THE STATE HIGHWAY tracked an east-west line sagging and rising through a series of gentle hill slopes, then slumping into a lowland where bright signs and flat buildings latched to one side like suckling creatures – a pair of strip malls, a Costco, an Olive Garden, a McDonald’s, gas stations, and various others, including a two-storey motel, of 1960s vintage, which appeared to be the oldest structure here, remnant of a previous age. These were all accessed by a road with a lane in either direction and a centre turn lane – a three-lane. The motel faced the three-lane with a discordant ensemble of pastel yellow, aquamarine and, on the second-floor balconies, salmon pink.
Ellis parked under a semicircular scallop-roofed canopy in front of the lobby and walked to the backside of the motel to check the view – the rooms here gazed without obstruction at the highway. He went inside and asked for a second-floor room, in back.
He stepped into the room and frigid air gripped him; mounted into the opposite wall was a roaring air-conditioner unit. Next to it stood a sliding glass door onto the balcony. A green-and-blue watery wallpaper flowed from the ceiling to a plum-coloured carpet bearing a history of spills and heels. A bed covered by a polyester blanket, two wooden side tables, a dresser, a desk and two hard-back desk chairs crowded against one another. On the dresser stood a TV, and over the bed hung a little framed picture of a jumping swordfish – it looked as if it had been cut from a magazine. Ellis turned down the air conditioner, then stepped onto the balcony. He stood for some minutes, watching the traffic on the highway, then went back into the room, retrieved one of the desk chairs and set it on the balcony. He sat and watched the road.
To the motel’s immediate left Ellis could see a Jiffy Lube and on the right was a drive-through bank. Ahead, across the highway, lay a golf course where people in twosomes and foursomes took practice swings, hit balls, watched them fly, settled into golf carts to drive a hundred yards then got out again, searched for balls, took practice swings, hit little spurting chip shots, stood around on the green talking, took practice putts, putted, all of this at a leisurely pace that contrasted oddly with the traffic’s incessant flurrying. The highway had two lanes in either direction, separated by a shallow grassy ditch. Once, a Suzuki Samurai had been stopped in that ditch with a driver who happened to look in his rear-view mirror just in time to see a semi sliding sideways, off the lanes, toward him.
As the afternoon passed the traffic in the westbound lanes clotted and dragged into a low-speed crawl, which didn’t begin to clear until a couple of hours later. Ellis phoned Heather and told her where he was, what he was doing, described the motel. ‘Do you think it will work?’ she asked.
‘Driving, I could miss him by a minute, I could pass him in the night. Statistically, my chances are probably better in one place.’
‘It sounds more healthy. Give yourself some downtime.’
‘I guess.’
Soon the sky was hung with a scatter of white stars, and the traffic had thinned to a swift motion of lights pressing the speed limit.
He wondered if Boggs might come here at night. He thought it unlikely. No one visited old battlefields in the dark.
Hungry, he stepped back into the room and then stood looking around, a little dazed, after so much driving, with the shock of still being in the same place. He went out the front of the motel to the three-lane and walked on the shoulder. At the Target he bought a bag of new clothes, then crossed the parking lot to the Olive Garden and consumed portions of penne and chicken. When he finished his stomach complained against the quantities, and he sat watching his glass of beer, the tiny bright sparks there that rose straight upward. His waitress stopped to comment on his sunburn, and when he told her he’d had his arm hung out of the window of his car for a couple of days, she talked about her car, a Buick that smoked when she started it.
He returned to the motel, slept, woke, dressed and set himself on the balcony as the sky, still sunless, began to brighten. Boggs will come, he assured himself.
On the morning of the accident the highway had been glazed by a light rain. When the man in the Suzuki in the ditch looked at his mirror and saw the jackknifed, overturning semi – the assets of the hauling companies were, like fires, beacons for hopeful litigants, so Ellis and Boggs had often been involved in cases with semi-trailer trucks – coming broadside toward him, he ducked. The roof of the Suzuki was crushed flat, and the driver had to be cut out with a Jaws of Life, but he walked away. The semi, however, continued into the opposing lanes, flipping. Even more fortunate than the man who walked away from the Suzuki were the occupants of a Ford Taurus that passed under the trailer at the apex of its flight – police photos showed the Taurus parked beside the road, undamaged, except for the radio antenna, which had been hit by the flying semi and bent to a right angle, like a crooked finger.
