Lake Charles (21 page)
“P-s-s-t. Brendan, wake up.” Ashleigh’s plea startled me to consciousness. “You went out like a light on me. Did you enjoy sweet dreams?”
“No, I didn’t,” I said, feeling the party van’s tires under us thrumming on the alpine switchback. “How late is it? Did you bust your curfew?”
She giggled at the idea. “What curfew? Dad is cool, especially since Mom died.”
“Sorry, I didn’t know she did. How?”
Ashleigh’s voice croaked a little. “Last Christmas Eve she cracked up in a paraglider accident out in godforsaken Utah.”
“So now you call the shots at home?”
“You’d freak if I told you by how much. Let’s discuss something else. Hey, ain’t J.D.’s van da’ bomb? Can you suspend your disbelief and pretend we’re Jason and the Argonauts sliding past Aeaea, the island where the enchantress Circe and her pet swine lived?”
“Yeah boy, get a load of the whiffs from the dead lobsters and pig shit. Did you like the show at the armory?”
“It didn’t really blow up my skirt. Hey, roll us a jay. Getting straight is a howling bummer. I told J.D. to drop us off at my house. The night is still young, and my Jaguar has a full tank of gas.”
“You own a Jag? Hoo boy, I’m in hog heaven tonight. Where are we going?”
“To romp through the mountains and then on to the Chewink Motel. Do you know it? Dad is the owner.”
“No, but your dad owns a motel?” Booty call, I thrilled.
“Yeah, ain’t that a rip? Wait. Did you bring the right protection?”
“Ribbed for the extra friction.” With a magician’s hand flourish, I produced the specialty condom.
“Cool. The next stop is ours, and then we’re guests at the Chewink. By the way, I’m curious. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“One sister.”
“Oh—is Edna Fishback your sister? I never made the connection until now. Guess I’m really stoned not to see it. Awesome.”
“H’m. Do you know Edna?”
“We’ve chatted a little, sure. Girlie stuff mostly.”
“But Edna is a homebody. She’s never gone to Yellow Snake.”
Her smile impish, Ashleigh tilted her eyebrows and bangs at my earnest face. “You’d flip out to know where your twin sister has gone and done.”
“Bullshit. She’s my twin sister, so I ought to know better than you do.”
“You’re the one who’s full of it. I know for a fact Edna has been to the Chewink Motel. Their guest register doesn’t lie.”
“Why does she go to your dad’s motel?”
Ashleigh giggled at my naiveté. “For the same reason her twin brother goes, I imagine.”
The shimmery neon tube letters, including the duds, at the Chewink Motel’s entrance spelled out “OFFI’E, VA’AN’IES.” My latest communiqué with Ashleigh revealing Edna had used the motel urged me to suggest we return here. After nosing into the gravel lot, Mr. Kuzawa doused the cab truck’s headlights as I located the two dark windows to Room 7 where I’d yawned awake next to Ashleigh’s corpse. At the office door, Mr. Kuzawa pounded his fist, and the overhead light flaring on blinded us.
“Who is that out there?” asked a querulous Mrs. Cornwell through the shut door.
“Jerry Kuzawa. We came by earlier with questions. Can you spare us a minute?”
“You again? More questions, I suppose. Nope, you better just buzz off.”
“We came to search in your rooms.”
“You better haul it on down the road, mister.”
“Please don’t be that way,” I said. “A key opens a room door easier than a shoulder does. A key also leaves no costly damage.”
“Is that a threat? My sheriff lives fifteen minutes away.”
“Always your call, ma’am, but we’re fast at bashing in doors and ransacking rooms,” said Mr. Kuzawa.
“All right, all right. Just don’t go nuts on me. I’ll be out directly.”
“Thank you, ma’am. We’ll be happy to wait.”
I stowed the 12-gauges below the cab truck seat, and the office doorknob soon rattled open. Tying off the fuzzy robe, she waddled out to us. The five-and-dime store glasses hung from a bead chain at her neck, and she let out the boiled cabbage odor from her dinner.
