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By Root 376 0

he was done riding for the day, he had his street clothes on. He went to the parking lot, got in a car I didn’t know he had, and drove off. I left it at that. Then I went to AA. Sat listening to the complaints of newcomers and the wisdoms of old crooked-nosed guys that have been sober forty years. Though I don’t usually go in for that kind of thing, I went to dinner with a bunch of people. Some Italian place on Thirteenth Street in Manhattan. We were in there half the night. Just shooting the shit the way a bunch of drunks do. Eating. Drinking Cokes and soda water. I didn’t tell anyone exactly what was going on with me, just said I had some troubles with the wife. One of the old-timers told me to just be patient. I figured maybe he was right. I’d give Karen some space to be crazy in and then maybe eventually she’d come around to liking me again.

BY THE TIME I got home, it was late, almost one. Sometimes Karen stays up watching old movies but not this time. She was in the bedroom, apparently asleep. I tried shaking her a little. I wanted her to wake up and say good night. She didn’t move though.

I slept in late. When I got up and went downstairs, I saw the note.

I don’t know what she thought. What made her decide to leave when she did. Maybe she thought that I was out whoring all night.

And now I have no idea where to find her or why she left and I’m staring at the TV screen, trying to think of something to do. Eventually, I decide to call Ruby. I dial her home number from memory but of course nothing’s ever that simple. She’s not there. I leave a message then go to the hall to get my cell phone from my coat pocket so I can look her cell number up. No luck on that one either.

I glance outside and see that it’s started raining hammers and nails.

For once, the weather agrees with my mood.

I put my jacket on and go outside. It’s a lot warmer than it’s been and the rain is melting what’s left of the snow. It’s a damned mess out there.

I get in the truck, start the engine, and put Beethoven on at full volume. The truck has become the only place that’s really mine anymore. As soon as Karen moved into my house eight years ago, she started redecorating and changing everything around and, over time, it got to be her house, not mine. Now I don’t feel that comfortable there.

It’s Beethoven’s Third Symphony and after a while the relentless fucking cheerfulness of it starts making me see red. I take the CD out and listen to the rain pounding down on the truck. Eventually I start driving. I head toward the Woodland Motel. I don’t really expect to find Ruby there and, if he has any sense, Attila will have moved to Tahiti. But I don’t think of Attila as someone with a lot of sense.

I knock at the door to room eight and nothing happens. I go to the motel office, a tiny room with a metal and glass booth where presumably the front desk person sits, shielded from untoward clientele. The booth is empty though and there isn’t any kind of bell to ring. I call out a few times and eventually, an enormous white woman comes lumbering in. She’s so big she can barely squeeze through the door and has to turn to the side to fit. She has unnatural-looking black hair, some of it done up in little crooked braids, the rest hanging in greasy curtains. She’s wearing bright red lipstick and has drawn in dark black eyebrows the way crazy ladies always seem to, a sort of Joan Crawford look with the eyebrow pencil going way beyond where there could have been any actual eyebrow. She wouldn’t have been a good-looking woman under any circumstances but at her weight she’s downright scary. Plus, I figure, she’s got to be insane. No one in her right mind would do that eyebrow thing.

“Yeah?” she snarls, showing me the brown stuff stuck between her front teeth.

“Room eight, Attila Johnson, you know where he is?”

“Ain’t nobody in room eight.”

“There was yesterday. Short blond man?”

“Oh yeah,” she says, looking a little animated now. “He’s gone. Guess you’d say he checked out.”

She bursts into a horrible laugh that makes her body jiggle.

“What?” I say, pulse