Читать книгу A Ford in the River - Charles Rose - Страница 8

The brakes went out at the traffic light. My right foot crashed on the brake pedal. We ran the light, doing sixty. The emergency jammed. Mona gasped. Birdbaths, horrendous porch swings, a feed and seed store, a barber pole streamed by like bits of wreckage. I geared down, regained control of the car, felt it glide to a stop like a taxi. Sweat trickled out of my armpits.

I switched off the ignition.

“We are not going to make D.C. tonight,” said Mona, lighting a cigarette. She handed over the cigarette.

I took a drag and gave it back to her. Mona was right. We were not going to make D.C. tonight. Or tomorrow. The nation’s capital was nearly four hundred miles away. Mona had pushed us along all evening, setting sunup as our ETA. Out of Cincinnati along the Ohio River, doing seventy on the two-lane, eighty on I-64. We were deep into West Virginia when Mona ordered me off the freeway. She said we couldn’t go on because a black sedan was tailing us. She clenched her fists.

Arc lights on the courthouse square, one sputtering, stone facades and cornices of drab buildings, a church on the opposite corner—hulking and short-steepled, flaunting its dank red brick. A carillon chimed a hymn. I walk through the garden alone.

A neon sign flaked rouge off, sifting down to the sidewalk. The hotel was four stories high, the windows set close together. Beyond the neon, a lobby spilling sour light like bile. Mona looked up at the neon, spelling out Spink Hotel.

“Should be pink, not Spink,” Mona said.

I said carefully, “Here there are no pink hotels.”

“Okay, it’s a Spink.” Mona grabbed her loaf-shaped makeup kit after slipping on her cheapo wedding band. Got out of the car. “Remember if anyone stops us, it was your idea to stop here. I wanted to make D.C. tonight.”

We had to stay here until I could have the brakes fixed, in this hotel in West Virginia, in a town that looked clean, respectable. Only the church looked ugly, still chiming about the garden. And the joys I share are beyond compare. What joys, whose? The carillon stopped with a lurch, an off-pitch, cretinous sound. I hauled the suitcase out of the trunk.

I followed Mona into the lobby. Metal ashtrays, sour green leather wing chairs, rust-flecked, junk cigarette machine. From his cubbyhole behind the registration desk the night clerk wobbled to greet us. He wore a Civitan pin in the left lapel of his iron gray gabardine suit coat. His head was bald as a billiard ball.

Mona sat down in a wing chair, crossed her legs, wiggled her toes in espadrilles, pulled her miniskirt down. She opened a package of Chiclets and popped a wad into her rosy mouth. I asked the desk clerk for a room for two.

He sized us up and shook his head like a deacon seeing his church profaned, then relaxed, realizing a buck was a buck, even at Spink Hotel. “A single is all we have available. I can arrange to put in a cot.”

“As you see we’re married.”

As he saw Mona was jailbait. But he opened up the register. “Sign it mister and missus.”

My ball-point signature skittered into illegibility. The night clerk turned to the mail slots and extracted a key with a dull green tab. Room 411 it told me. Mona was out of her chair, hugging her makeup kit as she made for the stairs. The night clerk lit up a Camel. He took a drag and coughed phthistically, spraying ashes on gray gabardine.

“We can’t afford to have your kind here. One night will be your limit. Or do you want me to call the law?”

I said we would be leaving tomorrow. Maybe late. We had car trouble.

“Two nights then.” He took another drag, closed up the register, turned toward the plate-glass window, the street outside. I turned too. A patrol car idled in front of the church. My car was parked by a meter but we had an out-of-state tag. At this hour worth checking out, along with certain guests at the hotel, who could be taken into custody if such was the night clerk’s whim. The night clerk nodded me toward the stairs. The patrol car glided out of view.

I passed the junk cigarette machine. There was a gum machine by the stairs, dispensing Chiclets along with other brands. Mona’d parked her wad on the coin slot. Thumbed it like a kidney. She’d kept on climbing, to the fourth and top floor, I was sure.

