The Houses in Rossford

PAUL ANDERSON took a good long shower, which surprised him, because he’d had a short long shower this morning. There was something about the road that made him feel two days icky, and he wanted to rinse out the dirt and the ache as best he could. Besides, he realized now, he was always conscious of using up Fenn’s water. He never wanted to be a nuisance.

Whatever Dan Malloy had been in his past life, right now he was nothing if not very cool. He had assumed that Paul and Noah would get a room together, and was surprised when they got them separately. They’d gone their separate ways agreeing to meet up at the continental breakfast tomorrow. While Paul was in his room, sorting himself out, there was a tap on the door and Noah came in.

“I’m going out to find some life in this hillbilly town. Wanna come?”

“I thought you said you were tired.”

“I was tired. Now, I’m not,” Noah said, simply. He repeated: “Wanna come?”

“No, I really am tired. Catch me later.”

“Allllright,” Noah said, stretching the phrase out, like if he kept it going long enough Paul might change his mind. But he didn’t.

Later there was a soft, but insistent and continuous tap on the door and Paul, stretching, got out of bed, pulled on his briefs, and went to answer.

“Noah,” he croaked.

Noah flipped on the light, and as Paul blinked, the little guy steered in someone tall as Paul, well built with a shaved head.

“Noah, what the—?”

“Meet Louis, he’s shy,” Noah said to the man. “Get it! From Interview With the Vampire, where—“

“I hate that movie,” Paul blinked, adjusting to the light. “What’s going on?”

“He is hot,” Noah said pushing cleaned domed guy in vaguely tight jeans and a fitted tee forward. “Isn’t he?”

The guy, nodded dumbly, his eyes full of appreciation for the nearly undressed Paul.

“Paulie, this here is Wade. And he’s a Marine. Serving out country, and on his way back overseas. I promised him we’d do our patriotic best.”

“What the?”

“Excuse me,” Noah said, taking Paul by the hand and guiding him into the bathroom.

“You wanna have a three way?” Paul said.

“Yes. It’s not like we haven’t before. Remember the one for that one film with Burt? Wasn’t that hot as shit? Doesn’t he look like Matt Castle? Com’on, Paul, let’s do this.”

Paul blinked at him.

“And that’s one hundred percent cornfed beef out there. I mean, you know it is.”

Noah stuck his head out the door:

“You still there, Wade?”

“Yup,” Wade said, dumbly.

“A Marine!” Noah breathed. “A fucking Marine. Now come on out and let’s fuck him!” Noah placed his hands on Paul’s penis through this underwear, and tugged on him.

“All right?”

“You got condoms at least? And lube?”

“You know I’ve got this shit covered. Come on, all right?”

“All right,” Paul said. “But let me pee first. Get on out. I’ll be there.”

Noah looked at Paul a moment, gave him a winning smile and a wink and then, with a thumbs up, said, “You’re gonna thank me for this in the morning.”

THE NEXT THUMP on the door came in the morning when a shaft of mean sunlight came through the curtains. There was a rapid staccato, and in a few moments Paul took in the hotness and confusion of his body against Wade’s well muscled back, his penis gently pushing into his firm ass and one of his legs, laced through Wade’s thighs. Vaguely, he wanted to fuck him again. On the other side of him Noah slept with one arm wrapped around both of their waists, his mouth open in slumber.

The tap came again.

Dan Malloy.

Noah stirred a bit, but Paul pushed himself off of the bed, searched for his jeans and did the delicate work of pulling them on over his morning erection, and then crossing the hotel room, cracked the door and slipped out.

“I overslept,” Dan said. “But I guess you all did too. I tapped on Noah’s door and didn’t get an answer.”

“He was out all night,” Paul said, turning red and grinning foolishly. “I’ll wake him up. Give ‘em a good old shaking.” He pantomimed shaking someone.

“All right.”

“We can be ready in about a half hour,” Paul said. “The continental breakfast, just like we planned.” He grinned idiotically.

“Great!”

“Alrighty then,” Paul said, slipping back in quickly and shutting the door.

He shook Noah’s thin shoulder and hissed, “Get up!”

Noah, mouth half opened, blinked and said, “What the...?”

Then he sat up.

“What time is it?”

“Father Dan just came in here.”

“What the fuck!”

“I mean, I stood at the door. He didn’t see anything. But we gotta be gone in a half hour.”

“Ey, Wade,” Noah was already speaking to the Marine, shaking his large shoulder.

“Wade, buddy! We gotta be rolling along.”

Wade got up, blinking and stretching.

“We got like a half hour,” Paul said. “I need to shower.”

“Hey,” Noah said, climbing out of bed, and standing naked before Wade. “For a lot of reasons it would be strange to have you in this room, but if you need to sleep a little and whatever, you can take my room. It’s paid for until noon.”

Wade sat up and nodded, looking around for his clothing.

