Solemn (14 page)

“Officers,” Landon said. “We weren't even here that early or near this room. I'm here legitimately with my fiancée and my son and we're being disrespected.”

“We mean no disrespect,” Sergeant Nichols said. “We're just trying to get to the bottom of what happened in this other room.”

“Shouldn't you be out in the backwood somewhere, looking for killers?”

“Prolly,” Bolden remarked.

He was seasoned in the job, against his heart and will. He wondered if it was time for him to tend bar alongside his dream girl Tammy, who had him coming back to I'll Be Good for nearly a year now. She was a break in the headaches he got, like after the senior he found decomposing facedown in her greenhouse or the few farm-accidental limbs mauled to stumps turned lifelong conversation pieces. And the woman missing from room eleven made him think of his new girlfriend: dark skinned, bartending, wild haired, narrow hipped, an exuberant face, an eager smile. And now he had privilege of making accusations in a young couple's chosen den of iniquity, possibly interrupting their pleasure and shaming the woman in the process. One of his friends from high school—who got expelled—had found good money in running bulls crazy so he could catch the sperm and sell it to farmers near and far, to keep the cattle giving. Almost as much for one splash as Bolden made in two or three days. But, how many times could…?

“Thank you for your time,” he told Landon.

“You're welcome,” Landon said. His son began to stir awake. “We'll be sure to visit the front desk and straighten out this mistake come early in the morning. For now, we just want to get back to sleep.”

“Understood,” Bolden said. Landon's looked like a face he could trust.

*   *   *

The next morning, Akila was too petrified to go to the office and try to return the master key without Louise or her boss noticing. Landon had no appetite, not even for the delights between her legs. They showered only out of good manners, to leave quick. Akila could explain the missing key as a mind harried by motherhood, the backbone currency she learned she could pay off her humanity with. In the shower she most surely had been the last to clean, Akila determined: the keeper of this place would have to copy a new master key, she wasn't coming back, and Landon would have to marry her to make up for all this drama put on her. Given the controversy, they went through no great pains to obscure themselves on the way out. They had no comment on a strap of yellow tape around the corner of the motel where a woman guest had once been. Many people would hear her name again the next week, when the story was printed. And now was not the time for Akila to displease Landon, as she saw any words about the controversy would. “Baby, this shit ain't none of our damned business,” he told her.

And so she did the best she knew how to do for who and where she was at the time. She heard, but she didn't listen. Nonetheless, she obeyed.

 

ELEVEN

Her maiden name was Weathers and that's how she signed everything now. She was the daughter of a Jackson banker and homemaker who did not see her for several months before the last time. They made reports. Several. Pearletta Weathers once bounced around adjoining counties with other college dropouts. The marijuana use marched to acid and mushrooms before it landed on the heroin they had no prior context for. Before Gilroy, she favored white boys. So she flip-flopped. She idolized rock music to draw even more of the white. She met them in their parts of the world. Her dressed-up and impressive parents traveled to the junctions, visited local motels, tore up the seedy parties in the park where those types collected. They paid off the outstanding tuition. The only benefit they could see in Gilroy Hassle, untalkative but mannerable, was that they could keep a tab on Pearletta then. Maybe. Since she had never brought the baby to visit—and it was so far from Jackson and the trailer couldn't really keep nobody for too long without an outworn welcome—to them the biggest disadvantage of the death was Pearletta again unleashed. Most recently, they waited on her call for two months. Pearletta had checked into Home-Away-from-Home last week.

“I'm sorry.”

Akila entered room eleven under assumption of no guest. No one was paid to be on the register. She did not have to use the master key. The door was unlocked. Pearletta didn't understand Akila's nice, albeit surprised, greeting. No connection whatsoever to the “Hey, how you?” and “'Member me?” and “Mrs. Hassle, right?”

“No bother,” Pearletta said. “I need new shampoo and towels.” Then she wrapped the cream motel cover around her. She smiled. Akila pushed the cart inside. She headed for the garbage can under the dresser. She avoided taking inventory of its contents. She dumped whatever was up there into the trash can she rolled with the cart.

