A Multitude of Sins (33 page)

Out again in the darkened desert, Howard ran his window down to let in the rich cooling breezes. Frances had put on some watery new-age electronic music that was making him woozy. He took his shoes off, tilted back and faced the landscape behind the barrier of the night.

A little band of nastiness which he definitely didn’t appreciate had begun widening between them all the way up to Flagstaff. It was the sort of thing you suffered in the workplace. Except, precisely because it
was
the workplace and not your real life, you weren’t stuck with whoever it was the way he was stuck now with nutty Frances. Which explained why being married was so good—at least the way he understood it: if you married the right person (and he had), you didn’t experience unwelcome surprises and upsets. The more you got to know that right person, the better it got—not the worse and more discouraging. You liked them and you liked life. The institution took you to deeper depths, and you felt serious things you wouldn’t otherwise feel. Idiotic and unnecessary escapades like this trip just didn’t come up. He hadn’t been married long enough to fully appreciate all this—a year, only—but he was beginning to. Of course, it was also nice to be spinning along in a big expensive car, headed for some unknown exotic place, where the night would be spent screwing an attractive woman you didn’t have to take care of the rest of your life. Still, though, he was sorry not to have just gotten on a bus in Flagstaff. Frances would probably have welcomed it. He’d just forgotten.

Occasionally a dimly lit settlement rocketed past. A scattering of lights, some shadowy men standing outside a bar or a crummy store or beside a row of pickups, seemingly unaware of the highway.

“Indians,” Frances said authoritatively. She’d elevated her seat and resituated closer to the steering wheel, so she appeared to be a tiny pilot in a green-lit cockpit. “We’re on the Hopi reservation here.”

“We don’t want to break down, then,” Howard said.

“I’m sure they’d take good care of us.”

“As soon as they finished stripping the car and killing us. That’s probably true. They’d give us a decent burial up on some platform.” He stared into the night, where a single socketed light glowed like a boat on the ocean. “I have Indian blood in me,” he said for no particular reason. “My father was a Paiute, and my mother’s named Sue.” It was a joke he’d never thought was funny before but seemed amusing now. “My mother
is
named Sue. Sue Crosby,” he added, feeling better about things, including Frances. The nastiness seemed to have drifted away suddenly. Though he wasn’t crazy about how she came off in her white shorts (too tight) and her blue blouse with the dopey, hand-painted anchor. She looked like a little Polack—somebody who sold cheap houses to other Polacks and bought her clothes at Target. She was too muscular, too—like somebody on the Polish gymnastics team. Somebody named Magda. Her body wasn’t that great to touch. He preferred softer, less toned-up women like his wife. Though Frances was older and, he assumed, had to take better care of herself.

On an impulse, he reached across the seat, unfastened her small right hand from the steering wheel and grasped it in his own hand. “I’ve been wanting to do that,” he said, though it wasn’t true.

“Okay,” she said, not looking at him, just peering ahead into the tunnel of light.

“I was thinking about those Japanese in the restaurant,” he said. “How weird is that? In fucking Flagstaff. Indians. Desert. Snakes. You wonder how they got there.” He
squeezed her hand for emphasis. He hated electronic music and switched it off before it made him carsick.

“They’re everywhere now, I guess,” Frances said in the new silence. “I’ve sold houses to them. They’re nice. They take care of their stuff.”

“Like lesbians,” he said. “Lesbians are good home owners.”

Frances sucked in her lower lip, squinted, scrunched her face up, then looked over at Howard. It was her Japanese imitation. “Condlo-min-lium,” she said through her teeth.

“We want buy condlo-min-lium long time,” Howard said, then they both laughed. She was funny—a side of her he hadn’t seen. “You’re great,” he said. Then he said, “You’re terrific.”

“Men sometimes velly hard please,” she said, still in the Japanese voice. “Too hard.”

“Yeah, but it’s worth it. Isn’t it? Innnit?” This was his only imitation—the harelip. People always cracked up.

“Not know,” Frances said. “Still early. Know better later.”

He moved his hand up to her firm small pointed breast, then wasn’t sure what to do next since she was driving and gave no sign she might want to stop the car and get something going. “If you pull this car over I’d fuck you right now in the front seat.” He pushed the button to un-recline his seat, as if to make good on his word.

