What’s in the bucket, stagnant beneath a drift of freshly frothy bubbles touched with lately golden light, it’s murky, filthily grey, splashing as the sponge is dropped exruptively overwhelming bubbles, light, and warmth. She sits back on her heels, shake of her head, back of her hand the wrist to her one temple, the other, swiping, short hair glossily bleached to a fakely translucent platinum, stripped of any color that might’ve lingered to leave room for all the possible colors to come rushing somehow in. The tub before her and the encompassing surround a fiberglass shell of seafoam green all slicked and smeared with streaks of suds and residual grime, trickled and dripping, popping.
She hoists the bucket with a grunt to tip it, careful of the lolling sponge, spilling filthy water into the bowl of a toilet likewise seafoam green. Her cargo shorts of frayed and ragged khaki, bleach-splotched, the velcro’d running shoes socklessly loose on her feet.
Clunk and rattle the bucket into the tub, tilted under the faucet she levers open, fresh water a whitely foaming gush that thunders at first, modulating as it fills. Her saggy, short-sleeved shirt buttoned all the way up to a collar the same dark green as the palm’s width placket, paneled to either side with a pale green almost but just enough not quite seafoam.
Shuts off the water, turning and twisting the weighty bucket to dump it, hurling water about to rinse away suds and smear but leaving, left behind touches, streaks, stubborn marring dregs. Fishes out the sponge to scrub at one, quickening, roughening, grinding with the heel of her hand to squeeze out greyly dribble and plop, but to no effect on the stain. She sits back, shakes her head, slams the sponge back in the bucket.
Up, then, lugging the bucket out of the bathroom into the bedroom without, beige carpet tightly woven wall to wall, somehow generally, vaguely grungy, though there’s no particular stain or worn, abraded patch that might be pointed out. Two queen-sized beds, headboards butted against the cream and pink striped wallpaper to the left, credenza to the right, flat black plane of a television screen hazed with dust all too clearly visible in the slice of daylight fallen through the open door, there to one side of the picture window, curtains drawn. A cart’s been wedged in the doorway, and she sets the bucket with its sponge on the lower shelf of it, then mechanically selects two folded towels from this stack, two smaller cloths from that, a mat folded square, each the same tenuous shade of much-laundered white, that she takes with her back and back into the bathroom, enclosed, windowless, harshly lit, green, to set them out, towels on the rack, cloths by the bowl of the sink, the mat, still folded, on the shelf beneath. Gets to her feet, unsteady in those shoes, one hand gripping, rubbing her other elbow, her upper arm beneath the sleeve, shifting to press the heel of it over her heart. Looks over the tub, still mottled about the length of it. Scowls.
“Green,” she says. And sighs.
Working the cart through the door, out onto the balcony lining the front here, along this second floor, the overhanging eave, the slatted railing a wornly chipped seafoam topped with a railing painted a darker forest, “Scuse,” someone’s saying, “scuse?” She looks up from the recalcitrant cart to see a woman leaned out of the next doorway down, brown hair tousled, baggy blue T-shirt, “donde,” she says, “no, wait, que es, uh, el, el wifi,” she’s waving a hand, looking for a word, “contra,” she says, but shakes her head, that hair a-flop, “el,” she says, “logios, ah,” and then, slowly, forcefully, “pass,” she says, “word? Password?”
Tugging an envelope from a slot on the cart, turning it over, she plucks a marker from the pocket of her shirt to scrawl $3@BREEZE on the back of it. Reaches leaning over the cart to hold it out to the woman who, after a moment, steps out to take it, black socks on the pebbled balcony, “Gracias,” she says.
“You’re welcome,” says Jo.
Straightening, frowning, taken aback, “Oh,” says the woman, “I’m sorry, I thought, I assumed, I mean, housekeeping, it’s usually, the staff, I mean, it’s usually, Mexicans, I mean immigrants, immigrants, I, uh, also, Honduras, but you, you – ”
“I was born here,” says Jo. “Well. Corvallis, but I, ah,” and the woman’s stepped up to the other side of the cart, “I should’ve known,” she’s saying, “I mean, you don’t really,” but “I grew up around here,” says Jo.
“Oh,” says the woman. Heel of her hand on the top of the cart, that envelope whitely twitching, tucked between her fingers as they tap tap tap, “well,” she says, “maybe, then, you could tell me,” leaning close, conspiratorially, “what’s a good place around here I could score?”
