Two girls, one with pink hair, the other blonde with bangs, they were flirting with Dwight Westover’s car in the parking lot of the Pratt Hotel. Dwight could see them through the window of his second-floor room. What he said was this: “Soggy bitches.” He threw his rental tux on the bed and went down the stairs and outside.
Now the girls leaned against the car’s driver’s side. The pink-haired one scratched her back on the side mirror; she squatted and straightened up, she squatted and passed a brown sack to the blonde, who put her nose to it and took herself a nice sniff. Pink-hair looked at Dwight. “Congratulations, dude,” she said. His face turned red. The girls stepped away from the car, sashayed across the parking lot and pried themselves giggling into a telephone booth.
Dwight reached out and rubbed his sleeve across the shaving cream on the car’s back window: Just Married was the lathery message. He looked at the girls. They were a little cute. Especially the blonde. She had crazy dark eyebrows, thick prickly ones, long lashes, those blonde bangs that quivered like loose guitar strings. He stared, smiled, realizing he was indeed a bachelor. The girls lifted four melodramatic simultaneous fuck-you fingers at him.
He turned away. Just Married. He was not just married, but almost just married: he’d left the church by himself and come here. He gave the window another once-over and went into the hotel office as the girls sang out, here comes the bride.
“I did what you told me,” the manager said. He was in a wheelchair, and had elevated himself high enough to sit with his knees at counter level, towering and serene like a scruffy Buddha, an unlit cigar going down his throat. “Someone called and asked for Dwight Westover, and I said, ‘nobody here by that name.’”
“The thing is, I want another room,” Dwight said. Then, in the tone of someone asking for something they don’t believe they deserve, he continued: “I want my money back. I have to leave right now.” Dwight didn’t believe what he had said: that he would leave Windfall. Leave Windfall? Leave Windfall. Big deal. But people would be looking for Dwight, people prepared with ripened purrs: Told you so or Better to have loved and lost. Better, then, to disappear. Better to make the disappearance snappy. But he was no illusionist, he had no smoke, no mirrors, and his hands were slow. He was slow. He could disappear only by leaving. All he needed was some money. He could get his tux deposit back, and the cash he’d put down to lay away furniture. And now a refund for the three nights he’d thoughtlessly arranged for when he first got to the hotel. He asked again: “Is there any particular reason why I can’t have my money?”
The manager spent ten seconds making a drippy sink noise with his lips, and drumming his fingertips on the counter, and looking, it seemed, at his own gratuitous lower lip. Then: “I don’t think it can be arranged, bub.”
“I haven’t even touched anything,” Dwight said. “Besides, the bathroom smells like shit.”
The manager tilted his head left and right as if to pry an answer free from a nook in his brain. “I know the meaning of the word compassion,” he said. “I do. And I tell you what. No refund on tonight’s stay. Hotel policy. Bookkeeping, you get the gist of this shit. But if you still want to leave tomorrow, we’ll refund the second and third nights. I’ll have to call my wife again and get her to run it through, though. Only she understands the great mystery of how to operate this goddamned computer. May I ask you a question, buddy?” The manager took the cigar out of his mouth, looked at the ash end, then fired it up again with a novelty lighter, a miniature version of the Statue of Liberty torch. “What’s that crap on your sleeve? Looks like jism.”
Dwight held his elbow out; the shaving cream had put a damp film on the sleeve. “I almost got married,” Dwight said.
“Looks like it was a close call.”
Dwight wheezed, paused—a mild asthma attack. He didn’t know where his inhaler was.
“Naomi Dudek, right?” the manager continued. “I saw y’ins’ engagement picture in the newspaper a few months ago. Didn’t she have about ten years and six inches on you?” He laughed through teeth that gripped the cigar, then started to gag.
Everybody’s getting a kick out of me, Dwight thought. “Whatever, where can I get a drink?” The manager pointed to a vending machine outside the office door. “I mean a drink,” Dwight said.
“The Nestegg Lounge has a six-pack shop if all you’re hunting is beer. Looks like you might need a runner though. You won’t get served over there without I.D. since that Shargool kid got his head ran over.”
