Rooms to Let
By the outskirts of Smyte, I’d settled on who I’d be. Waydean Long. I’d known a woman named Waydean, a red-headed girl I’d danced with for two weeks in a bar down in Florida. I liked the name well enough as I passed fast food joints and shopping centers that sold saw sharpeners and beauty supplies. Then the fast food joints gave way to a two-lane with a cleaned-out row of empty storefronts. A little farther along the river I came to the place that was his. There were two good-sized buildings, one a squat warehouse, the other a larger building with a smokestack. I studied the two buildings, their darkened windows, behind them a muddy brown river. What had Leroy Loving said? “Your father tried to own anything he could get his hands on.” A sign like a fist hovered above the building with the smokestack. Wallen Industries. Both buildings looked like nothing had ever owned them before and like nothing would ever own them now.
I pulled over, getting my calm back, but not for long. Right across the road sat a beat-up little restaurant called the Black Cat with a sign that featured a cat curling up around itself. Exactly what Maria Murdy, the seer I’d called for Willy’s, had described. A sign with lights, and a purple cat.
All of the nervous I’d held inside—the past hundred-odd miles, Radiance and Leroy Loving, that wild-animal-smelling house—welled up inside me. “You’re like a word left out of some sentence,” Cody had said about me, and that was a fact. Me, a woman alone in a car beside a diner full of strangers, waiting to see if the father I’d never met was one of them.
Inside, a bunch of old men were playing cards at some pushed-together tables while what seemed to be the rest of Smyte, all its children and great-grandmothers and everybody else, sat at the rest of the tables and booths. A waitress with hennaed hair came toward me, one arm with a tray of dishes and the other hand toting a lit cigarette. She looked fit to drop.
“If you want a stool at the counter, it’s yours, sweetie. I’ll fix you up a booth when one’s ready.”
The bell on the diner door jangled hard. More customers. I could hardly see for the bodies that stood or sat or crossed each other. Plates fell. Glasses broke and someone fell.
A huddle formed in the center of the room.
“It’s Lacy May,” someone said.
The huddle broke and I could see scrawny legs wearing a pair of scuffed-up penny loafers. It looked like a woman had fainted, but she soon sat up, her arms flailing. “Y’all get your hands off me.”
Another woman wearing coveralls pushed her way out from the kitchen and stood surveying the mess.
“I can’t raise that doctor she likes,” someone said.
Lacy May was standing now. “I don’t know when ever I asked for a doctor.”
“Some of you just head on home, now.” The woman tucked soft-looking hair, carbon-colored and threaded with white, behind an ear. Her coveralls had a name sewn on them. Della.
I stayed up most of that first night in a Motel 6 on the outskirts of Smyte, reading pages of Ruby’s girlhood diary, that world-before-me in her round girl-handwriting. There were stories about head-of-a-holler ghosts. There was a story about riding to the city with her mother, a woman named Esther who was my own grandmother. She was sick, it seemed, and they’d stayed for some days in a motel and eaten blue plate specials from the motel restaurant. Inside the diary were pasted cutouts from the menu. A cabin with smoke coming out of its chimney. A dancing pig. My mother before she’d even known I would exist.
I laid Ruby’s diary aside and took out her tarot deck. These weren’t discount-store entertainment like the tarot deck I whipped out, late nights, at some bar. These cards had the scent of magic, like the books I’d spend afternoons reading at the public library in this town or that one where Ruby and I were living, then. Books like The Golden Bough. Biographies of Marie Laveau and Harry Houdini. I wanted magic back then, enough to set the sheer force of my own will free. It took me a few years to figure out what I wanted to be free from, but I willed it, again and again, and when no one was looking, I slipped pages from those books in my pockets, or a whole book if it was small enough. Supernatural tales, ghosts and voodoo priestesses. Or something with a cleaner edge. Mysteries about lost treasures, missing children. My own life a mystery I had not been able to solve. Who was I? In my farthest-back memory, Ruby, her long black hair, me reaching up like she might disappear down some loverless street. My father’s whereabouts a mystery to us both.
I shuffled, cut, drew three cards, relying on memory for what each card meant. My past, the Tower, showed a castle going up in flames, miniature women jumping from windows, the mountains in behind criss-crossed with roads in no particular direction. No surprise there. My present card was more interesting. Priestess of disks. A cross-legged woman beside a tree with a parrot in it and a bare-butt kid and a hand with the Third Eye. Through the gift of loving touch, you stay in contact with life. I’d called Cody Black for three days running with no answer at all. And the streets out there in this place? I knew not a soul. It was my future card that sent me chills. Priestess again, of swords, a woman in a place of stripped-down mountains and owls. A woman with a coat made of snow. A journey to a cold realm. A separation.
