“Let me tell you something, Joe,” she said. “There’s really only one hotel nearby – it’s at a truck stop. The room’s gonna be a little bit bigger than my place and yes, you’ll have your own bathroom. You won’t have to go in and talk to Mama about what she won in her online gambling this week. And the rooms are gonna smell like cigarette but not quite as bad as my trailer. It will be nothing like my little shed here. And you can have your nice little calm life back for a few hours where you don’t have to rely on the hospitality of people who scare you.”
“Fuck, no. You don’t scare me,” I retorted.
She raised her eyebrows, looked at Trevor, looked back at me. Something in the way she studied my face made my pants tighten. She had a curvy, devil-may-care attitude about her. The way she shifted her hip, the swell of her breast against her ribcage, the jaunty smirk – and then there was the fact that she was right – she’d hit the bullseye. These people scared me. Lots of things scared me. How could someone I’d never known figure that out so fast?
If she could, in the middle of nowhere, then what would the world know about me when I went out into it? I had to be a pitbull in order to function in big law. That was my parents’ goal and mine, right? Mine – my goal. I decided to try being a pitbull back.
Before I could open my mouth, Trevor interrupted both of us. “Let’s just take him where he wants to go,” he said to Darla.
She started to protest and he cut her off with fingertips to her lips. It was a gesture I’d never seen anyone do to a woman and I expected she’d blow up at him but instead, she popped one fingertip into her mouth and sucked on it through a grin. Holy shit. If I’d been uncomfortable a minute ago, now I was so hard I was stratospherically crawling out of my skin – for a much better reason.
Trevor pulled back and some sort of look passed between the two of them that made me feel like I was intruding. “Besides,” he said quietly, “if he has his own room then you and I get this to ourselves,” nodding his head toward her little broken shed.
Darla
“You two argue about whatever it is that you wanna do while I go take a shower,” I said, escaping the back and forth between these two. My body still tasted like Trevor’s mouth, smelled like both of us, and needed a good, full cleansing. Kind of like being dipped in a baptismal pool. My new existence needed that kind of reset and my heart needed that kind of purity because, even though we’d been handed these extra hours, that was it. After that, my new life would leave me in a puddle of misery and nostalgia.
That, though, was better than what I’d had before I’d picked up this naked soul. Walking back into the trailer, I saw where Joe had put his foot through the rotted out porch. Dammit! I knew the floor was going, I just didn’t think it was going to go that quickly. Some furry creature of indistinct origin scurried under there and I hoped to God it wasn’t a swamp rat from the nearby wetlands.
When I walked into the trailer, Mama was in her place at the kitchen table and she looked up and just shook her head slowly. “Two men, now, Darla? Really?”
“Not at the same time, Mama,” I said, laughing at her, waving a hand as if the idea were so extreme that no one would ever think to do such a thing. Liar, a voice in my head whispered. Oh God, at the rate I was going I was gonna have more voices in there than a goddamn tryout for American Idol.
The shower spray was non-existent. The water pressure was down, which meant somebody was washing clothes or running the dishwasher right now. If it was Mama I’d be surprised. Most of the cleaning that got done around here was by me or Uncle Mike when he was in town. Maybe she was having one of her better times. That would be nice. When Mama was going through a good phase it meant that the world was easier to take.
As I washed the parts of my body that Trevor had touched most, the soap stripping away his essence but not his memory, I felt a twinge of regret. The scent of him was burned into my brain, the pressure of his fingertips, the friction of his skin against mine a sultry memory. It didn’t have to be just a memory. What we’d done already, of course, was stored away, nice and neat in a compartment in my mind that I could draw from whenever I needed it. New memories could be made in the next couple of hours and I didn’t think that bowling was gonna be one of them.
Washing my hair, discovering we were out of conditioner and cursing myself for not keeping track of that, I realized that when I blew dry my hair I was gonna look like a giant Chia Pet. Better to leave it damp and down and let it curl up than turn into a frizzball. I found some clean clothes in the dresser drawer of what you could loosely call my room – it was taken over mostly with trinkets that Mama had won over the past five or six years using online sweepstakes and gambling to keep herself busy.
Every once in a while she won something nice. One year she got a couple hundred dollars and a night at any hotel she wanted and she picked the water park and sent me and some friends. Another time, she won a really nice two week trip to Italy, all expenses paid, but it turns out when you win things in a sweepstakes you have to pay the taxes on the value of the thing or trip and we couldn’t afford it. Someone else got Mama’s trip to Italy and we just got a story to tell.
I walked back clean and ready to take on the rest of the day only to find Trevor and Joe whispering to each other furiously, Joe darting glances at me that didn’t look inviting. “What’s going on?” I asked.
Trevor slid his arm around my waist and smelled my wet hair. “You smell nice,” he whispered.
“It’s coconut chemicals,” I whispered back.
