Battleborn: Stories
BATTLEBORN
Claire Vaye Watkins
R
IVERHEAD
B
OOKS
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
New York
2012
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2012 by Claire Vaye Watkins
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
The following stories have been previously published, in slightly different form: “Ghosts, Cowboys” (
The Hopkins Review
), “The Last Thing We Need” (
Granta
), “Rondine al Nido” (
The Chicago Tribune Printers Row
), “The Past Perfect, the Past Continuous, the Simple Past” (
The Paris Review
), “Wish You Were Here” (
The Sycamore Review
), “Man-O-War” (
One Story
), “The Archivist” (
Glimmer Train
), “Virginia City” (
Las Vegas City Life
), “Graceland” (
Hobart
).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Watkins, Claire Vaye.
Battleborn / Claire Vaye Watkins.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-59675-3
1. Nevada—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.A869426B38 2012 2012009175
813'.6—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
for my parents
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”
STEPHEN CRANE
GHOSTS, COWBOYS
T
he day my mom checked out, Razor Blade Baby moved in. At the end, I can’t stop thinking about beginnings.
The city of Reno, Nevada, was founded in 1859 when Charles Fuller built a log toll bridge across the Truckee River and charged prospectors to haul their Comstock silver across the narrow but swift-moving current. Two years later, Fuller sold the bridge to the ambitious Myron Lake. Lake, swift himself, added a gristmill, kiln and livery stable to his Silver Queen Hotel and Eating House. Not a bashful man, he named the community Lake’s Crossing, had the name painted on Fuller’s bridge, bright blue as the sky.
The 1860s were boom times in the western Utah Territory: Americans still had the brackish taste of Sutter’s soil on their tongues, ten-year-old gold still glinting in their eyes. The curse of the Comstock Lode had not yet leaked from the silver vein, not seeped into the water table. The silver itself had not yet been stripped from the mountains, and steaming water had not yet flooded the mine shafts. Henry T. P. Comstock—most opportune of the opportunists, snatcher of land, greatest claim jumper of all time—had not yet lost his love Adelaide, his first cousin, who drowned in Lake Tahoe. He had not yet traded his share of the lode for a bottle of whiskey and an old, blind mare, not yet blown his brains out with a borrowed revolver near Bozeman, Montana.
Boom times.
Lake’s Crossing grew. At statehood in 1864, the district of Lake’s Crossing, Washoe County, was consolidated with Roop County. By then, Lake’s Crossing was the largest city in either. The curse, excavated from the silver vein and weighted by the heavy ore, settled on the nation’s newest free state.
• • •
O
r begin the story here:
In 1881 Himmel Green, an architect, came to Reno from San Francisco to quietly divorce Mary Ann Cohen Magnin of the upscale women’s clothing store I. Magnin and Company. Himmel took a liking to Reno and decided to stay. He started designing buildings for his friends, newly rich silver families.
Reno’s Newlands Heights neighborhood is choked with Green’s work. In 1909, 315 Lake Street was erected. A stout building made of brick, it was one of Himmel’s first residential buildings, a modest design, small porch off the back, simple awnings, thoroughly mediocre in every way. Some say construction at 315 Lake stirred up the cursed dust of the Comstock Lode. Though it contaminated everyone (and though we Nevadans still breathe it into ourselves today), they say it got to Himmel particularly, stuck to his blueprints, his clothing, formed a microscopic layer of silver dust on his skin. Glinting silver film or no, after his divorce was finalized Himmel moved in with Leopold Karpeles, editor of the
B’nai B’rith Messenger
. Their relationship was rumored a tumultuous one, mottled with abuse and infidelity. Still, they lived together until 1932, when the two were burned to death in a fire at Karpeles’s home, smoke rising from the house smelling like those miners boiled alive up in Virginia City mine shafts.
• • •
O
r here. Here is as good a place as any:
In March 1941, George Spahn, a dairyman and amateur beekeeper from Pennsylvania, signed over the deed to his sixty-acre farm to his son, Henry, packed four suitcases, his wife, Helen, and their old, foul-tempered calico cat, Bottles, into the car, and drove west to California, to the ocean.
He was to retire, bow out of the ranching business, bury his tired feet in the warm Western sand. But retirement didn’t suit George. After two months he came home to their ticky-tacky rental on the beach and presented Helen with plans to buy a 511-acre ranch at 1200 Santa Susana Pass Road in the Santa Susana Mountains. The ranch was up for sale by its owner, the aging silent-film star William S. Hart.
