Read Online B005HF54UE EBOK by Willy Vlautin - Free Book Online Page B

and hung up.
    She’d phone her mom once she got to the bus station and tell her not to tell anyone where she was going. Not even Evelyn. Then she called a cab and wrote a quick note on the back of an envelope,
    Mom and Evelyn,
    Had to leave for a while, don’t worry. I’ll call and tell you what’s going on. Don’t call Jimmy. And if he calls just tell him you don’t know where I am, that I just left. I’m leaving ’cause of him. I’m sorry and I love you both,
    Allison
    She put the note on the kitchen table, hugged the dog, and left the house. She sat on her suitcase on the sidewalk and waited for the cab. When it came, the driver put her suitcase in the trunk and she got in the back seat and he drove out of her neighborhood.
    ‘I need to go to the bus station,’ she told the driver.
    ‘Where you going to?’ he asked.
    ‘Nowhere, I don’t think.’

Chapter 16
Oxbow Motel
    When the bus stopped in Reno it was nighttime, near three a.m., and she sat in the rundown bus station not knowing where to go. The other passengers disappeared and the terminal emptied, and when it did she saw the driver of her bus heading towards a back room and she asked if he knew where the casinos were. He pointed in a general direction and she picked up her suitcase and left.
    She could see street lights in the distance and a few cars passed on what seemed like a main road. She walked in the darkness towards it. She could hear the sound of a river, and as she walked closer to it and the main street, she saw the lights from the casinos. The Comstock marquee appeared, then the Sundowner, and the Sands shone in the distance by itself. She made her way to Virginia Street, the main strip the casinos lined. There were people streaming in and out of the clubs. She walked past the Virginian and the Cal Neva and Harrah’s. There were pawn shops and souvenir stores, and she passed them and finally saw a motel called the Oxbow. A small yellow building with an ox, in neon, on the side.
    The front desk clerk was an old Indian man who spoke poor English. He told her a weekly room was $150. She filled out the card and paid him in cash. He gave her the key and she carried her suitcase up to the room, locked the door behind her, put a chair underneath the knob, and sat on the bed and cried.
    The room had a double bed, a desk, a dresser, a TV, and a bathroom. She’d never been in a motel room by herself, let alone in a city. She’d barely even left Las Vegas and now she’d done so by herself. The crying wouldn’t stop. She shut off the lights in the room and got in bed still wearing her clothes. Pictures of Jimmy appeared in her mind. The time he had gotten them a suite at Caesars, or when they’d go swimming in the lake. Times when he was decent to her, when he was kind. In the darkness she found the phone. It sat on a bedside table and she held it. She wanted to call him, to give in, but she also hated herself for wanting to so badly.
    As the night wore on, her anxieties worsened. She couldn’t sleep. Her body shook. She wanted to die. To disappear. To have the cleaning lady come in and find nothing, not a trace that she had ever been there. Not a trace she’d ever been anywhere or done anything in the world.

Chapter 17
Three Months
    The next morning she woke early and walked up and down the small strip of casinos which littered downtown. From a payphone she called her mother and told her she’d left for good, that she’d gone to Reno to get away from Jimmy Bodie.
    Her mother didn’t understand why she’d leave town, why she’d go to Reno of all places. The girl tried to explain it, and finally told her mother of a time when he had locked her in the trunk of his car. She had passed out at a party only to awaken in the darkness of a trunk. He left her in there overnight. In the parking lot across the street from his apartment.
    Her mother began crying.
    ‘Let me come get you,’ she said.
    ‘I can’t go back there,’ the girl