Age of Consent (7 page)

“What is wrong with your brain that you are doing math in my car? You need to get your
shit
together, Barbara. You need to pay attention to the University of
Life
.”

She told herself if she got out of this car alive she would never get back in. This was the last night of the last day, the very last time she would ever see him. She didn't care what it took to rid herself of him. Let him scream and shout. Let him tell her mother. It made no difference. She was done.

But she nodded in agreement that she needed to get her shit together—oh yes, oh yes, get her shit…

“Okay,” she said. “I agree.” Her admission satisfied Craig, who liked to seem sage and intelligent. He liked to teach her. He'd once explained why blood did not belong to one person but to everyone, and how if he were in charge of stuff, he'd stop blood-supply shortages by requiring hospitals to drain the blood of patients who died, but only a few minutes after they died so that it was still good, the blood. It wasn't rotten or anything. Then there was the guy he worked with who was born without thumbs. Craig had explained that the worst thing about missing thumbs was how it made it so the guy couldn't work a bong. And this was a shame because bongs gave you a better, cleaner, and more complete high. He was sure of this. He believed that one day science would find ways of measuring such things.

He veered onto an exit ramp, the motel sign a great beacon of light, then put the car in neutral as a way of saving fuel, a habit she never liked because traveling the slope of the road at high speed always made the car feel light and out of control. They rounded the curve of the exit, the car swerving and swooping along the contours of the road like an osprey tracking the air above the ocean's swells and surf. They were fast; they were flying. He was smiling now, singing along to a tune on the radio. He didn't care how fast they went; he was hunting. He was about to get his money. It was waiting for him there by the big bright sign.

SHE'D LEFT THE
key in the room, so they had to get the manager's keys to get inside. She followed Craig through a glass door with a strap of bells attached, then into a little square room lit from above by strips of humming, cold light. He rang a bell on the desk and called out “Hey, anyone here?” loud enough so if you were there you'd come running. That, or hide.

The countertop had neat piles of leaflets, a rubber plant, and a desk calendar with curled corners and a photograph of the motel on it. The night manager, or whoever he was, must have still been around because he'd left half a cup of coffee in a blue enamel mug, and a coffee pot roasting dry on an electric ring above the filing cabinet.

“You ever seen so deserted a place as this?” Craig said, thwacking the bell with his palm. “Hey, anyone here?!”

There were fishing rods in one corner, a trash can, an old sign. Craig called again and still no reply.

“What the fuck is the matter with this place,” he said. He stamped his foot, banged the bell with his fist, called out again. The hum from the fluorescent ceiling lights annoyed him. “Someone shut that damned tube off,” he said, as though to the staff. He took a broom from its place by the door, tossed it up and grabbed the brush end. He whacked it on the light fixture so that it blinked and swayed before resuming its noise. Now he grew red with impatience, paced the length of the counter, slapped the top of it, sounded the bell over and over again before finally throwing it against a wall. Then he went over to the bells tacked on the door and shook them like he was trying to get a coconut out of a tree.

“Hey!” he shouted. He was wearing the bicentennial ball cap. His untucked T-shirt billowed over his front, where a loose swatch of leather from his belt wagged with his steps. “Hey! I need some attention here!”

His voice boomed toward the back of the room where there were some closets and an exit door. Nothing happened. He flipped up a section of the counter that allowed him through to the manager's area, then opened cupboards until, at last, he found where the keys were stored on pegs. The one he wanted wasn't there and he searched the rack then looked on the desk, yanked open a drawer and swept his hand through, scattering paper clips, an ink pad, a calculator. A log of staples fell to the floor and broke into sections he then stepped on, turning abruptly when the phone began to ring. “You gonna answer that?” he said to Bobbie, sarcastically. The white light flashed on one of the extensions and the phone rang and rang. They both looked at it. “This is all your fault,” he told her. “Making us come back.”

Then he told her to get out, go back to the car and wait there.

She left him in the motel office and stepped into the night, wishing she were home already. Her house had a screened porch and she'd used paper clips to fix some extra mesh over the holes in the screen so bugs could not get through. She would sleep out there on nights like this, lying on a little camp bed beside a long section of screen, watching the moon through the trees. It was what she'd done the night before, quietly drifting into sleep in the silky warmth of the night. She had woken at dawn, feeling part of the trees and woods around her, part of the songbirds and squirrels and night animals.

She could still hear Craig calling for the manager. She had eight hours until she had to be at the bus stop for school and she'd better have washed her hair. It was sticky and stiff, hanging in her eyes. Sleep would be good, too. There had been times recently when she nodded off in class and the teachers behaved as though this was deliberate rudeness on her part. Her geography teacher once woke her, saying,
Do you have a problem I can help you with?
She'd shaken her head, stifled a yawn, endured the laughter in the classroom. No, he couldn't help her. She had a lot of problems he couldn't help her with. Her problem right now is she has to wait for Craig to get the money and get her home. Who could help her with that?

The motel sign was reflected in long bars of light on the Buick's gold hood and in colorful splashes on the window. When she approached she saw her own shadow, angular and dark. Then she stopped. Somebody was behind her. She could see plainly enough in the window's reflection. He was moving along the little cement path that led to the front of the motel. The night manager. He disappeared from view as she got into the car. She rolled the window down and listened. Crickets, the whirring of the ice machine, traffic in the distance. She smelled freshly cut grass and the fecund, growing greenery, and she breathed this in and tried to relax. Don't worry, she told herself. Craig would get the key and get the money and then drive to the station. In a matter of hours the whole awful night would be over. She pulled her knees up and hugged them. “Don't worry,” she said out loud. But when she heard the door of the reception area bang shut, upsetting the bells, she felt like a fuse had been lit somewhere in the distance and soon everything would blow.

