Now he turned on the light. She stayed as he had dropped her, curled like a shrimp, her limbs pulled toward her center. She watched his face unfasten its anger, then bloom with surprise, even wonder. For a moment it was like seeing a boy with a magnifying glass examining the complicated wings of a flying insect, enthralled and amazed, as though he could not believe his luck to live on this earth with such a thing as he held in his hand.
“What the hell?” He leafed through the fifties. Taking one, he flipped it over and back again, holding it up to the yellow bulb in the car’s roof. “Jesus,” he said, inhaling carefully, counting the bills in time with his breath. He turned them over, counted them again. For a long minute, he stared at the money, as though searching for a message in the stout face of Ulysses S. Grant. In a low, serious voice, he said, “Where did you get this?”
She couldn’t speak.
“It is a simple question.”
She heard her words—silly, girlish—as she tried to explain that she hadn’t been looking for anything, certainly not for money, and how the bills were dusty and had clearly been there for a long while. “So I took it. That was the wrong thing to do, but I took it.”
“From the motel room? Money was just sitting there in the room?”
“Yes, and I should have told you, okay? But I was worried. I mean, who leaves a thousand dollars in a motel except maybe a drug dealer? I should have told you. I’m sorry. But I didn’t know what you’d think—”
He didn’t register her apology. He was looking at the money, counting all over again. He pinched the wad in his hand, squinted at it as though measuring its thickness. Then he said, “You say a thousand.” He spoke very slowly, and far more seriously than she had ever before heard. “So where’s the other five hundred?”
—
HE WAS ON the air in just over an hour, but they were heading away from the station. He had to get back to the motel, find the rest of the money, then get out again. The car burned through seventy, eighty, ninety on the straightaways, him screaming at her, asking why in hell’s name had she left five hundred dollars behind? He could not be late to his midnight spot. Could not! She had fucked everything up, fucked it clean up, and why was he always making up for her incompetence?
She tried to read him, to figure out where the flying ball of his rant would land. She had to appear not too casual but not too wary, either. Whatever else, not scared, because that always made him worse. Slanted on the bench seat of the Buick, shoulder against the window, she stayed as far from him as she could without being accused of sulking, holding on to the seat with one hand, the door with the other. She didn’t want him to know she was worried by how fast he was driving so she held on lightly, as though her hands just happened to rest there. Meanwhile she watched the short distance between the car bumper and everything else in front of them. She tried to look up at the moon, a tonic of white stillness in the slate sky, to set all her thoughts there and ignore the speed of the trees and bushes and telephone poles flying past.
Out on the highway, he skirted the traffic. “You better hope we don’t meet a cop!” he said. Always her fault, always. He glared hard at her, as though she were the reason for all his ills and every trouble in his otherwise tidy life.
They skimmed the bed of a big semi, so close to its wheels she felt the suck of a vacuum pulling the side of the Buick. The shadow of the truck bed fell over them, the darkness covering her lap. A weight of gravity pushed against her shoulder, and she thought for one clear moment that her life was done now, that she would be taken by the truck as a field mouse is taken by an eagle.
Craig jerked the Buick into the next lane. She breathed out hard as he pressed down the accelerator. She felt her stomach burn as he swerved into a third lane, then skirted up two cars and over once more.
Now the highway dipped downward, with a long tongue of road ahead. The car rolled faster and faster. It was exactly as though they had no brakes because he did not use brakes. His response to everything—bends and bumps in the road, other cars—was forward, forward.
“What made you think I didn’t need the whole grand?” he said. As though the money—all of it—was already his.
After a moment she said, “I didn’t want to draw suspicion.”
“What?”
Louder this time, so that her voice carried over the road noise, “I said I didn’t want to draw suspicion!”
He slapped the steering wheel in exasperation, then punched the accelerator at the belly of the highway’s slope, and she swore they went airborne. He said, “Who was watching you? How can it be ‘suspicious’ when there is nobody to see?”
With the word suspicious he took both hands off the wheel to draw little quotation marks in the air. Air quotes while topping a hundred. He said, “That’s just retarded! You find money, it’s yours! That’s how it is with money. And other stuff, besides. Not car keys, okay. You can’t take someone’s fucking keys!” He spoke angrily, as though she’d done just that, taken a whole ring of keys off an innocent bystander. “Only a pussy takes someone’s keys!” he shouted.
She tried to think of a way of distracting herself. She started counting in threes: three, six, nine, twelve…
“And not clothes, either—that’s personal! And not even money once it’s in someone’s pocket—that would be stealing. But loose money is like air. It’s for whoever happens along. Do I ask if it is okay to breathe the air near you? Do I say, ‘Barbara, mind if I have a little whiff of your air?’ Well, do I?”
Thirty-six, thirty-nine. She opened her eyes to see the cars beside them becoming dangerously close as he teetered toward the next lane. She heard the sound of a car horn over the music and Craig’s bellowing voice.
“Come on! Answer me when I ask you a question, Barbara! Do I or do I not ask if it is okay to breathe the air near you?”