“However,” Noah had dressed while talking, and was pulling his Polo shirt on, “I need to use my shower quickly. I’ll walk you back.”

In the bathroom, Paul turned on the shower water and stepped in, laying his back against the plastic wall and letting the water shoot along his side and then, gradually pushing himself into its stream. He heard Noah ushering Wade out, heard Noah say, “I’ll be ready in twenty, all right?”

Paul did not answer. Paul thought, “Noah takes a lot of energy.”

At one time, he reflected, and not a time that long ago, he must have as well.

“Tom told me there’s this new play that someone sent him from a playwright out in California with a horrible name. He’s really impressed by it though, and tomorrow he’s going to bring it over so we can read it.”

“How do you spell playwright?” Todd said, looking up from his laptop, where he was editing.

“Like wheelwright. W-R-I-G-H-T. Not like someone who writes plays.”

“That’s what I thought. I like that. So I’m a filmwright.”

“Yeah. You can be.”

“See,” Todd swung around in his chair. “That’s what I like, the whole idea of art being a skill, a hands on skill like… I guess a wheelwright, or a blacksmith. Only playwrights still exist and blacksmiths and wheelwrights are sort of a thing of the past.

Fenn shrugged. “Some people would say writers and poets and playwrights are almost a thing of the past.”

“I don’t believe it,” Todd shook his head. “Like, here, in Rossford, no one watches my films. Maybe not in a lot of places in America. And you wonder, who the heck really watches the documentaries you think are so important. But every once in a while you get that contact, you know, with someone who might even be in this town, who saw the film you made. And then you realize you’re not as much a relic of the past as you thought you were.”

Todd turned around and, still working at his computer, in front off the large picture window that overlooked Versaille Street and its little two story houses with small porches, large picture windows and second stories full of dormer windows peeking out of the side.

“I think all those people whose stuff is supposed to be behind the times,” Todd said, “are actually ahead. And I think that just because for now, a lot of people have lost interest or… eh…” Todd stopped to take care of something and Fenn, heading to the fridge said, “I’m still listening.”

Regaining his thread, Todd said, “Just because a lot of people right now have lost interest or… the ability to be interested even, in certain things, doesn’t mean they’re gone forever…. Not at all.”

The phone rang and Fenn, in the entryway to the kitchen, reached behind him and answered it.

“ ’Ello?”

“’Ey, Fenn, it’s me.”

“Paul?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s Paul,” Fenn told Todd. “What’s going on, Paul. You all haven’t done anything foolish, have you?”

“Well, we’ve done a lot foolish,” Paul said, “But none of it has affected the money. I just called to say we’re in Southern Georgia.”

“They’re in Southern Georgia,” Fenn said. “God, that sounds like a long way off.”

“Did you know,” Todd, who was one for fun facts swiveled around and said, “that when John Adams traveled from Boston to Philadelphia for the first Continental Congress, it took between three weeks?”

“No,” Fenn said.”

“No, what,” said Paul.

“Oh,” Fenn repeated it.

“Get out,” Paul said. “Well, it took us two days to get to Georgia. And tomorrow we go into Florida and, well, it’s a long skinny state. From what Dan says we’ll stop outside of some old mission and meet another contact in the mission town. Not Raoul, he’s the island contact. You know, the more I talk about it, the more excited I am.”

“I picked up on that,” Fenn noted. “When you first started talking you sounded kind of down in the mouth. I didn’t want to mention it. But you did. And then you sort of perked up at the intrigue.”

“Yeah,” Paul said.

“How’s my priest?”

“Father Dan is amazing. I keep on thinking I should talk to him. Like he’d be good to know.”

“Dan is good to know. Most of the time.”

“You knew him before he was a priest, right?”

“I knew him when we were both kids.”

“Oh. So you know him know him.”

“Yeah,” Fenn laughed. “I know him know him. That’s why he’s got four—” Fenn stopped himself. “That’s why he’s got four jelly doughnuts.”

“What?” Paul said. “The phone’s petering out. It sounded like you said doughnuts.”

The phone was petering out. Fenn shouted: “Nevermind.”

He wanted to say something cryptic like, “The phones have ears,” but if the phones really did have ears, wouldn’t they pick up on that, too? When you were smuggling out four hundred thousand dollars, didn’t it just make sense to be a little paranoid?

“How’s Noah?”

“God!” Paul said.

“Oh… That’s the reason you were so… desolate.”

“We’ll talk about it when I get back, all right?”

“All right,” Fenn said. “be safe. Phone’s cracking.”

“All right,” said Paul. “We’ll call tomorrow.”

And then the he hung up.

“For a minute,” Todd said, “I thought he’d called to say something happened to the money.”

“You used to not care at all,” Fenn said, stepping back into the living room. “You used to go on about how bad it was and how we couldn’t keep it. Now you’re a regular King Midas. What would John Adams say?”