I climbed the first flight of stairs. Alone on the darkened landing I tried to clear my mind. For eighteen hours a day I had kept Mona off the streets of Cincinnati. Her sister was three hundred miles away, in Richmond, our real destination. Sally had promised me she would take charge of Mona’s care. There Mona might get straightened out, live without me. With me she would only get worse. Yet I knew, as I stood on the landing, mustering strength to keep climbing, that I wouldn’t be able to let her go. That was why I’d veered off the I-64 exit ramp, come to Spink Hotel.

Mona was still asleep. I lit a cigarette and got out of bed. I straddled a rickety chair, rocking with a furry squeak. Our room had a ponderous chiffonier beside a door to a tiny bathroom. On the other side of the bed a window overlooked a funeral home. Dust hung in the sunlight streaming in, lacing the carpet with hieroglyphics. The bed had a low headboard depicting a pastoral scene in low relief—a nymph being enticed by a satyr, in a scratchy, ivory stain. The satyr was playing a flute of some sort and the nymph was shielding her seat of love with both hands, fingers entwined. Smoking, I rocked with the back of the chair.

From a room below I heard hammering, intermittently, yet with what seemed a willed intent. I was now on my second cigarette. Smoke from the first blimped over the bed. In her sleep, Mona’s breath mushroomed, lofted smoke toward the scarred plaster ceiling. Rust streaks showed in Mona’s frowsy hair. The hammering had given way to the sweeping clip of a carpenter’s plane. Next door, beyond the bathroom, the chiffonier, a lachrymose bleat of a radio emitted theme songs from old soaps, “Stella Dallas,” “Lorenzo Jones,” “Mary Noble Backstage Wife.” Must be a geezer next door, over ninety, or were these songs meant for me. He walks with me and He talks with me, the carillon chimed, way off key.

Mona slept like she used to once, as if in a sodden sleep of depression. She used to total sixteen hours, waking up to watch Turner Classics, play solitaire, do crossword puzzles. I would come home to find her waiting up for me, with a list of words she was stuck on. Animal waste, urea, golden brass, ormolu. Oh the blessing of torpor, easy ease as I did my tasks, drove a taxi, worked in a housepainters crew, did whatever it took to keep her happy.

All this before the telephone call from her shadowy lover, Roebuck.

The chiming stopped, the radio stopped, the carpenter planing coffin boards stopped, in sequence, as if on cue. I pictured Roebuck’s oblong noggin, his bulging, baleful left eye. A black patch masked his right eye. I had inquired concerning the telephone call—your lover, who might he be? She had touched up a photo of Tom Cruise, inked in an eye patch, blackened in teeth. “This isn’t the Roebuck I know. He’s the Roebuck you think you know.”

She raised her head up to the headboard. Scrutinized me out of a sunny haze, knowing instantly where my mind was, on the Roebuck she, not I, had known. She’d claimed Roebuck was a lobbyist for Harlan County Strip mines. Promoting strip mining in D.C., driving a tan SUV. She had met Roebuck in a Covington, Kentucky, strip club in her last little manic excursion across the Ohio River—where she had been—mistake—a cooperative cocktail waitress. She had run off with Roebuck in his SUV, barreled around D.C. with him for a glorious month while I suffered an agony of worry back home. Dumped, she had come back home. Come back to me on a Greyhound bus.

Roebuck had sent her a postcard, last week, the Washington Monument. He had printed in caps “I need you. Let bygones be bygones,” and in lower case “Meet me at the Harrington Hotel. A fleabag on Tenth Street.” He’d telephoned her at home. I’d picked up the receiver. Roebuck’s baritone had bombarded my ear like amplified Ezio Pinza. Can you connect me with Mona? Connect? A singing telephone call. Unwillingly I had connected him to her. Before she picked up the receiver she had taken a drag from my cigarette. She had stubbed it out, as she was doing now.

“We are going to march on the White House. You were one of us but you finked out.”

