Her Name Was The Whippoorwill

ON FRIDAY Emory Means drove his pickup out to the Seneca reservation in upstate New York to buy a couple of cartons of cigarettes and a tank of cheap gas and then drove back to the Bull’s Head Hotel, where he lived and worked. He was forty-three years old, and he worked evenings, from three to eleven, behind the desk at the hotel, which was just two blocks from the south shore of Lake Ontario. The hotel was run-down. Emory liked to say it had a little dirt under its fingernails and a few fillings in its teeth.

He ate a late lunch in the hotel’s taproom, a local dish called “Dutch lettuce,” which is cabbage sautéed with onions and bacon and served with buttered rye toast. Afterward he went up to his room to get a book to read during his shift. The elevator was broken, so Emory had to climb five flights, and when he got there, he was tired. He poked his head out the window and smoked one of his Seneca cigarettes. His fingers smelled like gasoline. He watched a cement ship from Canada troll through the river and the drawbridge go up to let it through. The neighborhood was quiet and slow. He considered the three books he was currently reading: a study of the Christological nature of Jesus as found in the Gospel of John, a novel by D.H. Lawrence called Sons and Lovers, and a history of the eastern American forests. He decided on the novel, then picked up a carton of cigarettes and went downstairs.

At three o’clock he started his shift behind the desk. Business at the hotel was slow. Most of the rooms were rented long term and paid for with disability and Social Security checks. There was little turnover. Emory unwrapped two packs of cigarettes and shook them into an empty fishbowl behind the front desk so he could sell them to the taproom drunks for twenty-five cents apiece. He looked at the newspaper and then read his novel. At 8:30 the sun went down, and Emory stepped out in front of the hotel to have a smoke. It was June and that time of evening when everything was peaceful and lovely and the ordinary sounds seem somehow more gentle and comforting — even the men arguing in front of the off-track betting parlor up the street and the distant rumble of a train carrying film-developing chemicals into Kodak Park. A sea gull called from the docks. Emory thought the sky looked tender, as if it might bruise if you touched it. He thought about Renee.

Emory was falling in love with a woman named Renee Kelly, who worked from three to eleven at Kodak, a shift they called “the b trick.” On Friday nights she came into the taproom for drinks after work, and they often sat and talked, but nothing had happened between them. Emory had been married once, when he was twenty-two, but it had lasted only a hundred days. By his accounting, he had been in love exactly four times, and each time it had been like falling off a roof: there was a surprise at first, and then he was gone. This time with Renee seemed different, though. He had fallen in love slowly. It had been months, with every Friday night bringing a little something more, something bigger, wider.

When he went off his shift at eleven, Emory slipped his novel into a drawer and put a plate over the fishbowl to keep the smokes fresh. He bought a bottle of Genesee beer and a whiskey from Dick the bartender and paid for both with quarters from his cigarette sales. At about 11:30 Renee came in with three other women who worked at the Kodak plant. They were all dressed up as if going to the prom. Renee was wearing a cocktail dress and high-heeled shoes but still had her id badge around her neck. She was tall, and her face reminded Emory of the lake at night.

She sat down next to him at the bar and ordered a Scotch and soda.

“What’s with the dresses?” he asked.

“We’re celebrating. Cathy got a new job.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Emory said. “How was work?”

“Terrible.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. I sat in the dark and watched film spool for seven hours. Did I tell you about the old Ukrainian man who works with us? He gets so bored he howls. You can hear him down the hall in the dark.”

He wanted to tell her not to worry. He wanted to tell her that her face reminded him of the lake at night. He wanted to put her in his truck and drive her someplace clean and new — Vancouver, maybe, though he had never been there. Although he didn’t show it, Emory was sentimental and sometimes saw beauty and romance where there wasn’t any. For example, he thought it was beautiful the way a woman smoked a cigarette, even though it was probably killing her. And when he’d drunk too much as a young man and couldn’t see or hear properly and everything seemed to be underwater, he’d thought that was beautiful too. And in a way perhaps it was.

Sometimes Emory thought violence was beautiful. Once, he came out of the taproom around midnight and walked right into a fight between two men. There was two feet of snow on the ground, and more was falling. The winter waves of the lake lapped against the icy shore a couple of blocks north. One of the men bled heavily from his mouth into the snow, but the blood didn’t look red, and the snow didn’t look white. Instead they were both different shades of blue, lit by the neon light of the beer sign in the window, and it was all beautiful.

Emory drank several glasses of beer and bought another drink for Renee. He was not much of a flirt, but Renee was quite good at it. She could almost always find something interesting to say or do. One night she sang the alphabet song backward without missing a beat. Another night she went on about how much she liked the name “Emory.” Other nights she talked about her two teenage sons and her divorce. She liked Fleetwood Mac and read poetry. She told him she had once taken a poetry class and that her favorite poet was Ted Kooser.

But on this night she seemed tired of flirting. She sat and drank and talked about her job a little. “It’s the darkest dark you’ve ever seen,” she said. “In the hallways there are these soft green lights, but otherwise it’s just pitch-black. People make funny noises so you’ll know where they are.”

They talked about the weather, and Emory tried to tell her about the D.H. Lawrence novel. At one point Renee said something Emory couldn’t hear because the music was too loud.

“What did you say?” he asked.

She leaned in so close that her mouth was right in his ear. “I said, ‘I want to see your room.’ ”

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