Then the semi flopped onto the roadway behind the Ford and a fifteen-year-old Dodge pickup pulling a pop-up camper trailer crashed into the trailer’s roof. Several seconds passed before a Toyota Highlander, travelling at approximately 64 mph, struck the pickup from behind, smashing the pop-up camper to pieces and forcing the trailer hitch into the Dodge’s gas tank, igniting a hot fire that spread rapidly forward and backward. The pickup burned, the Toyota burned, the semi and its load of discount brand furniture burned. Two fatalities in the pickup and three in the Toyota. Only the driver of the semi, who extracted himself from the overturned cab with broken arms, survived.
Boggs was contacted just days after the accident by an attorney associated with the manufacturer of the pickup. After landing at the airport, Boggs and Ellis had driven first to look at the Toyota, which was held in a vehicle storage yard of a kind that Ellis – still early in his career – had never seen before, a collecting place for vehicles involved in ongoing disputes. Towering racks held vehicles atop one another, three-high, like shelved pieces in a gigantic museum. A rack ran five hundred feet or so, ended at an aisle, and then began another set of racks, and these rows of racked vehicles ran out to a distance of a half-mile or more. Big trucks with long lifting forks hurtled between the rows and spun at speed around the corners.
They found the Toyota, and Boggs hailed a forklift to pull it from its second-level rack and set it on the ground. The forklift then went away, diesel engine gnashing. Through the stacked vehicles, more of the lifting trucks were sometimes visible, charging around like beasts with great horns. Ellis looked at the vehicles to either side of himself – a Yukon with the front end flattened as if a slab of concrete had landed on it; a Dodge Ram with the circular imprint of a wheel in the damage of its grille; a Mini with the sheet metal ripped off one side as if it had run into a big planing saw.
‘Ellis, hello?’ Boggs said. ‘Still with us? What’s going on in your noggin?’ He was unwinding a plumb bob. He had already laid four tape measures around the Toyota.
‘Just looking.’
‘And thinking?’
‘Not really.’
Boggs grinned. ‘Now that’s a talent.’ Boggs shuffled and kicked his feet, still grinning. ‘As for me,’ he said, ‘my dancing frightens children and makes adults nauseous.’
When they came to the scene – here, the place that Ellis now sat watching – the tyre marks had been still visible on the road, only a little faded. And as they worked at documenting them, Ellis glanced at their photos of the vehicles’ tyre treads and noticed that the police had confused the tyre marks of the pickup and the Toyota. Which was bad for their client, the defendant’s attorney, because it meant that the Toyota had braked longer than the police had assumed, and hit the pickup at a lower speed, which made the breakout of a fire seem less reasonable.
‘Of course,’ Ellis said, when he showed the error to Boggs, ‘we could pretend we didn’t notice.’
Boggs cocked his head. ‘That would be a little unscrupulous, wouldn’t it?’ He held Ellis’s gaze a second, then shrugged. ‘Anyway, when you start doing stuff like that in this business, it catches up. The other guys are smart, too, and we end up looking stupid.’
Much later, Ellis described that conversation to Heather, and the shame he’d felt. She had, slowly, smiled, and asked, ‘But you still love me more than him, don’t you?’
Watching the traffic and the golf course, sorting his moods, he passed the day. A membrane of tension that had been stretched through his mind seemed to be weakening. He’d never understood the use of idle vacations, of endless sitting under the sun, but maybe this was it.
Immediately behind this thought, however, regret flipped itself back into view, and with a sense of compulsion he called the hospital and asked for room 312. The fifth ring cut off as the phone picked up. ‘Hello?’ Mrs Dell said, tentative.
Ellis hesitated.
‘Hello?’
‘I’m Ellis Barstow. I stopped in a couple of days ago.’
‘Yes?’
‘I was wondering if there’s any change in your husband’s condition.’
