Casey's Home (11 page)

“Right,” he said. “And it was
years and years ago.”

“Yes,” I affirmed. “Yes, it was.
It certainly doesn’t matter anymore.”

1981

The sun, so gentle to the sweet shores of
Southern California, was merciless on the long drive across Arizona and New
Mexico. Ben found he had to stop frequently, pulling over just in time to
prevent the Datsun, eating its way through coolant like a child with a plate
full of cupcakes, from overheating completely. The interior of the car,
normally a dull, dusty blue, began to swelter after days in the intense heat
and Ben could swear that the dash was actually melting off into a puddle of
gooey blue liquid on the powder blue shag carpet floor. He had never consumed
so much soda in his life, finding it the only reliable liquid to be had at most
of the rinky-dink gas stations along the 10. The highway snaked its way across
the desert toward Texas, the ultimate in American deserts, and Ben sweated
miserably, but in his mind felt that he was finally, maybe approaching
happiness head-on.

If anyone had asked, which they never did,
he wouldn’t have talked about the last five years, not in any detail. It was
like recovering from a death: the pain eased little by little until at last it
was nothing but a long, slow ache. Every now and then, without warning, the
grief would rise up in his mind and replay it all for him, mercilessly. Then it
felt exactly as awful as it had when it was fresh. Ben ground his teeth against
sorrow and turned up the radio. Salsa music, bright and foreign, skittered
through the car and synchronized with his weary nerves.

In El Paso he paused briefly before diving
into the Lone Star State, like sticking a cautious toe into the pool, and
called his mother. Trucks screamed by on the interstate as he explained to her
that he didn’t, in fact, know the exact day when he would arrive, but that he
would get there eventually, following the southern roads through to the north
of Florida and from there, sinking down into Tampa.

It was in San Antonio that he wished he
were still drinking. The lack of alcohol, so new to his tender system, seemed
to pulse through him as surely as the perpetual buzz he’d been on for months,
maybe years, who knew? He’d left Carla behind in Los Angeles. The only
meaningful relationship he’d had in years, stretching through the worst of his
binges, and there she was, stroking the hair back from his forehead and telling
him to just let it out. Of course, it was only when he’d stopped drinking and
decided to accept the job offer that she left him. He had become boring so
quickly, and Carla was the sort of woman who had to have a crisis. It fed her,
like oxygen, revving up her muscles and powering her brain cells into
overdrive. She said trauma made her more artistic. It certainly made her more
willing. Truthfully, he wasn’t all that disappointed. It would have seemed odd,
dragging her clear across the country. He hadn’t reflected much on why that
was. At the moment, he was looking forward to the new.

Pulling over at a small, dirty gas station
at the edge of San Antonio, he stretched briefly before stepping out of the low
car onto the smoldering tarmac. Everything here was gray with dust and oil, he
thought, pumping the cheapest possible gas into the Datsun. Inside, he selected
a Coke and two candy bars to help him make it through to Baton Rouge by
nightfall.

“That’ll be eight-oh-seven,” the man
behind the counter said as Ben rooted in his wallet for change.

“Here,” he handed the man a ten and then
he felt it, someone tugging at the edge of his t-shirt.

“Excuse me,” a voice said and he looked
over. A teenage boy, his voice much too deep for his body, stood next to Ben.
“Excuse me,” the boy said again. “Aren’t you somebody famous?”

Ben hadn’t been recognized much since the
accident. Hell, he had never been recognized much at all.

“Well, I used to play baseball.”

“Hey, yeah,” the boy said. “Yeah, I know
you. You’re that guy with the arm, right? You were the guy who broke his arm in
the Series, right? Boy, that must have stunk.”

Ben nodded, unsure how to answer that.

“Yeah,” the kid continued. “I remember you
breaking your arm. My dad and I watched it on TV. That horrible sound it made
when the bone broke… you don’t forget something like that.”

“Right,” Ben said.

“Is your arm better now?” the boy asked,
eying the wrong bicep. Ben nodded.

“All fixed,” he said.

