The Travellers Stay
by Ray Cluley
By night the motel was nameless, the stuttering fluorescence of its neon sign only a rectangular outline of where words once were. The light made the shadows of the building darker and gave moths the false hope of somewhere to go, collecting the dust from their broken wings so that a once vibrant white was now mottled and sulphurous.
By day the place fared no more favourably. The title of its sign was visible, Travellers Stay, but so was the fact that it needed a fresh coat of paint twenty years ago; flakes peeled like scabrous sores. In sunlight, the building behind the sign was more than a dark shape but not much more, the drab monotony of its sun-bleached walls broken only by the repetition of plain numbered doors.
When Matt arrived, the motel was neither of these places but something in between. Dusk was a veil that disguised before and after and the motel looked as good as it ever could. Anyone who came to the Travellers Stay came at dusk.
“We’re here,” Matt said. He made a slow turn and bumped gently up-down an entrance ramp. A sheet of newspaper skittered across his path as an open v, became caught on a wheel, and was turned under it twice before tearing free. He pulled into a spot between a rusting truck and a Ford that sat flat on its tyres and noticed neither. “Wake up.”
Only when he cranked the handbrake did Ann stir beside him, sitting up from the pillow she’d made of her jacket against
the passenger window. The denim had pressed button patterns into her forehead like tiny eyes. A sweep of her fringe and they were gone without her ever knowing they were there.
“Where are we?” Her breath was sour with sleep.
“Motel.”
Ann turned to the back seat. “John, honey.”
John, her teenage son, mumbled something that spilled a line of drool and woke. He wiped his chin and sat up. “What?” he said. “What?” He sniffed at the saliva drying on the back of his hand.
Matt released the steering wheel and flexed his fingers. He arched his back and shifted in his seat, eager to get out and stretch his legs.
Ann was looking around. “Here? Seriously?”
Matt ignored her.
There was a woman sitting on the porch enjoying a cigarette. She was leaning back on a chair with her feet up on the rail. She was wearing cowboy boots. Cowgirl boots, Matt supposed. Black jeans and a vest top the same, faded gray from too many washes. The door behind her was propped open by a pack of bottled beer.
“Want me to loan you fifty?” Ann said. “She can’t be any more than that.”
It could have been funny from someone else, but Ann had never mastered that type of humour.
“She’s not a hooker,” Matt said. He was tired. His words came out the same way.
“And how would you know?”
The woman was attractive. Matt found a lot of young women were, these days. But if he felt any lust it was for the
cigarette she held and the beer she drank. Hell, it was for the ease with which she did both. As he watched she brought a hand up to her mouth and inhaled lazily. She chased it with a tip of her drink.
“I don’t know,” Matt said. He got out of the car before he had to say anything else.
The woman looked his way and raised her beer in silent greeting.
“Hi,” he called back. Mr Friendly.
The thump of a car door behind him. Ann.
“We’d like a room,” he said to the woman.
“You sure?”
Matt looked at Ann and wondered how much of their conversation the woman might have heard.
“We’re sure,” Ann said. “You got any?”
Matt sensed some sort of bristling, but only from his wife. The woman in the chair merely shrugged. “Twenty or so, judging by the numbers on the doors.”
“We just want one,” Matt said.
“Help yourself,” she said. She said it differently to most people. Got the inflections all wrong.
“Do we pay by the hour here or what?” John asked, slamming his door at the same time because he wasn’t brave enough with his insult. Matt heard him, though, and he’d told him before about slamming the door. Not for the first time he wished Ann’s ex had got the custody he’d apparently wanted.
Ann made a show of looking around the parking lot and beyond. It was a show Matt had seen before and it meant she was looking at how he might look at the woman.
“Just one night,” he said.
“Hope so,” the woman said, getting up and going inside.
That’s how you do it, Matt thought, looking at John. Chicken shit.
Ann was looking at Matt, eyebrows raised, waiting for him to react somehow to the woman’s attitude. He made a show of looking around the parking lot and beyond.
The sky had darkened to something like the colour of the woman’s clothes. An occasional breeze tossed litter in small circles and swept grains of sandy dirt across the ground. From far away came the quiet noise of a passing car, a long hush of sound as if the coming night had sighed.
“We’re not staying here,” Ann said.
“I’m tired,” he replied. It meant yes we are and I don’t want to fight.
“I’ll drive,” said John.
