On the Wing (27 page)

*   *   *

WHEN WE WERE well on our way,
Spirit
asked, “How on earth did you come up with all that?”

“A few years ago, when I was in the Young Tars, we went on an outing Over South—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said.

Together, we began to sing:

O, Babbington, my Babbington,

You know I love you dearly.

When I'm abroad, you're with me still—

Chapter 22

Eldritch, Redefined

WE ARRIVED AT THE MOTEL just at that time when the optimism of day is beginning to yield to the gloom of night. The neon sign was sputtering. The ‘No' in ‘No Vacancy' flickered on and off. The office was lit, dimly, but there was no sign of anyone inside. We pulled under the porte cochere and sat there for a moment or two in silence. The air was heavy with the smell of cheap booze and stale cigarettes.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think that the flickering sign is trying to send us a message,” she said.

Another car pulled into the parking lot and under the porte cochere. The couple in the car looked at the office and then at us. We looked at them. They grinned sheepishly. We grinned sheepishly. They shrugged. We shrugged. They got out and headed for the door. I gave Al a look. She gave me a look.

“Shall we move on to someplace else?” I asked.

“Come on, bold venturer,” she said. “If they can take it, so can we.”

We got out of the car and walked to the door. I swung it open for her and indicated with a sweep of the hand that she was free to enter.

“After you,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

The woman in the couple that had preceded us turned and gave us a wink. Then she smiled and shrugged the small swift shrug of one who expects a good time. Al and I exchanged another look, a puzzled look.

“Hello?” the man called.

Nothing.

“Hello?” called the woman. “We'd like to check in.”

“I'm not sure about that,” I muttered.

From somewhere behind a wall or two, there came the sound of a chair scraping on a floor and then the sound of a door being opened and closed. Presently a door in the wall behind the desk opened and a surly man with a limp came through it. He had tired eyes, a nasty grin, and a day's growth of beard. A cigarette hung from his lower lip. He was shrugging into a wrinkled sport jacket, probably to hide an automatic in a shoulder holster.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked.

“What's it to ya?” snarled the woman.

“I gotta put somethin' in the register,” he said. “I'm gonna need two names.”

“Bonnie and Clyde,” said the woman, cocking a hip. “He's Clyde.”

“Last name?”

“I'm Parker and he's Barrow.”

“Whoa,” said the clerk. He put the pen down and gripped the edge of the counter. “Whoa.”

“What's the matter?” the man asked.

“I'm not sure I want to check you in.”

“Why?”

“Because—look—I guess you're not aware of this, but you've got the same names as two of America's most notorious criminals.”

“Oh, I know,” said the woman. “We hear that from people all the time.”

“Still, how's it going to look?”

“What?”

“Well, suppose you two go on a rampage while you're here, robbing, killing, looting, maybe torching the place to hide the evidence, and then in the charred rubble my boss finds the registration book and sees that I allowed you to register as Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow?”

“Mmm. I see what you mean.”

“He'll have my ass.”

“Okay. Suppose we register under other names?”

“Now you're talking.”

“For me, how about Connie Barker?”

“Not great. A little lame, to tell you the truth. But it'll do.”

“And for me,” the man said, “how about Clarence Darrow?”

“Excellent. Yeah. Clarence Darrow. Excellent. You've got a knack.”

Clarence smirked at Bonnie—I mean Connie—and she stuck her tongue out at him.

“Be right back, folks,” the clerk said to Al and me, “soon as I show Miss Barker and Mr. Darrow to their room.”

He led them out the door and into the night.

Albertine and I looked at each other.

“What do you say?” I asked.

“I'm game.”

I tried not to allow myself to grin in anticipation of the pleasure of playing someone else for a night, but instead I had to turn aside and study the paint on the wall.

The clerk returned and said, “Well, folks, what's it going to be?”

“Just tonight,” I said. “We're on the road.”

“I getcha,” he said with a wink, spinning the register so that it faced us.

