The Loveliest Girl by Barry Rachin (100 best novels of all time .txt) 📕

rushing off to impromptu staff meetings or nestled away in the office with motel suppliers. "Why don't you use a computer?"
"I don't own one."
"Well, at any rate", the older woman noted shifting gears, "until further notice, you're be working housekeeping with Felicia. My daughter has a list of rooms which should be cleaned first. And the pullout sofa in suite seventy-five is broken and needs replacing." Without bothering to say goodbye, she spun around on her heels and rushed off.

Felicia Fitch, who was married and had a little boy, was nothing like her mother, neither physically nor in temperament. Tall and lanky, she wore dark-framed glasses. A mop of jet black hair was styled in a page boy. The girl's face was pleasant, but the features seemed thrown together in such a haphazard fashion that there was nothing terribly distinctive. Once when she came to his room and saw the pile of torn and crumpled papers scattered about the floor, her usually placid features dissolved in a convoluted grin. "Tortured artist at work," she noted laconically and walked away.
Between the relentless heat and drudgery of dirty apartments, the day proved brutal. They vacuumed beach sand off forty-three rugs, changed upwards of a seventy-five beds and hauled away a mountain of soiled linen. Another housekeeping crew, what was left of the Russians, was working their way towards Reese and Felicia from the opposite end of the motel.
A strange thought occurred to Reese. The shrimpy Russian girl with the pallid complexion had run off with a Canuck, a French Canadian from the Province of Quebec. If the star-crossed lovers left Maine and crossed over into Canada, then the girl's legal status was now in jeopardy. And what would she do in a few short weeks when the temporary work visa expired and she was supposed to fly home?
Reese and Felicia didn't finish work until late in the afternoon and then there was a scheduling glitch. The receptionist had placed a newly-arrived party of five in the room with the damaged pullout sofa. When they opened the bed the bottom portion flopped down on the floor like a maimed animal. Reese had to scare up a replacement sofa from a vacant room. By the time he switched the furniture, the sun was already dropping below the horizon.

"Come with me." It was the insufferable Mrs. Fitch gesturing imperiously with a crooked index finger.
"I'm off-duty," he muttered.
"This won't take long." Without elaboration the gaunt woman hurried off. In the rear of the motel was a storage shed. Mrs. Fitch undid the security bolt and threw the double doors open. A heap of broken computers lay in a corner along with an Epson, continuous feed, dot matrix printer and mishmash of decrepit furniture that even the Salvation Army would have rejected. Further back toward the rear and nesting on top of rusting propane tank was a black laptop computer. The woman grabbed the device and thrust it into Reese's arms. "It's an older IBM Thinkpad model… Window's Millennium edition. You can't run Microsoft Office on it, because the operating system is too primitive." The gaunt woman averted her eyes as she spoke. "But it has a decent word processing software with spell-check."
"I can borrow it?"
"Keep it," the older woman said harshly as though she were offering a reprimand rather than a gift. Scurrying back out of the shed, she fixed the padlock in place. "It's yours to keep," she repeated with such brutal finality, that Reese didn't quite know whether to thank the woman or ask what was behind her uncharacteristic generosity.


Three days later, the nightmare began.
Reese woke up Sunday morning with blotchy yellow stains soiling the front of his jockey shorts. Reaching out tentatively with a poised index finger, he tapped the moist cloth. "Cripes!" There were two ugly blotches, one to the right and the other directly below his male member. It wasn't urine. He never dribbled or wet himself during the night. Reese examined his privates. A viscous, yellow discharge was oozing from the tip of his penis. But he felt no discomfort so maybe it was just a strain from lifting the sofa bed the other day. Just to be on the safe side, he washed his privates with soap - not just any soap but an antibacterial, Phisohex scrub that the office provided the housecleaning staff.
Reese had noticed a dull burning sensation when he peed earlier, but the urine passed freely and the discomfort went away almost immediately. Funny, he mused, how a person never gave his body a second thought when it functioned properly. He could go days without even being marginally aware of the unassuming appendage languishing unappreciated between his legs.
There was a knock at the door. "Reese, are you there?" Felicia Fitch asked. "I'm going to Len Libby's to buy chocolate if you want to come along for the drive."
Len Libby's was a famous tourist attraction on route one a few miles up the road in Scarborough. Back in 1997, the owner of the candy store commissioned an artist to fashion a seventeen hundred pound, life-size moose. Sculpted from milk chocolate, the antlered beast was constructed on site in four weeks. From when they opened the doors at nine a.m. until closing, the store ran a video showing visitors how the animal came to life. "Yeah, just give me a second." Now what? He would need to change his underwear and switch to heavy dungarees just in case the unthinkable happened. But then maybe it was all in his head. Reese felt himself. No, everything was perfectly dry now. False alarm! It was just a strain.

