Silent Retreats (18 page)

"How come what?" Skidmore said.

"How come you're feelin' footloose? I wanna know. I'm kind of a philosophical guy myself."

"Women, for chrissake," Skidmore blurted out.

"Okay. I know what you mean now," the driver said. He rubbed his hand across his face, checked his mirrors. "If you don't mind, I'd just as leave talk about something else. I'm serious, I don't want to talk about women, I can't stand it, I swear I can't."

"Had to leave my girl, back in Cheyenne." Skidmore was going to talk about it anyway. "Been on the road three days. Heard about Long Pine. It sounds about right for how I'm feelin'."

"How come you're feelin' sad and footloose aside from women? Let's talk about that aspect of it." The trucker drank the last of the whiskey.

Skidmore noticed the truck had sped up. They were hurtling through the dark at seventy with a full load. When the cab bounced, he could feel the trailer's weight pull them back.

"She stood me up," Skidmore said. "Lied to me. Kept a picture of her old boyfriend up above the bed to see if she could make me whacko. I took off."

"I'm about to throw your ass off my rig," the trucker said. "I'm goddamned serious here. For all you know, maybe I got a broken heart and this reminds me of something, you know?" He winced up his eyes and bit his lip. "I hate this topic, you get me?"

"She was a hell of a lover, though," Skidmore said, "when she wasn't playin' games. She'd get those long damn legs around me and, those crazy eyes, she'd be lookin' up there at me. Christ." At this speed the road was very bumpy and at times the trailer seemed to whip around back there.

"Watch this," the trucker said. He grabbed the bottle by the neck. He held it with his left hand. Skidmore expected to catch it on the bridge of his nose. "Sling 'em a mile—real accurate." He leaned half out the window of the truck, steering with the other hand. His head and half his body disappeared out the driver's side window, into the dark. Suddenly he fired the bottle over the top of the truck, over the two mounted chrome horns and between the various aerials, and it smashed against a sign that was whipping by which said to slow down to thirty-five for a very sharp curve. Laughing loud, the trucker dropped back behind the wheel real quick, first downshifting and then braking hard. Skidmore came up out of his seat and almost against the windshield, but he got his hands up. The truck whistled through the curve. Skidmore fell back into the seat as the driver accelerated back up to seventy-five.

"I just can't take bad treatment from a woman," Skidmore said. "Lyin' and no devotion, you know? You know what I'm talkin' about?"

The trucker didn't respond, but kept his eyes on the road. He was getting into a bad mood. He was wearing a baseball cap, plastic, one size fits all. He pushed up the bill.

"Should have smacked her, I know it," Skidmore said. "Can't handle a woman treatin' me like that—been crazy since Nam."

He looked over to see if that one landed. Sure enough. "You were in Vietnam? Where at?" The road was old and cracking up. They were both bouncing in their seats.

Skidmore didn't say anything.

"Marines? Regular army, I'll bet." The bill on his cap popped down and he popped it back up. "Regular army, I can tell. Intuition. I was in Two Corps myself, up and down in there—Hundred-and-first. D'you see action?"

Skidmore didn't answer. He stared straight ahead pensively, like a lot of men who've been to hell and lived to tell about it.

Finally the trucker said, "Look here. I know what you mean, okay? We're not the same, none of us are, after the war. Shoulda slapped the shit out of her, no doubt about it. What's she know about gettin' right down to the line, right?"

"Nah, can't hit a woman even if she lies to me, which is usually," Skidmore said, and they both laughed.

"Well, you shoulda slapped her around—that's what I'da done. You gotta right to. How much can a man take? I do it plenty. You got to sometimes. They understand. Sometimes they understand a man better'n you do."

Skidmore decided not to talk to the guy anymore, since he felt so free to finish off his whiskey after bitching about it, and to talk about Fiona like she was a goddamned coonhound. So, leaning over against his suitcase, he slumped down and acted like he fell asleep and after a while he did exactly that.

"You can just fall asleep there if you want to," he heard the trucker say at one point. "No problem for me." All the time he was asleep Skidmore was completely aware of the driver and the pounding of the road. Once he heard the guy say, "You in the reserves? Never mind." After a long time he felt the trucker downshifting and heard the airbrakes set, heard the engine whining down. The trucker reached over to wake Skidmore up. "This here's your place," he said. "Tell ya, I'm good for Omaha and you'd be better off takin' me up on it."