Said Mona. The loonies, the kooks, the feebs, the nuts and bolts of the nation. Fink out, a Roebuck locution. My Roebuck’s, not hers. For only I used words like fink out. Only I had thought of marching on the White House once, so far back in time it seemed primeval.

Mona squinted. She clenched her fists and rolled her eyeballs. She was receiving messages. My gut knotted as I waited for her to get through yet another delusion. Her demons were floating across the room as she motioned them out the window. “Out! No, don’t move! Sit!” Sally had to keep her in Richmond. Sally’s husband had to pay for the therapy. Alex, a textile engineer.

This D.C. business was a ruse. No march. No Roebuck.

“We don’t need you anymore. We’re strong. We have each other.” From Mona, in a monotone.

I was able to get out of the chair. “I’m going to telephone Roebuck personally.”

Extemporize, invent! Get her mind into phase with mine. A bar of Dial and a can of Rise would serve for receiver and mouthpiece. For these I went to the bathroom, pried the Dial off a squash colored stain, grabbed the Rise from the medicine cabinet—our Dial, our Rise. Squirting Rise into my left ear, I put in that call to D.C. Front desk, please. Long distance!

“We can’t make it tonight. The goddamned brakes went out last night. We’re stuck here, stranded, up shit creek without a paddle.”

I lowered the bar of Dial. Felt the seashell pulse in my tympanum, the Rise glob insanely seething. Heard, or thought I heard, a whisper, insidious. Give Mona up. Put her out of your life. Or was that Roebuck whispering?

I laid the Dial and the Rise on the bed table. Watched her pick them up, her moving lips.

“Roebuck,” said her lips. She clenched her fists, she glared at me. “Please don’t try to telephone him. You know he won’t listen to you.”

“I will listen,” I protested passionately, knowing she wouldn’t listen, heed, do anything to help me help her. I had to watch her go to the bathroom, I had to sit on the bed while she brushed her teeth. This she did with concentration. Her straggly hair showing rust streaks which she seemed to be trying to lather out. Soapsuds laced her nipples and aureoles, seen through the bathroom mirror. The pipes groaned as she rinsed.

We had a late breakfast in the coffee shop. It adjoined the bar and beauty parlor, these facing away from the lobby, fronting a side street of plum-colored brick. There was a familiar marble-topped counter, a tarnished nickel coffee urn, booths, a tessellated floor, an ornate cash register from times gone by, a glassed-in cigar and candy counter, another with slices of various pies, apple, lemon meringue, pumpkin.

Mona was slumped on her side of the booth. Her eyes were dulled. She was wearing her purple T-shirt, appliqued with a yellow cello. Brown crystals choked up the salt cellar. The plum-colored bricks outside were rippling with maple-leaf shadows.

Suddenly Mona spun something dire for me out. “This town is a good place for you. Your family is here. Your friends. Me, I’ll be moving on. On and on,” she crooned.

I made myself tune Mona out. The plum-colored brick, the soft maples, the darker green of a tree lawn on the other side of this side street, an embankment, steps, a front porch, green shingles, blazing white imbricated boards. Black Packard, Dad’s, in the driveway. Other members of my family in other booths, for the coffee shop was familiar, the cashier had a bow tie, red polka dot, a clip-on, like Dad had on. He had nicotine-stained teeth like Dad.

I thought of E. A. behind the prescription counter of the vanished West Side Drug Store. A laxative is it you need now. Or a ladies aid. Or salted nuts. Is it Sal Hepatica you need.

“It fits,” I exclaimed, “it figures.”

Mona’s rosy lips agreed. “Right, it figures. Your dad is in a back booth. The old fart who balled his fountain girls.”

“When he had the chance,” I said buoyantly, for we were having a conversation.

I ordered black coffee. The coffee arrived in pea-green mugs that I had once beheld brimming in Ovaltine. “Okay, so my Dad did my Mom dirt.”

