Earlier this week I got this scene stuck in my head. I don’t know where it came from or why it hung around so long, but it kept playing over and over in my head until it became way more distracting than it’s worth. That happens every now that then. Lots of times a scene will show up from out of nowhere, with no warning, and after a little while if I ignore it, it goes away. But then there are the rare cases when the scene won’t go away no matter how hard I ignore it. Those scenes dig in and force me to pay attention to them. The only thing to do when that happens is to type the scene out and move on.

This particular scene really has nothing to do with anything I’m trying to work on now. Doesn’t really have anything to do with anything I was thinking of working on in the future. It just showed up and didn’t want to leave. So I typed it up. And since Molly asked so nicely, I’m gonna post it here. Maybe it’ll make some sense to somebody. It’s first draft writing, banged out in one late night and one evening. Not the kind of thing I’d normally share with the world. But I don’t know that I’ll ever use it for anything, so I might as well share…

George climbed the stairs on the side of the building and found the room in the back, overlooking the parking lot. The door was open. He couldn’t see anything inside from out here on the narrow concrete walkway, but he could hear Glen Campbell wailing about the pitfalls of being a Rhinestone Cowboy from a tinny radio speaker somewhere inside. He looked this way and that, peeked down at the parking lot one last time to make sure he was alone, and entered the dark room.

There were two beds. The one closer to the door was still made and the top blanket looked relatively clean and pressed for a motel of this caliber. The farther bed was a tangle of sheets and blankets, with an open suitcase balanced at the foot and a lanky man in boxers and a t-shirt sprawled across the rest of it. His name was Kyle and he looked up at George and lifted a hand in a lazy greeting. His other hand clutched a can of beer that was a close relative to the short lineup of empties on the dresser.

“Aloha,” he said before taking a drink.

“Why’s the door open?”

“Air’s busted. Gets too hot with the door closed.”

“Why don’t you call downstairs to get it fixed?”

“Why don’t you stop assuming I didn’t think of that already? They’re sending someone up.”

George shrugged off the backpack he’d been wearing and dropped it in the center of the made bed. “There any more of those?” he asked, gesturing toward the beer can in hand.

“In the bag,” came the reply, along with a nod at the small round table pressed hard up to the dresser. It held a paper bag with the top folded over, plus a Styrofoam container, a pile of napkins, and a couple of squat cardboard cups with lids on them.

“There’s ribs in that box,” Kyle said. “You can have ‘em if you want. They’re too spicy for me.”

“Where they from?”

“That place down the road. The one that’s open all night?”

George flipped open the top of the Styrofoam container and snatched up a rib, thick and meaty and glistening with a thick red sauce. He took a bite and the heat of a thousand peppers seared his tongue and nearly tore his head off his body. The heat flared, then subsided into a low, nagging pain. Whoever had created this sauce was a genius.

“Good stuff,” George said as he used his free hand to pull a beer from the paper bag.

“I like food that’s a little spicy,” Kyle said. “But usually I order something hot and you can barely taste anything. So I ordered the super hot or whatever the hell they call it. And I think that shit melted my fillings.”

“Look at you, outthought by a pit boss in some two-bit fast food joint.” George gnawed the rest of the meat from the bone and then deposited the bone in the small trashcan by the door. He snagged another rib before he took a seat on the edge of the empty bed.

“Where’s the rest of them?” he asked.

“Room on the other side of the place,” Kyle said. “They’re too loud.”

George nodded as he popped the top of his beer can. He gulped the contents of the can. It was still cold, but well on its way to lukewarm. George wouldn’t be able to drink another if he waited too much longer. He finished his first beer and second rib in a few moments, then mashed paper napkins between his sodden fingers to clean them. Once all remnants of the barbecue sauce were gone, he grabbed a second can and returned to his perch on the bed.

“You bring it?” he asked.

In response, Kyle sat up, reached into his open suitcase, and retrieved a small packet wrapped in a dirty towel. He tossed it across the gap between the two beds. It landed beside George with a thud. George drained half of his second can before he hefted the packet, testing its weight. It was heavy and solid, and the towel it was wrapped in smelled of old dust and mildew. He unfolded it, flipped it over and unfolded it again to reveal a dark hunk of metal. A revolver, .38 by the looks of it. The metal was dull and lifeless. George slipped a hand underneath it and lifted it from its nest in the towel.

“What the hell is this?”

“My uncle’s service revolver,” Kyle said, his tone somewhat defensive. “He was a cop once.”

“Once in the 1800s?”

“You asked for a gun. That’s the only one I could find.”

George turned his hand to view the weapon from every angle. It looked exactly like something that had been cared for once, long ago, then forgotten and neglected for more years than anyone cared to remember. It would have to do.

He flipped it to the side and snapped it open. The cylinder popped out and he eyed it to confirm his first impression that there were no bullets.

