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She said 'bike' and he imagined her on a bicycle. He imagined her peddling through the rain. Maybe she meant a motorcycle. Courtney might never know.

"Yeah. Uh." He took his keys out of his pocket, then offered them to her. "Do you know how to drive? I shouldn't. I just had a drink. I mean..." He cleared his throat, shifted his body in that awkward way he had, as he tried to collect his words, "I'm not drunk, but..."

Maybe it was because she was French and in France one drink was merely an aperitif, ridiculous to think of it in terms of ‘drank too much’. One drink was, well, she wasn’t a drinker even when she was human but one wasn’t something to stop a person from driving. Now, three or five, maybe, but one? Pi arched an eyebrow at the man and shrugged, a very Gallic gesture, full of her Parisian influences, with her arched brow and slightly narrowed suspicion at his overly piousness when it came to alcohol. She couldn’t help herself, ingrained as it was to scoff at the American sensibility.

Maybe she judged too harshly, maybe he’d drank himself into a quiet stupor somewhere and was being considerate of her potential life on the somewhat icy roads.

With a nod she acquiesced, walked the far length of the bar to come around and stand at his side.
“Oui.” She said finally, “Show me where and I will drive.” She finished, holding out her hand for his key.

Hyper-cordiality. Hyper-vigilance. Hyper...

Courtney handed her his keys, because, yeah, he was too aware of himself. No, he hadn't had enough to drink, in order to be a detriment to the civilized world.

The overly-compliant. Courtney Apple, who offered his keys up after one drink, because he couldn't stand the thought of being questioned, didn't want her to ask him if he was okay to drive, or not. He figured he'd cut out a conversation.

After all, he wasn't trying to make friends, here, was he? She was his potential landlord, and it was better -- in his eyes, anyway -- for the landlord to see you as overly-pious.

Pious.

A word definitive of him, maybe.

Withering saint.

Withering Rachel.

Courtney jerked his thumb toward the door, headed that way. "It's the red Pacer." He would've said, 'Excuse the mess,' or something else, but there wasn't -- aside from the general residue of living -- a mess to excuse. He'd probably ask her to excuse the entire car, though, when she tried to start it and it stalled.

Pacer?

Pi gave the man a look. People didn’t buy Pacers because they wanted to look good. In fact the opposite was true. A Pacer was the vehicle a connoisseur bought as a gag for another petrol head. As they presented their gift with a red bow and **** eating grin they knew would be returned as their friend realized what stood in front of them. Having being out of production about fifty years the car Courtney drove was a classic, beyond ugly but a charm all its own and … oddly in pretty decent condition.

There was a beauty if the car, like there was beauty in watching the waddle of a VW bus haul its gas guzzling weight around a long stretch of highway it still transported you back to a time when things were slowly, more innocent, less frenetic.

Pi looked on the thing fondly. It weighed a freaking ton, as most cars pre-carbon and lighter metals were used to reinforce the vehicles of today. With fingertips playing thoughtfully with her lips she circled the vehicle, one hand reaching out to touch it.

“It is so beautifully ugly isn’t it?” She commented, throwing the man a teasing grin. “I’m not sure whether to be sorry for you or impressed.”

Using the key she unlocked it. She’d have to get into the car to unlock his side. This beast was made before central locking and like days of old, she’d have to reach over the passenger seat to flip the lock on his door to let him in. Her grin widened.

Pi was a mechanic. Not of cars. She wasn’t a petrol head, not by the standards that those who carried the name proudly did. But she liked to tinker. If an article interested her, she read it, if something ticked, hummed or grumbled – she liked to pull it apart and check out its insides, pilfer around to see how it ticked.
She didn’t know much about the Pacer beyond the fact it was a **** ugly, fishbowl of a car so heavy it outweighed its 1970s heft counterparts despite the fact it was one of the first compact vehicles of its time. And now she’d get to drive it.

Leaning over she flipped the lock for Courtney, staying leaned over as he opened his door with a smile.
“Thank you for letting me drive it.” She offered, settling back into her seat to start it, foot lowering easily into the clutch and turning the key over.

It stalled, but old cars did. It navigated like an elephant, and had the stopped speed of a rhino at full pelt, but you’d expect that with a car without anti-lock brakes and ancient engineering. But she loved every single minute of the drive to the trailer park.

She couldn’t have found a more dismal location to purchase real estate. Gloom hung like willow moss over each house, blocking joy behind its invisible green leaves, shrouding each ‘house’ with its twisted vines of collective misery. Pi hated the place. Loved it, peculiarly. But hated it too. She’d never lived in wheeled housing, not in Paris, not where real estate was defined in tiny apartments with barely two rooms and kitchens that doubled as bathrooms and privacy was merely a curtain pulled to stop your bare arse from being shown off to the world.

But it was the same, the feeling, the grit of it, the thinly veiled hopelessness.

This was Pi’s irony. Her past. But not her future. Not anymore.

She sat in the car, staring at the door of the trailer in front of them.