I hesitated for only a moment, then wrote “Panmuphle.”

I handed the pen to Albertine and watched as she wrote “Giggles.”

The clerk spun the register back in his direction and scrutinized the entry. “You got eye-dee?” he asked.

“I—ah—well—” I said, patting my pockets.

“Ah—let me see—” said Al, rummaging in her purse.

“Ha-ha,” said the clerk. “Joke's on you. Do I look like the kind of guy who's going to care if you register under a phony name?”

“Ha-ha,” I said.

“Ha-ha,” said Al.

“Speaking of phony names—” I said.

“Phony names? Who said anything about phony names?”

“No one,” I said. “Of course not. No one said anything about phony names. I don't know how the idea came into my head.”

“He gets these attacks,” Albertine explained. “Ideas come into his head.”

“He's not gonna get violent, is he?”

Cue the rain. Cue the lightning. Cue the thunder.

“Oh, shit,” said the clerk, hurrying around the end of the counter and rushing to the door. “I didn't know it was supposed to rain tonight. It's Manager's Bar-B-Q Night. This is gonna piss people off.” He scanned the sky anxiously. “It might blow over,” he said hopefully. “You better get to your room, though. If it does rain, it's gonna be in buckets.”

“You know,” I said, taking our bags and following him as he led the way out the door, “for some reason, I've been wondering whether I haven't been here before.”

“Uh-oh,” he said. “Spooky.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “It is kind of spooky. You see—”

A bolt of lightning.

“—I have the odd feeling that I was here when the town was called—”

A rumble of thunder.

“—Eldritch.”

“Oh, yeah. It used to be Eldritch.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but we went through a community redefinition.”

“A community redefinition? Did I hear you right?”

“Yes, you did. You most certainly did. We redefined ourselves as Hideout Hollow, ‘The Place to Get Away to When You Make Your Getaway from Someplace Else.'”

“Hideout Hollow?” I said. I was puzzled. “That sounds—well, forgive me for saying this, but it sounds derivative.”

“Derivative?”

“Yeah. Isn't there a Happy Valley around here somewhere?”

“Just over the hill. Oh, I see what you mean. You're right. They were our inspiration.”

“I thought so,” I said. “Happy Valley, Hideout Hollow. It's pretty obvious.”

“No, no. That wasn't it. They redefined themselves as Terror Town, ‘Your First Choice for a Vacation That Will Make Your Flesh Crawl.' Did wonders for them. Nobody was interested in a place like Happy Valley anymore. Old hat. Too soft. No edge. Terror Town, though, that was an instant hit. Did you know that before we redefined ourselves Terror Town was getting nearly ten times the tourist business that Eldritch was getting?”

“No. I didn't know that.”

“You didn't? I thought it was pretty widely known. You don't keep up with the tourist industry?”

“Not as much as I should—”

“Basically, Eldritch was going broke. It got so bad that some desperate town councilpersons would sneak out at night and switch the road signs, so that people who intended to vacation in Terror Town would find themselves in Eldritch instead.”

“I think some of that was already going on when I passed through here as a boy, quite a few years ago, on my way to New Mexico, piloting an aerocycle that I had built in my family's garage back in Babbington, my home—”

“What are you talking about?”

“About the first time I passed through here.”

“Yeah, but what's the point?”

“Perhaps you've heard about the night when Special Agent Panmuphle passed through here years ago.”

“Not that I remember, and I still don't see your point.”

“The point is that a kid was switching road signs when I came through here years ago.”

“Oh. Okay, now I see what you're getting at. That doesn't surprise me. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me at all if some of the very same councilpersons who tried sign-switching as a way of steering tourists to Eldritch hadn't done a little sign-switching as a prank when they were kids and that's what inspired them to undertake their desperate program of misdirection later in life. I mean, how many original ideas does anybody get in a lifetime? You can't really blame someone for mining the rich lode of youth during the mental doldrums of late middle age, can you?”

