Stars and Bars Page 7

  ‘Come on, Gervase. Don’t be a naughty boy.’

  Bloody dogs! he swore to himself, picking up Bryant’s case and backing out of the door.

  ‘Bye, Gervase! Bye, Candice! Bye, Mom!’

  ‘Say goodbye, Gervase, Candice. Say goodbye to Bryant and Henderson.’

  The most sensible women could be reduced to idiots when it came to animals, Henderson thought, contenting himself with a brief wave. There was not the slightest possibility of him actually vocalizing a farewell to those dogs, he vowed. He’d never be able to meet his eyes in the mirror again.

  They hummed down in the lift, the faint barking soon lost to earshot, and with little fuss installed themselves in the car.

  ‘Well,’ Henderson said, hands on the wheel. ‘Here we are. Go South, young lady.’ He looked round to see if she had caught the allusion, but Bryant was too preoccupied searching her multitude of pockets for something. She found it, and turned to face him, blowing hair out of her eyes.

  ‘Smoke?’ she said, offering him a squashed pack of cigarettes.

  The Holland Tunnel plunged them beneath the Hudson River. They emerged on the far bank to drive through Union City to the mighty overlapping clover leafs of junction seventeen of the New Jersey Turnpike. Bryant was on to her third cigarette and Henderson saw the road ahead through a thin grey mist. His eyes smarted and his nose itched with incipient sneezes. Bryant sat with her legs folded beneath her, her head propped on a fist, looking emptily at the shabby cityscape passing by.

  They motored south among a surge of large, surprisingly dusty and battered cars and truly enormous lorries, all changing lanes and shifting about the road- as fidgety and illogical as a school of fish. As Henderson became used to the eccentric driving conditions (so different from the impeccable lane-adherence on British motorways) his initial tension was slowly replaced by irritation. Why hadn’t he simply refused to take Bryant? Said it was impossible? It was typical, he saw, of his own particular weakness. He was too easily manipulated and put upon; too decent and obliging for his own good. He did everything Melissa asked of him and here was his reward: a rude, taciturn, chain-smoking ingrate as his travelling companion for the next two days. He was tempted to drive through the night to Richmond (home of the Wax grandparents) just to get rid of her. He felt a tear crawl from his left eye and squinted round to see Bryant lighting her fourth cigarette from the dashboard lighter. She lit the cigarette with the unreflecting professional ease of the habitual smoker, applying the little glowing hotplate to the end with barely a glance, inhaling and puffing smoke from the corner of her mouth until the tobacco caught.

  ‘You can get lung cancer from cigarettes, you know,’ he said.

  ‘Sure. And emphysema and cardiac arrest and they kill cowboys. I know all that.’ She sat back and smiled for the first time. ‘It’s a calculated risk. Don’t you ever take risks, Henderson?’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ he said.

  She looked at him. ‘No, I guess not.’

  They drove on through New Jersey. Sometimes the turnpike was raised high on stilts over a baleful marshy landscape, studded with small brown lakes and acres of tall reeds. Here and there a huge concrete and glass power station would rear up like an island, its cooling towers disgorging steam, humming wires looping out from its hot dynamos to feed the sprawling suburbs and distant cities—Edison, Metuchen, Plainfield, Sayreville. Power-lines, he saw, were everywhere. Electric cables had a prominence and visibility in America that was wholly unlike the neater, tidier Europe. Now he thought of the power stations as vast mills, churning out their miles of cable to enmesh the entire country with its warp and weft; cables that festooned every townscape and street-view, a great tangled net of fallen rigging over the land, holding it together. The effect was, he thought, to make everything appear messier and half-finished, ramshackle and rundown. American streets and roads looked, to his eyes, unnecessarily fussy, with wire and cable stretched all over the place.

  There was generally, he saw, as he looked at the scene on either side of the turnpike, more ironwork of all kinds in evidence: from the gawky, teetering TV aerials to the criss-cross cantilevers of the road signs, most of which looked in need of a paint. In Britain, he thought, we maintain our street furniture to an extraordinarily high degree; everything looks new and neat on the roads. Gangs of men roamed the country furiously repainting the white dashes of the lane dividers. He thought of some of London’s streets with their multitude of lines and zig-zags: double yellow or single, the various flashes on the kerbs, the grids and arrows. You needed a dictionary to park your car these days.

