“I can stay the fucking night,” he says, as the car slips to a halt, “but not any longer than that. I’ve got to be getting the fuck back. This, this is,” leaning over the wheel, looking about through the windshield, the bated chug of the idling engine, the half-empty lot under relentless sunlight, the bulk of the motel’s two-storey wing, dusty pink, the trim painted white where it isn’t a dark brick red, “not the place for the fucking likes of me. Did they,” he squints into a frown under those pushed-up goggles, “paint, the whole fucking building, while we were out?”
Jo, in the passenger seat, watches through silvery aviator sunglasses, a label still pasted to one lens, UV Protection, as he leans even further forward, peering about. She says, after a moment, “No?”
“Because it was not that fucking,” he says, sitting back, “I mean, it was the same color as your fucking,” taking her in, a cord-handled brown paper bag in her lap, weightily full, it says Fred Meyer in thick red letters, and her short-sleeved shirt of salmon, the wide maroon placket of it edged with white piping. “Huh,” he says, deflating.
“Yeah,” says Jo, hauling up another cord-handed brown paper bag, as weightily awkward, from the floorboard. “Look, if it helps at all, I can hook you up with a room, later. This place is never anywhere near capacity,” but he’s shaking his head, as if annoyed by the very suggestion, “no, seriously,” she says, gathering the cords in one hand, reaching with the other for the handle of the door. “Just come by any time after nine, I’ll get you a key.”
“I ain’t about to start sleeping in a God damned bed, your grace,” says Sweetloaf, with a wince, “there’s not a fucking thing about this fucking situation that calls for that level of, of whatever the fuck. I mention my fucking itinerary because of the implications it might present to your plans for whatever kind of fucking response.”
“I’m not,” she says, letting go of the handle, “going back,” and “I know, boss, I know,” he’s saying, “you made that pretty fucking clear.”
“It’s nothing personal,” she says, quickly, “it’s just, there’s some shit I have to, just, deal with, and it’s best for all concerned if,” but “Boss,” he’s saying, “boss, I fucking, my lady–”
“Don’t,” she says, quietly.
“This is something you really ought to fucking take up with herself, you know?”
“Well,” says Jo. “Got her number? And a phone?”
“I got you some pens, too,” he says, a flutter of a gesture toward the bags, “and some fancy note paper, what is it, stationery, while you, uh, were,” he shrugs, “so,” he says, “I’ll check back tomorrow before I go. You got anything, I can take it back with me. Otherwise, it’ll just have to fucking wait till I,” he sighs, heavily, “get back here.”
“Which is when,” says Jo.
“You think I’m fucking planning any of this?”
“Yeah,” says Jo, “well.” Yanking the handle of the door, shoving it open with a black-denimed knee, she sets a new Chuck Taylor on the pavement, black, all of it black, laces, toe-cap, sole, insignia, and braces herself to swing the bags out, but halts, looking to him over her shoulder.
“So,” he says. “Should I bother?”
“What?”
“Coming the fuck back tomorrow.”
“Of course,” she says. “What I was, what I wanted,” she looks away, then back, “you got another one of those bills you could break off for me?”
He sets the squat glass tumbler on a coaster before her, brimming with liquor brownly ruddy, and circular chips of ice. She lays a slip of paper on the dark wood of the bar, an oblong a bit more than twice as long as it is wide, black ink on green-tinged buff, a hundred-dollar bill, crisply pristine. His brow quirks as he sets his hand, his fingertips, on the one edge of it. “I have to ask,” he says. “I’m not keeping the change on this one, am I.”
Her shoulders lift, a gesture of ah, “Twenty percent of a well drink?” she says. “Best I can do. Funny, isn’t it, how,” lifting her hand from the bill to take up the tumbler, “you get even a little bit of money, you end up feeling broker,” slushy clink of ice as she twiddles the glass, “than you did when you had nothing,” and she sips.
“Hilarious,” he says, folding the bill away, turning toward the cash register down at the other end. She takes another, longer, deeper sip, turning on the stool to get to her feet, and nearly crashes into the man stood too close behind her, slopping whiskey from her glass, “Shit,” she says, switching it from the one hand to the other, shaking out her fingers as she sits herself back down, “did I get any on you?”
