Hothouse

By Maxwell Robinson

Delta Dawn was on the radio and a whore was riding shotgun. In the contours of her face he could make out a dozen or so soft implications, a brow unfurrowed but tracing its own outline as if it were, lipstick on the corners of a mouth bleeding into reluctant grins, heavy eyeshadow and a craned-back neck letting the light trickle down the semicircle curve of a hairline to paint her visage as sugar skull, her lips flattened to implicate her teeth, clenched to implicate her jaw, turned upright to implicate her neck and shoulders, dripping down the forensic indentations of her breasts and pooling in a theoretical navel to implicate him. Then, reversing their trajectory, pooling in discarded packs of Kools and green-gray cans, notions and smells and ideas of earthiness floating up from matted floorboards, wrapping around ankles and exploring calves made topographic with occasional razorburn, pausing before her knees. 

Jerry Varnadoe turned the volume down and leaned back. He made sure to put his hand at 12 o’clock on the wheel but not to grip it so tightly that it would show in his knuckles and forearms and that the skin wouldn’t tense around his bones and veins and he went to finger another pack of cigarettes in the cupholder, feeling for cotton filters and not the sole upturned one he had imbued with good fortune if smoked last. He placed one in his mouth, where it lay downturned thirty degrees at a bend situated one and a half centimeters from the filter, switching hands, rolling down the window, and then placing them both at ten and two, shuffling them when his initial placement proved slightly off, then relaxing his fingers, his palms, his forearms. “I have a zippo in the glove box,” he said. 

“Mm,” she said. 

“Could you get it out for me?” he asked.

“I guess, yeah. I could.” She rolled down her window and clicked open the glove box and took out a small metal box with an American flag embossed on the side and clicked the glove box closed. 

“Yeah, that’s it. Thanks, honey.” He leaned over for her to light it and she threw it in his lap. 

He picked it up, putting one hand on twelve again, and she put her head out the window. He lit it and got rotting mint and lighter fluid smell in his lungs and breathed in and breathed out and sighed and rubbed his chin and thought about how he needed to shave and fiddled with his ballcap and went back to ten and two. The oaks overhead curved down over them and shook and sweated thick and heavy in drawling early-june heat. Jerry pumped the gas and turned them into gelatinous lanky bushes until they saw a sign that said they were entering Amite County. “We’re getting a little far out,” she said. 

“I paid for the whole night,” he said. 

“Mm,” she said. “Have you got a place to stay?” 

“I’m figuring it out,” and he said it with a grin and affected frustration so as to not seem malicious to her but to not get caught up in treacly pencilneckedness either. And then they were on another stretch of two-lane, half-paved and fraying at its edges, acne-scarred and aged, seeping and creased, craggy and serene in its senility. “Do you live down here or what?” she asked. 

His grin remained but his inflection was flat. “I don’t see how it matters one way or the other,” he said 

“Cause there’s plenty of pimps in McComb,” she said, “and that ain’t very far from here at the very least –”

“You were on the way is all,” he said/ 

“Mm,” she said. “So you ain’t from here, then.” 

The cigarette was only halfway burnt down but he tossed it out the window anyways. “No, I ain’t.” He sucked on his teeth and tried to press his tongue up through the roof of his mouth so as to reach his eyeballs. She pressed her lips back down against her teeth and strung the corners of her mouth into something that would only betray emotion vaguely. The lipstick smudges made it seem as though she’d had an allergic reaction and was trying to preserve her manners in the face of biologically-induced asphyxiation. 

“Well, what are you here for, then?” she asked. “Amite county ought to have reasons for being there. Aside from being born.” 

“I’d prefer not to be sharing my, uh, the details of my travel to every woman I wind up meeting on the way.” He thought to himself that his attempt at being enigmatic had come across more as a halfhearted coquettishness, less charming than perverted. He did not realize it but he saw in her something to be seduced. Or maybe he did by way of synonyms. He did most things by way of synonyms. Archetypes, though he’d balk at the word, having long since donned the habit of enlightened anti-intellectualism, which primarily found its expression in the form of anti-polysyllabism – a loose enough habit, one able to smuggle chosen quirks cribbed from television screens, articles, internet feeds, the odd movie, the reluctantly-parsed book – that did well to obscure the shame of five semesters of college in affected philistinism. He supposed now that he was a minor role in the oeuvre of Harry Dean Stanton, a milky-lens photo of a trucker in an election year, a half-remembered Waylon Jennings song. 

