“I know he can’t hide. He left and he tried to hide. And hide me too.”
Elvira wrapped herself up in the quilt and pulled it over her head like a hood. Her bare feet were almost bigger than Jamie’s. She turned off the taps and closed the bathroom door.
“You know where they are?” Jamie asked.
Elvira nodded from inside her new wrap and scratched her leg with one long foot. Jamie grabbed the rifle off the bed. Elvira didn’t notice or didn’t care.
“Can you — um, can you show me? I need to find them. Him. Can you do that?”
“I can show anyone, but no one will let me. I know the place. You want me to go with you?” Elvira asked. “I don’t want to stay.”
“I’m your friend, okay? I am. I am. You just need to…you need to come with me.”
They stepped out into the hallway. There was nothing Jamie could do about the busted doorknob. They would know someone was here either way. He had traded in his corpse for a six-foot woman without any underwear who couldn’t look him in the eye. As they made their way down the stairs, Elvira kept talking and smiling. The words bounced off the walls. Jamie knew she wasn’t talking to him; she wasn’t talking to anyone but herself. It was the same thing Alisha’s mom did during visiting hours at the hospice.
“It’s the tall place downtown with all the bad chandeliers, but you have to take me with you. You don’t get to leave me here,” Elvira explained. “They don’t even let dogs in there. They think they’re so fancy, but even fancy people got dogs. I don’t want to be left places, okay?”
“The tall place? Pillaros?” Jamie said.
“No dogs allowed,” Elvira said. “That place. That is where he goes. Dusty, nasty place, but it’s where he likes to go. They have the big elevator in the back to get up to his room.”
“Where they go? Is that where they go?”
“Where he goes,” Elvira said. “It’s where he goes.”
“You gotta be more quiet,” Jamie whispered. “Can you do that for five minutes?”
Elvira was already ahead of him on the stairs, her feet skipping around the broken glass. Jamie followed her slowly, taking the steps one at a time on his fractured foot. He held the rifle against his chest and tried to keep a grip on the railing. There were only twenty steps to go.
Alone in his old living room, Jamie had courted name after name in the dark with rum burning the corners of his mouth. Each name had tasted wrong on his tongue. The name Elvira had only come up once during the whole process. Alisha had banned all those old names immediately. Carmella. Mabel. Margaret. She didn’t want her daughter prematurely aging while all her classmates remained Jennys and Susies, fresh-faced and pink-cheeked until eternity or high school, whichever came first. Jamie pushed for those older names the next morning; they were free from his unpleasant midnight associations. Free to do whatever they wanted on their own time. Those names were protected from the hopeless fates he saw swooping down to pluck Melissas and Donnas off their pink tricycles in broad daylight, to plunk them down with busted teeth and three children twenty years later in a subsidized apartment with electric heating and a clogged bathroom sink.
“You’re so slow, we’ll never find him if you take the stairs like that.”
Elvira wasn’t safe, though. There were already stories written there.
“Just wait, Elvira. Can you do that?”
Jamie began to take the stairs two at a time. Kansas was a blank space, but it didn’t mean she was safe. She was grain and flat sunsets and a line across the horizon, but there were still basements in Dodge City. Wichita had closets no one wanted to open. There were hidden things he’d never seen and bodies in the rivers, cold cases forgotten in Topeka.
It was the fifteenth step that he misjudged. The broken foot collided with a brown bottle neck that snapped under his weight. Tumbling down the stairs, Jamie felt his right foot crack against the railing. Elvira started laughing and clapped her hands. Jamie clutched the rifle close to his body as his spine rippled down the concrete steps.
Kansas was a blank space for anyone to fill in for themselves. She was already boxed in by the margins they’d drawn around her in that tiny house out on Baseline Road.
Jamie hit the bottom of the stairs in a pile of bloody clothes and prematurely aging bones. He closed his eyes against the pain and tried to stand up against the drywall. His right foot did not agree with this decision.
“Are you going to get up?” Elvira said. “We need to go. He won’t be there for long.”
There was another option. Kansas could fill that space in for herself.
Jamie braced himself against the wall. It was a fall; just another fall. Jamie grabbed Elvira’s hand and tried breathing in and out his nose while he attempted to stand. Elvira pushed the busted emergency door open. The world was covered with blurred lights that refused to focus. Jamie limped after the woman in the quilt, following her into the dark. He used the rifle as a makeshift cane. Pigeons sat on his car. They fluttered back up into the shit-stained balconies as the slouching figures approached the car in the motel’s single shaft of light.
26
This was far worse than a missing lion. “Just stay quiet for now, or we’ll really have a problem,” Al said.
Neither brother could avoid the figure glaring at them from across the room. The three smaller boys cowered between them in the doorway. Each one had his hands tied together and a piece of tape over his mouth. They shuffled from foot to foot.
There was a body in Al’s bed. It was almost looking at them, but the eyes were dried out and one was oozing down a purple cheek. The walls were splattered purple too and the bathroom door was busted. Tommy’s quilt was missing.
“Al, you gotta check this out,” Tommy said.
The exposed sheets looked too white for the room.
“Who the — fuck, the bathroom! Crane is gonna fuckin’ flip!”
Logan Chatterton recognized the body. Ducking under arms tattooed with obese reapers and small Guatemalan children wearing skulls for masks, he dove across the motel room floor. The two bearded brothers could only stare as he jumped up onto the bed and tried to speak through his gag. Logan’s bald head nodded back and forth with the words he couldn’t push past the tape. He ran his stubbled skull against the dripping face and guttural noises worked their way out of his chest. The swastika on his head was leaking again.
“Get the other two into the bathroom,” Al said. “Used to be so much easier when we got to make the decision. I said get them in there, Tom.
“Get offa there! Another freak. Last thing we fuckin’ need.”
Al tore the tape off Logan’s mouth and threw him to the floor. Logan scrambled away across the carpet on his knees, his chin covered in rug burn. The beard followed him and dragged him back against the wall. Logan kicked his feet against the hard shins behind him. His one bare foot connected with the bone. Logan’s voice kept bleating at the body on the bed.
“I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean it!”
“I said shut up!”
“I didn’t mean it!” Logan said. “She didn’t even want to look at me! I don’t want to be like them. I don’t want to have part of them in me, like Frankenstein. Did you want me to be like Frankenstein? Like pieces of everyone else? ’cause that’s what she told me! Part of whatever fucking tribe! I was already a freak enough, and now I’ve got their blood in me too?”
“Shut the fuck up!” Al said.