Chapter Three

Chapter Three: Gas, Road and Trees, Hotel Window, and Hotel by a Railroad

He woke up late Satuday morning, hot summer sunlight spilling in through his bedroom window and smarting his face. He'd gotten home late last night and collapsed into bed, too tired to change into his pajamas. The alarm clock on his bedside table informed him it was a quarter past eleven, surprising since it'd been years since he'd woken up past eight, his body's circadian rhythms firmly established. His apartment was eerily quiet, though he could hear the the laughter and high shrieks of children playing outside. Probably Lizzy Mitchem and little Tommy Keats from down the hall.

He forced himself out of bed. The barest fringes of a hangover doubled his vision and his mouth felt dry and scratchy, his tie strangling him in a chokehold. He pulled it off irritably and tossed it to the side.

Dirty dishes and a full garbage can met him in the kitchen. Ignoring the mess, he went straight to the sink and grabbed a glass of water, drinking it down in one gulp, the flavor metallic but quenching. He wasn't that hungry and his stomach, frankly, felt a little too tempermental for food. The thought of a greasy breakfast made him want to vomit. A strange tickling sensation kept niggling the back of his mind and it took him a second to place it. 

He was going to go to Two Lights today.

The memory hit him like a hammer. Last night -- Dorothy -- the overwhelming wave of homesickness that had washed over him. He'd gotten back to his apartment planning to go to sleep, get up, and drive to Two Lights. To see his family, after five years of mutual silence between them. There hadn't even been a Christmas card. 

He gulped. 

It was a terrifying prospect, one that could only be dreamed up half-drunk in the dead of night. But it held. Even in the harsh light of day, the idea was compelling. Was this what he'd unwittingly been straining towards all this time? Was this what had been holding him back? This unresolved tension? His restive past?  

The answer had to be yes. It was time for him to gather up the courage to face them, and find peace.

