3 -- The money is gone
Lance
stared down at the money on the bed-- two thousand dollars in assorted wrinkled
bills, down from $20,000 eight months earlier.
"So?" Sarah asked, folding their
clothing into the motel dresser, a towel around her head from the shower with a
single strand of wet blonde hair hanging across her forehead. She looked the
same as when he picked her up here months earlier.
Even the motel had the same stuffy scent to
it, of lint and packaged soap.
Only
the money had changed.
"So, it's almost gone," he spat and
stood, knees cracking from sitting too much. Hours and days in the front seat
of a van. He missed the vibration of the wheels beneath him.
"Lance, talk to me," Sarah growled,
her practical tone cutting through the haze of shock.
"I guess I'll have to get a job," he
mumbled and staggered to the window where the sky shocked him again. Or rather
that part of the sky missing. A black patch out of which no stars shown. The mountains
of Colorado, daunting even in the dark, like rising storm clouds cutting short
the day by hours. After eight months in L.A.
The
difference unnerved him, as if someone had stolen time out of his life. His
body clock had to readjust to the early twilight.
"You?" Sarah laughed in a tone harsh
enough to hurt. "What do you know how to do?"
"There must be something," he
mumbled and looked at the money again. The question had plagued him for months
and he had put it off, thinking the money would last forever.
"You mean we came all the way back here
so you could tell me that?"
"No," he said, turning from the
window to stare at Sarah's round face. In Hollywood, the street people teased
her, saying she looked like Doris Day. Blond hair and blue eyes stark markers
despite the outrageous red lipstick and near purple eyeshadow. Doris Day engraved
in her and she hated it. "We came back to see if you wanted to live here
again. Do you?"
He
knew the answer. He'd seen it in her eyes the whole ride back down the mountain
from Boulder, the emptiness of missing friends as stark and deadly as the dark
mountain against the night sky.
He loved it, not her, from his first visit
here, walking in awe like a child among skyscrapers, unable to believe in
things so ungodly big.
Eight months ago, he had come here to steal
her and had taken away a dream of snowcapped heaven California couldn't shake
from his head.
"I hate it here," she said and sat
in the chair beside the dresser, yanking the string for the lamp. Dull yellow
light filled the room and the black mountain vanished into a wobbly reflection of
his face in the window.
"Hate?"
"We shouldn't have come back."
He sagged and sat heavily on the bed, some of
the money tumbling to the floor where he left it. He stared at himself in the
glass.
Long
brown hair shaped around a rugged face. The eyes half hidden by protruding
brow. He had lobbied hard for her return, hoping she would feel the same magic
he did.
Maybe he should have guessed from her
willingness to leave with him back then, when he had come knocking on her door
after his stint in the army.
Come away with me, he'd offered, telling her
of a little dive he'd rented in East L.A., and the store he'd robbed back east
for the twenty-thousand-dollar grub stake. He wanted to settle down after Vietnam.
But the mountains had stolen his soul, and as
he talked her into leaving, he begged himself to stay. But among her friends he
felt skittish. One or two had been lovers and he resented it, allowing the
resentment to chase him west.
"Why?"
he asked, still staring at himself in the glass. "Why do you hate
it."
"Because it's boring," she said.
"Always has been, always will be.”
"But you agreed to come back."
"I forgot this part," she said
harshly. "I forgot how ugly the quiet can be. I used to lie in my bed for
hours cursing it, straining to hear the sound of motor cycles coming to rescue
me. It's the people I missed, and they're all gone now. They probably couldn't
take it either."
Gone like the money was gone. Spent in L.A.
fast life, clothing and drugs, and God knew what else. Gone and never to
return.
Though,
two thousand might be enough if they found a place and he found a job and...
"So, what do you want?" he asked
after a long silence.
Sarah shivered and slithered from the chair,
ambling slowly to the window. Below the rear of the hotel, the land sank into a
bowl of twinkling lights, Downtown Denver at its center.
"I want to leave," she said.
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