As he steps back into the office, Frank nods and says, “Night,” again. Frank closes the door and locks it behind Erik and Erik is alone in the Farm Inn.
Not knowing what to expect, he opens up the door leading into the hallway. The door shakes and groans like an alcoholic suffering through a case of the DTs. It needs a good oiling. The hallway seems to be lit by votive lights, it is so dim. In between the doors to the five rooms that line the hallway to his left are small plastic candles that are topped with dim orange bulbs that are shaped like flames. They blink slowly on and off to give the impression of a wavering flame. The hallway has a weird, throbbing orange glow. To his immediate right, Erik sees a set of wooden, handmade steps that look like a boy scout project gone wrong, like someone gave a fourth grader some 2 x 4’s, some nails, and a hammer. At the other end of the hallway is one door marked, exit and another marked, washroom. Three ceiling fans are spaced equidistant from each other, shoving around the stagnant, woodsy air in ineffective circles.
The walls seem to be made of reclaimed wood, maybe from other old barns, Erik thinks. They are roughly cut, unsanded boards and he doesn’t want to think about how many splinters he’d get by running his hand down one.
The steps sound like they’re going to snap or break with every movement he makes climbing up them. Erik runs up the remainder of them unleashing a chorus of racket like a set of creaky shutters getting tossed around by a storm. In front of room number 11, maybe ten feet from the stairs, Erik puts his bag down and inserts the non-black key into the lock, and opening the door. Just as in the hallway, his room is covered with a fake grass, plastic green carpet that he recognizes as the playing surface of miniature golf courses. He smiles to himself and decides that he likes this place. The exterior definitely has character, but the interior decorating moves it up into another level of novelty. It was 1989, he thinks, but there was no way that anything in this place was manufactured later than 1960. He couldn’t wait to tell everybody about it when he got home. Nobody would believe there’s actually a place like this out here, only in Wisconsin.
He should be carrying a putter over his shoulder and knocking around a bright pink ball through obstacles or under a windmill’s spinning blades on this carpeting. Do they vacuum this stuff or just hose it down and squeegee it off, he wonders. The first thing he decides to do is hit the bathroom before settling in.
Erik is surprised to find the fake grass covering the bathroom’s floor as well. Now he definitely hopes there is water and lots of soap involved in its cleaning process. A vacuum would not be sanitary enough. The bathroom is cleaner than he expected and he gives the bathtub/shower a cursory glance to decide if he will use it tomorrow morning. A dull orange ring circles the bathtub and he makes another mental note, this one deciding to skip a shower the next morning. He walks back to his room after emptying his bladder feeling hollow and ready to crawl into bed.
The bolt clicks as he turns it into the locked position and he steps up on to his bed to pull a chain and start the ceiling fan spinning. Erik plops down into a surprisingly comfortable bed and looks at the wooden, behemoth of a television set past his feet. A relic from the 50’s, he realizes it won’t have a remote and he doesn’t possess the energy to get up to turn on the thing and so leaves it off. There is a lamp on the right side of the bed on top of a nightstand with an ashtray sitting next to it.
Despite his lack of energy, Erik does not fall immediately asleep as is usually the case. The stuffiness of the room even with the fan turning gets to him and forces him, begrudgingly, to get out of bed and slide open the window of his room. A large reading chair is next to the lamp, in between the bed and the window. It is ugly, but looks comfortable. Covered in a standard black and red flannel pattern, Erik wonders how many lumberjacks were killed so that it could be made. Deciding to have one last cigarette before bed, he steps back on the bed and pulls the other chain down, turning the light off, but leaving the ceiling fan spinning.
Moving back to the chair, Erik sits down. It sucks him in, hugging him in all the right ways. He takes one long, first drag after lighting the cigarette and sets it down in the black, plastic ashtray on the nightstand. Nicotine fails at its job as a stimulant and now with a breeze drifting in through the window Erik falls asleep without even considering it.
The rumble of a truck engine shutting down and car doors slamming yank Erik rudely out of his slumber. His room smells of ash and he remembers the cigarette he only took one drag off of and sits up to see a cigarette’s length of ash leaning, propped up in the ashtray. The cigarette had burned itself out. He feels lucky to have not started a fire. Without thinking of it, Erik pulls out another cigarette and lights it, as is his routine upon waking.
The digital alarm clock’s red numbers glow 3:07 in the darkness. He had only slept for maybe an hour. Burning eyes force him to blink and he looks out of the open window to see what awoke him.
His room overlooks the parking lot behind the motel and he sees two men walking away from their Ford pickup holding what seems to be the figure of a woman between them. One man is tall and appears gaunt and pale wearing a black, leather, motorcycle vest with no shirt underneath it. He has long, black wavy hair that rolls back down his head all the way to his shoulders in a greasy waterfall of a mane that shines under the one bulb that illuminates the parking lot. The other man is at least a foot shorter, but is squat and round like an old Volkswagen Beetle. The fat man has a black t-shirt that’s probably a triple extra large but still looks painted on to his massive arms and stomach. His head is completely bald and he attempts to compensate for it by wearing a graying beard that is long and wiry. Erik immediately thinks of the beards he saw flipping through the sepia-toned photographs in the textbook for his American History: The Civil War class last semester. Together, the men look like some freaky biker version of Laurel and Hardy.
Erik sits up and leans in closer to the window’s opening. The lighting is poor, the single naked bulb not giving off enough light to let him get a good glimpse of their faces. The two men each have an arm around the blonde’s shoulders. Her head is lolling back and forth like she’s drugged or unconscious. As her hair reflects the light, it appears a platinum white. Erik thinks that it just might be Sheila before catching himself and realizing where he is, it couldn’t be.
Erik brings his cigarette up to his mouth, but then quickly pulls it down, worried that the men might see its glowing tip or the smoke rising from it. When he leans back away from the window, one of the men looks up towards his room. He doesn’t think the man can see him in the shadows.
Grinding the cigarette out in the ashtray, Erik listens to the men open the door and gently close it behind them.
Erik is afraid to move. Not sure that he understands what he just saw, he tries to decide if those men were just helping the woman to their room or if it was something else, something he really didn’t want to imagine.
Their silence is most frightening to him. They weren’t joking, laughing, or even angry, they just seemed calm and serious.
Another cigarette is lit although he had just put one out, if he could just find out for sure what is happening down there in that room. He has had too little sleep and doesn’t believe he is thinking straight...
-Dan Fleischhacker of Oakdale, MN
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