The Road Hog

The surrounding countryside was scrubby arroyo. The highway cut through it, rendering it vast and empty and dead on one side, sparsely populated by a low skyline of dusty, lonely, intermittent buildings on the other. He found the "Skyline Hotel" quite easily. The setting sun was burning up the landscape in a dry was of brilliant orange and pink and bold black shadow-fire.

He got out of the convertible. It wasn't his. The owner was leaking what was left of her brains out of a hole in her skull, stuffed into a drainage culvert a hundred miles away. For right now, all was well.

He went inside, not liking the faux Western decor, but immensely satisfied with the faded black and white portraits of dead gunslingers hanging, some of them crookedly, from the wall. Between those pictures was a standard thrift-store fair such as clowns, ships, etc.

A fat man with curly red hair and a mustache sat behind a counter in the lobby, which smelled of mildew and unwashed laundry and bad food and stale smoke and something even more unpleasant he couldn't quite put his finger on. The little man had a black-and-white old-fashioned tube television set in front of him, an item that looked, for all the world, more like a prop than anything. It was apparently playing old porno flicks, to judge by the sound.

"Excuse...excuse me?" he said, approaching the seated figure. Suddenly, a small jolt of recognition tickled his spine. Goose walked over his grave.

"Damn," he said to himself, "this guy's dead!"

He thought perhaps the man had had a heart attack while sitting there. perhaps overstimulated by his porn films. If so, he had died with a curious, wide-eyed expression on his face, a sort of Howdy Doodey grin frozen in time across his fat kisser. He put out a gloved hand, experimentally, to feel the figure.

A voice said, "Oh, he's mine. I was just testing my replacement."

A little man with a bald head ("A little crawfish of a man," he would laugh to himself later) walked thoughtfully up to the counter, eyed him warily, and then went behind.

He grabbed his "replacement" by the neck, at which point the air began to hiss out of him.

"Just a dummy...dummy."

he made no reply.

He waited, and said, "I need a room for the night. Maybe a couple of nights."

The little man looked down at his feet, but his lower lip (his face was splotchy as if he had a perpetual case of bad nerves) quivered a little as he said, in an offhand way, "Oh sure. That'll be two hundred bucks."

He giggled.

"Two hundred bucks? For a night in this dump?"

The little man looked as if he didn't exactly know how to reply, but said anyway, "That comes with the entertainment. Take it or leave it."

The little man shrugged his shoulders in boredom. The Road Hog took out a battered brown wallet, forked out a couple of bills, and laid them on the counter.

"Where do I sign?"

A huge plastic ledger was picked up from beneath the counter. He carefully scrawled in a fake name. If the little dope wanted some ID, he'd just leave.

"Okay. Do you need a wake-up call? Room service?"

The little man laughed bitterly.

"How about fuckin' filet mignon?"

"How about a snifter of brandy and some caviar? Maybe we'll just forget it, huh?"

The Road Hog exited stage left. Outside, burning o the hot tarmac, his car sent off waves of heat exhaust. He went around, opened the door enough to pop the trunk, and went around to get his luggage. In a faded, tan overnight bag, he had a human head wrapped in plastic.

He went back inside, put on his best "don't fuck with me if you want to keep your spleen" face, and looked over at the clerk or whatever. The little man said, "Here's your room key. Two-oh-one. I'll buzz you on in."

He certainly did. With the sort of loud electronic buzzer that is more commonly used in fun house attractions. The Road Hog wasn't sure, for a second, if he was in a hotel or at a rodeo, getting ready to ride a bucking bronc.

He took the door handle, walked down to the elevator, saw the "Out of order" sign, neatly and legibly scrawled across a cardboard boxtop affixed to the door, and then realized he would have to take the steps.

The sound of drip-drip-dripping seemed to permeate the hollow, echoing the stillness of the place. The walls were yellow, and peeling, with a few scrawls of absent-minded graffiti here and there. He made it, not even out of breath, to the second floor. It looked typical and rundown and dull as a paste. It looked like roaches went there to die.

The room was sparsely furnished. The smell of the hallway (which had approximated insect spray, cigarette smoke, must, and boiled cabbage) was less strong here. There was more of a stagnant water smell of old pipes...the building, he realized, could probably get up and crawl away by itself.

"This bed," he said, talking to himself, "I don't really want to use this bed."

