Holsteins and Herefords and the occasional longhorn. The wind on the open plain seemed to have sandblasted the color from the landscape and it was as if we had been transported to the screen of a black and white movie except for the pastel of cars traveling the highway. Everything that wasn’t a shade of beige was grey or black or white. But what the panorama lacked in color it made up for with the rich smells of flowering wheat and the sweat of tobacco being dried in large weathered drying bins and the perfume of wildflowers mixed with the fermenting dung left behind by farm animals. The air was warmer and no longer smelled of autumn.
In St. Louis I cruised to the outskirts of the city before finding a motel in a great enough state of disrepair that I could expect to forgo the identification dilemma. I could have used Mr. Assad’s driver license, and his credit card for that matter, but I knew that that would leave a trail which would eventually have been followed. The Motel Trafalgar, a dump with a Spanish ambiance, was much like the motel in Kentucky in its maintenance and upkeep; however, it was a popular place as cars seemed to be coming and going as though it were a fast-food restaurant. The clerk, a goateed weasel of a man dressed in a silk shirt and designer jeans looked at me with a puzzled stare when I asked for twin beds.
“All I got is king-size. Do you have two girls?”
“No, just one.”
“Then what do you need two beds for man?”
“I’ll take the king.” I looked through the window at the fading light of the sun and then down at my watch. I could almost hear the sizzle of the sun as it scorched the earth, melting into the horizon like a smoldering ember. And the sizzle seemed to keep time with the loudly ticking second hand of my watch.
“You want it for an hour?” “What?”
“The room, you want it for an hour?” “For the night.” I was puzzled. What kind of motel rents by the hour? And then it donned on me that I was not at an ordinary motel. I looked out through the window at a young red-haired girl in an ultra short leather skirt and a bikini top before I measured the sun and determined that I had perhaps an hour before darkness would swallow the sun. I knew that I might not find another dump in time to beat the light. Sarah and I would be behind a locked door if we stayed and there was no chance of being asked for identification. “For the whole night, something at the end, how much?”
“Eighty bucks.
I paid in cash and accepted a key attached to a plastic coaster with a young buxom bare-chested woman inviting me to visit GiGi’s Gentleman’s club.
We ate hamburgers and greasy French fries with chocolate milkshakes which we brought back to our room while I searched for a non-pornographic station on the television. We could faintly hear the girl in the next room being thumped royally, inaudibly moaning that she wished to be thumped a little harder.
“What’s that noise daddy?”
“There just having a party in the next room.”
“I wish they’d be quiet. Can you ask that girl to be quiet?”
“I don’t think she can.” “Why not?”
“She’s being thumped.” “Oh”
And the girl next door thumped until the rhythm eventually carried Sarah into slumber. In fact the girl next door thumped until I drifted off to sleep, at the foot of the bed at two-thirty in the morning.
9
I arrived in Wichita in the afternoon of the next day, a Wednesday, and to my amazement we found yet another decrepit motel. I hadn’t known that so many pathetic lodgings existed but as it turned out there was a boundless plethora of such places.
After we dropped our bags at the motel Sarah and I drove to a park and she played on the swings and climbed up and down the monkey bars like the boy I had made her to look like until she grew bored. All of the children who she might have played with were in school so she had the park to herself but the lack of playmates left her weary. Afterwards we ate sub sandwiches and watched television at the motel until we fell asleep.
The next morning we took our time getting ready as we were not scheduled to meet Amber until early afternoon. Killing time was becoming a chore but I did enjoy having Sarah as a constant companion.
At lunch time we ate in the car of the parking lot of our predestined meeting. I listened to a light-rock station and a STYX song was playing “Babe I’m leaving, I must be on my way…”, a song that Catherine had called our song because it was playing on the radio at the local pizzeria on the night of our first official date. As I recall several other songs played before that song but I think Catherine liked “Babe” so much that she waited for it to play so that she could stake her claim to it. I think she liked it because the song romanticized her returning to Kentucky and our time spent loyally waiting for each other. I wondered though, given her unfaithful act, if she had been faithful during our time apart or if it had been a part of her nature all along to be untrue.
After I had saved the day by putting
Tony Artino in his place, or at least that is how the story went after I defeated him that fateful day of my youth when I restored the alignment of the planets and reclaimed Catherine as my girl, I worked hard to elevate my self to Teresa’s good graces. Albert was easy. I had slain the dragon. But Teresa saw through my façade, to the flesh beneath my skin; my lust for Catherine’s budding young body; my utter lack of potential and my complete deficiency of confidence. I was the poor kid in the neighborhood and I dressed and walked and acted like the poor pathetic kid that I was. My father was a hopeless alcoholic, my mother a stoic wimp who put up with his abuses. My worth in the world could not have been less. And Teresa had caught me red handed, literally, robbing her niece of her most precious possession: her virginity.
But after Catherine left at the end of the summer to return to her parents in Kentucky I obtained a job at a local fast food restaurant, working my way from burger-flipper to shift supervisor to part-time (as I was still in high school) assistant manager. I stopped by Teresa and Albert’s house at least a few times a week to report to Teresa my progress and to brag about my ability to save money toward the goal of attending community college. To these accomplishments Teresa would respond with an off-handed remark such as, “It’ll take more money than that to go to college.” Or “City
College is nothing more than a high school without the discipline.” I would mow their lawn and rake their leaves and shovel their snow but I often heard Teresa chide Albert about my audacity for coming around after what I’d done. Once I even heard her say to Albert, “Why don’t you get that little bastard out of our yard before he steals something?” a reminder to Albert that not only was I below their social class, and thus not good enough for Catherine, but also an insinuation that because I was poor I must also be a thief. Nothing I did altered my image in her eyes. If she had her druthers I would not have been permitted to step foot on their sidewalk let alone date her niece; but I had slain the dragon and Albert reminded her of this in my constant defense.
One day, however, my dilemma of winning Teresa’s blessing was solved when someone broke into Teresa and Albert’s house, while Albert was working the night-shift at the factory, and bludgeoned Teresa to death with the Louisville Slugger that Albert kept at the side of his bed for protection. I heard Albert whale from all the way across the street, through my open bedroom window, when he found Teresa’s bloodied corpse.
As far as Albert was concerned the deadly blow that struck Teresa in the bean had felled him with that same single swat. Teresa was Albert’s whole life. She was his mother, his friend and his wife all rolled into one. She had fed him, she had comforted him and she, and she alone, had fucked him; according to Albert she was his one and only love. She told him when to get up and when to go to bed. She gave him permission to play and she punished him when he was a bad boy. Freud would have had a field day studying their relationship.