The Delilah Gospels

I’d been staying in this rotting motel for a week or two just north of Pontiac. Too long, really. I was starting to peel like the wallpaper and the week was due. It had a sheen of tobacco yellow and peeled off the wall like onion skin, revealing a brown layer of glued asbestos.

I’d thumbed my way from Toledo looking for some sort of movement once the yard dogs caught on to me. I didn't like to stay in one place too long anyway. Trying to find the good when my story's wearing thin.

Mrs. Robertson next door, well, she’d been a problem before. We’d shared a drink or two but I'd been around long enough to recognize her type. Let’s just say the doctor was in.

Her purse was a pharmacy without morals; stuffed with enough barbiturates to choke a horse. She's become more of an annoying residue who I'd rather serve acetone than gin to at this point. She could have been in her early 40s but her skin probably lived through the 60s. Her husband was doing a stint in rehab. Court ordered I think.

As the night wore on, I heard her alone again. I could smell her perfume through the wall, thick with formaldehyde. Enough to trick the smoke alarms that they'd had enough liquid courage to start singing again. I’d learned they had a habit of going off just on my ashtray alone.

It made the whole place smell like a funeral parlor dropped a pallet of embalming fluid while the janitor was on vacation, or maybe he was locked in the freezer of the morgue with a bottle of something brown and an attractive corpse; you know how those places can be.

I went to the front desk to voice my concern. The manager here could have been the type to split a pill with her. He shrugged it off. Not you too. You know how she gets, she'll pass out soon and sleep it off, he said. I turned around and asked him if he'd picked out a plot for her yet cause her clock was likely five minutes fast.

I could hear her growing more hysterical by each passing hour. It sounded like she was dancing around in there by herself; making a racket like a haunted ghost in it's own claustrophobic body.

She ended up wandering into my room through the shared door just before midnight while I was drinking the prayers of tap water in the motel sink. I didn't even think to check the lock.Knowing her, she was likely looking for a bottle, which she knew I had a habit of keeping around. But who could really tell, she was probably high on her own perfume.

She had stumbled around the bed, half undressing herself, luring her finger at me with a grin, like she'd grown tired of just the thought of me and wanted to sin. She looked as if she was looking for a lost earring the way she fumbled around. But she was too far gone to say any more than a sound.She slumped onto the mattress with a hum and a smile clutching the pillow like it was some lost lover.

I shook her once to see if she'd wake, her eyes glazed back at mine mumbling and then zipped back closed again, her hand still tugging to slip off her bra strap on her shoulder like an impulse that hasn't quite caught up to her current state.Now I'm not a saint and I'm only a man.

I looked down at her and thought to myself, No one ever writes any goddamn rules for when a woman passes out presenting herself in your bed unconscious, unwell, and too close; only what not to do.But I knew not to crawl into bed and wake up in the morning next to a woman whose mind was, well frankly, now a relic of her past. Too much trouble. Although it probably wouldn't be her first time waking up next to a creep without knowing how.I gently pulled the strap back on her shoulder.

I grabbed the corner of the comforter, pulled it out from under her, keeping her body from rolling off the mattress. I put pillows around her body to keep her on her side and pulled the blanket over her to sleep it off.I took the comforter and slept on the sidewalk just outside the motel door. If I was going to sleep outside, I knew I could do that anywhere and maybe it was time to get out of here.

The outdoor light hummed and flickered as the cicadas stitched their lullaby into the night, forming a kind of tragic symphony beneath the sterile timbre of the smoke detectors, now going off like a bunch of drunken musicians.

But I slept like a stone. At least until the maid cart rolled into my arm just before the sun opened its eye. My eyes cracked open, then widened. From the angle I was at, the maid thought I was leering up her skirt. She spun around, looking down, her face said it all.

She wasn't wrong, but all I did was open my eyes and take in the pleasant surprise of a peach I couldn't ignore, it's what the morning offered me. It's the little things, you see; the bruise blooming up her thigh, like a secret I'd stumbled upon and she knew I'd seen too much of, framed by cheap black cotton between her legs; the kind you don’t ask about, and she didn’t offer.

I got up off the sidewalk nodding and still caught off guard but trying not to loose all of my charm. I lit up a cigarette and offered her one. She told me her name was Delilah. She had just picked up this gig hoping for a little change but I was starting to think she was just a riddle on a cocktail napkin found in a dive from the night before. Maybe too old to be so hopeful but too young to be so bitter.

She looked like the kind of girl that could have Halloween on Christmas and send Christmas cards in June. She had legs like an alter built for the sins of a politician.

She welcomed the break and we had church in the back of her Chevy that looked like, at some point, it had slipped on a patch of rust one night and skid off into an oil field and maybe taken a bite out of a deer.

The morning light crept into the cracked windshield, diverting a bent kaleidoscope of desire on the headliner. It smelled of a damp lingering musk and spilled booze and receipts layered into the weather burnt seats. All mixed with a subtle peppermint scent of her hair.

She fed me from a vending machine, and I ate off a dirty plate while she brushed her hair and changed her clothes. I tried not to stare but I think that was the point; she didn't care. She'd already made up her mind about me.

She laughed when I said I believed in forever. Then lit another match just to watch the joke. She smeared her lipstick on a gas station condom and said art is just trash with the right lighting.

I noticed the pendant around her neck, I asked her about it and she said it had something to do with her first love, but I'm not sure it really mattered. I told her how Mrs. Robertson was probably still passed out in my room and how she would be one damn mess to clean around.

I told her I'd planned on leaving this town and would soon be on my way. I warned her that a girl like her shouldn't stick around here either; she should get out before its too late too. She offered a ride to avoid her shift, maybe not wanting to part ways just yet. She said she'd surprise me on the destination.

I sat in the passenger seat next to a driver who looked like salvation. We ended up just out side of flint. God, with a name like Delilah I should have known she'd take me to flint, a punchline to a joke nobody laughs at anymore.