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from Motel of the Stars |
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PART ONEWhenever you have two electrical fields
together, there is another field that exists. No matter how many fields you have
together, there is always present a group vibration of which everyone
partakes.
Jose Arguelles
THE MOTEL OF THE STARS
Pungent was the word for the thick August air and its scent of blossoms and things dead at the roadside, mixed with a tarry pitch that he knew meant coal in some form or other, whether or not that refinery was nearby. Stepping from the car, Jason Sanderson rounded it, waded into some tall weeds. He was reminded his childhood, when he’d slip out during the sermon with the other boys to the woods behind the church. If you could piss on an electric fence and withstand the sting without crying, they said, you were on your way to being a man. You won two cigarettes or a catalogue with pictures of women in bras and panties. What had the radio announcer said? The totalities of all our vibrations make one pure vibration that is god. Back then, the electric charge had surged through him and he had held it in, feeling frightened and then thankful when, once again, he stood in church and let sermon words wash over him. He stood and breathed and thought about the job ahead of him. Foreclosure. He knew that one, forward and
backward. He’d made an art of it, one
that involved subtle details and even a touch of humor, at the right
moment. He began his phone calls to
potential clients with questions about the weather, about family or whatever
holiday season was approaching. When
the negotiations about over dues and possible consequences escalated, he had
a repertoire of jokes that The Motel of the Stars. This foreclosure was for a motel with a name that reminded him of actors and actresses and piped-in Frank Sinatra over breakfast in a cafe. The folder the general manager laid on his desk some time back was crammed with more photocopies concerning that motel than he could have counted. Purchase orders and bills, the last of which was for an outbuilding to double as storage for the motel and as an auto repair shop. Copies of overdue notices and notices of threatened bank reclamation followed copies of threatening letters from lawyers, then notices from the credit bureau. He’d called the owner of the motel, whose name was Frank Llewellyn, numerous times. He’d written, left messages, and he’d spoken, only once, to a thin-voiced woman who’d promised indirectly to send back payment, which had failed to materialize. The Motel of the Stars. He imagined mirrored ceilings and magic finger beds. The motel could not be saved. Back in the car, he sighed and cranked the engine, then sat for awhile again tracing the penciled lines of his map. He was supposed to know he was nearing Inez when he saw the signs of the small town’s outskirts—a store with a soda cooler out front here, a gas pump there. He was to see a sign for a coal refinery called Estep’s and then a field cleared for a tent revival meeting. His general manager, who had the religious fervor of televangelists and an obsession with stock market indexes, had especially pointed out the revival meeting. They don’t make them like that any more. A preacher that knows how to shake and rattle and roll. They can heal you, son. He gripped the steering wheel as he pulled onto the road again, still studying the manager’s hand-drawn directions. At a crossroads about an hour
back, there was to have been a yellow trailer and then a post office just
before the right-hand turn onto a one-lane bridge. He’d just overlooked some landmark and he
traced the penciled lines and intersections of the map. He’d been angry since the
breakfast he’d shared with He’d been moving. Since before eight, he’d traveled east,
past blue-green expanses of central You’re scared, He usually listened to tapes of show tunes or to stations playing country oldies. Trailers for sale or rent. Rooms to let fifty cents. Now he flipped through A.M. and F.M.. but he kept coming back to hypnotic sounds that put him in mind of belly dancers. In honor of a festival called The Harmonic Convergence there were flutes and a keening stringed instrument and a radio announcer offering insights. Follow the sounds of cosmic consciousness. Rhythms that vibrate to the sound of one universal mind. Sanderson supposed the music was meant to be religious in some way, but religion wasn’t right either, since that to him was hymnals and his childhood prayers. Which was the one that always made him shiver? If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. The memory of that prayer and the music both recalled his anger and he flipped off the A.C, leaned out the open car window, inhaled the pungent air. This many years after his first wife’s death, words she loved came back to him. Pungent. She’d loved columns called “Enrich Your Vocabulary” and “The Power of Words” and she’d loved any and every dictionary, visual ones, foreign language ones. She’d bought bulky desktop versions and pocket editions she consulted at odd moments on family outings. She’d often given Sam the gift of a sentence full of words he should look up. The pungent atmosphere left him feeling disconcerted. Pungent. Sanderson savored the word now, reflecting upon its meaning. He loosened his tie, found a new radio station, part static and part