“Not my car.”
The woman returned with a large disk of white plastic declaring 8 in big bold black. It looked like a giant eye with twin pupils, the key dangling like a metal tear.
“Thanks,” Matt said, stepping up to take it.
“Clean sheets, towels, TV.” She pointed across the lot. “Vending machines are over there.”
“Thanks,” Matt said again. He gave the key to Ann and grabbed the bags from the trunk. John kicked at a crushed can and sent it clattering. The woman sat back in her chair and retrieved her bottle. She brought it to her mouth slowly. Swapped it for the cigarette.
“Quit staring.” Ann took one of her bags from him, more for the impact of snatching it than from any desire to help. She gave the room key back to him so whatever it opened up would be his fault.
“Good night,” the woman said quietly as they walked away. And in a dry tone, addressed to the floor, “Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
“It’s gonna be a shit hole,” John said.
Matt smacked him across the back of the head with his free hand. Thought, fuck it.
“Hey!” John and Ann said together, John rubbing at where he’d been struck.
“Language,” was all Matt said, but mostly he’d struck out because he was fed up with the boy. And there was no need to state the obvious—of course it would be a shit hole.
“You can’t hit me,” John said. “You’re not my dad.”
“Thank God.”
“Matt—” Ann started.
“Sorry. I’m just tired, okay? Sorry.”
He wasn’t tired, though, not really. Tired of driving, and tired of taking John’s crap, but not tired like he wanted sleep. In fact, what he wanted was a beer and a smoke and a few minutes on his own to enjoy both.
Ann gestured at the door. A brass 8 that was probably plastic, a peephole beneath like a dropping.
Matt fumbled with the key. The overlarge fob made it a handful. It was the old-fashioned type of key, one you turned in a lock. It turned easily enough; he could have opened the door with a toothpick. He pushed the door open.
There were whispers in there, whispers in the darkness. He reached around the frame for the light switch.
The first thing he saw when the light came on was the usual motel scenery. A large bed, nearly-white sheets tight across it with a tatty blanket on top, and a bedside table with one drawer. The drawer would have contained a bible in the old days but now probably held dried balls of gum and cigarette burns. A TV angled down from the wall so it could be seen from the twin room as well, though the door to that was closed. Somewhere there’d be a tiny bathroom that didn’t have a bath.
The second thing he saw was movement as a number of cockroaches scurried for cover. Their shiny bodies glistened in the light they tried to run from. One sped for the shadows under the bed while another moved as if lost. One made straight for the open door.
John brought his foot down hard but missed. The insect dropped down between two boards of the porch.
“Beautiful room, dear,” said Ann. But she went in, slinging her bag onto the bed. Fearless city girl that once was.
John went in ahead of Matt, knocking him as he passed. He said sorry as if it was an accident and Matt had to fight the urge to kick the back of his feet into a tangle that would send him sprawling to all fours.
John put the TV on and sat on the bed, looking up at a commercial.
Ann opened and closed the drawer.
“Picture’s shit,” John told them. He glanced at Matt and added, “Shot,” as an alternative.
Matt dumped the bags and went to find the bathroom. He expected to find it between the two bedrooms.
He found it between the two bedrooms.
There was nothing there to scare away with the light. Just
a sink and a toilet and a mirror. The mirror was spotted with neglect that would never wipe away. It distorted Matt’s reflection, darkened his face with blotches. Someone had smeared a fingernail of snot on it.
“Nice.”
He unzipped, lifted the toilet lid, and pissed, tearing a sheet of tissue to wipe the mirror with. It wasn’t until he was shaking dry that he saw the cockroach turning in the bowl. Its body span in a current Matt had just made and its legs kicked at the air. It would never get out.
I know exactly how you feel.
He flushed it away, wondering how it had gotten in there in the first place.
“Matt,” Ann called, “can you fix the TV?”
He glanced again at the mirror on his way out, wondering what had happened to the man he saw there.
Back when Matt smoked and drank, when he was single, when he was playing and the band was doing pretty good and could maybe one day do better, he got into a fight with a guy because the man was yelling at a woman. He did it because it was often a sure way to get laid and the woman looked good for that. Red hair, straight and long, good breasts and striking eyes. She wore a top that pushed her tits up and her eyes she showed off with subtle make up.