“Joliet Kendal Maguire?” he says, and her apologetic grin is washed away. She looks him up and down, slender and tall in a sharp black suit, his white shirt scored by a skinny black tie, his thinning dark hair closely cropped, eyes hidden by a pair of classic black sunglasses, and recognition splashes across her face, “You!” she says.
“My name is Mr. Loudermilk,” he’s saying, “I need you to,” but then, shaking his head, a quickly uncertain flutter, “we’ve met,” he says.
“You got shot,” she says.
“That’s immaterial,” he says, a flicker of a gesture, and then the recitation resumes, “I need you to come with me. It’s for your own protection, I assure you.”
“Yeah,” says Jo, “you guys, you need to coordinate better. That’s why you already put me here, for my own protection. And, ah, everyone else’s.”
His brows pinch behind those sunglasses, a frown. “We didn’t, put you here,” he says, folding his hands together, fingers interlaced.
“Upchurch,” says Jo.
His index fingers lift, steepled, “She,” he says, “isn’t,” but then, more deliberately, “she’s not,” he says, but then falters, and “Yeah,” says Jo, turning away on her stool, “you really need to get your stories straight.”
He leans over close beside her, hand braced by her elbow on the bar, “You need to come with me,” he says.
“I need,” she says, “to get my change, enjoy my drink, I need to figure out what I’m gonna say to, to, there’s a lot of things I need to be doing. None of them’s got a goddamn thing to do with you.”
“Everything okay?” says the bartender, warily close, bills folded between his fingers and thumb, and “Yes,” says Jo, “we’re fine, it’s all okay, yes,” taking the money, rifling through it to peel out a single bill and hand it back, “bring me another,” she says. He looks from her, to the glass, to Mr. Loudermilk looming beside. Nods, once, and steps away. “I assure you,” says Mr. Loudermilk, clipped and quiet, “Joliet Maguire, that whatever–”
“You don’t get to call me that,” snaps Jo, tucking the rest of the money into a pocket as she turns on the stool to glare up at him. “Maybe I don’t trust Upchurch, but you? I don’t know you at all, or your friends, and you sure as shit don’t know me. So she’s one up on you, there.”
“I know what you have,” he says, flatly grim. “I know it has a hold on you. I know what it can do, and what it’s already done. What it’s doing, even now. You must. Come. With me.”
“You know,” says Jo, lifting her tumbler nearly drained, “I’m actually kinda glad to see you? It means I can cross you off my list. I’m back down to fifteen. Yay, me.” She drinks the last of it down. “Fifteen what,” he says, but she’s continuing, “What that means, I’m talking to you, what it means is, if you start to get the least bit annoying, say, I just have to pull out my gun,” she lifts her hand, index and middle fingers extended, thumb cocked, “and pop! you’re out of my hair for the next little while. But,” she says, leaning close, “you really piss me off? Maybe then I let it out, this thing I’ve got,” she taps her breast twice, three times, just above her heart. “Wipe you out of ever having been. No one would know. No one could possibly know– heck, maybe you aren’t the first they’ve sent. Maybe I’ve done it already. Who could say?” He’s looking up and off by the time she gets to this point, at anything but her. “Well, Mr. Loudermilk?” she says.
“You can’t,” he says, looking down to her again. “You couldn’t possibly.” He’s shifted, drawn back, straightened his shoulders. “You should come with me,” he mutters. “Ms. Maguire, I assure you. It is very much for your own good.”
“I already got plenty of good,” she says, turning away.
“I’ll be around,” he says, and sets a blank white card on the bar by her glass. “You’ll call.”
“Don’t wait up,” she says.
“Terrible habit, I know,” says the bartender, taking up the empty glass, setting a full one in its place, “but I’m gonna ask, again, is everything okay?”
“It’s nothing,” says Jo, pushing the card aside as she lifts the new glass for a sip, then a gulp. He’s wiping a patch of the bar that isn’t noticeably damper than the rest of it. “I mean,” he says, “was he, ah, some sort of cop?”