“So where are we going to stay?” she asked. 

“A motel in Gloster I’ve been to,” he replied. “It ought to still be here.”

“So it isn’t your first time through here,” she said. 

“How’s it your concern?” he asked. 

“Well, you wouldn’t be just passing through, because Amite doesn’t really run through anything, unless you saw Monroe and figured you wanted to keep going for a while.” She snickered through her nose and did not open her mouth. He didn’t say anything. 

“And there are better ways to get to Jackson,” she continued, “if you’re headed in from Texas.” 

“I never said anything about Texas,” he said. 

“I saw your plates,” she said. 

“You get this wrapped up in everyone that gives you money?” he asked. 

“Only if it’s mutual, and I figure at this point it rightly is,” she said. 

“I never said anything about it being so,” he said. 

She grinned with her mouth shut and reached into his pack of cigarettes and pulled one out and put it in her mouth. She got a bic lighter from her purse and leaned out the window and smoked some more, tapping her finger to ash only sometimes and let the flame burrow and create steep cones like elongated gumdrops. It looked to him like she was playing a game with herself, to see how long she could stretch the tips of them before they collapsed, and he eased up on the gas so as to humor her. He only saw how many freckles she had when he looked in the side mirror and her face looked like paper-mache eggshells stretched thin across a wire frame. Then she tossed the butt out the window even though it had a couple drags left on it. He figured she’d gotten bored. 

“I been to Texas once or twice,” she started. “Galveston and Corpus, I think. I don’t know. I was real little.”

“Mm,” he said. 

“I guess dad was moving around a lot back then. I don’t know. Don’t figure it matters much one way or the other.” 

“Yeah,” he said. 

They were pulling into Gloster proper now and the dirt roads had crept into asphalt flanked by reluctant sidewalks mirroring squat rectangular brown-brick buildings. There was an old ad for Pall-Malls on the side of a drugstore and a newer one for Goody’s powder on the side of a thrift store. Then to the town center, which was a four-way stop with the sheriff’s office and a law office diagonal from a gas station and a diner. A flatbed lumber truck passed by and they turned right, down a road tapering and thinning into ratty strings of tar until it shed its paving too, past the Presbyterian church, which was bigger on the inside and had pews at hard right angles in affection for god and indifference to his works, sticky-white walls refracting sunlight in ersatz Greco-Romanism, that he had heard was a field hospital at one point in the Civil War, where the kids at sunday school would point to discolorations in the new linoleum and say that there were bloodstains. 

Then a left turn, a right, then contending with the overripe, bloated sun inspecting itself as it began its descent, past chain-link fences and barking dogs, into something resembling a parking lot which led to a shack connected to a two-story u-shape with twenty-four doors and twenty-four numbers on the front of them in black paint, with a look like it’d been yellowing and peeling since it’d been under construction, slumping its shoulders into contortionistic quadrupedal writhing, spanish roofs perched like cheap toupees, catching beads of sweat and letting them settle in brows and lashes, stretching into crisp wrinkles and crouching, rotating its wrists, craning its neck, testing the backs of its teeth with tongue.

They parked the car and got out. Jerry had a suitcase with him, the girl didn’t even have a change of clothes. The door was down a sketched-in little gravel pathway and the door made an electronic ding when they opened it. The guy at the counter was a thin man with aviator-frame glasses and slicked-back hair. He looked as though all the weight in his body was gradually converging on his forehead and his neck was powerless to support his skull for much longer. 

“Hello,” the man said, with a timbre and a shakiness that seemed not to derive from anxiety so much as it did from a physical frailty of the larynx. 

“Three nights,” Jerry said, reaching for his wallet. “How much’ll that wind up setting me back?” 

“But you’ve only got me for the one,” she interjected, hands balled at her sides, still smiling with her mouth closed. Jerry did not look back at her and pushed his lips upwards so as to touch the base of his nose. 

“I’ll get you back tomorrow morning,” Jerry said. 

“What time?” she asked. 

“We’ll figure it out,” Jerry said. 

The clerk smirked like a vole and Jerry thought that someone ought to kill him, though he wasn’t sure who. “Sixty dollars, sir,” he said, and when Jerry gave him three twenties he handed him a key with a blue tag that read ‘207’. 