‘They cut him open and did some things, to alleviate pressure, I think. And tests. Scans. He looks -’ She was silent. ‘Not good.’ She breathed. ‘They say wait. Wait and see. They try to be kind, but they make me feel like a child.’
‘I’m sure they’re doing their best.’
‘Sometimes when I ask a question there’s a strange look. I wonder if maybe they just don’t like to say, “I don’t know.” Sometimes I wonder if they know anything, really.’
‘They’re doing what they can,’ he said, without conviction.
‘Fifty per cent,’ she said. ‘I asked if he would live. Thirty said another. Per cent.’
‘I’m sorry.’ A pickup glided over the highway before him, pulling a camper trailer sheathed in aluminum, the sun dancing on it.
‘As if we were talking about the humidity.’
‘It is meaningless,’ he said.
‘I can’t even think about it.’ She added, in a odd tone of complaint, ‘He loves me.’
‘Of course.’
‘He loves music. He’s an excellent dancer. I doubt if he’ll be able to dance any more.’
‘I hope so.’
‘I should ask what per cent they have on dancing.’
Ellis laughed but caught himself and said again, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, no. You’re kind to listen to me.’
Some seconds passed.
‘Are you still there?’ she asked.
‘I am.’
‘I’ll let you go.’
That night he returned to the Olive Garden. He had the Buick-driving waitress again. She was heavy from the waist down, her face sagging with fatigued skin, but her smile was broad and earnest. She interpreted his return as a compliment to the food. She said the cooks here took greater care than at the Red Lobster where she used to work, and she attempted to talk him into a dessert. He said no but ordered another drink.
The restaurant emptied, he sat contemplating his beer, thinking his work with Boggs had made him strange. No one except Boggs saw the road and the world as he did, so that they seemed to live in a world of the same stuff as everyone else, but terribly rearranged. No wonder Boggs had become his friend. No wonder he didn’t know what to do now except to look for Boggs. His waitress brought him a piece of chocolate cherry cake, whispering, ‘Free free free!’ It would just be thrown away, she said. He began eating only to placate her, but the stuff tasted marvellous. He forked through it slowly, then worked the crumbs up one by one, thinking to himself that it might be as good as anything that he had ever eaten. This idea made him teary-eyed. The waitress stopped to pat his wrist. ‘It does that to me, too.’
Late the next morning he was sitting on the balcony again when his phone rang. He answered, and Heather said, ‘I’m here.’
‘You’re where?’
‘The guy at the desk won’t tell me which room you’re in.’
‘How can you be here?’
‘By the miracle of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. Will you tell me your room number?’
‘I’m just surprised!’ He told her the room number and sat waiting. Giddy. Anxious. She seemed to take a long time. And then yet longer, so that he began to worry that he had hallucinated her call, that he had been alone for too long with his own brain, and now some of the synapses were firing up delusional echoes and distortions.
When a knock sounded at the door, he flung it open. Heather stood there – small in the dim hallway, wearing a snug black T-shirt, jeans, flip-flops, hair pulled back, eyes red, tired, intent on him.
‘Please -’ he said, reaching. They clung to each other and soon were talking energetically, nonsensically. Suddenly Ellis lifted her and dropped her on the bed.
They made love with the clumsiness of delirium, then lay cupped together until Ellis stood and dressed. They talked and joked about her drive, about the weather. She talked to the ceiling and Ellis drifted around the room. He came to the balcony door – now, although it was a Saturday, the traffic had begun again thickening and slowing in the westbound lanes. He hoped that Boggs hadn’t come and gone.
‘I was a little afraid you’d send me away,’ Heather said. She laughed. Without leaving the bed she was pulling on clothes.
‘That’s why you didn’t you tell me you were coming?’ he asked. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
‘Everyone loves a surprise?’ she said.
He laughed. ‘I don’t care.’
She went into the bathroom, and he heard the water running. He opened the balcony door and stepped out. A couple of crows hopped in the grass between the highway and the motel. He heard her emerge from the bathroom. ‘Is John out there?’ she called.
‘Nope.’
