American Elsewhere (7 page)

“I am not sure what to do with it now,” he says grudgingly. “I liked the plant very much. But I suppose these things happen.” He sniffs, and produces a tiny note card from the mountain of old papers on his
desk. This he consults carefully, as if it is the ace in his poker hand, and pronounces, “Twenty dollars.”

“For a night?”

“It seems so,” says the old man solemnly, and he places the card back on the desk.

“So… you don’t know how much your own rooms are?”

“There are several rooms, with several prices. I forget them. And we have not had any visitors in some time.”

Mona, glancing at the piles of paper and dust, can completely believe that. “Mind if I ask how you stay open, then?”

He thinks about it. “I suppose you could say,” he concludes, “that there is no shortage of goodwill around here.”

For some reason, Mona feels he is telling the truth. But this does not exactly comfort her. “Just curious—is this the only motel in town?”

Again, he ponders her question. “If there is another motel, I am unaware of it.”

“I guess that’s an honest answer.” She reaches into her bag, takes out a twenty, and hands it to him. He takes the bill and clutches it tight in his hand, as a child would, and looks hard at her again. “Have you ever been here before?” he asks.

“Here? In Wink?”

“Yes. In Wink.”

“No. This is my first time.”

“Hm. Allow me to show you to your room, then.” He picks up the key, the twenty-dollar bill still clutched in his hand, and walks out the office door.

As she follows, Mona glances behind the desk. She sees no gun, no weapon, nothing suspicious. But she does not feel entirely satisfied. It is as if there’s a tiny wound in her mouth she can’t quit playing with. Something is wrong with this.

On the way out, she looks at the Chinese checkers board. There is something different about it now. She cannot say why—after all, it is dark, and she didn’t get a good look at the board—but she is sure the checkers have been rearranged, as if someone has just made a
complicated play. But perhaps the old man just jostled the table when he stood up.

He leads her down the row of motel-room doors. Night has fallen very quickly. The sky was bright blue, then streaked with pink, but now it is a soft and dusky purple cut short by the dark mesa surging into the heavens. The air has chilled considerably with the onset of evening, and Mona wishes she’d brought some winter wear.

“What is your name?” the old man asks.

“Mona.”

“I am Parson, Mona. It is very nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

“It’s good that you are staying the night here.” He gestures into the dark trees that crawl up the slopes. “The area around Wink can be a little treacherous, especially at night. I would not advise going out at night, especially outside of downtown. People get lost very easily.”

“I can imagine,” says Mona, remembering the steep hills and sudden precipices. “Can I ask you something?”

He stops to consider it, as if this is a very serious proposition. “I suppose so,” he says finally.

“I tried to find this place on a lot of maps before I came, but—”

“Really?” he says. “Why?”

“Well… I don’t really want to get into it too much now, since nothing’s settled yet… but I inherited a house here, supposedly.”

Parson stares off into the distance. “Did you,” he says softly. “Which house would that be, if I might ask?”

“It’s on Larchmont, or so they tell me.”

“I see. You know, I believe I know the residence in question. It is abandoned. But it is in fairly good shape. And you say you inherited it?”

“That’s what all these papers say.”

“How curious…” says Parson. “I cannot remember the last time someone new moved here. You will be quite the oddity, if so.”

“That’s kind of what I wanted to ask about. You might not have anyone moving here because no one knows this town’s here. It’s not on
any map. Is there some reason for that? Something to do with the lab on the mountain?”

“Lab?” asks Parson, puzzled.

“Yeah. Coburn National Lab. And, uh, Observatory.”

“Oh,” he says, and smiles. “Goodness. If you’re looking for a job there, I’m afraid you’re about thirty years late.”

“What do you mean?”

“Coburn was shut down years ago. End of the seventies, if I recall. I’m not sure why, exactly. I think they just never produced what they said they would. Lost funding. Wink was originally built around it, you know.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

“Did you?” he says. “Well. When it was shut down, it just left us all here. Where were we going to go? I suppose they took us off most maps to keep the place undisturbed. No spies sniffing around the lab, or some such. But now that we are forgotten, they never remembered to put us back on. To be honest, I like the peace and quiet. Even if it is bad for business.”

“Can I ask you something else?”

