Range Unknown
By Josie Turner
They think a maid won’t notice, but I do notice. I can count. Six in, five out; maybe four. Sometimes they all make it out, but they look like hell. Unshaven, stinking. Eyes blazing, like the amateur hikers that Search and Rescue stretcher off the crags. Same clothes as when they checked in – jeans with a crease down the front, and dorky T-shirts like some sitcom Dad would wear. White trainers like cruise ships. Who do they think they’re kidding?
#
I clean all the top-floor condos myself since Eunice quit. It’s easier with her gone. She’d only stand and watch anyway - wincing, her arthritic hips locked - giving me instructions like I haven’t worked here since high school. Pull the sheets tight, so you can bounce a quarter off the mattress. Christ, I hated her by the end.
Separate cloths for the sink and the bathtub – polish the mirror with newspaper – vacuum under the armchairs. Scowling at me like I’m some backslider, some amoeba who can’t remember a routine. Take a look at yourself, Eunice – all chewed up from cigarettes, your fingertips yellow.
Anyway. She’s left now and at least I know where she is. That’s a plus, for this place. She’s in her apartment by the station, smoking on her balcony, watching the town through narrowed eyes.
I clean the condos alone and imagine each of them is mine. Two beds, two baths, sitting room and kitchenette. I’d redecorate – throw out all the tweed and plaid, the ruffles, the tinted glass. But then I remember what living here would entail, and I shake myself out of the fantasy. No thanks. I’m emigrating to England – safe, flat, cold England.
Up here I can take in the views over the mountain range, the trail head lit each evening by descending hikers. That’s why they come, that’s why the hotel was built here – for the hiking, the vista: for proximity to the extreme and storied dangers of this particular route. The hotel is like a sanctuary, gathering hot and thirsty people who have catastrophically underestimated what the mountains might do to them. Plenty get lost out there, some of them forever. Maybe their skulls or just their teeth get picked up, years later, and identified for relatives back home. Maybe not. A few lucky ones are dragged out alive. One guy got stretchered into Reception and lay on the terracotta tiles staring blindly, his eyes like headlamps, his body red and shrivelled like beef jerky.
I grew up around here and know where it’s safe to tread. I’m pretty sure. Don’t go off trail, don’t go anywhere without water, and take more than you think you’ll need. Don’t go alone or after dusk or unarmed. When it gets real silent, get out.
Only sometimes I figure this hotel is another mountain range, built to face the original - maybe not so vast, but just as treacherous.
#
Shanyce sits behind the Reception desk, dealing with families checking in. Kids take one look at her and stop whining. She knows how to contour her face, she’s got a boyfriend who works for Sony, she drives a VW and she hardly talks to me, or any of the other housekeeping crew. She snaps key cards on the melamine counter-top like she’s banging a gavel. But still, I think there’s an air of doom around her. I can’t explain it. She’s young and beautiful: that’s two red flags right there. She’s marked, somehow. She’s vivid. She’s intrepid. Those groups who check in, six or eight or ten guys all together in their cop jeans and creaky white trainers, they talk to her like she’s a person, whereas me and Maria and Herve and Luis are just functionaries who carry their luggage and clean their toilets.
‘Hi Shanyce.’
She looks up at me through the feathers of her lashes.
‘You all finished?’ she asks.
‘Just about.’
She shrugs with one shoulder, like Why are you even speaking to me?
‘Quiet today, huh?’ I say.
‘I guess. Weather’s turned.’
I almost ask her about the patrons out on the trail, but we don’t keep tabs on them.
Shanyce is tapping on a laptop, her long nails chattering over the keys. Ma’am, you’re in trouble, I want to say, catch the bus with me now. We can stay at my uncle Gary’s place. Get away from here, Shanyce.
#
Melanie calls to me from the den and I can tell she’s further gone than usual. I find her lying sideways on the couch, one bare knee crooked up. She’s trying to open a beer can. She’s bathed in bars of low sun which ooze through the drapes.
‘Open this,’ she squawks.
I take the can and pull the tab.
‘Where the fuck’s Gary?’ she asks.
‘I just finished work, Mel.’
‘He hasn’t been home all day.’
I hand her the can and she takes a sloppy sideways slurp. She’s watching a gameshow on TV and she waves me aside. She’s kind of my aunt, I guess.
I lift Peanut the dog from the end of the couch where he’s getting pummelled by Mel’s feet, and take him to my room. It’s more of an alcove. There’s a curtain for privacy which I pull across, then I sit on the mattress with Peanut. My back aches from stripping all those bedsheets.