A few seconds passed. ‘Hey,’ she said.
He turned from the highway to look at her. She sat on the foot of the bed, and she seemed to be looking at the highway behind him. He glanced over to see if something were happening there.
She said, ‘I’ll go if you want.’
‘No, no.’ He hesitated, then moved into the room to stand in front of her. He knew enough to wait for her to go on.
‘What are we doing?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean?’ It had been a mistake, apparently, to go onto the balcony. But she knew why he was here. ‘We’re in a motel room, talking.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
Her gaze collapsed to the floor. ‘Could you possibly stop calculating what you say to the decimal place?’ She gripped the edge of the bed with her hands, then straightened and stood and moved and touched the bed, the wallpaper, the TV.
He said, ‘I’m sorry -’
‘Don’t,’ she said. Her face blushed, splotching white in the scars. ‘I just sometimes keep wondering,’ she said, ‘if there’s anything more between us than shared disasters. What are we doing? What kind of fucked-up catastrophe of circumstance are we?’ She laughed, not happily.
His breath shook. ‘We’re just two people in a room.’
‘You’re the brother of my dead boyfriend. You work for my husband, and you’re his friend, and he’s gone insane. It’s not a good situation. It’s a very complicated, very awkward and very bad situation.’
By now a liquid and opaque dread had filled him. His glance strayed between the tension in her neck, the highway, the sword-fish. ‘You drove out here to break up with me?’
‘We’re just bonded by trauma,’ she said.
‘I didn’t even like Christopher,’ he said. ‘If you think that’s all I have invested in this -’
A diesel went by with jake brakes thundering. He glanced toward it, and she said, ‘OK, go. Go. Go look for your buddy.’
‘I’m here to watch for Boggs.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Go ahead.’
He went onto the balcony and sat. He locked his gaze onto the roadway.
Some minutes passed.
In the room, something crashed.
He went back in as she pulled over the two bedside tables, then the desk. She pushed over a desk chair and then yanked the bedclothes to the floor. She turned and stood before him, gasping, her face strained.
‘Calm down,’ he said.
‘Stop that! I haven’t slept in days. I don’t know what’s happened to my life. I can’t stop crying. I don’t know what anyone wants. And you say calm down.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Don’t say that.’
Then he didn’t know what to say.
In the silence, she reached up with curious gentleness, as if grasping at a butterfly. He braced for her to strike him. But she brought her hand to her own face, gripped her cheek, and pulled down, clawing, nails trailing blood.
In surprise he shouted and lunged, and they fell together onto the bed. ‘I hate you,’ she said, while he fumbled to restrain her arms. A small woman, but strong. Finally he pinned her, and she said, ‘I hate everything.’
He panted. Blood trickled from her face. ‘Stop this,’ he said. ‘Stop this.’ She only stared at him, and he cried, ‘Stop this! I didn’t ask you to come here.’
‘No, you didn’t.’ But the resistance had gone from her arms.
He discovered he was squeezing her harder than he needed. He rolled away, stood flexing his hands. She lay unmoving except to breathe irregularly, staring at the ceiling, eyes streaming. His body shook, bright and hot. He sat on the floor. ‘You’re OK?’
She said nothing, went into the bathroom. When she came out, holding a washcloth to her face, his adrenalin had drained off, leaving him sagging. She sat beside him.
His heartbeat slowed.
She touched his hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Let’s not use that word.’
She giggled a little, weakly, or nervously. He shook his head. Then, in a loss of control, he, too, laughed.
‘Go watch for John,’ she said. ‘I’ll join you in a minute.’ He sat moving his fingers experimentally before he stood and went onto the balcony. Time passed, and when he looked back into the room, all the furniture had been set upright again, and she was gone.
To find a clear thought was difficult. He’d never seen her do anything like this before, and he couldn’t guess what she might do now.