“You been working here long?” Pearletta asked. Akila pulled back the blue curtain shielding a shelf stacked with linen.

“No,” Akila answered, even more puzzled by the calm and cognitive dissonance.

“You like it?” Pearletta asked her.

Akila had never had time to even worry about all that. She and the baby needed money, and one of her aunts knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew the manager. She drove over to the motel she'd driven by, talked to him, and started to work. In general, despite the budget pricing and the element one star could attract, the guests were okay and even funny sometimes. As if just by having to reside in such a place, for a night or a while, gave them the need to at least dignify how they left a room behind. Most attempted a taut bed, flushed toilets, trash out in one section of the room, nothing too terrible about them left behind for another to confront.

“Yes,” she said.

“Sit down,” Pearletta told Akila.

“I have a lot to do,” Akila told Pearletta.

Akila remembered a few fellas come out of the room in the last week with a complaint from a nearby lodger about old helter-skelter disco music rattling walls.

“I would love a job,” Pearletta continued.

A few cardboard fast-food trays, napkins, and socks littered the bed. Akila brushed off the corner of the tousled linens to sit.

“Why don't you get one?” Akila asked her. Pearletta rested her hands atop the covers. Akila winced at her forearms—crisscrossed with hysterical marks a child could have easily drawn in pencil as a prank. Beads of dried brown blood, scabs like stitches.

“If I did get one, I'd want to cook, like Julia Child.” Pearletta laughed.

Akila was shaken just from the first time someone passed her a joint. She never cared for it.

“You wanna hear about a fucked-up person?” Pearletta asked.

“I guess so.”

“I like white boys, sorry to tell you. Tried 'em all, I'm 'shamed to say. I like how they smell, like sawdust or new dolls. White boys love them some stuff. Can't get enough of it. They been coming 'round 'cause they know I got money my daddy wired, and the stuff the money Daddy wires can buy. White people never miss an opportunity.”

“No, they don't,” Akila agreed.

“You gotta man?” Pearletta asked her.

“Huh?'

“Tell me.”

“Well, yeah.” She said nothing of her son. She didn't see it as good reason to make Pearletta recall. “You met him one time. He helped you…”

“Nobody never helped me. Where your man, honey?”

“In the Army.”

“Oh, you got you a fine man … soldier boy! Well, ain't we lucky?”

“He came home last night for Easter. I'm supposed to see him later.”

“Easter's here,” Pearletta told Akila. “I used to skip church every Saturday.”

“Saturday?”

“We Seventh-Day Adventists.”

“We?”

“My family,” the woman said. “You believe I grew up in one of those crazy church houses? We had to go to church on Saturdays, 'cause that's really the seventh day. And on Friday nights, we couldn't watch TV or go to movies or read the paper or anything. It was the Sabbath. We were supposed to pray, but went to bed early.”

“That's odd.”

“No, it was fun. Even now, I fall asleep early on Fridays. Pump me up to party on the weekends.”

“That's one way to look at it.”

“Go to the dresser. I gotta picture over there.”

The top of the dresser shed more light than her trailer had. Pearletta loved nylons. A few pair were balled up and worn already. Another pair in a package. Pearletta hadn't seemed the type before to love makeup: willowy brushes, turquoise and emerald eye shadows with flecks of glitter, tubes of lip gloss. Disco looks. Two plumed perfume bottles announced themselves in a heady scent beyond them. A makeup mirror sat with a razor set upon it and a fine powder Akila guessed was not for any baby's bottom. A picture was right next to it. In it, Pearletta flashed a big Afro waved down with a texturizer. She was reinvented, now. A redhead white loomed behind. A look so serious on his face it was silly. He had on a Tupac T-shirt. His forearm gripped Pearletta's neck. There was a joint in his mouth, a chimney; smoke billowed all over his image.

“Is he … your boyfriend?” Akila asked.

“Oh no.” The woman grinned. “I'm just having me some fun. I'm waiting on him.”

“Well, I won't be long.”