Digging in the pocket of her cargo shorts, she sits herself on a stool before the bar, then slaps on the dark wood a screwed-up twist of paper that she smooths into an oblong a bit more than twice as long as it is wide, black ink on green-tinged buff, a twenty-dollar bill. Brushing back her colorless hair with one hand, sliding the bill across the bar with the other, looking expectantly to the bartender there, who’s finishing the pour on a pint of beer with a flourish, “Jim Beam Honey,” she says, “and then after that, a well bourbon. Rocks.”
He hands the pint to a beefy young man, floridly sunned, then mimes a disapproving look at a watch that isn’t on his wrist. “You gonna get to that before six-thirty?”
“I’m ordering it now,” she says, lifting her hand from the twenty. “Bring it whenever.”
“Hey, I got it,” says the beefy young man, “happy hour, full price, whatever, it’s on me.”
Jo turns, slowly, looks him up and down, flip-flops, board shorts, amber sunglasses pushed up on his forehead, sideless T-shirt that says Do You Even Know How to Use the Three Seashells. “The hell it is,” she says.
He snorts, sloppily taken aback, and, cheerfully enough, says, “Fuck you, bitch,” before turning a little uncertainly away, beer held high, weaving around the thinly peopled tables toward his friends in a booth by the window up front.
Hunkered over, elbows on the bar, colorless head hung low over a squat glass tumbler with one last sip left of something on the golden side of amber, oily tinting the melting ice. Her eyes are closed. Two fingers on her left hand, index and middle, pressed together, lift away from the others, the bar, as she rolls her hand over, supinating her wrist. She crumples the gesture, flicks it away, picks up the glass and lifts her head to toss back the rest of what’s left with a clinking swallow. “Jo?” says someone, away off behind.
She sets the glass on the bar, slides it off to one side. Draws a second glass toward her, identically squat, but filled with something a bit darker, a touch more ruddy about the ice. “Jo,” says whoever it is, “is that,” somewhat more closely, “shit, it is you. Joliet Maguire. What the fuck.”
A hand still on the new glass, she turns, slowly, to look to her left. The woman stood there, elbow on the bar, trimly blond, sharp-chinned, crayola-yellow polo shirt with the collar flopped up on one side, thin gold thread about her throat, and Jo purses her lips. “There are,” she says, “like, three people in the world, who get to call me that.”
“Well, shit. I hadn’t seen you since graduation! The hell are you doing here, in the Strand, on a Thursday, of all places!”
“I wasn’t at graduation, Kirsten,” says Jo.
A slump against the bar, tock of that head, the eyes roll, “Kristen,” she says, a lilting lift at the end, taken aback, and “That’s what I said,” mutters Jo, turning back to her glass. “Check your ears.”
“So!” says Kristen, leaning close, a hand on Jo’s shoulder, “what are you, visiting? Beaching, for the summer? You didn’t move back, did you?”
“I’m staying, ah, with my mother,” says Jo.
“Oh,” says Kristen, “oh, oh no, I bet I know how that’s going, oh, oh wait,” that hand to her chest, fingers splayed, then twisting to point at Jo, “she still has that motel. You’re working, at that motel!”
Jo sips, swallows, “She manages the motel,” she says. “I’m helping out.”
“I bet.”
Jo turns, to look directly at sunny Kristen, leaning a touch closer. “What color is it,” she says, and Kristen’s grin slips quizzically, “What?” she says, her bonhomie stumbled.
“What color,” setting the glass down, “is the motel?”
“Green, Jo,” says Kristen, looking down to that two-tone shirt, then up again. “Like it has been, I mean, it hasn’t been painted for years.”
“Yeah,” says Jo, taking up the glass again. “I know.”
“Hey,” says Kristen, her haleness gentled. “I could see if Bex’ available, we could,” a shrug, that hand held offering up, “get some pizza, maybe? Catch up? Old times.”
Jo drinks down the rest of the bourbon, back of her thumb pressed to her lips a moment, as if to hold something in. “Another night, maybe,” she says. “I’ve got a date.”
