The Girl from Charnelle (40 page)

Still holding Laura's hands, the woman stared at her until Laura did not think she could stand it anymore.

“You can go now,” Mrs. Letig finally said, releasing her and turning away. Laura sat there for a few seconds longer, not sure if she should move too fast. “Go. Go on,” she said. “Get out of here.”

Laura moved slowly to the door, opened it, and then turned back. She caught Mrs. Letig's eyes in the mirror for a moment, and she ran out the door and then out of the house. She got on her bike and waited for some sound, some indication of what was going on in that room. But there was no sound. It was foolish to think there would be. She hadn't really understood what Mrs. Letig was saying if her first instinct was to listen for some sound of tragedy.

It was dark but deceptively warm for December. She pushed down on the pedals. She pedaled hard four or five rotations, her head down, focused
on the road beneath her tires. The air whisked over her face. She wanted to look back, but she thought,
No
. She thought of Lot's wife, unable to keep herself from turning around, her body suddenly a pillar of salt—as if she had disappeared and something completely different, some nonhuman element, had taken her place. She thought of her mother, walking down their street with that tattered brown suitcase in her hand, not looking back. What if her mother had turned around? Would she still have been in Charnelle, but changed, a pillar of something that wasn't really her at all?

Laura kept her head forward and down. She watched the road glide by beneath her. She pedaled hard and navigated through the dark streets. She was relieved that it was so dark. She didn't want to be seen by anybody. She just wanted to keep going and going and going and never look back.

C
harnelle was the first stop on a wide arc around the smaller Panhandle towns in Moore, Hutchinson, Roberts, and Carson counties before the bus wheeled into Amarillo, where you could catch other buses to more distant places. The afternoon bus out of Charnelle left at two-thirty. A ticket to Amarillo cost only four dollars. Laura had forty-two. She would go there first and then decide. She carried her bag and satchel to the bus station, bought her ticket, and then boarded the bus and sat by a window in the back, one of only four passengers, none of whom she knew.

She fell asleep right after they left Stinnett, and when they stopped again, it was dark, so it seemed as if a long time had passed. She wasn't sure what day it was or where exactly she was. She thought at first that she must have stayed on the bus too long, wound up in God-knows-where. She asked an old woman sitting across the aisle where they were.

“Amarillo, honey.”

Relieved, she gathered her things. The bus station felt grimy and warm
as she studied the departure times for Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Little Rock, and Albuquerque. She didn't know where she wanted to go, and the least expensive choice would cost her another seven dollars.

“Is there a place I can sleep?” she asked the attendant, a stiff-backed man with glasses and graying hair at his temples.

“There's some motels down the road.” He looked her over. “But they ain't too nice.”

She motioned to the row of benches. “Can I sleep here?”

He cocked an eyebrow, examined her more carefully. “I wouldn't advise sleeping here. It's not all that safe, not for someone like you.”

“How about those motels then? Do you know how much they cost?”

“They're not too expensive. Maybe two or three dollars, but like I said, they ain't all that nice. Don't you got someone you can stay with?”

“No,” she said.

“Let me get you a taxi to take you to a better part of town.”

“No, I'll be fine. Which way to those motels?”

Outside, it started raining—the streets black and shiny, the buildings slick, grainy, fluorescent. He pointed out two motels, the American Inn and the Red Motor Lodge. Both were run-down, seedy: shingles missing from the roofs, beat-up cars and trucks in the parking lots. The American Inn was either missing a final
n
or was misspelled, so that it read the “American In.” She walked across the street to the lodge. The desk clerk, a tall, rangy man with a purple scar on his forehead, wore a dirty straw cowboy hat tipped back on his head. When she asked how much rooms were, he didn't immediately answer. Instead he leaned over the counter and looked at her bags and then at her.

“You're awful young, ain't you?”

“How much is a room?” she asked again.

“Two bucks. Three if you're staying the whole night.”

She thought this was odd. “I'm staying the whole night.”

“You have to pay in advance.”

“That's fine,” she said and took out her coin purse. The desk clerk tried to see into it. She lowered it below the counter and quickly withdrew three dollars.

He rang up the amount on the cash register, took her money, and then gave her a large key with a green 29 on it. “Upstairs to your right,” he said.

“Thank you.” She pulled her bag and satchel over her shoulders and traipsed up the red-carpeted stairs, which were stained with spills and cigarette burns.