He pulled the covers off. He took out some plastic garbage bags he had stuffed in his valise, and spread those across the surface of the bed. Then he picked up the remote.

It was an old-fashioned tube TV mounted on the wall. All the channels were fuzzy, except for the one showing porn; probably showing it 24/7. It looked like some loop he had once paid twenty-five cents to see in some grimey little bookstore in Des Moines.

There was a brief commotion out in the hall. He went to the door and unlocked it, careful to keep the chain fastened. Outside, he could see a few guys milling, drunkenly, around a battered hotel room door. One of them seemed, unfortunately, faintly familiar. Shit. The last thing he needed was to be recognized and placed here.

One of them said, "We're going out for more beer. Be right back. Anyone needs smokes?"

Poetry.

Young guys. Party time. Bill and Ted. Excellent.

He shut the door again with a mui of disgust on his lips. On the television screen, a porn star calling herself "Aunt Peg" was being jackhammered at both ends. He would have turned it off, but it was all he had for the company right at the moment.

He sat down on the bed, his throat so dry it seemed to be crawling. He had given up the smoking habit years ago, but right now he wished for all the world for a butt. Something to take the edge off.

The walls felt as if they were crawling with bugs. In the light fixtures, the curling, browning little bodies fried in the sickly yellow glare of the exposed bulbs.

"They commit unintentional suicide. They can't help it. They're attracted to the light, drawn to it magnetically. But then, they can't get out of the light fixtures. Can't climb out, even though, oddly enough, they can fly...I can't see any logic in it. So they die, slowly, we must assume, agonizingly, transfixed next to the source of their great fascination. Dying next to the bright white flame of their lightbulb god."

He didn't know who he was addressing, and wasn't sure why he was speaking at all. His voice fell flat, echoless against the bare walls. Those walls looked like they might be a cheesecloth of roaches, infested down to the very rocky, fibrous surface.

He heard the buzzer downstairs.

He waited.

In a few moments, she would be at the door. The whole thing was choreographed down to the grim specifics. He knew. He always knew.

A few seconds later there was a knock at the door.

He opened it, keeping the chain securely fastened. A slightly puffy, bruised face peeped in at the crack. It was a woman's face.

Mascara smeared around the eyes. Face too pale; lips thin and colorless.

"Hey."

She paused pregnantly. As if that had been a question, almost.

"Hey," he returned. He wasn't altogether sure of how to respond.

He undid the chain. She sauntered in. He saw she was wearing a cheap denim mini skirt, a pair of plastic slippers, and a bad strapless top. Yellow.

Her arms were covered in bruises and bad tattoos. She wore no hose; her legs were pale and skinny, and her skin was splotchy. She kept scratching absentmindedly at bug bites.

"Yeah, so anyway, I'm Sabrina. You look like you're new around here. I mean, I haven't seen you before or anything. A lot of people just passing through I guess. Not so many now, though, since they changed the highway. So yeah..."

She trailed off and sat down in one of the cheap plastic chairs lining the wall.

"Hey, mind if I smoke? I know it bothers some people. Some guys really hate it, I mean, They hate a girl who smokes and smells like smoke. One guy I was with wouldn't kiss me. said it was just like kissing an ashtray. He still let me blow him, though."

She finished this last with a great guffaw as if it had been the height of hilarity. He sat down on the edge of the bed, eyed her warily.

"No," he said, as if she had actually been asking his permission. "Go ahead and smoke if you like. It won't change anything."

Her eyes narrowed. She began to roll a skinny joint with shaking, dirty fingers. Her fingernails were corroded with pink polish and grime.

"Um yeah, okay. I don't guess that it will. Anyway, I usually charge a hundred bucks for a hand job. One-fifty for a bj, and another hundred gets you the works. So--"

She toked in, held her breath for what seemed an interminable moment, and then tried to pass the reefer to him. He held up his hand, palm upward, as if to say, "no thanks," and then smiled. A smile that was perhaps too wolfish, too predatory to make her feel comfortable.

After a moment she asked, "What's the matter? Don't you like to talk? Awful quiet."

She tried to sound disarming, but he could hear the hint of suspicious unease creep into her voice. Her eyes darted to the door, and he thought, She's judging how long it would take for her to bound over to it, undo the chain, and get out of here.

"No," he said slowly. "I don't guess I'm much of a talker. People should work on being good listeners, don't you think? It's much more to their advantage."