“You have done so already—I see nothing barring you from doing so again.”

“Did you ever know a Laura Alvarez here?”

“Here in Wink?”

“Yeah. She would have left about thirty years ago or so. She worked at the lab up on the mountain. I’m trying to find out more about her. She’s—she was my mom.”

“Hm,” he says. “I am afraid I cannot help you. I am not the most social of people. I remember very few names.”

“Even in a town this small, you don’t know?”

“Small?” he says. “Is it so small?” He looks up, examines the room numbers, and selects one. “Ah. Here we are. Our bridal suite.” He smiles at her, but does not open the room.

“Thanks,” she says.

“We do not really have a bridal suite,” he says. “It was a joke.”

“Okay,” she says.

He unlocks and opens the door and shows her in. The carpet is brown shag, and the lamps on the walls are made out of deer horns. The bedspread is done in a colored diamond pattern that Mona identifies as Native American, and it looks comfortable enough.

“The TV,” says Parson firmly, “does not work.”

“Okay.”

“I will help you move in,” he says, and begins to walk back to her car.

“That’s okay,” she says. “I have all my things in my bag.”

He stops and peers at her bag. “Oh,” he says, both irritated and disappointed. “All right, then.”

“Is there a good place to eat around here?” she asks.

“There is the diner, but it is likely closed for the funeral.”

“Oh. Yeah, I saw. Who died, the mayor or something?”

“Someone important,” he says. But he adds, “Ostensibly.”

“And you didn’t go to the funeral?”

He gives her a cryptic look, face suddenly closed. “I do not go to funerals. It would not befit my station. Luckily for you, I do offer a complimentary breakfast. I may provide it now, if you wish, rather than in the morning.”

“I’d be much obliged.”

“Excellent,” he says. “I will return shortly.” Then he turns and shuffles back across the parking lot.

Mona has had a lot of weird encounters in her life, but she feels like this one has just made top seed. But before she can think on it more, there is a flicker of light in the sky. Startled, she looks and sees that blue clouds have gathered around the mountains behind the mesa. They are small but violent: each one flickers with lightning every thirty seconds or so, which makes the mountains look like they’re crowned with a tangle of blue neon lights. It is a powerfully unearthly sight to see this island of chaos in an otherwise peaceful night sky.

It is then that she sees the moon is up, but there is something strange about it. It takes her a few moments to put her finger on it.

“It’s pink,” she says out loud. “Why is the moon so pink?”

Parson’s voice comes from behind her. “It always is, here.”

She looks and sees the old man has sneaked up on her. He’s carrying an aluminum tray with an egg sandwich and sausage that look like they came out of a vending machine. To her amusement, the meal is paired with a Corona and a Pop-Tart.

“Bon appétit,” says Parson.

Every night it is the same, Bolan thinks. Every night the truckers spill into the Roadhouse, reeking of cheap tobacco and old sweat, sleep-deprived and claustrophobic and half-blind from the sight of endless highways. Every night they order the same drinks and demand the same songs and shriek the same half-intelligible catcalls. There is always some lout who gets too hopped up on whichever substance is available that night and has to get hauled out and spanked in the parking lot. (And just three months ago Zimmerman and Dee laid one man out and left him breathing under a timber truck, yet in the morning they found him frigid and pale and still, one eye dark with blood and his fingers at many angles; the boys admitted they’d been overzealous, and the man still sleeps somewhere out in the woods under the stones and pine needles, and sometimes Bolan wonders who else is out there with him.) Then, finally, the truckers approach the downstairs girls in stages, and they’ll spend the rest of their evening in the back rooms, coaxing favors out of the girls, or the girls coaxing money out of them. Sometime around three or four they will come stumbling out of their wretched fog and wander out to the parking lot to sleep in the cabs of their trucks. And then, just before dawn, once she’s made all the totals and rechecked the registers, Mallory will stalk upstairs to Bolan’s office, and tell him what the night’s take is.

It’s almost always good. Often it’s very, very good.

And every night, Bolan thinks as he stares out his office window, there is lightning on the mountains, and the bulbous red-pink moon. It does not matter what phase the moon is in, nor does it matter what the weather is like. These are the things that compose Bolan’s world: the red-pink moon, the Roadhouse, and the blue lightning on the mount.

