I.
Blue neon fizzled overhead. As Harvey Andressen put out his scrawny hand to grab the motel office’s doorknob, a dark shadow lurched across the screen. Harvey stepped back. Startled moths flurried away as the door swung and a tall boy with flapping red hair ran out and pounded off into the night. “Florrie!” the boy called out, jamming his hands excitedly into his jeans’ pockets as he ducked past parked cars. “Hey, Florrie! I did it! We’re in!” A car door slammed.
Harvey shrugged and stepped forward into the office. The two men already there looked up at him. The wild-eyed man behind the desk had a grin, lights and shadows doing a dance in the seams of his face. “Hello,” he said, hospitably.
“Howdy do,” said Harvey, blinking at the jellyglasses on the cluttered desk. A couple of empties, and one half full. “Go on ahead,” he waved his chickenclaw hand. The stripes in his seersucker suit rolled and wavered. “Whatever you’re up to, don’t mind me.” His skin sagged off his bones in yellow pouches, so that even when he was trying to smile gaily, he looked sad. “Don’t mind me …” He peered now at the man sitting on the floor, with his back against the wall. Sweaty shirt gonna stain that wall, thought Harvey. But then. None of my beeswax. “You havin’ a party here, hey?”
“Damn love nest,” said the man on the floor. “It’s the times. Still. Kid that young … ought to be protected. That’s why they got laws …”
“I liked the boy,” the man behind the desk said. “He’s a good kid. A brave one. Drink your drink and don’t insult my guests.” He shuffled through a pile of what looked like unpaid bills to find the register book, and then shoved it forward to Harvey. “Sign here,” he said. “Pay no attention to my friend.”
The old man wrote a spidery script, like the writing on beer bottle labels. But the motel man managed to read it upside-down. “Andressen. Harvey Andressen.”
“That’s me,” said Harvey, writing on. “This here I’m giving is my daughter’s address, but Lord knows I don’t plan on livin’ there no more.”
“Don’t tell me,” the man on the floor groaned. “A run-away.”
“Ohio’s a nice place,” said the man behind the desk.
“Nice place my ass,” Harvey croaked. “Tell you the truth. They got no respect for they elders, in Ohio, not no more. Put you in some in-sti-tuition, that’s all they think to do. Call it a home. Home my ass. Wham bam and you’re in and no gettin’ out, and no damn thank you ma’m, neither.” The wrinkles in his seersucker suit rolled and valleyed like a sea as he jiggled up and down, agitated. “Not this old man, they don’t put in no home, o, no, sirree. I’m goin’ to Mi’mi, where they got respect for older folk. Pretty gals set in your lap … I seen them post cards.” He nodded energetically. “All them titties bouncin’ up and down that beach. Well. That’s for me, that’s what I say, and to Hell with O-hio.”
“I’ve been to Miami,” said the man on the floor, breathing as though he might be in some sort of pain. “It’s no different. No different from here.”
While the motel man took Harvey’s money and made change out of a battered tin candy box, Harvey tried his best to educate the man on the floor. “Well sir, what you got to have is a positive atti-tude. Set your mind right, and you can grab off all the tittie you want. Think it right, and you’ll do it, ever time.” Harvey hopped a couple of excited hops. “Wasn’t it you just called this place a love nest? Here, right under your nose?” He snatched at the key the motel man offered. “Think on that!” He skittered toward the door. “I hate to run,” he said, “But by golly when you got to go, boys, you got to go.” Going out, he flapped his arms and looked more like a frightened stork than anything human. “So I say … goodnight, all …”
The motel man looked serene, counting the money into the box. “All I know is, them sweet titties better watch their … O, Christ, Otis, you know what I just did?” He picked up his half-full glass and observed the glitter of light in the liquid, solemnly. “You know how dumb I am? I gave that crazy old man the key to the room right next to that nice kid. And the walls … Christ, at night you can hear the paint flaking off and falling kerplud on the floor next door, that’s how thin those walls are made …”
“Kmmp, kmmp.” The man on the floor either simpered or choked. “You got any idea how high those hearing aids turn up?”
“I didn’t see any hearing aid.”
“There was one. On this side.”
The motel man leaned back in his chair and laughed before he swallowed his drink. “O Jesus.” Sweat beaded up on his nose, glitter wet. “O, Jesus God. I hope he doesn’t blow a fuse.”
II.
Harvey wondered what the girl in the room next door looked like. Young, she’d be, for sure. The kid who’d run out the office door was still wet behind the ears – ears stuck out like handles on an old milk jug, at that. He wondered why he suddenly remembered those ears.