  But here everything looked well-used. The verges were dusty and ragged; where road ended and verge began was a matter of real ambiguity. In England edges were distinct. Kerbstone production had never seen such boom years. Verges were sharp, and well-defined: finished off, beaded, seamed. Sometimes in America you saw the same rectitude, but usually edges were frayed and worn. There was no manic energy expended in maintaining them.

  So what? he thought later, suddenly bitter. Here energies were directed to making the important things work—like telephones, food production, heating and cooling—not dissipated in buffing up roadsigns or polishing cats’ eyes. By their verges and street furniture shall ye know them…

  His sombre mood continued to darken as they bypassed Philadelphia. He was getting thoroughly disenchanted with the belching smokestack in the front seat beside him. For the most part he drove in tight-lipped silence. He could be as sulky and withdrawn as any spoilt teenager, he told himself with quiet satisfaction: no trouble in descending to that level at all. He contented himself with looking at the scenery and pondering on its strangeness: all the houses made of wood; the astonishing number of playgrounds, tennis courts and baseball diamonds scattered generously about.

  Unfortunately his ill-humour seemed to make Bryant relax, as if it had been the very self-consciousness of the adult-child relationship that irked her. Now he was being selfish too, she seemed to unwind. She switched on the radio for a while and sang quietly along to some of the pop-songs. She proffered the odd remark: ‘Hey, look at that neat car!’ or, ‘I spent a weekend in Philadelphia one night.’

  Henderson confined his replies to monosyllables, then she said: ‘Do you know that you have really a lot of hair growing out of your ears?’

  Henderson did indeed know. It was one of the catalogue of alarming body-changes he’d been registering recently. He had rather too much hair growing out of his nostrils too, if it came to that, for his liking. He certainly didn’t care to be reminded of it.

  ‘These things happen, you know,’ he said. ‘As you grow older your body changes. It’ll happen to you too,’ he observed with some relish. ‘Things will happen to your body when you’re a mature woman that you won’t be too pleased about.’

  ‘I’ll have plastic surgery.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

  She shrugged. ‘So how old are you, then?’

  ‘Thirty-nine.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘What do you mean ‘Is that all?’

  ’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess I thought you were older.’ She scratched at something on the dashboard. ‘I mean, Grandpaw Wax has got hair in his ears too. You’ve ] almost got as much as him. I just figured you were, you know, older.’

  Henderson felt himself colouring. The nerve, he thought. The little bitch. He tried desperately to think of some way of getting his own back.

  ‘We’re staying at the Jefferson-Burr tonight, aren’t we?’ Bryant asked.

  The Jefferson-Burr was one of Washington’s grander hotels. If you hung out of certain bathroom windows you could glimpse the White House lawn. Melissa had booked two rooms.

  ‘No,’ Henderson lied, revenge inspiring him. ‘It was full up.’

  ‘Oh. Where are we staying, then? The Hilton?’

  ‘No, no. It’s a little way off yet. I’ll tell you when we get there.’

  Chapt
er Two

  ‘Skaggsville Motor Hotel’, a tatty billboard proclaimed at the side of Highway 95, along which they now drove, ‘Next junction.’

  ‘Here we are,’ Henderson said.

  ‘You’re kidding!’

  ‘Best I could do at short notice.’

  The motor hotel stood in an expanse of crowded carpark. It was long, three stories high and as functional as a tool box. Henderson ordered Bryant to stay in the car while he ‘checked’ their reservation.

  The lobby was carpeted in worn orange sunburst pattern, with matching curtains. Underfoot it felt vaguely adhesive. It was ideal. By the reception desk was a little noticeboard.

  THE SKAGGSVILLE MOTO HOT WELCOMES

  THE DELAWARE FIBRE-GLASS CURTAIN

  WALLI G CONVENTIO

  ‘Welcome to the Scaggsville Motor Hotel,’ echoed a small plump receptionist. ‘Are you with the convention, sir?’