"I almost forgot to tell you," Felicia said as they pulled out of the Scenic View parking lot. "A girl, Cassie Moffat, came by to see you last night, but you were out."
Reese cringed. "Was there any message?"
"No. She's stopping by again later today."
At Len Libby's a clerk was handing out samples of homemade fudge. Felicia grabbed a piece but Reese waved the girl off. "She has a very nice way about her."
"Who did?" he replied absently.
"That girl who came to see you. She has the loveliest smile!"
Reese shrugged. Cassie Moffat certainly had a very engaging way about her; her lovely smile was quite possibly her greatest asset.
Len Libby featured dark chocolate prepared with pure butter and heavy creams. The display case held a huge selection of truffles stuffed with real fruit. There was marzipan honey almond, pecan buds, butterscotch squares, peanut brittle and a butter cream concoction laced with brown sugar. The girl behind the counter recommended the toffee molasses chips and Bordeaux dark nougat. Felicia bought an assortment of chocolates, taffy and fudge.
"Is she your girlfriend?"
"What's that?" Reese couldn't keep his thoughts in order for more than two seconds back to back.
"The Moffat girl - are you dating?"
"Not in this lifetime." She stared at him confusedly but let the matter drop. "I'll be back in a minute." Reese hurried to the men's room and locked the door. He had to pee real bad. Hovering over the urinal for the better part of a minute, nothing came out. The whole front of his underwear was a gooey, golden mess. His plumbing was busted! Another thirty seconds petered away. Still nothing. Then, just as he was getting ready to zip up his fly, the urine dribbled out in a fitful broken stream. In five different directions, Reese was pissing razor blades. The searing, white hot pain - it felt like Roto-Rooter had just reamed out his urethra.
"You don't look so hot." They were back out in the parking lot.
"No, I'm Okay."
"Here, this should perk you up." Felicia snapped off a huge piece of peanut brittle.
Peanut brittle, the drug of choice for gonorrhea. Just what Reese needed! "Yeah, that tastes great. Thanks a million." He could feel his legs going rubbery as he slid into the car.
Five minutes later as they turned on to East Grand View Ave, Felicia said, "That Moffat girl had something she wanted to give you."
"What was it?"
"I'm not sure. She didn't say. Just ran off in a hurry."


Reese went back to his room and called a doctor. "I'd like an appointment."
"New or regular patient?" the receptionist asked.
"New."
"Nature of the visit?"
"I got an infection."
"Where exactly?"
Reese considered his options. "It's a venereal disease."
"Tomorrow at two," the woman spoke in a nasally monotone. "You'll need to arrive fifteen minutes beforehand in order to fill out paperwork."
Reese hung up the phone and began to cry. He cried because, in the better part of twenty years, his gonads had never let him down. They always performed properly, kept their own counsel and never gave him an ounce of grief. No nothing. And what did he do? He copulated with the town whore and, in the bargain, bartered away his otherwise perfect health. Idiot! Moron! Cretin! Moral degenerate! Well, the great American novel, which wasn't getting written any time soon, would have to wait just a little bit longer.

What was it Felicia told him as they were returning from Len Libby and the seventeen hundred pound chocolate moose? Cassie would stop by later on. Reese wasn't going anywhere special. He wouldn't let on to anything. When the timing was just right, he would let the fat whore from South Boston's infamous D Street Projects know exactly what he thought of her debauchery. Truth be told, it was because of people like her that Reese couldn't get beyond the tip of his nose with his writing. Cassie wrecked his peace of mind. Shaky at best, his writing was now losing all perspective; his world view was becoming brittle, misanthropic, misogynistic, dogmatic, world-weary and cynical. His stilted prose ended up where it properly belonged in the overflowing wastebasket.
And the prissy Mrs. Fitch was no better. Never a kind word, she ran the Scenic View Inn with an autocratic, iron fist. The motel was shorthanded. Reese pulled a double shift the previous Tuesday, and the cantankerous woman never even paid the mandatory time-and-a-half much less thanked him for his loyalty. No, life sucked. There was no hope for humanity, because nothing was ever what it seemed to be.
Earlier that morning Reese traipsed down to the beach. The tide receding, an adolescent boy was skim boarding on the bubbly outgoing surf. Throwing himself down on the warm sand, he scanned the shore. A bunch of sooty terns were wading about in the shallows. Much smaller and darker than the gulls, they scrupulously avoided the noisy tourists and more aggressive birds.
Caw! Caw! Caw! Far more numerous were the gulls. Reese spotted herring gulls, a scattering of ring-billed terns and a solitary black-legged kittiwake. All the herring gulls sported a blotch of bright red on the underside of their bottom beaks at the furthermost tip. How come he had never noticed that distinctive anomaly? Describing nature - a writer was supposed to report what he saw not what he imagined. The herring gulls' tails were porcelain when observed in flight out over the ocean, but once they set back down on the sand, the topmost tail feathers were decidedly gray. Everybody thought they knew what a herring gull looked like, but much of what they imagined was slightly off-kilter, just a tiny bit askew.
And oddly enough, sea gulls weren't really sea gulls. They had no salt regulation glands and needed to return to land to obtain fresh drinking water. The birds were scavengers and in the Old Orchard area increased their numbers by feeding on human garbage dumps. Reese had learned these things