HEARTBREAK MOTEL

The sun doesn't shine on the desert towns where California, Arizona and Nevada converge. It glares, searing the asphalt highways lined with truck stops and trailer parks until the air shimmers with heat. In the neon nights, the listless and the luckless -- dropouts, boozers, gamblers and speed freaks -- take refuge in cheap motels. No one knows how many drifters travel the roads, how many alienated Americans hole up in motel rooms, in anger or despair. No one can even say if there are more of the rootless in this desolate corner of America than elsewhere. Theirs is an invisible subculture, or was until last month, when the FBI traced Oklahoma City bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh to the old motor courts of Kingman, Arizona, where he brooded for weeks before driving east.

But sit in the white plastic chair by the ice machine at the Highland Motel in Bullhead City, Arizona; hang around the parking lot at the El Rey Motel in Searchlight, Nevada; knock on doors at the Desert Inn Motel in Needles, California, and the sad stories pour forth. There's the fireman who fled his eastern Washington home when his wife started sleeping with his fire-station colleagues. He moved to Alaska, worked security on the pipeline, then drifted south, where he gambles away his earnings as a casino janitor. There's the Michigan supermarket checker whose husband left when she told him she had breast cancer. Eight operations and a nervous breakdown later, she is worried about losing her new lover, a gas-station attendant. There's the Chicago doctor whose divorce and emergency-room stress led him to slam methamphetamines. Now a motel handyman, he shows the needle scars on his arms.

For most of these motel dwellers along the dry plateaus between the Dead Mountains and the Black Mountains, political violence is the last thing on their mind. The FBI discovered that when it arrested two drifters who had passed through Kingman and also Perry, Oklahoma, where McVeigh was arrested. Journalists converged on Kingman only to find that the two men spent weeks watching television, rarely emerging from their motel rooms except to buy beer and food. "I'm a drunk," explained a baffled Robert Jacks on Nightline, after the fbi finally released him. "I just pick up work -- or anything I want as I go, you know." The next week, another drifter, Steven Colbern, was arrested in Oatman, halfway between Kingman and Needles on Route 66. The remains of a methamphetamine lab were found near his trailer. Colbern, a UCLA graduate in chemistry and a fugitive from a weapons charge, had met McVeigh, but the FBI discounted him as a bombing suspect.