He sat, then stood again, and tried to analyse, to review the variables of the problem. Now, particularly, when everything and everyone had turned strange, it seemed important to be exact. Heather had been his half-brother’s girlfriend. She had liked his half-brother. Ellis, however, had not liked his half-brother. This difference had been shrouded behind the fact of his half-brother’s death. Then, she had led Ellis to his job, and thus to his boss and friend Boggs. He liked Boggs. Heather, who was married to Boggs, did not like Boggs; or, at least, she did not love him. Not any more. And now, having learned of the affair between his subordinate and his wife, Boggs threatened suicide. The shape of the relationships was not a triangle but a square bisected along a diagonal:
But this failed to adequately capture the problem, because it also had a temporal aspect, which extended along a third dimension. He tried to visualise a graphical shape for the events on that axis, but it eluded him.
But the situation was not a technical problem. Perhaps to try to understand it as such would only lead to insanity. How then to understand? To see each other clearly? How to prevent everything from being contaminated with guilt, doubt, resentment, anger? Was that why she was gone? Was she gone?
A half-hour later, she knocked on the door and came into the room with two cold bottles of Chardonnay and a package of plastic cups. She offered one to him.
He took the cup, but set it aside and rubbed his face with his hands. ‘Was that you?’ he asked. ‘Before?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so.’ The marks on her cheek amounted to three small scratches, in the place where the fire had scarred her years before. ‘This has been hard.’
‘It made me feel like I didn’t know you.’
‘It’s over.’ She fidgeted with the wine bottle. ‘Water under the bridge?’ she said. ‘Or did I burn it?’
‘No, you didn’t burn it,’ he said. ‘But you really scared it.’ He held out his plastic cup. They sat with their wine, watching the road. After some minutes he said, ‘I figure he won’t come here after dark, when he can’t see anything.’
She refilled his cup.
They drank the two bottles of wine.
Into the evening they talked about inconsequentials and trivia, and he found himself laughing hysterically as the day’s end came with the sun cutting under clouds boiling in from the west, so that the fading light and the arriving cumulus appeared like a massive collapse, an avalanche of glory pounding down. When the sun had gone from sight he suggested the Olive Garden, but she wanted to walk farther, to a family-owned Mexican restaurant in one of the strip malls. The piñatas nailed to the wall were dusty, the carpet filthy. A pudgy girl of five or six wandered in and out of the kitchen gripping a naked Barbie doll. But the margaritas tasted strong; the salty, greasy food filled him.
‘How long will you stay here?’ Heather asked.
‘How long will you?’
‘Why can’t you answer a question?’
‘A week.’ He said it and felt strings and cords all through him jerk tight. Why a week? He had no idea. And what would he do then? But he had announced it, and he let it stand.
‘Today is Saturday. You got here on Thursday? At sunset Wednesday, we go home?’
He said yes.
The next day he sat on the balcony, and Heather sat with him, or she went back into the room and turned on the TV, or she slipped out of the room without notice. She returned once with a change of clothes, a magazine, chewing gum, and then a second time with food and wine. With the TV on, she called out comments on a home-decorating show. On the room’s desk she had already accumulated a little pile of things she’d found along the road and in parking lots – buttons and dimes, several bluish pebbles, a few coffee stirrers, a pocket-sized calendar.
He watched the wind striking the eighth-hole flag. A man stood on the balcony two rooms over and shouted into his cellphone about estate planning. ‘No, no! There are springing and non-springing powers of attorney!’ For a long while in the mid-afternoon Ellis heard nothing from the room behind him except for the grunts and subdued voices of a tennis match on the TV and the fainter noise of ice crunching between Heather’s teeth.
He asked, ‘You play tennis?’
‘I’ve made things out of tennis balls. You?’
‘No.’
‘It’s kind of sad.’
‘Tennis is sad? Tennis is love and matches.’
‘That we don’t know these things about each other.’
She sat on the balcony with him, and through the remainder of the afternoon they talked in a lazy, intermittent, negligible way. It resonated in him differently than their conversations in the past, and it struck him that they’d never before had time like this. The sun might track over the sky, from its first appearance to its end, and the two of them remained together, not hiding, not racing the hour. The traffic always looked the same, more or less.
‘Maybe we should stay here forever,’ he said.
She smiled.