I pull out my scrapbook from under the mattress and browse the magazine pictures of England I’ve collected. Nothing fancy – not the palaces and such which I know are there, and I’ll visit someday. But the small dark-brick houses which stand in the rain and wait for me. The sad houses. I’ve seen them on PBS detective shows. It’s always drizzly in England, and everyone is downcast. They don’t drink beer from cans over there. I bet in some town or village there’s a particular house with tall narrow windows and an overhanging roof – it wants my key in the lock, my breath misting its windows. I’ll get there somehow. I’ll live there, where it’s safe, with a husband and our baby.
‘Hey Dopey,’ calls Mel. ‘Fetch another can, will ya?’
I run through mystical English place names, like they’re some kind of spell to lift me out of here – Sussex, Essex. Evesham. They all sound like rain.
‘You’ll never go there, so stop mooning,’ she tells me when I’m back in the den, and that’s how I know she’s been through my scrapbook. I want to tip the beer over her head, but she’d probably enjoy that. ‘Fucken England. The tunnels will get ya first!’
‘Stoppit.’
She turns on her back and laughs up at the ceiling fan which swishes in slow rotations.
‘Tunnels get all the girls.’
‘Go to hell.’
I happen to know they don’t just get girls, but I don’t mention that.
‘Take you all the way up to Greenland,’ she chuckles. ‘Don’t tell me to go to hell, you little bitch.’ Her face crumples as though she’ll cry. This is the prelude to her falling asleep, gurgling and muttering curses. I wait by the TV until she’s passive enough to roll onto her side, in case she vomits. Although I don’t even care if she chokes. It’s just routine, like neatening the furniture in the condos.
#
‘Hey Eunice.’
‘Who’s that? Theresa, that you? Wipe your feet.’
‘I’ve wiped them.’
Eunice is wrapped in a shawl in her living room. Too cold now for the balcony. She’s sucking on a cigarette and the fug of tobacco makes me cough.
‘Well close the door.’
I make her a coffee and sit down opposite her. Her chairs are arranged as though they’re having an argument with each other. She asks me what detergent I’m using these days, and has that dumb restaurant manager gotten fired yet, and when are they fixing the air conditioning? I answer as much as I can. It’s no fun at Eunice’s apartment but it gets me out of Gary and Mel’s place, especially when they’re fighting. My high school friends have disappeared into colleges and marriage. No, not disappeared – just moved on.
‘Eunice,’ I ask, as she sparks up another cigarette with her little gold lighter. ‘I’m worried about Shanyce.’
‘Who?’
‘On Reception. Black girl, drives a VW.’
‘I don’t remember her.’
‘You do. She told you to hurry up one time, because we had an early check-in.’
‘She told me that, did she? Then I definitely don’t remember her.’ Eunice took a vicious drag on her cigarette. ‘Don’t you worry about her, neither.’
‘She’s going to go away.’
‘We don’t talk about that.’
‘But I’m worried, Eunice.’
‘No use worrying. Got any parties in?’
Parties were the groups of guys who block-booked the condos a few times a year. There were always vacancies for them, no matter how busy the hotel seemed.
‘Not at the moment.’
‘Well then.’ Eunice catches my eye. ‘CIA,’ she mouths.
‘They are not CIA,’ I reply.
‘How do you know they’re not?’
‘I just do. They look like dorks.’
‘They work for the Government, anyhow. Those IDs? Fake.’
She glanced anxiously around the room, as though we were about to get busted. There was only a dresser against one wall, filled with Disney memorabilia, and a sink under the window. Her single bed was forlorn in the corner, with a stuffed bear on its pillow.
Eunice and I would check any IDs we found in those condos. They were always brand new, in unblemished plastic wallets. Driver licenses for ‘Chad Greenleaf’ and ‘Michael Sorbino.’ Sometimes passports for ‘Pravin Chopra’ or ‘Roberto d’Angelo.’ Generic as hell. On rare occasions there were women, checking in together or posing as a couple with one of the guys, sharing the uniform of pressed jeans and Mom sweaters. They all had alert, unsmiling expressions. ‘Mary Smith’ was one. Mary took a while to reappear. She had officially checked out with her ‘husband’ quite early in the season. Her stuff was all packed up. I remember wiping her long blonde hairs from a bathroom sink, and washing lipstick-smeared mugs. But I spotted her several weeks after she’d supposedly left, eating an omelette in the restaurant, looking out of the panoramic window towards the lilac shadows of Spaniard’s Gulch. She was pale and thin. I found a pretext to sit behind her, noticing that her wedding ring had vanished.
