After Bathing at Baxters (16 page)

Joe stands uncertainly in the doorway of the diner. There are only three or four people in there eating the gammon slices and the steak and tomato platters, and Joe doesn't know whether to walk on in and say hello. Eventually he decides not to and moves off into the lobby where Ella is checking in a couple of blond-haired guys with thick moustaches and backpacks. Couple of faggots, Joe reckons, and good luck to them. He guesses that his tolerance goes with the job. Being a motel owner doesn't leave you much time for scruples. Ella now, she just hates faggots. There are five, six rooms free right now, but Joe knows, just as he knows the wind won't let up till dawn, that Ella will book the two blond guys into the worst one and then try and charge them double for room service. He wanders out onto the back porch where it is quite dark now and light shines through curtained windows. There are raised voices coming from Number 7, but Joe doesn't stop to listen. He and Ella used to go on like that sometimes, back in the old days before he gave up the insurance job. Joe wonders about Billie-Sue for a while, and whether this had anything to do with it all. He decides not, pads back inside where he can hear laughter coming from the kitchen, wondering what crap Larry is telling Ella now.

Mr Ferguson lies on his back, stripped down to his vest and undershorts, counting the cigarettes. He wonders about going out to the lobby for a fresh pack, but this will mean putting his pants back on so he forgets the idea. Mrs Ferguson is brushing her hair with short, angry strokes. ‘Listen,' she says. ‘You lay a finger on me and I'll holler so loud every cop in the state'll be here.' Mr Ferguson shrugs, like the guy in the cartoon whose wife buys a sofa out of the catalogue without telling him. ‘Have it your own way,' he says.

Lying on her back in the darkness, Loretta wonders what she'll say to Henry when he arrives. She remembers a movie where this girl sits there waiting for her boyfriend to come back from New Jersey or Vermont or someplace, and when he gets there she simply says nothing, just folds up into him. Loretta wonders if she'll be awake enough to do this. She reaches over and looks at her watch, which has a luminous dial, and discovers that it's 10.15. After that she switches on the light again and takes another drink, thinking maybe this is how Henry will find her, sitting up in bed sipping liquor and giggling. She thinks about the copier salesmen's convention, and that it's a pity Henry doesn't do something more glamorous – be a cop, say, or sell real estate. But then Loretta doesn't think she'd like to go out with a cop and you need qualifications for selling real estate, so perhaps it's for the best. She takes another drink and listens to the wind, which is getting up now and, she thinks, kind of scary and comforting at the same time.

In the kitchen Larry is finishing the dishes, while Ella puts the unused gammon slices back in the freezer. Joe, wandering in through the yard door, hears him say: ‘And you ain't gonna believe me, Mrs Jenks, but twenty-three inches is the record for a dick. Some old negro they had in a hospital in St Louis.' Ella roars, but Joe stays quiet. He wishes Larry wouldn't say that stuff to Ella, but it hasn't ever occurred to him to ask him not to. The phone rings and Ella picks it up, turning round so that Joe can see the look on her face change from irritation to anxiety. ‘Baby,' Joe hears Ella say, ‘baby, where you
been
?' and Joe realises that it's Billie-Sue, Billie-Sue on the end of some phone, in some call box a thousand miles away most probably. Larry tries to catch his eye, but Joe isn't talking. He moves off again into the shadow, shoulders down, his head twisted to one side.

In Number 4 Mrs McCormack thinks that she'll try shaking Clyde just one more time and then if nothing happens she'll go for help. Making this decision gives Mrs McCormack confidence. She can see herself tugging Clyde's arm, see him roll over and say, ‘What's with you then?' in that way he has. She pulls hard on Clyde's hand, pressing down on the fingers hard enough to hurt, staring all the time into Clyde's wide-open eyes, but nothing happens. For a moment Mrs McCormack wonders what to do. She cannot get the thought of the mobile home out of her head, wondering who'll drive it away, who'll pay for it and for her. Then she remembers the deal she did with herself, that it's already midnight and most likely people will be asleep and that somehow this will make it worse.

Joe, standing in the shower-room in his pyjamas, hears the crash of glass on stone and knows instinctively that the neon sign has gone down in the wind. In a way he is pleased at the interruption, as Ella went straight to bed after Billie-Sue's phone call and Joe isn't too keen on disturbing her. He moves through the empty corridors to the lobby, where the night lamp is burring and Mrs McCormack stands timidly in front of the reception desk. ‘Can I help you?' Joe says politely – he is always polite to Mrs McCormack – but he knows what has happened, and Mrs McCormack knows he knows. They look at one another steadily for a while, without speaking, while the insects whirl crazily round the lamp.