She saw Craig walking quickly down the path, the wooden fob in his hand, his head bent in the direction of the room. He turned in to the path that led to the motel's interior, then down the step to the little path that led to the room. A motion sensor clicked into action and produced a sudden, gauzy light that draped over him like a cape. He disappeared into the light and she could see no farther.

She opened the glove compartment, searching for cigarettes just in case Craig had missed them. Crushed in the corner was a single stale Marlboro with a tear in it, which she fished out carefully and tried to straighten. The filter had specks of loose tobacco and she was busy picking those off when she heard her name and looked up. Craig was standing on the bank of grass, blue in the neon light, his ball cap in his hands, his hands on his hips.

“Barbara, get in here and help me!” he said.

She poked her head through the open car window. “Help you how?”

“Don't ask me how! Move!”

How could he
not
find the money? It was in a drawer on top of a Bible with a note. She'd already told him that. It was impossible to miss. She wondered if she'd made a mistake and the money wasn't there. Maybe she was remembering incorrectly. Maybe she put it somewhere else. Finding the roll of cash, fishing it out from behind the night table—all that felt as though it had happened long ago. She could no longer think straight; she was tired, her thoughts agitated. She wanted to lie down, but she pushed open the door instead.

Her Dr. Scholl's clip-clopped along the cement path and she was aware of the noise and the likelihood of disturbing people. But she couldn't figure out how to tiptoe in such inflexible shoes and he pulled her along so quickly she had no choice but to clomp down the path. They reached the room and he pushed the door open, then stood in the yellow light taking up a good deal of the small space where they'd been all those hours ago and said, “Find the fucking money.”

The room looked burgled. The bed still had the brown coverlet but he'd been through the drawers and they stood open, some now with broken handles, some pulled off their runners so they lay at angles across the floor. The dresser drawers were only made of flimsy plywood and the back of one had come off and now sat inside the three remaining sides. In another she could see the print of Craig's shoe across the lining paper. The curtain was drawn back so the light from outdoors shined onto the bed, which was still tidy, still as she'd left it, except two of the curtain hooks had flown onto it and gleamed there like pieces of jewelry left behind by a guest.

She went to the bedside table. He'd already pulled the drawer out, leaving it open at an angle. The Bible was there, the pages open beneath the book's spine.

“We could have had it already!” he said. He was stripping the bed, pulling up the mattress, digging inside the pillows. “We were here! In this same fucking room! And you had the money in your
hand
.”

She felt his anger radiating toward her. “I'm looking!” she said, but when she pulled out the Bible, which was facing down on its open pages, there was no money inside it. She shook the pages so they waved beneath the hard cover like a swatch of hair, but nothing came out. No money, no note. She kneeled down and looked under the night table's squat legs, but found only cobwebs and a stray pack of matches. In the space against the wall was an electrical cord and a socket. She could not see the money no matter how much she willed it to be there, and she could not leave until it was found.

“Stupid!” Craig said, about her or about the situation or maybe both.

For a moment she thought she saw it and gave a sudden shout.

Craig looked up. “You got the money?”

But it was only the note she'd written, which she threw back to the floor now. She dropped lower, scouting close to the carpet, her nose to the ply, looking crossways over the room. The contents of the drawers were all over the place: a pen with a crack in it, a phone book, some brochures.

Craig looked at her. “Fucking stupid,” he said.

There were footsteps outside. She heard them and froze. Both of them did, Craig standing with a corner of the mattress leaning on the wall by his ear, her on all fours with her head cocked to one side like a dog. The footsteps grew louder and Craig said, “Get to the bathroom!”

She ran, stubbing her toe on the edge of the bed, then stepping out of her sandals and hopping barefoot, so that she all but fell onto the bathroom floor. She switched on the light and heard Craig yell, “Off!,” so she switched it off again and sat on the toilet, perched on the edge of the rim, arms folded on the tops of her thighs, forehead against her knees. She felt a slushy sourness in the pit of her belly and listened as whoever it was came into the motel room. She thought it must have been the manager. She heard the shock in his voice from seeing the place so torn up and Craig there with a bedsheet in his hands.

The guy said, “What the hell?,” and then Craig started shouting at him that he was looking for his money.

“What money?” she heard the other man say.

“What I left here!” Craig's voice. “What you took!”

“I never took any money! I'm calling the police!” The guy's voice went falsetto at the word
police
and then she heard something snap and a kind of slapping sound and a heavy object fall. She heard the manager saying, “That's it, I'm definitely calling the police, man!,” and then Craig's voice booming as though from a megaphone. He had a deep, thundering voice with a lot of reverb, and when he shouted it was as though there were ten men inside of him.

“Call the police and tell them you stole my money, you fucking coward!” Craig bellowed. She heard a dull wet thud, and something scraping the window, and finally a boom so the whole room shuddered. Now the guy was screaming. She heard a whooshing sound and the guy yelping in pain. Craig was still shouting about his money and being robbed. The motel manager was crying out “Please stop!,” and she didn't want to open the door, but she had to look.

There was Craig with the antennae from the TV in his hand, slender long metal twins, jagged at the broken ends. He was using them like rapiers, or not like rapiers exactly because he did not thrust the ends of the antennae into the guy but sat astride his chest, beating the metal whips across his face as he was down on the floor, his head pinned in place by Craig's knee on his neck.

“Tell me where my fucking money is!” Craig was shouting.

They were angled into the corner, the motel manager making the most awful crying and begging noises. She'd never seen two men actually fighting but she realized now that it was nothing like what you saw on television. There was no sport to it. They did not size each other up and take honest swings. The man on the floor being whipped in the face cried out in a high-pitched voice while Craig kneeled on him, lashing his cheeks and forehead and nose until the man gave up and howled, animal-like, lying on the ground, and still Craig did not stop.