She snorts. “You know what they say. All cops are bastards.”
“The hell is my stuff?”
Her mother sits up on the bed and aims the remote at the big screen television there on the credenza, shutting off the stern detective, You mean Mackenzie, she’s saying, and the screen goes black. “Shut the door,” she says.
Jo takes a ragged breath, then turns with a jerk to seize the door and slam it, clunk and thunk of the flip-lock hardware bouncing with the impact. “What did you do with my stuff?” she says belligerently, “all my, bags, the clothing, that I just got, that I have been, it was, I had it all still in the bags, in two-seventeen–”
“Jo,” says her mother.
Jo’s mouth snaps shut. Her arms, spread wide, drop to slap against her jeans.
“It’s all right here,” says her mother, pointing to the drawers in the credenza, “perfectly safe. As will you be.”
“Ma,” says Jo.
“When you are not cleaning rooms, or working the front desk, you will be here. With me. You will not be using any more, empties, by yourself.”
“Mom,” says Jo, slumping with a glower. “That’s not gonna–”
“You were out all night, last night,” scooting, pushing herself to the edge of the bed, “you came back in such a state,” getting stiffly to her feet, “Lord only knows what you were–”
“That’s none of your business, Mom. You don’t need to know what I’m doing every goddamn hour of every goddamn–”
“You are high, Joliet!” Her mother’s expression stonily resolved, she takes a step away from the bed, toward Jo. “Or drunk. Already. Again. It’s not even five o’clock in the–”
“It’s Sunday!” snaps Jo. “I’m a goddamn adult! I get a fucking day off, and you don’t get to–”
“Attitude!” snarls her mother, taking another step, and a deep, restorative breath. “You have no job,” she says, quietly, another step, and another, quite close now. “You have no money. You have no house. You came to me for help, and you will take that help as I give it to you, or you can march yourself right on out that door. Go back to your friend, your dealer, your, your,” biting her lip, “pimp,” she says, “whoever it was who bought you all that,” looking over to the credenza, “those things,” she says, but yelps as Jo with a lurch pushes past her, headed for that credenza, “Joliet!” she cries, but doesn’t hasten after. Jo’s yanking open one drawer, another, “Where,” she says, slamming the first one shut, “where’s the box. Dad’s box. Where’s Dad’s box,” yanking open another drawer, looking back over her shoulder to her mother, who’s wordlessly pointing, past her, past the credenza, to the unlit alcove at the back, the closet there, across from the bathroom. Jo slams the drawers shut, heads over and back to haul the closet door aside with a shuddering squeak, peering into the shadows, stoops of a sudden to yank open the box there on the floor of the closet, rummaging about.
“Jo,” says her mother, hesitant, querulous.
She stands, shuts up the closet more carefully. Turns about, a composition book in her hands, the cover of it starkly marbled black and white. “Jo,” says her mother, more certainly, but Jo’s looking past her, heading past her, for the door to the room that she opens, “Joliet!” says her mother, but she steps out, closing it gently, but firmly, behind.
The office, cramped, warmly lit by low afternoon light, a young man behind the counter who doesn’t look up from the glossy black book in his hands until Jo steps up and around to his side, opening a drawer, “the heck?” he says.
“Pen,” she says, digging into the drawer, paper-rustle and plastic-crinkle. His one hand keeping his place in his book, he reaches across himself to fish a pen from the jar at the other end of the counter, then leans over and down to offer it to her. She looks up a moment, to the pen, to him, then back down to the manila envelope in her hands, softly wrinkled.
“Jo,” he says.
She looks up once more, and down again, then tucks the manila envelope back into the drawer. She takes the pen.
“Wendy being a bit much?”
“Don’t ask,” she says.
