without complication. Much seemed unmanageably complicated, but these things were simple and granted him a knowledge of her that he had lacked.
She sat on the balcony toying with the matchbooks, folding and fitting their flaps together in various schemes of assembly. ‘What are you trying to make?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ She pulled them apart and began again and again, sometimes working in a couple of Marlboro cigarette packs she had also found. She created something like a spiral staircase. Then took it apart and worked out a swanlike creature. She had a few pieces of broken mirror as well, which she tucked into the crevices of the matchbook sculpture, so that here and there it shone. She hunched over the matchbooks for a long while, making tiny adjustments with small, sure fingers, and she looked absolutely capable, as if the making of small new curiosities signified the skills to do anything, to move the world.
Small dark scabs had formed where she had scratched herself. Eventually he took her feet onto his lap and massaged them, and she slouched in her chair and fell asleep. Watching her, he recalled the airport, years before, his misery and awe. And now? Now he was moved to happiness.
Later that afternoon she went into the room. Two golf carts in the seventh fairway had collided in a way that bent a rear wheel, and several men in shorts and polo shirts gathered around it. Then, one by one, they wandered off, abandoning the damaged golf cart in the middle of the fairway.
‘For some reason I keep thinking,’ Ellis called, ‘maybe a circus will come down the highway, on parade. A couple of elephants marching down the highway would make me very happy.’
Heather didn’t reply. He peered into the room, but she had gone.
He watched the highway for a few more minutes, then went in to use the toilet. A pair of red panties that Heather had laundered in the sink were hanging over the shower curtain rod. He ran a finger over the seams, then washed his hands, splashed water on his face, dried it away, and his phone rang. ‘Chinese?’ Heather said.
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m just wandering around. I found a bag of water balloons.’
He returned to the balcony. An iron shot rose off the seventh fairway and fell and dribbled onto the green, still far short of the pin. ‘I’ll walk over to that Chinese place for takeout,’ Heather said. ‘All right with you?’
Ellis said OK. He leaned on the rail and looked over the traffic. On the edge of the highway away to the right something snagged his attention, a tall figure. Ellis knew as soon as he focused on it that it was Boggs – Boggs bending to look at the ground, Boggs striding along a few paces, Boggs bending to the ground again. Ellis’s breath caught, and Heather said, ‘What?’
‘He’s here.’
‘John?’
Boggs straightened, turned his face to the sky and raised his arms outward. Ellis still held the phone to his ear but had forgotten it when Heather clicked off. He was watching Boggs, and he didn’t see her until she was already running across the lanes of the highway.
The traffic gapped and she crossed quickly. Boggs didn’t appear surprised to see her. She stopped maybe ten feet from him, her mouth moving. Boggs lifted a foot and looked down at it. His lips hardly moved as he spoke. Heather advanced, and she shouted.
Ellis crashed through the room, downstairs, past the reception desk, around the building. By the time he reached the side of the highway, Heather and Boggs seemed calmed. They were talking. Ellis rushed through a break in the traffic. ‘Hey!’ he called from the median. It looked almost like a conspiracy, and as he waited for an opening to cross the remaining two lanes, he burned. And at the same time he was aware that he stood in the same ditch where a man had barely ducked a semi.
When traffic opened and he could move forward his frustration grew confused. Heather stood downcast. Boggs studied the sky. He looked well tanned, rested and sad, like a man in the midst of a disappointing vacation. Heather didn’t look at Ellis, but instead toward the golf course, perhaps at a rattling flag there, perhaps at nothing.
‘You’re all right?’ Ellis said. But having said it, he was unsure who he meant or what
‘Say something,’ Boggs said. He seemed to be ignoring Ellis’s question, to be talking to Heather. She didn’t move or respond. The three of them stood in silence. This wasn’t what Ellis had expected; his strongest temptation was to run down the roadside, away from it.
Boggs said, ‘OK then.’ He smiled at Ellis. ‘We were just rehashing some history.’ He glanced at Heather, but she stood silent. Ellis circled in order to see her face – but she wasn’t looking at anything: her eyes were shut. She seemed pale, and when Ellis touched her she was trembling.
‘Did you hit her?’ he asked Boggs, furiously.
Boggs set his hands in his pockets. ‘Of course not.’ He started away, into the golf course.
Ellis took a step after him, but stopped and went back to Heather. ‘What did he do?’
She shook her head.
‘Let’s go back to the motel,’ he said.
‘Are you going to go after him?’ she asked.
‘Do you want me to?’
‘Don’t ask me that!’
He stared at her. ‘I couldn’t see as I came down from the room -’
‘You didn’t miss anything.’
‘Then what -’
‘Go,’ she said. ‘He’s going to kill himself, isn’t he?’ She motioned as if she would shove him, but she did not touch him.
Boggs now was at the far end of the seventh fairway. Ellis looked from him to Heather. ‘Are you sending me away?’
‘No,’ she said.
Ellis cursed. He studied her gaze a second, but she was now steady and opaque. He turned, ran.
Boggs had nearly reached the golf course parking lot. Ellis sprinted through the rough along the seventh. He remembered that Heather had been married to Boggs for years; in comparison he hardly knew her.
By the time he reached the parking lot, Boggs, in his convertible, was pulling away. Ellis ran behind, with little hope.
Boggs, however, had to pause for an SUV backing into a parking space, and then as he came to the street entrance, the traffic there was heavy and seeping. Ellis thought he might actually catch up. And then – what? Vault into the passenger seat?
Boggs approached the street at speed and made a screeching turn into traffic that terrified Ellis – vehicles from both directions braked loudly, swerved, blew horns. But Boggs, with apparent calm, had locked himself into the crawling traffic. Ellis, running hard, managed to come up beside him. He could hear Boggs’s car stereo. It sounded like
‘You all right?’ Boggs asked, slowing a little.
‘Yes.’ Ellis had to fight for breath.
‘Are you sure? I mean, in a bigger sense?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You don’t have to follow me, you know.’
‘Let me help you!’
Boggs shrugged. His jaw had set hard, and he studied the windshield. Traffic opened before him, and he accelerated a bit. ‘What do you want?’
‘To talk!’ Ellis shouted.
‘Just say it!’
‘What?!’
‘What you have to say!’
‘Let’s sit somewhere!’ Ellis gasped; he couldn’t run like this much longer.
‘What?!’
‘This is stupid!’
‘What is?!’