She endowed him with a sense of pride, when she asked about the car, when she said she wasn't sure whether to be sorry, or impressed. It was like telling a joke -- not a hand-me-down-repeat-misfit from some comedy show, but a joke you made up, yourself -- and having somebody laugh at it, for the first time. He smiled big and wide, shrugged in response to the question. He wasn't sure, either, but he knew he felt impressed with himself, in the moment.

Courtney wasn't a petrol head, either. Not at all. He didn't pine over cars, didn't study them or dissect them. He wasn't even a mechanic. He just had a fascination, when he saw it -- the Pacer, all deep red and bone white,mottled and used, loved by the previous owner, all the history in the back seat,the front seats, all the other lives that had been through it, over the years. The way the body was shaped, kind of rounded, the big, back window that reminded him of a fish bowl.

Or of a murder scene, like most things in his life, like most people in his life. There was something otherworldly, but disenchanted, about the car, which had lead him to buy it, in the first place, from a pot-bellied, aging greaser who smoked like a choo-choo train, who probably was a petrol head with a ****-eating grin. Not like Courtney who saw a kind of tragedy in the comedy of the vehicle, who fell in love with its dumb and blatant poetry.

The interior still smelled like cigarettes. That was Courtney's fault, since he'd re-taken up the habit around the same time he started drinking, again.

When she thanked him, he nodded, shrugged mouthless, in that way he had. Most of the drive, he looked out the window, watched where she was going in the drizzle. Listened to the slosh of tires through wet. The silent interior. No radio. Just the muted sounds from outside. The intermittent darkness of street lights passing overhead.

When they stopped, he turned his head to look through the front window, eyebrows perking.

And it didn't matter what the trailer looked like. He could give a **** about its interior. It was private. It was away from the jostle of people ordering drinks and the cleaners, knocking quietly on the door and wondering if they were disturbing.

It was away, which was where he wanted to be. Away.

The grit and the hopelessness matched the murder scene dynamic of his car, of the people, of his life.

Anything was better than nothing.

He cracked the passenger's side door. Both hands in his pockets, using the toe of his shoe to fraction the door open as he studied the layout, from the outside.

Climbing out of the car she pushed the door shut, not bothering to lock it since she doubted anyone would steal the monstrosity. Instead she walked around the front of the car, waited for Courtney to join her and made her way to the front door.

There wasn’t anything to differentiate the trailer from the others, except hers looked a little less lived in. There were no tricyles or broken down cars on blocks out the front. Her trailer hadn’t been prettied up with rows of flowers or pretty ornaments placed in yards to bring some joy where joy was routinely sucked into the void and rendered useless.

Instead her trailer lay in waiting, a blank canvas no one had put a stamp on, bare space around an isolated building on wheels with nothing to distinguish it. It was as unloved as any trailer could be, merely a blot on the landscape, a rectangle single wide bump.

Walking forward she pulled her set of master keys from her pocket. She always carried them, even if she never used them, one key for each location. One key to unlock the places she owned.

The door stuck, unused to being opened. Turning the door handle she used her shoulder to nudge it open, listening to it creak as she pushed and letting the handle go so it swung wide it’s single arm opening wide in decrepit welcome.

“Here we are.” She announced redundantly, stepping into the place with a jaundiced eye. The air was musty, dust flying with floating motes, disturbed by the rush of air filling the interior with unwelcome freshness. It wasn’t a place that pulled at a person’s heart strings. It was in no way a home, but it was a shelter, with a roof and Spartan furniture, enough to live, to sustain life and to act as residence to someone who didn’t really care either way.

Pi suspected, given Courtney’s rather ambivalent nature, that it was exactly the sort of place a man like him needed. It goes to show, there was a place for everyone. And everyone for a place, even ones like this.

“Feel free to look around” She offered after he joined her inside? “Let me know if you think it will do.”

He slammed the passenger's side door, then jiggled the handle to make sure it was shut. It didn't bother him that she didn't lock the car. The probability of the car being stolen was zero to none. Nobody was going to come and swipe his Pacer. He could leave it unlocked, all the time, and nobody would take the car. It was pure compulsion -- how he would have locked it, himself.

He stood, for what was probably thirty-five seconds, but felt more like a full minute -- and you can count those seconds, out loud, show yourself exactly how long that is, show yourself exactly how painful it is to wait for even one minute -- outside, still studying, watching, like he was returning to some part of himself that he didn't need to churn up, just yet.

His shoes scraped through gravel, dry grass.

No, it wasn't particularly home-y, pretty, kept. No, it didn't feel lived in. It felt left. Quiet, black, creaking. Something that sat there, unused. He had the feeling she'd never rented it out, before.

He was quiet. Could hear a television from another trailer, over. Could hear Pi as she jimmied the door open, could hear her shoes, could hear his own breath.

