Ridge Road, Chapter 11 · One-Fourteen

Lorraine kept the road report on a whiteboard behind the front desk, in green marker, and she rubbed it out and wrote it again every time WYDOT changed its mind. At six-forty on Wednesday morning it said I-80 WB CLOSED LARAMIE TO RAWLINS. NO EST. TIME. Under that, smaller: COFFEE IS FREE. DONUTS ARE NOT.

Sam paid for two donuts and filled two styrofoam cups from the urn. Outside the big front window the lot was a field of white humps, every truck and car drifted in to the mirrors, and the snow was still coming sideways out of the west. Hank’s Pete sat at the end of the row with a drift up its grille.

“He’s still asleep?” Lorraine asked.

“Snoring.”

“They all snore.” She went back to her crossword. “The one in one-fourteen was in here at five. Took three cups. Said to tell Doyle he’d be at the Village Inn when it opens.”

Sam put the lids on the cups very carefully.

“You know him?” he said.

“I know everybody who gets stuck here.” Lorraine filled in a word. “He’s been stuck here before. He’s polite. Tips the girl who does the rooms. Wears a wedding ring and talks about his husband like the man hung the moon.” She looked up over her glasses. “That what you were asking?”

“I wasn’t asking anything.”

“Sure you weren’t, hon.”

He walked the cups back along the covered walkway with snow blowing in under the overhang and hitting him in the ear. Room 114 had its curtains open a hand’s width. The light was on. Sam did not look in. He looked anyway.

A big man in a thermal shirt was sitting on the end of the bed, lacing a boot, and his red beard had gone grey at the corners. He glanced up at the window, saw Sam, and lifted a hand off his knee, easy.

Sam nodded and kept walking.

---

Hank was awake when he got back, sitting up against the headboard with the sheet round his waist and his reading glasses on, looking at the weather on his phone.

“Teddy Marsh says he’ll be at the Village Inn,” Sam said, and held out a cup.

Hank took it. He didn’t drink. “Lorraine tell you that?”

“Lorraine told me a lot. He’s married. He tips the room girl.”

“Good for Teddy.”

“I saw him through his window.”

Hank took his glasses off and folded them. “And?”

“And he waved.” Sam sat on the edge of the bed with his own cup in both hands. “He lasted a month.”

“He did.”

“Letter nine,” Sam said. “You wrote Walt that the third one quit. That’s him.”

“That’s him.”

Sam waited. Hank drank some coffee and made a face at it.

“You want to go to breakfast,” Hank said, “or you want me to tell you here, with no pants on?”

“Both.”

“Then I’ll put pants on and tell you at breakfast, in front of him, so he can say where I’ve got it wrong.” Hank swung his legs out of bed. “That’s the only fair way I know to do it. Walt taught me that one.”

---

The Village Inn was across the frontage road, two hundred yards that took them ten minutes in the wind. It was half full of truckers and a church choir out of Fort Collins whose bus driver had refused to go another mile. Teddy Marsh had a booth at the back with three coffee cups in front of him and a plate of pancakes he hadn’t started.

He stood up when he saw Hank. He was as tall as Hank and heavier, and for a second the two of them looked at each other across the booth like two trucks backing into the same dock.

“Doyle.”

“Teddy.”

Teddy put out his hand. Hank shook it. Then Teddy turned to Sam and put out the same hand.

“Teddy Marsh. You must be the one that didn’t get on the bus.”

“Sam Ortega.” Sam shook it. Teddy’s grip was warm and brief. “I didn’t get on the bus.”

“Neither did I.” Teddy sat back down and pushed the pancakes to the middle of the table. “Help yourselves. I ordered before I lost my appetite.”

They slid in across from him. The waitress brought two more cups without being asked. Hank put both hands round his and looked at Teddy.

“I owe you a conversation,” Hank said. “About three years late.”

“Four.”

“Four.” Hank nodded. “Sam knows the Salina part. He doesn’t know the month. I’d like you to tell it, and I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

Teddy looked at him for a long moment. Then he laughed, short, and shook his head.

“Well, that’s new,” he said. He turned to Sam. “You want the short version or the long one?”

“The true one.”

