4.1 Space Empty: Pine Tree Motel, Room 111, Oasis, Oregon

Mr. Brown has a wife that never lifts a finger to help.  She hasn’t since 1972.  She was twenty-six.  She’d played right field for the church softball team.  They had a son, he was three weeks old, almost four.  Mr. Brown did not notice the baby was dead on the morning the baby was dead.  Mrs. Brown found him.  And when she did, she swaddled him tightly and ran in search of Mr. Brown.  Three rungs up from the asphalt, she stumbled on their apartment stairs, then the screams came, the first since she’d found her dead son.  Mr. Brown was being unfaithful at that moment.  At that time, still a relatively young man, he wasn’t all bad, just mostly.  And from inside the apartment where he had stopped being unfaithful but had not yet zipped up his pants, he decided against going out to help his wife with the baby.  He did not understand yet that his son was dead in his wife’s arms.  After the funeral, Mrs. Brown developed a limp and a lot of excess weight.  She stopped playing ball. She stopped going to church.  She stopped lifting a finger.

A hardware store employee, Mr. Brown, worked for his parents at the time.  The population was small and their business was small and Mr. Brown’s checks were small, but they got by.  They had no more children and that was a savings, and his folks, the elder Browns, passed on within thirteen months of each other.  It was in the hardware business he discovered the value of barter.  The physical exchange of goods and services.  A heavy-duty wheelbarrow for a roll in the hay.  A pitchfork for a blow-job.  Naturally, the superstores (Wal-Mart 30 miles east and K-Mart about twelve miles south) put him out of the hardware business.  Locals found Brown’s Hardware prices a little too high.  The Browns could not compete and decided to take what they could for the narrow storefront and sink it into a little motel.  The Pine Tree Motel.  Twenty-four rooms; twelve down and twelve up; plus living quarters with handicapped ramps and wide doors attached to the Office.  Mrs. Brown was by now in a wheelchair, her limp had not gone well with age and her excess weight had become more than merely unwieldy.  Mr. Brown in these times was far less successful with bartering attempts, but that did not deter his efforts.

The space in front of room 111 was empty.  One of his favorites had flown the coop and  it not even light yet outside.  What was she thinking?  The Gas-M-Up Lucky over in Teensy Bit wouldn’t be open for at least another hour; those Markelson brothers were not early risers.  Unlike Mr. Brown, who was.  There were things to be attended to that needed attentions early, when travelers were just stretching into wakefulness, finding their ways to the shower, undressing.  He was sorely disappointed that his favorite, Sunny Lindegarde, out of Lincoln, was off and gone so early.  For today, she would be the one that got away; for tomorrow, for tomorrow, well, he would just have to wait and see.  The peephole was there, through the wall from 110, and he would be there.  If it took earlier than today, so be it.  Mr. Brown would not miss her rising again.

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