The Drifter(44)
Betsy made it across most of the Panhandle before she couldn’t take the silence and the swarm of her own thoughts for another minute. She’d been memorizing the lyrics to the Afghan Whigs’s “You My Flower,” on repeat for an hour, astonished by Gavin’s ability to sleep through her “singing.” So she woke him up with a doughnut, a pint of Tropicana, and an airplane bottle of vodka in a parking lot near Mobile.
The original thought was that they’d stay with two of Gavin’s friends from Jacksonville, Tulane guys who worked at a bar near campus. When they arrived unannounced at their crumbling house off of St. Charles, the last address Gavin had written in his book, the place was empty. There was no sign of anyone, anywhere. In front of the house there was a wide porch with enough half-assembled bikes to make even Betsy wince, and a withering, yellowed pile of The Times-Picayune in the corner. Gavin left a message on an answering machine from the pay phone down the street, saying that they were in town and they’d swing back by again later.
“I didn’t recognize the voice on the recording,” he said. “I’m hoping it’s a roommate. Otherwise, they moved.”
They stopped for more coffee, better this time, but the heat of the day was mounting, pressing down on their hangovers, and they needed a place to sleep it off. They wandered around looking for a room. When they stumbled onto a sloping, defeated Victorian bed-and-breakfast with a vacancy sign in the window, they climbed the creaking steps before Betsy paused on the shady porch.
“I’m sure that you think I’m an unbelievable moron right now, and possibly a little crazy,” she said. “But thank you, you know, for getting me out of there.”
“You’re cute when you’re crazy. Plus, I’ve got nothing better to do,” he said in a way that made her think that maybe he meant it.
For sixty dollars cash, up front, they got a room from an ancient, round woman wearing a long, purple knit vest with long pockets weighed down by rings of more keys than she could ever identify. Check-in time wasn’t until three, she said, peering over the top of her red-framed reading glasses, taking a long look at Betsy’s drawn, delicate face before she decided to show some mercy. At the top of a dark, narrow staircase, down a long hall of unmarked doors, they dropped their duffel bags in a room with dark green walls and a simple iron bed made up with an old flour sack quilt and pushed up against a large window with its heavy, brocade tasseled shade pulled low. Across from the bed was a small desk with a reading lamp and a ladder-back chair. A slice of sun crept in from under the shade and made the dust particles in the air look like tiny, floating, electric snowflakes.
“Bath’s third door on ya left,” she said. “Drinks on the porch at six. You’re buying. Come down for breakfast. Not before eight. Big key’s for the front door. It’s locked after ten. Little one’s for the room.”
“Thank you, um . . . ,” Betsy asked.
“Miss June,” she said, turning sideways to pass through the narrow door. “Get some rest. You two look like you saw the wrong side of dawn. Keep the noise down and you’ll make me happy.”
Betsy barely remembered taking her shoes off, but five hours later, she peeled her face off of the crocheted pillowcase and pushed her hair off of her forehead. It was the kind of dreamless, heavy sleep that left her drenched in sweat and feeling oddly weightless. It took a minute for her to remember where she was. The light had dimmed. The sun was so low in the sky that it made the tiny room glow a deep shade of amber. Gavin was still asleep but she didn’t dare look at him, afraid he might wake up to find her staring at him like some kind of psychotic house cat. She cracked the window, letting in some of that early evening summer breeze. Then she grabbed a towel and a change of clothes and padded out the door to the shower down the hall. She closed her eyes to let the water rinse the soap from her face and thought again about the night before. Maybe it was the upstairs neighbor, opening the sliding door, she thought. There have to be at least a dozen explanations for that noise, the creak of the wood, the music, but she kept going back to the first one, over and over again.
She remembered the time, early in their freshman year, when Caroline convinced her that the cops were in front of that same apartment, ready to arrest them for smoking pot. Caroline saw a neighbor’s brake lights through the curtains in the living room and suddenly hit the floor, inspired to mess with her new friends’ heads.
“Get down,” she’d hissed. “What are you? Idiots? Can’t you see there’s a cruiser out front? Shit! Our neighbors must have smelled the smoke.”
Betsy, who was panic-stricken, turned around to see Ginny in the kitchen, clutching her middle, doubled over with laughter. Their pledge-sister Holly was with them, and she hit the floor to crouch between the sofa and the coffee table, eyes wide, so impossibly high that she’d believed every word that Caroline fed her about their impending arrest for possession.
“Poor Ginny,” said Caroline, still in a husky whisper, never once breaking character. “She is so high that she doesn’t know she’s about to spend the night in jail with a fifty-year-old hooker.”
Ginny had fallen for it before and was giddy to be on the other side of the joke. But Betsy and Holly were the new girls who still believed, wholesale, that Len Bias let his guard down just one time, snorted a solitary line of coke, and that was all it took to stop his heart on the spot. Fear of sudden death by mild drug use was enough to keep Betsy straight through all of high school. So the first time she let herself go in her friends’ apartment, no curfew, no one to notice or care, pulse feeling strong, inhaling the weed smoke through a cored apple pipe, her only misstep was to fall for the old “cops outside the window” routine.