Wall Street Noir by Peter Spiegelman

Author:Peter Spiegelman [Spiegelman, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook
Publisher: akashic books

FIVE DAYS AT THE SUNSET

BY PETER SPIEGELMAN

Lethe, South Dakota

Lethe, South Dakota. Not much to it. Not much more than a wide place at the end of an off-ramp—a frozen, flinty afterthought to the interstate, just right for gassing up, taking a leak, and heading out again. Not much to see besides the filling station and the quick-mart, the Sunset Motor Inn, the plow barn for the county road crews, and the Lethe Lounge next door. No reason to hang around.

“Not unless you’re lost or out of luck,” the desk clerk had said. She was maybe twenty, and her pimpled face was round and sort of vacant, but she’d got it exactly right. I made up a name and paid cash for the room.

There was no particular reason I stopped in Lethe—no particular draw it had over any of the hundred other shitholes I’d driven through in the past week, and nothing about the peeling paint and blistered plywood of the Sunset that was especially tempting when I pulled off the highway that first night. I hadn’t planned on anything more than a few hours sleep and maybe a shower, but when morning came I couldn’t get out of bed.

I don’t know how long I lay there, listening to the wind in the light poles, fingering the thin sheets, and smelling the mildew and my own sour breath. There was a constellation of brown stains on the ceiling, and if I squinted they looked like the outlines of the states I’d passed through. Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois. Blind panic, fear, anger, and, as I crossed the Mississippi, a floaty, detached kind of feeling. It was a funny buzz—like a contact high but more fragile. It vanished like smoke whenever I thought of Mia.

The sun had crawled right to left across the window shade by the time I managed to reach for the remote. I channel-surfed until I found CNN, and watched what passed for news until someone knocked at the door. It was the pimply girl, wearing a coat like a sleeping bag and carrying a can of Lysol and an armful of dingy towels. I pulled on some clothes and let her in. Then I went to the Lethe Lounge.

It was a cinder-block bunker with a satellite dish on the roof and chicken wire on the windows. Inside was nighttime, and the smell of beer, cigarettes, fried potatoes, and piss. There was a jukebox near the door, and a pool table and pin-ball machine in back. I hadn’t seen the cruiser in the parking lot, and I almost bolted when I noticed the state trooper at the bar. Sweat pricked on my forehead when he turned to look, and my knees went soft, but then he turned away, no more interested in me than the bartender was.

I took a deep breath and slid onto a stool and ordered a Coke. I looked at the TV mounted on the wall, and—miracle of miracles—it was tuned to CNBC. I sipped my Coke and watched, and after an hour a piece about the bank came on.

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