Outside, the unseen ocean somewhere behind and the sun, angled hot and high, her shadow a sharp black stub bobbing before as she sets off up the street, the two-storey wing to her left, the one-storey stretch and outbuildings to the right, both painted a buttery beige and trimmed in umber, a couple of pickup trucks, the sedan, the minivan, sunlight piercing from glass and chrome and candygloss finishes, baking dust-clouded fenders, all of that left behind. The sidewalk ends, and she steps from concrete to dying grass, Community Acupuncture, says a low sandwich board to the right, Farmers Insurance, a sign planted there to the left, where a lawn’s been paved to make a compact lot. Beyond, the houses encrease, elaborate, retreat behind larger and thicker screens of hedgery and tree-rows, even as the verges of the macadam crumble ever more irregularly. A trio of motorcoaches parked at varied angles to the left, no, one of them’s a paneled van, Mid Coast Plumbing, it says on the side. Two nearly identical bantam-weight SUVs side-by-side before a garage, the smallish house behind beetled by a high red deck. Across another street and up the gentle rise ahead, and just past the next intersection the pavement abruptly ends, though the street carries on for one more block, a stretch of graded gravel that crunches underfoot, lawns huddling close again, a black luxury pickup, smashed taillight repaired with dull grey tape. The gravel ends with the last of the lawns, a tattered burst of ivory bobbing, Queen Anne’s lace at the foot of a utility pole, a denuded trunk lifted straight and true to uphold its corner of the web of power lines above, and more flowers all about, blue and lavender lupines, a bright red shock of paintbrushes, low white asters, each in tended, segregated clumps, and she steps over the flowers, beneath the gravid bow of a transmission line, onto the grass, then into the trees.
The trees, a screen of low but enthusiastic alders she has to shoulder among, kicking her steps through underbrush that thins and recedes as shadows softly set, alder giving way to young upstanding Douglas firs, needled branches high above that reach to heavily, greenly screen the slope below from all that blazing sun. She looks about, one hand up to brush back her sweat-damp, colorless hair, cupping a moment the back of her head, her other hand up and out to balance herself, gripping the composition book, and she sets off leftwards, angling down the gentle slope until her feet find a path, bared earth sketched through tufts of grass and tangles of vine and brush, the retiring ferns, all this rich dark green that seems to be holding its breath, a thickly patient silence broken only by her footfalls as she makes her way, houses hidden away to her left now, trees and more trees to her right, but thinning ahead where the light grows stronger, a brightness falling from glimpses of hot white sky.
Out from under, here a clearing the line of firs behind her along the slope, given way to scrub and brush and more stands of alder as the slope evens out, the wood untangling to abruptly end by the dusty pavement of an access road looped about a smooth expanse of grass, marked by lines of chalk, two great athletic fields set side by side. Beyond, an empty parking lot, a pop of color, a playground, tucked against the anonymous beige bulk of a school, low and wide, but here, this rocky knuckle she steps up onto, topped by a crooked tree, short-trunked, but with great boughs broadly spread, an oak, older by far than the firs, lofting a proudly rounded crown of glossy green. A hand on the cracked and fissured bole, she steps around, careful of those sprawling roots, smiling to see there a hunch of them forked, an accidentally perfect seat at the foot of the tree she settles herself into, looking out over the fields, the school, the wooded hills beyond.
She sets the composition book and the motel pen on the one root gnarled beside her, and works something out of a pocket of those new black jeans, a small clear glassine envelope, corner of it pouched with glittering golden dust. She works in a finger and thumb for a pinch, and as she does so in this indirectly hot white afternoon her hands, the baggie, the dust are engulfed with a radiance that is not so much brightness as clarity, shadows sharpening, colors fixing, becoming more themselves. She lifts her pinch to press a smudge of gold in the air, drawing it into a glittering ring, closing her eyes, smiling, a deep, relaxing breath. That smudge of clarity diffuses, spreads, melting before her, and when she opens her eyes after another breath there’s the singular blue and yellow and red of that playground, primarily popped against the blankly quiet wall of the school, the empty green of the fields hatched with chalk, the hush of the canopy above her, and the high white sky.
She lays the composition book open on her lap, flipping quickly through to a blank page. Takes up the pen, uncaps it. Lifts it to her lips, lowers it to tap the paper once, twice. A twist, a turn, she starts to write.
