Monk was in someone else’s body and he couldn’t make it respond to his commands. The hands fluttered when he badly needed them to ball into a fist His legs jerked spasmodically when in fact he wanted them to swing out and over the cot filled with bramble onto the floor. He came fully awake and realized he was having another post-traumatic attack. Only this bout had blended with the last stages of a nightmare. And he was having difficulty deciphering his present reality beyond his psychological state. Whose bed was he in? And why was it so fucking hot?
He glanced around the room, locking on an indiscernible object located on the wall. He stared hard at the thing, trying to adjust his eyes in the velvety darkness. Leaks of light like inert gas hung below the crack of the door and halo’ed around the curtained window. As if he were an amnesiac, or a visitor stranded on this planet Monk searched for the names of the other items in the black room.
A mosquito landed on his sweating bare chest and he slapped at the insect on automatic response. The creature took off, buzzing around his left ear, taunting him with its superior mobility. There was a creak on the walkway outside, and his consciousness dropped fully back into his body, his skin alert like an organic sensor net. He was in the A-Model Motor Lodge, and he was slick from disorientation and heat.
The gun? Where had he put his .45? He scrambled and plucked it out from beneath the mattress near where his head had rested. Another creak. He got out of bed—was he naked? He felt downward with his left hand and tugged on the stretchy material of his sweat pants. That’s good, he’d hate to be laid out in the local funeral parlor bare-assed. His mother would be chagrined.
Monk had his ear to the door, his eyelids nearly shut so as not to distract his sense of hearing. There was some rustling and the clink of metal. He twisted and yanked on the knob, and it wouldn’t give. His breathing stopped, and he assumed someone was holding the knob on the other side in big corded hands that would soon be locked around his neck. He tugged on the knob again, hard. It finally occurred to him in a bolt of clarity to unlock the damn thing. With measured movement, he undid the tab, the anxiety pumping his heart starting to subside.
“Hi,” the woman said. She was the one he’d seen going off to gamble when he’d first arrived at the motel. Now she stood at the door to Number 15, her key in the lock. Her potato sack of a purse was draped across her like a bandoleer. Apparently she’d just returned from another battle of lone woman versus the dreaded gambling empire. The green-blooded octopus that at first caressed and soothed you with its embrace, but invariably drew you closer and closer, until it devoured you whole, waiting for the next morsel to temporarily satisfy its hunger.
“Hey,” Monk answered, the .45 down at his side, hopefully obscured in the low wattage of the red lights hanging over the covered walkway. “Have any luck tonight?”
“Okay,” she said, getting her door open. She started across the threshold, then paused. “You some kind of salesman?”
“I go from door to door, but too often find the occupant running out the back.” Out on the highway, a late model car—was it a Sable?—turned into the courtyard, the cone of its lights illuminating both of them. The car completed its U-turn and drove off in the opposite direction.
“Well, goodnight.” He closed the door on her quizzical frown. He stood against the inner door, reassembling his mind. The thing on the wall was that damned cavorting catfish. His mental state was better but now his lower leg, the one that had been shot, was hurting again. Great. He prowled the room, massaging his thigh. Eventually he clicked on the TV, and sat on the bed, his leg lying flat on the covers. On screen a preacher in a lightning blue jacket with rings on each hand and a tsunami of white hair, tearfully cajoled his audience to seek the counsel of Jesus, the greatest prosecutor of evil in the universe. The devil—and by inference, the criminal lawyers who served as his minions—was the source of all mendacity and afflictions.
Monk fitfully found his way back to sleep, the muscles in his lower leg finally subsiding to a rhythmic throbbing; a lullaby of pain. Half awake, in his head he could hear the telegenic holy man screaming that Jesus was going to present a bill, and too many would not be able to afford the payment.
A dark-skinned Jesus answered the door to the house in the valley of sorrow as an exhausted Monk knocked. The Lord was holding a photo of Monk’s cousin in blackface, with wide white lips. God’s son laughed at the joke. He had real nice teeth.