VACANCY & ARIEL

Начало книги

CLIFF CORIA HAS been sitting in a lawn chair out front of the office of Ridgewood Motors for the better part of five years, four nights a week, from mid-afternoon until whenever he decides it’s not worth staying open any longer, and during that time he’s spent, he estimates, between five and six hundred hours staring toward the Celeste Motel across the street. That’s how long it’s taken him to realize that something funny may be going on. He might never have noticed anything if he hadn’t become fascinated by the sign in the office window of the Celeste. It’s a No Vacancy sign, but the No is infrequently lit. Foot-high letters written in a cool blue neon script: they glow with a faint aura in the humid Florida dark:

VACANCY

That cool, blue, halated word, then…that’s what Cliff sees as he sits in a solitude that smells of asphalt and gasoline, staring through four lanes of traffic or no traffic at all, plastic pennons stirring above his head, a paperback on his knee (lately he’s been into Scott Turow), at the center of gleaming SUVS, muscle cars, minivans, the high-end section where sit the aristocrats of the lot, a BMW, a silver Jag, a couple of Hummers, and the lesser hierarchies of reconditioned Toyotas, family sedans with suspect frames that sell for a thousand dollars and are called Drive-Away Specials. He’s become so sensitized to the word, the sign, it’s as if he’s developed a relationship with it. When he’s reading, he’ll glance toward the sign now and again, because seeing it satisfies something in him. At closing time, leaving the night watchman alone in the office with his cheese sandwiches and his boxing magazines, he’ll snatch a last look at it before he pulls out into traffic and heads for the Port Orange Bridge and home.

Читать дальше →