True: every bar in town was strict about I.D. since nineteen-year-old Mosey Shargool had gotten drunk at the Nestegg and later passed out on an exit ramp to the interstate highway that ran through town. Someone ran over his head. He’d dropped out of high school and soon he was dead.
Drop out and die. That was an interesting thought.
“Damn,” Dwight said.
Despite his circumstances he’d been excited when he first turned the key to room 202; this was the first time he had ever stayed in a hotel. The room was simple, pleasing, with one queen-sized bed, two end tables and a waist-high dresser, a TV balanced on a tipsy particleboard stand. The walls were sheetrock, the color of potato chips. Good enough, Dwight had thought, and flipped the lights on and off to make sure they worked. He changed out of his tux and looked for a hook on the back of the door to hang it up. Then the stink had hit him, the smell of rotting linoleum and steaming sweat and plain human funk. Then the bitchy horny brats in the parking lot, the shaving cream on his sleeve.
But the manager had made things clear. Dwight would have to stay at least for tonight. He grabbed the remote, as heavy and straightforward as a shoehorn, and flipped on the TV. There was an announcement that the Heath County Volunteer Firemen’s raffle drawing—worth five-thousand dollars—would be held at seven P.M. that night. Dwight had over fifty raffle tickets in his car. They’d been bought as cheap, playful party favors for the wedding guests, but Dwight had forgotten to give them to his sister to place at the tables for the reception. It was now three o’clock. The reception, had there been a wedding, would be starting right now. Guests who had skipped the wedding and decided just to show up for the buffet and cake might be there already, sitting on folding chairs in the basement of the Pfeffer Hunting and Game Lodge, wondering where everybody else was. How quickly, Dwight thought now, his life’s plans had changed. He could think only of Naomi’s bridesmaids’ whispering. The taxing anxiety of the guests in the pews who looked uncomfortably at their watches and sighed, having presaged the fact that the wedding would be called off by forfeit and feeling a smug serenity at their intuitions’ having been right on the money. His best man, Tom Teagle, saying, I’ll give you all the money in my wallet and you just keep it, buddy, take a trip. And Dwight’s car, freshly washed, waxed and shipshape, decorated with toilet paper and beer cans, which he had cut off before driving out of Saint Luke’s alone with Tom’s forty bucks in his pocket plus twenty-six of his own. Looking in the rearview mirror he’d seen the words spread on the glass of the back window, Just Married. The i was skimpy. The message could have read Just Marred.
There was a knock at the door and a voice: room service. Dwight nudged the curtains and looked outside. An exhausted-looking woman held up a six-pack of beer, a wise woman, Dwight imagined, bearing six kissable gifts. He opened the door. “The husband sent me over,” the woman said. “I’m Mrs. Delmar, the real goddamned manager.” Dwight reached into his pocket for some money. “Forget it, sport,” she said. “This one’s on us for your,” a pause, “inconvenience.”
Dwight thanked her and put the six-pack in a small garbage can, then took the can out to the ice machine and filled it up. Back in his room he searched the pockets of his tuxedo looking for his inhaler. He checked his suitcase, which was packed with clothes for this little hometown honeymoon. But Tom Teagle, he remembered now, had the inhaler. Dwight had asked him to keep it, along with the wedding ring, in his pocket.
Neverfuckingmind, Dwight thought. It was surprising, the force with which those words helped him to let certain things drop. He must have said neverfuckingmind fifty times today, each time lightening his burden a fraction, as if he were shaving away at a stump made of his own pain. The pills his parents used to make him take had had a similar effect, but they were expensive and made him feel nothing at all.
Fuck the job, too, he thought. It wasn’t ideal work loading boxes onto pallets and the pallets onto trucks at the mail-order warehouse. The boxes were filled with cast-iron weather vanes, XXXL T-shirts that said I’m shy (but I’ve got a big dick), key chains shaped like Daredevil fishing lures.