The room immediately depressed her. It stank of smoke. She had to open the window to get some fresh air. The chair was bloodred, the arms and cushion both tattered, the white stuffing oozing out like intestines; the bedspread was yellow-green, discolored over time and also worn and damaged with burn holes and loose threads. She pulled back the covers. The sheets looked old. They smelled clean, though. The bathroom wasn't filthy, as she expected, but there were rust stains around the faucet and the drains of both the bathtub and the sink. A black-and-white television set, with long rabbit ears, sat precariously on the end of the dresser. She turned it on and was surprised to get a clear picture. On one of the stations, a variety show she'd never seen featured perky country music, and she left it on, just to have some company in the room as she washed her face and brushed her teeth.

She got into bed before she realized she hadn't eaten since breakfast. She didn't want to go out or spend any more money, but she felt she had no choice. She was starving. She couldn't believe that she hadn't thought to bring food with her. It had been the last thing on her mind. It would have been so easy to make a couple of sandwiches and pack some fruit. It would have saved her some money.

She changed into blue jeans and put on a sweater. She hadn't thought to bring an umbrella. She asked the clerk if there was some place she could get a hamburger, and he pointed across the street to a joint he said had decent food for pretty cheap. He seemed friendlier than before.

“I could make you a sandwich,” he said.

“I appreciate it. But I want a hamburger.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. “Feel free to drop in when you get back. We could have a couple of beers.”

She nodded. He offered her an old newspaper to put over her head. She thanked him, and he touched the brim of his hat and smiled, his two front teeth rimmed in gold.

The café was cloudy with cigarette smoke, the customers mostly men. The few women wore too much makeup. She asked for a burger and fries to go
and waited on the bar stool with her head down as the cook fixed and sacked it for her. The woman who took her order was old, large, her face ravaged by wrinkles and liver spots.

“You from around here?” she asked Laura.

“No, ma'am.”

“Where you from?”

“Charnelle.”

“Where you staying?”

Laura pointed across the street.

“How long?”

“Just for the night.”

The woman leaned back and cackled loudly, as if this was a joke. “So you're the girl from Charnelle.”

Laura felt confused, as if the woman had mistaken her for someone else. “Beg your pardon?”

“You be careful, you hear.”

Laura, still confused, paid the woman. When she turned around, several of the men stared at her. Hungrily, she thought. The rain had subsided into a drizzle, so she abandoned the paper and ran with her bag and drink, darting inside the motel lobby. The clerk had left his desk, a relief. The stairs creaked loudly, even though she walked on her tiptoes. She locked the door, and then she positioned the red chair under the doorknob, as she'd seen it done in a movie. The room didn't smell as bad as before, so she shut and locked the window and then turned on the television and watched
Rawhide
while she ate and then turned down the volume but kept the television on so the room wouldn't feel so lonely.

She read from the book of American short stories that she had brought home from school. She should have left it at her house, but at the last second she decided to take it. She'd already done enough—what did it matter now if she stole a schoolbook? Besides, she wanted something more to remind her of Charnelle. She'd brought clothes and her diary and this book. She would miss school, would miss Marlene and Debbie, and would also miss Mr. Sparling, the way he kept them focused on their reading, made them think hard and clearly about the meaning of the stories, not just their plots but the stories underneath the stories, the Yes and the No of the American dream, which her classmates had grown tired of hearing, and she had, too, for a while, but not now. He had said that when the Yes and No were together, when you
experienced them simultaneously, then it was no longer so simple, and she felt he was right, felt that she knew this firsthand now.

She opened the book and started rereading a story she liked by Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose writing she generally did not like. But she was fascinated by “Wakefield,” about a man who leaves his family, just disappears, but in reality moves only a couple of blocks away and spies on them for years, watches them as they recover from their grief, as their lives fold over the scar of his absence. The story reminded her of “Rip Van Winkle,” but it also, more importantly, reminded her of her mother, made her wonder if perhaps her mother had been lurking around Charnelle, watching them, spying on them. She wished on some level that it was true, though she knew that it wasn't, that her mother had left for good, and they would never—no matter how many theories they devised—know what became of her.