‘Mary’ was in better shape than some of the guys who resurfaced, weeks or months after their arrival, looking like that hiker who’d come off the crags, bug-eyed and burnt up. And some of those Michaels and Robertos we never saw again. Their groups checked out and drove away in people carriers – six guys in, four guys out.
There was a hotel waitress who had nothing to do with the parties - a pretty girl from out of town, I never knew her name. And Regina from the laundry, who had two kids. Disappeared. Boyfriend trouble in both cases, we were told. I’d told Regina I was going to England someday, and she’d laughed like I planned to fly to the Moon.
I’m watching out for those girls, hoping they’ll turn up in the restaurant or the basement, blinking as though they’ve spent a long time underground.
I’m watching out for Shanyce, before she disappears.
‘You’ll be ok,’ says Eunice, following the track of my thoughts. ‘You’re a Plain Jane.’
‘I know.’ I make myself inconspicuous. When I get to England, I’ll grow out my hair, maybe put on lipstick. Until then I aim to slip under the radar. I even get the shivers when the hotel’s automatic doors open for me – it’s like someone’s monitoring me, ushering me in a particular direction.
‘Even so, lock up behind you when you’re working,’ said Eunice.
‘I do.’
‘And don’t go down in the basement.’
‘I have to wheel the laundry down there.’
‘Well take someone with you when you do.’
I blink back tears. That’s the most anyone’s cared about me in a long time.
#
I’m in the basement when I spot Shanyce. There’s no way in the world she should be down here. I’m unloading laundry hoppers into the chute while she’s standing around the corner of the low-ceilinged corridor with her back to me, talking to someone in her confident voice.
A party has checked in, and they’re occupying the condos. Four guys this time. ‘Peter Jones’ and ‘Mark Richardson’ etc. It’s like they’re not even trying with the names. I wonder whose job it is to come up with them. I wish it was mine. I’d like to sit in an office and invent cover stories for whoever these people are – I’d be a lot more imaginative.
I make myself seem busy, scooping up linen and feeding it slowly down the chute to the laundry room which occupies the sub-basement, the deepest layer of the hotel. I think about Regina, who was so loud and vivacious. I’m not like her. I’m quiet.
‘…given what we know about structural integrity? The last review suggested – hey, Theresa, is that you?’
‘Oh, hiya Shanyce.’
‘Do you need to be here?’ She turns to face me. I notice how straight she stands, with her shoulders back, her feet together, as though she’s on parade.
‘Yeah.’ I nod towards the hoppers.
‘Will you be long?’
‘Not long.’ I smile.
I am suddenly very scared. Shanyce has the evasive mask-like expression I’ve seen on the men and women who check in here. She is tall and dauntless, and as I peek around her, I can see ‘Mark Richardson’. Shanyce is with a group of guests who Eunice would brand the CIA, and she is not speaking to them as a Receptionist would – meekly, helpfully. She knows them. She’s in charge of them.
It’s time to leave. I manuever the empty hoppers back up the slope, their wheels catching in the ripped linoleum. There is a charged silence behind me.
This world devours girls, I know that. No one else remembers the waitress, no one’s looking for Regina besides her bereft kids. No one will look for me. Gary and Mel will crack open another beer and rent out my alcove to one of their drinking buddies. Eunice will mutter ‘I warned her’ and take another drag on her cigarette.
‘The tunnels will get ya!’ I hear Mel crowing.
I think of those unprepared hikers who sink into the crags and gullies up on mist- shrouded peaks. The ones we don’t find at all – neither burnt survivors nor skeletal remains. They get eaten, people reckon.
I’m riding the elevator now, away from Shanyce and her mysterious authority.
The climbers get eaten by predators or else they get deleted in some way we cannot describe. They fall out of sight. There’s a vast negative space inside those mountains, and the range is as long as the continent – longer. Our nation rests on another nation we know nothing about.
On the first floor, I can see Shanyce’s VW through the plate glass windows, with a people carrier parked next to it. I shove the hoppers into the service closet and then push through the swing doors into Reception. Sunlight is bouncing off the mountains - tangerine-colored, warm as salvation. Families are whooping around me, toddlers jigging on the couches. I remove my apron and my lanyard and dump them on the countertop. The automatic doors swoosh open and I’m outside. I’m walking through the parking lot, keeping Shanyce’s car in the corner of my eye.
I’m heading for the bus stop - for my uncle’s place, my scrapbook of England, my mattress on the floor. I’ll hold Peanut tight, kiss him goodbye.
I’m moving on. I’m getting out – getting out from under.
~~~