She hadn’t realized he expected an answer. “No,” she muttered. Forty-two, forty-five…
“No, I fucking well don’t and why should I? Same with loose money.” He glanced at her from across the car, a low, sorrowful look as though he was concerned about her intellect. “You need to understand some things,” he said. He checked the road briefly, then whipped his head back to her once again. “Would you agree that you need to understand some things?”
“Yes,” she offered. Fifty-one, fifty-four…
“Quite a few things?”
She nodded.
“Because you don’t know anything yet. Tell me one goddamn thing that you think you know.”
She had no idea what he was talking about, or why she had to answer, or how. “Fifty-one isn’t a prime number,” she said. “You’d think it would be. It sounds prime.”
He shook his head. “You’re completely insane. A total nutbucket,” he said.
“It’s true. If you had five and one together it’s six and therefore divisible by three,” she said.
He glared at her. “That’s the kind of stupid shit nobody cares about.”
“Three times seventeen.” She knew he didn’t care. That nobody cared. She was talking nonsense. She was scared to death.
“What is wrong with your brain that you are doing math in my car? You need to get your shit together, Barbara. You need to pay attention to the University of Life.”
She told herself if she got out of this car alive she would never get back in. This was the last night of the last day, the very last time she would ever see him. She didn’t care what it took to rid herself of him. Let him scream and shout. Let him tell her mother. It made no difference. She was done.
But she nodded in agreement that she needed to get her shit together—oh yes, oh yes, get her shit…
“Okay,” she said. “I agree.” Her admission satisfied Craig, who liked to seem sage and intelligent. He liked to teach her. He’d once explained why blood did not belong to one person but to everyone, and how if he were in charge of stuff, he’d stop blood-supply shortages by requiring hospitals to drain the blood of patients who d
ied, but only a few minutes after they died so that it was still good, the blood. It wasn’t rotten or anything. Then there was the guy he worked with who was born without thumbs. Craig had explained that the worst thing about missing thumbs was how it made it so the guy couldn’t work a bong. And this was a shame because bongs gave you a better, cleaner, and more complete high. He was sure of this. He believed that one day science would find ways of measuring such things.
He veered onto an exit ramp, the motel sign a great beacon of light, then put the car in neutral as a way of saving fuel, a habit she never liked because traveling the slope of the road at high speed always made the car feel light and out of control. They rounded the curve of the exit, the car swerving and swooping along the contours of the road like an osprey tracking the air above the ocean’s swells and surf. They were fast; they were flying. He was smiling now, singing along to a tune on the radio. He didn’t care how fast they went; he was hunting. He was about to get his money. It was waiting for him there by the big bright sign.
—
SHE’D LEFT THE key in the room, so they had to get the manager’s keys to get inside. She followed Craig through a glass door with a strap of bells attached, then into a little square room lit from above by strips of humming, cold light. He rang a bell on the desk and called out “Hey, anyone here?” loud enough so if you were there you’d come running. That, or hide.
The countertop had neat piles of leaflets, a rubber plant, and a desk calendar with curled corners and a photograph of the motel on it. The night manager, or whoever he was, must have still been around because he’d left half a cup of coffee in a blue enamel mug, and a coffee pot roasting dry on an electric ring above the filing cabinet.
“You ever seen so deserted a place as this?” Craig said, thwacking the bell with his palm. “Hey, anyone here?!”
There were fishing rods in one corner, a trash can, an old sign. Craig called again and still no reply.
“What the fuck is the matter with this place,” he said. He stamped his foot, banged the bell with his fist, called out again. The hum from the fluorescent ceiling lights annoyed him. “Someone shut that damned tube off,” he said, as though to the staff. He took a broom from its place by the door, tossed it up and grabbed the brush end. He whacked it on the light fixture so that it blinked and swayed before resuming its noise. Now he grew red with impatience, paced the length of the counter, slapped the top of it, sounded the bell over and over again before finally throwing it against a wall. Then he went over to the bells tacked on the door and shook them like he was trying to get a coconut out of a tree.
“Hey!” he shouted. He was wearing the bicentennial ball cap. His untucked T-shirt billowed over his front, where a loose swatch of leather from his belt wagged with his steps. “Hey! I need some attention here!”
His voice boomed toward the back of the room where there were some closets and an exit door. Nothing happened. He flipped up a section of the counter that allowed him through to the manager’s area, then opened cupboards until, at last, he found where the keys were stored on pegs. The one he wanted wasn’t there and he searched the rack then looked on the desk, yanked open a drawer and swept his hand through, scattering paper clips, an ink pad, a calculator. A log of staples fell to the floor and broke into sections he then stepped on, turning abruptly when the phone began to ring. “You gonna answer that?” he said to Bobbie, sarcastically. The white light flashed on one of the extensions and the phone rang and rang. They both looked at it. “This is all your fault,” he told her. “Making us come back.”
Then he told her to get out, go back to the car and wait there.
She left him in the motel office and stepped into the night, wishing she were home already. Her house had a screened porch and she’d used paper clips to fix some extra mesh over the holes in the screen so bugs could not get through. She would sleep out there on nights like this, lying on a little camp bed beside a long section of screen, watching the moon through the trees. It was what she’d done the night before, quietly drifting into sleep in the silky warmth of the night. She had woken at dawn, feeling part of the trees and woods around her, part of the songbirds and squirrels and night animals.