The truly dangerous expedients, mutters the phone on a stand over there on the credenza, and the speaker pauses here, and somehow through the hiss of the carrier wave there’s an echoing sense of the space in which he’s speaking, of the size of the audience attently awaiting the next word, the next clause, of this leftist, says the phone, woke ideology, this, this cultural Marxism, and there’s a shift in the hiss at that, those words, a collective gasp to suck the air from whatever room, are camouflaged, says the phone, leaning into that word, behind a hundred and one persons! and the shouts and cries then, tinnily distant from whichever microphone, but nonetheless the next word’s shouted, clipped, movements! and the next, each syllable spitefully drawn out, or-gan-i-za-tions! and another moment, waiting, as the hubbub recedes, resumes a more quietly rapt attention, that our unenlightened, our complacent, and a shout at that, of approval, at the word, or outrage, at the notion, friends and neighbors, says the phone, never suspect, from year’s end, to “Mom,” says Jo, sat in the corner there, but the woman across the small round table holds up a hand, stump of a cigarette smoldering between her fingers, to be an adept, says the phone, and effective, “Mom,” says Jo again, more forcefully, even as she’s getting to her feet, stepping once, twice to the credenza, shirts, the phone’s saying, must have at all times in the forefront as she snatches it up, our minds as she pops a fingertip against the screen of it, shutting off the tirade, “Turn that back on,” says the woman with the cigarette, taking up the fork from beside her bowl.
“Mom.”
“I was listening to that, turn it back on.” Spearing a last bit of tuna from the detritus of her salad. “It’s a podcast, Mom,” says Jo. “Play it later. With headphones.”
“I don’t like headphones. They hurt my,” a couple-three wet coughs, “my ears.” Glaring through drifts of smoke. “Turn it back on.” She bites the tuna off the fork.
“He hates immigrants,” says Jo, “and black folks, and women, and queers and trans people and Jews, and by God he’s gonna do something about it. There. You’re all caught up.”
“There’s no need for attitude.”
“What we need,” says Jo, “is to talk about the tub in two-seventeen. Whatever bullshit, fly-by-night, cleaning supplies falling off the back of a truck joint you get your shit from, it cannot make a dent in whatever it was whoever it was did in that tub, however long ago it was. I,” shaking her head, pushing away her only partially depleted bowl, “we might have to,” she says, “refinish the fucking thing, I don’t know.”
Her mother, with a wince for the angled gerund, draws her cigarette in and up for a drag. “And you know,” she says, blowing out more smoke to disturb the sargasso’d shoals between them, “how to refinish a tub, do you,” the last couple of words hacked up with more coughs.
“There’s got to be how-to videos. I can figure it out.”
“And you intend we should, what, leave the room out of circulation, while you figure it out? And the, the smell, the noise? The disruption?” Coughing, again, she stubs out the butt in her bowl. “Has someone, has someone complained.”
“Mom.”
“Wait until someone complains! Until then, it’s fifteen minutes per room.”
“Mom.”
“Twenty-seven rooms! Fifteen minutes per room. That’s what you have, to get through the day.”
“Mom, I’m not there to spend fifteen minutes in a room. I’m there to clean the room. It takes longer than fifteen minutes, then it takes longer. Twenty-seven rooms is too many for just one person, I told you, you never should’ve, you never should’ve fired Griselda.”
“We must live, and work, within our means,” says her mother, plucking a fresh cigarette from a crinkling pack.
“I,” says Jo, but, shaking her head, she looks away, to the brief kitchenette that lines the back wall of the room, the cabinets, the sink, the narrow stove. The bowls, the two of them, on the table. She gets to her feet. “I’m gonna go sleep in one of the empties.”
“Jo,” says her mother, lowering the cigarette she’d been about to light.
“Nobody else is checking in tonight! You could, might as well, send Andy home, you want to save some fucking, money,” headed around the table, bumping into a chair, “Joliet!” snaps her mother, “you turn the Captain back on,” coughing, “right this instant!” but Jo’s seizing the knob, she yanks open the door, she’s out, across the walkway that lines the front of the low, one-storey wing, into the mostly empty parking lot, a couple of sedans, a truck there, she turns about, catching her breath, a hand to her chest, just below her clavicle, to the left of the sternum, pressed tight. Up and out, past the meagre slope that drops from the lot, the five-lane highway below, past the lit-up lot across the way, spread to skirt a big-box store, Grocery Outlet, says the high sign brightly red, past the low roofs scattered and the scrubby tangled trees, a glimpse, so far beyond, so flatly empty, metaled gold at once so dull and terribly, painfully bright beneath a bronzely lurid sky, the onerously burning sun efflorescing daylight in such richly brilliant streaks of falling yellow, of failing orange, of umber and white to ripple, pierce, to shadow and define the thinly vaporous scrim of cloud above the unseen shore.
