The Bypass

There was no highway to turn off of anymore. That was the thing Karl Schroeder could not get used to. For twenty-eight years he had come up from the valley the same way, north on 395, and turned off the highway onto South Virginia at the top of the strip and driven down past the car lots and the motels to the Saddleback, and the road had been the road, the main line north and south, everything on it and everybody on it going somewhere through the middle of it. Now the highway was a mile east of him on a raised bed of its own, four lanes cut through where the fields had been, and the cars went by out there at seventy without ever knowing the strip existed. What he drove down now was just a street. They had even changed the signs. Where it used to say US 395 it said something else, business route, a courtesy name for a road that no longer did the business.

He was seventy-five. He had sold the cattle in 1971 and the Carson Valley ground in 1974 to a man who put houses on it, and he and Agnes lived in town now, in a place near her mother’s old house, close enough that he could drive up to the motor court in twenty minutes when there was a thing that needed a signature or a decision, which lately was every week. The partnership had come apart the ordinary way, by death mostly. The brother-in-law in Carson City had died in 1976. One of the Gardnerville men had sold out to Karl and the other in 1969 and moved to Arizona. The other Gardnerville man had died last spring, and his widow wanted out, wanted her third turned back into money while there was still money in it to turn, and Karl had come up today to sit with Russ and look at the books and decide whether there was.

Russ Whitlock was still there. That was the other thing. Russ had run the Saddleback for twenty-eight years, had never run anything else after Bakersfield, had lived the whole time in the manager’s unit at the end of the L with a hot plate and a good chair and a television, and he was past seventy now himself, slower, his hands not steady, but he still opened the office at seven and still kept the calendar on the wall, though the calendar was a different kind of calendar than it had been. Karl found him at the desk with the ledger open and the electric fan off because the afternoon was cool.

“Karl.”

“Russ.”

“You drove up.”

“I did.”

Russ turned the ledger around so Karl could read it. Karl sat down in the customer chair, the same chair, or one like it, and put on his glasses and looked.

It was not what it had been and it was not nothing. The tourist trade was gone, the three-weekends-sold-out that Russ had shown him that first summer, the parts salesmen and the Fish and Game conference and the families driving through. Nobody drove through anymore. But the units were mostly full, because Russ had done the sensible thing three years ago when the freeway opened and stopped chasing the traffic that was not coming and started renting by the week and the month instead, to men who worked construction and men who had come to town for a job and men whose lives had gotten small, and they paid, most of them, most weeks, and the place ran a little ahead of what it cost to run.

“It is not a motel anymore,” Russ said. “I want you to understand that before you decide anything. It is a place people live. It is a different business than the one you bought into.”

“I can see that.”

“The El Rancho down the way is going the same road. The Ho Hum is holding on because it is close enough to downtown. The ones in the middle, like us, we are apartments now with a sign out front that says the wrong thing. I have thought about taking the neon down. It says VACANCY and we are never vacant and it costs money to light it, but people find you by the sign, so it stays.”

Karl looked at the numbers a while longer. Out the window the lot was quiet in the afternoon, a few old cars, a man in work clothes sitting on the step of his unit with a cigarette, the little lawn gone mostly to dirt, the flagpole still there with no flag on it. Two lots north he could see the back of the El Rancho, the robin’s-egg pool drained and fenced off with plywood. Across the street the houses from the twenties were long gone, replaced in the sixties by a muffler shop and a used-car lot, and the used-car lot had a banner up that had faded past reading.

“You remember what I asked you,” Karl said. “The first day. Before you had a single guest.”

Russ leaned back. “I remember you asked me a lot of things that day.”

“I asked you how long it would last. And you told me. You said it lasts as long as the highway runs through it, and when they build a freeway around it the strip is in trouble. You said that in 1954. Could be ten years, you said, could be twenty.”

“It was twenty-six,” Russ said. “I was off by six years to the good. I have been off by worse.”

“And then I asked you something else, at the end, going out the door, and you did not answer me.” Karl took his glasses off and folded them and held them in his hand. “I asked you what happens to a motor court when the highway moves.”

Russ was quiet for a moment. Outside, a truck went by on the surface street, slow, going somewhere local, and behind it, far off, the long steady sound of the freeway carrying the through-traffic north around them, the traffic that would never turn off onto this street again.

“You want the answer now,” Russ said.

“I have got a widow in Gardnerville who wants to know whether her third is worth anything, and I have got to tell her something by Friday. So yes. I would like the answer now, twenty-eight years late, if you have got one.”

Russ closed the ledger. He put his unsteady hand flat on the cover of it and looked at Karl across the same desk they had first sat at when the paint was new.

“All right,” he said. “What happens to a motor court when the highway moves is that it becomes whatever the people who are left need it to be, or it becomes nothing. That is the whole answer. Those are the only two roads out of here, Karl, and one of them you can still drive.” He tapped the ledger once. “The question is not what happened to it. That already happened. The question is whether you want to be a man who owns apartments on a street that used to be a highway, or whether you want to be done. And that one I cannot answer, because that one was never mine to answer. It was always yours.”

Karl put his glasses back on and picked up the ledger and opened it again to the first page, and outside the freeway went on carrying the town around them, and he did not say anything yet, because he did not yet know.

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