At 2 a.m. Loretta wakes up in a roomful of fight. Henry is standing over her waving the empty bourbon bottle in her face like it was a TV reporter's microphone. He is tired, she thinks, and the bald patch on the crown of his scalp is showing even more. ‘You're paralytic, you know,' Henry is yelling. ‘Just a disgrace, you know that?' And Loretta laughs uncontrollably, as if it were the funniest thing she had ever heard. Outside the blue emergency lights dart and flicker.

McKechnie's Diner, 9 a.m.

From the washroom window Lila watches the smoke move up from beyond the trees: thick, ochre-brown smoke that hangs over the lines of pantsuits and towels Ella McKechnie has drying on the big hickory clothes-horses. For some reason the smoke makes her think of the old days, back in Indiana, and she concentrates for a while on these distant, phantom images – a maple tree that grew over the back porch, seeing Bob coming in over the fields wearing that shirt she bought him out of a catalogue – until someone hammers on the washroom door and there is the sound of feet moving in the passage outside. Lila doesn't care too much about the hammering – the only person she defers to around here is Mr McKechnie, and it isn't his time for the washroom, not for an hour – but still she pulls herself up off the can and starts putting make-up on her face from out of an old vanity case lying on the window rest There is a message on the bag says
Elegant Living
, and Lila can recollect buying it twenty years ago in Macey's and wondering what elegant living was and how you lived it.

The smoke is disappearing now, drifting away across the tree-tops down to the creek, and Lila figures it's that Larry Frazier over at the garage, most likely, burning car tyres again. Mr McKechnie doesn't like Larry Frazier, nor the bikers who hang around Larry Frazier's forecourt, nor the smell of the sump oil. ‘Guy is a
cracker
,' Mr McKechnie will sometimes say late in the evening, getting confidential over a Coke or a whisky sour, and Lila will nod and hold her glass in the way the celebrity guests do on the Dick Cavett Show. There is more knocking on the washroom door, and Lila frowns slightly so she can fix her eyes, watches as the creases run in chevrons down each side of her face. She blinks a couple of times, pushes open the door and stares out into the corridor, where there is a punk kid with yellow hair and K-Mart sneakers smoking a cigarette up against the wall. Lila shrugs, adjusts her waitress's uniform – they still have dinky bomber jackets that say
McKechnie's diner
– moves past him into the sweet, syrupy air.

In his office out behind the checkout till and the Coke dispenser Mr McKechnie sits staring at the mail. A dozen letters maybe, circulars, bills, junk from the
Reader's Digest
and the NRA, a card which Mr McKechnie can tell by the handwriting is from his brother in Tampa Bay. Above his head a fan winnows the stale air. The phone on the desk buzzes, but Mr McKechnie carries on sifting, like a kid rooting through a toy box after his favourite muppet doll, until, sure enough, right at the the bottom of the stack he finds the letter with the Tennessee Loan Bank stamp. Putting it on the desk at right-angles to the photo of Ella and the framed citation from the Guild of Kentucky Restauranteurs, he looks through the window to the diner, where there are early customers ordering breakfast fries or studying copies of the
Lafayette Sentinel
while they wait for fresh coffee to brew. A tall guy in his twenties wearing a suit sits smiling in front of a plate of hash browns, and Mr McKechnie, who is 180 pounds and five feet six, looks at him for a while, wondering what it must be like to be twenty-five and work as a lawyer or in real estate instead of being fifty with the bank talking about repossession and non-renewable loans. Was an article Ella read him the other night from one of her digests about looking on the bright side and controlling your life, but Mr McKechnie doesn't believe in that stuff, ever since the steel cable snapped above the car hoist ten years back and sent a ton of metal down onto his leg. Took three operations and a metal plate to get him to walk again, and even now a stroll across the yard leaves him out of breath. Reaching down beneath the desk, Mr McKechnie fingers the ridge of hard skin above his knee, waits for the little shiver of pain to edge along the bone, wondering all the time what Ella will say, so that in the end the thoughts merge and for ever after the letter will remind him of pain, Ella's face seen through the perspex divide, the young guy in the suit smiling over his breakfast.

