Don Webb - The Evil Miracle.pdf - Don Webb - widez2

DON WEBB

THE EVIL MIRACLE

Martha Wills made the down payment on the Starlight Motel in 1966 in memory of

her only love. Now in 1992 she is sixty-seven and wondering if there is a

chance

of selling it in a terrible real estate market. And there are the spiders.

The tarantulas-- big furry black ones-- had always been a problem. Just one of

them padding across the asphalt would bring a Yankee tourist screaming for

his)or more likely his family's) life. Across the highway the old prairie dog

town was full of 'em, and they became quite frisky in the warm weather. Martha

knew them as harmless. You damn near had to step on one to get him to bite

you.

As a child she and her brother Billy used to fish 'em out of holes with bubble

gum. You'd get your well-chewed bubble-gum -long, dangly, and pink -- and

you'd

lower the string into a prairie dog hole. You'd pull up a tarantula and swing

'em round--sort of a living hairy yo-yo. Tourists didn't relate well to this

story. Next were the garden spiders. Black-and-white wonders of the spider

world, they could've been designed by Picasso. They spun huge webs to glisten

rose window-like with the morning dew. Usually she'd have one on the roses out

front and one in the bear grass out back. But this year they were everywhere

linking guests' cars with their sticky floss; obscuring doorways, filling the

aluminum steps which led to the diving board of her pool. Martha had taken to

getting up at dawn and dewebbing the place.

Finally there were the brown recluses. A different matter. They were one of

the

truly poisonous species. The bite could be fatal. Martha's cousin was once

bitten. The tissues of his leg turned black and smelled of rot. When months

later-- Robert had healed, he was missing a handful of leg. The tiny brown

recluse likes to sleep in shoes and other tight places. Martha had found six

the twenty-seven years she owned the Starlight. Three of the six she had found

last month. She figured that the spider increase was somehow due to pesticide

use. She'd half-slept through a TV movie with that theme. She didn't tell

anyone

about the spiders. She didn't want rumors to start. Brown recluses could kill.

In the days when the Starlight catered to an interstate tourist trade, a death

would have meant nothing. Somebody from New York/ Ontario/Alabama had died. So

what.? Who cares? But the small patronage the Starlight now enjoyed was

connected to the hospital. Her clients were the families of the patients. They

came in from nearby little towns and left after cures, deaths, or loss of

hope.

But they recommended the Starlight to their plagued neighbors. Cheap and

clean,

they said, in walking distance of the hospital and the McDonald's. One death

from spiders -- or even the notion that such a death was likely -- would close

the Starlight by the same word of mouth that kept it open.

Martha hadn't told her niece or her nephews that she was going to sell the

Starlight. If she told them-- she'd have to do it. 'Cause she's that way.

Women

don't make it in the business world if they appear indecisive. It was like Mr.

Rheims said, you have to have fire in your heart and ice in your veins. Mr.

Rheims represented the appearance of love to her. Perhaps she even loved him.

His name was John.

It was early in the morning and the maids hadn't arrived. Martha turned on the

lawn sprinklers. Just so. Any more and people's cars would get wet, any less

and

the grass wouldn't. She said good morning to Mrs. Abrams, who was already on

her

way to sit in the ICU waiting room. Promised her that she'd pray for Mr.

Abrams.

She removed the web across the office door and went inside to make her first

pot

of decal

Across the quiet highway she noticed one of her guests doing something very

strange.

The fellow had checked in over a week ago. Martha had been preparing for bed

the Starlight hadn't had a night clerk in three years -- when someone hit the

buzzer in front. Wearing her peach-colored fuzzy bathrobe, she had checked him

in. He wore this khaki outfit; if he had a pith helmet, she would've sworn he

was on safari. He had known her name.

"You're Martha Wills, right? That's what I was told, Martha Wills."

It was late and she hadn't asked who or why, but she wondered. Folks always

talk

about the Starlight, never about Martha. She didn't think anyone had mentioned

her by name since she won $100 by being the ten thousandth customer at a Food

King.