"Listen," Skidmore told him. "I'm a dangerous man—got people after me. You don't know half of it. You want me outta here and don't know it."

"Well, we're half a mile north of town, maybe a little better. Just walk down that old road there. See them lights? That's Long Pine herself, God help ya."

Grabbing the suitcase, Skidmore opened the door and jumped down into the dark. He thought it might be a trick. He didn't see any town anywhere, but he'd had it with this guy anyway so he thanked him, yelling up into the cab, and the truck wound up and rolled away. Skidmore walked south for ten minutes before he could see anything except stars. When he saw the lights and got closer to them, their sparlking brightness against the dark blinded him, and at one point he lost the road and fell headlong into a narrow sandy ravine, rolling down against an old fence. When he found his bag and climbed up out of there, he was at the Long Pine Cooperative Grain Company. A colossal cattle truck went by fast, heading into town, downshifting as it passed in anticipation of the city limits. Skidmore watched as the truck tore down the main street, throwing grit and dust up into the streetlights, ultimately disappearing under a train trestle at the other end of the street, into the dark beyond. It was 4
A.M.
Except for the time-and-temperature sign on the savings and loan, the business district, two blocks long, looked like the set from
Gunsmoke
. Skidmore brushed himself off, noted that his ear was bleeding from the fall, and headed down the street looking for the hotel.

When he found it, he was amazed. It was a four-story, wood-frame structure with outdoor catwalks around all four floors so that, with the gingerbread architecture and trim, it looked like the main part of a huge old riverboat, the prow buried in the sand. Skidmore didn't see one rodeo participant, though he looked. In fact, Long Pine looked pretty dead.

The desk clerk was at least one hundred years old and was capable of assigning rooms and checking people in and out while fully asleep. He put Skidmore in room 556.

"Room 556? There are only four floors."

"This here's the penthouse. It's on the roof. Nice view of the airport. How long you stayin'?"

"Fifteen, twenty years," Skidmore said. "I'm setting up a law practice. You got anything not on the roof?"

"Maybe you ought to practice somewhere else, then come here when you get good at it," the old man said, and he laughed hard at his joke. "Look here, this here's the penthouse, sir—it's our best room, no extra charge 'cause I assigned it to you arbitrarily. Holy shit, what'd you do to your ear?"

"Fell down, nothing serious."

"Look, sir. No offense, but I can see you're completely a drunk man, so I want to tell you something. This here hotel has rules. No visitors we don't know about. They call you from this phone, they don't go just trailin' off up into the place. We got a bouncer, too, case you think I'm kidding. So I advise you to go on up there to 556 and sleep it down. If you don't like the place, we'll change you tomorrow."

"This place full 'cause of the rodeo?" Skidmore asked. He dabbed at his ear with his shirt-sleeve.

"Rodeo?"

"The rodeo, you know." Skidmore winked.

"Ain't no rodeo here I know about," the old guy said. "Used to have one at Winner, but the Indians took it over. Got a helluva go-cart track."

"I'm talking about the rodeo that the . . . the girls take part in. You know."

"Ah, jeez, you mean the HOOKER rodeo!" The old man laughed. Skidmore conveyed his relief that at last he'd communicated.

"You a trucker, or what?" the old guy asked him.

"I told you, I'm an attorney at law."

"Well then," the old guy said, "you're the victim of false advertisement conducted by our city council about a year ago. They put posters up in all the damned truckstops from here to hell and high water. Guess some of 'em are still around. Never was no rodeo of that sort. Just a idea to get a little tourism, and to get the truckers to come in off the main highway just out half a mile. Pretty funny at the time." The old man chuckled and set the key on the counter. "Don't forget the rules, you hear?"

"I hear," Skidmore said. Hesitantly he picked up the ancient, tarnished key to 556.

"One more thing," the old guy said, pulling out a mimeographed sheet from a cubbyhole beneath the counter. "You mentioned you might be hangin' around—play softball?"

"Nope," Skidmore said.

"Nope," the old man said subvocally as he wrote on the sheet. "The lawyers mostly play for the Lutheran church. Ever go to no Lutheran church?"

