“We need a room,” I said.
“Mark my words. We’ll be sleeping in the old man’s crate.”
On top of the flooding, it was New Year’s Eve, a not-so-small fact that happened to’ve slipped my mind. Super rolled to the 50 again and headed for Nevada. The world was still a sad-sack place, its folks a sad-sack lot. Every roach trap along the way had someone sleeping in a closet. Maybe he was right, Basil, and we were doomed to a night in the basement of a church, eating macaroons and Jello with bluehairs and bums and other sundry dopes.
Through this spot and that we made our way, past the unlucky bastards we’d seen the journey in, the roofs of their cars nearly swallowed. A grown man sat on one, a big old dude with a Grizzly Adams beard and shearling vest. From a distance it seemed he was talking to himself, or maybe even singing, but closer it grew plain the bear was sobbing like a kitten. He just stood there on display, right in the open, pouring out his guts.
“Pity,” Super said, “never cries in the streets. But wisdom. Every day it’s howling on the roads, and not a varlet hears it.”
Was he a cream puff, this man? We thought not, though, again, he was no insensitive beast… The song about the man who couldn’t cry until he’d been taken to the place for the insensitive and insane. Who after that not only cried, but cried every time it rained. Who once it had rained for forty days and forty nights died on the forty-first day — he just dehydrated and died…
And it was true, I thought: he was there, and then he wasn’t…
We hove on, getting the brush at every joint — stuck in and shut out, all at once. I picked up the paper. “‘Fed by a week of pounding rain and melting snow,’” I read, “‘Lake Tahoe rose to its highest level in modern times Tuesday, rising six inches in a day to surpass the lake’s legal storage capacity—’”
“Needles in your brain, Horatio, is all that is.”
“Says here it’s a twelve hour drive just to Sacramento.”
“We got a friend,” Super said. “Up yonder.”
“What friend is that,” Avey said.
“Fear not, butterfly. She will feed you.”
Around the bend the lake rolled into view once more, turbulent, vast, and blue, roiling with whitecaps, and scarves of mist, and not a single squawking gull, nothing from a painting on a doctor’s wall, just apathy, brutal, just eternity, cruel. A flooded shopping center drifted past, and then a golf course, flooded, too. Then more concerns, the Mickey D’s again, the crowded Shell’s, that diner packed with refugees and locals and archangels and creeps. And then we were parked before the Thunder Chief Motel, a drowsy looking joint with dripping eaves and needles on the porch. But just like the rest, this one had its blinking sign: NO VACANCY.
“I know you can read,” I told the old man.
“We’ve got a friend.”
“By the looks of it,” Avey said, “he’s doing a good business.”
The old man wriggled in his seat. I looked at his fingers on the wheeclass="underline" BEND and GIVE.
“What’s the deal?” Basil said.
“The old man says he’s got a friend in there,” Avey said.
“The implication,” I said, “is he can somehow squeeze us in.”
“I’ll hold my breath,” Basil said.
Inside, I rang the bell. To the left hung a pic of two of the scariest entities I had ever seen. The woman reminded me of something from Poe, risen from ancestral vaults. She had a forehead like a boxing glove, her eyes bulged over a steak-knife nose above a scratch for lips, and her beehive do was purple. Next to her, and much taller, stood her giant of a freak, Herman Munster’s brother, his iron hair in a bowl-cut and skin like the rinds on nasty cheese. At least the office was warm. It smelled of TV dinners and mentholated smoke. I rang the bell again.
“Be right with you,” said a voice from behind a half-drawn door.
I had my arm around Avey. She looked at me and smiled. I wanted to be alone with her, in the warmth of a room with chocolate and toast, beneath some grandma’s quilt. We’d murmur to each other, we’d sleep, I’d rest in the belly of her sighs. I wanted to say, I love you, but mumbled, “Take your time.”
The guy through the door was the monster in the pic, the selfsame bizzaro of a guy. He was not, however, clad in a tux, but bicycling shorts and a pale green tee that said MARINE WORLD, AFRICA USA. He was barefoot. Most of his toenails were black. Best of all, he was an inch or two taller than Basil, pushing seven feet.
“What can we do for you kids?” he said, and placed a dish of olives on the counter.
It took me a second to find my voice. “Hows about telling us you accidentally switched on your NO VACANCY sign?”
“Since Moses got the tablets,” said the man, “I been sitting in this office. That’s a long time, you know.” I picked up a postcard featuring a Fabio-type lunk in a g-string, smoldering with his pinched blue eyes and ridiculous bulge. It said FABULOUS LAKE TAHOE. “And in all that time,” the man said, “I haven’t seen anything like what we’ve got going on here.” Now that he’d moved closer, the sacks beneath eyes took on a whole new meaning. “I ask you,” he said, “would either one of you kids go out in this if you did not absolutely have to?”
“So you did make a mistake with the sign,” Avey said.
The man smacked his lips. “Nincompoops I think the world is spawning these days,” he said. “If you ask me, that’s what I’d say. This genius of a couple, it turns out, decided they were going to try to make it home tonight. Only fifteen minutes ago they conceived of this exploit.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
The man crammed a handful of olives in his mouth. “Do I look like the kind who kids?”
“Depends on what the-kind-who-kids looks like,” I said.
The man took a step back from the counter and held out his arms. “The father of our country?” he said, smacking on his olives. “He’s a big fat nothing next to me.”
“How much,” Avey said.
“Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know. But I think you’ll agree that $59.95, plus tax, is a precious good deal.”
“We’ll take it.”
“Just the two of you?”
“We’ve got three more outside.”
“Not to be slippery, but that will make it $89.95.” From behind a pair of thrift store specs, he took up a pencil and licked its tip. “Two king-sizes ought to keep you, I think.”
“You know an old man named Super?” Avey said.
“That I cannot say.”
“He says he knows you.”
“Lots of people say they know me when I don’t know them from Jehoshaphat.”
“He’s right outside.” I pointed out the window, but go figure, Super had disappeared. “Well,” I said, “he was a minute ago.”
“He couldn’t’ve gone far,” said the man. He slid his check-in book my way. “Now if one of you gentle people would be so kind as to share your intimates.” He snuck another peep outside. “You may think I’m plotzing, but my eyes, they tell me there’s a little monkey out there, dangling in that truck, I swear.”
“Plotzing you are not,” Avey said.
The man shook his head. “Then I wasn’t plotzing.”
I asked Basil to cover the tab till we could reach a bank.
“You got dough in the bank?” he said. I looked at him. A wad of bills appeared in his hand. “Here.”
The room was typical, a tube on the wall, plastic drinking cups and cheap white towels, the Hallmark photo of two owls in a hole in a tree. Lucille wanted to get in bed but Basil wouldn’t let her. He needed her to get his truck. Triple A told us such conditions would usually keep us waiting two or three hours, but it just so happened a man was nearby. Fifteen minutes later, our buddies were gone.