But the strange man in khaki -- what was his name? -- was picking up bits of

spider web with tweezers. He was putting the webs in some kind of tiny glass

test tube. One strand per tube. He capped each tube with a black rubber

stopper,

then carefully put the tubes into a case specially fitted to hold them.

Her secret was out. This was some kind of scientist here to study the spiders.

Her heart sped up. Her doctor had told her to avoid excitement and coffee. Her

heart sped up and this scared her. It was almost a pain to feel this feeling

her chest.

She gripped the smooth wooden counter with the thumb and index finger of her

left hand. She could feel her pulse through her fingertip. She would have to

relax -- have to use the method she learned at Amarillo Community College.

Relax, now, relax. Relax between each beat. When she felt calm, she looked at

the tar-brown nail of her thumb and wished for the millionth time she could

give

up smoking.

She couldn't see the strange man from the window of the motel office.

His name was Olin Fletcher, and immediately it became Dr. Fletcher in her

mind.

She decided to call a realtor that afternoon. The realtor came along with a

photographer. He shot the Starlight from several angles while his boss drank

iced tea with Martha. They agreed on the truths and lies that could be used to

sell the motel. The realtor cautioned her against any kind of For Sale sign.

That almost always scared away guests. In fact, Martha might want to run some

undetectable promotion to fill up the units. The realtor couldn't promise a

sale--it was a slow market--but if Martha could wait six to twelve months, the

realtor was willing to work with her. Then the realtor mentioned a figure. It

was twenty thousand more than Martha was even hoping for. She should've come

this decision long ago. The realtor also told Martha that the housing market

was

worse, and when the time came to move from the Starlight she was sure she

could

find Martha an affordable house in town.

Move from the Starlight. She hadn't quite figured that part yet. Damn Dr.

Fletcher.

She served the realtor some carrot cake. She bought it from a shop in town and

carefully put it on her grandmother's green platter. Everyone thought it was

her

own. She pushed her gold-rimmed spectacles up the slope of her sweat-shiny

nose.

She looked outside and saw that Dr. Fletcher was pestering the photographer.

Fletcher had finally donned a pith helmet. What did he think he was -- on

safari.? Trying to talk the photographer into shooting some footage of the

quaint aboriginal motel.? Please, God, don't let him say anything.

She'd lost track of what the realtor was saying; and now the realtor was

leaving, and she hoped she didn't look like a senile fool. Dammit she wasn't

old. She was just distracted. She'd always been distracted by the Starlight.

The realtor and the photographer left. Martha heard the doors slamming shut on

their white station wagon -- the sound of gravel as they sped off in the dry

Texas heat. She wondered if she had agreed to anything. This was the worst it

had ever been. She was letting words make solid life decisions for her and she

didn't even know what the words were. She'd let her life drift into this state

of disconnectedness. She was worse off than the Starlight. Both were real only

in the past, sharing the fate of ruins -- sagging shapes and spiders.

She would put a few things right, though, and one of them would be Dr.

Fletcher.

Her chance came two days later. Fletcher stood in front of the Starlight on

the

tiny strip of Bermuda grass that separated the asphalt of the parking lot from

the asphalt of the highway. He admired the burnt orange sunset broken by the

Spanish tile roof of the Veterans Hospital. He must have heard her walk up

behind him for at the perfect moment he waved his right arm to the sky and

said,

"It looks like an opened paradise."

She almost fell backwards, because the same words had been said to her

twenty-seven years before. Her blood must're collected in her feet, which

suddenly seemed made of lead, and her voice must've gone there too for when

she

spoke she had to lift each word against the gravity of the whole earth. "How

poetic," she said, and thought it was the most stupid and flat thing she had

ever said in her life -- save for when she had said those same words

twenty-seven years before. And then it had been worse because she had said

them

to a man whom she had just fallen in love with. A Miata whizzed by with its

bass

so loud she could feel it in her hollow chest. She looked hard at this strange

man in the safari suit. It couldn't be the same man. He had his height, but it

couldn't be the same man. It couldn't be the same man, because this man

brought

fear and disappointment and the other had brought love and hope. It was a

terrible thing to be an innkeeper because your guests were always bringing you

emotions from their strange, far-off lands.

