The Blues & Billie Armstrong 59
CHASING GHOSTS
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
I kissed Laurette lightly on the cheek and walked down the stairs. At the bottom I turned and looked back. “What was he like—Cole, I mean—did you know him?” She said, “No, I never met him. Pop and Molly did, I guess, but I never even saw a picture of the guy.”
At Main Street Liquors I bought a pint of Maker’s and set it in the passenger seat next to my mother’s old hatbox.
In my mind I saw myself all those years ago by the burn barrel in the backyard, holding up the blue-flowered sundress by the hangar, checking the other pocket and finding the J.R. Cole obituary. I remembered reading that scrap of paper and thinking I had finally found the truth—when I had only found the mask of a trick, a crime against the truth.
But what was I doing with my own secrets? Lowballing for Billie’s freedom—and my own redemption—by telling as little as I thought I could get away with.
I opened the hatbox, thumbed through and found the Polaroid snapshot of my mother next to the ocean in the blue felt hat with the silvery band and the blue polkadots. She stood on the edge of a cliff, facing the camera at a three-quarter angle, the coastline curving northward behind her. The wind was gusting and she held her hat on with one hand while her hair blew around her face. Her smile was shy and cautious but real. She was lovely, and not just in the usual sense of that word as a bland synonym for pretty or charming, but in a truer sum, meaning as in love.
At the bottom of the hatbox I found the key to Room 24 at the Crow’s Nest Motel, and it flashed me back to all those fantasy road trips we dreamed of when Billie and Sonny first made the deal for the Fairlane. As a young man, I’d made it to some of those destinations. Hitched out to Chicago and hung around the blues clubs. Drifted up the coast to Canada and down the coast to Mexico. Made the seven hills of San Francisco my backyard. But I never did get to Shelter Cove, despite my curiosity about my mother’s history there. For one thing, Shelter Cove is one of the most remote towns in California, sitting on the edge of the serrated Pacific coast at the end of a narrow twisting road that is the only way in or out. For another thing, I knew I would never be able to think of it as anything but the last place my mother was happy.
I slid the sunroof open, hit the down buttons on all the windows, cranked up the stereo, and pointed the Cadillac out of town. I drove, fueled by whiskey and impulse. And the blues. I kept the engine rhooming and the wind roaring through the car. I drove north out of town and west on the highway, speeding past Parker’s Junkyard, the only business still operating at the corner of Rawson Road.
I was thinking about the shortcut Sonny and I took through the cemetery and wondering who bothered to buy and mark the empty grave of a man who hadn’t in fact been killed—my mother, my father, someone else? And if J.R. Cole had somehow made it out of Vietnam alive, where was he today and did he ever think of my mother and Shelter Cove and blue polkadots on a silver hatband.
By the time I got to the coast, it was dark and I was wildhearted drunk. Can you drown anger, regret and disillusion with whiskey? I was giving it a go. I stopped to replenish my supplies and ask for directions at the general store, which fortunately had a liquor section. “Just stay on this road and look for the big neon crow,” said the old guy behind the counter.
I turned in when I saw the sign and parked the Caddy near the office. Out beyond the parking lot of the motel, I caught moonlit glimpses of tumbling water, heard the ocean scolding the rocks. A young woman with multiple facial piercings and purple highlights in her hair ran my credit card and gave me the key to Room 29. She looked concerned at my beat appearance—no shower or change of clothes after the night in jail, unshaven and blood-eyed from too little sleep and too much drink. She handed me a flyer for the local pizza place and said, “Here, mister. They’ll deliver to your room.”
I lugged my overnight bag, the hatbox and the new bottle upstairs to my room. I poured bourbon into a plastic cup, used the room phone to order a large pizza, then stood on the balcony looking down at the parking lot and the blue neon crow with the red neon letters that bisected its body, saying “The Crow’s Nest,” pulsing on and off like an electric heart.
That night and the next day and then another night are stitched in threadbare memory.
Sockfooted late-night trips to the ice machine. Mad dreams infiltrated by raving infomercials and colorized westerns. Wandering empty streets in thick nightfog that somehow manifested a color that could only be called dark white. Stumbling upon a Gen Y bacchanal—a menagerie of twenty-somethings who all looked like the motel clerk. Freakshow piercings and acres of tats, work boots and flannel shirts, all in a cloud of kush smoke as thick as the fog. Three dreadlocked white dudes on guitar, standup bass and banjo, playing what I estimated to be male feminist punk bluegrass. A big-legged gal with a head of black patent leather hair was dancing on the wooden deck in extravagant twirls. I showed her the Polaroid and asked if she recognized the location. She laughed and danced away.
One thing I do remember clearly. Room 29 was the last room at the far end of the two story building. Bringing in my “luggage” that first night, I passed Room 24 and noticed a light on. The next day, Wednesday I guess, somewhere close to dinnertime I think, I happened to be making my way back from another supply run, and a white-haired couple came out of 24. Relaxed-fit jeans and orthopedic shoes. Matching immaculate white fisherman sweaters. They passed me in the parking lot on the way to their Prius and I nodded and said, “Evening.” They smiled and they both said good evening and held hands like second-honeymooners.
I watched from the balcony as the old husband backed the Prius out, turned on the headlights and drove out into the foggy twilight. I went to my room and took the old room key out of the hatbox. I strolled the balcony down to Room 24 and casually checked in all directions. The key slid right into the lock and it clicked open with a slight turn. I slipped inside quickly.
The Crow’s Nest must have been a fairly new establishment in 1968 when my mother and J.R. Cole were here. Now, in 2010, there were signs it had fallen into disrepair over the years and then recently been refurbished. The architecture had that early Sixties, rectangular, skinny-tie and loafers feel, but the new paint job was teal and coral and white, something you might expect from a second rate decorator hired out of Marin by some Silicon Valley cashouts.
I thought maybe this moment was why I came to this diminutive nowhere by the sea, to be in this space with the ghosts of my mother’s madness. But standing there in the middle of the room brought no peace or understanding. It was just a pastel motel room waiting for its rightful occupants.
The white hair Prius couple were tidy and organized. Before they checked out, the woman would probably straighten up, strip the bed, and pile all the dirty towels in an orderly mound on the bathroom floor.
The man would still leave a ten for the maid.
The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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