And they went back out the front door and it made another electronic ding through a speaker they couldn’t see and went up a set of stairs that squished under their feet because of carpeting that felt soggy and really wasn’t and wood that they felt ought to have been wet and rotted out, even though it wasn’t any of those things either. Then they went in the door and turned the overhead light on and the room was burnt yellow like puke or ronsonol. There were two beds and a couch, all green-beige and covered in plastic sheets. A small, cheap TV was on a wooden stand next to a bible and there was a lamp and an electrical outlet and a radio alarm clock on a nightstand, which looked like it was made out of plastic or some kind of cheap laminate. 

She went over to the television and put on the news and he went to the bathroom. He didn’t have to piss, he just looked at himself in the mirror. He set his ballcap down and pawed at some matted-down brown hair blackened with sweat and pulled it down to cover some of the lines that had been creeping into what he thought was a too-broad forehead, to in its mattedness and blackenedness draw away from the three lines threatening to puncture the corners of his eyes, to how his stubble made a round head with a squared-off jaw seem somewhere between ponderous and matronly. He inhaled under his shirt and smelled dry cold sweat and cigarettes and energy drinks. Then he splashed water on his face and went back into the room and the TV was saying something about a drive-by in Pike County. She’d taken her shoes off and was sat criss-crossed on the bed with bare feet and red toenail polish. Her hair looked bigger and more ginger, like she’d draped her head in the pelt of a small mammal. 

Her face was all gradients and discolorations. In the antiseptic yellow light he could notice the bumps and grooves and ridges of pimples and craters smothered in concealer applied thickly but unevenly, the suggestions of purple blooming from under black eyeshadow, the ridges of chromatically-cut fake eyelashes not long enough to reach the denouement of a proper curl. Flaws of habit, not of form, in any case. And in these flaws he could make out the staging ground for an offensive: he saw his in as being the method by which he would cripple her. He had begun to construct an image of her in his mind of the silhouette of a femme fatale, of someone whose latent femininity he would be forced to coax out of perpetually pursed lips, whom he would be forced to brutalize and ignore, to thrash about and neglect, to whittle down to a base girlishness which he could then coddle and sweeten by the force of his will alone. The matter of her prostitution was of no concern to him; if anything it provided a means where he could elaborate upon his theories of seduction in a controlled environment, where he could oscillate freely and observe, record responses to each whim he indulged, and modify his own habit accordingly. 

“What’ve you got that shit turned on for?” he asked. She didn’t say anything, just leaning back and crossing her arms and letting out a reverse-gulped sigh through her nose. Jerry picked the remote up off the bed and clicked his thumb down the list of stations until he found an old James Dean movie and left it on and sat next to her. 

“You ever watch this before?” he asked. She leaned forward and cupped her hands around her chin so he could only see the back of her head. 

“Nah,” she said. “Ain’t seen a ton of older movies.” 

“You ought to rectify that,” he said, enunciating every consonant in ‘rectify’ so as to lengthen the drawl through his nose by way of his teeth. “That’s Jim Dean there. He’s good in this.” 

“Sorta good looking too,” she said. 

“Naw,” he said. “He’s too pretty to be good looking.” 

“I don’t mind that he’s pretty,” she said. 

“I just don’t think he could look after nobody,” he said. 

“I guess he’d make a cute girl,” she said. 

“Don’t get queer on me,” he said. “He’s dead, anyways.” 

“I ain’t queer,” she said. “I just think he’d be cute is all.” 

“Quit being fucking dumb,” he said.

“I ain’t dumb,” she said. 

“How much school did you end up doing,” he said. 

“I don’t think it matters a whole lot,” she said. 

“Are you still in school?” he asked. “Is this how you’re paying for it?” 

“I said I don’t think it matters,” she said. 

“You were asking me shit earlier,” he said. 

“That’s different,” she said. “I think you know it’s different.” 

“I’m just trying to get cozy with you is all,” he said. He tried to run his hand through her hair and she swatted it away. 

“Fuck off,” she said. 

“Don’t get coy on me,” he said. He grinned and touched her hair again and she didn’t swat his hand away. 

“I ain’t being coy,” she said. “I mean it.” 