“No. Stay. I sent him off for it,” Pearletta said.

“For … what?”

“Our stuff,” Pearletta said, just like she was talking about number one on the Top 40, but Akila had yet to hear it. “He's worse than me. Come 'round to see about me where I used to live. Trailer park out yonder. His family own the whole thing. My husband used to pay them for our plot there. Long time ago, that was. We been friends ever since.”

“You both look like two very intelligent people,” Akila said. “I'm sure if you-all stopped some things you could start a family. Make a good life.”

Pearletta rose up in the bed.

“Family? Family? That ain't shit,” she said. “Oh, I'm smart all right. I almost got a business degree. Went to school in Huntsville. Oakwood Academy. Religious school for black kids. Hah!” Pearletta stared at the ceiling as she reminisced.

“And today, you know, it's Good Friday. I do still pay attention. But anyway. So I skipped church one day, trying to remember my way to the theater. It was farther than I had thought. Well, I come to one of the only stoplights in this goddamned town. This car waiting to turn left. But the guy driving saw me. And there were other cars behind him, so he kept on going, straining to look at me. He almost hit the car in front of him. I get to the end of the block, by this fabric store I used to go to with my mama for things she likes to do. And the car pulled up again next to me. Out the blue.”

“Did you holler for police? Was he trying to kidnap you?”

“Oh honey, no. Over and over he kept on asking for my number.”

“Seem like he was desperate.” Akila chuckled.

“I thought the same,” the woman said. “But still. He had these really gray eyes, five o'clock shadow, big cheeks, dreadlocks … all the way up to the roof of the car. He called me, over and over all day every day, until we were talking all night. Every night.”

Akila would never have such a story to share about Landon. That era of her life—of giggles under the covers on the telephone with boys, or even sneaking out of dorm rooms to meet them—ended before it began. She found Pearletta's nostalgia remarkable and immature, so different from how she saw she had framed her. She enjoyed it.

“I was supposed to meet up with the guy,” Pearletta kept on. “It was a few weeks. I didn't know what was going to happen. So, I showed up where he told me to meet him.”

“Was he there?”

“Yes, he was there. But not like I had imagined him.”

And Pearletta laughed until she cried, but she was still too high to move much.

“He didn't have no legs. Scared me half to death. I was walking over. He opened the car door and was just sitting there with his arms out, like a tree trunk.”

“But-b-b,” Akila stammered. “He was driving…”

“That's what I thought, too. They drive past you, look, stop. Honey, I wouldn't even come close to the car. It was too … weird. I had been imagining he was tall. But I saw two things in his lap looked like canes. I guess they're what he used to drive. You know they come up with everything these days. But this sucker started yelling some shit about Desert Storm. ‘I'm a soldier, doll … I swear 'fore God, I'm a soldier!' Hmph.”

“What you do? You keep on talking to him?”

“Hell no, I didn't keep on talking to him. I laughed at his ass. I laughed and laughed until I just couldn't no more. Next day my friend asked me to go to a party. So I did. And I met my husband. Thought I wouldn't never be scared of a man again.”

“You still married?” Akila asked, recalling a little of it. Not much. Just enough.

“Sometimes I wonder what might've happened if I hadn't laughed at him. If I gave him a chance. Like now, I think about it all the time. If he wasn't such a bad guy. If, due to his disability and all, he would have been good to me. Better than the rest.”

“Don't matter sometimes. A dog is a dog, hind legs or not,” Akila said.

“Well,” Pearletta said, “he could've told me. You know?”

“I know,” Akila said, wondering of the time.

“Like it was this other man in a car one night, with his little girl. Out at the trailer park I used to live in. We liked each other, for a little while. They call him Red. Hah!”

Akila missed it, but it would catch her later.

“Now, he told me he had a woman,” Pearletta continued. “Almost twenty years married. He told me. He did. Daughter and son too. He gave me money. Sometimes.”

It caught Akila and let her loose. Then, caught again. Finally, it slipped away …

“Honesty the best policy,” was all Akila said, rising from the bed to go now.