Paul stopped trying to stuff the latest empty under the covers. “What did you just say?”
In a matter of moments Paul learned that Kym was carrying the Weather Gnome’s child. His immediate reaction, even drunk, was to imagine Kym and the Weather Gnome and their child as a row of lawn statuary.
“This is outrageous!” he cried, rising from the bed in manufactured dudgeon. But he bungled the effect by tangling his ankles in the bedclothes and toppling flat on his face.
In the end Kymberly paid him to move out, loaning him enough money for a damage deposit and a couple of months’ rent on a new place. He quickly learned that he wasn’t able to afford a place in the leafy collegiate neighborhoods he wanted to live in, nor was he able to afford even one bedroom in the nicer apartment complexes in south Lamar. He had to settle for the third part of Lamar, the commercial wasteland past the interstate, which he was now entering on his way home from work. Twenty-five minutes in the car in the heat and traffic had largely cooked away his elation over his raise. Like Dante descending into the lower tiers of seducers, deceivers, and falsifiers, he entered into a curbless region of self-storage units and U-Haul dealers behind cyclone fences and curls of razor wire, interspersed with empty lots of yellowed grass and heat-baked earth. He passed a catfish parlor advertising ALL-U-CAN-EAT in huge block letters on its blank concrete wall; a vast barn of a Texas dance hall with a corrugated tin roof and a neon sign that read RIDE ’EM, COWBOY! in a script of looping lassoes; a ramshackle wooden vegetable stand slung with bunches of desiccated jalapeños; and a windowless cinder-block tavern called This Is It. With a sinking heart he turned down the cracked old two-lane highway to San Antonio, towards his home for the moment, his temporary refuge from the blows and buffets of the world, the small apartment complex he called the Angry Loner Motel.
SIX
IT WAS AN OLD MOTEL from the fifties, two separate oblongs of colorless cinder block, two stories each, facing each other across a wide parking lot of parched asphalt, seamed with cracks and punctured exactly in the middle by the square, rusty, rattling grate of a storm drain. The place’s official name was the Grandview Arms, but the only view from Paul’s front window was of the apartments across the way, and the only view from his tiny bathroom window in the back was a stretch of Texas savannah littered with rusting pickups and abandoned appliances. Paul’s shoulders clenched as he turned off the highway, clanked over the grate at the middle of the lot, and pulled into the space in front of his apartment. He switched off his car, and the engine gasped to a stop. Paul’s Colt was the smallest and youngest car in the lot; each of his Angry Loner neighbors drove an enormous, spavined automobile from the seventies and eighties, some extinct Detroit saurian that listed to one side or the other or dragged its rear end as if it had a body in the trunk. Whenever one of these aircraft carriers came to life (which invariably required a two- or three-minute warm-up period of guttural, unmufflered roaring), its engine grumbled, its tailpipe rattled, and its shocks — or what was left of them — groaned and squeaked like old men.
Paul rolled up his windows, snatched his dress shirt off the passenger seat, and hustled out of his car. Two or three of his neighbors always seemed to be lounging in the open doorways of their apartments or slouching over the rail of the second-story balcony, each man dangling a burning cigarette or a can of beer from his big-knuckled hands. He had as much difficulty telling the men apart as he did their cars; they might all have been brothers from some inbred, clannish, conniving family out of Faulkner. The younger Snopes brothers wore scuffed motorcycle boots, tight black jeans, and faded t-shirts, while the older Snopeses wore ancient cowboy boots, blue jeans baggy in the seat, and denim work shirts, untucked over rock-hard beer bellies. Each one, from twenty-five to fifty, had leathery skin and lank black hair and two or three days of thick stubble along his sullen jaw. Some had streaks of dirty gray in their hair; some wore handlebar moustaches, some goatees; but none of these distinguishing marks made them any easier to tell apart. All of them, young and old, had dark, penetrating eyes that seemed to look through Paul to his bones. None of them were bald.
Clutching his limp shirt to his chest, Paul fumbled his key into the lock. The only thing scarier than his neighbors was what waited for him in his apartment. He drew a deep breath. It wouldn’t make any difference where he lived, he’d always be coming home to the same thing. He turned the stiff lock and pushed open the door, and the smell of cat pee stung him to the back of his sinuses.
“Oh, Paul! Mr. Trilby!”
Paul paused in his doorway. Mrs. Prettyman, his landlady, was mincing across the parking lot. She lived in what used to be the motel’s office, a little brick building at the far end of the lot, and the very instant she stepped out of her door, all the loitering Snopeses along both sides of the motel ducked into their doorways and locked themselves in their rooms. Mrs. Prettyman curved neatly around the wide indentation of the drainage grate.
“I’m so glad I caught you.” Her sharp little heels somehow never caught in the cracks and potholes. “I’d just like a word.”
Paul waited in his doorway, his back to the shadowy room behind him. Mrs. Prettyman called herself “the manageress” of the apartments, though Paul was certain she owned the place. This evasion allowed her to deflect any requests for maintenance or extra time in paying the rent. “I’ll have to take that up with the owner,” she’d say, in her buttery Texas singsong, and then, twenty-four hours later, “The owner says the refrigerator is supposed to make that sound,” or, “I’m afraid the owner needs your rent payment this afternoon.”
She stopped with one hand on her hip and another, proprietary hand on the doorsill. “Hon, I know you got a cat in there.” She gave him a glittering smile, all steel and no magnolia.
“Really.” Paul did not invite Mrs. Prettyman in. “Have you ever actually seen a cat come in or out of my apartment?”
“Well now.” She waved her hand theatrically in front of her nose. “I don’t need to see it, darlin’, I know it’s in there someplace.” She replaced her hand on her hip. “It might be you just don’t notice it anymore.”
Oh, I notice it, Paul thought. That smell had caused him to be evicted from every apartment he’d had since moving out of Kym’s house. The Grandview was the last stop on Paul’s descent, the one place he was reasonably certain wouldn’t evict him. “On my word of honor,” Paul said, certain that Texans liked that kind of thing, “there’s not another living creature in here but me and the cockroaches.”
Which is true, thought Paul. Mrs. Prettyman narrowed her eyes and angled her head, peering past him. On a couple of occasions, Paul had caught her in his apartment when he came home from work, peering under his swaybacked sofa bed on her hands and knees or poking up the stained panels of the ceiling with a broom handle looking for the cat. He bought her off with an extra twenty-five dollars a month; this for a cat that didn’t really exist. Now she was obviously trying to shake him down for more, but he was damned if this greedy old harridan was going to get a penny of his raise.
“Come on in and look.” He gestured into his hot, malodorous living room. “If you can find the cat, you can have the cat.”
“Well now.” Her smile tightened, and she stepped back from the door. “If I ever do see a cat around here, I’m going to have to tell the owner.”
“Be my guest,” Paul said. “Give him my fondest regards.”