Just for the Hell of It, Ione Said Yes

In the spring of 1965, Ione Butts, sole proprietor of the Knight’s Best Motor Lodge, widow of the handsome asshole Henry Butts, and mother to a ten-year-old child, inadvertently acquired a sixty-foot knight in shining armor. A man named Franklin Tort came into the motel office with his hat in his hands and said: “I got a knight in shining armor, ma’am, and I am willing to part with him for free. He is of my own construction, built on the scale of a Trojan horse and impressive in the extreme. However, Mrs. Tort is not at all fond of him. She wants him gone and has threatened to dismember him. She has purchased an axe expressly for the purpose of dismemberment. She is forever waving the axe in my face and saying that she means business. I have come to believe that she does mean business; and I thought that, maybe, given the name of your establishment, the knight could be put to some use here.”

“Oh, Mama,” said Ione’s daughter Tanya, who was a baton twirler and a busybody of epic proportions, “please say ‘Yes.’ That is just exactly what we need. We need a knight in shining armor. We do, we do.” And then, turning to Franklin Tort and batting her eyelashes: “My daddy is dead. I am an orphan.”

“You are not an orphan,” said Ione. “Run off and play.”

“I’m too old to play,” said Tanya.

“For God’s sake,” said Ione, “ten years old is not too old to play.”

“I would deliver the knight,” said Franklin Tort, “and set him up in front of the motel.”

“Well,” said Ione.

“People would see him for miles around. He would be like a beacon to your establishment.”

“Oh, Mama,” said Tanya, “we need a beacon.”

“Hush up,” said Ione.

And then, just for the hell of it, Ione told Franklin Tort, “Yes.”

“Just for the hell of it,” had become Ione’s rule of thumb for making decisions since Henry died. Alternately, she resorted to asking herself the questions “Why not?” and “What the hell; who cares?”

On Thursday, the sixty-foot knight arrived. He was lying on his back and strapped to the flatbed of a semi, stretched out as if he were a warrior in a tomb. He was much larger than Ione had imagined he would be, not that she had put much time into imagining him.

In truth, she had almost forgotten about him entirely.

“He’s here! He’s here!” shouted Tanya. “The beacon is here. We are saved.”

Ione watched from the office as the knight was unloaded from the truck and, with the help of a pulley, chains, and several men, raised to a standing position in front of her motel.

“My God,” said Ione when the knight was fully erect. Tears sprang to her eyes. She batted at them with an impatient hand.

Franklin Tort came into the office, sweat running down his face and the front of his shirt soaked through. He said, “I hope that he is placed to your satisfaction.”

“Yes,” said Ione.

That night, the handsome asshole Henry Butts spoke to Ione in her sleep. He said, “Baby, I want to apologize.”

You can be sure those words made Ione sit straight up in bed.

“Go ahead,” she said.

But Henry was silent, unable, even from the great beyond, to say that he was wrong.

Ione got out of bed and went outside where the air smelled, as it often did, of a woman who had been overzealous in her application of orange blossom perfume. Some were charmed by this smell. Ione was not. Nothing about Florida charmed her. It was Henry Butts who had found it all so charming. It was Henry who had moved them from Boston to a place he consistently, idiotically, referred to as the Land of Honey and Dreams.

Semis were roaring down Highway 12 and the knight was standing silent in the darkness. The sight of him made a small spark of something travel up the length of Ione’s spine.

She went and sat on his left foot and lit a cigarette. Henry had not liked it when she smoked and for that reason she had continued smoking even though there had been no particular pleasure in it for her.

Now, though, inexplicably, the tobacco was sweet to her in a way that it had not been when Henry was alive.

Henry Butts had died in a car crash, in a headlong collision with a semi. In the car with Henry was Dolly Fremont, Tanya’s baton twirling teacher. When Ione was called upon to identify the body, Henry was fully clothed and looking very much like himself except for a spot of something red on his forehead, which turned out to be lipstick, and not the expected blood.

