After Bathing at Baxters (15 page)

But all this time it was falling apart. Us and Jimmy, that is. Even when we signed the record deal in a Warners suite at some fancy hotel in NYC, he wasn't there. Disappeared off to the mountains, people said, but his mom didn't know and none of the guys in the Bozeman pool halls had seen him in months. When he fetched up in Denver a week later, all he'd say was that he'd been looking for Lewis and Clark – I thought he meant Lois Lane and Clark Kent until Errol figured it was the guys who'd found the Oregon trail. They packed us off on tour after that – I had a feeling one of the record company execs had decided Jimmy was bad news – doing college gigs, East Coast theatres that took four, five thousand kids, which was shit-scaring when you remembered that six months back we'd been playing flophouses in front of thirty people. For a while Jimmy did fine. He had this bad boy image in the press, what with the leather jackets and the biker pins, he had himself photographed with Mickey Rourke like they were buddies, and he said ‘Shit' on the
David Letterman Show
, which the record company reckoned was great publicity. But back there on the corner of the stage with my bass guitar – I used to hunker down next to Curtis's kit so that Jimmy and Errol could take the spotlights – I'd catch sight of him sometimes, staring at the crowd or off into space as if there was only him there, and I'd wonder. We did a live show on MTV the week they put out the first album and he was like a spoiled kid at a party, kicking over the monitors and bad-mouthing the lighting guys, and halfway through the last number he trashed a three-thousand-dollar Telefunken microphone, and that was serious, even at MTV. He'd met Marsha by then, who none of us ever liked – dark-haired girl who worked as a model on the East Coast fashion magazines and had Indian blood, Jimmy said – and Errol, who'd roomed next to them a couple of times, said you couldn't get through the door on account of the dealers.

He disappeared again in the spring, time we were cutting the second album, off to some Indian reservation in Nebraska where there was a kid drummer he wanted to record on an eight-track. We went ahead and finished all the same, and you can take it from me the voice you hear on ‘Lonesome Dove' isn't Jimmy's, no way. When he got back from Nebraska he gave these interviews saying rock and roll was dead, and he just wanted to play chicken skin stuff from the prairies. No amplification, just country music like his grand-daddy had sung him. We toured Europe that Summer. Frankfurt. Paris. London. I don't remember the places too well. He waited till the last gig until he walked out on us. In style, too. Half an hour before the soundcheck, when he hadn't shown, Curtis broke into his room and there were a couple of bolsters twisted up on the mattress to look like a body, with a watermelon from the complimentary fruit selection for a head.

Back home he wrote us this letter that some of the music papers printed, about Indian music and not being on the same wavelength. Every time a band breaks up you get a letter. I hardly noticed. Curtis, Errol and me were auditioning for another singer, but it was pretty clear by then that we weren't going to find one, and that the record company wouldn't care if we did. But I still kept hearing about Jimmy. Marsha had quit by then and was dating some Hollywood actor, but he got a solo deal someplace. I even went to see him on his first tour – the hall was half-empty and he got mad every time somebody shouted for one of the old songs. Then when he disappeared the last time it didn't even register: Curtis and me were too busy picking up our careers, building the studio and guesting on that Soundgarden album. But I read the stories in the papers. They found him out on the Bozeman trail, head down in some dried-up creek with a backpack and a couple of empty water carriers: dead a month, the medical guys reckoned, and never did find Lewis and Clark. But a month or so later I was back in Bozeman, looking around the old places – Sally Pasricha was dead and the pool hall was closed down – and I hitched up to Belmont and the woods and the old bungalow. There was no one around – his mother had gone off someplace on the East Coast, people said, and the roof had fallen in over the dime store linoleum – but I stood there for a long time staring down at the freeway stretched out in the distance like an old black snake, remembering how I'd met him and the times we'd had, and thinking that it was kind of sad and kind of unnecessary, like the way the whores asked for change on Sally Pasricha's staircase or the tumbleweeds blew in over the old river bed with no one to stop them or care which way they fell.

