Middle of Nowhere (9 page)

I checked the oil, too. She showed me how. When all that was done, she suggested some supper in the diner attached to the gas station, since it would be a long time before our next stop. We had a whole bunch of mountains to drive across.

I took Artie to the bathroom and when we came back Mrs. Burt was already settled in a booth where three paper placemats with frilly edges were laid out. Artie slid in next to Mrs. Burt. I took the facing window seat. Outside, big trucks were roaring past. I could see a wide gray river between the trees. The town was sitting right at the bottom of a mountain, in its shadow, so it already seemed like it was getting dark.

The waitress came with menus and a jar of broken crayons for Artie to decorate the placemats. He pointed in the menu at the colored picture of bacon and eggs.

“You already had breakfast,” I said. “This is supper.”

But Mrs. Burt said, “Breakfast at suppertime! It makes you feel like you're starting the day fresh. Let's start all over again, boys. Let's forget all that fuss this morning. Remember, we're in Hope!”

By “fuss” she meant the police. I'd actually forgotten them until she brought it up. As soon as she did, I felt hopeless. Hopeless about Mom and how to let her know where we were.

The waitress came back with Mrs. Burt's tea and a saucer piled with plastic creamers. After she left, Artie drank the creamers. Mrs. Burt let him. When the waitress came back with our orders balanced along her arm, Mrs. Burt pushed the saucer of empty creamers toward her and said, “We'll need more of these.”

The waitress didn't blink an eye. She brought more at the same time she brought a little silver rack filled with individual portions of jam and honey and peanut butter. Artie forgot about the creamers because he'd never seen anything as wonderful as this little rack.

“It's a walker for jam!” he said. He was so busy emptying it and restacking the jams, he couldn't focus on his food until I suggested he try all the different jams on his toast. Mrs. Burt tipped what was left in the rack into her purse.

Waving her arm, she called out to the waitress, “We need more jam over here, miss!”

This time the waitress did blink. She blinked and frowned, but Mrs. Burt stared her down until she went away and came back with more jam.

Artie, I realized then, was going to be a very spoiled kid before all this was over.

After breakfast number two, we drove on. Mrs. Burt leaned close to the wheel, staring out through her glasses and the windshield, thumping her chest and burping all the way.

We were taking the old highway. On the new highway you had to pay a toll. Also, the old highway was more picturesque, she said. It wound above the river, higher and higher, curvier and curvier.

Soon I began to feel like throwing up. Partly I was worried about leaving Mom behind. Partly it was carsickness. Car after car passed us, even on those dangerous bends, which was maybe the real reason she took the old highway. The Bel Air couldn't make the speed limit when we were going uphill.

Artie and I dozed off. When we were all awake again, Mrs. Burt taught Artie a song called “I've Heard That Song Before,” which they sang over and over until I had to say, “I've heard it before, too. Like about a million times.” I peeled the covers off one jam after another and passed them to Artie in the back seat. He couldn't sing when he was licking jam out of the little packets.

It was almost dark when we finally drove down from the mountains into a bald, hilly countryside. Mrs. Burt took the exit after a big sign that read
MOTOR HOTEL
and was pleased to see trucks filling the parking lot.

“You can always tell a motel has a good bed, or a restaurant has good grub, if truckers stop there,” Mrs. Burt told us.

Very slowly, very stiffly, she hobbled into the office with the walker I'd got from the trunk. We waited in the car until she came back a few minutes later carrying a key on a wooden block.

The room had brown carpet and two double beds separated by a night table.

“Well, looky here, boys,” she said, going over to one of the beds. “This is a bonus.”

There was a metal box attached to the headboard with a slot on the top for coins. The instructions were printed on it, but it never said what the box did. Mrs. Burt knew.

“It's a vibrator bed.”

“What's that?” I asked.

First she made us change into our pajamas and brush our teeth. Then she asked me to read the instructions because the print was too small for her.

“Twenty-five cents for ten minutes. Fifty cents for half an hour.”

“Half an hour's the better deal.” She fished in her purse for a quarter for each of us and we fed them to the box.

A noise started up as loud as the car wash, and the bed began to tremble. I thought it was an earthquake until Mrs. Burt cried, “Lie down, boys! Lie down!” Artie and I fell onto our backs laughing and let the bed shake us like jumping beans.

“Get on, Mrs. Burt!” Artie cried and she did. She fell down next to us and we all jiggled together.

It would have been relaxing if it wasn't so loud. I guess that was the “motor” part in Motor Hotel.

We fell asleep with the lights on and the vibrator bed still rumbling. The last thing Artie said was, “Mrs. Burt? This was the best day of my life.”

BANG, BANG, BANG!

I sat up. Between the bangs, it seemed very quiet. The bed had shut off. The room was dark, but I could still see because the lights from the motel office shone through the curtain.

