Roxy’s Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

them vomited, moaned, and sobbed along the way. Who else but
     the mythical Charon would want to own and operate such a graveyard?
    Most of the time, there was that elderly, sick-looking man at the desk in the very
     small lobby, butoccasionally, a young man with reddish-brown hair was there. He had a pockmarked face
     and slightly orange lips. Maybe he brushed some lipstick on them. As skinny as someone
     who had been near starvation for a week, he sat on a stool, with his small, feminine
     shoulders turned inward as he hovered over a checkerboard, apparently playing his
     right hand against his left like someone with a multiple-personality syndrome, both
     hands with the long, dirty fingernails of someone who had been scratching his way
     out of a grave. The first few times I saw him, he barely looked back at me, but one
     time, for some reason, he sat back and smiled, revealing two rows of nearly corn-yellow
     teeth.
    “My grandfather told me to watch for you today,” he said.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Pappy Morris. He owns the joint.” He shrugged. “Someday it will be mine. My father
     ain’t around no more. We don’t know where he went. My mother left about ten years
     ago with a cable television salesman.”
    “Terrific,” I said. “You gave me your biography in less than a minute.”
    I started to go up to my room.
    “Hold up.”
    I paused and looked back. “What do you want? Is there some sort of discount for guests
     who endure more than two nights here or something?”
    He smiled and shook his head. “You’re different. Gramps is right.”
    “Really? How am I different?”
    “You’re clean, and so far, you’ve stayed clean.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “What the hell are you doing here and still clean?”
    “It isn’t easy, considering the shower has water the color of a penny, and the warmest
     it gets is cold.”
    He shrugged, illustrating how low his concern for the residents of the hotel could
     go. “So why are you slumming?”
    “Slumming?” I looked around, pretending to be shocked. “I thought this was the Plaza.”
    His laugh was more like someone gasping through clenched teeth and shuddering. “You
     know, if you need work or want to make more money, I know someone who’d put you at
     the top of his list. You just kick back ten percent to me. You know, like a manager
     or something.”
    “What sort of work?”
    “You know. Work?” He smiled lecherously and turned his upper body like a flirtatious
     teenage girl. “The work the other girls who live here do.”
    “Oh. I see. Well, it’s work to you,” I said dryly, realizing what he meant. “To me,
     it sounds like digging in the garbage.”
    He lost his smile. “I’m just trying to be of some help.”
    “Yeah. That was exactly what the hangman used to say.”
    “Huh?”
    “Thanks. I don’t need work. I’m independently wealthy and here only to complete a
     major financial deal,” I said, and headed for the rickety stairway again.
    The elevator still had an out-of-order sign on it.Actually, it looked as if it had been out of use for as long as the building had stood.
     Despite my sarcasm and defiance in the lobby, when I entered my hovel of a room, I
     felt myself sink into an even deeper sense of defeat and depression. The creep downstairs
     was right. Really, what was I doing there? The only thing that had happened was the
     creep downstairs offering to become my pimp.
    Great accomplishment, Roxy, I told myself. You showed them. You showed them all.
    How much longer could I do this? I had the money to stay for another couple of weeks,
     but where was it getting me?
    This time, I had a great deal of trouble falling asleep. The sounds coming from other
     rooms began to resemble sounds I might hear in a jungle. Someone was obviously in
     great pain, someone sounded as if she was pleading for mercy, and someone else was
     coughing so much I was sure he would crack open his chest and drop his lungs on the
     floor. Later, someone