Richard Ford: Rock Springs

“I was just thinking how much I hated being in a motel without a car that was mine to drive. Isn’t that funny? I started feeling like that last night when that purple car wasn’t mine. That purple car just gave me the willies, I guess, Earl.”

“One of those cars outside is yours,” I said. “Just stand right there and pick it out.”

“I know,” she said. “But that’s different, isn’t it?” She reached and got her blue Bailey hat, put it on her head, and set it way back like Dale Evans. She looked sweet. “I used to like to go to motels, you know,” she said. “There’s something secret about them and free — I was never paying, of course. But you felt safe from everything and free to do what you wanted because you’d made the decision to be there and paid that price, and all the rest was the good part. Fucking and everything, you know.” She smiled at me in a good-natured way.

“Isn’t that the way this is?” I was sitting on the bed, watching her, not knowing what to expect her to say next.

“I don’t guess it is, Earl,” she said and stared out the window. “I’m thirty-two and I’m going to have to give up on motels. I can’t keep that fantasy going anymore.”

“Don’t you like this place?” I said and looked around at the room. I appreciated the modern paintings and the lowboy bureau and the big TV. It seemed like a plenty nice enough place to me, considering where we’d been.

“No, I don’t,” Edna said with real conviction. “There’s no use in my getting mad at you about it. It isn’t your fault. You do the best you can for everybody. But every trip teaches you something. And I’ve learned I need to give up on motels before some bad thing happens to me. I’m sorry.”

“What does that mean?” I said, because I really didn’t know what she had in mind to do, though I should’ve guessed.

“I guess I’ll take that ticket you mentioned,” she said, and got up and faced the window. “Tomorrow’s soon enough. We haven’t got a car to take me anyhow.”

“Well, that’s a fine thing,” I said, sitting on the bed, feeling like I was in shock. I wanted to say something to her, to argue with her, but I couldn’t think what to say that seemed right. I didn’t want to be mad at her, but it made me mad.

“You’ve got a right to be mad at me, Earl,” she said, “but I don’t think you can really blame me.” She turned around and faced me and sat on the windowsill, her hands on her knees. Someone knocked on the door, and I just yelled for them to set the tray down and put it on the bill.

“I guess I do blame you,” I said, and I was angry. I thought about how I could’ve disappeared into that trailer community and hadn’t, had come back to keep things going, had tried to take control of things for everybody when they looked bad.

“Don’t. I wish you wouldn’t,” Edna said and smiled at me like she wanted me to hug her. “Anybody ought to have their choice in things if they can. Don’t you believe that, Earl? Here I am out here in the desert where I don’t know anything, in a stolen car, in a motel room under an assumed name, with no money of my own, a kid that’s not mine, and the law after me. And I have a choice to get out of all of it by getting on a bus. What would you do? I know exactly what you’d do.”

“You think you do,” I said. But I didn’t want to get into an argument about it and tell her all I could’ve done and didn’t do. Because it wouldn’t have done any good. When you get to the point of arguing, you’re past the point of changing anybody’s mind, even though it’s supposed to be the other way, and maybe for some classes of people it is, just never mine.

Edna smiled at me and came across the room and put her arms around me where I was sitting on the bed. Cheryl rolled over and looked at us and smiled, then closed her eyes, and the room was quiet. I was beginning to think of Rock Springs in a way I knew I would always think of it, a lowdown city full of crimes and whores and disappointments, a place where a woman left me, instead of a place where I got things on the straight track once and for all, a place I saw a gold mine.

“Eat your chicken, Earl,” Edna said. “Then we can go to bed. I’m tired, but I’d like to make love to you anyway. None of this is a matter of not loving you, you know that.”

Sometime late in the night, after Edna was asleep, I got up and walked outside into the parking lot. It could’ve been anytime because there was still the light from the interstate frosting the low sky and the big red Ramada sign humming motionlessly in the night and no light at all in the east to indicate it might be morning. The lot was full of cars all nosed in, a couple of them with suitcases strapped to their roofs and their trunks weighed down with belongings the people were taking someplace, to a new home or a vacation resort in the mountains. I had laid in bed a long time after Edna was asleep, watching the Atlanta Braves on television, trying to get my mind off how I’d feel when I saw that bus pull away the next day, and how I’d feel when I turned around and there stood Cheryl and Little Duke and no one to see about them but me alone, and that the first thing I had to do was get hold of some automobile and get the plates switched, then get them some breakfast and get us all on the road to Florida, all in the space of probably two hours, since that Mercedes would certainly look less hid in the daytime than the night, and word travels fast. I’ve always taken care of Cheryl myself as long as I’ve had her with me. None of the women ever did. Most of them didn’t even seem to like her, though they took care of me in a way so that I could take care of her. And I knew that once Edna left, all that was going to get harder. Though what I wanted most to do was not think about it just for a little while, try to let my mind go limp so it could be strong for the rest of what there was. I thought that the difference between a successful life and an unsuccessful one, between me at that moment and all the people who owned the cars that were nosed into their proper places in the lot, maybe between me and that woman out in the trailers by the gold mine, was how well you were able to put things like this out of your mind and not be bothered by them, and maybe, too, by how many troubles like this one you had to face in a lifetime. Through luck or design they had all faced fewer troubles, and by their own characters, they forgot them faster. And that’s what I wanted for me. Fewer troubles, fewer memories of trouble.

I walked over to a car, a Pontiac with Ohio tags, one of the ones with bundles and suitcases strapped to the top and a lot more in the trunk, by the way it was riding. I looked inside the driver’s window. There were maps and paperback books and sunglasses and the little plastic holders for cans that hang on the window wells. And in the back there were kids’ toys and some pillows and a cat box with a cat sitting in it staring up at me lie I was the face of the moon. It all looked familiar to me, the very same things I would have in my car if I had a car. Nothing seemed surprising, nothing different. Though I had a funny sensation at that moment and turned and looked up at the windows along the back of the motel. All were dark except two. Mine and another one. And I wondered, because it seemed funny, what would you think a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night looking in the windows of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn? Would you think he was trying to get his head cleared? Would you think he was trying to get ready for a day when trouble would come down on him? Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him? Would you think he had a daughter? Would you think he was anybody like you?