country. Hank Williams. Cause tonight I’m gonna see my cara mio. Tonight he’d be home again, to fat new sofa pillows and exotic foods for a celebration. Celebrate rather than mourn? His son, dead ten years. One-handed, he slid his tie off, tossed it into the back seat, set off down the road again. He’d shut the door a long time ago and he wanted it to stay shut, ten year’s anniversary or not. **** In the first year after Sam was reported missing at sea, Sanderson had gone the gamut. He’d felt deeply numb, until that had given way to a grief that made him feel ashamed. Grief and anger at no one in particular swirled in his heart. Rage gave way to uncertainty. He was perplexed when he studied his receding hairline in the bathroom mirror. He grew sideburns and a goatee and plucked gray hairs he’d never seen. He bought Grecian Formula, new, slimmer ties and a cologne called Machismo. He took a night class or two, one in astronomy and another in poetry, and he wrote verse that his instructor said was too sentimental. There were too many poems about sunsets and love and butterflies and he’d never been able to pull off what he’d really meant—the image he’d had in his head of a butterfly or a moth, something about wings that beat against a door, one locked tight against something he couldn’t name. He bought a gun case for the living room and stocked it with oiled rifles he never used. He took up golfing, a sport he’d previously found ridiculous, and he agreed without too much reluctance to go on a number of blind dates arranged by his office co-workers. Shirley, a woman with bitten nails and stiffly spray-netted hair, had phoned him three times after their Saturday afternoon coffee date, but he’d let the machine take the calls. There’d been Tiffany, who left salty-tasting blueberry pies on his desk at work, and Brenda, who talked him into attending a meeting the Fellowship of Christian Scientists. Lisa. Judy. Lee Ann. They married so quickly it surprised him,
their wedding a small gathering in the home of Emotional Wellness Encounters, they were called, and they were
led by a counselor named Harry Simon, a man with frizzy gray hair and
sparkling dentures who spoke of inner peace
and spousal communication skills as
if they were on sale at a discount store.
At one such Encounter he and Rosa and another couple they’d met the
night before sat in a circle, holding hands.
In the end, the three of them had stood around him in his chair,
placed their hands on his shoulders and on his face and neck. Laying on hands, they’d have called it when
he was growing up, but that was different.
Harry Simon had cold, sweaty palms and the woman from the couple had
wept and stopped to blow her nose.
Simon, as group mediator, kept saying let it go, let it go, but Sanderson could not summon a particular
definition for it. What should I do now, he asked,
whispering in Of what, he had wanted to ask all of them, should I let go? His
father used to say, Jason Sanderson, make your bed. Make your bed and lie in it. He’d made his by now, and he knew that. Jason Sanderson, repo man. He lived where he lived and he’d married
who he’d married, twice now. He’d
wanted children this time around, not one to replace Sam exactly. Something, he told A place he seemed to go where she
couldn’t follow, a removal that frightened her. That was what **** In Links there were signs along “That looks tasty, son,” Sanderson said as he paused on the steps. “’Sang,” the boy said. “Pardon?” “Sang’, mister,” the boy repeated, gesturing impatiently toward his lap and the pan. “Ginseng.” Sang’. Ginseng. Sanderson turned those words over in his mouth. “I don’t think I’d know ginseng, if it bit me,” he said at last. He did have a recollection of his grandmother and a trip to the woods to pick greens or to hunt up this and that herb. The boy plucked a gnarly root out the pan and cast it in the direction of his high topped sneakers. “Granny’s got me going through everything, just about,” the boy said again. He plucked a tiny rock out of the pan, flicked it with thumb and forefinger. His hand had a tiny anchor tattooed on its back. “She got anything to eat in there?” Sanderson asked as the boy set the pan aside and stretched his skinny, longish legs. He followed Sanderson inside the store. Bolts of cloth and stray shoes and canning jar lids spilled from boxes sat here and there, and a woman crouched on her ankles near an open crate. “Granny,” the boy said. “Them beans cooked yet?” He nodded in Sanderson’s direction. “Customer’s here.” The woman nodded as Sanderson made his way around the pile, then she stood and gestured with one hand clutching a headless plastic baby doll. “Pardon my housekeeping, mister,” she said, her voice a wind-piped whisper that made him want to clear his own throat. She peered up and down at him. He wondered why he’d carried in his briefcase. “Got enough stuff in here to clothe the hungry and feed the poor too, Mister,” she said as she tossed the doll into a box and nudged a heap of papers with one booted foot. “That so?” Sanderson said as he eyed the store’s shelves, stocked with the basics, soups and toiletries and animal feed. The store smelled like that. A grainy scent of feed, and a bitter odor that stung the nose. “My Daddy run this store up to the day he died and I don’t reckon he ever throwed out nothing.” She sighed and shook her head. “You got a bite to eat around here?