"You think so?" he said. "I'm a lonely man and lonely men are given to

poetry."

She would break the pattern. She would say something different. She had to

remember. Ah! she knew -- comment on something new.

"I like the way the orange light shines on the metal of the new water tower,"

she said. It was awkward as hell, but at least it was original.

He looked at her with his little green eyes filled with hate. She knew she had

stopped him at some game he was playing, but she wasn't sure that she had done

good thing.

"The man taking pictures told me that you were going to sell this place."

"Are you interested in buying it?" I wouldn't sell it to you/or a kazillion

dollars, she thought.

"Me. No. Even as interesting a site as it is." He shook his head. "It would

tie

me down too much."

He turned to face the Starlight, and she automatically turned as well.

Together

they began walking toward the office.

"Could I get you something? A Coke? I like to do special things for my

customers

who stay for weeks." She would find out his game.

"Not yet," he said. "Not yet."

And before she could say anything else, she saw Mrs. Abrams walking like a

wooden zombie. Her cheeks were shiny with tears. Martha remembered that she

hadn't prayed for Mr. Abrams. She went toward the grieving woman, immersed in

her real life's work. It was only much later after she had literally tucked

Mrs.

Abrams into bed that she thought of the meaning of "Not yet, not yet."

Martha's relatives came the next day and it was like a funeral.

She had called them at eleven o'clock in the morning -- her nephews Bill, at

his

dry cleaning shop, and Ralph, at the Frame-It-Yourself in the mall; and her

niece Sarah, at the Credit Bureau. Apparently the three of them had decided

among themselves that if Aunt Martha ever sold the Starlight, she must be in

bad

health and soon to die. Or at least soon to be a burden. Sarah, along with the

two nephews, drove up in her slate-blue Ford Escort. They stayed inside the

car

for a few minutes talking among themselves. Martha watched them through the

office's bay window.

When they came in they talked too loud as though she was deaf. They were

overly

solicitous. They kept telling her to sit down and not to fuss. Sarah's mouth

said that Aunt Martha could come live with her; although Sarah's eyes said she

Would rather go to the dentist seven thousand times instead. Bill and Ralph

were

full of information on the wonderful retirement communities the city had to

offer. It seemed that there was the place that began as a sort of apartment--

"Just like being a guest at the Starlight"-- and then as she deteriorated she

could be eased into nursing home-type care. A simple gentle process perfectly

tied with the dimming of the light.

She told them that she was getting her own house. A house away from them. They

could just leave. And she cried and they left.

This had never happened before.

She had just called them out of courtesy; they had no place in her life. If

John

hadn't left. No.

She had been with him a month in 1966. He had brought her love and mystery and

magic. She'd been a maid then and the Starlight a more prosperous

establishment

living on the lifeblood of Route 66. He had changed her life so much that she

knew she would have to hold onto this place.

He had told her that a certain kind of man meets a certain kind of woman and

both are changed by the experience. This can happen at the most unlikely

places,

but at likely times. There is a time when a man has reached a certain stage of

his personal development -- that only a certain woman could excite love,

imagination, and will.

And for that woman, of course, there was only that certain man.

After they had known each other for a week (and had only made love once), he

took her to a used book store and bought her a copy of Goethe's Faust. He read

to her about Gretchen-- not at the beginning of the play, but at the end. When

Faust's damnation is near -- when he has pushed his powers and knowledge to

the

max and only Hell awaits. Yet Gretchen's prayers open Heaven's gate for him.

Her

love and constant devotion translate him to a state of glory and knowledge of

God.

But Faust abandoned Gretchen, she had said.

"He did what he had to do," he said. "He stuck to his quest."

"But he was evil," she said.

"He sought knowledge and power. Is that evil? Perhaps it's just breaking the

human horizons. Galileo was evil when he moved the center of the universe from

the earth to the sun. From that understanding we have the space program.

Someday

we'll even have a man on the moon. Is it evil to want knowledge and power? We

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