“All right.” Teddy cut a corner off the pancakes and didn’t eat it. “Four years ago I answered Walt’s posting. Owner-op, Tulsa to Denver. I was forty, I’d been driving for a fleet out of Joplin for twelve years, I wanted my own seat with somebody who knew what he was doing. First week, Doyle says about nine words. Second week we hit Salina, he walks me into that diner, buys me pie, tells me about a man named Walt and a Greyhound bus. Says he won’t ask me to stay. I stayed.”

“Why?” Sam said.

“Because I was sweet on him. Obviously.” Teddy said it plainly, with no shame in it. “I figured he told me that story so I’d know the score, and I figured I could live with the score. A man who’d tell you a thing like that over pie is worth waiting on. So I waited. A month of sleeping in the bunk and listening to him not talk.”

“He never touched you,” Sam said. It came out flatter than he meant.

“Never. Never said he would. That part he was honest about.” Teddy picked up his fork and put it down. “The trouble was, nothing else changed either. I’d crack a joke, he’d look out the window. I’d ask about the house off Lewis, he’d say ‘It’s a house.’ I asked him one night at the Pilot in Amarillo if there was any chance, any at all, and he said, ‘I don’t know, Teddy,’ and went to sleep. Next morning I got my bag out of the side box and told him I was going home. He said ‘All right.’ He drove me to the bus station.”

Hank was looking at his coffee.

“I wasn’t fair to you,” Hank said.

“No,” Teddy said. “You weren’t. You weren’t anything. You were parked in that lot in Salina with the engine running, and I was sitting in the passenger seat waiting for you to put it in gear.” He shrugged his big shoulders. “I was mad at you about two years. Then I met Dale at a Pride picnic in Springfield, and I quit being mad, because I’d have missed him.”

He turned his left hand over on the table so the ring caught the light.

“He’s six years older than me and he does taxes. Man can’t drive a stick to save his life. We got married last June.” Teddy looked at Sam. “So that’s the month. That’s all of it. I heard Doyle on the CB last night and I wanted to get a look at him. He looks different. I’d say that’s on you.”

Sam didn’t know what to do with that, so he ate a piece of pancake.

“I wrote Walt about you,” Hank said. “The fall after. I said the third one quit and I didn’t blame him.”

“You wrote Walt.” Teddy’s eyebrows went up. “You still writing that man letters?”

“Not anymore. I gave them to him.”

Teddy sat back against the booth and looked from Hank to Sam and back.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said quietly. “You did put it in gear.”

---

Walking back across the frontage road, Sam kept a half step ahead with his head down in the wind. At the room he got the key card in on the third try, and inside he went straight to the heater and stood in front of it with his coat still on.

Hank shut the door and leaned on it.

“Say it,” Hank said.

“I don’t have anything to say.”

“Sam.”

“He got a month.” Sam pulled off his gloves. “He sat in my seat for a month and you didn’t talk to him. Fine. I believe you. I believe him. I liked him, which is worse.” He threw the gloves on the dresser. “And I’m standing here jealous of a month where nothing happened. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever felt.”

Hank came off the door. He didn’t come close. He sat down on the end of the bed, a few feet away, with his hands on his knees.

“It’s not stupid,” he said. “He wanted something from me, and I didn’t give it, and I didn’t tell him I wasn’t going to. I let him sit there. That’s the worst thing I did to anybody in nine years, and I did it to a decent man.” He rubbed his face. “You’ve got a right to be jealous. He got a month of me being a coward. You’d be jealous of that if you had any sense.”

Sam turned round from the heater.

“Did you want him?”

“No.”

“Not even a little?”

Hank looked at him straight. “I wanted somebody in that seat so I didn’t have to hear the bus leaving. That’s what I wanted. It could have been anybody. That’s what was wrong with it.” He swallowed. “You’re the first one I wanted in particular. I told you that in Salina and I’m telling you again in a motel in Wyoming with snow on my boots.”

Sam stood there for a minute with the heater roaring at the back of his legs.

“Next time,” he said, “if some guy from your past calls you on the CB, you tell me about him before breakfast. Not at breakfast.”

“Deal.”