Well. Maybe not
just
those things, Bolan thinks, perhaps a little bitterly. There will always be the little favors he has to do for the people in charge. But without those, where would he be? Certainly not here, listening to David Dord, occupant of the absolute bottom rung at the Roadhouse, except maybe for the downstairs girls. Or some of them, at least. A couple of the whores are pretty canny, more so than Dord.

Bolan turns back to him. “What do you mean, you think it went
well
?” he asks over the thumping music from downstairs. “How does a funeral go well? How would you deem one a success, Dave?”

“Well, I don’t know,” says Dave. “You stick the fucking guy in the ground and hopefully he stays there. Then the preacher says all the appropriate whatnot and you’re done. That’s how I judge it.”

Bolan blinks slowly. “That’s a very low bar, Dave,” he says. He wishes the Roadhouse were not doing such good business tonight: this is a conversation he’s been dreading all day, and he wants to hear every bit as clearly as he can. “Think, Dave,” he says. “Think real hard for me. Did anyone say anything? Did anyone do anything at all? Anything out of the ordinary? I’m just curious here, Dave. Enlighten me.”

David Dord, who in his funeral garb looks like a child wearing Daddy’s suit, simply shrugs and shakes his head. “Tom, it was a funeral. It wasn’t a hot spot for talking. No one was particularly eager to discuss their affairs or any such fucking thing.”

“As far as you saw it.”

“Yes, as far as I saw it.”

Bolan slowly blinks again. He is already regretting sending Dord. If he could have he would’ve sent Zimmerman, who is in charge of
security at the Roadhouse, and is always very dependable. But after their little job up on the mesa, Bolan knew Zimmerman would be far too hot to send to the funeral. He’s given Zimmerman the next two weeks off, and hopefully the man is spending his time somewhere indoors and quiet, maybe with one of the house girls, which might make everything a lot less quiet. The other two—Norris and Dee—Bolan is keeping close to the Roadhouse. They’re both young and, like a lot of the help Bolan seems to get, quite stupid, and the other night was their first real trial. Bolan needs to know if they’re going to crack. So far Dee seems steady, which does not surprise him: the boy has coasted by on looks and muscle for so long that his mind is too underdeveloped to realize how dangerous their job on the mesa really was. But Norris, well… he isn’t so sure. The kid is definitely messed up. Bolan doesn’t think he should’ve sent him along at all now, not even as the driver.

But he can’t really blame Norris. Zimmerman told Bolan what happened to Mitchell in that place. The room that just didn’t
stop
… and even though Norris never actually went inside, Bolan is aware of how disturbing those kinds of places can be. There are places in Wink you just don’t go.

But all this means he had no one better to send to the funeral than Dord. Dord is not a man Bolan would trust with buttering a piece of toast. He hates looking into Dord’s soft, pasty face and seeing those dull little eyes peeping back at him. He wishes now that he had sent Mallory. Mallory would’ve done a good job, and come back with simply piles of information. But because she is so good, Bolan has Mallory off doing another little errand tonight, one he is even more nervous about than the funeral.

He checks his watch. It should not be long now.

“So it all went quietly,” says Bolan.

“Yes.”

“And nobody mentioned anything of note.”

“Note?”

“Nothing about, oh, foul play.”

“No,” says Dord.

Bolan smiles at him coldly. “That seems pretty unlikely, Dave.”

“Why? I thought you said things went well up there.”

“They went well. Well enough, I guess. But they know what’s up.” He swivels in his chair to stare out the window again. It is a black night with a strong wind, and he can see the ponderosas waving in the blue luminescence of the parking lot lights. “They know something’s wrong. They just don’t know if they can do anything about it.”

“And they can’t, right?”

Bolan stares out the window for a moment longer, watching the dancing trees. Bolan is the sort of person who has looked like he’s in his late fifties for the past thirty years. He has no hair on his head except for his eyebrows and a small, snow-white goatee, and his eyes are puffy and hooded. His face does not emote particularly well: the best expression it makes is one of cynical disappointment, as if he’s expected this sour turn of events and it has confirmed his worst suspicions about the world. Luckily for Bolan—or perhaps unluckily—this is the exact expression he needs to make most of the time.