“What are you after now?” she asked.
“We’re not sure, but we’ll know it when we see it,” replied Mr. Kuzawa.
She stuck her palm out at Mr. Kuzawa for greasing.
“Show us around again and we’ll see.”
Her ponderous sighs got us to the nearest unit. She bent at the waist and inserted the door key. The open door allowed for entry. Mr. Kuzawa, his .44 drawn, prowled inside and ran a hasty look-see. No villains hid behind a shower curtain or under the bed.
After our futile search in all thirteen units, Mr. Kuzawa looked at her, his tone gangster sinister. “Did Ralph Sizemore come here tonight?”
“Of course not.” She wagged her no-chin head at us. “I can’t imagine why he would.”
“Doesn’t he own the motel?” I asked.
“Own this place?” Her gales of braying laughter echoed over the courtyard. After her derision trailed off to snorts, she responded. “Sizemore isn’t the proprietor of this dive.”
“Then Ashleigh lied to me,” I said. “Her father doesn’t own this motel, and Edna isn’t here.”
“It’s just been me for the past twelve-and-a-half years,” said Mrs. Cornwell. “No guest named Edna that I know of has ever registered for a room.”
Swaying on his feet, Herzog let out a yawn. “So it’s yet another dead end.”
“Sorry to drag you out of bed,” said Mr. Kuzawa. “Just to negate any ill will, why not rent us three rooms?”
Mrs. Cornwell’s crabby mood lifted. “That’d do a lot to iron out this misunderstanding.”
“I thought as much. Which room, Brendan?” asked Mr. Kuzawa.
“I’m a sentimental softy. Put me in Room 7.”
“Ma’am, will Sizemore come crashing in on us?” asked Mr. Kuzawa. “Will you be tipping him off?”
She wrested her robe’s flaps tighter. “You’re the paying customers, and your dust up with Sizemore isn’t my business. Period.”
“That’s the answer I wanted to hear,” said Mr. Kuzawa.
I paid for our room tab from the dwindling wad of twenties, and we left to bunk in our respective berths. Flipping the clean towels and washrag to the bureau top, I postponed a shower and, still dressed, crashed on the mattress. The new ceiling mirror captured my frown. Room 7 at the Chewink Motel in Yellow Snake, Tennessee, sat primed to accommodate cheap rendezvouses and cheaper murders. But I bore Mrs. Cornwell no ill will. She’d her creditors to pay the same as I did.
I rolled over with the recent gunfire still rattling my ears. I squelched the image of the handless, headless thug. Enough ghosts harangued me. A sketchy memory came of the wine-colored sedan staked outside my door that May night. The driver’s face remained fuzzy. But then I couldn’t sketch in my dad’s facial details either. I believed he carried a distinctive crescent scar an inch above his right eye. Did he still weld the seam joints on the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline? The crews had completed it two years before—in 1977—but a lost son had to kick off the quest to find his missing father somewhere.
For me, Valdez marked that spot. The stay behinds might recall Angus Fishback, and I’d learn where his wanderlust had sent him next. He may’ve rambled on to a logger gig. I smiled at me the lumberjack. I felt I was savvy enough to become a logger. Mr. Kuzawa had taught me to speak their lingo and ape their swagger.
I’d lost a little swagger after Salem Rojos and I parted ways. It still smarted. I sighed. Ah, first love so broke our tender hearts. That night we’d relaxed in the lawn chairs. Their portable TV sat on the rear porch step. What did we tune in? Tony Beretta drove screaming after the villains in his gray muscle car. The citronella candles were a joke because I swatted an army of mosquitoes attacking me. Pete and his wife had gone to bed, and Salem and I sat alone. Squirming in her lawn chair, she parked her bright eyes on me.
Here it comes
, I thought. We’d been quarreling all week.
“I won’t be at your pot parties, Brendan. Ever.”
