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This story is taken from Tess Gallagher’s introduction to The 1989-1990 Pushcart Prize XIV, 1989, and is copyrighted by Tess Gallagher, who has given permission to re-publish.
Once in Santa Maria, Ray and I had been put up in a noisy but trendy art deco hotel where movie companies were wont to park writers. It was called the Shangri La and it felt like a converted motel. The rooms were approachable without entering a lobby. Anyone could climb the stairs to the open air corridor that ran along the doors to the rooms. At about 11 p.m. on our first night, a knock came at the door, first softly, then firmly. When we didn’t answer right away, a man’s voice began to come through our door explaining, then asking. I told Ray not to open the door but he did anyway. He opened the door as far as the chair would allow. So this guy, with Ray peering out through the crack in the door, told Ray again how his car had broken down earlier and that he’d taken it to a nearby garage for repairs. Now he’d gone to pick it up and they were charging him twenty dollars over the estimate and wouldn’t release the car until they had the cash. Remember, it is 11 p.m.. The man explained that he needed the car to go to work, never mind that he had to get home to sleep that night. Furthermore the guy promised Ray that if he loaned him the money he would personally drive home and get the twenty dollars and slip it under the door in an envelope before morning so as not to disturb him again. Ray asked the man to wait a minute. He shut the door and went to where his slacks were thrown over a chair and took out his billfold. Then he opened the door on its chair, reached through the narrow space to give the man the money.
After Ray had completed this transaction, for which he was to receive sleep in exchange for twenty dollars, I think I probably said something appropriately salty about con men and scams, and Ray half-heartedly pretended to have simply paid the man to go away. But it’s clear to me now, as it was at the time, that Ray thought there could be something authentic about this man’s desperation, his need to knock on the doors of strangers at 11 o’clock at night. Ray wasn’t taking any chances. He’d covered his bets, making sure he hadn’t turned someone in genuine need away.
The next morning at the Shangri La, I kept an eye on Ray. Sure enough, I caught him, first thing, staring at the patch of blank carpet in front of the door. There was no cash. No envelope with money. He turned to me and we both grinned and then we began to laugh until our eyes smarted. He knew that I knew he had expected to find that envelope of money near the door. But, he hadn’t. The hilarity of the situation spilled over us in that Hopperesque room attached to a stranger we would never see again. But Ray hadn’t lost anything. He’d believed against the odds, and that is somehow always to be ahead of anyone’s game or trifling with one’s trust.
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