Mona patted the yellow cello. The conversation was over. “I want soft-boiled eggs,” said Mona when the waitress showed for the second time. Her iron-gray hair and beaming face loomed like a No Smoking sign. I stared at—who else—Mom. Right here! Bless her! Love her! It was Mom who’d kept my Ovaltine hot. E. A’s Vera C. E. A.’s blood pressure she’d monitored—made him lay off strudel and shortcake. Now she waited to take my order.

“You make his sunny-side up. And lotsa hash browns. Lotsa toast.” And then, “Looky there in the back booth.” Mona smacked her purple T-shirt, cello reeling, wambling, straightening up. “It’s your cousin. Your nutty uncle and aunt.”

A chubby lad munching a grilled cheese, slurping a cherry Coke through a straw. Sweet pickle slice, sweet disposition, sitting next to Uncle Dell. Uncle Dell ran a ladies’ shoe store. Aunt Flo juggled Indian clubs back in vaudeville days at B. F. Keith’s. Uncle Dell chewed on a dead cigar, incessantly working crossword puzzles. Urea again. Ormolu. Cousin Robert made model airplanes. His fingers were gummed with airplane glue. Hunks of balsa wood in the bathtub. It was a race with hungry white corpuscles that Cousin Robert had run and lost. Yet here he was slurping a cherry Coke, munching grilled cheese. Dell and Flo wolfed down pasta. They were good people living careful lives. They ignored my funk, Mona’s mania as they might cripples. Just passing through, I grinned at them. Try not to let on they are sickos, Morse-coded their chinking forks.

Mona blurted with conviction. “Only creeps and weirdos, sickos will be members of Roebuck’s family. Every one of us is an only child.”

Mistake! I wanted to cry out, shake her into sense. There would be Sally, Alex in Richmond. She wasn’t alone. Help was on the way. A fly buzzed in the sun haze, the simmering, down-home apathy. Mona chain-smoked, pecked at her hash browns, cracked a soft-boiled egg, let the yolks ooze out. A Greyhound brayed on the plum-colored brick. The coffee tasted like bitter lye, as if it had pooled in the nickel urn for a month. Nobody was slurping a cherry Coke. Mona eyed the cashier’s bow tie. She ground her cigarette into egg yolk.

“Either you get me some chewing gum or I turn you in to the management.”

Again the carillon, the chimes. I picked up a fork and a butter knife.

“Hello! Put me through to Roebuck.” The fork pricked my earlobe. The blade of the knife nuzzled my lower lip. “No, you’re not going to put me on hold. I’m a taxpayer. I won’t stand for it. You put me through and I mean now.”

A fly was buzzing our eggy plates. I brandished the butter knife, shouting. “You tell Roebuck I don’t have a family. I have Mona. Only Mona.”

Mona was clenching her fists.

Mona was curling her big toes. Her feet were propped on the footboard. She was staring out the window. She had taken a Valium willingly in the coffee shop after I bribed her with Chiclets. A police car jarred the plum-colored brick. Temper tantrum, I’d thought of signaling. The all too familiar carillon chimed A Mighty Fortress Is Our Lord. All this before noon.

We had taken a tour of the town, up Main Street to the surrounding hills, down a side street, left, then left again, down Oak Street toward the funeral home. A cedar tree in the front yard, a hearse in the porte cochere. Viewed from Oak, straight on, the funeral home—with its ivied brick, its rambling porch, its mansard roof—should have resembled a harmless domicile, not a giant hen laying a bloody egg. We sat down on the curb, rested awhile. Big daddy, little Mona smoked cigarettes, courted a vagrancy rap. As I discoursed, Mona rubbernecked.

“Outside of Xenia, Ohio, there is this data bank. In case of sabotage or malfunction its countless records and dossiers can be shunted off to D.C. My divorces, your abortion, all our sins and errors and our slip-ups are on record, mark my words. The day you ran away from home, your first coke hit, on record. My DUI’s, my frantic lust. They have a data bank in Xenia. For the losers who will go first! For the oddballs, the peeping toms, the stewbums over fifty. Baby our days are numbered.”