Behind me in this strange room, white sheets on a bed and an open window and a little air coming in through a screen. Wait, Ruby, said to me. Just wait and see. Along a few of the highways I’d driven, I’d sketched out any number of scenes in my head, and none of them involved much patience. In some scenarios I rushed up onto porches, pounded on doors, punched a fist or two into a wall in a dining room where some man who might or might not look a bit like me was playing board games with a family I’d never met. Or I’d more often seen myself giving up altogether, wasting away in a hospital ward when a man in a father-looking getup poked his head in at the last minute, his arms full of roses, just as I was despairing of ever knowing my own name.
Fathers were as much ghosts to me as Ruby’s holler haints. They were magazine advertisements, clean-cut men with polo shirts and shiny ladders to climb to fix the roofs of houses where I’d never lived. They were movie-star men. Heroes and bad boys. They rode off into sunsets and never came back. Leroy Loving had been a miscalculation, a granddaddy instead of a father. Ride into Radiance and hug a father’s neck or slap him across the face, my choice. But I was no closer to knowing my own father than ever. All I had was a name. Russell Wallen. I flipped open Ruby’s diary to the last page and wrote the name down. Wrote it again, with my left hand. The name itself seemed to have nothing at all to do with me, when you came right down to it. Miracelle Loving. Waydean Long. My own names were just fine without adding his to the mix. I scooped up the tarot cards and slid them into their box. I still wasn’t banking on cards telling me much truth, but I supposed waiting would have to do. Russell Wallen, mystery man, unknown father, was out there somewhere. A journey to a cold realm. Outside in Smyte right this minute a late summer night was letting go of its heat, and I told myself some weeks here would do.
When I asked about rentals by the week at the Motel 6 and a couple other Smyte motels, it was no dice. I sat outside a convenience store with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. In the For Rent section, I found a listing for a room upstairs in a house. The last time I’d thought about a room for rent was about a million years ago, and that one had involved some once-upon-a-time place where Ruby and I had shared a sofa bed. Did anyone even rent a room anymore? This ad came from none other than Lacy May, the woman who’d fallen in the Black Cat Diner. She offered the room and supper which, that first night I found myself a brand-spanking-new boarder, was a big bowl of red potatoes and a plate of fish sticks.
“We have to wait.” A teenage girl took a seat beside me.
“Why’s that?”
“You’ll see.” She smiled at me, her mouth full of large, gnarly-looking teeth.
A man in a turquoise leisure suit was on the other side of the table. “She offers a hearty appetizer before the meal.”
Another guy in a sweatshirt with a fish and One Way!! on it came in from the living room. “Appetizer? That what you call it?” He glanced around the table, took the seat on my other side. “Can’t eat prayers.”
“Both of you.” The girl patted her hair. “Would you just quit it?”
Lacy May kicked the kitchen door open and made her way toward the table, two hands full. She set down a plate piled with slices of white bread and beside it a beat-up Bible with a tiny cross hanging from its spine. “Always polite to ask the new guest first.”
No one said anything.
The girl nudged me. “We do this every night. I tell myself it’s mystical.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” the leisure suit said. “We pass the Bible to someone new each night and that person opens it and points and reads a verse.” He pointed with a thumb at Lacy. “And she tells us what we need to know about it.”
Lacy handed the Bible to me and I held it awkwardly. “It speaks,” she said. “Not me.”
“Just open it.” The girl looked hungrily at the sliced bread and at a jar of red jam.
I flipped through and let my fingers land at the Old Testament. Book of Psalms. Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath shined. I read it aloud, then again. Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath shined.
She went around the table, starting with the big-toothed girl who would, Lacy said, learn how to understand her own sense of beauty, how to unloosen her heart. And the turquoise-suited man. Heaven, she said, was within him, in the palm of his own hand. He needed to learn how to be gentle.
Lacy looked at me last of all. “The verse tells what you could find right in front of you if you waited. What you’ve forgotten.”
I looked at her and nodded and said nothing, thinking that I could have been over at the Motel 6 with the Gideon Bible, but this place? What you’ve forgotten. There was a reason, I told myself, that I was here.
“What did you think?” the girl whispered to me.
“Fortunes,” I whispered back as we began to eat. “There are worse things.”