Suspicious River Read Online Free PDF Page B

hadn’t noticed that he was fat back in the office, and bald. Maybe he’d been wearing a hat, I couldn’t remember. I just looked at him, blank. His own expression was wide-eyed and full of crazy hope. When I sighed, he frowned and stopped pumping. He put his drink down on the chest of drawers. When I held out my hand for the money, he said, “What?”
    “The money,” I said.
    His jaw dropped a bit and then he covered himself up with a towel—suddenly shy—while he fished through the pockets of his black pants, which were laid out carefully on the bed, to find the money for me.
    “Here.” He shoved the three twenties toward me like a disgruntled tenant. He wouldn’t look at me.
    I didn’t ask him what he wanted, just got on my knees and took it in my mouth. He whimpered when he came but never touched me. His arms were straight down at his sides, fists gripping and ungripping nothing, and I kept the soft cash in my own left hand the whole time.
    Remembering him, I wondered if that man might have been Gary W. Jensen’s buddy, the one who’d told him about me.
    Probably not.
    Maybe the trucker from Milwaukee. He’d left real happy and said he’d send his friends.
     
    “Come in.” Friendly.
    Gary W. wasn’t undressed, though it seemed to me he’d changed his shirt. This shirt was starched stiff and light blue. Hadn’t the other one been white? He was sitting on the edge of the bed, smiling, a bottle of Rolling Rock in his hand, and now that he had his leather jacket off, I could see that his shoulders were no wider than my own. He was only a few inches taller, couldn’t even have weighed much more, but he looked solid, scrappy—a thin tough man.
    “Here,” he said, holding the green bottle toward me. I saw another one, then, between his knees, and I thought he must have mistaken this for some kind of date—strangers getting to know each other better, something like that. But that’s not what this was about.
    “I can’t,” I said, gesturing behind me, “I’m working.”
    He started to laugh at that. His eyes were true brown. “Oh,” he said. “You can come up here and give blow jobs to total strangers, but they won’t let you drink a beer.”
    It wasn’t angry, the way he said it, just honest—pointing out a contradiction, sharing an absurdity. I wasn’t offended. I laughed, too. I liked his smirk, his accent, which seemed sarcastic, consciously a little stupid.
    “Well,” he stood up and put the two bottles of beer on the dressing table, which was blond and shiny, made of wood pulp and sawdust pressed into boards—fake, like everything in the motel room. The drywall was smooth and freshly painted, and the partition that separated the bathroom from the rest of the room was covered with metallic wallpaper that reflected the light from the window. It all seemed identically, eternally, fresh and sterile from room to room.
    He hadn’t closed the curtains.
    “Well, here.” He fished through the pockets of his jeans and handed me the money politely, then stood facing me, seeming happy, not nervous at all, just excited in a shrugging, boyish way.
    I looked at the money in my hand. Two twenties. Two tens. I slipped my foot out of my shoe and bent a bit to slip the bills in under my heel.
    The slap surprised me as I was standing up again, lifting my eyes back toward him.
    We were both still smiling.
    Just the flat surface of his hand made contact with my face, and it knocked me off balance. He stood in the same place, looking.
    I hadn’t wanted to gasp, but I knew I had by the way he laughed, that smirk, at my shocked face. It stung. It must’ve gone very red, burning, or drywall white. Then he hit me again, leaning into it more deeply this time, taking a step toward me as if he were pitching a baseball game, and then he pulled me forward onto the floor, onto my back.
    I closed my eyes and heard a jet pass over the Swan Motel. Someone going somewhere fast. It took him a long time, a lot of