Borealis by Ronald Malfi
1
Twelve years ago, a man named Bodine checked into a Las Vegas motel under the name Thomas Hudson with a young girl who was of no relation to him. She was a pretty little thing, perhaps eight or nine years of age, dressed plainly in a simple cotton dress embroidered with tiny red strawberries around the waist. To glance casually upon the pair, one would assume they were father and daughter. But on closer inspection, anyone with a knack for detail would see that the man was no one’s father. Tall, gaunt, haunted—looking at him was like staring infinity in the face. With his black, hopeless eyes recessed into deep pockets and an air of chronic fatigue surrounding him like a cloud of Midwestern dust, this man was no one’s father.
“What’s wrong?” the girl said. “Why did we stop?”
Bodine’s grip tightened on the Bronco’s steering wheel. The sodium lights from the motel fell against the Bronco’s windshield. A light rain had begun to fall.
“We’re getting a room here,” he said, his voice low. “We’re staying here for the night.”
The girl leaned toward the dashboard to peer out the windshield. She wasn’t wearing her seat belt. “Looks dirty,” she said, sizing up the motel.
It was one of a million nameless joints he’d passed on the drive from the mountains of Colorado and across the equally anonymous desert highways. There was nothing distinguishable about it. After a while, on the road, everything started to look the same.
“We call this comfortable digs,” he said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Means we stay here tonight.” He shut the car down and popped open the door. Paused. “You wait here,” he said, an afterthought.
“Can I play the radio?”
He didn’t think there was any harm leaving the keys in the ignition. Unless she’d been lying, judging by her simple questions about what the pedals on the floor were for and why he had to turn a key in order to start the “growling”, as she called it, he didn’t think she knew how to start the vehicle let alone drive away in it. Bodine turned the switch over until the door chimes sounded. The girl, whose name Bodine did not know, smiled and switched on the radio. One tiny white hand ran through the dials until she located an oldies station while Bodine watched.
“How come you need to turn the key to play the radio?” she asked now.
“Because it runs off the car’s battery. I need to turn it on to use the battery.”
“Cars have batteries?” She sounded almost incredulous.
“Yes.”
“Is that how they drive?”
“They drive on gasoline.”
“Like from the last time we stopped,” she said. “How you put it into the gas tank, like you said.”
“Yes.” He suddenly felt like an imbecile. What the hell was he doing talking to her like this, anyway?
“Are you going to shoot somebody?” the girl asked before he could step out of the Bronco. The statement caused him to freeze, caused the fingers of his left hand to tighten on the doorhandle.
“Why would you say something like that?”
“Because you have a gun in your pants.”
His throat was lined with sandpaper. “How do you know that?”
The girl didn’t answer.
“How do you know that?” he repeated, one foot out on the blacktop, his fingers still strangling the doorhandle.
The girl just smiled and stared straight ahead out the windshield. She swung her legs to the rhythm of the music, her face radiating a sickly glow beneath the wash of sodium lights. “I like this song,” she said after a bit.
The motel lobby was rundown, filthy, and haunted by cigarette smoke. A flickering black-and-white television was mounted to the wall on brackets behind the night counter.
“One room,” Bodine said at the counter. “One night.”
“Just you?” said the grizzled cowboy behind the counter. No stranger to midnight characters of peculiar design, the cowboy did not give Bodine a second glance. And that was just fine by Bodine.
“Just me,” Bodine said.
“Name?”
“Thomas Hudson,” said Bodine.
“Credit card?”
“Cash,” he told the cowboy, who did not raise an eyebrow.
The room was tomblike. Peeling alabaster walls and an oatmeal-colored carpet, the single bed, wide as a coffin, was dressed in a fleur-de-lis spread, heavily starched. The bathroom reeked of mildew, and the shower curtain was curled at one end of the shower into a filthy plastic sleeve. In the tub, a bristling brown spider did pushups by the drain.
“It smells bad in here,” said the girl, wrinkling her nose. “Gross.” She stood clutching the empty cardboard cylinder that had moments ago contained a milkshake.
“Go turn down the bed,” he told her, carrying his nylon duffel bag into the bathroom. He set it beside the sink and unzipped it. Inside: fresh sneakers and a change of clothes. Brand spanking new. The sneakers were too bright and the clothes still had the tags hanging from them.
The girl did not move. She watched him through the open bathroom doorway. When he turned and saw her staring at him, he nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Thought I told you to go turn down the bed,” he said, his voice quiet and level. Nearly monotone.