“No. Certainly not. I didn't mean to imply—”

“Anyway, it turned out the problem was the name. We hired consultants, they surveyed a sample of the populace and found that something like ninety-two percent of people who planned to take a vacation within the next twelve months had no idea what
eldritch
means.”

“Ninety-two percent?”

“Ninety-two percent.”

“So you changed the name.”

“Changed the name, came up with a good explanatory slogan that tells you what kind of experience you're going to have when you visit, trained the townspeople how to behave when they're interacting with visitors, remodeled our attractions and accommodations—”

“Redefined yourselves, in short.”

“You got it, Panmuphle. We redefined ourselves. Here's your room.”

“Thanks, I—”

“Anything else?”

“What time is the Manager's Bar-B-Q?”

“Called on account of rain.”

“Aw, gee,” said Albertine.

“Well, Miss Giggles, if you and Mr. Panmuphle—Special Agent Panmuphle, I mean—would like to come back to the office after you get settled, I'll give you a beer in consolation.”

Giggles was all for it. That's why we found ourselves, a little later, drinking beer in the office and discussing the difference between night and day.

*   *   *

“I KNOW HOW IT IS,” he was saying. “I've been there. It's like day and night. Or night and day, I guess I should say. That's what people say, isn't it? It's like night and day? Well, it is. Rolling through the day, the bright American day, you feel something big, and strong, and—what? Uplifting! That's what. Up-fucking-lifting.”

“Like the lift on an airplane wing,” I suggested.

“Sure. Whatever. I wouldn't have said that. In fact, I didn't. I didn't say anything about an airplane wing. Didn't even say anything about an airplane. I said ‘uplifting,' as you may recall. I had in mind something spiritual. That's the point I wanted to make. There's a kind of spiritual uplift in that light, the light of the American day.”

“I see,” I said.

“Let me ask you something.”

“Mm?”

“I want to ask you something.”

“Okay.”

“You sing sometimes, don't you? While you're driving? In the daytime? In that amazing light? You start singing sometimes, right?”

“We often sing,” said Albertine. “One of us better than the other.”

“Sure. I knew it. You see? I told you I've been there. I sang too, when I was on the road. Couldn't hardly stop some days. I was a singing fool. Driving along. Singing. A singing fool.”

He picked up his beer bottle. I think he meant to take a drink before he went on, but something came over him. He paused with the bottle half raised.

“But,” he said. He nodded at us, just once. “But,” he said again, with added emphasis. Then he took a pull at the bottle. He wiped his mouth and said, drawing the words out as he delivered them, “At eventide, something happens. Something happens to the tone of the country. The bright American day gives way to the dark American night. Does that seem obvious to you?”

“Well—”

“There's more to it than you think. Something ominous seems to fill the sky. It's not darkness exactly. Because the American night is never really dark. There are always lights, the lights that make the dark places darker, like the bright notes in a saxophone solo that make the blue notes bluer. One of those moody saxophone solos. You can't make a moody saxophone solo out of silence. You need some notes. And you can't make the ominous American night out of darkness alone. You need some neon. You need some fluorescence.”

“That—that's just the way it was when we arrived here this evening,” said Albertine. “What light there was somehow made the night darker, and made this place seem threatening.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It's part of the package. The buzzing neon light in the sign, like it's going to burn out any minute. The way the ‘No' in ‘No Vacancy' flickers on and off uncertainly or randomly, as if it was tryin' to send you a message. All part of the package.”

“The package?”

“Yeah,” he said with a chuckle. “The owners used an ‘atmosphere service,' Retro-Glo. They gave it that feeling of the kind of place you'd only stay in if you were on the lam or cheatin' on somebody. A few tricks with the lighting. Knock the furniture around some. Generally scuff the place up. Hell, I could've done all that. And for a lot less. But these guys were really talented with paint. Repainted the whole place, everything fresh, but it looks old, worn-out. You ought to see the work they put into grease spots. Real artists. I couldn't have done that. I couldn't have done any of the electric stuff, either. Like the automatic odorizers.”