“So you told me.”
“Yet you still go. I can smell the pot on your clothes, hair, and kisses.”
With a silent groan, I recrossed my ankles.
She’s got to be on the rag
, I thought but said, “I never promised you I’d quit.”
“My point precisely, and this is as good a time as any to promise it. Say it. I’m waiting, Brendan.”
What a bitchy nag
. “Is it a big deal?” I shrugged. “I don’t miss any time from work. I’ve got no DUIs or arrests.”
“Well,
I
don’t like it. If you respected my feelings, you’d make the promise.”
“I tell you what. I’ll only come over when I’m straight,” I said, sure that my compromise was a generous and fair one. “How’s that sound?”
“Sounds like bullshit. You have to decide. It’s the dope or it’s me. There’s no wiggle room left here.”
Resentful anger heated my cheeks and ears over her issuing an ultimatum. “Why did you wait until tonight to whip this on me, Salem?”
“It’s always bothered me. I like Brendan fine, but the pothead Brendan is a turn off.”
The tube picture was jerky. The Rojos watched TV in the backyard to savor any refreshing breezes. Mrs. Rojos had a neurosis that air conditioners bred summer pneumonia. Right now, breezes or no breezes, I sat there stewing. Nobody had called me a “pothead” to my face, and I didn’t like the seedy appellation.
“I’m waiting for your answer, Brendan.”
“Maybe we should take a break from each other.”
“There’s no maybe to it.” She bolted up from her lawn chair and moved to head indoors. She stopped but didn’t look back at me. “Good-bye, Brendan. If you ever grow up, give me a call. I’d love to hear when you’ve turned it around.”
“Hey, I’ll do that sometime.”
But I’d never updated Salem I was powering through kicking my drug habit, and I had a few major laps to go. That’s not to say I liked to live in my hermitage over the taxidermy shop. No nookie was a drag. But hell, I reasoned, I’d meet a galore of other Salems. With its 55,000 rowdy pipeline roughnecks, Valdez was rife with its juke joints, crapshoots, and cat houses all catering to the Good Time Charlies. Sure, I’d take off up north, hunt down Angus, and we’d go set the woods on fire. We Fishback men were babe magnets.
In the final ticks before sleep sandbagged me, I pictured Yellow Snake’s gulag, and I prayed to stay free of it. If I could only get the goods on Ashleigh’s real killer and erase the bull’s-eye from off my back. Despite my best efforts at resisting it, once asleep, I was a failure at staving off the dreams. Yes, the eeriness was back, so I flowed with it rather than battled it.
The pot’s smog choked the Jaguar’s interior since we hadn’t opened the windows. Ashleigh shrieked in orgiastic glee as we squealed around the hairpin curves along the ridges before we descended and docked at the Chewink Motel. After we nested in Room 7 (on this very spot!) she fessed up.
“My dad isn’t actually the owner.” Her crafty smile was my first glimpse of her deceitfulness.
I stuffed an inhalation and shrugged before expelling the smoke. “So, you fibbed to me. Why?” Her eyelids, I noticed, went liberal on the kohl. Had she always resembled a zombie? Or did the greasy smoke engulfing us distort my sight?
“Brendan, my fair sex lies through our teeth all the time. We can’t help it. Tonight you learned a vital lesson on life.”
“Meet the sophisticated man of the world,” I said, my laugh an ironic one.
“What’s it like having a twin sister?”
“Nerve-racking.”
“No, I’m serious here. Do you finish each others sentences or can you read each others thoughts?”
“Of course not.”
“Did she mature faster than you did?”
“On that I don’t have a read at all.”
“I wanted a sister. Being an only child has turned me into a self-centered hellion. My nannies told me that while I grew up in their care.”
I said nothing because I wasn’t going to touch that with a ten-foot pole.
“I’ve led a melancholy life, Brendan.”
Trying to lighten the mood, I laughed. “Who uses a word like ‘melancholy’?”
“You’re right.”