Back in the diner Lila takes side orders: French fries, apple pie, milk shakes. Over the years Lila has evolved a formula to remember her customers by, stripping them down to the basics of looks and gesture. The guy in the suit is Steel Nose; the punk kid is Corn Hair; the old man who comes in every morning for a popsicle is Dentures. Never fails. Sometimes the waitresses trade shorthand gossip about the customers with her: ‘Steel Nose left me a dollar tip'; ‘You catch the mess Dentures left under his seat?' Lila stoops down to whip a plate off an empty table and then swerves to avoid Duane, the kid Mr McKechnie hires to swab the floors, as he moves past with his mop and pail. Lila smiles and Duane says ‘Howdy Miz Lila', which though Lila thinks Duane is a weird kid, what with his rat's-tail hair and the black T-shirt, she kind of appreciates. She peeks up at the perspex divide, but Mr McKechnie is slumped down over his desk, as the fans beat above his head, and Lila knows that his leg is hurting him again. Lila feels sympathy for Mr McKechnie, has done ever since the day three years back when he picked her letter out of the pile of application forms and gave her the job, even though there were two twenty-year-olds with torpedo tits showing off their legs in the waiting area. For a moment Lila wonders what Bob would have said about Mr McKechnie, but somehow this comparison doesn't help and she concentrates instead on cleaning up a chair where someone has left two pieces of pie, an empty pack of Merits and two state lottery tickets. Above her waitress's cap the flies whirr and cluster.

Back in the bungalow Mrs McKechnie stuffs clothes into a travel bag. Pantsuits, jeans, sneakers, a pair of high heels she bought in Louisville last Fall when they were there on a day trip. Mrs McKechnie doesn't know what the weather's like this time of year in California, but she guesses it's going to be hot. Outside the window the smoke is drifting in again from across the trees, and Mrs McKechnie figures that it's typical of Larry Frazier to play a stunt like that, today of all days. She peers up hopefully at the yard and the line of cars, but there isn't anyone there except Duane carrying cans of bleach in from the outhouse, and Mrs McKechnie recollects that she never did like Duane, what with the hardcore magazines he keeps out back in the store and the looks she's seen him giving the waitresses, and that not having to talk to Duane again will be a whole heap of fun. The travel bag is nearly full now, with just a lamé windcheater waiting to be packed in somehow, and Mrs McKechnie considers it for a while, remembering finally how Eugene gave it to her at Thanksgiving a while back, and wondering if she'll care to be confronted with it in three months' time in LA. But there are going to be worse things, Mrs McKechnie thinks, than remembering Eugene watching her pull open a mound of tissue paper. She rolls the windcheater up into a ball, squeezes it inside the plastic bag lying on the window sill, stows it away.

In the kitchen Duane thinks about the girl he met two nights back at the Winnebag, and wonders if she'll come and see him like she promised. Over by the grill Joe the black cook is talking his religious stuff, which is something Duane doesn't care for, but he figures that it isn't anything he ought to mention since the two of them are working together. ‘You see Duane,' Joe is saying in that heavy voice of his, ‘sin is all around us, Sin ain't something we can ignore.' ‘Yeah, sin,' Duane says politely, hoping Mrs McKechnie or someone will come in and give him a different job, but the white door to the diner stays shut and Joe shakes his head again and goes on: ‘Isn't a man in this state can say he don't know something about sin. Not you, not me, nor the Reverend Johnson at the Tabernacle.' Joe can go on for hours like this. There is a line of fresh eggs running across the groove of the draining board, which need to be made into batter, and Duane starts busting them one by one into a glass bowl, making a little flourish with his hand like one of those TV chefs on the cable channels, thinking all the while about the girl and what kind of tits she has, and what he'll say to her. ‘And that sin is ours to deal with,' Joe goes on. ‘Ain't nobody else's.' Looking out through a space in the steamed-up window, Duane sees a pair of bikers in leather jackets strolling around Larry Frazier's forecourt and sucks in his breath enviously, wondering for a moment what it would be like to speed round the county on a Harley Davidson with the girl from the Winnebag clamped to your spine, maybe, and not giving a shit about anything. ‘So what you gonna do Duane?' Joe says, urgently but somehow still not looking at him, ‘how you gonna fix that sin?', and Duane blushes, that way he has when anybody talks to him, and nods. ‘I'm working on it, Joe,' he says.