The sun hung a couple of fingers above the horizon, and a fine layer of dust, or pollen, or pollution, had settled over his skin. ‘When we leave here,’ Heather asked, ‘what’ll we do?’
‘Live together,’ he said. ‘Get married?’
‘If John just runs away and we never hear from him again, I’m not sure how difficult it’ll be to get a divorce.’
He wasn’t sure either. ‘Should’ve done it a long time ago,’ he said.
She stood and went into the room.
The horizon line began to eat into the sun. When he went back into the room, she was lying on the bed, watching him. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘What?’
‘If you’d said something, I would have divorced him a year ago,’ she said. ‘You pursued me, you found me. You knew what you wanted. I liked that. And me, I should make that jump alone? Me? I’ve never succeeded at anything. Never. And now I’m supposed to leave everything, with no word from you. When I’ve failed at my marriage. I’ve failed as an artist. I try to teach art to little kids, and the kids hate me.’ The left side of her lip twitched. She looked toward the room’s door. ‘I couldn’t pull your brother out of that car.’
He crossed and uncrossed his arms. He lowered himself to the bed. He said, ‘I’m sorry.’ She groaned. ‘I am,’ he said.
They lay in opposite directions on the bed, his head at her feet, with a hand gripping her ankle. They were naked. Street lights threw pale slants through the half-drawn windows. A yellow light cast on the ceiling advanced, strained to reach to the ceiling’s middle point, held there, then collapsed back in a rush, only to return and work to reach the middle of the ceiling again. He watched this cycle several times, with empty fascination, like the action of waves on a beach, until eventually he became aware, too, of the traffic noise and realised that the light on the ceiling was caused by the passing of vehicles’ headlamps. He turned from it and moved his other hand to her other ankle, so that he held both.
‘Your kids don’t hate you,’ he said.
‘A few do.’
‘You’re not a failure.’
She said nothing.
‘I didn’t know,’ he tried, ‘that you felt your art was a disappointment.’
‘Well,’ she said, shifting a little, ‘I don’t take it seriously, which is the problem. I don’t have the confidence to take it seriously.’
‘You should.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’m not very creative or interesting. I’m not very smart. I don’t have confidence. I don’t know what I want.’ She laughed. ‘Should I go on?’
‘You don’t believe any of that, I hope.’
He heard the sheets shift as she shrugged. ‘I’m just telling you how I feel. I think some of my problems are just a part of growing up without a mother. No one taught me how to live as a woman in the world. I hate this kind of talk. Let’s talk about something else.’
‘I’m sure you can be a great artist if you want. I’ll insist. I’ll lock you in a dungeon and bring you pieces of trash to work with.’
‘Maybe I just want to paint kittens and rainbows. Flags and eagles.’
‘Eagles and kittens?’
‘Kitten-eating eagle flags,’ she said.
‘Sounds more like your style.’
He clung to her ankles and felt her settle a hand between his thighs. Eventually they slept that way.
The next day she came and went again, returning with food, with sunscreen. He waited for the times when she was out before he used the bathroom. He didn’t like to admit that he had to abandon his post even for that. On the room’s desk lay a considerable pile of cigarette butts that she had collected and a cellophane-wrapped 100 count box of matchbooks that she had found beside the road. They were bright red, with Ziggy’s Smokehouse written on them in a white script, and an address several states over. Later she came out onto the balcony with a motel pen and pad of paper. She drew a delicate scene in miniature of the highway, and the eighth fairway and flag, in blue ballpoint, cross-hatched for texture. Looming over the scene and looking down were giant flower heads with elaborately realistic, human, pinched faces, as if they’d just smelled something terrible. One smoked a cigar. Heather rolled the sleeves of her T-shirt to her shoulders, and turned her face to the sun. ‘I always wanted to live on a beach.’
‘We can do that,’ he said.
