Дональд Уэстлейк: Collected Stories

So it was the truth Boy told the clerk at the Lest Ye Forget Motel, unnatural though that felt: “Boy Cartwright. The Weekly Galaxy made one’s reservation, some days ago.”

“You’re a foreigner,” the lad in the oversize raspberry jacket with the motel chain’s logo on its lapel told him, and pointed at Boy as though Boy didn’t already know where he was. “You’re French!”

“Got it in one, dear,” Boy agreed. “Just winged in from jolly old Paris to observe the festivities.”

“Laurena Layla, you mean,” the lad told him, solemn and excited all at once. Nodding, he said, “She’s coming back, you know.”

“So one has heard.”

“Coming back tomorrow,” the lad said, and sighed. “Eight o’clock tomorrow night.”

“I believe that is the zshedule,” Boy acknowledged, thinking how this youth could not have been born yet when Laurena Layla got herself perforated. How folly endures!

“Wish I could see it,” the lad went on, “but the tickets is long gone. Long gone.”

“Ah, tickets,” Boy agreed. “Such valuable little things, at times. But as to one’s room…”

“Oh, sure,” the lad said, but then looked doubtful. “Was that a single room all by yourself?”

“For preference.”

“For this time only,” the lad informed him, speaking as by rote, “the management could give you a very special rate, if you was to move in with a family. Not a big family.”

“Oh, but, dear,” Boy said, “one has moved out from one’s family. Too late to alter that, I’m afraid.”

“So it’s just a room by yourself,” the lad said, and shrugged and said, “I’m supposed to ask, is all.”

“And you did it very well,” Boy assured him, then flinched as the lad abruptly reached under the counter between them, but then all he came up with was some sort of pamphlet or brochure. Offering this, he said, “You want a battlefield map?”

“Battlefield?” Boy’s yellow spine shriveled. “Are there public disorders about?”

“Oh, not anymore,” the lad promised, and pointed variously outward, saying, “Macunshah, Honey Ridge, Polk’s Ferry, they’re all just around here.”

“Ah,” Boy said, recollecting the local dogma, and now understanding the motel’s name. “Your Civil War, you mean.”

“The War Between the States,” the lad promptly corrected him. He knew that much.

“Well, yes,” Boy agreed. “One has heard it wasn’t actually that civil.”

In the event, Boy did share his room with a small family after all. In a local pub — taa- vin, in regional parlance — he ran across twins who’d been ten years old when their mother, having seen on TV the news of Laurena Layla’s demise, had offed herself with a shotgun in an effort to follow her pastoress to that better world. (It had also seemed a good opportunity for her to get away from their father.) The twins, Ruby Mae and Ruby Jean, were thirty now, bouncing healthy girls, who had come to Marmelay on the off chance Mama would be coming back as well, presumably with her head restored. They were excited as all get-out at meeting an actual reporter from the Weekly Galaxy , their favorite and perhaps only reading, and there he was an Englishman, too! They just loved his accent, and he loved theirs.

“It’s one P.M.,” said the musical if impersonal voice in his ear.

Boy awoke, startled and enraged, to find himself holding a telephone to his head. Acid sunlight burned at the closed blinds covering the window. “Who the hell cares?” he snarled into the mouthpiece, which responded with a rendition of “Dixie” on steel drum.

Appalled, realizing he was in conversation with a machine, Boy slammed down the phone, looked around the room, which had been transmogrified overnight into a laundry’s sorting area, and saw that he was alone. The twins had romped off somewhere, perhaps to buy their mother a welcome-home pair of cuddly slippers.

Just as well; Boy was feeling a bit shopworn this morning. Afternoon. And that had been the wake-up call he must have requested in an optimistic moment late last night. Most optimistic moments occur late at night, in fact; realism requires daylight.

Up close, the banana-split Temple of Revelation appeared to have been served on a Bakelite plate, which was actually the shiny blacktop parking area, an ebony halo broadly encircling the temple and now rapidly filling with RVs, tour buses, pickup trucks, and all the other transportations of choice of life’s also-rans.

And they were arriving, in their droves. Whole families, in their Sunday best. Sweethearts, hand in hand. Retired oldsters, grinning shyly, made a bit slow and ponderous by today’s early-bird special. Solitaries, some nervous and guarded in hoods and jackets too warm for the weather, others gaudily on the prowl, in sequins and vinyl. Folks walked by in clothing covered with words, everything from bowling teams and volunteer fire departments to commercial sports organizations and multinational corporations that had never given these people a penny. Men in denim, women in cotton, children in polyester. Oh, if Currier and Ives were alive in this moment!

Boy and the rental Taurus circled the blacktop, slaloming slowly among the clusters of people walking from their vehicles toward the admission gates. Show or no show, miracle or nix, revelation or fuggedabahdid, every one of them would fork over their ten bucks at the temple gate, eight for seniors, seven for children under six. Inside, there would be more opportunities for donations, gifts, love offerings, and so on, but all of that was optional. The ten-spot at the entrance was mandatory.

Everyone here was looking for a sign, in a way, and so was Boy, but the sign he sought would say something like VIP or PRESS or AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. And yes, there it was: MEDIA. How modern.

The media, in fact, were sparse in the roped-off section of parking lot around to the side of the banana split, where a second entrance spared the chosen few from consorting with the rabble. Flashing his Galaxy ID at the golden-robed guardian of the MEDIA section, driving in, Boy counted two TV relay trucks, both local, plus perhaps half a dozen rentals like his own. Leaving the Taurus, Boy humped onto his shoulder the small canvas bag containing his tape recorder, disposable camera, and a folder of the tear sheets of his earlier coverage of Laurena Layla, plus her truncated note of gratitude, and hiked through the horrible humidity and searing sun to the blessed shade of the VIP entrance.

It took two golden-robers to verify his ID at this point, and then he was directed to jess go awn in an keep tuh the left. He did so, and found himself in the same curving charcoal-gray dim-lit corridor he’d traversed just twenty years ago when he’d gotten the body in the box. Ah, memory.

Partway round, he was met by another fellow in a golden robe, next to a broad black closed metal door. “Press?” this fellow asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Yes, sir,” the fellow said, drew the door open, and ushered him in.

With the opening of the door, crowd noises became audible. Boy stepped through and found himself in a large opera box midway down the left side of the great oval hall that was the primary interior space of the temple. Raised above auditorium level, the box gave a fine view of the large echoing interior with its rows of golden plush seats, wide aisles, maroon carpets and walls, battalions of lights filling the high black ceiling, and the deep stage at the far end where L.L. used to give her sermons and where her choir and her dancer-acolytes once swirled their robes. The sect had continued all these years without its foundress, but not, Boy believed, as successfully as before.