Saturday Night at the Jenks Motel

Joe sits heavily in front of the big oblong dressing mirror – a gift from Ella's folks, he remembers, fifteen years back – tying the tie that Ella gave him that morning. Ten dollars it cost, Ella said, out of an L. L. Bean catalogue, which Joe privately thinks is extortion, and Joe hasn't worn a tie in five, six, years, not since he gave up the insurance salesman's job and they moved up here to Missouri, but here he is, anyhow, sitting on the end of the bed fixing this weird, multi-coloured noose under the collar of his white shirt. Kind of thing that goes down well with the customers, Ella thinks, a guy wearing a tie, and Ella knows about these things, Joe reckons. He fixes it some more, flapping the end over his fingers and letting it loll down over the mound of his stomach. Beyond the mirror is a gap in the winceyette curtain where Joe can see the neon sign that says
Jenks Motel, Bar and Grill, Children Welcome
moving backwards and forwards in the wind. One of these nights, Joe knows, the sign will slam down and shatter on the forecourt, but somehow he never has time to fix it. In the distance he can hear the sound of the cars out on the freeway and the noise of the police sirens doing speed patrols over by Jackson Gap – Saturday night sounds. Saturday nights make Joe nervous, have done ever since a couple of years ago when the local Hell's Angels chapter tried to check in and hold a party. Wasn't anything you could call trouble – two extinguishers broke and a busted window – but the memory still makes Joe uneasy. He sits staring at his face in the mirror, at the tie and the fisting sign, not seeing them, or anything.

In the kitchen, Ella daydreams. About the past, mostly: staying with her grandparents in Kentucky when she was a kid, but there are other flashes – wondering if they would get the motel registered in the state leisure and amenities guide, wondering what she would say if Billie-Sue, who hadn't called in six months, was there on the phone, and how the conversation would go. There is a big pile of food on the slab in front of her – steaks and gammon slices and huge Florida tomatoes – that will need cooking, and Ella gazes at it awhile before thinking that she'll get Larry to do it when he comes in, which isn't fair on Larry, who has eight rooms to clean and the kitchen floor to swab down, but then who else in Missouri is paying five an hour for the sort of work Larry wants? Remembering Larry's money sets Ella thinking about trade and she peeks through the kitchen door into the lobby where there are still six keys hanging on the wood and six empty hooks. Still, she reckons, it's a Saturday night with the summer coming and ten to one some teenage kid wanting to ball his girlfriend will feel like stopping here and paying thirty dollars to do it. And then the daydream whistles up again and Ella stops worrying about Joe and howcome he doesn't talk to her anymore and Billie-Sue and howcome she never phones and is back in Kentucky on a spring morning with her grandpa pointing out over the bluegrass and saying that you could always tell where a jackrabbit was hiding because eventually, never mind how long it took, the ears would twitch.

In Number 5 Loretta lies on her stomach in the sky-blue dressing gown Henry likes drinking from a glass of iced water. There is a bottle of bourbon on the side table in the plastic cover that the liquor store checkout girl wrapped it in, but Loretta thinks she'll save that for later, after Henry arrives. She imagines the two of them curled up on the bed late at night toasting each other in neat bourbon. Even now Loretta can't stop congratulating herself on how things have worked out, on Henry being in this part of the county for a copier salesmen's convention and wanting to get back together again, and Henry's wife being away in Maine for the weekend visiting her folks. Loretta checks her watch. 7 p.m. An hour, maybe, or an hour and a half and then Henry will be here, dusting his hands down on his knees that way he has, telling her how fine-looking she is and how much he's missed her. Loretta rolls over onto her back and lights a cigarette, like in a movie with Michelle Pfeiffer or Ellen Barkin, where the girl lies in the darkened room on the unmade bed so that when the phone rings and she starts up her breasts tumble into her hands like ripe fruit.

Joe and Ella jostle into each other in the kitchen, where Larry stands slicing tomatoes with a long-handled knife. He has a trick of throwing each tomato in the air and catching it on the blade as it falls. ‘Like that tie,' Ella says, and Joe nods self-consciously. Neither of them knows how to behave in front of Larry, who is eighteen and saving up to pay his way through medical school. ‘You put them extra towels in Number 3?' Ella asks. Joe shakes his head and looks at Larry. Larry smiles. Another thing about Larry is that he has this habit of quoting details from all the medical textbooks he reads, details about tapeworms and inflated livers and all the weird stuff that can kill you. Ella wishes secretly that Larry would say some of this stuff now, but Larry stays quiet and flicks another tomato effortlessly into the air. ‘And the sign,' Ella tells Joe. ‘You could at least have fixed the sign.' Joe shrugs, the way he has done every Saturday night these last five years, the way he did when his mother died, the way he did when Billie-Sue told them she was moving in with some longhair over at Carson Lake. The wind scrabbles at the window. Outside Ella can hear heavy car tyres – a station wagon, maybe, or a Pontiac – crunching up the dirt in the driveway.

