Suspicious River Read Online Free PDF Page A

train brakes screeching into infinity.
    But animal.
    A hungry cat outside a white door about to be closed.
     
    “Smith,” he said, “Gary.”
    Sure enough, it wasn’t in the ledger.
    I looked up at him. His smile was a flinch on one side of his face—a smirk, a wink—sexy, I thought, experimental. He smoked a cigarette and the smoke weaved around his head like a web, the way an egg white, cracked, swirls and rises in a glass of water. Then he started to cough, rattling and wet, and he said through it, eyebrows raised in a question, “You don’t got my reservation?”
    “No,” I apologized, “but it’s O.K. We have plenty of empty rooms.”
    Luckily he didn’t seem to care. Some people will get upset that you don’t have their names even if the whole motel is empty. They’ll stand around fretting long after you’ve checked them in, room key safely in their hands, wanting to know exactly what went wrong, looking as if some piece of themselves had been lost, like a greasy playing card disappeared from the deck without which the game could not go on. It seemed to be proof to them of an insecure universe, proof that they might barely even exist if they didn’t insist on it. I’d want to comfort them, to say
It’s just Millie, she writes nothing down
, but I couldn’t.
    “I called last Saturday,” he said. “Morning.”
    His leather jacket was thin, a starched white shirt under it, and there was rain on the shoulders and the slick sleeves. He was small, but nice-looking. Thin. His hair was brown and short, wavy—sparse on top, and he had a scruffy beard that might have been new, accidental, or both. He scratched at that stubble as if to make sure it was still on his chin.
    “Hmm,” I said, looking at the open book again, though I knew his name wouldn’t be in it—Saturday morning, Millie’s shift. “Well,” I said, trying to change the subject, “Fortunately it’s not a problem at all. How many nights?”
    “One for now,” he said, and I noticed his accent then. East Texas. Or Tennessee. And thick. A little like humidity between us.
    I took a check-in card out of the drawer under the adding machine and began writing the date on it, then
Smith, Gary
. He flipped his wallet open onto the counter and handed me his Visa—small slice of plastic silver like a homemade knife. But the name on it was Jensen, Gary.
    I glanced back then at the guest book, still open on the counter. And there it was, in Millie’s handwriting—Jensen, G.
    He’d lit another cigarette and leaned, smoking it, with his elbow on the counter. He was watching me write. I picked his credit card up off the counter between us with fingernails painted shell pink, and ran it. A long string of numbers and Jensen, Gary—smudged and permanent imprint on a piece of paper.
    I wrote $60.00 under Payment. $2.40 under Tax. $62.40 under Total. Then I turned the paper toward him and watched as he signed his name: Gary W. Jensen. Then he looked up.
    “Forgot my own name,” he laughed. “Forgot I wasn’t gonna use the credit card, and then I forgot whether or not I’d put the reservation in my real name. Sneaky guy, huh?” He tugged on his shirt collar and smiled. “Guess you caught me,” he said. His eyes were brown and clear. Forty, I guessed. He smelled like soap mixed up with smoke.
    “Guess so,” I said, and I held his eyes in silence until he started to look nervous.
    It works every time. They think they’re bigger than you, bigger than some girl behind a motel counter, that God made them that way. But if you don’t flinch, and it’s sex that’s being negotiated, they wither under it like a hot light and start to sweat.
    “Well.” He looked behind him, and I could see the inch of neck exposed between his hair and the collar of his coat. The skin looked just shaved, a bit naked, scraped. There was no one behind him, and he looked back at me with his eyebrows raised and his face seeming younger for a moment than forty, with a