That made Joe go from sour to smirking. It was a small victory but I’d take it. “Joe definitely wants to go to the hotel,” Trevor said, frowning.
When I made eye contact with Joe, it was like falling into a pool of beautiful. I wanted to swim in it forever. I shouldn’t have had these thoughts but I did. It was like I was cheating on Trevor right in front of his face but I wasn’t. I wasn’t interested in Joe, I just kind of wanted to marvel at him. Nobody around here looked like him. Nobody.
Around here, adolescent acne meant that you had adult scars, crooked teeth just were, and walking with that kind of fluidity and grace, well, you didn’t get that way working at the gas station, bagging groceries, or framing a house. You especially didn’t get that way driving truck, spending seventy, eighty, a hundred hours a week on the road, hunched over a wheel.
“I can take you,” I said. “No problem.”
Trevor looked at me and his eyes widened a little, then he smiled. “Let’s go.”
Joe
“Alright,” she turned to me. “Get in the car. We’ll take you to the hotel. Do you want to go bowling with us first?”
I yawned. I swear to God it wasn’t fake. The exhaustion of dealing with Trevor’s disappearance, with his mom, with the drive, my broken car, all of it was wearing on me.
“You don’t need to throw that in,” she said as we walked over and I opened the back door. I could see parts of the asphalt beneath us under her car and wondered if I needed to put my feet through to make this thing run, like something out of a cartoon. She started it up and it was surprisingly quiet, Trevor crawling in the front seat.
As he sat down he said, “Oh! My ass feels weird.”
“What did you guys do last night?” I asked.
Darla let out a loose peal of laughter that made me start to like her a little bit. “We only used the strap-on once,” she said.
Trevor punched her lightly on the shoulder as she started the car. He turned around and said, “No, I mean I only rode in the front of this car naked. Not being scratched by the torn vinyl is a luxury.”
Turning around to catch my attention, Trevor kept glaring at me in ways that clearly expressed that he thought I was being rude – but it looked like Darla had figured out my point of view. What a treat to be considered for once. Trevor’s selfishness pervaded this entire experience, from the moment he disappeared – no, actually from the moment he ate all my peyote – right up until the second Darla reappeared. All I wanted right now was my own room, my own space, my own bed. Later tonight, if the car could be fixed or tomorrow morning – God, I hoped it wasn’t tomorrow morning – then away we went and I could escape from this chaos.
Fuck Trevor. Fuck, fuck, fuck Trevor. He stood here arguing that I should shield him from his mom, that I should stay here at Darla’s little…whatever you call that thing…and that I should stop being a snobby asshole. I didn’t think I was being a snob. I just – I mean look at this place. I was being a realist.
Darla’s little shitbox got us on the road and we put put putted on the interstate up one exit. She pulled off to one of those buildings that looks like it could be a factory, a hospital, a hotel, or a registry of motor vehicles – it was that nondescript. Hotels just didn’t look like this back home. At least not in Eastern Mass. Maybe out west in the boonies.
Oh. Right. I was in the boonies. Ground Zero of the boonies. The prototype for –
“Here it is. The luxury five-star hotel of northern Ohio.”
“You don’t have to keep digging it in. I get the point.” I was tired and pissed and she kept going on as if I were some kind of snob and I was pretty fucking sick of it.
“I don’t think you do get the message, Joe,” she snapped back.
Now it was Trevor who looked at us like he was watching a Wimbledon game.
“You’re jealous,” I snapped back. “I drive a nice car, we come from a nicer place, I have nicer things, yadda yadda yadda. It’s not my fault you live this way.”
I could tell from the look on Trevor’s face that I’d crossed a line – and I could tell from the way that her face reddened that I’d hit a nerve.
“You just proved her point, you asshole,” Trevor growled.
“I think she’s proving mine.” I got out of the car as fast as I could, four eyes glaring at me as if they could somehow erase the fact that they were wrong with the sheer force of anger. I didn’t care. This was so out of the realm of anything I had ever wanted to experience that I figured Trevor had gone half mad again. We weren’t on some reality television show. This wasn’t Big Brother – Ohio Edition or An Idiot Abroad – U.S. Version. This was me being treated like shit for coming out here and rescuing Trevor in the boonies.
Whatever had happened to turn me into the bad guy, I didn’t even know what to think. I didn’t know why they were both being so weird. I slammed the car door shut and something distinctly metal echoed in the air, a dropped piece of something. Darla didn’t even flinch, so I didn’t point it out.
“Thank you for the ride,” I said. Just because they thought I was an asshole didn’t mean I lost every bit of decency. I wasn’t going to give them any more ammunition against me.
“You’re most welcome,” she said tartly as she squealed in reverse out of the parking lot. I watched them drive off until the car disappeared, and then looked around. At one end of the giant parking lot was a building that could have held the KGB…or the world’s saddest daycare center. That would be the hotel. At this point, as long as there was a bed, a bathroom, and a coffee maker, I didn’t care.