He grabbed her shoulder and pulled her onto her back so he could see her face and got to where he could move in to straddle her, sitting on his shins with his knees touching her shoulder and her hair was flat on the bed behind her like a ratty peacock and he leaned down to kiss her so he could smear her makeup all over her face and paint her in red gradient splotches and tear apart the sketch he had of her head and segment it into independent hamlets of nose, eyes, mouth, ears, forehead and chin and steal away her prettiness so she wouldn’t have anything else that he didn’t have, but she kept her mouth pinched tight like red wax on cheese and her teeth were razor wire behind her lips so he started licking her face all over like a dog until she scratched her green drugstore nails down his arm and he yelled and smacked her across the face and she yelled back at him and called him a fucking piece of shit and a fucking son of a bitch and a bastard and he screamed at her what the fuck was that what the fuck was that. 

“I don’t want to do none of that,” she said, face turned towards the bathroom.” “Fuck you mean,” he said. 

“I mean I don’t want to do none of that,” she said. “I ain’t saying it to say it. I don’t like that shit.” 

“Quit being a tease,” he said. He dragged his feet in lopsided semicircles back toward the bed. 

“I’m being fucking serious,” she said. “I ain’t a fucking tease.” 

“Are you usually this ornery with your clientele?” he asked. And he enunciated his consonants the same way. 

“You paid me to fuck you,” she said. “I don’t got to like you.” 

“You ought to look at me more,” he said. She did not reply. 

At this point he decided to dispense with his methodology. He did not admit that his methods had failed in their application, rather that there was something faulty in their object. A churlish juvenalia, something premature, defective, coarse, any other number of adjectives he could generate from memorized turns of phrase, something that in no way reflected the failure of his methods but rather their adaptability. He would cut his losses here. He would adapt his method in such a way that he would not use it at all, gliding on his sheer cogito into sexual encounter, and would of course be proof of his own personal magnetism. She had hitherto spent her time facing away from him, curling into herself and sinking her mind into her stomach, which he interpreted to be the result of some solipsism, narcissism or neuroticism on her part. He decided that he would address all three of her theoretical ailments by acting as though he had never theorized them at all. By extension, he would stop seeing his goal as seduction and instead view her as nothing in particular. It would be flattering to her sense of professionalism. He grabbed the remote off the bed and turned towards the TV and she spoke. “Can you keep it turned on,” she said, in a creaky low volume that stretched the pitch of her vowels like gelatin. “I like to keep it on.” 

And he tossed the remote onto the other bed and sat down next to her and started rubbing her left shoulder, making little shallow circles with his thumb and pressing in the manner of a caveman mashing berries into a thin paste against a rock. He put his other hand around her waist and did the same, insinuating in the direction of her navel. Then he moved to the top of where her thigh met her hip and leaned his chin in to touch her neck and scratched it with his bristles to see if she would do anything, if she would affirm him with reciprocity and provide entrances to herself beyond the obviousness of orifices despite his abandonment of his techniques. She sent him signals in the form of shivers and a lean forward in the same way she had done before, and was met with a pull back down to the bed in the same way he had done before, and rubbed her shoulder from the front, pressing into the bit of tissue that connected it to her chest. She bit down on her gum and teethed on its pink softness. He scraped his chin down until the side of his face lay on her stomach and breathed her sweat in through her blouse and thought about how he wanted to live inside her lungs. 

She stared at a lamp on the table and laid still and Jerry could see clearly her face sloughing down into the plastic over the bed and thinning against it until it was a two-dimensional illustration, its shading and depth removed and her attractiveness abstracted into pales like before and her hair was pressed like the petals of a sunflower. He wanted to breathe into her and make her share his lungs and she seemed as though she didn’t want to breathe anything at all, so she made quick little in-and-out breaths so it didn’t feel like there was any air inside of her and that she was nearly dead without having to commit to the whole thing. He grabbed her hand and she grabbed it away and put it on his head and Jerry thought that she wished he would die and a bass-clef crackling fuzz came up from between his tongue and his uvula and he felt like he was going to puke the same color as the paint on the walls, so he got up and sat on the ground and she sat upright on the bed and watched TV. 

He watched with her, but he’d already seen the movie a couple of times, so he could follow along from listening to the words. She just wanted to look at James Dean anyways. He looked at her and she was still while she watched it, until she smiled at it with her mouth open and he saw that she had braces with little pink rubber bands. 

He froze and blinked and breathed and blinked again. Then he got up and leaned over and pointed at her with his other hand kept at his side. 

“How old are you?” he asked. 

“Old enough,” she said. 

“You ain’t fucking old enough,” he said. 

She stood up and pointed at him back. “You don’t know that. You don’t know shit about that.” Her eyes looked fat and swollen and her cheeks looked like they were turning yellow. “You’re wearing fucking braces,” he said. 