“That’s cool,” the boy said. “Too bad you
couldn’t still play. Guess that must stink. Well, see ya. It was cool to meet
you. Wait until I tell my dad about it.”

Ben turned back to the counter. The man
behind it smiled weakly at him and handed him back his money.

“Keep it,” he said. “Sounds like you could
use it.”

Jesus, it had come that far, receiving
charity from a gas station clerk. Ben simply nodded and pocketed the money. It
took several minutes of driving before he regained his sense of equilibrium.
But the joy that had been there, the hope for something better, had gone,
leaving him feeling bleak and desolate in the Texas desert. Misery and
self-reproach gnawed at him, worrying his frayed edges like a terrier with a
deflated toy.

He drove right through Baton Rouge before
finally stopping at a dingy little motel on the outskirts of town. Built in the
Fifties, its sign was a watery blue with two neon-outlined bathing beauties
diving into the words below. Ben parked the Datsun next to the only other car
in the lot and stepped out into the sticky night. The hotel clerk seemed quite
pleased to see him.

“Don’t get many folks driving through
anymore,” he said. The freeway hummed a few blocks away, just far enough to
make a motel built on the two-lane highway obsolete. The place clearly hadn’t
seen much of an update since it was built, which didn’t help. Ben gratefully
accepted the key to his room anyway, glad to slow his own momentum, if only for
the night.

“Is there somewhere to eat around here?”
he asked and was pointed down the street to a sign that read “Crazy Eddy’s Cajun
Bar and Grill.” Outside, the air seemed to hum with moisture and insects. Great
flying beetles and gnats and every sort of buzzing, creeping thing hovered
around the streetlights, being snapped up by bats, black against the midnight
blue sky. It was like a scene from a Hitchcock movie. “The Bugs.” The thought
made him chuckle. It was only a slight puff of air from his dry lungs, but it
was enough to make a man waiting at a bus stop in front of the hotel stare at
him and back away toward the street. Ben smiled at him and the old man squinted
tentatively toward something resembling a smile. At the end of the street, Ben
pushed open the door to the small diner and settled into a red vinyl booth.

Sidling by as if she were vaguely
frightened of him, a waitress tossed over a laminated menu and moved on. Ben
stared after her, her wide ass squeezed into an impossibly tight pair of
culottes that then splayed out around her knees like a shorter version of bell
bottoms. This place really might be the end of the road, he thought, if it
attracted women like that.

“What’ll ya have?” a pleasant voice said
and Ben looked up to a vision guaranteed to change his mind about Baton Rouge
entirely. This waitress was thin and pale, even delicate, with her waist-length
red hair braided into a heavy plait that swung when she nodded her head. The
skin on her face was as translucent as fine linen paper, and she had bright
blue eyes, the color of paint on china.

“Cheeseburger,” he said, “and a Coke.”

“Great, that’ll fill ya right up,” she
said. Her voice held a slight Louisiana accent, like pepper, and her full lips
twisted the words so that she sounded as if she were smiling. Ben was
transfixed and moved that something so lovely could exist here, in this small,
dirty place. It was like finding a blooming garden in the middle of a swamp.

When she returned ten minutes later, he
was unaccountably nervous. He’d been watching her; her lithe body as she moved
between the seats, the way her breasts rose when she lifted her arms to tack
his order onto the metal carousel behind the counter. “Here you go, sweetie,”
she said, setting the steaming burger in front of him with a flourish. God, but
she was beautiful. Ethereal, trembling, a fairy.

Ben ate ravenously, his exhaustion pushed
from his belly to infect his head. He longed to fold his arms on the table like
a pillow and rest there, watching her. Instead, he left her the ten dollars he
hadn’t spent on gas that afternoon as a tip and walked through the buzzing
darkness to his room, his head spinning with sleep and arousal.

