VACANCY & ARIEL

Lucius Shepard VACANCY & ARIEL

VACANCY

Chapter 1

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. Sometimes when he’s falling asleep, the sign will switch on in his mind’s eye and glow briefly, bluely, fading as he fades.

Cliff’s no fool. Used car salesman may be the final stop on his employment track, but it’s lack of ambition, not a lack of intellect, that’s responsible for his station in life. He understands what’s happening with the sign. He’s letting it stand for something other than an empty motel room, letting it second the way he feels about himself. That’s all right, he thinks. Maybe the fixation will goad him into making a change or two, though the safe bet is, he won’t change. Things have come too easily for him. Ever since his glory days as a high school jock (wide receiver, shooting guard), friends, women, and money haven’t been a serious problem. Even now, more than thirty years later, his looks still get him by. He’s got the sort of unremarkably handsome, rumpled face that you might run across in a Pendleton catalog, and he dyes his hair ash brown, leaves a touch of gray at the temples, and wears it the same as he did when he was in Hollywood. That’s where he headed after his stint in the army (he was stationed in Germany near the end of the Vietnam War). He figured to use the knowledge he gained with a demolition unit to get work blowing up stuff in the movies, but wound up acting instead, for the most part in B-pictures.

People will come onto the lot and say, “Hey! You’re that guy, right?” Usually they’re referring to a series of commercials he shot in the Nineties, but occasionally they’re talking about his movies, his name fifth- or sixth-billed, in which he played good guys who were burned alive, exploded, eaten by monstrous creatures, or otherwise horribly dispatched during the first hour. He often sells a car to the people who recognize him and tosses in an autographed headshot to sweeten the deal. And then he’ll go home to his beach cottage, a rugged old thing of boards and a screened-in porch, built in the forties, that he bought with residual money; he’ll sleep with one of the women whom he sees on a non-exclusive basis, or else he’ll stroll over to the Surfside Grill, an upscale watering hole close by his house, where he’ll drink and watch sports. It’s the most satisfying of dissatisfying lives. He knows he doesn’t have it in him to make a mark, but maybe it’s like in the movies, he thinks. In the movies, everything happens for a reason, and maybe there’s a reason he’s here, some minor plot function he’s destined to perform. Nothing essential, mind you. Just a part with some arc to the character, a little meat on its bones.