Fate granted me two small miracles. One, we heard nothing from the management about me shacking with her, and Two, I got work at Labor Ready the next day: busting up floor tiles with a small jackhammer. I and an elderly black man worked eight hours but the foreman put ten hours on our work tickets; two hours of welcome overtime pay; cash on the barrelhead. We returned the following day to finish the job and the foreman gave us each a twenty-five dollar bonus for working hard.
Those two days and nights had a refreshing domesticity about them. It's not that I was reminded of my sixteen years of marriage before hitting the road, but it presented me with a much clearer picture of Moira. She wasn't the hyper personality she had been when I picked her up, and though she liked to hear herself talk, it wasn't the speech of a nervous girl trying to impress an older man. Now it was the speech of a girl trying to explain herself to a lover...and to herself.
Her mania had shifted from the cause to the effect. She didn't say any more about the deviant bath Josie's mother had given her seven years earlier. She spoke of how odd she felt when she encountered ponds and lakes and pools and tubs full of water; the way the water felt against her skin and the dark urge it would awaken in her. I didn't ask what it was that she had drowned, or where and how it had been done. I would rather she volunteer the information. But she saw the question in my eyes when we were in bed together, talking or watching a movie or engaging in the rough foreplay that we both liked.
Whatever it was she had done, this "drowning" event, it was an act of revenge, I felt sure. She didn't suggest that in any overt way, but it was there in the implications of what she said about the urges; her reaction to bodies of water, any body big enough to get into.
I recall the night before we left Topeka, how sweaty we were in our lovemaking because of the thunderclouds and our neglectfulness in turning on the air conditioner that I had unplugged as a defense against the non-adjustable thermostat that had chilled the room too much. Suddenly we realized just how hot and stuffy it was. I got off her and went to plug in the AC, and when I looked back at her she was holding out her arms and marveling at the perspiration literally running down to her shoulders. Her face was showing a hint of the fearful fascination she felt. I say 'fearful,' but that's not quite the right word. 'Disturbing' might be better, but it doesn't reveal that shade of horror that she would talk about in a mock joking way.
We did not re-visit the swimming pool and Moira took no more baths; she preferred communal showers, which were often the beginning and the end of a bout of sex. If she worried about her mother messing up her prospects with the Benton's she never let on. I made it clear that I would just as soon we nix the Tennessee angle and head straight for West Virginia. She called Marcia every few hours to ask what she had heard and how things looked for a visit; staying with Marcia indefinitely was now out.
She was intrigued with what little I had told her about The Lord of the Roads. I was deliberately vague about the fellow, not just because I thought it fun to tease her, but because it was something, and someone, you had to experience to understand.
"Why is he called 'Lord of the Roads'? What's his real name?"
We called him 'Top,' I explained to her; 'we' being members of one of the motorcycle clubs that he had jocularly sanctified, or maybe I should say 'vilified,' but in a perversely positive manner. The Lord wasn't anything you could put your finger on. It was a collective alter ego, but beyond that I would not, and could not, explain until she was there, herself, in the midst of it. She would shiver theatrically, like a child hearing a ghost story.
We were a little sentimental about leaving the Lodge, but sick of pizza. I had just over a hundred and fifty bucks and Moira admitted to having eight hundred-plus on her bank debit card, with fifteen hundred in her account, to draw on. So really, we were pretty well set for the long ride to Morgantown...via Memphis.
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