The Motor Lodge

The papers had closed at ten that morning, and by noon David Ah Lum was standing in the middle of the cracked courtyard of a motor lodge he now owned, a horseshoe of twenty-two doors around a dead kidney-shaped pool that had been dry so long a small tree was growing up through the deep end, and he was doing the thing he always did in a new room, which was to stand still in the center of it and let it tell him what it was, except that this room was telling him something he had not fully let himself hear until the deed was actually in his name, which was that people lived here.

He was forty-eight. He had opened his restaurant on this same street eight years back, in the teeth of the crash, when everyone he respected had told him he was a fool, and the restaurant had worked, had worked better every year, until the fools were the ones who had told him to wait, and the money it threw off had let him do what he was doing now, which was to buy the sagging 1955 motor lodge four blocks south of his own front door and turn it into something a person would drive across the country to sleep in. That was the idea. He had seen it done downtown, an old casino tower made over into a real hotel with no slot machines in it at all, and he had walked the halls of it and thought, on this street, with these bones, I could do that smaller and truer than anybody. The corridor was turning. He had bet on that turning once already and been right. The boutique-hotel people had not come this far south yet. He would be first, again, the way his whole life had trained him to be first into the cheap forgotten room and make it worth something.

Except that the room was not empty, the way his storefront had been empty in 2007. It was a quarter full of people who had nowhere else in Reno to go.

He knew the number from the manager, a tired man named Ruiz who had run the place for the out-of-state owner and had stayed on through the closing because he had not been told to leave: five of the twenty-two units rented long term, by the week, cash, no lease, no deposit, which was the whole reason people lived in a place like this, because it asked nothing of you up front that you could not scrape together on a Friday. A man who did overnights at a warehouse. A woman with a boy in the fourth grade who caught the school bus at the corner. An old man who had been in unit nine so long the manager could not remember him arriving. They paid a little more a week than an apartment would cost a month, which was the cruel arithmetic of the bottom of the market, and they paid it because an apartment wanted first and last and a credit check and a deposit, four thousand dollars of nothing-down that none of them had and none of them were ever going to have, and the town, this year, had roughly no empty apartments left in it anyway.

David walked the horseshoe. The doors were steel, painted and repainted, dented at the kick line. A window unit dripped a dark stain down the stucco under unit nine. Somebody had a folding chair out and a coffee can of cigarette ends beside it. Somebody had a string of Christmas lights up in August. In front of unit fourteen a bicycle lay on its side with training wheels, and David stood looking at the small bicycle for a while, because he had been told about the boy but the bicycle was a different kind of knowing.

He had heard what other men were doing this year, downtown, over on the west end. Buying these places by the block. Emptying them, boarding them, bringing them down. The city itself had money set aside for it, was paying to knock the worst of them flat, and there were people who called that progress and people who called it something uglier, and both of them were talking about actual human beings who on a given night had had a door with a number on it and then did not. David had read all of it. He had told himself, signing, that he was not that. That he was making something, not erasing something. That renovation was a kinder word than demolition. But standing in the courtyard he could not get the two words to hold as far apart as he needed them to, because the boy on the bicycle did not much care which word you used for the thing that put him out.

The oldest arithmetic in David’s family ran under all of it, the way it always did when he stood on this street. His great-great-grandfather Wei had come to this valley in 1868 to lay the railroad track a mile north of here, and had stayed, and the town had let him keep exactly one kind of storefront and no more, and then one November when the town decided it wanted the ground back it had marched into the Chinese quarter and burned it and razed it and paved it over, and the Ah Lums had scattered and endured and come back, as they always came back, and it had taken a hundred and forty years and every kind of patience for one of them to finally own a piece of this street outright instead of merely being allowed to work on it. David had wanted that his whole life, the owning, the name over the door, the thing that could not be taken because it was his. And now he had it, more of it than he had ever had, and the first thing the owning had put into his hands was the power to do to five people almost exactly what had been done to his own.

Ruiz came out of the office with the keys, the whole ring of them, and held them out. “You want me to give them notice?” he said. “The weeklies. Thirty days is the law, but the man before you never did paper on them, so.” He let it hang. “Your call now.”

David took the ring. It was heavier than he expected, twenty-two keys and a dozen others for padlocks and gates and things he had not found yet, warm from Ruiz’s pocket, and he stood in the middle of his courtyard turning it over in his hand and looking at the string of Christmas lights and the small bicycle and the dark drip under unit nine, and he thought about the room this could be in a year, and about the boy who caught the bus at the corner, and he did not, standing there, know which of the things he was going to do.

“Let me think,” David said.

Ruiz nodded like a man who had expected no better answer and went back into the office, and David stayed out in the sun in the middle of the twenty-two doors, the keys in one hand, the weight of the whole turning street on him, first again, and for the first time in his life not at all sure that being first was the same as being right.

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