“Come inside,” Jessie said, but I declined. I wanted to enjoy the fowl myself, not share it with others. Others inside the party would want to see my fowl.
“No way am I going inside,” I said, and laughed a little. “I’m taking this fowl home.”
“Good luck,” they both said.
I unlocked my bicycle from his porch and rode it back home, where I would have to hide the fowl from Rae. She wouldn’t like the fowl, never. I steered my bike with one hand so I could check on the fowl in my jacket pocket. Its eyes were glowing in the dark as it looked up at me, smiling. I had a happy fowl, and it made me happy. It was fine right there in my pocket, with me protecting it, already grooming it. The fowl wasn’t trying to hurt me or make any noise at all. The fowl was so nice.
When I got back to the house, I hid the fowl in the bedroom in my dresser drawer so Rae wouldn’t find it. I told it good night and looked at it. The fowl had no odor whatsoever. It never made a sound, just breathed its chest in and out, breathing heavily for a tiny thing.
That night I wasn’t able to sleep because I kept thinking about the fowl. I took it out of the dresser drawer while Rae slept and stayed up all night in the living room with it, looking at it and touching it and letting it nibble and peck in my hand. I had no appetite and the thought of food made me feel sick to my stomach.
The most fun thing about the fowl was feeding it, and like most things, it grew quickly and became bigger, but it began to smell bad and shit and vomit in the house. The fowl was too big to hide from Rae, so I had to carry it with me to the park and leave it there. It tried to follow me, and when I picked it up and threw it, I must’ve injured it, because then I saw the fowl drag itself across the ground toward me. I ran away from it that night. I kept hiding from the fowl anytime I saw it in the park, but it always saw me and ended up back at my house, which frightened Rae and caused us to fight.
The only way I could get rid of the fowl was to ignore it. Eventually it went away, but never for good. Sometimes it returned, and whenever I saw it, I felt a pull at my heart to want to pick it up and hold it. I could never fully rid myself of the fowl, and there was something I loved about it, no matter how disgusting or how elated it made me feel.
WHEN I GOT HOME, Rae was still gone. I called her cell but got her voice mail. “It’s me,” I said. “Where are you?” I hung up. I couldn’t figure out if I was mad or sad. I didn’t know whether to be angry at myself or at Rae for ignoring my call. In the kitchen I drank the last of the wine. I looked through drawers for a pack of cigarettes but couldn’t find anything. Then I went into our bedroom, packed a duffel bag, and left.
I drove my shitty low-slung Oldsmobile to the El Cortez Motel. It was the motel where Rae and I used to stay sometimes, pretending we were somewhere far away. I wanted to call her on the motel phone and try to get her to come stay with me. The motel’s VACANCY sign flashed pink out front. Inside, I was certain the motel clerk recognized me. He chewed on a toothpick and wore a patch over one eye. His hands looked like my dad’s, dry and cracked with stubby fingers. Behind the front desk, the sign on the door read: MAN GER. All the motel doors opened to the empty parking lot. Nearby, a desolate highway stretched west through the plains.
“The door says manger,” I said. “Away in a manger.”
The clerk handed me the key to room 121 but never looked at me.
I walked down the row of doors until I got to my room, opened, and went inside. It smelled of old cigarette smoke and cleaner. I immediately went to the phone, which was the old rotary kind. I called Rae’s cell, and she answered.
“I’m at the El Cortez Motel,” I said.
“Why? Go back home.”
“Drive over here,” I said. “I’m sorry I smoked. It was because my mom called you. Drive over here.”
She was silent a moment. “No, you need to go home. You lied again. I told you I was leaving if you kept smoking that shit.”
“Please come to the motel.”
“My God, Edgar, I can’t even talk to you right now. I’m staying at Jessica’s tonight.”
She hung up, and I immediately called back. It went to her voice mail. I called again, and the same thing. I was a little high. I’d brought along a small duffel bag containing a bottle of a few oxycodone pills, aspirin, a tape recorder, a few cans of beer, and Rae’s broken sunglasses I had doctored with black tape. These were all the things I needed for the night. I took the sunglasses out and squeezed the tape on the handle to make sure it hadn’t loosened. I put them on a moment, then took them off and set them on the desk beside the bed.
I wanted to talk to someone. A roadside motel like the El Cortez was not a good place to feel lonely. The room was a mirror image of all the other rooms, the center of nothingness, dim and warm despite the air conditioner blowing. It felt like an isolated presence, welcoming me. But I liked the room dark—no light entered from the drawn curtains, which were green. The lamp threw a jagged and intimidating shadow across the pale wall, and the carpet, partially stained, was avocado.
In the room I sat on the edge of the bed, looking up at the ceiling. Something in my head was expanding, I felt, trying to force its way out. My skull felt heavy when I kept my head tilted back, looking up. This was how things went—first the head, then the stomach. When I saw my reflection in the mirror across the room, I wondered whether people saw me differently. I’d lost some weight.
In the bathroom I took an oxycodone and drank a cup of water. The only thing I had in my pocket other than my wallet was my turquoise snakeskin lighter, which was a gift from Rae. I imagined her here with me. I thought of her watching me play chess in the park against one of the druggies, daring me to lose. She kept me on edge, a dominant and unpredictable force. I started to feel sick to my stomach.
I turned on the TV. A movie was on, showing a man walking through the desert. I stared into the TV. The man was walking and walking, going nowhere. Where was he going? I wondered. A drifter, a wanderer, in search of something important. This must be real life, I thought. Searching for something, trying to move forward. Looking for meaning or happiness. The commercials were all in Spanish.
When a commercial came on, I peeked out the peephole and saw the parking lot outside. I could see desert dust blowing around in the wind. I looked back up at the ceiling and felt a sense of transparency and isolation, a sense of longing, a dampening of the soul. The room smelled like all the other motel rooms. Above the bed hung a framed watercolor of a farmhouse painted in browns and reds. A field surrounding the farmhouse was dull green, with nothing else around, only empty pasture. The farmhouse looked vacant, too, with a broken-down pickup truck beside it. No sign of life anywhere. I wondered who lived there and then who painted it, and for what purpose. On a different wall, the only other picture in the room, was another watercolor, a painting of an old wooden fence with barbed wire. A dreary sky in the background. A barbed-wire fence. I wondered why a fence, such a lifeless and dull thing, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. A fence, used to enclose territory. It was as if the motel was emphasizing its loneliness.
The room darkened as I sat in silence. This was how I liked to spend late afternoons, it occurred to me, sitting in a room as it darkened. Letting the darkness spill over me and the room. I opened a beer from my duffel bag and played the tape on my recorder, hearing my own voice. I heard myself say, “I looked for the Great Spirit today.” I heard myself laugh through my teeth, but I wanted to hear someone else’s voice, by circumstance, unfiltered and cautious.