“Not good plan now,” Frances said, still in Japanese. “Hold raging dragon. Good come to mans who wait long time. Make big promise.”

He caressed her breast, leaned closer, smelled the perfume she’d put on in Flagstaff. “Big promise, yeah, you bet,” he said, but again wasn’t sure what to do. He held her breast a few moments longer, until he began to feel self-conscious, then he re-reclined his seat and went back to staring out.

For a time afterward, maybe an hour, they were encased in silence—Frances staring ahead at the illuminated highway, Howard gazing at the border of desert, beyond which in the
scrubby recesses of darkness who knew what acted out an existence? He mused for a while about what sort of house Frances might live in. He’d never seen it, of course, but assumed it was a minuscule, white-shingled, green-roof Cape with fake dormers and no garage, a place she paid the note on herself. Then he thought darkly about Ed, whom he hadn’t thought about all day, until he’d seen her phoning him. Frances was basically a solid, family-oriented person, no matter what she was doing with him on this escapade. She was a capable
do-er
, who took care of things, and made a good living. She just couldn’t make
every
thing fit exactly for Ed’s particular benefit. Fucking him, for example—that didn’t fit. Though you needed to be able to do the unusual—be married and still have it be all right. Even if you had to lie about it. There was no sense hurting people for reasons they couldn’t control, or that you couldn’t either. Just because everything didn’t always fit in the tent, you didn’t throw the tent away.

He kept a pretty clear mental picture of Ed, despite having never seen him. To him Ed was a big, shambling, unshaven man in gray clothing and unlaced shoes, who’d once been physically powerful, even intimidating, but was no longer the man he once was, and so had become sulky and capable of saying cruel and unfair things to innocent people, all because life hadn’t been perfect. As it wasn’t, of course, for anybody. The expression “block of wood” and the wounded, weathered face of the old movie actor Lon Chaney, Jr., had become linked to Ed and with the nonexistent sex Frances intimated he provided.

Whenever Howard thought about Ed, it eventually involved some imagined confrontation in which he— Howard—would be cool and collected while Ed would be seething and confused. Howard would try to be generous and friendly, but Ed inevitably would begin being cutting and sarcastic. He’d try to make Ed realize that Frances really loved him, but that sometimes other tents had to be brought in and pitched. And then it always became necessary to kick
Ed’s ass, though not enough to do any real damage. Later, when both their marriages had been repaired and time had elapsed, he and Ed could become grudging friends based on a shared understanding about reality and the fact that they both cared deeply for the same woman. He imagined going to Ed’s funeral and standing solemnly at the back of a Catholic church.

Ahead in the pale headlights, the figures of a man and a woman appeared on the opposite shoulder—at first small and indistinct and then hyper-real as they came up out of the dark, walking side by side. Two Indians—dressed shabbily, heading the other direction. Both the man and the woman looked at the big red Town Car as it shot past. The man was wearing a bright turquoise shirt and a reddish headband, the woman a flimsy gray dress. In an instant they were gone.

“Those were our ancient spirits,” Frances said. She’d been silent, and her words carried unexpected gravity. “It’s a sign. But I don’t know what of. Something not good, I’d say.”

He quit thinking about Ed.

“I guess if they were going in the other direction, we could’ve given our ancient spirits a ride. Drop them off at a convenience store.”

“They were coming back from where we’re going,” Frances pronounced in a grave voice.

“The Grand Canyon?”

“It’s a completely spiritual place. I already told you the Indians thought it was the door to the underworld.”

“Maybe we’ll see Teddy Roosevelt, too.” He felt pleased with himself. “We oughta turn around and go back and ask them what else we need to see.”

“We wouldn’t find them,” Frances said. “They’d be gone.”

“Gone where?” he said. “Just disappeared into thin air?”

“Maybe.” Frances looked at him gravely now. He knew she disapproved of him. “I want to tell you something, okay?” She looked back at the streaming white center line.

Up ahead was a string of white lights—a motel, he hoped. It was long after eleven, and he was suddenly flattened. Those two Indians might’ve been phantoms of fatigue, though it was strange they’d both see them.