“Florrie,” the boy had called her. Well. Whatever Miss Florrie looked like, she talked a tarnel stream. The murmur of her sharpy voice came through the wall, but you couldn’t tell from that about her face or shape. He tall and she tall that’s one thing, but if she were a little bit of a thing (and he kind of guessed that’s what she was – the name was like little flowers, pale and ruffley and pink) that’s another. She was probably a bit like that Carrie Jones had been with the dirty neck like a plucked turkey’s, there in the fifth grade cloakroom. All those bags of lunch and sweaters on the hooks, smelling of peanut butter and squashy bananas and wool … Carrie’d had the dry heaves, he remembered, after it was over. But quietly, so nobody could hear, that was the kind of girl Carrie was, and that was as crazy to remember now as the look of that boy’s ears. Harvey ran his scrawny yellow hand across his cheek and scratched at his own ear. Funny, how the hearing aid made it itch sometimes. Well. Little or big or tall or squatty, what he absolutely knew was, they were taking one damned long time to get to bed.
Here he was in his nightshirt already. And there they sat, one on each side of the room it sounded like, in all their clothes, far as he could tell, sitting and jabbering. All that jibber jabber, sure no else was going on.
He’d pushed the sprung-out wicker chair ready against the wall poked it comfortable as he could with the pillows from the bed, and a water glass handy. “But,” Harvey muttered, not realizing he was making any noise at all. “That glass won’t be no use, just the receiver on the wall and the controls up, and it’s like the voices are water pouring down a funnel, into my head.”
Beyond the wall, the voices murmured, back and forth, a steady stream. Still gabbing on.
Harvey scowled at the suit jacket he’d hung around the chair back. Deep creases in the seersucker like reflections of his gnarled face. Wrinkles. “Guaranteed! Wouldn’t you know?” He ought to take it back to the G.D. store and throw it through that window with a brick. Guaranteed. ‘Won’t wrinkle for a lifetime’? Pig shit. A butterfly’s lifetime, do they mean? Look at it!”
The voices next door abruptly stopped. Harvey clamped his lips together tight. What were they listening for?
The girl beyond the wall giggled shrilly and Harvey skittered to the wall. Something goin’ on, at last. His hearing aid receiver, dangling a thin loop of wire, snuggled tight against the wall.
“You could turn the light out, Davy,” the girl said, and Harvey grinned. He could even hear the light switch. It rasped, like it had a load of rust. And the bed creaked, too. Harvey scratched at his belly, enchanted now.
“Maybe your mom won’t take on too bad,” the boy said. “Maybe she’ll even think it’s kind of … funny!”
“Funny!” she gasped. “Davy you don’t know my mother one eensy teensy bit if that’s what you think. Maybe Selma Morganstern’s mother would laugh, but mine? Are you out of your head, anyhow?”
“I didn’t mean funny exactly, I guess. But it is, kind of, you know, to come all this way into Georgia and then they wouldn’t …”
Harvey groped for the chair and sagged back into the pillows, letting the receiver fall into his lap. Still a-jabbering. That all they intend on doing? Mercy on us, Moses. Talk you can do on some streetcar, on a bus, in a library. Anywhere. What the Sam Hill ails them two?
She said something, and he answered. Harvey stood and took up his listening position once again. Might be worth his while.
“Sure I am,” the boy, Davy, said, clear as clear. “Honest, Florrie. Sure I am. You know I am. Just as glad as glad could be.”
“You don’t act it.” Her voice faltered. Harvey could barely pick it up. “But I’m glad you’re glad. If you’re truly glad.”
“I’m glad you’re glad I’m glad.”
She giggled. “I’m glad you’re glad I’m glad you’re glad.”
Harvey writhed against the receiver. Blabbers, he thought. He wanted to scream at them, shut up, shut up! Save your damn blabbin’ for fifty years from now, when you’ll be needin’ it.
The glow around his lamp was warm, and seemed to throb for a moment, as if something brighter had passed through, into his room. Harvey nodded sheepishly, and mouthed a shy apology. Mae was just beyond that glow, he supposed, and he could guess the look in her eye, hadn’t seen it years and years, sweet look that still could let him know he was up to Sin again.
“Could be,” he muttered. “Maybe Mae, you’re right. You sure always used to be. And I got to agree it serves me right, all this talkin’ goin’ on. But it’s not so bad as if I was lookin’ in the window, now, some peepin’ trick like that, is it? And they’re young … fair game.”