Dwight cracked a Gennessee and sipped, making a toast to the future. For good measure he even wished Naomi good luck, though that would require three or four more beers to be more sincere than it was now. But this was manly self-destructive resistance speaking; the fact was that his eyes were bigger than his liver, and the second beer was already making him sleepy. He slalomed in and out of an uneasy consciousness on top of his tuxedo, while a TV meteorologist yacked about a weather system approaching the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania from “practically out of nowhere.”
Dwight woke up and looked at his watch. One A.M. He got out of bed, took a leak in the sink, and opened the curtains to look into the parking lot. The hotel manager had wheeled himself out to a telephone booth that stood under a streetlight at the edge of the parking lot. He was watching the stars. Dwight went outside to join him.
“Never really introduced myself,” the manager said, and reached out to shake hands. “Name’s Whip Delmar.”
Of course, Dwight thought, and put the name with the story he’d heard, remembered how Whip had lost the use of his legs. Some kind of demolition accident at the old drive-in, with rumors about money and out-of-town lawyers.
He leaned against the phone booth. “Are you waiting for a phone call or something?”
“No,” Whip said. “Waiting for unidentified flying UFOs. If I sit here under the streetlight they’ll be sure to see me.”
“Why do you want them to see you?” Dwight asked.
“Zero gravity. It’ll cure what ails you.” With this comment Whip pounded his fists on his thighs, demonstrating their numbness. “Them high-brained critters are bound to pass over Windfall. They’re looking for a reliable specimen. The big cities are too polluted, people’s lungs get damaged and such, they can’t handle the different air.”
Okay, Dwight thought. A dreamer. Not bad. “Have you been to any big cities? I could use a nudge in the right direction.”
“Lived in Altoona for a year. And I’ve been to Pittsburgh, seen the Bucs play at Three Rivers. My nose is running again.”
Dwight found a paper napkin in his pocket and handed it to Whip. “Chilly,” Dwight said. “You know what Naomi said to me? That she wasn’t sure I loved her.” She had said this to Dwight in one of the small Sunday school classrooms in the side hallway of the church. The blinds had been drawn and the room, obscenely clean and smelling of holy water, seemed like the antechamber to some earthly imitation of heaven. She had spoken what seemed the final words on the subject. Dwight looked up at her—she did indeed have a half foot on him, and nine—not ten—years. But Dwight could say nothing to her.
“Not sure you loved her?” Whip said. “Sounds like an excuse to me. Maybe she wasn’t sure about it herself, about her loving you.”
This seemed even worse to Dwight; he’d prefer it if he didn’t love Naomi, rather than Naomi not loving him. “She’s twenty-nine. Everybody said she was too old. Even Naomi said so, but I talked her into it. Now everybody’s waiting to tell me they were right.”
“Did you love her?”
“I did, but not anymore. Here,” Dwight said, handing Whip another napkin.
“You make it sound like it all happened a long time ago.”
Dwight imagined himself in ten years, thinking about the past and shrugging it off. Maybe Naomi was right. Everything depended on the interpretations of love and whether the lovers involved could agree on how to express it. They could both say I love you. But neither could know what the other meant by it.
The phone in the booth rang, pulling Dwight out of his daydream.
“That’ll be the leader,” Whip said. “Don’t answer it.”
“The leader?” Dwight asked. “Leader of what?”
“The leader come to call me homeward.”
It rang twice more. “What do you mean?” Dwight asked, and stepped into the booth.
“Don’t pick up,” Whip said. “I’m telling you.” He spun back and steered his chair to face Dwight. Dwight smiled at Whip’s eyes, one blue, one grayish, stuck too close together above a nose that started low, and turned down and wide over the top of his lips.
After eight rings Dwight picked up without saying anything.
“Who’s this?” a woman’s voice said. “Let me talk to Whip.”
“It’s your wife, I think,” Dwight said, handing the phone to Whip.
“Yes, dear leader,” Whip said into the receiver. He sighed a few okays, and hung up.
Dwight helped wheel Whip back to the office. “She sleeps when I work, I sleep when she works,” Whip said. “That’s hotel life. She’s actually right below you in 102. She looks out the window sometimes and catches me looking up at the stars. She doesn’t want me to get abducted.”