“Georgina!” somebody shouted just as the pounding started again. “Georgina! Open up!”

Artie clutched me. In the other bed, Mrs. Burt was feeling around on the bedside table for her glasses. Once she got them on her face, she peered across at us. When she saw we were awake, she switched on the light.

“Georgina!” the man at the door bellowed.

“There's no Georgina here!” Mrs. Burt bellowed back. “Go to bed!”

“Like hell! Come out!”

At the sound of that swear word, Mrs. Burt really woke up. She snatched the walker waiting by the bed and struggled to her feet. Barefoot and in her nightie, she stomped over to the door. Even on carpet you could hear she was mad just by the way she put the walker down.

“Watch your language,” she said through the door. “I got kids in here.”

“Get out here, Georgina,” the man roared.

“You'll be sorry if I open up this door!”

“Don't open the door!” Artie wailed.

“Mrs. Burt!” I said. “Get back!”

She did not. She undid the chain. When she threw the door open, she had to lean into the frame for support while her other hand shoved the walker out.

There was a very drunk man outside swaying all over the place. I knew he was drunk because of Gerry. Sometimes Gerry had to pee in the bathtub because he couldn't hit the toilet when he was swaying so much. That was how drunk this man looked. Gerry-drunk.

Mrs. Burt wasn't that much steadier. She took a wobbly step forward and knocked the walker against his legs.

He stumbled back.

“Where's Georgina?” he slurred.

“I told you, she isn't here. Now leave us alone. I got a couple of kids with me. We don't like your bad language.”

He rubbed his eyes and looked at her, all confused — Mrs. Burt in her nightie with her dandelion hair, just the walker between them. Artie was bawling by then.

When I appeared in the doorway, the man looked from Mrs. Burt to me and hiccuped.

“Excuse me, ma'am. I got the wrong room.”

“You sure do,” said Mrs. Burt.

“I apologize.”

“I should hope so.”

I closed the door and put the chain on again and offered my arm so Mrs. Burt could get back to bed a little quicker. Between calling out to Artie, “There, there. That bad man went away and Mrs. Burt is here. Nobody got hurt. You're safe with Mrs. Burt,” she was chuckling to herself.

“I want my mom,” Artie cried.

Mrs. Burt sat on our bed. “Of course you do.”

I got the lotion from the pillowcase, and Mrs. Burt watched me dry Artie's face with the sheet and smooth it on.

THE NEXT MORNING
at breakfast Artie stayed tight against Mrs. Burt in the restaurant booth. Mrs. Burt told us she'd been so excited after chasing Georgina's boyfriend away that she couldn't stop shaking. She thought the vibrator bed had turned back on.

“Do you see, boys? I don't take guff from anybody. I don't care how big and strong they are.” She slurped her tea. “I know how to handle men, especially. The bigger and stronger the better. You should have seen me cooking in those camps. I was the only woman mulligan mixer. The only woman for a hundred miles.”

But I wasn't really listening. I was thinking about how to let Mom know we'd gone.

There were only two things I could do: write and phone. I knew that on a scale of one to ten her answering the phone this morning would be about a one, but I had to try. Because when we were back together again — me and Mom and Artie — I wanted to be able to say to her that I'd done everything I could.

“Mrs. Burt? Could I borrow some money?”

“Sure,” she said, opening her purse and sliding ten dollars across the table to me. Then, since the purse was already open in her lap, she dumped in all the jams from the rack.

“Get some snacks for the road,” she said.

“I'm getting change for the phone,” I said.

Her face fell so hard it almost hit the table. She grabbed my hand.

“If somebody else answers, hang up. Okay, Curtis? Hang up.” And from how her fingers dug in, she put fear in me.

“Okay,” I said.

At the cash register I changed the ten for quarters. Then I went to the lobby where the pay phone was. The number was long distance. A little message popped up telling me how much money to put in.

As the phone started to ring, the hope in me started to rise. It rang and rang and rang. Then all of the quarters jangled down into the coin return slot and the ringing stopped.

WE DROVE THROUGH
the town and out into the scrubby hills. Mrs. Burt said we were still heading north. In the back seat, Artie played with Happy and the china figurines while I watched out the window. Sometimes there were cows.

I started to feel like I was watching a movie on TV. Even though there weren't any characters, there was action. We were escaping! And the countryside was changing. The desert hills flattened out and got greener. Farms and towns appeared and disappeared. The forest spread out across the land.

I asked Mrs. Burt about the car, and she said that Mr. Burt had bought it new in 1957.

“Where is Mr. Burt?” Artie asked.

“He's deceased. Do you know what that means?”

“He has rickets?”

“Not diseased.
Deceased
. He's dead.”

Artie started to wail. It seemed out of the blue, but probably wasn't. You never know what's going on in a little kid's head. Maybe all this time he'd been thinking of what I had been trying so hard not to think.