She said,

"Hey, if you want me to come back some other time, I, like, totally understand."

He knew she was suddenly eager to be out the door, whether or not she made any money or not. He sighed, got up from the bed, went over to the window, and pulled back the sash, Outside, the sun was a thin sliver of fiery peach behind a cresting hill. Miles beyond, the lights of the city gave mute testimony to the presence of civilization they seemed perched just on the edge of. In between, concrete overpasses, railroad trestles, vacant industrial parks (opened like the cancerous maws of toothsome old crones), and miles and miles of dusty scrub alienated this desolate waystation of hell from the rest of the world. Here, time froze like the semen in a dead man's balls.

"Have you ever thought about time?" he finally said, turning toward her. He interrupted himself, saying, "I'm talking now. You should be happy that I am."

Silence.

"Anyway, I'm sure you're not going to believe what I have to say. In fact, I'm not sure, given your obviously limited capabilities, that you could even understand it. But, you see, we've been through this before--"

Silence. Then--

"Yeah, well, okay man. I don't really have time for this. I mean, I'm going to go ahead and go, okay? Maybe--"

"No, really, just hear me out. No, sit down. I won't take very much of your...valuable time. I promise. Anyway--"

She seemed curious enough to listen to him. Or, maybe she just thought that this was his come-on. Either way,s he remained in her chair.

"You see, everything moves...in circles. Like in cycles. DO you follow me? You do follow me, don't you?"

He said this last with a thin veneer of hostility. His voice had an icy, cool edge to it he knew could slip out, like a whirling blade, and slice their good feelings as easily as slicing a jugular. She fidgeted in the cheap plastic chair, leaning forward, obviously needing a fix. Her eyes were wide, puffy; bloodshot. Mascara was caked in ugly circles around her swollen lids.

"Yeah, you've been bruised. You've been battered. Desiccated and dissected again and again. Tell me: who hurt you? Who was it?"

He leaned in close, the smell of her breath making a noxious counterpoint to his rapidly rising interest.

Why do you keep hurting me? he thought she whispered.

But, with tears streaming down her face from formerly dry eyes, he realized, suddenly, that she said nothing.

It was in a bright blue hotel, a wide, spacious place the likes of which had never been built before. A flight of short stairs lead up from a lobby that was cool and carpated and, also, surprisingly, even shockingly blue.

Blue, blue--blue everywhere. The stumbled their way inside from the street, drunk and with another couple. Up the stairs then, through the glass doors, and into the darkness beyond. The Sanctum Sanctorum.

Up the stairs again (couldn't they have taken the elevator? But, alas, that would have been too easy.) to the darkness of the upper floor. The four of them stumbled down the hall, into the spacious suite, into the darkness.

Then, stripping off each other's close. Flesh against flesh, tongues entering mouths, fingers groping and plying and pressing.

The young couple fell to the floor laughing, the woman baring her naked breast, the flap of her blouse pulled open and the buttons popped. The man she was with gyrated on top of her, trying to get his pants off, too drunk to do much of anything but stumble across the floor on his hands and knees.

But the moaning and the movement in the shadow told him that the man had found his mark. He could hear the chippy moaning and gasping.

He turned to his own date. The Starlet. The Ingenue.

"You oughtta be in pictures!" he sang softly, sweetly, mockingly.

The dame had fiery red hair. Or maybe it was just some trick of deceptive lighting (how? It was as dark as the tomb in here.) He put out his quivering fingertips, stretching toward her as she reclined her back against a fusillade of pillows. She still had her hat and boa wrapped around her.

"Did...did you ever...did you ever?" he couldn't get the words out.

She looked at him quizzically. Suddenly, the young couple grinding away on the floor disappeared entirely, and the spotlight seemed to be on the two of them.

"Did I ever what?" she trailed off suspiciously.

He paused, laughed suddenly, and said "Did you ever...fuck Clark Gable?" He couldn't stop laughing and snickering. But she had the queerest, most serious expression come across her.

"Gable? No. 'Fraid not. Next question."

She dragged reflectively on her cigarette, held it away from her face at an angle, and turned upward. The air in the room suddenly felt twenty degrees cooler than it had previously. All external sound sources seemed to fade being in this damnable hotel to him felt like being digested, slowly, in the belly of the beast.