“And I want to hear you say Teddy was a decent man to his face. Before the road opens.”

“I’ll say it.”

“And you’re buying him breakfast tomorrow.”

“I’ll buy him two.”

Sam looked at him a while longer. The anger had mostly gone out of him while Hank talked, and what was left under it was something he didn’t have a name for, a kind of ache that Teddy had sat in that seat wanting the same man and got a bus ticket for it.

“He’s a nice guy,” Sam said. “That’s what gets me. If he was a jerk I’d feel better.”

“If he was a jerk he wouldn’t have told it straight.” Hank looked down at his hands. “He told it better than I would have. He left out the part where I didn’t even carry his bag.”

Sam took his coat off and dropped it on the floor. He came over and stood between Hank’s knees, and Hank put his arms round his waist and his face against Sam’s stomach and breathed there.

“You smell like pancakes,” Hank said into his shirt.

“You smell like the Village Inn.”

Hank laughed against him. Then he turned his head and kissed Sam’s belly through the cotton, and then lower, and Sam’s hand went to his shoulder and held on.

---

There was a brown vinyl armchair in the corner by the window, the kind every motel in America had bought in the same year. Hank stood up, turned Sam round by the hips, and walked him back to it.

“Sit,” he said. “Down low. Slide your ass to the edge.”

Sam sat. Hank pulled his sweatpants off and his boxers with them and threw them on the bed. Then he dragged one of the pillows off the bed, dropped it on the carpet in front of the chair, and got down on his knees on it. His right knee popped. He swore at it.

“You all right down there?”

“I’m fifty-one. I’m fine.” Hank put his hands on the insides of Sam’s knees and opened them. “Put your legs over the arms.”

Sam hooked one knee over the left armrest, then the right one, and slid down until his tailbone was right at the edge of the cushion. It put him spread wide open in front of Hank’s face, bare from the waist down in the grey snow light from the window, his cock already hard and lying up against his belly.

“Christ,” Hank said softly, and looked at him for a while.

“The curtains are open.”

“There’s nobody out there but snow.”

“Teddy’s three doors down.”

“Then Teddy’s going to hear about this from the wall.” Hank leaned in and licked a long stripe up the underside of Sam’s cock from the base up, slow. Sam’s hips jerked and the vinyl squeaked under him.

“Hank.”

“Mm.”

Hank took the head in his mouth and sucked, and Sam made a sound he’d have been embarrassed by at breakfast. Hank’s beard scratched the inside of his thighs. He went down slow, came back up slow, his tongue flat underneath, and his big hands spread Sam’s thighs wider on the armrests and held them there.

“Your mouth,” Sam said. “God. Your mouth.”

Hank pulled off and didn’t go back. He went lower instead. He sucked one of Sam’s balls into his mouth, then the other, then pushed Sam’s thighs higher and put his mouth under them. Sam’s head hit the back of the chair.

“Oh. Oh, fuck. Hank.”

The last time Hank had done this, Sam had been face down in the sleeper with his mouth in a pillow, and he hadn’t seen a thing. Now he could see all of it. He could see the top of Hank’s grey head between his thighs and Hank’s eyes flick up to check on him, and he could watch Hank take his time, kissing the crease of each thigh first, then working his tongue in slow and patient as if he meant to stay down there until the road opened. Sam grabbed the armrests and heard himself start talking with no idea what he was going to say.

“Don’t stop, don’t stop, that’s… fuck, that’s so dirty, Hank, keep doing it, I can’t believe you’re doing that in a chair…”

Hank laughed against him, and Sam felt it right through him. He pushed his tongue in deeper after that, and when Sam tried to close his legs on the armrests Hank’s hands held them open and he kept on, wet and unhurried, until Sam was shaking and loose and couldn’t remember what he’d been jealous about. Then he reached over to the nightstand without getting up, felt around, and came back with the Walgreens tube. Water-based, the label said, in blue letters. Sam had checked it twice at the Walgreens on Harvard.

He worked two slick fingers in, easy, and crooked them. Sam’s whole body jerked in the chair.

“There,” Sam said. “There. Right there.”

“I know where it is.” Hank pressed it again and watched Sam’s face. “Three?”

