A Conspiracy of Tall Men by Noah Hawley

Author:Noah Hawley [Hawley, Noah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

When Roy was twelve he watched a glass move across a table by itself in a motel room in Charleston, South Carolina. He was a boy in torn jeans with a blond crew cut, who had recently begun his growth toward adulthood with a sudden six-inch spurt. His knees were scabbed. He was sharing a room with his sister. His parents, Jim and Kathy, were next door at an Italian restaurant drinking jug wine. The motel was a dilapidated two-story Holiday Inn. The water in the pool was a disingenuous shade of green. They had come for a funeral, an uncle Roy had never met who had died in a nursing home next to a box factory on the dirty side of the river.

The glass in question had been used by Roy earlier that day for water from the bathroom tap. Now it was empty and dry, a squat, slightly spotty highball glass that had worn a little paper hat when Roy fetched it from the toilet tank. Leslie was on the floor, lying on her stomach kicking her heels. She was using a purple crayon to draw hair on a horse. She had made an olive sun and grass as blue as the ocean. When Leslie grew up she would harbor a secret longing for the comforting warmth of a woman’s touch. She would drink vodka straight from the bottle one night at a frat party and end up naked and disoriented on a pool table. She would move to the countryside after graduation and study veterinary sciences. The local townspeople would know her as Dr. Biggs. Eventually she would marry Jeffrey Dobbs, who would later become a congressman. Lying on the floor of a motel room that smelled like feet, none of this was written, however. She was just a nine-year-old girl shellacking a coloring book with unpopular crayon colors, the awful greens and barbaric browns, the flesh-colored pinks and olive-tinted yellows.

Roy was sitting on one of the lax, concave beds. It was a humid summer day, a puzzled blue sky holding its breath, quietly longing for thunderstorms but finding only heat and light. The air conditioner in their room struggled and chugged. Roy put down his copy of The Return of Tarzan. He wore a T-shirt with a logo for the band AC/DC on it his father had bought him last spring. That summer he had started working on his cousin’s fishing boat off Puget Sound. His mother said it was cute that he was developing little chest muscles and little arm muscles and little leg muscles. He was no longer just a little boy. He was now a little boy who ate like a horse. The funeral was tomorrow morning. All the relatives were flying in and checking into similar hotels and motels. The uncle had encountered the unfortunate circumstance of dying alone in a city none of his family regularly frequented. He’d lived his last few years afraid that his children would show up after his death and pry the gold from his teeth.

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