proprietor with his eager idiotic look.
Now, he turned up the sound on his radio. He tapped his foot to the sound of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” bobbing his head, never taking his eyes off her. Raising her voice, she announced, “I think you had best clean up the bathroom.”
“Don’t expect women in here too much nowadays. Rationing’s loosening up though. We get more gas.” She gave him a weak nod, took a deep breath, and exhaled. His shirt said, CLYDE.
“It’s bloody hot!”
“You’re not from here, I can tell,” he said, congratulating himself on his close observation. She defined herself by not having a drawl as she addressed him as though he were her servant.
“I’ll be needing a place for the night, if you get my meaning.” What she meant was, clean, fit for a queen.
“Now, lady, my wife’d blow me sky high!”
She gave him a hollow laugh and in the end, he directed her to a house owned by a widow-lady who let out rooms. He reached in his shirt and scratched his belly. “If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll take you by there.” He winked. “I can show you a real good time.”
“You are quite mistaken. I’m not that sort of girl.” Drained and discouraged, she readjusted her rucksack, checked Russell’s gold Bulova watch on her wrist for the time, centered the shotgun case and hefted her weary leg over the bar to set out for the widow’s place.
“No more than three miles, and most of ‘em’s flat.”
Three miles took over an hour. She was dehydrated, fatigued and in a very dark humor. No one to blame but herself. There are canals and rivers enough in Florida, she could easily have taken a canoe and gotten halfway to hell, farther than riding this goddamned bike. Bloody fool that she was. Florida was crisscrossed with options superior to pedaling a bike.
“My word, ain’t you a sight!” Mabel Sue said, hands on hips, an apron over her cotton dress. Phyllis could barely speak.
“Clyde,” she uttered.
“Don’t I just know it? He called and said you wanted a room for the night. That’ll be two dollars, but breakfast comes with it.”
“Anything,” Phyllis said, hefting herself off and kicking down the stand. The packs on her back had shifted, pulling her to the left. The first to come off was the shotgun, which prompted a whistle from Mabel Sue.
“Mighty smart. A pistol’s easier to haul though,” she said, cocking her head to note that her foreign guest wore a sopping, stained shirt. “I got a Bendix. That’ll be fifty cents more for the electricity.” The room was clean but the pillow looked sour and the mattress lumps cast deep shadows under the chenille spread.
Phyllis was past caring.
She lay down, closed her eyes, and prayed for rescue. Russell owed her that much. Why in the hell had he let her do this? Why had he made her the innocent victim of those harpies and ex-wives who had literally driven her from her own comfortable home? What she had thought to be her own decision, was not. The bitchy neighbors had driven her out. She had been manipulated. Russell would have been distressed to see her now.
Jealousy, it all boiled down to jealousy. Even Mum. Well, it figured. More than one jungle species was known to turn against its own. There you have it—jealousy. Russell had given her the house and all the others received were poisoned apples. Well, one day, they’d all croak eating those apples. They’d kick the bucket, be tossed into a pauper’s pit.
“Jest one more thing,” Mabel Sue said, appearing in the opened doorway without knocking. “If you turn on the lights?”
Phyllis opened her eyes slowly and squinted in the direction of the voice. “Yes?”
“Well now, I couldn’t say I’d advise it because of the bugs.” Phyllis swung her head toward the open window and saw that the screens had been removed. “Moths to a flame, like they say.”
“Right,” she agreed. “I don’t think I could stay up late enough to even switch on the light.” Unending Wartime Daylight Saving—sun forever. A war with no night, no moon and stars. The blazing sun never dropped beyond the horizon any more. When it did, it popped right back.
“Any chance of finding a bit of supper here?”
“Care for a lime Jell-O salad? Some chipped beef on a bun?” Phyllis moved her head, faintly nodding. She was too bushed to quibble. “Fine. Another dollar?” Phyllis, being Scottish, was frugal but this woman was stingy-mean. She lay back pitying herself.
Mabel Sue was a case in point and reminded her just how much she disliked the native people here. Their stupid lazy accents made them seem inferior, unlettered, certainly unambitious and uninteresting. Phyllis weighed her low opinion of Mabel Sue’s dim brain against the facts, but given the present situation, she’d have to admit she’d been outsmarted. In the infernal hour it took her to pedal from Clyde’s station to this appalling house, Mabel Sue had craftily removed the screens, turned off the hot water and set some green Jell-O slime in a mold to pass off as dinner. The bar of soap was a mere sliver. The wretched towels were mildewed.
She’d been outsmarted by the Floridians, all of them. All of them women.
Miserably, Phyllis gave up and fell into an exhausted sleep, not even opening Russell’s half-finished paperback that she’d dropped in her sack. The chipped beef dinner had been spitefully placed on the night table as she slept with a bill for the dollar. Flies covered the chipped beef.
5
She fled the next day after a breakfast of eggs and ham. Coffee but no tea. No milk. No sugar. Even the blacktop leading back to Highway One, the North-South road, looked hopeful in spite of the wind from the Atlantic. Over the dreary next days the few motels she stayed in smelled like Cuban whorehouses. Sweat and sperm on the damp sheets, damp because everything was damp where the heavy air sank, and she was sure even the angels wept, making the humidity worse. How did she know what a Cuban whorehouse smelled like? It smelled like this.
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