Ione had looked Henry over carefully and then asked the coroner if the force of the crash could have actually unzipped her husband’s fly. The man had looked at her with mournful eyes and then looked away.

“Oh,” said Ione, “I see.” An utterance that reminded her, very much, of something her mother would say and the manner in which she would say it, and that called to mind, with frightening force, her mother’s pinched mouth and powdered face and heavy-clasped pocketbook.

And then, still sounding very much like her mother, Ione said, “Yes, that is my husband. Thank you so much for your time.”

And now here she was, the owner of a motel, sitting on the foot of a knight, smoking a cigarette, the widow of a man who had died speeding down the highway with his pants unzipped and lipstick smeared on his forehead.

“God help me,” Ione said out loud.

She waited. She smoked her cigarette down to the end. She bent her head back and looked up at the knight. And then she sighed and stood up and went back to bed.

The next morning Tanya was sitting at the kitchen table dressed in a leotard covered in sequins, eating a bowl of Wheaties. Her baton was propped against her chair like a cane.

“You’re dressed up,” said Ione.

“Today is the Little Miss Twirl contest,” said Tanya, batting her mascara-coated eyelashes. “I am going to win.”

“Forgive my ignorance,” said Ione, “but what is the Little Miss Twirl contest?”

“Mama, I told you and told you. It is to discover the best child baton twirler in the state of Florida. Dolly said I am good enough to win. You have to drive me,” said Tanya.

“No,” said Ione.

“You can’t stop me,” said Tanya.

“I most surely can,” said Ione.

Tanya’s lower lip stuck out. Tears trembled in the corners of her eyes. “But Dolly said I could win.”

“Do not talk to me about Dolly,” said Ione. “Or about winning. Or about batons. Or about twirling them.”

“What you mean,” said Tanya, blinking her eyes furiously, “is don’t talk to you at all.” She picked up her baton, slammed out of the kitchen, and went out to the front of the motel. She positioned herself next to the knight and started twirling. Angry sparks of sunlight shot off the baton. The sequins on Tanya’s leotard glowed and the knight shone painfully bright. The whole display was so brilliant that it hurt to look upon it directly. Ione turned away.

The day continued along in an objectionable manner.

Not long after 11:00, Bob Filker from the city council arrived in the Knight’s Best front office to say that the knight in shining armor was a violation of city ordinance.

“What city ordinance?” said Ione.

“Excessive ornamentation,” said Bob Filker. He had a briefcase and a small potbelly and blue eyes. “Excessive lawn ornamentation. The city council would like to see it removed immediately. Also, it’s a safety hazard. When the sun hits it, it’s actually quite blinding.” He cleared his throat. “On the way out here, I myself was almost blinded. I almost drove right directly off the road.”

Ione stared at him. Yesterday, she had been indifferent about the knight. Today, this minute, she was convinced that her life, the motel, the whole world, in fact, would come crashing down without the knight.

“No,” she said.

“Pardon?” said Bob Filker.

“No,” said Ione.

“Well,” said Bob, “it’s not really negotiable.”

“Everything is negotiable,” said Ione, sounding to her own ears very much like Henry Butts.

In the beginning, when they first purchased the Knight’s Best, before Tanya started taking twirling lessons, when Ione still believed Henry, when Ione still loved Henry, and Henry, seemingly, still loved Ione, the two of them had met in the afternoons in Room 8. Eight was one of Ione’s favorite numbers and it seemed to her to be a number, conjoined and intertwined as it was, suited for love.

Now, looking at Bob Filker, Ione saw the number eight superimposed over his confused and anxious face.

And then, clear as you please, she heard Henry Butts say three words: Bribe him, Ione.

“Mrs. Butts?” said Bob Filker. He cleared his throat. His ears stuck out of his head at an odd angle and the late-morning light shone through them and made them glow pink, like the inside of the conch shells that lay in bins in gift shops all up and down the entire state of Florida.