“Can’t blame her,” Dwight said, trying not to laugh.
“She’d miss me,” Whip said. “And things would never be the same between us. She’s like that. But sometimes you just need a vacation from gravity.”
In the morning Dwight went back to the office, where Mrs. Delmar was yelling at Whip. “It’s not that I’m afraid they’ll come and take you away,” she said. “It’s the idea that you want to leave me here while you’re up there floating around doing somersaults. Good morning, Dwight,” she said finally. Her large white shoulders plumped out of the tight straps of her one-piece dress. Her rubbery braid came over one of them like a whitened vine.
Dwight saw Whip behind the counter, applying oil to the hubs of the wheelchair’s wheels. “Hey, Dwight,” he said. “What’s up?”
“If it’s not too much trouble, I really need to get my money back.”
“You understand you can’t get a cash refund,” Mrs. Delmar said. “I’ll just take it off your card.”
Dwight handed her his credit card, which was over its limit of five hundred dollars. “Do you know how long it’ll take before the refund shows on my card? I might need to use it today.”
Whip shouted then, “I know what she’s going to say. That your guess is as good as hers. She always says that.”
Mrs. Delmar laughed and threw a newspaper at Whip. “He took the words right out of my mouth,” she said. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“No cash, huh,” Dwight said. “Maybe never mind then.”
“Tell him what else,” Whip said.
Mrs. Delmar picked up a piece of paper from the desk, then looked at Dwight. “I didn’t tell anybody you were here, Dwight, but somebody called and left a message for you just in case you stopped here. A girl called, her name was what was it? Bridget Blackie. And what she was saying is that Naomi still gets her piece of the action.”
“That’s all?” Dwight asked.
Mrs. Delmar handed him the note. “That’s all, Dwight. I told her there was nobody here named Westover but maybe she knows anyways. So, no refund? Here’s your card back.”
Dwight took his credit card back and left the office. He got a cello-wrapped pack of minidonuts from the vending machine and returned to his room.
Bridget Blackie was Naomi’s best friend and the maid of honor. But a piece of the action? He didn’t know what that meant. Piece, action. It sounded sexual. He and Naomi had had interesting sex. She had been his second, and he had been her nineteenth.
He dialed nine for an outside line, called Tom. “Buddy,” he said. “I need my inhaler if you can bring it to me without letting anybody know where I am.”
Tom would bring Dwight’s inhaler at lunchtime. It was nine A.M. Monday morning and Dwight realized he was sunk. In order to get any cash he’d have to go to Warner’s Furniture and get his layaway deposits back. Minus some penalty bullshit, he could get out of there with a few hundred dollars. First he drove to Stuckey’s to return the tux.
“One of your friends was just here,” the clerk said. “I’m sorry.”
Dwight handed the tux and shoes to him. The clerk gave Dwight a check for eighty dollars.
“I paid cash,” Dwight said. “I need my deposit back in cash.”
“No can do,” the clerk said. “We don’t even know the meaning of the word.”
Dwight got the same bum-fuck at the furniture store; his cash installments would only be refunded by check. His good luck in not being seen by anybody he knew was subverted by the bad luck of having to make another trip to the bank, where one of Naomi’s sisters worked. I got to get to a bigger town, he thought.
He went directly to the bank, got in line for a teller he didn’t know, and cashed the checks. As the teller was counting out his cash, two hundred fifty-eight dollars, Lori, Naomi’s sister, walked behind Dwight’s teller, then looked at Dwight. “Here to drop the wad?” she asked. What could he say? The Dudek family was weird, all girls, no boys and no father. He said nothing and went back to the Pratt Hotel and cleaned up all the crap in his car that would remind him of Naomi. He found, under the seats, a few tissues she’d dabbed lipstick prints in, a condom wrapper from months before when they’d done it in the backseat, parked in her grandmother’s driveway. There was a hairband of hers in the ashtray, and in the backseat—papers, little scraps and shreds of shit, lists and receipts, from the wedding. He put the stuff in a yellow plastic bag and slam-dunked it in a dumpster.