A steady stream of traffic flowed past us, like a funeral procession, pickups, sedans, SUV’s, a decrepit coupe. The jingle of loose fan belts, the whickering slap of corroded plugs mingled with boom boxes. Finally, only birds and maple leaves delineated a breeze soft and silent like a balm.

“Tell all that shit to Roebuck.” Mona stood up, lit a cigarette. She was skywriting big and little R’s with smoke from her cigarette. The Roebuck I knew, eye patch, oblong noggin, remained hidden from me, like the birds I heard in the foliage.

“Don’t tell me my days are numbered. Yours are. Always have been.”

Along with E. A’s, Uncle Dell’s, Aunt Flo’s, Cousin Robert’s. Mine too. Me, her husband. Washed up, replaced by Roebuck. Mona’s dove-gray eyes were turned on me, quietly scanning me up and down. For a nanosecond she was beautiful.

The Chiclets were on the chiffonier, on one side of an Indian club I had sized up as a delusion. I turned to the open window. A hearse was still in the porte cochere. A cigar butt stuck on the driveway. Mona crooked her big toes. She sat up and turned to the satyr, thumbing Chiclets into its penis. I gripped the neck of an insubstantial Indian club, screwing its head into my left ear.

“Front desk, please. Long distance. I mean long, the Washington Monument.”

I heard a seething inside my left fist. I lowered the Indian club, replaced it on the chiffonier. A useless instrument, this telephone. I rummaged through Mona’s loaf-shaped makeup kit. Found the Valium, went to the bathroom. The stain on the basin of the sink took on the shape of a fetus. Running water wouldn’t eradicate it—and wouldn’t drown out Mona’s jubilation.

“Roebuck. Babe, it’s Mona. Yes, I reversed the charges. Okay, I won’t call you again.” The things she was offering him. Exotic patterns of sex, highs I had never dreamed of. My face in the mirror was a guardian’s face, jowled and haggard, obsolete. The muffled chimes were back, the planing of coffins, the hammering. I gulped a Valium, steadied my hands.

“Him? He’s nothing. He can never be what you are to me. That’s why he’s trying to trick me.”

Slowly, I turned off the water.

I’d had a beer in the hotel bar. I’d put in a long-distance call to Mona’s sister in Richmond, Virginia. I told Sally about my little problem here, brake failure, Mona going bonkers. I told Sally Mona had taken a sleeping pill. Sally put Alex on the phone.

“Eddie you must be on the sauce.”

“Get over here as soon as you can.”

“It’s three hundred miles. Are you out of your mind?”

I hung up on Alex, why not, what good was he to me? I went out to the lobby and sat down in one of the wing chairs and stared out at the street. I thought of Mona asleep up the stairs in room 411. Several sleeping pills had done the job. I remembered how before she had taken the pills, she had craftily eyed her glass of water.

In the rouge light outside a girl carrying a loaf shaped makeup kit was standing under the neon. She was ambling across the street, toward the arc lights pooling the courthouse square.

The night clerk opened the register. With a ball-point he scratched out my signature. I got up, trudged toward the exit. I left the hotel, breathed in noxious particles of neon like bug spray. Then sweet night air. Mona, a distant figure now, in the last of the arc lights, was running. I would follow her to the edge of town, catch up, we would hitch a ride to D.C. We would make D.C. by tomorrow night, find a hotel, any hotel. Crawl into a bed like a diving bell, sleep, drift on, sink deeper.

She was skipping invisible rope in the headlights of a patrol car. One officer picked up her makeup kit. I had to walk away from Spink Hotel, toward the patrol car, its flashing red and blue lights. What I had done before I would do again. Follow her, try to extricate her. See her as somehow recoverable. Or was I the seen, in a tracking shot still unrolling as the red and blue lights glided farther away, the hotel receding behind me, as I clopped over plum-colored bricks—crying Mona come back to me Mona—toward Roebuck, my Roebuck, his oblong noggin swelling, his one good eye drilled into mine.