The room was small and a bit shabby, but
it smelled clean. There were no real amenities, just a bed and a battered
Seventies television so curved it distorted the picture like a funhouse mirror.
Ben scrubbed at his weary face, staring at himself in the mirror. It didn’t
seem possible that he could look so old, since he was only twenty-eight. The
soft planes beneath his eyes had hardened and become defined, as if he were
carved rather than born. For a brief moment, he longed for a beer, or six.
Something to take the edge off this trip, off this long day. He opted for yet
another soda, feeling tentatively for sleep in the recesses of his body and
finding none. In his shirt pocket he discovered a quarter and a dime and
carried them, jingling, out into the sticky night.

The waitress from the diner was waiting at
the bus stop, shifting from one foot to the other so that her braid swung
sweetly against the small of her back. She had changed her clothes since he’d
last seen her, from her uniform to a pair of tight black jeans and a baggy
green shirt, but her hair was like a badge, immediately identifiable. He
supposed that was the point, really. At her feet was a duffel bag; in her left
hand she held a cigarette she wasn’t really smoking. After a moment, she
dropped it and tapped it out. Ben stood under the shadowed overhang of the
motel’s second story and debated the wisdom of what he badly wanted to do. The
tinny clink of his change decided it for him, as she turned and peered at the darkened
walkway. Not wanting to frighten her, he stepped out beneath the street lamp.

“Well, hello,” she said, sounding
unnerved. “If it isn’t Mr. Ten-Dollar-Tip.”

Ben nodded politely. “I was just going to
get a Coke,” he said and opened his hand to reveal the money. She stared at it
for a moment and then turned back to the street, watching for the approaching
bus. The road stretched away from them as an empty corridor, lit by strings of
weak street lamps and the occasional blinking sign.

“My brother was supposed to pick me up,
but he’s probably drunk at some bar.”

Ben wasn’t sure what she expected him to
say to that. That her brother was a son of a bitch? He wasn’t comfortable
talking about anyone’s time in bars. She shifted her purse onto her other shoulder
and turned back to him.

“Where’re you headed?”

“Florida,” he replied, moving the coins
around in his hand, feeling the rough edges catch against the calluses on his
palm.

“Where from?”

“California.”

She looked him up and down carefully, as
if searching him for a reason, for some outward indication of a vagabond soul.
He wondered what she found.

“That’s a long way,” she said at last.
“You got family in Florida?”

He nodded. Together, they peered down the
street, but the bus didn’t appear. An ancient Mustang sputtered past, driven by
a kid with long, blond hair like a girl. It was late, well past eleven. Even
the teenage boys were headed home.

“Are you sure it’s coming?” he asked and
she shrugged.

“Eventually,” she said. “I ain’t walking
three miles home at this hour, and I ain’t got the money for a taxi. Either the
bus’ll show, or my brother will, eventually.”

“I could give you a ride,” Ben said,
pointing toward his car, alone in the parking lot.

“Right,” she said slowly. “Some man I
don’t know offers me a ride home. You think I’m stupid or something?” But she
was smiling, just a little.

“Then maybe I’ll just stand out here with
you till the bus comes,” he said. “This doesn’t look like the world’s safest
neighborhood.”

“Which is why you’re stayin’ here.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Basically, I’m
cheap. And I don’t usually give waitresses ten dollar tips, you know. It’s been
a long day and you were...” He hesitated at the edge of the truth, then skirted
it. “... nice to me.”

“That’s my job,” she said, but again, she
was smiling.

They stood quietly for a moment, listening
to the distant sound of cars passing, on another, livelier road. The motel sign
hissed as it blinked; she brushed away an insistent fly.

“Come on,” she said at last, picking up
her duffel bag of clothing. “The diner’s closed but I got a key. I’ll get you
that Coke.”

Ben followed, the change still pressing
into his tender skin. As she fumbled with the keys to the diner door, he
stuffed the money into his pocket and wondered, not for the first time since he
left California, what the hell he was doing.

She didn’t bother with the lights. The
diner was bathed in the soft, pulsing color of the jukebox and a double strip
of pink neon that outlined the counter. Setting her duffel down by the door,
she lifted the end of the counter into the kitchen and took two clean glasses
from beneath the bar.