Then he sat in his car again and started the engine. He would have split right then if he’d had his fucking inhaler. He could get another one but it would be an ordeal, another risk of being embarrassed.
“I shouldn’t have called you,” Dwight said, then horned the inhaler into his mouth and blew.
It was seven o’clock; Tom was six hours late. He turned the TV on and sat on the edge of the bed. “All I said was, ‘don’t get angry.’ I didn’t even tell you what I was going to say, man. You’re paranoid.”
Dwight went to the window and checked the parking lot; beside his car was Tom’s truck. “So what is it?”
“Listen,” Tom said. “You can’t just hide here because your wedding got blown. Plus you’ve got a bunch of wedding presents, including mine. Everybody’s like what should we do now? They don’t want to return all that shit. They bought it for you and Naomi.”
“Have you seen her?” Dwight asked.
Tom ran his hands through his hair. “You got a place I can spit? I got a chew in. Here we go.” He took an ashtray from the nightstand and spat into it. “Personally? I mean with my own eyes? No, I haven’t seen her. But everybody’s on your side, man.”
“Everybody’s waiting to say I told you so.”
“Christ, Dwight, I mean she’s nine years older than you. I think she did you a favor calling it off. Timing was bad, I’ll give you that, but think what else might have happened.”
Dwight stood by the bed, looking at the TV screen, Windfall news, weather system coming our way, details after this. “So everybody knows?” Dwight asked Tom. Tom spat and said, “Sure.”
So by now the whole town of Windfall had heard that Dwight got dumped just before the wedding. Even people who didn’t know him would later remember his name if they met him. People on the street, even years from now, would point at Dwight and say, Remember that poor dude? Dumped at the altar by an old lady, damn.
“I gotta get back,” Tom said. “But one more thing—I heard one of the raffle tickets y’ins bought for the thingy, the reception, was a winner. So don’t forget who your friends are.”
He’d forgotten about the raffle tickets. “You’re bullshitting me,” Dwight said.
“It’s just what I heard from one of Naomi’s friends. Y’ins hit it, five thousand dollars.”
“Go,” Dwight said. “Don’t tell anybody about me being here or the raffle tickets or anything.”
After Tom left, Dwight looked at himself in the large mirror above the dresser, took a deep breath, and said, be cool. He jumped up and down on the bed six times, then looked in the bathroom mirror and said, I told you to be cool. He tore through his suitcase, emptied all the pockets of his four pairs of pants, and his three shirts, then went out and looked in the car. He’d thrown a bunch of stuff, he remembered, into the dumpster, and ran outside to check.
It was getting dark and it was breezy. He turned the corner to get to the dumpster; the two girls he’d seen milling around before, blonde and pink, were sitting on cinder blocks beside it, passing a cigarette back and forth. You never even show me any attention in public, Naomi had said to him once. Not once have you kissed me in front of other people. Dwight’s answer to that had been that he was shy.
But not anymore. He walked past the two girls. They were watching him, trying to turn him on. “Want a piece of nooky?” the blonde asked. And Dwight, shaking his head, climbed into the dumpster.
They got a laugh out of it. Everyone was getting a laugh out of Dwight Westover. As he scrambled around in the dumpster, he heard one of the girls say, “that fucking hurt.” Dwight stood up and looked over the edge; Pink-hair was rubbing her cotton-candy head. Then Dwight felt it too, a smack on the back of his head from a chunk of hail, purplish and the size of a lozenge, which dropped between his feet and started to melt. The girls ran to the phone booth in the parking lot. Whip Delmar was sitting nearby in his wheelchair, seemingly in some kind of trance, taking the blows of icy stones without flinching.
The hail banked against the sides and top of the dumpster like repeated raps with a spoon on a wet snare drum. Yesterday Dwight had been in a tuxedo, tonight he was in a dumpster. Dumpster. Get it? Dwight asked himself, tearing through the bags, looking for one that looked familiar. You got dumped and here you are. Look at that poor dipshit.