In Number 7 the Fergusons continue the argument they began twelve hours ago over breakfast and carried on through the three-hundred mile drive east from Kansas City. On the TV screen in the corner of the room a grey-haired man in an expensive-looking suit is talking to a glamorous woman in a one-piece bathing costume, and Mrs Ferguson watches them as she argues. ‘You got no right,' she says bitterly. ‘Driving her home like that in broad daylight, staying out there on the patio for a coupla hours like it was a free show for the neighbourhood. No right at all.' Mr Ferguson lies sprawled over the bed counting cigarettes from out of a bent, crimson packet. There are seventeen. He flicks one up from between thumb and forefinger into his mouth, focusing only on the moment, the noise of the flints colliding beneath the chromium of the lighter. Mrs Ferguson's voice is a faint susurration, like rainfall heard a long way off.

In the kitchen Larry is frying gammon slices in a big open frypan. When each slice is done he transfers it from the pan onto the glass hotplate under the grill. Ella sits watching him from the kitchen table. There is no sign of Joe, who has gone to checkout the new arrivals in the lobby. Eventually Larry says: ‘I mean, take your lungs, right? Say you cut them open and pulled all the surfaces out flat, how much of them do you reckon there'd be?' Ella frowns. ‘I guess I don't know, Larry,' she says. She thinks for a moment, hard, not wanting to seem stupid. ‘About the size of a blanket maybe?' Larry grins, takes another gammon slice out of the pan and puts it on the hotplate. ‘Couple of baseball pitches more like,' he says. Ella listens, open-mouthed. Larry is eighteen years old and all that, but Ella thinks he is the most interesting person she has ever met.

In Number 4 Mr and Mrs McCormack rest side by side under the pink coverlet, watching the light fade in blues and greys over beyond the outhouse wall. Snowbirds, both of them, been on the road for five years with the trailer and the mobile home until Mr McCormack got sick, which is why they've been spending time in the motels and the resthouses. Their joint age is a hundred and sixty-three. The light fades some more and the cartoons on the silent TV give way to a re-run of
The Golden Girls
, which is a series Mrs McCormack likes but doesn't care to turn up for fear of waking Clyde. Mrs McCormack checks the alarm clock on the bedside table and finds that it is eight o'dock. A whole eleven hours until it goes off. Mornings are the worst times, listening while Clyde rolls over in bed, trying to figure out whether he feels good or bad. Most mornings these days he feels bad, and Mrs McCormack resigns herself to another day of TV, catnapping and watching Clyde drowse his way through the long summer afternoons. For a moment Mrs McCormack feels panicky and wants to reach out and touch Clyde under the coverlet, prod him until he's awake, but then she calms down again. She remembers seeing Clyde this way before and every time he's gotten himself right again. Always figured that he could sleep himself back to health. Mrs McCormack watches the light again and then wonders fretfully just what it is that she's going to do about Clyde, about the way Ella looks at her in the mornings, about the three-ton mobile home in the driveway which will be falling apart soon with no one to check the tyres or clean out the portable sanitary closet. She takes a hand mirror out of her bag and starts to check her make-up before thinking that this is a foolish thing to do and throwing the mirror on the floor where it lies amid the trail of used tissues, cash dispenser receipts and old copies of
Senior Citizen
magazine.

Lying on the bed, Loretta wonders what time Henry will come. He said eight or nine, but Loretta doesn't mind when it is, just so long as he gets there. She imagines him striding into the room, not even bothering to knock, and sweeping her up in a bear-hug. Loretta's glass is empty again, so she sashays over to the table by the door and pours herself some more iced water out of the pitcher. She thinks about opening the bourbon, only this would be mean on Henry, to start drinking before he's arrived. In the end she tugs off the plastic cover and measures herself a finger. After all, Loretta reflects, there isn't anything else to do, here in a motel in Missouri, listening to the cars on the freeway and waiting for Henry.