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Friday, January 1st, 2010
excerpted from the forthcoming novel Summer of Hate
PART ONE: 2005
1/CATT: HER KILLER
There are some people who like feeling like they’ve arrived at the end of the earth, the opacity of an alien place.
Catt stands outside her room at the Villa Vitta Motel. A slight western breeze off the Gulf flavors the desert morning with promise – a promise Catt knows will seem like a distant memory in the harsh glare of 11 a.m. She’s wearing the same clothes she dropped on the floor after arriving last night – a brown gathered skirt and a cardigan sweater, her “Mexican” clothes – not that these clothes are especially ethnic, but when she’s in Mexico she puts on whatever things she pulls first out of her bag. Catt drove down here in a rush. Her black shoulder-length hair is pulled off her face with a sweatband she found in the gym bag she forgot to unload from her car.
The rooms at the Villa Vitta are set behind stucco arches attached to an awning that offers two feet of shade. Straight ahead, there’s a badly paved two-lane road and beyond it, a blue strip of water.
Looking down the cement strip under the awning, Catt sees she isn’t alone. Outside #10 there’s a plastic lawn chair and a cooler of beer in front of a new Ford 150 truck with Oregon plates. She and her small mixed-breed dog are in #8.
Otherwise, the motel is empty. It’s a Tuesday morning in March 2005 – it’s unlikely this neighbor is here on vacation, he must be working. Even though the town doesn’t look exactly ripe for development, he could be some kind of construction surveyor, which
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means he’ll be gone most of the day.
Catt feels somewhat safe and relieved. Since she threw her nylon duffel bag in the car yesterday morning she’s put more than 600 miles between herself and the person who threatened to kill her. The person was male, but whenever someone impressed her, Catt rarely focused on gender. Her killer identified this as one of her pr0blems. Moreover, he, the killer, “my killer,” as Catt told herself, would be driving an older black BMW sedan that luckily seemed not very well suited to Baja back roads.
“Is that a threat or a promise?” Catt remembers this as a comeback used by the neighborhood kids she used to run with. The repertoire of repetitive phrases among 11 year olds in her exurban blue-collar town had been somewhat limited, and Catt remembers very little of this. There was also, “Tom Tit,” meaning small, used by Jeffrey Kader when comparing her chest to her friend Nancy O’Reilly’s and the ever-popular “My ass your face,” used by the boys when Catt and her friends fawningly asked for a match to light their Kool cigarettes.
Three and a half decades and several continents later, Catt no longer smokes on a regular basis but she still has small tits, “the kind of tits that will hold up ‘til she’s 60,” as a colleague of hers appreciatively wrote in Index or Purple or Nylon about Charlotte Rampling. But yes – Catt’s current problem was she’d seen her killer’s threat as a welcoming promise. She was tired of running the show, she didn’t know how else to stop. The death she imagined was preceded by pleasure, a dreamy trance ending blackness. It did not occur to her, ever, that the moment of her actual death – which would take place in Acapulco – would involve any actual pain, any stabbing or gunfire. She pictured herself in a hotel room signing binders of trust deeds, her hand invisibly guided by the gaze of her killer, transferring her assets to him.
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