6.
 The routine was simple and fell into place quickly.
They kept the shades drawn and took turns resting. In late morning each day, when the maid came, one of them would be sleeping. When Korinta returned from her trips painting the red stone formations to the north and the gray canyons further south, Sparto drove away into the night. Or Korinta might go out at night while Sparto slept. And of course they slept together tiredly and soundly each night.
Tony, husband of Ginger, was a gray-haired heavy set man with square glasses and a slow, heavy demeanor. He wore checked shirts and plum vests and baggy jeans and didn’t look as though he’d hurt a fly. Most of the time, Korinta saw him kicking back in one of the chrome-legged chairs, with grungy boots on the little round glass table top, reading the local newspaper while the world flew past on the highway outside.
The maids were dedicated but slow-witted young women, with thick lips and almond-shaped eyes as if they were of a distant galactic race. They were eager to please and serious in doing their work, though very slow. They liked kind words, and took the slightest criticism very devastatedly. They stood like statues and watched as Korinta probed around. For example, Korinta offended one girl by taking out the trash herself, and when Korinta got to the fenced in area by the dumpsters, she noticed another fenced-in area next to it containing large inexplicable machinery resembling huge steel plumbing whose joints were held together with bolts the size of a man’s fist. The local police, in dusty chocolate cars, in khaki uniforms and looking faintly, oddly, like the chamber maids, drove by and slowed to stare but did not stop for conversation. When they stared, driving slowly by, the policemen’s mouths gaped open, exposing twisted pink tongues and gums with lots of odd little white teeth like stray pebbles on a beach.
One time, Korinta went out to paint and followed a dirt road (which had a sign that said “Private Road—Turn Back”) for several miles until she realized she was being followed by a dark brown van. From a distance, it looked as if the van had no windows at all, not even a windshield. It followed at a distance that always kept it just this side of the horizon, never getting larger or dwindling, and always matching her speed. Finally she came to a large compound in a dead-end valley. The hills all around blocked out sunlight, and the gate area was shady. No guards were in evidence, but there were huge coils of barbed wire strung over the top of the wire fences, three rows deep, and it was clear that someone wanted to keep visitors away from the windowless low concrete buildings that sat basking in the sunlight like long-dead bones. Spooked, she whirled in a cloud of dust and started back—to find that the brown van had vanished.
Then came Mr. Rodney Soltan, a small brown-haired man with fanatical eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, who appeared to fall in love with Korinta on first sight, but had his sights set on proving that the Western Sunset Arroyo Motel was an extension of Area 51, a top secret U.S. Government installation housing dead aliens or some similar bovine crappola.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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