryl, you’re not making any sense, and, for the record, you don’t have to bring Donnie into this.”

  “Don’t you dare tell me I’m not making any sense, and, for the record, I’ll talk about Donnie Payne if I want to. I know you think I’m stupid. I know you think my armpits smell bad and my boobs are too big. I know you laugh at my clothes behind my back. You always have.”

  “I have never laughed at your clothes.”

  “Liar. You think I don’t know why you give me all that preppy L.L. Bean crap for my birthday? And you want to hear about Donnie Payne? I’ll tell you about Donnie Payne. Donnie Payne liked my clothes and Donnie Payne liked the way I smelled and Donnie Payne flat-out loved my boobs, and if Donnie Payne hadn’t got drunk and run around on me with Carmen Skipper I’d still be married to him. I wouldn’t have pissed on you if you’d been on fire.”

  “Cheryl, don’t say that.”

  “And I’d have been better off, too. You’ve been looking down on me from the moment you walked out of Mr. Putnam’s office in that stupid necktie and I’m done with it. I’ve never done anything but bust my ass my whole life and I’ve tried to be a good mama to Misti since the day she was born and look how it’s all turning out. It ain’t fair, none of it. So, fuck you.”

  The Wade-n-Sea sign was so tall that from the parking lot Darryl couldn’t even see the letters. The steel stalk simply seemed to disappear into an electrical pink cloud. Darryl thought briefly about climbing it. Out of sight overhead the neon spat and hummed.

  On the far side of the swimming pool the old woman waved a long-handled skimmer through the water, while beside her the old man slouched in his wheelchair. Occasionally he lifted an arm and pointed. Despite the blue light shimmering upward from the water, the fog rendered their forms incorporeal. Darryl tiptoed carefully across the parking lot toward the pool, bent slightly at the waist, staring at the ground. He didn’t have on his glasses and didn’t want to step on anything that would hurt his bare feet. He hadn’t been able to find one of his shoes.

  “Everything all right in there?” the old woman asked.

  “Ma’am?”

  “The room. Everything all right with the room?” She pulled the skimmer out of the pool and tapped the mesh twice against the white gravel behind her just off the walkway. Dead and dying moths, maybe hundreds of them, bobbed and fluttered on the surface of the water.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am,” Darryl said. “The room’s fine. Except maybe the toilet. The toilet doesn’t flush very well.”

  “Not enough fall,” the old woman said. “It was like that when we opened the place in fifty-one. Nothing to be done. I got a plunger you can use.”

  “We’re good for now, I think,” Darryl said, reflexively touching his back pocket. He had stopped carrying a reporter’s notebook when they sold the paper, but still tended to classify people according to whether he thought he could get a feature out of them. Old people were good bets because, even if they had nothing else to say, you could still get most of them to talk about the way things used to be. Old guys at fruit stands had been his secret weapon against slow news days.

  Darryl pointed up into the fog. “Tell me about your sign,” he said.

  “It’s grandfathered in,” she said, “if that’s what you’re wondering about. You can’t build them that high anymore. People have told me they’ve seen it from three miles out, but that’s probably bullshit. I never went to look.”

  The old man raised his arm.

  “That one?” she asked, dipping a moth out of the water. “Oh, look at that. That’s a big bastard.” She tapped the moth out on the gravel. “A few years ago some nice gay fellows tried to get it declared a national historic something-or-other, but nothing ever came of it. I think they liked it because it was pink.”

  Darryl touched his back pocket again. He didn’t have a newspaper to write for, or even a notebook to write in, but decided to go ahead and interview them anyway. He thought he’d been tired of the newspaper business when they sold the Argus—all those sordid AP stories about Clinton’s sexual predilections, or the feature one of his young reporters brought him about an “authentic mountain dulcimer player” who actually had an MBA from the University of Miami—but now he knew better.

  “Of course, the amazing thing about that sign,” the old woman continued, “is that none of the hurricanes ever broke the neon. We’ve never had to replace a single tube. We’ve replaced the roof four times and we’ve been flooded more times than I can count, but the damn glass never broke. We’ve been on several news shows about it.”

  “That is amazing.”

  “The gay fellows thought so. They have a bed and breakfast up the road in Kitty Hawk. It looks like a nice enough place, but I’ve never gone inside. We tried a continental breakfast for a while, but it was a pain in the ass. Every morning people cleaned us out and took all the food back to their rooms, even those tiny little boxes of cereal, so we said screw it.”

  The old man slapped his hand once against the arm of his wheelchair, then pointed at the water. The old woman turned toward him and put her free hand on her hip before looking again at Darryl.

  “Tell me something,” she said. “Are you planning on swimming in this pool tomorrow?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t think so.”

  “Then the hell with it. I’m not going to worry about it anymore.” She dropped the skimmer onto the sidewalk and turned to face the old man. “I said I’m not going to worry about it anymore.” She turned back to Darryl and pointed at two deck chairs. “You want to sit down?”

  “Sure.”

  “Jorge should’ve had the cover on by now, but he’s a lazy prick.”

  “Jorge?”

  “Well, I shouldn’t have said that. He’s not really a lazy prick, I don’t guess. He’s married to Dolores. He works full time at
the Holiday Inn and just moonlights over here. He still needs to get his ass over here and put the cover on, though. Remind me to get on Dolores about it tomorrow.”

  The old man slowly raised his head and mumbled something.

  “Listen at that. This one over here doesn’t like Mexicans. He thinks they’re taking over the world. Of course, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Nags Head is running out of Mexicans. I don’t know where they all went. Some of the big places have started shipping in Russians. The Russians, though, will steal anything that ain’t tied down.”

  “Are you both from here?” Darryl asked.

  “He’s from Florida,” she said. “I grew up near Salvo. My granddad had a fishing pier. It’s not there anymore. The Ash Wednesday storm took it off in sixty-two.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “He was in the Coast Guard during the war and it was his job to ride up and down the beach on a horse. The U-boats were bad, especially in forty-two, everything was blacked out—if you lit a lantern to go to the outhouse somebody would arrest you—and at night we used to sit in the dark on the end of Granddad’s pier and watch the ships blow up. You’d see the flashes off in the distance, and then three or four seconds later you’d hear, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Next day we’d go up and down the beach to see what had washed up and this guy, him and his buddies would ride up and down on their horses and look it over and tell us whether or not we could keep it.”

  “What was the best thing you ever found?”

  “Spam. Oh my God, we thought that was a treasure.”

  “Did any bodies ever wash up?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s how we met,” the old woman said. “Isn’t that right?”

  The old man grunted.

  “Listen to him. He’s still pissed off at the Germans. He’s a Jew, so I guess he’s got a point. I’m not a Jew, but his people weren’t observant, so when we got married it didn’t matter. I say if a German’s check don’t bounce, who gives a shit? What were we talking about?”