“This sure is nice, though.” Davy’s voice came through the wall, clearly, dreamy. “I mean, just you and me here like this, with the clean sheets and all.”
“Sheets.” Harvey choked on sudden, helpless rage. Sheets! By the Great Harry, now it’s sheets. Anger filled his head, blotting out reason with its red heat. His hands shook as though he were palsied. Sheets! He reached out to turn off his own light, tipping the lamp crazily, before the light switched off with grim finality.
The boy’s voice drifted on, soft, dreamy, and even without the receiver, Harvey heard him, soft, more words … “You share a room with Belinda, don’t you? I mean, you did. I guess you’re used to havin’ somebody nearby in the dark like this.”
“O, Davy,” she giggled. “It’s not near the same.”
“Still, it’s different for me. In a nice way. When I was a kid, I used to lie awake in the dark and talk and talk and I was only talking to a make-believe boy I made up, in my head …”
“What’d you talk to him about? What was his name?”
“Didn’t have a name. Just, ‘Boy.’ That’s what Uncle Jace always called me, ‘Boy,’ so that’s what I called him. Talked about what it’d been like, if we’d … if I’d been sent down to Okeechobee and Uncle Mort’s and the ranch with the cattle and all, ’stead of bein’ sent to Uncle Jace and his dernfool everlastin’ cabbages. That kind of stuff. What I’d do, when I got big …”
Harvey Andressen spit off into a dark corner, making a hacking noise deep in his throat. He didn’t care if they heard him. He really hoped they did.
But Davy’s voice droned on, unperturbed. “Florrie, you’d never believe. It’s like tons and tons of sand just shifting and flowing down the road, when they go loping off, those Brahamas. I always wanted that, more than anything. To be down in Okeechobee, with Uncle Mort …”
“Well.” Florrie’s voice turned icy. “Maybe if that’s what you want so much, you could still go down.”
These Goddamn kids were going to inherit his earth. Harvey could have wept.
“I told you it was just kid stuff … make believe.”
“But you’d like that? To work with cows and all?”
Davy was breathing more heavily, rasping. “No. Not really. And you don’t call them cows …” He lapsed into a silence, a broken silence punctuated only by the hoarseness of his breath.
Silence. Harvey pressed the receiver to the wall, and sucked in his breath, the better to listen. What’s that boy up to? Kissin’?
III.
Silence. And in the quiet shadows of the next room, Florrie wondered, too – what’s that boy up to?
Davy’s breathing was so deep and steady. Almost like he might be … But he couldn’t be. Not after all the mess they’d gone through, driving all day up from home, and then being stopped from even getting a license just because they couldn’t prove how old she was, and how they’d tried, two three places, and finally, they’d found this place, even that hadn’t been easy. Davy’s ears always turn red when he’s lying. Nobody’d know that but her, but they seemed to know anyhow, somehow. Davy couldn’t lie for a fool …
She inched closer to him on the musty coverlet they hadn’t even pulled back properly, nubbly chenille sort of stuff against her face – put her hand on his arm, in the warm crook of his arm, the inside of his elbow, warm and smooth. “Davy?”
She couldn’t believe he would fall asleep like that, right here. Not after everything. “Davy? I love you …”
Other than his breathing, now soft, relaxed and steady, Davy made no reply.
Mad and mortified, Florrie snorted in his ear. In the dark, he smiled gently and slept on, exhausted.
Florrie bounced away from him, teach him. Let him think she was just trying to get away from lying side of him, had to get comfortable, is all, bounced and bounced.
The old springs creaked and groaned beneath them, but even that didn’t seem to budge into Davy’s sleep. Was he deaf then? Exasperated, Florrie bounced some more, harder. The old bed, complaining bitterly, hopped and skittered on the sloping floor, banged its headstead against the wall. Davy slept on, peaceful as a child.
Incredible. Florrie was working up a sweat just trying to wake him, yet he didn’t stir.
IV.
Incredible, too, how soothing the sound of squealing bedsprings was to the old man on the other side of the wall. A warm flush of desire spread slowly over Harvey Andressen’s aging thighs. “Hoo hoo,” he cackled into the night. “Them Mi’mi titties best watch out, ’cause here I come, ready or not. There’s life in the old bugger yet.”
“Davy,” he heard the girl moan. “O, Davy, love me!”
Grinning, Harvey turned his hearing aid down to Low, scrunched deeper into the pillows of his chair, and slept. Peaceful, restored. As did the boy next door.
“I hate you,” Florrie snapped, with one final resentful bounce. But no one heard her. “I hope your damned old cows get hoof and mouth disease. I do. I do. I do.”