  ‘Me?’ Did he look like a fibre-glass curtain-walling contractor, he wondered? ‘No, no. I just want a room for the night.’ He put down his credit card on the desk. Two! rooms.’

  She looked at a chart. ‘We don’t have two rooms left, sir. The convention.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I have a junior suite.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s like an extra large room with two double beds, some armchairs. Sorta like a suite but in one room.’

  He thought. What should he do? Press on?

  ‘Your name, sir?’

  ‘Dores. Look, I’ll be back in a second.’

  He dashed outside to the car.

  ‘They’ve only got one room. A junior suite.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  He realized he was getting in a bit of a flap. Calm down, he told himself. He went back in. Bryant followed at her own pace. Henderson signed his name on a card, was given his key and told where he could find the room.

  ‘Great,’ he said, a little worried. This wasn’t quite how the revenge was meant to function. He turned. Bryant was looking at a mildewed picture of the Capitol hung on the plastic pine panelling.

  ‘Enjoy your stay, Mr and Mrs Dores,’ carolled the friendly receptionist. Henderson whirled round in horrified protest, but the girl was on the phone. Good God, he thought, this is probably some sort of federal offence—crossing state lines with a minor masquerading as a wife.

  Bryant looked at him through thin eyes.

  The room was at the very end of a very long corridor. Outside the door was a mumbling drinks dispenser and an ice-machine. They had a good view of the car park.

  The same orange sunburst pattern encountered in the lobby prevailed here too.

  ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Not too bad.’

  It looked lived-in, certainly. By keeping his eyes restlessly on the move and never allowing them to settle for a second he found it was just about possible to avoid noticing the many little rents and stains and cigarette burns, legacy of a thousand previous occupants.

  There were, as promised, two double beds, and a pale green, three·piece plastic suite with the bonus of a baby’s cot in one corner. Henderson looked in vain for a shred of natural fibre or piece of wood. Perhaps that was why the curtain-wallers had their convention here—they felt at home.

  ‘I’ve seen worse,’ Bryant said, not nearly as put out as she should be. She turned and looked at him.

  ‘Let me get one thing straight,’ she said. ‘This ‘Mr and Mrs’ business. You’re not going to try and fuck me, are you?’

  ‘Good God, no! I wouldn’t dream…How dare you…A simple error on the part of—’

  ‘Relax,’ she said. She was beginning to sound like Teagarden. Henderson mopped his burning face, aghast at the obscenity of the notion.

  Bryant threw her jacket on the bed. ‘Just checking.’

  They ate in the hotel dining room at half past seven. It was full of large men rather uncomfortably and selfconsciously dressed for ‘business’ in suits and ties. Henderson ordered a steak, which overlapped his plate by a good inch on either side. Bryant had a vegetarian salad and three cigarettes.

  Henderson managed about eight square inches of his steak and pushed it aside. He felt strangely depressed, which he put down to having been in Bryant’s company for most of a day. This didn’t bode well for the marriage. He sighed, and thought about tomorrow. He wondered when they would get to Atlanta. Beeby had phoned Gage to let him know Henderson was on his way. They would make an early start in the morning; get Bryant dropped off as soon as possible…He looked around the dismal dining room, suddenly missing New York. He wished he were staying at the Jefferson-Burr, instead of this anonymous hotel. Too clever by half, he considered ruefully. This was what happened when he tried to be malicious or cunning: he ended up inconveniencing himself. He was condemned to remain ineffectual, tolerant and nice.

  Bryant tipped saccharine into her Sanka.

  ‘What exactly are you meant to be doing on this trip?’ she asked.

  Henderson told her about the Gage collection, its significance, what he had to do when he saw the paintings.

  ‘Where does he live, this old guy?’

  ‘Somewhere called Luxora Beach.’

  ‘Are you going there?’

  ‘Later. I’ll get directions in Atlanta.’

  ‘Are you staying with him?’

  ‘No. I’ll probably stay in a local hotel.’

  ‘Could I come?’

  ‘What!?’

  ‘Can’t I come with you? I’ve never been to the real South.’

