Subtraction. Mary Robison
was Nietzsche, quoted in a kind of goodbye note that Raf left.
“I thought of a place,” Raymond said. “We’ll be lucky or we won’t.”
We jounced over the train tracks after the guard gate’s arm lifted. We passed a Fiesta, a food market with brass noise coming from loudspeakers over its entry doors. We went by scrap-metal yards, and a building titled O.K. CREDIT USED CARS AND TRUCKS.
Raymond’s engine was missing bad. He fought the stick for each gear shift. His suspension was blown.
We banged along beside a broad cement ditch—Buffalo Bayou.
“All right, darlin’,” he said. “This is gonna be rancid.”
“I’m ready.”
He looked over. “Maybe,” he said.
There was a marquee with pink and emerald bulbs and tall letters that read: THE NEW TEXAS MOTEL—WE HAVE HOURLY RATES—XXX-PLUS MOVIES!
Raymond whipped on a pair of dictator-style dark glasses.
He wheeled into the central court for the motel, where parking slots surrounded a circle of chicken-wire fencing. Inside the fence, a couple lean boys reclined, sunbathing on lounge chairs.
Attached to the motel was a shack called The Anzac Club. In a box of shadows from the overhang of its tin roof three Mexican women swayed. They were all three stout women, all rocking to the cowboy music issuing from the club. A newborn baby gestured in the arms of the stoutest.
Raymond got out and went over to her.
I stayed in the green car.
He ambled back to me eventually, swinging a room key. “You wanna come with?” he asked.
“I guess I do,” I said.
“Be sure now. You’re not counting on anything.”
I boosted off the mushy seat and stepped out of the convertible.
We entered the motel room through a rusted pummeled door that looked as though it’d been wrenched from its hinges and smashed in before.
Inside, a pinging air-conditioning unit kept the temperature icy and mixed up smells of people and disinfectant and a fruity incense.
The walls had new wood-tone paneling.
Mostly there was a bed—a swollen featherbed under a black velvet throw.
“Well, no husband,” Raymond said. He turned to me. “Maybe you’re glad.”
“But he was here? Here here?”
“Afraid so. My Spanish is leaky but I believe she said last night, and they didn’t none of them see him leave. But he’s left,” Raymond said.
He dropped onto the carpeting and got cross-legged. He popped on the TV.
The screen showed nude men with a slender woman, very busy.
“Good, the BBC,” I said.
“Sorry. I just thought you oughta get the whole landscape.”
“Oh,” I said, “I know the landscape.”
The show wasn’t a movie, it was a video, and the moans and gasps that went with it sounded contained and local, as if coming from the next room.
“Well, look at that,” I said.
“I don’t wanna,” said Raymond.
“She’s made different from me.”
“You better hope she is,” he said. He put out the picture and his shoulders sagged.
I didn’t move. My knees were crooked over the high edge of the bed and my bottom seemed to be sinking through the mattress, but I didn’t get up, didn’t let my gaze wander from the gray iridescence of the blank TV screen.
“Well,” Raymond said. “We need us a telephone before we can go any fuh-thuh.”
Back in the green convertible we drove an access road that paralleled the Gulf Freeway. We passed a furniture warehouse, industrial plants, a Flintkote factory that was sided with glazed tiles.
My motel room was at the Park Inn, a pricey building built during the boom.
The room had a low ceiling, and off the front balcony was a great palm that sent barbed shadows through the picture window and made pointy areas of darkness and chill.
Raymond docked his car next to my rental, the red Firecat.
“Don’t think we’re quitting yet,” he said, as he stopped his engine from screaming.
Now instead we had the happy ratcheting of a zillion cicadas.
“There’s still several of Raf’s people I can ask. Who might’ve caught his act someplace or other.”
In my room were pieces of blond rattan furniture. The quilted bedspread and cushions and carpeting were gray-green colors. Tropical-Confederate was the motif here, I supposed.
Raymond yanked off his heavy boots and kicked them that-away, dropped backward onto the bed, stacked both pillows behind his shoulders to prop himself up.
Over the dressing-room counter, I slit cellophane from a throw-away drinking tumbler but could draw only warm water.
Raymond steadied the gray desk phone on the lap of his jeans. He was all business, readying to make calls.
I went out for a bucket of ice.
On the room’s far back wall were glass doors that could be jerked open to a catwalk and for a view of the court below. The court had a patio, web-and-metal lounge chairs, an Olympic pool, all-out landscaping.
I went with my tumbler of ice water through the sliding glass doors.
It was evening now, and a hundred artificial lights glowed on the court below. Down there were Black Southern Baptist goings-on.
The Park Inn was hosting a couple of conventions this week—the Baptists, who posed in maillots and swim trunks of sherbet colors on the pool’s concrete patio, and a gathering of foreign scholars, bearded men and pale women in dresses.
In the water at the pool’s shallow end, the children of both groups spanked up fans of splash.
There were spotlights on the spears and spikes of junglery overhead. Shadows made jagged stabbing lines across the patio chairs and table umbrellas.
“Well, fuck it,” Raymond said after a call. “Now you see him, now you don’t. There’s still several people I can talk to, though.”
I said, “They’re getting up a water-polo game down in the pool. You want a drink? There’s a bottle of Hennessy in my things somewhere.”
“Just soda pop,” Raymond said. “I’m recovered, they call it.”
“How long?”
“Three years.” He clawed at his hair.
“Then what you especially didn’t need was a visit from my husband, Jack Daniels.”
“Hell, I like the guy,” Raymond said.
“I know,” I said and I did. “You gotta like Raf.”
Raymond brought a swimsuit from the trunk of the green convertible.
“Would you get tossed outa here if I was to put myself in that pool? I would dearly love to,” he said.
“No, of course you should. You deserve at least that for all your trouble.”
“I been enjoying myself, actually,” he said.
“Is Luisa your wife? I noticed her name painted on the car.”
Raymond made his smile. He said, “Two years now. Which was all of the original bargain.