“The picture won’t stay like it’s supposed to,” she said as he emerged from the bathroom. She tossed the remote onto the bed and continued pulling things from her bag. Instead of
makeup, these days her eyes were lined with tiny wrinkles. She rarely looked at Matt now as she had back then. The way she looked at him now was like he was exactly the way she supposed. Her eyes still lit up when she smiled but that was less frequent, and usually because of some TV show. The first time she came her eyes had been wide and her mouth was a pretty O, as if the orgasm had startled her. He hadn’t seen that for years.
Matt reached up and turned the TV off by the main switch. ‘Fixed,’ he said.
John muttered something Matt ignored and Ann ignored the both of them.
“I’ll get some dinner,” Matt said.
John threw himself onto his own bed and stretched out. “Pizza.”
“He’s not driving tonight,” Ann told her son. She didn’t use the most supportive tone.
Matt left, closing the door on both of them and resting his hands on the porch rails. He looked at the sky and saw nothing he hadn’t seen a hundred times before. The words of the motel sign were invisible now, hidden in the glare of a surrounding neon rectangle. The yellow tubes looked like they’d been white once and then pissed on.
Across the lot, on the shorter length of an L shaped porch, the woman continued to smoke and drink. Occasionally she’d look at the end of what she smoked but mostly she looked at the ground.
Matt took a deep breath. He hadn’t had a cigarette in six years (Ann had urged him to quit) and so he hoped for some second-hand smoke. What he smelt instead, carried to him on the dusty air, was the welcome tang of marijuana. He filled his lungs
with it, slight as it was. He watched as the woman released another mouthful of smoke, wishing he was near enough to breath it in.
He went to the vending machines instead.
A couple of cockroaches, alarmed by his approach, hurried out from beneath the machine and raced past his foot, slipping under the door of room 12. Others congregated around a nearby garbage sack, bumping into each other and adjusting their course.
The vending machine offered the usual candy and chips as well as some microwave snacks, though he hadn’t seen a microwave in the room. He rummaged in his pocket for money and found only a couple of folded bills. The readout told him NO CHANGE.
He’d see if the woman could help him.
She heard him coming and puffed a final time on her joint. She was stubbing it out and chasing the last toke with beer when he offered his money and said he needed change.
“Of course,” she said. “Change.” But she made no move to give him any. He leant closer with the cash and she took it with a sigh. She stood up and stretched, pushing out her chest in a way that was all the more alluring for being unintentional, her hands at the small of her back until it clicked. He wondered how long she’d been sitting out here. Before he could ask, or make any kind of conversation, she was stepping into the office behind her.
“For the machine?” she asked, calling it slowly. Lazily. The same way she drank her beer.
“Yeah.”
She returned with a handful. “It’s kinda picky with what it likes,” she said, explaining all the coins.
“Great. Thanks.”
She puffed her hair out of her face, brushed it aside when that didn’t work. “Anything else?”
“Yes, actually. Do you have a microwave back there? Only I saw-”
“Yeah, we got one,” she said, sitting again. “Just bring whatever you get and I’ll nuke it.” The gulp she took of her beer was an obvious goodbye.
Matt went back to the machine. He fed it coins until it served him his choices and took them back to the woman.
“Can I help you?” she asked. It wasn’t like she’d forgotten seeing him already. And it was disconcertingly earnest.
“Sure,” he said. “You can nuke these.” He tried a smile.
“That’s it?”
He wondered if she was a hooker after all.
“Er . . .”
She took the food from him and carried it back in, side stepping over a cockroach that sped across the floor. It turned a circle and went back the other way.
“Where you heading?” she asked, tossing the packets into the microwave. For a ridiculous moment he thought she was talking to the roach.
“Nowhere.”
She looked at him, started the microwave. “You got two minutes,” she said over its hum.
Matt laughed politely. “Home,” he said, “Picked the boy up from his dad’s, saw the in-laws. They want to give me a job.”
“Not good?”
“No.”
“What do you do?”
He said it for the first time in years. “I’m a musician.” Words that used to impress every girl he ever said them to. Some pretended otherwise, but it always worked.
“Not any more,” she said.
“What?”
“Not if ma and pa get their way.”
“Oh. Yeah. Exactly.”
“They just want what’s best,” she said. It was what Ann had told him, several times, until the drive lulled her to sleep. He’d probably end up taking the damn job.
They were quiet until the microwave dinged.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I want them to leave me the fuck alone. ...
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