There were twin double beds, each covered with bright-gold spreads that had been tucked under the pillows and then pulled over them, so the pillows looked like the corpses of infants. There was a table between the beds with a Gideon Bible, a TV-channel guide, and a flesh-colored phone on it. Beyond the second bed was the door to the bathroom. When you turned on the light in there, the fan would go 74
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on, too. If you wanted the light, you got the fan, too. There was no way around it. The light itself would be fluorescent, with the ghosts of dead flies inside. On the counter beside the sink there would be a hot plate and a Proctor-Silex electric kettle and little packets of instant coffee. There was a smell in here, the mingling of some harsh cleaning fluid and mildew on the shower curtain. Alfie knew it all. He had dreamed it right down to the green rug, but that was no accom-plishment, it was an easy dream. He thought about turning on the heater, but that would rattle, too, and, besides, what was the point?
Alfie unbuttoned his topcoat and put his suitcase on the floor at the foot of the bed closest to the bathroom. He put his briefcase on the gold coverlet. He sat down, the sides of his coat spreading out like the skirt of a dress. He opened his briefcase, thumbed through the various brochures, catalogues, and order forms; finally he found the gun. It was a Smith & Wesson revolver, .38 caliber. He put it on the pillows at the head of the bed.
He lit a cigarette, reached for the telephone, then remembered his notebook. He reached into his right coat pocket and pulled it out. It was an old Spiral, bought for a buck forty-nine in the stationery department of some forgotten five-and-dime in Omaha or Sioux City or maybe Jubilee, Kansas. The cover was creased and almost completely innocent of any printing it might once have borne. Some of the pages had pulled partially free of the metal coil that served as the notebook’s binding, but all of them were still there. Alfie had been carrying this notebook for almost seven years, ever since his days selling Universal Product Code readers for Simonex.
There was an ashtray on the shelf under the phone. Out here, some of the motel rooms still came with ashtrays, even on the first floor.
Alfie fished for it, put his cigarette on the groove, and opened his notebook. He flipped through pages written with a hundred different pens (and a few pencils), pausing to read a couple of entries. One read: “I suckt Jim Morrison’s cock w/my poutie boy mouth (LAWRENCE KS).”
Restrooms were filled with homosexual graffiti, most of it tiresome and repetitive, but “poutie boy mouth” was pretty good. Another was
“Albert Gore is my favorite whore (MURDO S DAK).”
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The last page, three-quarters of the way through the book, had just two entries. “Dont chew the Trojan Gum it taste’s just like rubber (AVOCA IA).” And: “Poopie doopie you so loopy (PAPILLION NEB).” Alfie was crazy about that one. Something about the “-ie, -ie,” and then, boom, you got “-y.” It could have been no more than an illiterate’s mistake (he was sure that would have been Maura’s take on it) but why think like that? What fun was that? No, Alfie preferred (even now) to believe that “-ie, -ie,” . . . wait for it . . . “-y” was an intended construction. Something sneaky but playful, with the feel of an e. e.
cummings poem.
He rummaged through the stuff in his inside coat pocket, feeling papers, an old toll-ticket, a bottle of pills—stuff he had quit taking—
and at last finding the pen that always hid in the litter. Time to record today’s finds. Two good ones, both from the same rest area, one over the urinal he had used, the other written with a Sharpie on the map case beside the Hav-A-Bite machine. (Snax, which in Alfie’s opinion vended a superior product line, had for some reason been disenfran-chised in the I-80 rest areas about four years ago.) These days Alfie sometimes went two weeks and three thousand miles without seeing anything new, or even a viable variation on something old. Now, two in one day. Two on the last day. Like some sort of omen.
His pen had COTTAGER FOODS THE GOOD STUFF! written in gold along the barrel, next to the logo, a thatched hut with smoke coming out of the quaintly crooked chimney.
Sitting there on the bed, still in his topcoat, Alfie bent studiously over his old notebook so that his shadow fell on the page. Below
“Dont chew the Trojan Gum” and “Poopie doopie you so loopy,”
Alfie added “Save Russian Jews, collect valuable prizes (WALTON
NEB)” and “All that you love will be carried away (WALTON NEB).” He hesitated. He rarely added notes, liking his finds to stand alone.
Explanation rendered the exotic mundane (or so he had come to believe; in the early years he had annotated much more freely), but from time to time a footnote still seemed to be more illuminating than demystifying.
He starred the second entry—“All that you love will be carried 76
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away (WALTON NEB)”—and drew a line two inches above the bottom of the page, and wrote.*
He put the pen back in his pocket, wondering why he or anyone would continue anything this close to ending everything. He couldn’t think of a single answer. But of course you went on breathing, too.
You couldn’t stop it without rough surgery.
The wind gusted outside. Alfie looked briefly toward the window, where the curtain (also green, but a different shade from the rug) had been drawn. If he pulled it back, he would be able to see chains of light on Interstate 80, each bright bead marking sentient beings running on the rod of the highway. Then he looked back down at his book. He meant to do it, all right. This was just . . . well . . .
“Breathing,” he said, and smiled. He picked his cigarette out of the ashtray, smoked, returned it to the groove, and thumbed back through the book again. The entries recalled thousands of truck stops and roadside chicken shacks and highway rest areas the way certain songs on the radio can bring back specific memories of a place, a time, the person you were with, what you were drinking, what you were thinking.
“Here I sit, brokenhearted, tried to shit but only farted.” Everyone knew that one, but here was an interesting variation from Double D
Steaks in Hooker, Oklahoma: “Here I sit, I’m at a loss, trying to shit out taco sauce. I know I’m going to drop a load, only hope I don’t explode.” And from Casey, Iowa, where SR 25 crossed I-80: “My mother made me a whore.” To which someone had added in very different penmanship: “If I supply the yarn will she make me one?”
He had started collecting when he was selling the UPCs, noting various bits of graffiti in the Spiral notebook without at first knowing why he was doing it. They were just amusing, or disconcerting, or both at the same time. Yet little by little he had become fascinated with these messages from the interstate, where the only other communications seemed to be dipped headlights when you passed in the
*“To read this you must also look at the exit ramp from the Walton Rest Area back to highway, i.e. at departing transients.”
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rain, or maybe somebody in a bad mood flipping you the bird when you went by in the passing lane pulling a rooster-tail of snow behind you. He came gradually to see—or perhaps only to hope—that something was going on here. The e. e. cummings lilt of “Poopie doopie you so loopy,” for instance, or the inarticulate rage of “1380 West Avenue kill my mother TAKE HER JEWELS.”
Or take this oldie: “Here I sit, cheeks a-flexin’, giving birth to another Texan.” The meter, when you considered it, was odd. Not iambs but some odd triplet formula with the stress on the third: “Here I sit, cheeks a- flex in’, giving birth to a noth er Tex an.” Okay, it broke down a little at the end, but that somehow added to its memorabil-ity, gave it that final mnemonic twist of the tail. He had thought on many occasions that he could go back to school, take some courses, get all that feet-and-meter stuff down pat. Know what he was talking about instead of running on a tightrope of intuition. All he really remembered clearly from school was iambic pentameter: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” He had seen that in a men’s room on I-70, actually, to which someone had added, “The real question is who your father was, dipstick.”