“Three. Hurry up.”

“We’ve got nowhere to be till Monday.” Hank went slow anyway. Three fingers, in and out, twisting, until Sam was fucking himself down onto them with his heels braced on the armrests and calling him every name he could think of.

“Stand up a second,” Sam said. “I want you in my mouth first.”

Hank pulled his fingers out slow and got to his feet, knee complaining, and opened his jeans. Sam sat forward in the chair with his legs still hooked over the arms and took Hank’s cock in his hand. It was hot and already wet at the tip. He licked it clean, tasting salt, and dragged his tongue down the thick vein underneath and back up while Hank’s breath caught over him. Then he looked up at Hank and sucked the head into his mouth.

Hank groaned and put one hand flat on the wall over the chair.

“Easy,” Hank said. “Easy, or I’m done before I’m in you.”

Sam didn’t go easy. He took him as deep as he could, gagged a little, pulled back and did it again, his chin wet, his own cock throbbing against his belly every time Hank swore. He liked the sound of Hank swearing. He liked the way Hank’s thighs shook. He pulled off with a wet noise and rubbed the head across his lips.

“Teddy never got this either,” he said.

“Nobody gets this. That mouth’s mine.” Hank’s voice had gone rough. “Sit back. Now.”

Sam sat back. Hank reached for the Walmart box on the nightstand. Sam heard the wrapper tear. Then Hank was up on his knees on the pillow, his jeans shoved down round his thighs, his cock thick and slick in his fist, and the height was exactly right. The chair put Sam’s ass right at Hank’s hips.

“Safe word,” Hank said.

“Wait.”

“Say it if you need it. I’ll stop dead.”

“I know you will. Put it in me.”

Hank lined up and pushed. The head went in slow and fat and Sam’s breath went out of him all at once. Hank held still, breathing hard through his nose, his hands on Sam’s knees, and then he pushed again, deeper, and again, and he was all the way in and Sam’s legs were trembling over the arms of the chair.

“Oh my God,” Sam said. “Oh my God, you’re so deep in me this way.”

“Too much?”

“No. Move.”

Hank moved. He drew back slow and slid home, and the chair rocked back on its legs and thumped the wall. He did it again. The angle left no room for gentle. Every stroke drove up into him and dragged across that spot on the way, and Sam’s cock bounced on his belly and leaked a string onto his shirt.

“Don’t hide from me,” Hank said.

Sam didn’t. Hank had gone red over his beard and the sweat was running down from his hairline into it. He was watching Sam the whole time, watching where they were joined, then watching Sam’s face again.

“You like it like this?” Sam panted. “Me in a chair in front of you?”

“I like you every way you come.” Hank snapped his hips and the chair hit the wall. “Like this I can see all of it. I can see you take it.”

“Then give me more,” Sam said.

Hank didn’t, yet. He slowed right down instead, till he was barely moving, rolling his hips in short deep grinds that kept him deep and pressed on Sam’s spot without ever letting up. Sam’s eyes rolled back.

“Oh, that’s mean,” Sam said. “That’s so mean. Hank. You’re grinding right on it and you know it.”

“You wanted to know what Teddy got for a month.” Hank leaned in over him, one hand on each armrest now, his belly against the backs of Sam’s thighs, his breath hot on Sam’s face. “He got nothing. You get this. You get me on my knees on a motel floor with my knee shot, fucking you slow in a chair while the whole state’s shut.”

“Say it again.”

“You get this,” Hank said, grinding deep on every word, “every day it snows and every day it doesn’t.”

Sam grabbed Hank’s undershirt in both fists and pulled him down and kissed him, sloppy, open-mouthed, tasting himself on Hank’s beard, moaning straight into his mouth while Hank kept up that slow wicked roll. When he let go he was gasping.

“Okay,” Sam said. “Okay. Now. Hard. Please.”

“Please,” Hank said, like he was tasting the word.

“Please, Hank. Fuck me hard. Let Teddy hear it.”

Hank gave a rough laugh and did. The chair thumped the wall in a steady beat and Sam stopped caring. He held the armrests and took it loud, yelling Hank’s name over the heater while the vinyl squealed under his ass and Hank fucked him in long hard strokes that shoved the chair back an inch at a time. Every time it hit the wall Hank dragged it forward again by the arms, Sam and all, and started over.

