This town wasn’t much. A couple of places by the highway, closed or indifferent, cigarette butts and harvest stubs blown clear up to the doors. Telephone books rotting in split plastic bags. East glanced up with effort at what remained of the signs: TIRES, VACUUM REPAIR. It didn’t matter now. A nightclub that once had some style: a splashy sign, now a skeleton, and exterior walls studded up with white stones like a dinosaur’s armor. Some sort of weird, fenced yard like an impound lot that said SLAUGHTERRANGE.COM. HELP WANTED in soaped letters in the window. A matronly farmhouse across the road disapproved of it all.
He turned down the side road and found a main street parallel to the highway. There, an old grocery, a post office full of cobwebbed shipping boxes, a pawnshop. Two stores said ANTIQUES but were falling apart themselves. The windowsills on the hardware store were rotting. A doughnut place seemed to hold the only people now, and one bar, blinking BUD, where they would be tonight. A Laundromat, machines scraped out and yawning.
And the little motel: Starlight. Two little wings of ten rooms each spread from an airy center office filled mostly with dust. Curls of neon tubing still clinging to the sign. It was the sort of motel you found on big north-south streets in The Boxes, but open there, sprawling, a clientele there to use or drink or hide, who sometimes just lived there for decades, disapproving of the others, fallen oranges rotting beneath their parked cars that never moved. But here in Ohio, the Starlight was empty, bleached sun-white and then dusted again, front door padlocked though the sign still said OPEN.
Town wasn’t much. Clearly they’d run the highway just north of it at some point. But the highway had failed to keep it alive.
Boy, this is why you get on the plane, he thought.
Outside the Starlight Motel, he climbed atop a concrete planter full of poisonous-looking dirt and surveyed. Relieved now of its relentless moving forward, his body cracked with want. A passing moment of sunlight lit the houses briefly. In the offing was a church, a shingled thing jumbled together like children’s blocks, a big cross, gilt and dirtied.
Two days walking in the air had thinned out his stubbornness. But the stubbornness that remained was choosing. He had chosen. This is where you said you’d stop, he reminded himself. Small, and no people out: everything he saw to hold against the town, to walk away from—to flee it, in fact—were reasons that, standing in the fading light, he steeled himself against.
A pickup truck with five kids in parkas in the back, sitting packed together, rumbled by slowly. All five kids turned their heads to look. Their mother gave him a single glance and blew a plume of smoke out her window, then flicked the lit cigarette butt after it.
He didn’t even know the town’s name.
—
After an hour, when his eyes had measured the town and his body had stiffened with cold, he climbed down from the planter awkwardly and walked to the grocery store. Closed. But oranges and cans on racks inside: at least that. At least the store was alive. He scrutinized the darkness inside, then backed off and read the sign. CLOSED ON SUNDAY. He had never heard of a grocery store being closed on Sunday.
Maybe, then, it was Sunday.
Next he walked to the doughnut shop. It was emptier than before, perhaps. But open. He paid his money for two large fried apple fritters, then added a cup of hot chocolate. He was beginning to treat the cold as a permanent adversary. The hot, doughy air of the shop was worth the people staring. He stood numb, breathing the steam off the scorching cup.
He used the bathroom for what he hoped was not too long. Hot water at the sink up his forearms, over his face, around the back of his neck. Carefully he dried himself. The clatter out by the main highway drew him back that way. The weird impound lot had, in the last two hours, filled with trucks and cars. The building there resembled a small barn backed up to a clumsy, bulldozed berm a story high, blocking off view from the road. A few dim lights burned cold on poles. The clatter back there was shooting. It had started just before sunset. He had heard the first shots from the doughnut shop as he stood there eating a fritter, dreaming on his feet. The first burst made him spill the rest of his hot drink on his fingers. Triggered, not automatic, four or five shots in all. He looked up, shaken: the locals in their booths had looked up too but were already back to their doughnuts.
Shots rang again as he stood at the mouth of the lot. The house. The wondering face of the girl. Involuntarily his body ducked. He looked around in the cold air—one split of dying orange in the dulling sky in the direction he’d come to know as south. A small car sat glowing its parking lights near the barn like a resting hog.
The shots weren’t right—they didn’t sound the same way. They lacked the knock a gunshot had. A tump, a different bang—he didn’t know how to describe it. No houses like in The Boxes to echo off. But the same rhythm, the exchanges of fire, he could hear that—the conversation. The old music of his streets.
A target range? But there were shouts from inside too, and scrambling. An occasional yelp.
Somebody burning their ammo up, he told himself.
He slipped closer to the barn, finding a place to listen.