“ Sanderson asked. “Take my Daddy, now, Mister.” She wiped her hands on an apron marked with grease spots. “You sit right there and tell me if a man needs to keep ary old soap scrap and snake skin he ever come by.” She shook her head. Across from the shelves were racks of items that must have been geared to tourists. Straw hats. Recycled Mason jars labeled Pickled People, which were small, decapitated heads with puckered faces, made of bits of cloth and cotton. And above all that were dried, weedy looking bundles tacked to the tops of shelves or suspended from the store ceiling. “Them’s my herbs, mister,” she said. She squinted and gazed up at the bundles. “Horsetail. Mullein.” She gestured toward the lower shelves. “And I’ve got me a bunch of stuff laid up for this fall. Sang.’ Yaller root.” Sanderson glanced down at jars full of the gnarled roots the boy had been sorting through, and more. Bits of stalks and stems. Seedy looking pods. “Daddy’s the one,” she said, “taught me about healing. Ministering herbs. Laying on hands, when the spirit took him.” While she talked, Sanderson studied Granny’s powdery-looking face and lilac-colored cotton dress. Anklets, he noted, ones neatly turned down above her shoes. She could have been his own grandmother. “Not that I took natural to learning what Daddy had to teach me,” she said. “I was too fixed on running here and there and yonder. But he was a good man, my Daddy. I’ll give him that one.” She sighed. “Raised six younguns’,” she said. Close to the shelves was a cheese and meat cooler, a counter with a crock pot advertising beans and cornbread and, Sanderson was relieved to see, a hot dog warmer. He pried a charred-looking wiener off when it came around on one of the revolving prongs, then piled on mustard and relish and onions in canning jars marked necessaries. The coffee was instant, and bitterly sweet, once he’d dumped in three packets of sweetener. “Mister, that your car?” the boy asked. He’d followed Sanderson back out onto the porch, where he stood eating and looking at the empty parking lot was empty and the tail end of Main Street. The boy was also eating a hotdog
and the two of them regarded Sanderson’s car, a black “You know the horsepower on that thing?” Sanderson had to think a minute, and realized he no idea. He mumbled something about a V-8 engine, which he was sure of, and munched his hot dog. “How fast have you takenher?” Sanderson, who used cruise control, and had not driven without a seatbelt nor played chicken with a road sign in about a million years said, “Oh, hundred, or thereabout.” “You ever ride anybody in that car?” the boy asked. “My wife,” Sanderson a nswered. The boy licked mustard from his fingers. “She like cars?” “Well enough.” “Enough ain’t enough for a ride like that, mister.” “That right?” “I can think of bunch of folks could admire that car.” “I’ll just bet you could think of a person or two.” Sanderson swallowed his hot dog. “I might,” the boy said. It was well after The boy recited information about torques and engine types and drive trains, and the future glowed in his eyes—a shop all his own as an add-on to the store. “If I’d had a car like that I could have gotten over there that quick.” He snapped his fingers. Sanderson wadded up the hot dog wrapping paper and made a move toward the porch steps. “I could have gotten there quicker than the rest of them did.” “Over where?” Sanderson asked, pausing mid-steps. Granny wedged open the store’s screen door with one booted foot, gazed up at the sky. “My daddy always said a sky like that one there’s a sign.” “Sign of what?” Sanderson swallowed, once and twice. The hot dog taste was still in his mouth, charred and gritty and he’d begun to feel unaccountably tense. She shook her head and leaned close, her scent sweet, like pouch tobacco. “Don’t you know nothing, Mister?” She elbowed him. The air now seemed to have a burning scent and he took out his handkerchief, blew his nose. “I used to know a little,” he said at last. “About signs.” “Smoke’s a sign of trouble or the Lord, one,” Granny said as she pointed up at wisps of grayish clouds traveling west, the way he’d come this morning. With a sinking feeling he couldn’t yet identify, Sanderson peered up at the whitish sky. “Most of it’s settled from over that way, besides,” she said and elbowed him a final time. “Over where?” he asked again as the three of them studied the haze. A heavy feeling had begun to accumulate in his chest and he fumbled in his pockets for tablets to settle his stomach. “Over to the Motel,” the boy said. “Over to Inez where they’re at. Mama and them.” “The Motel?” Sanderson asked and he paused at his car door. “Which one would that be, son?” “How many do you reckon there are in Inez, mister?” the boy said, looking indignant. He pulled the cigarette pack from his sleeve. “What happened over there, son?” Sanderson asked, dreading the answer. The taste in his mouth had coincided now with the smoke-laced sky. The three of them regarded that sky and the woman shook her head and pointed down the road in the direction he still needed to go. **** As he pulled
the car back onto the road, he could hear Not that he
didn’t have his share of the past.
Like the old woman from the store, Sanderson’s daddy, too, had been a
healer, but not the kind with herbs or divining rods. His father had been a To heal himself
after Sarah died, he’d moved with Sam from the mountains of western Sam. Sarah.
