Whatever thoughts or fantasies Brenda was entertaining, it was weighing heavily on her mind. She had reassumed her fragile moon child personna, and the delicate smile that normally went with that had deteriorated into a semi-pout. She stirred a couple of times and finally broke the silence.
"What the hell is this all about, E.G.?"
"These things never turn out the way I've got them figured," I admitted.
B.C. wasn't looking at me. Instead she was content to stare out across the dusty, gravel surface of the parking lot past the road at the trees. There was an ominous stillness, like the calm before the storm. There was no moon, and the barriers created by the dense pine forests that carne right up to the side of the small motel created the illusion of being in the one small space allocated for the use of humans.
As far as I could tell, the motel had two or three other guests besides us. Several doors down, a new Buick with Kansas license plates hovered in front of a darkened unit. Beyond that, at the far end of the motel, a red pickup truck with Manitoba plates and a boat trailer was parked.
A layer of haze, the kind you get in the muggy stillness on a hot summer evening, hovered over everything. Chambers Bay was the kind of place 99 percent of the human race never sees, never wants to see and doesn't even know exists. After three hours' exposure to its decidedly limited charms, I had about decided you could fold me right in with the 99 percent.
Again it was Brenda who broke the solitude. "You've read everything I've read and had a chance to think about it — what's this all about? Every time I try to reason through it all, I run right back up against that same old brick wall. It can't be an animal — but then how do you explain those strange prints? Her voice trailed off again. It was plain to see she didn't know where to go with her line of logic. "Damn it," she grumbled, "why can't I make some sense out of this?"
"I've got it all figured out," I assured her. "It has something to do with giant koala bears purchased by the Russians, airlifted up from Australia, and dumped in the Canadian wilderness. Their whole purpose is to screw up the Canadian lumber industry so that the Russians can sell some of their low quality Siberian timber at higher prices in the world market."
My feeble attempt at light-hearted banter didn't even elicit a groan. Brenda gave me her version of the moon child cold stare riddled with contempt and announced that she was turning in.
When the door clicked behind her, I got up and headed for the office. My fascination with the no-talk, no-smile motel clerk had to be checked out. By the time I got there, I realized that the lights had been dimmed, and the young man was nowhere in sight.
There are very few times when a closed door will stop me, and this wasn't one of them. When I tried the knob, it turned, and I let myself in. The office was an austere affair — two cracked vinyl chairs, a worn, patterned linoleum floor covering and a battle-scarred cashier's desk complete with a montage of cigarette burns. An antique Emerson fan struggled valiantly to circulate the stale air. Outside of the hum of the fan, you could have heard a pin drop. One thing for sure, sullen boy was nowhere in sight.
The whole setting was an invitation for a little exploring. I slipped behind the counter, pulled back the makeshift drape from the doorway and peered into the darkness. It revealed nothing more than another dingy corridor lined with a series of doors, all closed. At the far end of the hallway, a single 40-watt bulb was charged with an impossible mission. It hung right next to a faded, crudely lettered sign that informed the occupants that this was the exit. I tried to picture the tiny hall, full of choking smoke, and some poor soul trying to find the obligatory exit sign. If they were dependent on that sign, they were doomed.
I worked my way down the dimly lit hallway and inched the back door open. The small, tree-sheltered parking lot behind the motel was unlit. The only activity was confined to a dark car parked on a small strip of land jutting out from an adjacent drive into the shallows of the bay. A young couple were entertaining themselves with a journey into the ugly world of crack. The bittersweet smell of their little experiment had drifted all the way up to the back door of the motel. With nothing else to record, I turned to go back.
"Are you looking for something?"
The almost freakish, broken quality of the voice startled me, throwing me off guard. I couldn't tell whether it was the fact that he was there or whether it was the quality of his voice. Nevertheless, there he was; the immobile, too pretty face with the hooded brown-black eyes staring back at me. Even in the darkness there was something disturbing, something intensely evil about the way he looked at me.
"Hey, you're just the guy I was looking for," I quickly said.
"Do you need something?" he managed. All the while I was trying to piece together the voice; it was too hoarse, too raspy, barely a whisper, wholly inconsistent with his almost unreal, unblemished countenance.
"Matter of fact, I do. I can't find the ice machine. It's hotter than hell in my room. I think I should report it to the manager, er… what's your name?" I was pulling out all the stops.
"Kelto, sir."
"Kelto," I repeated. "What the hell nationality is that?" Everybody has heard of the ugly American; well, I was giving the kid my version.
"Kelto is a Lute name, sir."
"Lute?" I repeated. I made it sound like a question.
"My people come from the vast Northwest Territories — the outlands." He was all too content to let it drop at that. Nothing about him correlated with the vision of Lutes as I knew them — squat, dark and swarthy people one step removed from their Mongol heritage. Kelto was the antithesis of everything Lute. "I'll get you some ice, sir," he said and disappeared back through the same door I had used.
I listened briefly to the howls of unbridled laughter emanating from the darkened car out on the point and followed Kelto back into the hallway.
Five minutes later I had my bucket of ice and returned to my room. Brenda had left the flimsy drape between the two rooms partially open, and I wondered if it was an invitation or evidence of the same tendency that allowed her to walk around all day with a gaping hole in the right knee of her faded jeans.
Deciding it was the latter, I poured the ice in the toilet, pulled back the smoke-stained chenille bedspread and crashed.
Some people sleep well in motels. Others manage a good night's sleep only when they're bedded down in the womb-like security of their own bedroom. Me, I've never been able to sleep anywhere. That's not to say I don't nap — those quick cobwebby, not quite enough trips into a hazy, half-satisfying never-never land. That I can do, and I can do it anywhere. Unfortunately, I can do it on a plane, in a car and even in a meeting with my publisher. Consequently, I've spent most of my life viewing the world through splotchy red orbs that make me look like my eyes were painted in by a half-crazed surrealist.
At any rate, there I was, five o'clock in the morning, wide awake, peering out of bloodshot eyes at a hint of the dawn and wishing I could go back to sleep.
Nevertheless, I hauled my aging frame out of the rack and staggered to the window for the ritualistic early morning appraisal of the new day. Something had happened during the course of the night. The new dawn was gray and brooding and somber; the bay was angry and busy with whitecaps. The sky was painted with streaks of polluted orange laced with slate gray streaks of clouds trailing back to the still dark western horizon. Fracto stratus, I mumbled to myself — and even though those weather bureau days were some 25 years in my checkered past, the definition of the clouds was still a portend of rain.
Nothing would delight me more than to paint you a bright, cheery portrait of one Elliott Grant Wages that bounced out of bed, smiled at the world, slipped into a pair of designer sweats and jocked it up for 30 minutes before sitting down to a bowl of Grape Nuts. Such, sadly, is not the case. After 50 troubled summers on this old planet, the only thing that can force this worn old transmission into gear is a couple of shots; one is nicotine, the other caffeine. It's true that I'm holding it under one pack a day, but that first one in the morning is critical to all systems go.