On top of all that, he was a bullshitter and had no more true ambition than a frog.
I hated to get it started, but I said: “Tell me about it.”
Silence hung in the air for a time.
I sat down on the bottom step of the stairs and waited. Wylie got up again and ambled over, nodded his head in the direction of my crotch, but it was just a feint, to keep me honest. He laid down at my feet.
Bill said, “I got to talk to you in private. I don’t want to do it over the phone. I need to see you. Can I come over? I’ll have to take a taxi, but I think I can swing it. We can have a couple of drinks in the study.”
I thought about that one. I wasn’t in the mood to get Beverly stirred up. Telling her Bill was coming over was like telling her I was going to stack and store a wheelbarrow load of fresh pig manure in the house.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Beverly doesn’t like me, right?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Don’t have to. She talks to me like I’m a bill collector.”
“You two just don’t click.”
“We don’t click all right.”
“Look, what she’s got against you is ten thousand dollars you haven’t paid back. Ten thousand you don’t plan to pay back. Some of us work, Bill. Come over with the ten thousand in your hand, Beverly’ll meet you at the door in her panties playing a bass drum.”
“Uncle Hank, you know I’m going to pay that money back.”
“No, I don’t. You got a job? You’re twenty-four years old. It’s time you started footing your own bills.”
“Really, Uncle Hank. I’m not trying to borrow money. I need your help.”
I was going to tell him to find someone else, but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. All I could think of was Bill at seven years old, right after my brother was killed.
“Listen,” I said. “Here’s the score. I got plans this morning, and I don’t want to get in dutch with Beverly.”
“I hear that.”
“I’m gonna take a shower and take the family to lunch, then I’ll meet you at your place.”
“I’m not at my place, and I’m not going back there. And if I did go back, you wouldn’t know where to go, because I don’t live where I used to.”
“What?”
“The place I moved to is the place I’m not going back to… Forget all that, okay. I have to see you now.”
“After lunch, Bill, or get someone else. Call Arnold, see what he says.”
Silence again. Arnold was my older half-brother from my Dad’s earlier marriage. Arnold’s mom had died in childbirth. My father was young then and hadn’t done so well with Arnold. Arnold didn’t so much grow up as he got jerked up.
“All right,” Bill said. “Let’s do this. I’m at a motel. Calls itself a tourist court, actuallyem"rt, act. I got it on a match book here… Christ, how could I have forgotten a name like this? Sleepy Time Tourist Courts. I’m in room forty. This place is a hole.”
“I know where it is. Another year or two without paint and repairs, they’ll be holding that place up with a stick. Couldn’t you have found something better?”
“Money.”
“Yeah, well, you did okay then. Listen up. We finish lunch, I’ll drive over. Might be as late as two or two-thirty. We go by one of my stores and pick up a movie for the night on Saturdays. Sometimes we goof around a little. Run a few errands. I’ll move things quickly as possible.”
“What I’m talking here is more important than fucking lunch and a movie. I’m talking some desperate shit.”
“It’ll hold,” I said. “See you after lunch.”
I didn’t give him time to complain. I hung up. I didn’t really think what he had to say would amount to much, figured no matter what he said, in the end it would all come down to borrowing more money.
I was mistaken.
2
I finally got the family home and swapped the van for my pickup, I drove over to Sleepy Time Tourist Courts. It was about two o’clock then.
Beverly hadn’t been too happy about me saying I was going over to see Bill, and threatened me with castration with the edge of a credit card if I loaned him any money.
The only thing I felt good about right then was driving my truck. I love that ugly bastard. It’s old and grey and scratched and runs like the proverbial scalded dog. Has a gun rack against the back window that sports a double barrel twelve gauge and a baseball bat, a loaded. 38 in the glove box.
Before I started out for the illustrious Sleepy Time Tourist Courts, I had put the shotgun and the ball bat on the right side floorboard and thrown my old man’s hunting coat over them. The coat lived in the car, same as the twelve gauge and the ball bat.
I didn’t hunt anymore, not since I was a kid, and I didn’t carry either the shotgun or pistol out of fear, but I had a respect for those guns, as well as the baseball bat and the old hunting coat.
The coat, truck, guns, and baseball bat had been my Dad’s, and it was the all of my inheritance, that and the skills of a woodsman, which had now grown dim and rusty, but were still appreciated.
For his inheritance, my brother’s boy, Bill, Mr. Hard Luck, had gotten three-hundred-and-sixty dollars and thirty-eight cents, long spent.
Arnold, half-brother and redneck, had inherited my dad’s six bird dogs, ten acres of land and a mobile home, a fishing shack on two acres out at Imperial Lake, and my Dad’s bad temper. Except for the temper, you could say Arnold got the best deal, but then, the way my Dad saw it, he owed Arnold more.
· · ·
Sleepy Time Tourist Courts didn’t strike me as a place you/divali d get much sleep. Unless you’re talking about the permanent kind. It’s on the side of Imperial City where the poor people live, made mostly of blacks and Mexicans and poor whites, and on some nights, especially summer nights when the heat’s way up, and the desperation gets so high a fellow can hear himself sweat, guns and knives come out and someone gets hauled away to a pauper’s grave. I pulled up in front of the place and got out and locked the pickup.
The motel had been built in the fifties and remodeled to fit the more modern motel concept of the mid-sixties, which was about the last time I figured the rooms had been swept out. The place was painted asshole pink and the pink was peeling. It dripped and scaled all over. All the curtains on all the windows were drawn, lest a little sunshine get in.
Room forty was upstairs. I could see the door number plain enough from where I stood by my truck. It was one of the few rooms that still had a number on it. The metal railing shook as I climbed. Pigeon shit was all over the landing and there was a used prophylactic lying beside a hypodermic needle. Come next hard rain, however, things might be cleaner.
I knocked on the door and Bill answered. His dark blond hair was rumpled and greasy and his face was oily and set with lines.
His shirt was stuck to him and his pants had a snotty shine. He was banged up and a little bloody.
“Goddamn, Bill,” I said.
“Get in,” he said. “Hurry up.”
I went inside and he closed the door. It was dark and the odor of his body in there was strong enough to go buy groceries and lube my truck.
“Turn on a light,” I said.
“I prefer the dark,” he said, “but I’ll give you a little light.”
There was an old stuffed chair by the window, and I went over there and sat down. At my elbow, on the table, was a lamp with a towel draped over it. Next to the lamp was an open bottle of cheap wine with most of the wine gone. Next to that was a stack of newspapers.
Bill turned on the lamp, almost knocking over the wine in the process. The light, muted beneath the towel, looked like the glow from a jack-o-lantern.
“What now?” I asked. “Spooky noises, a flashlight under our chins?”
“I’m depressed and scared, Uncle Hank. Too much light makes me feel kind of sick. Don’t jack with me, all right?”
“What have you done?” I asked. “Cut through the bullshit and get to it.”
“It’s not that easy, Uncle Hank. There’s a lot to it… First, look at this. Tell me what you think it is.”