Cut off from the rest of reality, they were. The world outside ceased to be. Her face was suddenly a cool, placid surface, a sort of living painted surface or waxen effigy. It seemed timeless. No wonder audiences ate her image up there on the screen. You couldn't stop looking at those cool, grey eyes, those high, heavy cheekbones, and flaming red hair pulled into quizzical and stylish buns. The skin was milk-white porcelain, but she exuded anything but weakness.

She opened her red, red lips (they almost shined black), and said, "Why do you keep hurting me?"

He retracted, physically; he felt himself pull away, losing his sensual idolatry, and retreat into a cool, husky little ball. He wasn't certain about the question, but it had the pregnant weight of prophecy connected to it. He started to blubber a lame response and felt his voice catch in his throat.

It was when he came back later he was told he had been banned from the hotel. A little woman in what looked to be a red marching band outfit but was probably some uniform for bellhops told him that his starlet had expressly forbidden anyone without proper identification (whatever that might be) from entering beyond the glass doors, into the cool, otherworldly darkness...

"She's rented the whole hotel for the next few weeks. She can decide who comes and goes," yadda yadda yadda.

He considered for a moment how he might slip in anyway, but then thought better of it. House detectives and hotel psychics and snoops and hidden microphones all meant he would, most likely, get caught. And a place like this would certainly press charges.

The little woman in the bellhop uniform or whatever it was shifted from one foot to another. She looked tired, and her nose fidgeted.

"Oh, by the way, Mister, she DID give us something to give to you, though. A package. Do you see how she is? She gave our manager here a whole mess of beautiful flowers for his birthday..."

He was so fascinated by the birthday bouquet, but he said, "I'll jut take the package and go."

She looked as if his rudeness irritated her marginally, but reached back behind the counter (curiously, several women with hot plates seemed to be preparing room service with wads of money bulging in one fist, and spatulas in the other), and produced a cardboard box.

He placed it under one arm and went out the sliding glass doors into the busy street.

Later, in the dark of his dingy room, with stink beetles dying slow, brilliant deaths trapped in the light fixtures, he opened the small cardboard box with trembling fingers.

He thrust a hand inside. It was filled with a large passel of photographs. Shocking stuff.

Crime scene. And pornography of indescribable filth. There were other photos, stuff made on the spot, obviously: women in lingerie, garters, bound and gagged with nylon stockings, posing lasciviously with legs spread, tied down to iron bedsteads; posed with animals, blank stares and bored, hollow cheeks and bad teeth and puffy, swollen eyes.

And then there were the dead women, posed in faux erotic semblance; arms and legs amputated, entrails wrapped around icy ankles and flesh frozen in time.

Severed heads on bedspreads...

His fingers trembled as he dragged shakily on a cigarette. That phrase came back to him again--

Why do you keep hurting me?

And, on each of these photographed faces, these erotic atrocities, he could see the image of his ingenue, his starlet, reflected, like the shattered fragments of a mirrored reflection. And he wondered about time, and the cycle of things.

***

He brought the heavy suitcase out to the boot of the car, wheeling it on a little board mounted on roller skates. The desk clerk barely acknowledged his going, seemingly catatonic with his fuzzy, filthy head resting on his skinny, nicotine-stained fingers. he wondered if the man were dead, asleep, or if it were another of the mysterious inflatable dummies the prankster had foisted on him last night.

Outside on the walk, he stopped at a newspaper dispenser and reached inside. He didn't bother to pay; the door was broken.

He leafed through, reading by the dim orange glow of the crime lights. He finally found an article, buried back a few pages, about the infamous interstate killer the FBI was actively searching for, the fabled murderer the press had dubbed the "Road Hog." He smiled. That was him.

He was happy that they were taking notice of his handiwork. But it made things that much more dangerous for him. Obviously, he couldn't continue like this forever. But there was no turning back, turning away from what he was.

"Big deal," he said, mimicking the words of one man. "Death always came with the territory. See you in Disneyland."

He pulled the little rope and wheeled the heavy luggage out to the trunk of his car. The asphalt seemed hot enough to cook eggs on, he fancied he could see thermal exhaust coming from it. A few dire insects pestered him, but they were easily dispatched with a slap. The air was so close you could barely breathe.

He hefted the thing into the trunk. He was lost, momentarily, in a fantasy of what he had heard happened in such hotels as these.