Up the stairs, static pulsed in a room where someone had left the phonograph running. The needle, locked in the groove of the dead wax, dragged on, a quarter weighing it down. The window was smeared with late afternoon sunlight. Someone gave up cleaning the glass halfway through, and the dust was swirled into sunlit loops. Through the hardwood floor, you could hear the buzz of a tattoo gun.
There’s a shop down there called Skin Deep, where a guy, who called himself Molar, just put Rose’s initials inside a wobbly heart on my arm. Rose put that heart there with a sewing needle and a pen a long time ago. Now it’s blue and disappearing into my skin. It’s the same as Rose’s first tattoo. Her stepfather put his initials on her when she was young. She said she slept through it. That disappeared into her too.
“Is there a laundromat around here?” she asked Molar, after he finished my arm. There was a tooth on his neck, with the word “sweet” ribboned across it. I knew what she was really asking.
“Sure,” he took my cash. “King Street.”
We made sure King Street Laundry was empty. It was just a small room, designed to look like a chessboard: black-and-white checkered floor, rows of machines lined up, the round doors all hanging open. Nothing but old magazines and paperbacks spread across the folding tables. Rose locked the door behind us, and we stripped, each trying to keep our balance on one leg as we pulled our pants off. We threw our clothes in the wash as a young mother pushed a stroller down the sidewalk in front of the glass exterior. Her eyes widened, and she forced her attention back down toward the stroller, where a baby slept.
Rose was staring at my lips, hungrily, and was on me a second later, right there on the cold, tiled floor. The washer thundered along with off-kilter rhythm.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
She laughed until she couldn’t breathe when we got a flat on the way to Buffalo. There was no room to pull over. I don’t remember the road, but it was a narrow section. While we put the spare on, a drifting semi missed us by inches. The oily wind almost knocked me over. But Rose laughed even harder.
When we hit Horseshoe Falls around 3 in the morning, she wrapped herself around the railing and wept.
“It’s too much,” she kept saying, hot tears glittering in the streetlight, rolling down her cheeks. She had those high, Navajo cheeks.
The mist looked like a thundercloud rising. I said there were faces in the mist, and pointed here and there. But there weren’t any.
Suddenly, she looked up. “I see them too,” her lower lip shook.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Up the stairs, the quarter slipped from the phonograph arm. It rang and rattled on the hardwood floor until it became still. The needle floated back onto its cradle. It was early morning, still dark. Nobody’s lived here for a long time—there’s an eviction notice on the table. Whoever he was, he left everything behind. There was an old set of walkie-talkies, a cigar case with blurry water-damaged polaroids piled in, as if to keep them hidden. There was a set of fatigues, and a black leather vest with “Lost Army” and “POW-MIA” patches across the shoulders, all hung up in the closet. A pocket-watch commemorating Robert E. Lee was hidden in the back of a drawer, while a shelf full of records featured BB King, Aretha Franklin, and Otis Redding, almost exclusively. There was a glass flask with a rotten cork—just a swallow of whiskey left in there. Four or five journals, all filled with handwritten poetry addressed to “Yellow Texas Rose,” sat piled under a small mattress in the corner. The mattress was only big enough for one—and even one was a stretch.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
It was 5 in the morning, and Rose said she heard mice scratching in the wall. I don’t remember the city or the motel. Boise, I guess. All I remember is I just shaved my face clean for the first time in years. Looking in the mirror, for a moment, my face looked so strange to me. Like it wasn’t mine. I never realized how tired and sad my eyes were turning. Rose called out again from the other room.
“Lew, you’re missing the best part.”
“I’ll take care of it.” I crawled across the bed, and punched the wall where the scratching sound was, above the headboard. I listened while Rose watched someone get slaughtered in a horror flick.
“What’s this called?” I asked.
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The bell and light came on as the striped crossing gate came down. We were somewhere in California, a dusty place near the ocean. It was a passenger train, coming down the line fast.
“I love you,” she said, for the first time.
“I love you too.” But my voice was drowned out by the train roaring by.
Before I could stop her, she ducked under the crossing gate. I shouted and reached for her. She ran a few steps and suddenly stopped. She stood there, frozen in her little white sneakers. The train couldn’t have been more than a few inches from her face. Her eyes were closed as I threw my arms around her and dragged her back under the gate. They were still closed as I shouted and shouted. It didn’t make any difference what I said. I could have said anything, for all it mattered. She was silent. She just stood there, swaying—as if listening to music. When she finally opened her eyes, it was like I wasn’t there at all. She just looked past me. I checked over my shoulder. I don’t know what I expected to find.
“I’m getting a beer,” I started toward a bar nearby, across the tracks.
“Sounds good,” she said, standing there, as I walked away.
“Are you coming?”
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
I called her sister on the phone one night. She answered, though I’d never spoken to her before.
“Who’s this?”
But I could tell she knew.
Before I could ask what happened, she asked me what happened. All I could think to say was something about the city clock. I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it from where I was.
“It hasn’t been reset for daylight savings yet,” I said. “Ten instead of Eleven.”
She hung up on me.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
You could hear the tattoo gun through the hardwood floor as the movers unplugged the phonograph and put it into a black contractor’s bag, along with the records, clothes, poetry books, all of it: to be hauled off and tossed.
We set the pocket-watch and the cigar box of photographs aside, though, “In case the guy’s got kids out there somewhere,” the boss told us. “Don’t think too much.” I saw one of the other guys pick a quarter up off the floor and slip it into his pocket. But I didn’t mind.
I didn’t mind getting rid of any of it. None of it felt like it belonged to me anymore anyway.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
I like to remember the time Rose got a new flower tattooed on her shoulder. She had elaborate ones all over her. Molar had to wake her up when it was done. She was having a nightmare and almost jumped off the table, which was an old gynecologist bench. I remember the stirrups up in the air, waving back and forth.
We laughed about that one.