John puts the underwear back in her mouth. “Florence,” he says. Then he repeats the name several times, breaking it into two crisp syllables, and thinking you don’t often hear someone below the age of seventy named Florence. “Was it your mother’s name?”
She shakes her head.
John’s sweating profusely. He rubs the back of his hand over his forehead, then shakes the hand. Drops of perspiration fly against the near wall. Suddenly he has the feeling he may be performing acts—even mundane ones, like wiping his brow—for the last time. His thoughts don’t expound upon the feeling. Then he’s not sure that he felt it at all. “A relative, though?”
The woman doesn’t respond, just shivers like somebody’s opened a freezer in front of her. “It’s a beautiful name. Someone took some time picking it out. Not like mine—John. John Moon—that’s a real simple, common kinda name.” John feels horrible, actually physically sick. He pictures Obadiah Cornish’s head with an ear, lip, and its nose sliced off and his little baby and Moira in the hands of the madman who did it. He nods solemnly at the woman. “Fella sits in the next room with his throat cut who’s got somethin’ to do with stealin’ my wife and kid and even if I was you or the cops, Florence—I’d think I’d done it.”
The woman’s good eye madly squirts left to right like a guppy.
“I don’t know what to do,” says John. Abruptly his legs start hopping up and down as if they’re run by little motors and he feels, between its vicious pounding, his heart whispering extra little beats like the flapping of a sparrow’s wings. He wonders if maybe he’s having a heart attack, only nothing really hurts. He feels more like a jet revving up to take off. “But I got to do somethin’.”
He looks down at the woman’s fingers and they’re white where they’re digging into her pink sweatpants above the pee stains on her thighs. It strikes him that she’s more petrified than he is and that he’s the reason why; realizing this angers John, as he’s twice told her he doesn’t intend to hurt her. A knock sounds on the door and a female voice with a Spanish accent says, “Clean room, okay?”
Florence precipitately bolts up from the bed and bounds for the door. From his sitting position, John dives headlong and tackles her. For several seconds they grapple on the rug, she squealing through her gag and kicking and punching at him, until finally John gets on top of her and pancakes her to the floor. He barks at the hallway, “No room service!”
“Later, you want?” asks the voice.
Suddenly, in the midst of her exhortative squirming, the underpants pop out of Florence’s mouth. She starts to scream, but John points a threatening finger at her, and she stops, her mouth a frozen pink gash. “Later, no!” John calls out, sitting up and, with his knees, pinning Florence’s arms to the rug. “We’ll make our own beds!”
“Si,” says the woman.
“Wait!” hollers John.
“Eh?”
“I’m in room 229. I don’t want no room service there neither!”
For several seconds there’s no answer.
John yells, “No towels. Nothin’!”
The voice says, “You stay there?”
“Right. Two doors down! Don’t even knock! Comprende?”
“Two-twenty-nine. Si.”
He hears her walk off down the corridor, stop at the room before Obadiah Cornish’s, knock, and in a few seconds the door open, then close again. He says to the woman, “I guess I got to put you back in the tub.”
“No,” she whispers.
“I cain’t see ’nother way.”
“I won’t tell nobody what I seen.”
“You won’t have a choice once they find ya.”
“I could say there was a stocking over your head and I didn’t see your face.”
John thinks about it. “They’ll know a’ready I was here.”
“What’s it matter, then?”
“I need time.”
“To do what?”
“Get back my wife and kid.”
“From who?”
“I ain’t sure.”
“Mis… John—listen… please?”
“What?”
“You’re hurtin’ my arms.”
John rolls off her, flops his arms out to the sides, and gazes up at the ceiling. The woman sits up next to him. “Can I reach in my sweats?”
John rolls his head toward her. “What for?”
“I got a joint in there. You wanta smoke a joint with me?”
John doesn’t say, but doesn’t stop her when she reaches into a side pocket of her sweatsuit and pulls out a fat cigarette and a Cricket lighter. She puts the cigarette in her mouth, ignites it, inhales deeply, then withdraws it and places it between John’s lips. They smoke the whole joint without talking. Afterwards, John is just as confused as he was, but a little calmer, and the woman acts so, too. “You got bus fare to Enid, Oklahoma?” she asks.
John blankly stares at her.
“I come back East to visit my sister in Boston but couldn’t find her. Somebody there said maybe she’s dead.” She reaches into her sweats for a Tiparillo, places it between her lips, and lights it. “What I seen a’ the East, I could easily forget.”
Her makeup is smeared and now John sees that it had been partly used to conceal a whirligig-shaped scar on the cheek below her bad eye. “How much would ya need?”
“Couple hundred—three, make it—for food ’n all.” She sucks on the cigar, then rolls the smoke out over her tongue. “But you gotta let me take a shower first and change.”
John frowns at her.
“I ain’t gon’ go out in public smelling like piss.”
“You wouldn’t say nothing?”
“Who’d want to hear ’bout it out in Enid?”
John scratches an ear. “Five minutes,” he says.
The woman stands up and walks toward the bathroom. John gets up and follows her. She shuts the bathroom door in his face. A minute later, when the water starts running, he steps inside and leans against the sink. From behind the drawn curtain, Florence lists what she hates most about the Northeast—the weather, people’s lack of manners, too many cars and overweight men, a closed-in feeling she can’t pinpoint, the price of marijuana, beer, and food. When the water stops running, John hands her in a towel and her blond wig. A few moments after, wearing the wig and with the towel snugly wrapped around her, she pulls back the curtain and steps out. Her legs and shoulders are pale white, smooth, and unblemished, as if they are fifteen years younger than her face.
In less than ten minutes, she’s dressed, has put on fresh makeup and packed all her belongings. They walk down the back stairs to the rear parking lot and over to John’s truck. John opens the passenger door and waits for Florence to get in. He shows her his gun and tells her not to move, call out, or honk the horn. She says she wouldn’t anyway. She wants to get back to Enid. John shuts her door, walks the fifty feet over to the lobby’s rear entrance, opens it, sticks his head inside, and tells Skinny Leak, “Weren’t nobody home.”
Leak glances up from the set and shrugs. John pulls out his wallet, takes from it one of the hundred-dollar bills he had removed this morning from the sugar jar, and lays it on the counter where the old man can reach it. “If he asks—or anybody else—I weren’t never here.”
Leak sticks out a bony hand. He picks up the bill, pockets it, and hisses. “You’s one the Fitch boys, ain’t ya?”
John leaves without saying.
The bus station is on the south side of town in the first floor of a retired glue factory. Circled by a high metal fence, the terminal parking lot is potholed dirt. Two buses sit in it. Another, half full of passengers, idles in front of