“He’d say, don’t lose my fucking money.”

“No,” Fenn shook his head. “I think that’s more of an Alexander Hamilton thing.”

“Is John Adams the guy who made the beer?” Paul said, coming back into the one room they were sharing tonight. Ostensibly Paul had suggested this because it saved money, but in reality he thought Noah would be far less able to bring trouble back to a motel room he shared with a priest.

“Yeah,” Noah said. “It’s good stuff.”

“You’re thinking of Sam Adams,” Dan said, closing his breviary, and crossing himself. “He was John Adam’s cousin. And, incidentally, I don’t know if he made beer or not. The beer’s just named after him.”

“Oh,” said Paul, having one of those moments when he thought that going off to California had put huge gaps in his education. He vowed to read more.

“John Adams was our second president,” Dan continued.

“Oh, John Quincy Adams,” Noah said.

“John Quincy Adams was the sixth president,” Dan clarified, “and he was John Adam’s son.”

“So, a whole family,” Paul noted.

Noah sang, “The Addam’s fam-il-y,” and snapped his fingers.

For some reason it bugged Paul that Noah didn’t mind being stupid.

Dan thought of bringing up Abigail Adams and talking about David McCullough, but he always had a sense that he talked too much about things most people cared far too little about, one reason he kept his sermons short and sweet. So Dan rose, stretched, and said:

“For once, it’s really a beautiful night. I think I’ll go out and enjoy it. You can see stars here, you know?” As an after thought he added, “Anyone care to join me?”

“I’m gonna take the van out and see about the life around here,” Noah said. “Of course I’ll leave the Bag with you guys.”

Somewhere they had agreed to refer to it as The Bag, never mentioning what was in it. Like a Catholic around the tabernacle there was a casual sense of sacredness with which they regarded the Bag and its unnamable contents.

Dan nodded and Paul said, “Actually, I would like to go see the stars with you, Father.”

They all set out, but not before Dan had securely hidden the Bag. Where, he wondered, would I not look if I were a thief? And then that’s where he put it.

“That,” Dan said, stretching out and pointing, “is my favorite. Andromeda. It’s a whole family of stars clumped right up there. Her mother was vain and boasted about how beautiful her daughter was, so a goddess demanded she tie her to a rock where she would be destroyed by a great monster.”

“Wasn’t that a movie?”

“Oh, yes,” said Dan. “Not a very good one. But, yes. And Perseus came, some say with the flying sandals of the god Hermes, and he had just killed Medusa, and he held up her head and it was so ghastly—”

“It turned the monster to stone.”

“Yes. And then, of course, Perseus married the beautiful princess. And see, there is Perseus. And see, upside down on her throne is her mother, who got her into all the mess.”

“Is that why the gods put her there upside down?”

Dan looked at Paul and grinned.

“Yes, I think so.”

“I wish the gods were still around today,” Paul reflected. “There’re a lot of people I’d like to see them hang upside down in the sky.

“See, I wish I’d paid more attention in school. I wish I’d gone to college. You know what I used to do, right?”

“Yes,” Paul said. “I know a little bit about it.”

“Well, sometimes what I really regret, more than what people think I’m supposed to regret, is feeling like I’m never smart enough. Like the smart people are the ones I’m working for. I always felt like I should have gone to school, should have read more. So I could know about stars and…. Gods and… Medusa.”

“Well, you already know about Medusa,” Dan said with a smile.

“But you know what I mean. I hate just being some dumb ex-stripper, ex-escort who did dirty movies. I think that’s the worst part of it, being dumb.”

“Look, Paul,” Dan sat up straight. “I haven’t known you very long, but you’re not dumb. Not at all—”

“I thought the second president of the United States was the guy who invented the beer! If I’d got up and gone to college—”

“You’d probably still think that. Look, don’t get me wrong. School is a great thing. Really, I loved it. Most of the time. And… maybe you could have made better use of the last few years of your life than how you did. It’s not mine to say. However this is mine to say. The real school is this world, and that’s how people find out about things. They want to know. They want to know things, Paul! And they don’t let the fact that they don’t know everything get them down. They make it a friend.

“Whatever you did in the past, and whatever you don’t want to do anymore doesn’t matter. It’s what you do now. And right now you are this really good person who knows that John Adams was the second president of the United States and his son John Quincy Adams was the sixth and Sam Adams was his cousin and he didn’t invent the beer, and his wife Abigail Adams wrote great letters and was a feminist and an ardent opponent of slavery.”

“Actually, I didn’t know that last part.”

“But you do now. That’s my point. And if you know something like, Abigail Adams was a feminist and an ardent opponent of slavery, if you know the last paragraph out of my mouth, and that Cassiopeia was Andromeda’s mother and Perseus saved her life by holding up the head of the Gorgon to a monster and turning the monster to stone, then right now, you know more than three fourths of the people you’ve ever met who’ve made you feel stupid.”