“Look,” Henry had said the first time he saw a conch shell. “Look at this. This is truly the Land of Honey and Dreams. Can you believe something like this comes from the ocean? Isn’t that amazing? Can you believe the wonders of this world?”

“I am sorry about your husband,” said Bob. “I would like to say that. It can’t be easy to run a motel on your own. But it doesn’t change the fact that the, um, ornamentation is against city ordinance.”

Ione turned and took the key to Room 8 off the hook. She put it down on the desk, between her and Bob Filker.

“What’s this?” he said.

“The key to Room 8,” said Ione.

“Oh,” said Bob. “I see.”

 

In bed afterward, Bob Filker rested his head on Ione’s breast.

“I was coming down the highway,” said Bob, his voice dreamy, “I was driving down the highway and I saw that knight and the sun was hitting it and it was blinding, I tell you. I had to slow down. I almost had to stop the car. You never know when you’re going to get knocked off your horse.”

“What horse?” said Ione. The flowered curtains of Room 8 were drawn shut, but there was one small line, one narrow crack where they did not meet. Ione held her hand up to the pencil-thin light. She looked at her fingers with something close to astonishment. She felt as if she had gone on a long journey and just now arrived home.

Somebody started pounding and kicking at the door to Room 8.

“Who’s there?” Bob Filker shouted, sitting straight up in bed.

“Mama, Mama, I know you are in there. Mama, Mama, open up.”

“That’s my daughter,” said Ione.

“Mama,” screamed Tanya, “I am going to hitchhike into town if you won’t drive me. I will, I swear I will. I’ll hitchhike.”

“Is there some kind of emergency?” said Bob. He was out of bed now and pulling on his pants. “Does she need some help?”

“I need a ride into town!” shouted Tanya.

“She’s in distress,” said Bob. He opened the door and Tanya flung herself into his arms.

“There,” he said, his voice gentle, “it’s OK, it’s OK. What’s wrong, honey?”

“I need a ride into town,” said Tanya again.

“Anything you want, honey,” said Bob, “anything at all.”

 

That day, after the Little Miss Twirl contest, when the three of them drove back to the Knight’s Best, Ione could see the knight glowing on the horizon. He was visible from a long, long way off.

“What I meant to say earlier,” said Bob Filker.

“Uh huh,” said Ione.

“I wanted to tell you about Saul when he was headed to Damascus; and then how he was knocked off his horse by the light of Jesus and he became Paul. His whole life changed. Just like that he became somebody else. That’s what I meant about the horse, about getting knocked off your horse.”

“Yes,” said Ione.

“Are you holding my mama’s hand?” Tanya said, leaning up and putting her head between them.

“Yes,” said Bob Filker.

“She’s a widow,” said Tanya.

“I know that,” said Bob Filker.

“My daddy died in a car crash,” said Tanya.

“Would you please hush up?” said Ione.

“I just thought you should know,” said Tanya.

“He knows,” said Ione.

Tanya sank into the back seat, but then she came forward again.

“I tell you what,” said Tanya, “that is the last time I lose at anything ever. I want to win, win, win. I want to win from now on.”

 

Of course, later, the knight came down. The city council had its way. There was not enough sex, not enough bribery in the world, to convince them to let him stay.

And eventually, Ione would sell the motel and she and Tanya would move back to Boston. Ione would get her teaching degree. Bob Filker and the afternoon in Room 8 would become a memory, a small crack in the curtains of a darkened room in Ione’s mind.

Sometimes, though, she would be standing at the blackboard, a piece of chalk in her hand, and she would be struck by something glowing at the edge of her vision and she would turn slightly, oh so slightly; and just like that, it would come flooding back: the knight and the warmth of Bob Filker’s hand in hers, and the handsome asshole Henry Butts holding up that conch shell, and saying, “Can you believe this, Ione? Can you believe the wonders of this world?”