Teresa became startled in her seat as Martin punched the horn. A convertible Mustang rocketed around them and a chubby finger sprung into the air, the nail polish a stop-sign red.
Teresa smacked her sleep-gummy lips. “Welcome to Southern California.”
Martin still hadn’t recovered. He was strangling the steering wheel, muttering, and probably fantasizing about pushing each sleek silver car into a shallow ditch. When he finally got over it, he leaned back in the seat and shook his head. “They’re bad in Arizona but out here there are just so damn many.”
“Makes you wonder why we bother to save the world.” She snapped open her box of cloves. Only three left. Better conserve, she thought.
Driving weariness had branded into the contours of Martin’s face. A creature of the road. “If you could dress up for a party this year, what would you be?” he asked.
“Adults don’t dress up.”
“Sure they do, Teresa. They go to parties and dress up. You can buy one of those pirate outfits, a rock chick, a tiger woman, maybe a refrigerator or one of those fat lady suits—I dressed until I was twenty, up until when I met you.”
“Sorry.”
“So answer the question,” he prodded.
“I’d be one of those ghosts with the holes cut in a sheet.”
Martin shook his head. “That’s the lamest costume ever.”
“So what would you be?”
He shrugged. “I’d show up as anything if it meant going to a party on that night rather than... you know.”
“Yeah, that’s something we gave up. Halloween parties.”
“Hey, you want to play?” he asked.
Their eyes met for a moment and she tilted her head. “Haven’t done that in a while. A few years?”
“I’ve got more things to add to the list. It’ll be hard to top me this time around.”
She folded her arms. “You go ahead and start. Tell me your first thing. Martin, what has the Messenger taken from you?”
Martin sat up, excited to play. “Aquariums.”
“Say what?”
“I’ve always wanted an aquarium, but I think it’d be difficult to maintain one on the road. Not with how you make those jackrabbit starts and sharp lefts.”
“Oh, you’re going to have to do better than that,” said Teresa. “Cruises.”
“Oh but we’ve been on ships before.”
“They weren’t vacation ships. Can you imagine us going to Jamaica? Being trapped on a boat for weeks? Then on the island, walled in by the Jamaican chapels? The church would be all over us.”
“Point taken. Mowing the lawn.”
“Oh now you’re just being silly.”
“Give me a dark Heineken, some sunglasses and the early morning allergies—ah! We’d need a house though first. I’m not mowin’ other people’s damned lawns.”
She gave him a sidelong glance. “Weddings.”
“Are you proposing?”
“A friend’s wedding or, God forbid, a family wedding. The ceremony, the reception, the dancing, the bouquet—”
“The garter belt. What about pets?”
“Now hold on, we’ve not been deprived there. We picked up at least half a dozen strays this year alone.”
“And then gave them to a shelter. It’s not the same.”
Teresa looked out the window, disconnecting from the conversation. “Pets just die too early anyway. Guess we’re better off.”
Martin kept driving. Dealing with the tailgaters and excessive lane-changers almost became a therapeutic diversion, even as they hit rush hour.
~ * ~
The Messenger never led them to five star hotels. They were lucky if they even got a hotel instead of a motel. The Happy Moon Lodge was the prototype for this manner of dwelling. A two-story building with a barren, sun-scratched roof and lazy air vents spinning. The place slumped in the bottom of a depression just off Mount Vernon Avenue. The second floor overlooked a swimming pool filled with some kind of limeade and dappled with mosquito larvae.
“A hospitable resort,” Teresa read from a travel book.
“Oh so they got massages here?”
“Yeah but have to go up the street and meet the leper with the shopping cart.”
“Is it far?”
Teresa smirked before slipping outside. Martin checked that his door was locked. “I wonder. What about the God thing? Like this is our test? Just think about it this time. It makes more sense than anything else.”
“I thought this conversation died about a thousand times ago.”
“No conclusion was ever drawn,” he replied.
“If the Messenger was God that would make us guardian angels and you’re no angel. I’ve known you too long.”
He grinned and leaned in to put her in a guillotine chokehold. A nervous laugh died in his throat as he stopped and withdrew. What the hell am I thinking?
Teresa cocked an eyebrow. “I better not be that brittle yet.”
“I know but—”
He missed a beat and she fell sideways, swung around and grappled him. Though he knew how to break a blood choke, he couldn’t believe her speed, this woman who’d been barfing a lung for the last hundred miles. Teresa applied gentle pressure to a carotid artery, just to show him she’d found it. Martin didn’t need reassurance. She could have given him a case of cerebral ischemia right then, and he didn’t have to speculate long about that. He raised an arm buzzing from blood restriction, aimed a pulsing finger to the motel office. “After you, wonderful, brilliant, beautiful lady.”
She gave him a cool kiss on the neck and released the hold. “There’s a good boy.”
There was no front door, just a wobbly screen. The office had two cubicle-sized rooms. A man sat on a stool, his plump tropical shorts running down the sides. An Asian soap opera played on a nine-inch television sitting on top of several torn maintenance manuals. The air in the room hung with the odor of cheap cigarettes and Martin could tell that in the summer this place would be the worst kind of hell imaginable—he could almost foresee the sweat waiting behind the man’s broad forehead.
“We’d like a room through the first of November.”
The manager tweaked his chin. Martin and Teresa waited a moment, while the man completely ignored them. After politely reading the subtitles for a spell, Martin opened his mouth to repeat their request, this time with a spicier conclusion, but the man cut him off. “Cash and Card?”
“Cash,” they chorused.
He turned one eye to them. “Five hundred, seventy-five. Credit card for deposit please?”
“We don’t have a credit card.” Martin glared at Teresa.
“Two hundred cash for deposit.”
Martin knuckled his way into his pocket. There was plenty of money but he wished it spent elsewhere, not given for this rundown pusbucket of a motel. They had broken a few thousand at a credit union in San Bernardino and deposited the rest in the Messenger’s secure checking account. After the credit union they went to a fantastic Mexican restaurant called El Sombrero. Martin could still feel the onset of a carbohydrate crash; the beans, rice and tortillas anchored around his waist. It was not doing anything to improve his mood. Besides which, this motel manager looked like he could have been Tony Nguyen’s father. It made last year sharply return. Did they have to stay here?
They did. Teresa taught Martin to never question the Messenger’s instruction, no matter how unreasonable. It was a code to live by, he guessed.
After the manager put the cash in his safe, he handed over a torn copy of the receipt. He took down a pair of keys. “Second floor. Room 218. You come here for a pool key. No loud TV. And this is for you.” He brought up a black envelope from under the counter.
Martin felt dizzy. The second letter? This soon? Teresa looked differentially at him. “Did you see who it was?” she asked the manager.
“Watching TV—I didn’t look up. Nice voice. They had a good voice.”
Teresa gently took the envelope.
“Tall or short?” Martin asked. “Man or woman?”
Something lit in the manager’s eyes and then instantly failed. He shrugged as though in response to a more trivial question.
Outside rain sprinkled and every color looked crippled with black. They took up their necessaries and waited to get settled in their shabby little room before opening the second letter. Everybody had a vague story about who left the letters that controlled their destiny every year. Each story contradicted the next. And as always, the Messenger remained unknown.