That night people on the golf course played with flashlights, hitting green-glowing balls. Ellis and Heather left the room and walked for dinner. The waitress who had given him cake sat in the booth with them to tell an incoherent story about her husband’s hair plugs. Back at the motel room, they joked of Detroit and Los Angeles, of how one might find a Little Detroit in Los Angeles. The next morning he arose before her and sat in the early cool outside, thinking pleasantly of sleeping in the same bed with her through a night and rising and not leaving, of talking lazily with her, of watching her step from the shower towel-wrapped and hair wet, of detecting the scent of her in the bed and in her towel, of watching her stretch in the morning, up on her toes. Of listening to the noise of her urinating, of the sharp odour of her shit in the bathroom, domestic intimacies that he seized and understood without complication. Much seemed unmanageably complicated, but these things were simple and granted him a knowledge of her that he had lacked.
She sat on the balcony toying with the matchbooks, folding and fitting their flaps together in various schemes of assembly. ‘What are you trying to make?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ She pulled them apart and began again and again, sometimes working in a couple of Marlboro cigarette packs she had also found. She created something like a spiral staircase. Then took it apart and worked out a swanlike creature. She had a few pieces of broken mirror as well, which she tucked into the crevices of the matchbook sculpture, so that here and there it shone. She hunched over the matchbooks for a long while, making tiny adjustments with small, sure fingers, and she looked absolutely capable, as if the making of small new curiosities signified the skills to do anything, to move the world.
Small dark scabs had formed where she had scratched herself. Eventually he took her feet onto his lap and massaged them, and she slouched in her chair and fell asleep. Watching her, he recalled the airport, years before, his misery and awe. And now? Now he was moved to happiness.
Later that afternoon she went into the room. Two golf carts in the seventh fairway had collided in a way that bent a rear wheel, and several men in shorts and polo shirts gathered around it. Then, one by one, they wandered off, abandoning the damaged golf cart in the middle of the fairway.
‘For some reason I keep thinking,’ Ellis called, ‘maybe a circus will come down the highway, on parade. A couple of elephants marching down the highway would make me very happy.’
Heather didn’t reply. He peered into the room, but she had gone.
He watched the highway for a few more minutes, then went in to use the toilet. A pair of red panties that Heather had laundered in the sink were hanging over the shower curtain rod. He ran a finger over the seams, then washed his hands, splashed water on his face, dried it away, and his phone rang. ‘Chinese?’ Heather said.
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m just wandering around. I found a bag of water balloons.’
He returned to the balcony. An iron shot rose off the seventh fairway and fell and dribbled onto the green, still far short of the pin. ‘I’ll walk over to that Chinese place for takeout,’ Heather said. ‘All right with you?’
Ellis said OK. He leaned on the rail and looked over the traffic. On the edge of the highway away to the right something snagged his attention, a tall figure. Ellis knew as soon as he focused on it that it was Boggs – Boggs bending to look at the ground, Boggs striding along a few paces, Boggs bending to the ground again. Ellis’s breath caught, and Heather said, ‘What?’
‘He’s here.’
‘John?’
Boggs straightened, turned his face to the sky and raised his arms outward. Ellis still held the phone to his ear but had forgotten it when Heather clicked off. He was watching Boggs, and he didn’t see her until she was already running across the lanes of the highway.
The traffic gapped and she crossed quickly. Boggs didn’t appear surprised to see her. She stopped maybe ten feet from him, her mouth moving. Boggs lifted a foot and looked down at it. His lips hardly moved as he spoke. Heather advanced, and she shouted.
Ellis crashed through the room, downstairs, past the reception desk, around the building. By the time he reached the side of the highway, Heather and Boggs seemed calmed. They were talking. Ellis rushed through a break in the traffic. ‘Hey!’ he called from the median. It looked almost like a conspiracy, and as he waited for an opening to cross the remaining two lanes, he burned. And at the same time he was aware that he stood in the same ditch where a man had barely ducked a semi.
When traffic opened and he could move forward his frustration grew confused. Heather stood downcast. Boggs studied the sky. He looked well tanned, rested and sad, like a man in the midst of a disappointing vacation. Heather didn’t look at Ellis, but instead toward the golf course, perhaps at a rattling flag there, perhaps at nothing.
‘You’re all right?’ Ellis said. But having said it, he was unsure who he meant or what all right could possibly indicate.
