La Plaza Del Sol, by Shelagh Power-Chopra
Frank checked into the hotel around midnight, swapped weather stories with the clerk behind the counter and stepped outside. “La Plaza Del Sol” was lit up in dirty neon, high above the road; he rolled the words around his tongue and said it aloud in a bravado Spanish accent. He pretended he wasn’t in the middle of swampy, rural Ocala but instead surrounded by dark bosomed ladies bearing sweets and Sangria. The plaza of the sun, of the dirty little sun, sun, sun. In reality, it was a seedy place just off the highway, tucked away in a grove of dying dwarf palms. It had an ornery pool, smack in the center of the plaza, a misplaced pie hole filled with dark, dank water and a layer of green scum on its surface. His room was right before the pool, so close that if he opened his door, one wrong step and he’d be in the pool. Got yourself two showers there, the clerk said when he gave the room key.
The room had a refrigerator, two brown paintings of ships on one wall, a double bed and a spiral staircase that led up to a closed door in the ceiling. It was disconcerting, and he climbed the staircase and banged his fists at the door in the ceiling, hoping someone, anyone would come. He had bought a bottle of cheap red wine with him and asked the clerk for some glasses but he didn’t have any. So Frank drank the wine from a yogurt container he found in the trash, said a nimbly cheers to the sky and flipped on the TV. There were three stations, and he soon learned Stuart Pinhope’s wife had triplets and how to knead something doughy. The last channel was full of fuzz and static with traces of a blurred and ghostly figure dancing.
He was supposed to meet Dina there and thus begin an affair, begin the stipulation of all rotation and whatnot, he liked to think. He had never had an affair before, but he thought one should always try something once and when she winked at him at the office he was sure something good could come out of it. Even when Sal died in that fire last May, when his body was dragged out and plopped on the lawn and half his skin was peeling off his bones, he didn’t feel too bad about it, Sal had a crappy life, a fat wife and a job down at Croby’s bar, the swill of humanity lying before him at all hours. Dina was late, but wasn’t she always? He was always late, late to life, late to the miserable curls of the cow and the dregs of the fodder in the fields.
He had grown up on a farm, not far from here, chased alligators and sweated a musty odor much of the time, up to his knees in the swamp and how he loved the humidity–heck, the humanity of the jungle down here. Once he traveled up North for a holiday trip visiting some cousins mid-winter and the snow trailed him like a relentless stalker, it was exhausting, trying to keep warm and remember who you were, remember that the earth was still kind and loved you, not hated you with its whimpering and ragged claws and when he returned he felt at peace, felt the world had settled down for him, stepped down and buried him with its warm, temporal glow.
He sat on the bed now, studying the brown ships and the brown river reeds and drank more wine and thought about the sex he was about to have, the dribbly glib afternoon kingdom he was about to reign and he felt feverish, hot and stoked at the thought of her body naked—wasn’t much of a body, really but she had a clean mind, could see for miles, through shit, through disasters, and could of canned up his life in a very instant and thrown away the opener, there you go, Frank, there’s your life in a nutshell, in a tin of beans. But what would they call it? His little life? Sardines and crackers or misconstrued romance and rescued reasoning. He used to take the pontoon out and go fishing for skates, dip his finger in the water, test it and thrown in the line just before dusk when it was real quiet out there, no shadows, no wind and the glorious heat of the waves and he wouldn’t catch anything, nothing, he knew it too, just liked being alone in a void, a void of tangent emasculation!
There was knock at the door. He opened it, expecting Dina’s tiny frame but instead it was the clerk, sweat streaming down his face: Hey mister got a minute? Got an accident out front! But Frank didn’t hear any sounds, any tires screeching, glass breaking. Need some hands! he screamed now and they ran forward, the clerk deft on his feet and Frank missed the turn and fell hard into the pool, plunging, plunging down.
And he thought of Dina and how she told him there was this waterfall that she used to go to as a kid, it was a stunner—a real tsunami, she said, all translucent waters rushing towards me and then one day these teenagers came down and blasted that wretched song, “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head,” and that beauty just froze and swam away, it was ruined and that’s the song that came to his mind just then: they keep fallin’ keep a fallin, keep a fallin, keep a fallin.
Bits of pool scum waved towards him and he thought he saw something dark at the bottom of the pool and he grasped at the water and started sinking more but then managed to clutch the concrete piping and hoist himself up and out and the clerk growled at him from the side, no time for that now, no time! Frank staggered forward, saw the flashing lights and reeled about, drunk and empty, in the plaza of the burning sun.