Alright, then. Today he was going to Two Lights.

~~~

The problem was he didn't have a car.

 

But he did have a motorcycle.

 

It was an ancient thing, a Harley-Davidson WLA he'd bought from the army secondhand and civilianized. It was stored underneath an old sheet of tarp in the apartment building's underground garage. There was a certain symmetry in riding it back to Two Lights, since he'd driven it to New York in the first place. He'd return the way he left. 

 

It was still in the garage when he went down to check. It was a little rusty and the exhaust spit out an ominous jet of black smoke when he turned the key, but it started, and that was more than he'd been expecting. He took nothing but his wallet and slung the small case containing his camera behind his back. Though the day was warm, he put on his black leather jacket, wary of windburn.

 

The jammed city streets kept his speed low. He drove cautiously at first, riding the break, allowing the bike to warm up. New York passed him by, the city buildings and street vendors and lavish storefronts a familiar landscape. Some of the people in the crowd turned to stare at him as he rode by, a couple of children even pointing at him and exclaiming to their parents in high, excited voices. It was a nice feeling, standing out, being unique. He should've done this a long time ago.

 

He weaved his way in and out of traffic, bypassing the yellow train of taxis, slowly picking up speed. The day was hot and he could already feel sweat beading his temple and dampening his shirt, making the thin white cotton cling to his chest. The wind blew through his hair and whistled softly in his ears. It was strong enough to make his eyes water, but he forced himself to go faster, foot pressing down hard on the accelerator.

 

He merged onto highway with a smile, out of the city at last. The sunlight was bright and crystalline and all the cars beside him seemed oddly colorful, a cherry red Mercury that flew past him like a bullet, a bumble bee Cadillac with a glinting chrome front, a sweet cream station wagon with a family inside obviously on a road trip.  

 

There was a certain peace to be found in driving. The world faded out to nothing but the road and the sky and the neverending horizon. The sun tracked its way across the sky and the taste of dust settled on his tongue. He lost chunks of time, zoning out, his mind flitting from memory to memory, his stomach flipping whenever he landed on a particularly volatile one. The handbars felt slippery underneath his hands, his palms sweaty, more from nerves than the sun.

 

By four o' clock he was running low on gas and stopped at a little fill-up joint just outside the New Hampshire-Maine border. It was like coming out of a trance. The sun was low and the air was finally beginning to cool. He bought a bottle of coke and drank it down in under a minute, reclining, exhausted, against the pump, his throat working furiously. His body felt strange, stiff from staying hunched so long, yet boneless from spending hours in the sun. Twisting around to see if anybody was watching him, he covertly took his camera out of its case, the mix of metal and black plastic hot in his hands.

 

Like performing a dance learned long ago, he raised the device to his face and peered through the viewfinder. A rush of deja vu hit him. It'd been ages since he'd experienced this feeling -- this distillation of the world into one small box, this moment, these pieces. It wasn't exactly a miniaturization, but a removal of excess, like cutting fat from meat, cropping the periphery to get to what mattered.

 

He focused in on the garage adjoining the gas station. It was open but empty, a tool box sat cooking on the concrete, a stray wrench lying on top of it. The walls of the garage were covered in tools, old posters of classic cars, and a dog-eared pin-up calendar. Ancient, rusty license plates were hung around the top of the garage, where wall met ceiling, the different colors dull, the jumble of numbers and letters forming some kind of cryptic hieroglyph.

 

He adjusted the exposure and then pressed down on the release, hearing the grinding mechanical click as the shot was taken. It was like a benediction, a wordless 'yes'. There was a rightness to this, to capturing the smaller worlds, archiving them in their quiet, venerable glory. Why had he ever stopped? How could he have forgotten this?

 

It was like he couldn't even help himself. Once the first picture had been taken, the camera was glued to his face. He wandered around the gas station and the garage photographing everything. The manager's weathered face, a crumpled cigarette butt, the potholed asphalt, the cars racing past, the sign advertising five cent Phillies cigars, the rust patterning his motorbike. Before he knew it an hour had past, lost in the exhilarating thrill of rediscovering his first love.

 

Finally, he forced himself to stop before he wasted all his film. He was tired; he could finish the trip tomorrow. After inquiring within, the manager directed him to a small motel five miles down the road, the Lonesome Star.

 

He pulled into the motel's parking lot, the twilight sky a fireworks display of red, pink, and orange. His room was outfitted in a tacky sailboat and shell motif and the small complementary bible in the dresser had been graffitied with curse words and badly drawn pornographic cartoons.

 

He took pictures of that stuff too. After inspecting his motel room and splashing some cold water on his dirty, sunburnt face he wandered outside, camera hung around his neck. Every so often he would take a couple more pictures -- a hawk circling a piece of roadkill lying on the shoulder, the perfect mirror symmetry of the trees and the road.

 

Everything looked so, so new.

 