Think about tomorrow, Dwight thought. Think about leaving. He’d take the raffle ticket to the fire department and get his money. He’d keep it all but maybe give some to the Delmars. They’d been on his side since he arrived here; he’d even miss them once he was gone, and would send them a few hundred dollars once he was set up somewhere else. The old man, Dwight thought, could use some therapy and drugs to keep him off the UFO trips.
The hail let up and then there was thin rain and finally silence. It was too dark for Dwight to see now. He decided to run back to his room and get some matches. But first he’d grab a few little bags out of the dumpster and give them a quick once-over before going back.
A square of blue light came through the dumpster’s sliding door. Somebody screamed “Geronimo!” There was a whirring noise. Dwight jumped out of the dumpster with a few bags of garbage. The air smelled like fish food. A purple mist floated in the parking lot beside the telephone booth, then separated into individual funnel shapes, and disintegrated in proportion to the dissipation of the whirring. The air was dense and a shimmering black. The streetlight was out. The light in the telephone booth, out. Quiet. Then the sky seemed to unzip. Reaching into his pocket for his inhaler, Dwight looked up, and Whip Delmar’s wheelchair fell on his head, knocking him out.
When he regained consciousness his mother was kneeling beside him. His father, and Tom, and some of Dwight’s and Naomi’s friends and relatives were there as well. He looked around for Naomi, but she hadn’t come. From what Dwight could hear of the conversation, paramedics were on their way. He could only guess that the girls in the phone booth had called 911. He tried to stand up, then slumped down again and put his hand on his head.
“I told you that Naomi wasn’t for you,” his mother said. From dear old Dad: “We tried to warn you, son.”
Beside Dwight were the bags he’d carried out from the dumpster. In the light of the streetlamp, which had come back on, he recognized one of them; it was the yellow bag from the convenience store into which he’d crammed the garbage from his car. The raffle tickets were in there. He felt the bump on his head again, and stood up with his father’s help. He reached into the bag and pulled out a handful of tickets. Whispers from the crowd, oohs and aahs and bingos and impressions of a cash drawer opening, cha-ching.
Dwight looked at Mrs. Delmar, who was sitting beside the phone booth in Whip’s damaged wheelchair. She was looking up at the sky. Her lips curved like a sad little bell.
“Nobody believes me,” she said. “But you saw it, didn’t you, Dwight?”
“I saw it,” Dwight said. “That was one hell of a disappearing act.”
“Disappearing act? Oh, he’ll be back,” Mrs. Delmar said. “Outer space is no fantasy camp. What they’ll do is stick him with prods and such, hoops and wires and plugs right up the old wazoo. He’ll come running back to Windfall with his tail between his legs, you bet on it. But he’ll never be the same.”
Dwight looked up at the sky, then around the parking lot for any evidence of what had just happened. There was the lump on his head; the wheelchair’s spokes were dented on one side. And Whip Delmar was gone, snapped past the elastic, beyond gravity.
Dwight’s father nudged him: “One or both of them I bet has been drinking. UFO?”
Dwight tied the bag into a knot at the top. “I’ll meet you at the house,” he said to his parents.
But he didn’t go home. He took the ramp to the interstate highway, headed south at eighty miles an hour with tickets worth five thousand dollars. For good luck he wished Naomi good luck of her own. Shit, he thought, she was probably right, maybe he didn’t love her very much, but she’d lost the raffle—he wouldn’t share the money with her or anybody. The ironic winner’s smile, the smile recently thrust upon him, unkinked on his face when he realized he’d been driving, talking to himself all the way, for nearly four hours—as far from home as he’d ever been. But he’d have to turn around, go back to the fire department to get his money.
He pulled over and patted his hands against his pockets, trying to find his inhaler. It wasn’t there. Nor was it in the pockets of his letter jacket, which he took off and threw in the backseat. He then got out of the car and stood under the stars and looked straight up at them, appraising the firmament, its possibilities, its parameters, and saying to himself, shit, shit, where’s my goddamned UFO? He got back in the car and turned around, heading back to Windfall, the orange fuel-gauge telling him that he was running on empty.