  ‘Absolutely out of the question.’

  ‘Come on, Henderson, I won’t get in your way.’

  ‘Completely impossible.’

  ‘I just can’t stand the thought of a week with Grandma and Grandpa. You don’t know what they’re like.’

  Too bad.’

  ‘Pke-ease.’

  ‘No. No. En oh.’

  ‘God!’ She looked genuinely irritated. Touche, at last, he thought triumphantly, smiling to himself. She couldn’t take being denied.

  After dinner Bryant went back to the junior suite complaining of a headache. Henderson walked down another quarter of a mile corridor to the bar. It was called The Barbary Coast but for the life of him he could see no thematic reflection of this motif in the place’s wholly unremarkable decor. It was filled with grim curtain-wallers who were being entertained by a haggard country and western chanteuse seated at an electric organ on a small dais at the end of the room. Two bored waitresses in very short beige satin dresses ferried drinks to and fro.

  Henderson sat at the bar, sipped at a large Scotch and thought about phoning Irene in an attempt to rebuild a few of the burnt bridges. Unaccountably, as he sat and drank, he found himself getting more and more dejected and heavy hearted. He looked suspiciously at his whisky. He felt an immense weariness of spirit descend on him, as if some deity had personally and unequivocally confirmed that all the follies and inexplicable cruelties of the world were man’s lot, and that attempts to ameliorate them were utterly vain and futile.

  He looked around him. The curtain-wallers’ faces were slumped with a similar bitter wisdom. Was it something to do with the Scaggsville Motor Hotel itself, he asked himself? Some curse on the hapless building? Some maverick charge in its static electricity? He wondered if he had been drugged…Then he realized what the source of the universal tristesse was.

  The haggard chanteuse had a repertoire consisting solely of the most morose country and western numbers in the songbook. She set her Japanese electric organ (thin as an ironing-board) to plangent, and sang heartrend-ingly of suicide, abortion, adultery, desertion, mental and. physical cruelty, alcoholism and terminal illness. Her own face, pale and scored beneath dyed blue-black hair, seemed to testify to first hand experience of these various afflictions—but perhaps that was merely the side-effect of singing that type of song each evening.

  The tune she was currently playing seemed vaguely familiar; a recent or current hit, Hend
erson thought. He listened to a verse.

  Each gnat she cooked me a fan dinner,

  Each gnat I throwed it on the floor,

  Then I took my sailf to town,

  Till the mornin’ come aroun’

  Drinkin’, gamblin’ ‘n’ sleepin’ with some whore

  She switched her machine to ‘soughing violins’ for the chorus (‘I was the happiest, meanest, full-time, sigried-up sinner’) but Henderson decided that he’d had as much as he could take.

  He walked down the endless corridors feeling markedly more happy with every step he took away from the mournful saloon. Some convention, he thought. He had heard they were usually an excuse for a riotous booze-up. The curtain-wallers would return home to their wives shriven and repentant.

  He let himself quietly into his room. The lights were out, Bryant seemed to be asleep. He went softly into the bathroom. The basin area was scattered with pots and tubes, grips and make·up;. Long fair hairs clung tenaciously to the wet enamel.

  He confirmed that the door was locked and took off his clothes. His body had a yellowish whiteness under the lights. He swiftly checked out the crisis areas. His nipples, once neat buttons beneath a shading of chest hair, had grown into wide pink coarse teats. Always rather hefty, he had never worried unduly about putting on weight: he ate and drank as he wished and carried the usual penalty padding as a result. But now he had critical weight loss: his buttocks were disappearing. They were shrinking. His trouser seats, usually stretched and shiny, were now loose and flapping. He turned sideways and looked in the mirror. A good kilt-wearing arse, a Scottish girlfriend had once complimented him. If he wore a kilt now its rear hem would hang inches lower than its front—be brushing the backs of his calves. And, talking about legs, his legs were going bald. Normally covered in a springy furze, his legs, from the knee down, had gone smooth and shiny. And yet all this extra hair was sprouting from his ears and nostrils…He wondered if some back-street trichologist would transplant his nasal and aural growth; re-sow it on the desert slopes of his shins.