Curious, he wandered into the motel's common room, the bell above the front door tinkling as he stepped inside. The clerk who'd checked him in had disappeared. The desk was unmanned and the room was empty, except for one older woman sitting beside a window, who turned to look at him. The blast of icy, air-conditioned air was jarring.

 

She turned away politely so as not to stare. An elegant Fabini red hat sat perched on her head, her grey hair pulled back beneath it, deftly frosted with white. She absently gazed out the darkened window, her entire body turned towards it with a kind of military precision, as if her matching stiff red suit refused to let her relax. A cream, fur-collared coat was draped around her shoulders like a cape. The room itself was dim, the navy blue couch blending in with the drab blue carpet and clashing with the putrid yellow walls. Beside her hung an amateur painting of a pastoral landscape, all muddy browns and greens. Dispiriting decor, overall.

 

He approached her cautiously, thinking of how he'd walked up to Dorothy only the night before. It seemed like decades ago, now. "May I?" he asked her, holding up his camera.

 

She stared at it for a second, as if unsure what it was. Finally, she nodded and looked at him placidly, her eyes as grey as her hair. He brought her face into focus, her crowfeet's sharpening, the shadows deepening underneath her dangerously steeped cheekbones. A midnight queen. He could've studied her face forever, lost himself in the details, where God, divine perfection, truly resided.

 

He jolted himself to the present: Take the picture, you a*s. He pressed down on the release and heard the click.

 

"Thank you," he murmured softly. "I'm sorry if I disturbed you."

 

She smiled at him, like a mother patronizing a small child.

 

"Come sit beside me," she said, patting the space beside her on the couch. "Why did you want my picture? It has been many years since I was beautiful."

 

He opened his mouth to counter this -- she was beautiful, she really was, beautiful and stern and aristocratic and arresting. Utterly out of place in a motel like this, and thus utterly intriquing. She was asking him for his story, but he'd've died to known hers.

 

"I'm not sure why I'm taking pictures," he said, sinking into the seat beside her. "I just photograph whatever I like, really. For fun. Because I love doing it. And -- and you have a wonderful face."

 

"My husband has not told me that I'm beautiful in a long time. He used to tell it to me everyday. He would wake up and kiss my stomach and my feet and tell me he'd married the most beautiful girl in the world. More beautiful than Cleopatra. Veronica Lake." She smiled, recollecting the memory. "We used to be so happy."

 

She looked at him, but her eyes seemed ghosted in the dim light of the room, as if she had cataracts. Her gaze went straight through him and a shiver ran up his spine.

 

"I am not even sure if I love my husband anymore. Isn't that funny?" Her tone was flat and her face was numb. She looked liked she'd forgotten how to laugh centuries ago. "I've been married to him for over twenty years, shared a life and a home with him. At this moment, he is up in our motel room. But I cannot remember this. This tiny fact." She sighed. "I am getting so very old."

 

Was it the late hour? Did all the oddballs come out at night? Or did the darkness just bring out everybody's secrets and quiet vulnerabilities? The clock ticked above the check-in desk, maddening, but the woman paid it no mind. It might've been a trick of the light, but her eyes seemed glassy with tears. Before he could properly examined her, she cast her gaze down to the camera in his hands.

 

"They say a photographer can only take good pictures of what he is close to. What he loves." She paused. "I hope your pictures turn out well." Her conclusion was left unsaid, but he came to it anyway, reading the loneliness between her words: I hope you love me. 

 

And then, of course, that lightening strike of connection hit him. That effortless, unthinking empathy. It was like a craving, satisfied. For a brief, infinite moment he lost himself in her. Wanted to be her --desperately -- and make it all better. He dropped his camera into his lap and reached out and took both her hands in his. They were soft and, like the rest of her, smelt faintly of Jean Nate. Though they were curled with arthritis, they were skeletally elegant, the sparkling diamond ring on her finger frigid with all the love she had lost.

 

He squeezed her hands, as if hoping to inject life back into her, or maybe wake her up, somehow. She looked down at her hands in his, and then, searching, looked up at him again, but didn't really see him. He felt transparent, like a ghost summoned to a seance. Why? Why?

 

She answered. "You look so much like my husband. When he was younger. Blond, like him. And your eyes, exactly. It's like you've come to haunt me. Torture me, perhaps."

 

He was unexpectedly hurt by her words, the injustice of them, but he didn't pull away. The feeling soon passed, however, and she continued staring through him, still soaking up details that couldn't be there, didn't belong to him. He wasn't her husband. Any connection they had, on her part, wasn't real. It was melodramatic to call it a tragedy, but at this late hour, everything was.

 

He brought her hands to his lips and kissed them each. She blushed and smiled like a young girl, painfully earnest, in the first spring of love. The expression was beautiful -- lifted fifty years off her face. And, yes, he felt a quiet surge of love for her, this stranger, this woman, who allowed him a small peek into her life, her thoughts. It was love mixed with appreciation. It wasn't often he escaped the confines of his own cyclical thoughts.

 

Finally, he let her go. He picked up his camera, brought her hands into focus, and took another picture. He thought it would turn out well.

 

