The black-and-white cab went north on Main to the highway, then west along the highway for two blocks. It slowed and turned sharp left under a canvas sign stretched between two poles: MOUNTVIEW MOTEL AND TRAILER COURT. I drove by it, U-turned at the next intersection, and came back in time to see the black-and-white cab pull out with its back seat empty.
I parked short of the canvas sign and slid to the other side of the seat. The Mountview Motel and Trailer Court stood in the social badlands between the highway and the railroad tracks. It had a view of the mountains in the sense that every building in Bella City had. Through a wire-net fence to which vines clung halfheartedly, I could see twenty or thirty house-trailers lying like beached whales in the dusty court. Around and under them, children and dogs were playing. The near side of the court was half enclosed by an L-shaped building made of concrete blocks, pierced with twelve windows and twelve doors. The first door was marked Office. Lucy’s suitcases stood on its low concrete stoop.
Lucy came out, followed by a fat man in a T-shirt. He picked up her suitcases and escorted her to the seventh door, in the corner of the ell. Even at a distance, she looked rigid with strain. The fat man unlocked the door and they went inside.
I drove into the court and parked in front of the office. It was a dismal cubicle, divided by an unpainted wooden counter. A frayed canvas settee stood by the door. On the other side of the counter there was a rolltop desk stuffed with papers, an unmade studio bed, an electric coffeemaker full of grounds, over all a sour coffee smell. A dirty printed card scotch-taped to the top of the counter announced: We Reserve the Right to Choose Our Clientele.
Chapter 4
The fat man came back to the office, his belly rising and falling under the T-shirt. His forearms were marked with blue tattooings like the printing on sides of beef. One on the right arm said: I Love You Ethel. His small eyes said: I love nobody.
“Any vacancies?”
“You kidding? Vacancies is what we got plenty of.” He looked around his office as if he suspected something the matter but couldn’t exactly place it. “You want a room?”
“Number six if it’s empty.”
“It ain’t.”
“How about number eight?”
“You can have eight.” He rummaged in the desk for a registration blank, which he pushed across the counter. “You on the road?”
“Uh-huh.” I signed my name illegibly, omitting my license number and home address. “Hot today.”
“You ain’t seen nothing.” His defensive tone was accentuated by an asthmatic wheeze. “It’s barely a hundred. You should of been here around the first of the month. It was darn near a hundred and ten. That’s what keeps the tourists away in droves. The room is two and a half single.”
I gave him the money and asked to use the phone.
“Long distance?” he wheezed suspiciously.
“A local call. Private, if you don’t mind.”
He produced a telephone from under the counter and ambled out, slamming the screen door behind him. I dialed the number of the Mission Hotel. Una’s voice answered immediately when the switchboard called her room: “Who is it?”
“Archer speaking, from the Mountview Motel. Lucy Champion checked in here a few minutes ago. She was evicted by her landlady, a colored woman named Norris on Mason Street.”
“Where is this motel?”
“On the highway two blocks west of Main. She’s in room seven.”
“All right, fine,” on a rising note. “Keep a close watch on her. I’m going to pay her a visit. I want to know where she goes after I talk to her.”
She hung up. I moved into room eight by placing my overnight bag in the middle of the worn rag rug and hanging my jacket on the one wire hanger in the cardboard wardrobe. The bed was covered with a sleazy green spread that failed to conceal the economic depression in its middle. I didn’t trust the bed. I sat on a straight chair that I placed beside the front window and lit a cigarette.
The window gave me a view of Lucy’s door and window across the inner corner of the ell. The door was closed, the green roller-blind drawn down over the window. The smoke from my cigarette rose straight up through the stagnant air to the yellow plaster ceiling. A woman groaned behind the wallboard partition in the next room, number nine.
A man’s voice said: “Anything the matter?”
“Don’t talk.”
“I thought something was the matter.”
“Shut up. There’s nothing the matter.”
“I thought I hurt you.”
“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”
My cigarette tasted like burning grass. I butted it in the lid of a coffee can which had been left in the room as an ashtray and thought of the people who had lain alone or in pairs on the iron bed and looked at the yellow ceiling. Traces of their dirt remained in the corners, their odors clung to the walls. They had come from all over the country to look at the yellow ceiling, stir in the iron bed, finger the walls and leave their indelible marks.
I moved across the floor to the partition between my room and Lucy’s. She was sobbing. After a while she said something to herself that sounded like: “I won’t.” And after another while: “I don’t know what to do.”
People were always sobbing to themselves and saying that they didn’t know what to do. Still, it was hard to listen to. I went back to my chair by the window and watched the door, trying to imagine I didn’t know what was going on behind it.
Una appeared in front of it suddenly like a figure in a dream. A marijuana dream. She had on leopard-spotted slacks and a yellow silk shirt. Leaning towards the door like an eager fighter, she struck it two backhanded blows with her right fist.
Lucy opened the door. Her curled brown hands came up to her mouth and hooked on her lower lip. Una pushed in like a small garish battering-ram, and Lucy fell back out of my line of vision. I heard her staggering heels strike the floor. I moved to the partition.
“Sit down,” Una said briskly. “No, you sit on the bed. I’ll take the chair. Well, Lucy. What have you been doing with yourself?”
“I don’t want to talk to you.” Lucy’s voice might have been soft and pleasant if fear hadn’t been playing tricks with it.
“You don’t have to get excited.”
“I’m not getting excited. What I do is my own business. It’s no business of yours.”
“I wonder about that. Just what does your business cover?”
“I’ve been looking for a job, a decent job. When I save a little money, I’m going back home. It’s not your business, but I’m telling you anyway.”
“That’s a good thing, Lucy. Because you’re not going back to Detroit, now or ever.”
“You can’t stop me!”
There was an interval of silence. “No, I can’t stop you. I will tell you this. When you step off that train, there’ll be a reception waiting for you. I phone Detroit long distance every afternoon.”
Another, longer pause.
“So you see, Lucy, Detroit is out for you. You know what I think you should do, Lucy? I think you made a mistake leaving us. I think you should come back with us.”
Lucy sighed very deeply. “No, I can’t.”
“Yes. You come back. It’ll be safer for you and safer for us, safer for everybody.” The bright clatter of Una’s tone took on an illusive softness: “I’ll tell you what the situation is, dearie. We can’t just have you running around loose the way you have been. You’ll get into trouble, or you’ll have a teensy bit too much to drink in the wrong company, and then you’ll blab. I know you people, you see. Blabbermouths every one of you.”
“Not me,” the girl protested. “I’d never blab, I promise you faithfully. Please leave me go on the way I been, minding my own business, please.”