Excerpted from LO SIENTO, by Lake Markham, via APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL PRESS. Available now.
“Guess what,” was how the sheriff started it. The sheriff was named Duke, and Duke had worn the badge for as long as he could remember. He was beyond his prime, he was overweight from all the drinking, and he always wore a pair of dark sunglasses, which helped to conceal the bad eye he’d had since the day he was born. On his great big lips, Duke kept a mustache of the most pristine quality, its form held together by the power of Brylcreem alone, so that whenever there was anything at all that the sheriff wanted to say, the mustache bobbed up and down on his face like a magical harmonica:
“They’re giving me another chance,” he went on, setting the whole thing into motion.
But behind his green desk at the courthouse annex that day, all Reverend Francis could do was beam with elated joy: “I had a pretty good feeling,” was what he said about it. With his small, clean hands the reverend began to rummage through the depths of a file cabinet for the keys to a police cruiser, which he then dangled like a reward before the sheriff’s private eyes.
“Guess it’s a good thing I hung onto these after all,” he said as he did it, rattling the keyring between his tiny little fingers.
By then, you see, the sheriff and the reverend had become the best of friends, and a lot of things had happened through the years to make sure it stayed that way. For one thing, they were the only people in history to have spent their entire lives in the lonely West Texas town of Lo Siento, which meant that they’d gotten to know one another much better than most people ever would. Everyone else who’d been born in the town would one day come to leave it behind, and eventually even those who’d moved there freely would find a reason to get themselves dragged away. But there was something about Duke and Reverend Francis that was just a little bit different, something that no one in Lo Siento, try as they had, had ever been able to identify with any clarity. At the heart of their contentment seemed to lie a secret, as it were, one that lurked just beneath the surface and, if ever it were to be discovered, would quickly explain away the question that veiled their lives in mystery.
“You always did think about that stuff, Frank,” Duke told his friend about the car keys. Then Duke took the keyring and sauntered out the door of the small office.
But before he did that, he made the reverend this promise:
“I’ll see you after a while.”
***
Elsewhere and interlaced amid the desert colors that day, a Toyota Tacoma, like a basket down the Nile, was winding its way toward Lo Siento. And powering its tired frame onward was no more than the exhausted right foot of the stranger behind the wheel. Of Lo Siento, he knew only that it was hot: while he’d been out on the road, it had become the month of May, he had put his body into the heart of this desert, and the sun had by now received occasion to put its hands on all the eye could touch. What had begun for him as delight at the horizon up ahead had long turned to distress under any consideration. And as he tortured forth what breeze the air conditioner was still willing to surrender, as if in protest its vents had begun to sputter in the throes of their little deaths. He knew he should have run out of gas ten miles ago, but he hadn’t, and then there was Lo Siento.
Now Lo Siento was where he was.
When he crossed over the city limits and into the town, he read these words to himself from a billboard overhead:
Welcome to Lo Siento
They appeared to him like a mirage in a cartoon speech bubble, extending from a photograph of a handsome old man. His smile was the same bright white as every last one of his pearl snap buttons. On either side of him was a band of royal tigers, which appeared to be shown mid-leap out of an explosion: those were a couple of show tigers, alright. He scrutinized the image until it seemed to him that all the excitement must mask some elemental riddle.
“Lo Siento,” he spoke the words again.
When he’d filled his tank, he pulled the Tacoma into the parking lot of a motel. That was where he would sleep. He stepped out of the truck and saw it for the first time against the backdrop of the desert, where it belonged as one part of a single, continuous vision. He stopped to imagine how he himself must look at that moment, road-worn and wrinkled, seared as he was onto the face of this galvanized earth.
The name of the motel was stamped into a tin sign that was hanging from a pole, deeply weathered by its time spent baking beneath the Texas sun. When he squinted he could see that the sign did in fact bear a name, though it was so faint that he almost read it as a whisper:
Motel
The empty office was stuck behind a plexiglass window. Everything in there told the story of its age: there were smoke-stained walls, there was a hunter-green desk lamp, there was a yellowed calendar that looked to be from the year before.
“Hello,” he said morosely. He rang the bell for service. He knocked on the window and the sound of his fingers against the glass carried across the lot like gunshots. Finally a pair of feet appeared at the top of the staircase inside, and the face of an old man ducked down low to catch a glimpse of him. The old man ambled down the steps and he got to the partition. His black hair was cropped closely to his head, and small red capillaries spread like maps throughout his rosy cheeks. When at last he spoke it was into a microphone, which configured his words into a distorted signal:
“What do you need.”
“Room for the week.”
“Smoking or non.”
“Whatever’s cheapest.”
The old man took a ledger off the desk and he looked at him again. “Ain’t none of them cheap,” he said into the microphone. “Do you want to smoke in your room or don’t you?”
“I don’t smoke,” he told the old man.
“Alright, then,” the old man said. He said it like he was entertained. “I’m starting to like you.” The old man put a pair of reading glasses on his face. “You want non-smoking. That’s what that means.” He looked back down to punch some figures into a calculator, then jotted a couple of notes into either column of the ledger.
“Seven nights,” he declared. Then he cleared his throat. “Three hundred and forty-five dollars. I’ll just need to see your driver’s license.”
He fished his license from his jeans and counted the cash out in moist twenties. He was starting to run out of money. The old man turned to copy down his information, then looked him squarely in the middle of his face.
“Room 205,” he said. “I put out breakfast at seven-thirty, supper at six.” The old man took a key from a hook on the wall, which he tossed under the window with the driver’s license. “You’re on your own for lunch.”
“Sounds great,” was what he said. He saw a nameplate on the desk that was the color of gold. Someone had etched this word into it:
Ralph
“Leave your things at the door,” Ralph started to say. “I’ll bring them up in just a little while.”
“That’s alright,” he said to Ralph. He took the motel key and he took his driver’s license, then stuck the both of them into his back pocket. “I don’t have much.”
“Suit yourself,” Ralph told him.
Suit himself was what he did. He carried his bags up a flight of cast-iron steps to the second floor, where room 205 was the third door on the left. Behind it was a dwelling that lay completely empty aside from a queen-size bed, a paisley armchair, a chest of drawers which had survived the decline of antiquity. The salmon color of the walls made the plaster seem living and breathing, as if it were made of flesh that could be punctured and wounded as easily as himself.
In the bathroom was a stained old tub and a bottle of L’oreal shampoo. The shampoo was almost empty. A towel, torn to rags but still smelling clean, hung silently from a ring beside the door, and a single lightbulb above the mirror flicked on and then back off again as he tugged at the beaded string that came out of it.
“I have an idea,” he said to his reflection. He was standing beneath the lightbulb in the mirror. Then he pulled on the little string again, and when he did that he cut both of the lightbulbs off.
Back in the main room, it was the bed that caught his eye. It was only then that he realized how tired he really was. The clock on the nightstand told him it was 5:07, but when he laid on the mattress and shut his eyes, any effort to count the day he’d just endured melted away from him completely. At first it was only the details that vanished, but soon even their matter had fallen from this world. And then, before he knew any better, he had found himself deep within a soundless slumber.
— Lake Markham is a writer and photographer based in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of the 2021 novella, Shooting the Messenger, and the 2024 photo zine, hyperreal texas, both out of print. He has since settled his debts with the Lone Star State.