“If anything happens to me, you know?” Frances said, without waiting for his answer. “I mean, if I have a heart attack in the motel, or in the car, or if I just keel over dead, do you know what I expect you to do?”

“Call Ed,” Howard said. “Confess everything.”

“That’s what I
don’t
want,” she said, her voice edgy with certainty. Her eyes found him again in the green-lit interior. “You understand this. You just walk away. Leave it. It’d require too much explanation. Just fade away like those Indians. I mean it. I’ll be dead anyway, right?”

“What the shit,” Howard said. He could see the magic letters M-O-T-E-L. “Don’t get fucking weird on me. I don’t know what happened when you talked to Ed, but you don’t need to start planning your funeral. Jesus.” He didn’t want to talk about anything more serious than sex now. It was too late in the day. He was sorry all over again to be here.

“Promise me,” Frances said, driving, but flicking her eyes back to him.

“I won’t promise anything,” he said. “Except I’ll promise you a good time if we can get out of this hearse and find a bed.”

Obviously she was stone serious. Except he wasn’t the kind of person who walked away, and there was no use promising. His family had raised him better than that.

“You know what I’d do if you got hit by a car or struck by lightning?” Frances said.

“Let me guess.”

“You don’t need to. Some complications aren’t worth getting into. You don’t know what I mean, do you?”

The motel sign was off to the right. On the left—like a little oasis—was a bright red neon casino sign with rotating blue police lights on top, and a big red neon rattlesnake, underneath, coiled and ready to strike. Beside the snake
the neon lettering said strike it rich. The casino itself was only a low, windowless cube with a single, middle door and a lot of beater cars and pickups and a couple of sheriff’s vehicles nosed into the front. “Womans some-time velly hard to prease,” Howard said in Japanese, just to break up the gloom.

“I wish you’d do what I ask you to,” Frances said disappointedly, steering them into the motel’s gravel lot. A lighted office building inside of which a man was visible behind a counter, talking on the phone, sat beside the highway. The units, in a row behind it, were white stucco teepees with phony lodge poles showing through phony smoke holes. There were ten teepees, each with a small round window on either side of its front door. Two other cars were parked outside individual units. Lights shone from their windows.

“If you have a heart attack,” he said, “I promise I’ll ride with your body back to Willamantic. Just like whoever that was. President Kennedy.”

“Then you’re an idiot,” Frances said, stopping in front of the office, and staring ahead disgustedly.

“I’m
your
idiot, though. At least tonight,” Howard said.

He was out the car door fast, his sneakers in the gravel, the sky all around suddenly dazzlingly full of pale stars, though a strong disinfectant odor was floating all through the little parking lot, and there was country music coming from the casino. Frances continued talking inside the car— more about leaving her behind—but he didn’t hear. He looked up and breathed the stinging disinfectant smell all the way deep down in his lungs. This was a relief. They’d driven way too far. The whole idea sucked to begin with. But he just wanted to get her off her stupid subject—heart attacks and deaths, etc.—and back to why they’d come. People talked and talked and none of it mattered to the big picture. It was like buyer’s remorse—but tomorrow would be different, no matter what you worried about today. You rode it out. He thought quite briefly about having been named agent of the year. It made him, for a moment, happy.

. . .

From the driver’s seat Frances watched a large, long-tailed rat as it pestered and deviled a snake while the snake tried to make its way across the gravel from the line of teepees to the scrub ground where the desert began. The motel sign hummed and made the floodlit lot feel electrified, and kept the entire little skirmish visible. She wasn’t aware things like this even occurred. The snake, she thought, was the natural enemy and physical superior to the rat. The rat had things to fear. But here was the surprising truth. As she watched out the window, several times the snake stopped, coiled and struck at the rat, who reared up on its little hind legs like a tiny stallion and danced around. Then the snake, having missed, would start to slither off again toward the vegetation and shadows. The rat pursued almost idly, nipping then hopping back, then nipping again, as if it knew the snake personally. Eventually she let the window down to hear if they were making noise—if rattles were rattling or anyone hissed or growled. But the country music from the casino was too loud. Eventually the snake found the edge of the gravel and slid away, and the rat, its work complete, scurried back across the lot and disappeared under one of the dark teepees—not, she hoped, the one they’d be staying in.