**** He passed the Inez diner and then a hardware store and a trailer park. He drove reading the new directions the boy and his grandmother had given him, drove until he saw the Church of the Repentant, his new landmark. He missed the last sharp curve and had to slow down, back into a driveway and turn around. He passed the last five mailboxes and rechecked his directions and took the last dirt road on the left. There’d been a fire the night before, all right. He sighed and picked up his briefcase and stepped out of the car. What was left of the motel looked careless and abandoned. Glass from broken windows crunched under his feet as he approached the side yard where there were the odds and ends of everything heaved out at the last second. A dresser with the drawers gone was upended near a metal foot locker; a plastic child’s tractor trailer was melted and shapeless and lay next to what was left of a wooden-framed photograph of a dog. He imagined the two stories of the building he’d seen in his files, and he imagined the house that might have once been, windows with green shutters and a porch swing. Now, only the last walls of the building itself were standing, and those were a charred substructure held together by pipes and thick, blackened wires. He could after all have found his way to Inez by smoke-scent alone. He knelt near some stone
steps. “The repo man,” he said aloud
as he scooped up a handful of warm ashes and rubbed them between his
palms. “Come to douse the ashes.” He followed a path littered with before-the-fire cans and bottles that led behind the house. That’s where the people were, less than a dozen of them, seated around the base of a huge willow tree, its trailing fronds singed. A worried-looking woman with foam curlers didn’t meet his eyes. Near her was a younger woman in jeans and cowboy boots, and beside her was an old man in a wrinkled wool suit jacket was crouching on his ankles and stirring ashes and dirt. He took his place at the edge of this group. “Authorities been here yet?” he asked in the general direction of the old man, but no one spoke. He stood, wiped his sooty hands against his trousers and stood, waiting. Already he could envision the investigation he’d have to conduct. Already he suspected arson and he thought of the forms he’d have to fill out, his own possible accountability. Didn’t you have an inkling? Not a clue about these people? He could hear the bank manager now. Then he heard the voices. Singing, from a rise near the smoldering foundations of the house. He stared in that direction, where there were two little girls. They wore cotton checked dresses and sneakers with the toes cut away and their joined hands were lifted high as they danced, twirled in the ashes scattered in the burnt grass. Their braids flew back as they circled a low wooden table and, beside it, a chair. Pocket full of posies, the girls sang as they spun. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. From not too far away, someone called to the children. Don’t you all hear me? Get on home. The girls laughed and whispered and hurried up a rise and their laughter died away in the distance. Sanderson set his briefcase down in the grass and approached the chair. It was metal, its once green paint scorched and peeling, and it held a woman, knees in her arms, head resting on her knees, a glimpse of her face the only thing visible from the folds of a blanket covering her. He felt as if he was spying upon a private intimacy, but he looked down into this face, which was shiny with sweat in the hot sun, she reminded him of someone. Photographs of Middle Eastern women covered by impenetrable veils, but more than that. The small pale and sooty face with its with shut eyes, was both familiar and disconcerting. Surely it wasn’t possible, but she seemed to be sleeping. “His girl,” someone said behind him. “Pardon?” Sanderson asked. The old man with the wool jacket motioned to him. They walked several feet away from the chair, in the direction of the remains of the house. “The daughter,” the old man whispered. “Leastways his step girl, her he had to deal with, once the mother took off. Back six years and more.” “What’s her name?” Sanderson studied the huddled figure. Beneath the edges of the blanket, he could see bare feet and pale pink polished toe nails. “Lory,” the old man answered. “And she’s about as odd-turned as he is, I’d say.” “Where’s he at?” Sanderson gripped his briefcase, thinking of the coming encounter with Frank Llewellyn, the questions about how the fire had started, insurance premiums, responsible parties and accounts due. The red tape would be a tangle it would take months to figure out and already Sanderson’s head swam with it all. “Reckon he’s over at the shop,” the old man said, gesturing in that direction. “Trying to calm down or sober up, one.” Sanderson straightened his tie, remembering the recent acquisition of the storage building and repair place. “I came on business, you know,” he said. He studied the woman and the chair again as she shifted. The sight of her face, so incredibly still, tugged at him. “Least he kept a clean room and she kept the books or something, upstairs where she stayed,” the old man said. “Place did better than some of us expected.” “It’s a shame it didn’t do as well as the rest of us would have wanted,” Sanderson said, then was sorry for it. If hadn’t known better, he would have said the woman was peaceful, except for the deep lines etched beside her mouth. “Sometimes you just have to leave a body be,” the old man said, as if Sanderson hadn’t spoken. He bent, fished a broken cup handle out of the burnt grass. “Before it was a motel, son, that was a house. Not much of one, but it was there almost a hundred years.” They both stood looking in the direction of the woman who was so still they could see the blanket rise and fall with her breath. He found himself breathing too, in time with the rise and fall of her chest. His own chest, to his amazement, felt calmer than it had all day. As he stepped back from the chair, he breathed more deeply, once, twice, searching for the directionless anger that had all day sought a resting place inside him. Then he noticed a low table near the woman. On it was an open dictionary, hard-backed and heavy, and its pages rustled in the wind. He wondered what page the wind would settle with, what word. |
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