He was waiting for her in the lobby of a new Motel 6 off the freeway. As he walked through the glass doors she saw that he was unshaven, his thick black eyebrows unruly as if he had tossed and turned and left straight from bed. He told her to walk toward the Mustang with him and they sat in the front seats without looking at each other.
“I have new account numbers,” B. blurted out.
“What are you talking about?”
“I took them from a subdivision.”
He put his forehead in his hands. “You kidding me? Are you asking to get caught? It’s not as big as you think out here. You have to let me take care of that.”
“I wanted to be prepared. So it would go more quickly.”
“How did you know I’d help you, huh? You think I’m a sucker?” She tried not to hear the plaintiveness in his voice.
“Of course not,” she stalled. “I was just hoping. I was hoping you’d see me again. I wanted it to help us.”
“Forget the damn account numbers.”
A brown-skinned maid rolled her cart in front of the car. In a torturous slowness, she pulled out one at a time a roll of toilet paper, a set of sheets, soap. B. tried to wait but could not. “Do you have the new ones?”
He kneaded the eyebrows. “I could leave right now. Sob story and all.”
“Will it take very long, Daughtry?”
“I could, you know. Get back in the car and drive all the damn way back and forget I ever met you.”
“Please help me, Harold.”
He turned toward the door and rubbed his knuckles across his cheek. He looked all of a sudden small and thin.
“We’ll have them in a day,” he said coldly. “My buddy’ll deliver them here. He wants a cut.”
“We could go meet him,” she said.
He laughed angrily. “Ha! You ain’t the one making the deals.” He reached across her and opened the passenger door. “C’mon.”
He led her to his own car in the parking lot. It was a battered coupe, the black interior faded to gray, a piece of ceiling hanging, gouges in the seats. It smelled of cigarettes and aftershave. She did not like leaving the Mustang, but she knew she must follow him. When she’d woken up that morning, her muscles had been taut with dizziness, her fingers clenched around the bedspread, numb.
He drove out behind the motel, toward a collection of cottonwood trees in a vacant field. Their appearance in the middle of the empty lot gave them the aspect of a solemn gathering, a mournful tête-à-tête. “I saw this spot driving in,” he said. “We can relax a little, be normal for once. It’ll be good for you. You don’t look right.” From the trunk of the coupe he grabbed a bag of sandwiches and six-pack of beer and she noted with passing guilt that he had made a picnic for her.
The creek under the cottonwoods was a bed of dry rocks. He laid out his black leather blazer for her to sit on and spread out the sandwiches. His oiled hair was a dark dome over his pale face, his features pale and tired and slicked with sweat from the heat. B. drank some of the beer but did not feel like touching the sandwich in the hot shade. She wanted to get the picnic over with, act through whatever Daughtry needed her to act through, get on to the checks. But Daughtry smoked a cigarette and drank his beer in sullen silence, as if mulling over a lost argument. The beer and the heat brought her back to her girlhood, her father with his bottle in the backyard after pruning and watering the roses (he loved to tend the rosebushes, never her mother). He spoke to B. in the simplest of terms—what she was playing, where she and her mother had bought her dress—and she did not know why she missed these stunted exchanges, why they seemed now reassuringly delineated.
She knew she should try to tell Daughtry about missing the delineation, to offer some kind of truth. “I suppose when I was a girl,” she began hesitatingly, “I had the same idea about growing up as everyone else. Marriage, children. Then in college I didn’t want to think about it. I only wanted to be on my own for a while, have my own apartment and job, nothing seemed so urgent . . . Then people started making less sense. They always asked me the same things. They started to feel very different from me, from what I thought about, and I began . . . to feel funny. I had this dizziness, you see, this nausea or wooziness or I don’t know how to describe it. So I tried to feel better from what’s supposed to make a girl feel better: meeting men, seeing pretty flowers, having my hair done. But none of it worked. And now the dizziness is there all the time. It never stops.” She gasped for air, it seemed. “Sometimes I don’t see how to live.”
Daughtry took a long pull on his beer and then tossed the empty can toward the dry creek. “Tell you the truth, part of me wants to hit you. I’ve never hit a girl and I never will, but part of me wants to slap some sense into you so bad I could taste it.
“You got no idea what it’s like, with your school and your books and your fanciness. It’s not like I don’t have dreams too, you know. I’m a custodian, for Chrissakes . . . I want to get a little fishing boat. My days off sometimes I go down near the wharves and throw in a line, take the catch back to Chinatown and sell ’em right outta the bucket. Gone in minutes, those Chinamen know their fish. But it makes me feel good. I got my own spot picked out and it don’t matter if it’s foggy and the tourists are shaking in their windbreakers, I’m out there and I don’t have to think about the damned union or time card or parole. Just the smell of the ocean and the fog mixed in the air, like a perfume . . . I can smell it here in this dry hole. Now if I had a boat, that’s all I’d do.
“I’m sorry you’re dizzy,” he said. “But you’ve never had to worry about money in your life. I knew that the first day I saw you. You could do anything.”
“Have you ever been on a boat, Daughtry?”
He dug at the dry grass with his boot heel. “Naw. But I seen ’em doing it. I could do it if I had the chance.”
He looked up into the cottonwoods. He seemed to be reading the flickering leaves for some go-ahead.
“I thought about it the whole drive out here. What I think we should do. That would really set us up, fix us both. By the time we’re done we’ll have enough to get to Mexico, and I think we should get married down there.” He paused here but still did not look down from the trees. “You told me yourself the college guy hurt you, and so that kind of guy isn’t the answer for you. You need someone like me. You’re too soft for things, is what I’ve figured out. Too thin-skinned. I’m the kind of guy who can look out for you.” His voice gathered strength as he spoke. “So after this run, we won’t have to do anything else. I can get a boat down there and take care of us. You’re different and I’m different and maybe we fit together.”
He paused and there was a hot breeze rustling the cottonwood leaves, then silence.
“You can say right now if you don’t want to marry me and I’ll leave you alone.” He looked at her now. “I’ll leave you alone, but you’ll be on your own getting the money. That’s my offer to you.”
She had watched his mouth moving, his tobacco-stained teeth and his pointed tongue flashing periodically over his dry lips. The words “marriage” and “Mexico” floated over her. She understood in them only her hands at the counters again, sliding the checks forward and collecting back the crisp bills, returning to the delineations, the cool expansive feeling. She would tell him whatever he needed to hear.
“I can’t cook,” she answered finally.
A crooked smile bloomed in his face. “I’ll handle it, baby. I’ll do the fishing and the cooking and you just stay pretty and get a tan.” He grabbed her and pressed her head into the damp of his chest, lips to her dirty hair. “It’ll be the best living. You’ll see.”
She waited in the odor of his undershirt and their sweat for him to release her. The dappling of light through the cottonwoods made parts of them golden, his bicep, her white wrist, and in this light his proposal and her acceptance of it were remote and enchanted, a story she could listen to and admire.
Back at the motel, he threw an envelope onto the bed. The blonde woman in the new driver’s license had not dissimilar features—an oval face, the aquiline nose. But the woman’s eyes were younger, fresh and open. B. memorized the freshness before putting the ID into the ostrich-skin purse, as if she could inhabit that too.
Daughtry made love to her in the motel bed. He did not comment on her rankness, the rat’s nest French twist; it seemed to make him that much more devouring. She tried to lose herself in the sensations of skin on skin, the friction and release. But in reality she was walking across the linoleum, taking up the chained ballpoint pen, watching the clock above the vault. He fell asleep afterward, his hot thick body clamped over hers, but she went on, tracing the lines of the teller windows, running her fingers along the velvet ropes.