“You bring any ammo?”

“Couldn’t find any,” Kyle said. “We’re gonna have to buy some.”

“Gonna have to buy a kit to clean this fucking thing too,” George said. “Where’d you find it?”

“In the attic, in some old boxes. I didn’t even know it was there. Good thing I found it now, before my kid went poking around up in there.”

“You have a kid? Since when?”

“Since always. He just turned five last month.”

“Shit, I don’t think I knew that,” George said. He turned the gun around and looked up the barrel. “No worries about your kid hurting himself with this thing. Even if he could find a bullet for it, it’s so damn dirty it’s not gonna shoot anything. He’d be in more danger if he dropped it on his foot.”

He thought he saw something clogging the barrel, so he held the gun over the towel, pointed it downward, and tapped against the side. After three taps, some dark flakes fell out, along with the tiny, dried and shriveled body of a brown spider. George barked a laugh.

“Was your uncle Barney Fife or something? Did he ever use this thing?”

“My uncle’s dead twenty years,” Kyle said. “Gun’s probably been in that box at least twenty-five.”

“After I clean it we’re gonna have to shoot it. You know anyplace we can do that?”

“I thought we were bringing the gun for show,” Kyle said. “You never said we were gonna use it.”

“Probably we won’t. But if you’re bringing a gun, you’ve gotta be ready to use it.”

“And you’re ready to use it?”

“Right now I think I’m more ready than the gun is.”

“You ever shoot a gun before?” Kyle asked.

“Plenty of times. More rifles than handguns, to be honest. But I’ve shot guns like this before, over the years.”

“Ever shoot one at somebody?”

George leveled him a look that said there would be no forthcoming answer to that question.

“You know a place we can shoot this thing?” he asked again.

“Down by the river, probably,” Kyle said. “Go down there right after sundown and it’s not real crowded. Quiet too, but not so quiet a couple of shots would send anyone running.”

“Sounds good enough.” George rewrapped the gun, along with the spider’s corpse, and slipped the packet into the drawer of the nightstand between the beds. “I wanna meet the others. Introduce me.”

“They’re in room 211, around the front of the building,” Kyle said. “Introduce yourself. Don’t be shy.”

George was going to argue, but he was already tired of Kyle’s voice. He drained the second beer and added the empty can to the collection. Without another word he walked out of the room.

There were seven doors along this side of the building, then four more after George turned right, and then after three more doors following another right, he found the door to room 211. It was closed, like every other door except for Kyle’s. He could hear the TV from inside. He knocked.

A short, dark man with longish hair and a full beard cracked the door and peered out at George. He said nothing, and based on the small slice of his face visible through the space between door and frame, it looked unlikely that he was interested in speaking.

“¿Hablas Inglés?” George said.

A small shake of the head. “¿Habla usted español?”

George did, a little, but for now was going to play dumb. “No,” he said, with an emphatic headshake. A standoff, he thought. Mexican. How appropriate. He smiled.

The door was pulled open from inside and another man was revealed behind the first one. He was older, the hair at his temples white, his skin dark and wrinkled from years of exposure to the elements. His dark eyes narrowed and he looked George up and down.

“You’re el Blanco?” he said.

“I guess so,” George said. “Kyle’s friend.”

The man waved him into the room and shut the door behind him. The room looked much like the one he’d left Kyle in, but there were four other men lounging on the beds or on the floor or basically anywhere a body could sit. Any space not filled by a body was covered in grocery bags, some stuffed with groceries and some already doing duty as garbage bags. The room smelled of sweat and beer and junk food. And George thought he smelled the faint aroma of marijuana too. This was how he imagined a dorm room might smell.

The man who answered the door pushed his way back to a spot in the edge of the bed and joined his compatriots in watching the TV. Wresting was on, from Mexico, and the picture was so fuzzy and static-filled that George couldn’t imagine how they could follow the action. That was their problem. They were content to ignore him for now and he was content to be ignored. George turned his attention back to the older man, obviously the boss of this crew.

“You have guns?” George asked.

The old man shook his head. “Kyle said no guns.”

George nodded. At least they could follow orders. Or lie to him convincingly. For now he’d assume that first one.

The man fished around in a paper sack on the dresser and produced a can, which he held out to George.

“¿Cerveza?”

George took the can, which felt colder than what Kyle had been drinking, and thanked him. He looked at the can and all the words on it were Spanish. While George could understand it a bit if he listened, and could mangle it a bit if he spoke it, he couldn’t read a word of the language. He drank anyway, and it wasn’t the worst beer he ever had.

“You been to the place yet?” he asked.

The old man nodded. “Yesterday. It’s like Kyle said. Should be easy.”

“It’ll be the first easy thing, then,” George said. “But here’s hoping.”

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