Another, deeper breath. She lifts her hand away from her chest, fingertips lingering, pressing for just a moment more.
The office, cramped and dimly lit, a young man sat behind the counter, intent on the glossy black book in his hands, Cyclonopedia, it says on the front in thin white letters, Complicity With something obscured by his fingers. “Hey,” says Jo. “What do we got tonight. How many available.”
“Down to seven,” he says, turning a page. “Weekend’s kicking off, heck. Maybe you’ll get to turn on the No in front of Vacancy tomorrow.”
“I doubt it,” she says. “Go on, I’ll spell you a bit.”
“I’m good,” he says.
“Fifteen, twenty minutes, you must have something you want to go do.”
He lowers the book. “What about Wendy.”
“Captain Kemp’s Hour of White Power,” says Jo.
“Make it thirty,” he says, getting to his feet.
“You drive a hard bargain,” says Jo, letting him come out before she slips behind the counter, settling onto the crooked office chair with a squeak. “Oh,” he says, “Ricky’s already called once about the girls in two-fourteen, the noise.”
“Ricky the Fence hasn’t got a leg to stand on, in that particular department. I know what he’s talking about, I’ll keep an ear out. Go on. Get.” Smiling, until he’s turned away, out the door, closing it up behind him, and then the smile is gone.
She yanks open a drawer halfway down the stack of them to one side, riffling through with a crinkle of paper and plastic address windows a handful of narrowly business-sized envelopes, all of a blue-tinted cream, Havelok Sogge Hospitality, each of them says, a black logotype above the return address, all to tug out an older, much-used manila envelope, softly wrinkled, looking about as she wriggles the flap of it open. Works her fingers within among the loosely sheaved bills to tease one loose and out, closing up the envelope and slipping it back into place, all by touch, nudging the drawer shut with a knee, and only then does she look down to see what she’s retrieved, a single bill a bit more than twice as long as it is wide, black ink on green-tinged buff, 20, the numerals in each of the four corners. She crumples it suddenly, squeezes it into a twist, stuffs it into the pocket of her cargo shorts. Kicks off those loose shoes under the counter and draws up her legs to rest her bare feet stained and specked with grit on the cushion, folding her arms about herself, forehead against her hiked-up knees beneath that colorless hair.
Sits up of a sudden, on the one side of one of the wide beds in that dark room, curtains drawn and no light lit, breathless a moment before a slow soft exhalation, deflating her back to her pillow, curled on one side beneath the whitely rumpled sheets.
“No,” she says, quite loudly.
Sat up, bent over, she fishes something up from the floor, an item of clothing, a shirt indeterminate in the darkness. Looks over her shoulder to the nightstand between beds, the suggestion of a lamp there, but lets the shirt drop as she stands up off the bed, heads around the foot of it past the other toward the back of the room, a shadow among shadows, toward the deepest darkness there.
A moment, and then the bathroom lights flick on.
The bowl of the sink, bolted to the wall, the tiles lining that wall, the toilet, but most of all that tub and its encompassing surround, fiberglass touched by, streaked with dregs that mar its finish of dusty rose, the selfsame rosy color of the toilet, tiles, the sink.
Back out into the room now half-lit past the one bed neatly made plunging headlong over the other to snatch up the shirt from the floor, wind it about herself as she gets back up, buttoning the wine-red placket once, twice, yanking open the door, a third button done as she barrels out onto the balcony lining the front along this second floor, the overhanging eave, the slatted railing a wornly chipped dull rose, topped with a rail of dark brick red, she turns back about, the door there, the window framed in the same dark red, sat in a siding of rosy planks.
“Pink,” says Jo. And sighs.
Jim Beam™ is a trademark of Jim Beam Brands Co., part of Suntory Global Spirits Inc. Demolition Man, written by Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau, and Peter M. Lenkov, ©1993 Warner Bros. Cyclonopedia, written by Reza Negarestani, ©2008 re.press and Reza Negarestani.