He lipped an unlit cigarette and furrowed his eyebrows, made his way after her. Kicked some gravel, let it roll around under the sole of his shoe. Slapped the back of his neck, where the tattoo was still healing, under his skin. The tip of his tongue dodged around the cigarette, pushed it to the side, to the other side.

When he touched things, he did it with light respect, not fear, but quiet temperance. Even the trailer's door handle. This wasn't his property. He'd be less careful, if it was his.

"Where's the guy who was here, before me?" He said it from behind her and to the right, his silhouette blocking up the doorway, for a second, before he side-stepped, and the light showered in behind them.

He could hear the vibrations of his body, in the silent places, in between words.

“No idea what happened to the.. guy who was here last. ” Pi answered and it was the truth. She didn’t, have any earthly idea. She was curious though, how he’d known it had been a male. Although, her curiosity was surface, a passing thought, discarded as she considered the place with new eyes, he eyes of a landlord inspecting a property that would become the home of someone else.

It really had seen better days.

The trailer had been a steal. If there was such a thing as a bargain basement deal for what was obviously an already basement trailer this was it. Most of the furniture in the place had come with it. The only thing Pi had bought new was the mattress in the one bedroom. Not even in an apathetic state would she consider sleeping on the one that had been left behind. Stains, big brown ones, peppered the sides and one round one in the middle. She hadn’t asked what happened to the previous owner/tenant.

She hadn’t smelled blood when she’d taken over ownership. But she’d sensed misery and apathy, sensed it in the way a hound worried the base of a tree searching for the dominant urine signature and whining its worry, wanting no bar of it.

Pi turned to face Courtney as the shadow of his body filled the doorway, automatically taking a step back as his shadow loomed larger than the man himself, blocking her view, momentarily hiding his features from her. Quickly, she raised her hand, sweeping it left of the front door.

“Bedroom.” She pointed out (a little redundantly), distracting him (and her) before turning again, giving him her back and moving further into the house. “Bathroom. Kitchen.. Living room and Dining room.” She finished with a lack of fanfare, the last said as nearly one word since the living room, the kitchen and the dining room really were, just one big room. Some single wide trailer designer’s nod to open plan living space, which inadequate tried to mask the matchbox size of the place.

God it was dismal and for the first time Pi wondered really why she’d bought it at all and rather than ask him again what he thought of the place, she kept silent (cause she’d asking it before and rather thought she was pushing it if she did a second time).

His breath fell out of him, foggy. Rasped and careened in billows.

In the dark, from behind her, he didn't notice that Pi's breaths were empty. He never made any solid eye-contact, anyway, kept his gaze bouncing above her head, inspecting the gauzy shadows of cobwebs in the ceiling corners.

If it'd been brighter, he may have seen it, may have taken note, because he made intuitive leaps, like that, like how he'd asked what happened to the previous guy, out of some basic instinct, something that muttered in his ear.

She motioned to the left, and Courtney side-stepped, again. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, then stuck it behind his ear, gave it a balancing point. One of his hands went into his jacket's pocket. The other hand, he used on door handles.

The bedroom, first, since that was where he'd been directed. He slid the door open, looked in, looked to the left, at the closet doors, looked to the right, at the night stands and the bed. For an increment -- some three or four seconds -- he stood there, adding everything up. His mind played clairsentient movie reels -- somebody on the bed, writhing around, holding the sides of their head, somebody kicking at the covers, somebody screaming and slapping the walls, somebody sobbing. Courtney frowned, but moved on.

He turned, walked through layers of indifferent darkness as he slid open the bathroom door, and scanned the bath, toilet, sink. The bathroom, then the closet across from it. He opened that door, then closed it, without really looking at the closet's insides.

From the foyer's closet to the kitchen.

His body stirred the old energies, brought noise to the silence, brought breath to the stale. Memories rose, like the dust, and slapped him across the face, leaving his chest hollow. A strange feeling settled over him.

The trailer's interior was as cold, inside, as it was, outside.

A striking difference, when he turned on the stove, watched it heat up, turned off the stove. Opened the oven.
He didn't really care about the trailer's dismal state. He didn't really care if the utilities worked, or not, but he went through the motions, through the process of checking everything, while she was there. Kitchen cabinets.
From the kitchen cabinets to the bare dining room table. He ran his hand across it, gathering soft, brown dust on his palm. He wiped his hand against the hem of his shirt.

From the dining room table to the living room. The furnishings seemed old, but relatively unused. He didn't pick up anything from in the living room, like he had in the bedroom. No visions assaulted him.

He stood in the middle of the living room, turned a slow circle, one hand hanging limp, the other still in his pocket, his eyes skimming from the floor to the ceiling.

When he saw her silhouette, in the dim blue-black lighting -- the side of her face lit marigold by the streetlight, outside, he paused. And, then, he did notice, the eerie way that no fog came from her mouth, or her nose, how her chest rose and fell, but...

He ignored the creeping feeling that pricked the back of his neck, said, "It'll do," at least until he found other accommodations.

He was trapped in-between. The trailer suited him. It was a kind of purgatory.