His left knee slipped off the armrest. The angle jammed wrong and a hot jolt went up his hip.

“Wait,” Sam said. “Wait. Wait.”

Hank stopped dead. He didn’t pull out and he didn’t move. He held Sam’s thigh and waited.

“Leg slipped,” Sam said, breathing hard. “My hip. Just give me a second.”

“Take a minute.” Hank lifted Sam’s leg carefully and set the knee back over the armrest, then put his palm on the outside of Sam’s hip and rubbed it, slow, with his thumb. “Better?”

“Better.” Sam let out a breath. “Okay. Go. Slow first.”

Hank went slow first, and then he didn’t, and then he got one hand flat on Sam’s belly, low, and pressed down as he fucked up into him, and Sam’s voice cracked in half.

“Hank, I’m close, I’m close, don’t change anything…”

“I’m not changing a thing. Squeeze down on me like that again.”

“Are you…”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m close too.” Hank’s rhythm broke. “Sam. Sam, I’m going to…”

“Do it. Let go in me. I want to feel it.”

Hank shoved all the way in and held there, shaking, and came with a low groan that kept going, his fingers digging into Sam’s thighs. Sam felt him pulse inside him, felt his whole weight lean in, and nearly went with him. Almost.

Hank stayed there, breathing, for a long minute. Then he eased out, slow, got himself sorted, and before Sam could even ask he bent down and took Sam’s cock into his mouth.

Sam yelled. He was still open and slick from the fuck, and Hank’s two fingers slid back into him with no trouble at all and found the spot that was already swollen and sore with wanting. Hank sucked him deep and hard and rubbed it at the same time, slow inside and fast with his mouth, and Sam’s hips came up off the cushion to meet him. He could hear himself, filthy and helpless, telling Hank he was going to come, telling him not to stop, and Hank groaned something low around him that Sam felt in his hips. It took about ten seconds. Sam came with his heels drumming on the armrests and both hands on Hank’s shoulders, a long broken noise coming out of him, and Hank swallowed it and stayed on him till he pushed Hank’s head away, oversensitive, laughing and shaking.

“Jesus,” Sam said. “Jesus Christ, Hank.”

Hank sat back on his heels on the pillow and wiped his beard with the back of his hand. His right knee popped again.

“That chair’s done,” he said.

“The wall’s done.”

“I’ll pay Lorraine for the wall.”

---

They slept through the afternoon. When Sam woke it was getting dark again and Hank was at the window in his undershirt, holding the curtain open a crack, his phone lit up in his other hand.

“Walt,” Hank said, and passed it over without turning round.

Sam read it. Radar says Laramie’s snowed under. You two eating? Ortega, make him eat a vegetable.

Under it, an earlier one Hank had already answered. Walt: You run into anybody up there? Hank: Teddy Marsh. Walt: Huh. Tell him I’m sorry I put him in that seat. Hank: I’ll tell him.

“You told Walt about Teddy,” Sam said.

“Before breakfast,” Hank said. “Learned that this morning.”

Sam put the phone down and came to the window and leaned against Hank’s back. Out across the lot the snow had finally slowed. A plow was going along the frontage road with its yellow light turning, throwing a white wave up over the ditch. Down the row, room 114’s light came on.

“WYDOT says six a.m. Monday,” Hank said. “If the wind lays down.”

“Then we’ve got four more days.”

“Four more days,” Hank said. “Sweetheart, I’m going to need a new chair.”

Somebody knocked on the door. Three knocks, slow.

Hank let go of the curtain. Sam pulled his sweatpants on and opened the door to the cold. Teddy Marsh stood on the walkway with snow in his beard and a six-pack of Coors hanging from one hand.

“Evening,” Teddy said. “I won’t come in. Dale says hello, and he says I’m an idiot for not asking this at breakfast.” He looked past Sam at Hank. “When that road opens Monday, I’m running west same as you. Rock Springs, then Salt Lake. I’ve got something I want to ask the both of you, Doyle, and I want to ask it sober, so this beer’s for after.”