‘Say something,’ Boggs said. He seemed to be ignoring Ellis’s question, to be talking to Heather. She didn’t move or respond. The three of them stood in silence. This wasn’t what Ellis had expected; his strongest temptation was to run down the roadside, away from it.
Boggs said, ‘OK then.’ He smiled at Ellis. ‘We were just rehashing some history.’ He glanced at Heather, but she stood silent. Ellis circled in order to see her face – but she wasn’t looking at anything: her eyes were shut. She seemed pale, and when Ellis touched her she was trembling.
‘Did you hit her?’ he asked Boggs, furiously.
Boggs set his hands in his pockets. ‘Of course not.’ He started away, into the golf course.
Ellis took a step after him, but stopped and went back to Heather. ‘What did he do?’
She shook her head.
‘Let’s go back to the motel,’ he said.
‘Are you going to go after him?’ she asked.
‘Do you want me to?’
‘Don’t ask me that!’
He stared at her. ‘I couldn’t see as I came down from the room -’
‘You didn’t miss anything.’
‘Then what -’
‘Go,’ she said. ‘He’s going to kill himself, isn’t he?’ She motioned as if she would shove him, but she did not touch him.
Boggs now was at the far end of the seventh fairway. Ellis looked from him to Heather. ‘Are you sending me away?’
‘No,’ she said.
Ellis cursed. He studied her gaze a second, but she was now steady and opaque. He turned, ran.
Boggs had nearly reached the golf course parking lot. Ellis sprinted through the rough along the seventh. He remembered that Heather had been married to Boggs for years; in comparison he hardly knew her.
By the time he reached the parking lot, Boggs, in his convertible, was pulling away. Ellis ran behind, with little hope.
Boggs, however, had to pause for an SUV backing into a parking space, and then as he came to the street entrance, the traffic there was heavy and seeping. Ellis thought he might actually catch up. And then – what? Vault into the passenger seat?
Boggs approached the street at speed and made a screeching turn into traffic that terrified Ellis – vehicles from both directions braked loudly, swerved, blew horns. But Boggs, with apparent calm, had locked himself into the crawling traffic. Ellis, running hard, managed to come up beside him. He could hear Boggs’s car stereo. It sounded like Notes from the Underground – a favourite of Boggs’s, though Ellis had found it unreadable. He yelled, ‘Boggs!’
‘You all right?’ Boggs asked, slowing a little.
‘Yes.’ Ellis had to fight for breath.
‘Are you sure? I mean, in a bigger sense?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You don’t have to follow me, you know.’
‘Let me help you!’
Boggs shrugged. His jaw had set hard, and he studied the windshield. Traffic opened before him, and he accelerated a bit. ‘What do you want?’
‘To talk!’ Ellis shouted.
‘Just say it!’
‘What?!’
‘What you have to say!’
‘Let’s sit somewhere!’ Ellis gasped; he couldn’t run like this much longer.
‘What?!’
‘This is stupid!’
‘What is?!’
Ellis cried hoarsely, ‘This isn’t a joke!’
‘No joke!’
‘No!’
‘OK!’ Boggs was accelerating. ‘Havalek thirty twelve!’ he called, then pulled ahead.
Soon he had vanished. Ellis stopped and gasped for a minute with his hands on his knees. Then he turned and walked back along the road and through the golf course. He dodged across the highway lanes. When he reached the motel parking lot, Heather’s car was gone. This made him feel guilty. Then, aggrieved. He didn’t bother to go up to the room. He climbed into the minivan, started it and turned it onto the road. Every job had been filed under a designation based on the last name of the job’s client – like Jim Havalek, a plaintiff’s attorney – followed by a sequential number. Ellis recalled Havalek 3012 pretty clearly: a single-vehicle accident that had occurred about two hundred miles away. He pulled into the flow of traffic and phoned Heather. She said she was driving home. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Go on. You’re doing the right thing.’ Her voice sounded mechanical, maybe even rehearsed. ‘You know,’ she said, fading, ‘you -’ She began again. ‘You know why I called him John, not Boggs, don’t you? Because he hates it.’
‘Sure,’ he said. He was surprised by the sympathy he felt for Boggs.