“Lots of people wear braces,” she said, but the words dribbled down her chin in thin strings. 

He sighed and pinched the spot where the bridge of his nose met his brow and he wished that he could reach in and pull out his frontal lobe in ribbons like a mummy. “What grade are you supposed to be in,” he asked. “You don’t even gotta tell me how old you are. Just tell me what grade you’re supposed to be in. Please.” 

“I ain’t supposed to be in any grade,” she said. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. “Can you gimme a straight fucking answer here?” “I ain’t in school anymore,” she said. “I told you that already.” 

“I already paid you,” he said. “I ain’t – I ain’t gonna fuck you.” 

“I’m old enough,” she said. “I told you.” He sighed again and pinched his face in the same spot again. 

“Who bought the braces?” he asked. 

“What,” she said. 

He turned to her and stepped closer to her so she would feel his height against her and the impressions of his eyes against the tops of her eye sockets. “I mean,” he said, “who paid the orthodontist to put the fucking braces in your fucking head.” She did not say anything and instead opted to inspect his left earlobe, though as far as he knew there was nothing wrong with it. “Was it your fucking mom?” he asked. “Did your fucking mom get the fucking braces put in your head?” And he pinched his face again and let out an anorexic whimper like a dog that didn’t know why it was in pain. “Do you live with her? Does she fucking know about this?” “I don’t live with her,” she said. “I took myself to the dentist.” 

“Then how much did they cost?” he asked. 

“What – what does that have to do with anything?” she asked back. 

He paced back and forth with his head down, every five steps stopping to drag his foot across the ground like a rearing bull and hoping that his neck would extend at such an angle that his head would burrow into his ribcage. “If you bought them,” he said, “you’d know how much they cost, cause there’s no way you got insurance.” He looked up at her and her face looked like how he’d imagined it against the plastic sheet, except for her nose, which protruded and disturbed the flushness of her face like that of a trainee geisha. 

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” 

“I need to go have a cigarette,” he said. He got his keys and his wallet off the table and she sat down on the bed and watched TV some more and he went out the door and back down the stairs and past the gravel and into the parking lot and pulled on the handle and it didn’t open so he pulled on it again and the car alarm went off and he turned it off with his key and he unlocked the door and he got in and started the car and drove out of the parking lot and past the Presbyterian church and past the town center and then he turned east toward McComb and past an old ad for Chesterfields and another one for an old Civil War battleground put up by the tourism board. 

The road got less paved as he went on just like before but in reverse now, receding coarsely from asphalt into uneven clumps of dirt seasoned with pebbles and crushed twigs. There were no streetlights so the trees were just an audience and the air smelled red and wet like tongues. He thought that he felt guilty but he wasn’t sure and he really didn’t anyways, because he’d excised the guilt away from his own being and could see it as something else. He was a surgeon squeezing a bloody tumor in the palm of a rubber glove. He could pare away more at himself, conceptualize himself, turn himself more into his own object than him, really him. His badness was negated insofar and he recognized it was bad, his guiltiness the same, scrape away all the clumps congealed in the inner linings of his brainpan or whatever else there was to him and lay it in front of him and peer at them through microscope lenses and clad himself in sterile white cloth that could obscure his finer points, that could swaddle him in its formlessness and that he could shape himself to fill, not with fat or muscle and skin and bone but lines, thick-bolded and dot-dash lines of nothing. Delta Dawn was on the radio but this time it was sung by Waylon Jennings. He figured he was fifteen miles out now and he found another little town he didn’t recognize and pulled into the parking lot of a gas station. 

He reached into the glove box and pawed at a .38 special with dark-stained crosshatched wood grips he got cheap at a pawn shop a couple years back. He set it in his palm and set his other hand over it and squeezed it like he was trying to smother a mouse and leaned back and breathed in and breathed out and he grabbed his lighter from the cupholder and dropped it in the floorboards. He put the gun in his mouth, slipping the barrel between his lips and teasing the gap in his front teeth with the front sight. He wrapped his tongue around the muzzle and folded its tip, attempting with halfhearted battering-ram motions to slip it down its opening. He bit down on it until his gums hurt and for a few minutes he suckled on it, as if he were trying to propel a cartridge into his brain without the assistance of gunpowder, as if it were a teat. Then he took the gun out of his mouth and put it in the cupholder and tried to fall asleep for about fifteen minutes.