Mr. Sparling had asked them to write an essay detailing the various reasons that not just Wakefield but that other characters left their communities. When he said this, she could feel her classmates stealing covert glances at her, but she ignored them, no longer cared what they thought. She put her head down and wrote about Wakefield and then about Huck Finn, striking out for the new frontier, fleeing civilization. She wrote about Bartleby, so politely preferring not to, removing himself more and more from the world, until he at last died. She wrote a paragraph about Hester living on the outskirts of town, shunned and humiliated. But what she was really thinking about as she wrote was how Gloria had escaped Charnelle to be with Jerome, to start a new life in a different place, far from home. And how perhaps that's what her mother had done as well. When she wrote the essay, she and John were about to strike out themselves, and she had imagined, though of course not written about, that journey for herself and John.

Rereading the story now, she thought about how she had finally left Charnelle after all, and not because she could no longer imagine living there but because she felt that she no longer belonged there, that she had lost her privilege. She remembered reading
Oedipus Rex
last year, how he had gouged out his eyes for what he'd unknowingly done and had asked for death, but his brother-in-law had given him a punishment worse than death—a wandering exile. When she read it, she thought about her mother, wandering in exile, which sounded exotic, but now, the day after leaving the Letigs' home, she realized that exile was a form of shame, and shame
was what had made her ride so fast through the dark Charnelle streets, hoping she wouldn't be seen. She was determined to disappear, just run away from them all, like her mother had done, convinced that it was better to remain a mystery, to say No and, if you could, begin your life over rather than remain in the place where you had caused so much grief.

Traveling on the bus, dozing, unsure which town she was in, she also felt as if leaving was a way of discovering her mother, felt in some ways that she was traveling down a path her mother had already laid for her, as if the very act of leaving might lead her to her mother's doorstep in a strange city, in another world.
A new world.

But now, not even seventy miles from home, lying in this dingy bed, she felt more confused than ever about her own motives, what a stranger she was even to herself. And she was afraid as well, and wondered what kind of timid traveler she would be—no longer welcome in Charnelle but not welcome anyplace else. Perhaps that was what exile was and what she deserved. Had she been a coward for leaving, abandoning her family, abandoning her responsibility in the Letigs' tragedy? Wasn't that the coward's way out? Wasn't running away the easy thing to do? Wasn't it much harder to stay? She wasn't sure anymore.

She drifted off fitfully but woke again to the sound of drunken stumbling in the hallway. Then she heard a key in her own door. She jumped up and saw the doorknob jiggling but not opening. She ran to her bag, reached in, and searched for her pocketknife. She pulled it out and then scurried over to the far wall and watched the knob rattling.

“Damn door!” a woman's voice called.

“Let me try,” a man said. He turned the knob, but it didn't open. “Shit,” he said. Then he kicked the door several times.

“Cut it out,” the desk clerk shouted from downstairs.

“The damn key doesn't work, Tim!” the woman shouted back.

“What number is it?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“What door you at?”

“Oh, shit. Sorry.”

“Keep it quiet,” the clerk called. “I got real customers tonight.”

“Come on, sugar,” the woman cooed.

The next door down opened, and she could hear them mumbling and then laughing through the walls. Then she heard what sounded like a
struggle, and then, a few minutes later, the wall next to her bed began shaking, as if someone were hammering on it. She moved away, watched the wall vibrate, the cheap, framed paintings above the lamps threatening to fall. It was all over in a couple of minutes.

There was silence, and then more laughter, and then the pipes from the bathroom next door whined. The door opened, and the man said, “Thanks, Jenny,” and stomped noisily down the hallway and the stairs.

“That was fast,” she heard the clerk say.

“If you can't be good, be quick,” the man said.

Laura wished she had a radio. The pipes whined again, and then, moments later, the door opened and closed. Laura moved the chair and looked through the keyhole but saw only the gold-dressed torso of the woman as she walked by. She heard her half stumble down the stairs.

“You want a beer, Jenny?”

“You're a sweetheart, Tim. I can't, though.”

“Come on. You got time. That brute was fast. Come on. Just one. It's cold. I got my icebox fixed.”

“I guess just one wouldn't hurt.”

Laura packed her things and waited for daybreak.

 

Although it was still early in the morning, Velma was already awake, dressed, and outside feeding the chickens when Laura arrived in the taxi. She had not called beforehand. She wasn't even sure what condition Velma would be in; she hadn't seen her since July, and then only briefly. Velma put her hand over her eyes to block the morning sun and watched as the taxi pulled up in front of the house.