She could still hear Craig calling for the manager. She had eight hours until she had to be at the bus stop for school and she’d better have washed her hair. It was sticky and stiff, hanging in her eyes. Sleep would be good, too. There had been times recently when she nodded off in class and the teachers behaved as though this was deliberate rudeness on her part. Her geography teacher once woke her, saying, Do you have a problem I can help you with? She’d shaken her head, stifled a yawn, endured the laughter in the classroom. No, he couldn’t help her. She had a lot of problems he couldn’t help her with. Her problem right now is she has to wait for Craig to get the money and get her home. Who could help her with that?
The motel sign was reflected in long bars of light on the Buick’s gold hood and in colorful splashes on the window. When she approached she saw her own shadow, angular and dark. Then she stopped. Somebody was behind her. She could see plainly enough in the window’s reflection. He was moving along the little cement path that led to the front of the motel. The night manager. He disappeared from view as she got into the car. She rolled the window down and listened. Crickets, the whirring of the ice machine, traffic in the distance. She smelled freshly cut grass and the fecund, growing greenery, and she breathed this in and tried to relax. Don’t worry, she told herself. Craig would get the key and get the money and then drive to the station. In a matter of hours the whole awful night would be over. She pulled her knees up and hugged them. “Don’t worry,” she said out loud. But when she heard the door of the reception area bang shut, upsetting the bells, she felt like a fuse had been lit somewhere in the distance and soon everything would blow.
She saw Craig walking quickly down the path, the wooden fob in his hand, his head bent in the direction of the room. He turned in to the path that led to the motel’s interior, then down the step to the little path that led to the room. A motion sensor clicked into action and produced a sudden, gauzy light that draped over him like a cape. He disappeared into the light and she could see no farther.
She opened the glove compartment, searching for cigarettes just in case Craig had missed them. Crushed in the corner was a single stale Marlboro with a tear in it, which she fished out carefully and tried to straighten. The filter had specks of loose tobacco and she was busy picking those off when she heard her name and looked up. Craig was standing on the bank of grass, blue in the neon light, his ball cap in his hands, his hands on his hips.
“Barbara, get in here and help me!” he said.
She poked her head through the open car window. “Help you how?”
“Don’t ask me how! Move!”
How could he not find the money? It was in a drawer on top of a Bible with a note. She’d already told him that. It was impossible to miss. She wondered if she’d made a mistake and the money wasn’t there. Maybe she was remembering incorrectly. Maybe she put it somewhere else. Finding the roll of cash, fishing it out from behind the night table—all that felt as though it had happened long ago. She could no longer think straight; she was tired, her thoughts agitated. She wanted to lie down, but she pushed open the door instead.
Her Dr. Scholl’s clip-clopped along the cement path and she was aware of the noise and the likelihood of disturbing people. But she couldn’t figure out how to tiptoe in such inflexible shoes and he pulled her along so quickly she had no choice but to clomp down the path. They reached the room and he pushed the door open, then stood in the yellow light taking up a good deal of the small space where they’d been all those hours ago and said, “Find the fucking money.”
The room looked burgled. The bed still had the brown coverlet but he’d been through the drawers and they stood open, some now with broken handles, some pulled off their runners so they lay at angles across the floor. The dresser drawers were only made of flimsy plyw
ood and the back of one had come off and now sat inside the three remaining sides. In another she could see the print of Craig’s shoe across the lining paper. The curtain was drawn back so the light from outdoors shined onto the bed, which was still tidy, still as she’d left it, except two of the curtain hooks had flown onto it and gleamed there like pieces of jewelry left behind by a guest.
She went to the bedside table. He’d already pulled the drawer out, leaving it open at an angle. The Bible was there, the pages open beneath the book’s spine.
“We could have had it already!” he said. He was stripping the bed, pulling up the mattress, digging inside the pillows. “We were here! In this same fucking room! And you had the money in your hand.”
She felt his anger radiating toward her. “I’m looking!” she said, but when she pulled out the Bible, which was facing down on its open pages, there was no money inside it. She shook the pages so they waved beneath the hard cover like a swatch of hair, but nothing came out. No money, no note. She kneeled down and looked under the night table’s squat legs, but found only cobwebs and a stray pack of matches. In the space against the wall was an electrical cord and a socket. She could not see the money no matter how much she willed it to be there, and she could not leave until it was found.
“Stupid!” Craig said, about her or about the situation or maybe both.
For a moment she thought she saw it and gave a sudden shout.
Craig looked up. “You got the money?”
But it was only the note she’d written, which she threw back to the floor now. She dropped lower, scouting close to the carpet, her nose to the ply, looking crossways over the room. The contents of the drawers were all over the place: a pen with a crack in it, a phone book, some brochures.
Craig looked at her. “Fucking stupid,” he said.
There were footsteps outside. She heard them and froze. Both of them did, Craig standing with a corner of the mattress leaning on the wall by his ear, her on all fours with her head cocked to one side like a dog. The footsteps grew louder and Craig said, “Get to the bathroom!”
Age of Consent Page 6