~~~   

 

The smell of cigarette smoke hung diffuse in their motel room and early morning sunlight poured in through the window. Her husband stared out of it in a trance, while she tried not to stare at him, godly and forbidding, awash in golden light, exhaling thin, parallel streams of smoke from his nostrils like a dragon. Straight backed, his black slacks and black vest turned him into one long black column, and his bald pate shined in the sun. They heard the faint scream of a train coming to a halt from the railroad yard across from the motel.

 

She looked down at the Bible in her lap; she read a little every morning. In her old age, she found she was less devout than she used to be. The fervency of youth had faded. But like all rituals, it brought her comfort, like a warm cup of tea on a cold afternoon.

 

It was the rhythmic quality of the words, their unassailable dignity. They had been distorted by time and human fallacy, passed down for generation after generation, translated into every language across the globe. And yet their power was still potent.  They still struck a harrowing chord within her. From the Almighty Himself, the Creator of All. Even now, after all these years, after a lifetime of dull Sunday sermons, the thought moved her, and she swallowed and clutched the book tighter. The Good Book. Indeed.

 

'Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort;

 

Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.' 

 

She closed the book and rose from the chair. She was still in the pink satin nightie she'd worn to bed. She caught a glance of herself in the mirror above the dresser and was startled by how old she looked: a woman obviously past her prime, maybe even a grandmother. Her breasts were heavy and her grey hair drooped limply around her shoulders.

 

She walked over to her husband and stood beside him in the sun, her skin soaking up the warmth. For a moment, it was like they were two strangers, waiting for a sign and wary of eye contact.

 

Well, she thought with a melancholy sigh, maybe they were.

 

At this sound, he turned to look at her. It was like an electric shock, and her heartbeat ratcheted. She examined his face and it was like seeing him again for the first time after years apart. The boy -- the photographer -- in the lobby last night really did look a lot like him. Shy, she smiled at her husband and felt his gaze sweep across her. His blue eyes still sparkled, but were circled with crowsfeet and shadows. He'd had nightmares again.

 

"You're beautiful," he told her softly. The words rang though her body like a bell and she felt her heart swell tenderly inside her breast.

 

"I love you," she said. She was surprised by the surity of her words. After all, only last night she'd been doubting their entire relationship, what they'd based twenty years of marriage on. But the answer came to her naturally, it fell, tumbling, from her tongue. 

 

He leaned over and kissed her, his dry hand caressing her cheek. It had been so many years since they'd performed this dance. She thought he'd forgotten its steps a long time ago. The frantic, faintly hysterical urge to weep -- or maybe praise the Lord -- nearly overwhelmed her, but she managed to reign herself in, preserve the sanctity of the morning. The moment.

 

"I love you too," he replied, his voice hoarse with smoke and emotion. 

 

A deep wellspring of hope was struck within her. She clutched at his collar for a moment, struggling to channel this geyser of emotion. The white cotton was stiff with starch; she'd ironed the fabric to perfection, ever the good wife. Nevertheless, she adjusted it, needing something to do with her hands. They felt antsy, and probably would've happily roamed over his body for hours of their own will, resurveying the livered skin and white, wispy chest hair.

 

The sun was rising fast now, filling their room with a celestial glow. An ascension, of sorts. Basking in the love of her husband and her Savior, she felt at peace.

 

'And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.'

 

They looked at each other, and this time they saw.

 

~~~

 

Leon left the motel around ten. Before he kicked his bike into gear, he looked up at the building one last time. The words Lonesome Star Inn were painted across the scuffed brick in yellow and blue, the 'I' of 'Inn' dotted with a star. For a heartbeat, he thought he spotted the woman he met last night in the lobby standing behind one of the upper story windows, the faint figure of a man outlined beside her.

 

But then he blinked, blinded by the sun, and all that he could make out was the reflection of light on glass.