for a room, she asked us how long we wanted it for, as if it were unusual for patrons to stay an entire night. She handed us the keys with a look that said, Don’t get your hopes up.
Our hopes were modest indeed as we drove around to the back of the tavern. There things seemed a little quieter, at least at first. There were no lights on in any of the other rooms. Deedie and I unloaded the car and the dog, got ourselves into the bed, and closed our eyes, holding on to each other for dear life. The dog slept at our feet.
Sometime during the night, we heard a scratching sound on the door. It was Deedie who heard it first. “Jim,” she whispered to me, “wake up.”
“Hunh? What?” I said, emerging from a dream in which I was somehow back at the graveyard in Centralia. I thought I smelled smoke.
“There’s something,” she said. “At the door.”
Lucy raised her head and growled. We’d changed her K-9 Kotex before settling into bed at the One Season that night, but it was hard to know how long ago that had been. The scratching sound on the door came again.
I pulled the curtain aside to see a large German shepherd standing outside our door. He looked at our room with a sense of fierce entitlement, like Let’s not have any of your nonsense; let’s just open up, shall we.
Incredibly, a moment later he was joined by another dog, some kind of shepherd/mastiff mix. He barked. A love supreme. A love supreme.
Lucy looked at us and then back at the closed door, upon which the first dog was scratching again. It was no mystery what was happening. The locals were answering the call.
Now the parking lot outside our room was filled with the roar of a motorcycle. It was the unmistakable ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of a Harley, soon to be joined by another, and another. We heard voices, loud ones, guffawing and swearing. Headlights flashed against the curtains of our room. Another dog barked, a third creature having apparently joined the first two at the party in the back of the One Season Motel.
“What are they doing?” Deedie asked me, and I didn’t know what to tell her. My theory was that the tavern had finally closed down, and the bikers were now assembling for a final debrief following last call. Where all the dogs were coming from, I couldn’t say. All I knew was that the hormones of our dog were acting as a kind of lighthouse, guiding to our door every last sleaze-dog in the Alleghenies.
The trio of doggos barked more insistently now and with what sounded to me like more fury. A love supreme, a love supreme. The bikers revved their engines. A bottle smashed on the pavement. Deedie looked at me, her English-professor husband, with a sense of late-dawning disappointment, as if it were occurring to her only now exactly how little use I’d be if it came to a fight.
“What’s going to happen?” Deedie asked, and she pulled on my elbow insistently. “Jim,” she asked more urgently now, “what’s going to happen to us?”
* * *
Athough we failed to die that night, Deedie’s question continued to haunt me as the years went by. I did my best to protect my wife from the cruelties of the world, although I suspected, from time to time, that some of those cruelties lay not outside of our door but in my own heart. I thought that I was protecting her by keeping my mouth shut about my most private sense of self, but keeping a secret, especially one as atomic as the one I held, is rarely a way of protecting anyone. Like so many men, I figured that the best way to deal with trouble was to keep things locked down in the hole. It had got me this far. But I began to wonder if I could keep my silence forever.
I thought about the men—and women—that I knew and wondered how many of them, like me, bore a profound burden in secret. It made me think about my parents, whom, like all children, I’d always thought of as authority figures, as a couple who had a clear sense of what they were doing. And instead considered, for the first time, whether they had been just as clueless as I was now.
I doubted it, though. My father seemed to have something in his veins that I did not, something that