"Nope," Skidmore said.

"Nope," the old man said, writing again. "If you was to play softball, what position would you be interested in playin'?" Skidmore stared straight at him, and finally the old man, waiting for a response, looked up from the paper.

Skidmore kept staring at him until the old man went back down through his bifocals to the mimeographed sheet. "No softball," he muttered as he wrote.

The room was actually a cupola on the roof of the hotel. It was an ordinary room, just stuck on top. You could step out onto the tarpaper-and-gravel roof and there, right behind the hotel, was the airport runway, blue lights forming a tall upside down V fading away up the horizonless dark. Skidmore went into the bathroom and threw up for several minutes. Just his luck, the toilet stopped up and overflowed. He had kicked off his boots and now his white socks were soaked in upchucked whiskey. Exasperated, he fell backwards onto the bed and didn't wake up until three the following afternoon.

He woke up because the phone was ringing. He would have answered it immediately but his head fell off. His head fell off and rolled across the floor so that the hanging-out tongue involuntarily licked the hotel room linoleum each time the head went face down. Or at least it felt like his head fell off. After a while he realized his head was still on and he couldn't think what he'd just seen go across the floor. Groggily he answered the phone.

"Hello."

"Front desk, sir," the caller said. "We have a gentleman down here who would like to see you. He's wearing a Nazi helmet with Viking antlers on the side. He says he would like to discuss Federal Express."

Skidmore was staring down at the linoleum pattern. "I see. Did you get his name?" he asked.

"No. He's right here, if you want to speak to him."

"Just get his name, if you wouldn't mind."

Skidmore heard scuffling on the other end of the line, and then someone else had the phone.

"Hello?" the person said.

"Yes?"

"Sir? I wonder if you couldn't come down here a moment, before they start happy hour and everybody in this whole town gets drunk and freaked out." The voice seemed rather polite.

"What is it that I can do for you?"

"Well, are you the lawyer or is this the wrong room?"

There was a good idea, Skidmore thought to himself. "This is the wrong room, I'm sorry. This is room 317. No lawyer here," he laughed. "Haulin' cattle, Cheyenne to Omaha. Need a ride?"

"Listen, sir, I'm real sorry about this. Excuse me one moment."

Then Skidmore heard him speaking to the desk clerk. "You scrawny son of a bitch, you hooked me up to the wrong room—what room was it?" he said. Sounded like a scuffle.

"Room 556," the clerk answered. Sounded like something was around his neck.

"Sir, I'm real sorry. We've got the wrong number here. I didn't mean to bother you. We're recruitin' lawyers for the Federal Express, the softball team, you know? I apologize, and my friends apologize."

"That's just fine, young man," Skidmore said. "No trouble at all. Good afternoon to you." He hung up.

Fast, Skidmore got his suitcase and his boots and quickly tied the bedsheets together. As he left the room, the phone began ringing again. Hanging the sheets around a drainpipe at the back of the hotel, he tossed down his suitcase and lowered himself to the fourth-floor catwalk, strolled to the fire escape, went down it and found his suitcase, then walked over to the Airport Bar and Grill for a late breakfast.

Eating, he sat in a booth close to the front window, so he could watch activities on the roof of the hotel and, by looking up an alleyway, could also see if it was all-clear out front. Several members of what was evidently a motorcycle gang stirred around out front. They had Federal Express written on the backs of their T-shirts, above a skull and crossed softball bats. After a while, the mad dog who had called him came storming out the front door of the hotel, climbed on his motorcycle, and sped away doing a wheely and causing dirt to fly straight up behind him like a rooster tail. The rest of the gang followed, raising a storm of dust and noise in the downtown area. After downing five scrambled eggs and a glass of red beer, Skidmore went back over to the hotel. The desk clerk on this shift was a young man, and Skidmore sat his bag down and asked for a room.

"How long will you be staying?" the clerk asked.

"One night," Skidmore said. He filled out the register, using the name of his friend McFarland, who was completely fictitious. Early in his adult life Skidmore had created McFarland to have someone to talk to, a very best friend—and McFarland, luckily, over the years, had consented to allow the friendship to continue. While not positive, Skidmore was fairly sure the friendship would not be harmed by his taking the liberty of using McFarland's name in this special instance.