The Santa Susana Mountains are drier than the more picturesque Santa Monica Mountains that line the California coast. Because they are not privy to the moist winds rolling in off the sea, they are susceptible to fires. Twelve hundred Santa Susana Pass Road is tucked up in the Santa Susanas north of Los Angeles, off what is now called the Ronald Reagan Freeway. Back in 1941, when George was persuading Helen to move again, taking her knobby hand in his, begging her to uproot the tendrils she’d so far managed to anchor into the loose beige sand of Manhattan Beach—
Just a bit east this time, sweet pea
—the city of Chatsworth was little more than a Baptist church, a dirt-clogged filling station, and the Palomino Horse Association’s main stables, birthplace of Mr. Ed. Years later, in 1961, my father, still a boy, would start a wildfire in the hills above the PHA stables. He would be eleven, crouched in the dry brush, sneaking a cigarette. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
At the heart of the ranch was a movie set, a thoroughfare of a Western boomtown: bank, saloon, blacksmith, wood-planked boardwalk, side streets and alleys, a jail. Perhaps the set dazzled Helen. Perhaps she—a prematurely arthritic woman—recalled the aching cold of Pennsylvania winters. Perhaps she spoiled her husband, as her children claim. Whatever the reason, Helen laid her hand on her husband’s brow and said, “All right, George.” And though by all accounts Helen came to like the ranch, on the day George took her out to view the property for the first time her journal reads:
The property is quite expansive, surrounded by mountains. G. giddy as a boy. Not such a view as the beach, though. The road out is windy and narrow, sheer canyon walls on either side. Seems I am to be once again separated from the sea. And what a brief affair it was! Looking west I felt a twinge like something had been taken from me, something a part of me but never truly mine.
Within a week of the Spahns’ move up to 1200 Santa Susana Pass Road, Bottles the cat ran away.
But George was more adaptable than Bottles, and luckier. In 1941, Westerns were still Hollywood’s bread and butter. George ran his movie set like he’d run his dairy ranch, building strong relationships with decision makers, underpricing the competition. It certainly didn’t hurt business when Malibu Bluff State Recreation Area annexed Trancas Canyon and sold off its many sets, making Spahn’s Ranch the only privately owned—and therefore zero-permit—outdoor set for seventy-five miles. The Spahns enjoyed a steady stream of business from the major studios, charging them a pretty penny to rent horses and shoot films at the ranch, among them
High Noon,
The Comstock Boys,
and David O. Selznick’s 1946 classic
Duel in the Sun
, starring Gregory Peck. TV shows were also shot at the ranch, including most episodes of
The
Lone Ranger
and—before Warner Brothers, coaxed by Nevada’s tax incentives and the habits of its big-name directors, moved production to the Ponderosa Ranch at Lake Tahoe—
Bonanza
.
• • •
W
e might start at my mother’s first memory:
It’s 1962. She is three. She sits on her stepfather’s lap on a plastic lawn chair on the roof of their trailer. Her older brother and sister sit cross-legged on a bath towel they’ve laid atop the chintzy two-tab roof, the terry cloth dimpling their skin. They each wear a pair of their mother’s—my grandmother’s—oversize Jackie O. sunglasses. It is dusk; in the eastern sky stars are coming into view—yes, back then you could still see stars over Las Vegas—but the family faces northwest, as do their neighbors and the teenage boys hired to cut and water the grass at the new golf courses and the city bus drivers who have pulled over to the side of the roads and the tourists up in their hotel rooms with their faces pressed to the windows. As does the whole city.
Their stepfather points to the desert. “There,” he says. A flash of light across the basin. An orange mushroom cloud erupts, rolling and boiling. Seconds later, she hears the
boom
of it, like a firework, and the trailer begins to sway. Impossibly, the heat warms my mother’s face. “Makes you think,” her stepfather says softly in her ear. “Maybe there’s something godly out there after all.”
The blast is a 104-kiloton nuclear explosion. It blows a hole into the desert rock, creating the deepest crater of all the Nevada Test Site’s 1,021 detonations: 320 feet deep. The crater displaces seven hundred tons of dirt and rock, including two tons of sediment from a vein of H. T. P. Comstock’s cursed soil, a finger reaching all the way down the state, now blown sky-high in the blast. The July breeze is gentle, indecisive. It blows the radiation northeast, as it always does, to future cancer clusters in Fallon and Cedar City, Utah, to the mitosing cells of small-town downwinders. But today it also blows the curse southeast, toward Las Vegas, to my mother’s small chest, her lungs and her heart. And it blows southwest, across the state line, all the way to the dry yellow mountains above Los Angeles. These particles settle, finally, at 1200 Santa Susana Pass Road.
• • •
W
e might start with George’s longest year:
For nearly twenty years, George’s letters to his son, Henry, back home in Pennsylvania were characteristically dry, questions about herd count, tips for working the swarm at honey harvest; he hardly mentioned his own ranch, which to his son would not have seemed a ranch at all.
But by the early 1960s the demand for Westerns began to wane and George Spahn blamed, among others, Alfred Hitchcock. He increasingly ended his notes about farm business with aggravated rants about “cut-’em-ups,” and
“sex-crazed” moviegoers’ fixation on horror films, probably meaning Hitchcock’s
Psycho,
the second-highest-grossing film of 1960, after
Swiss Family Robinson
. On the first day of February 1966, George Spahn filed for bankruptcy. By then, unbeknownst to George, his wife’s kidneys were marbled with tumors. Six weeks later, at UCLA Medical Center, Helen died from renal failure on the same floor where my father would die thirty-four years later. The coroner’s report noted that her tumors were visible, and in the glaring light of the microscope seemed “like hundreds of hairlike silver ribbons.”
After Helen’s death, George neglected the few already tenuous ties he had at the big studios. He wrote Henry often, spoke of the ranch deteriorating, of weeds pushing up through the soil in the corrals.
“I’m tired,” he wrote to his son on July 23, 1966. “Let most everyone [three part-time ranch hands] go. It is hot here. So hot I have to wait for dusk to feed the horses. They get impatient down in the stalls and kick the empty troughs over. Boy, you wouldn’t believe the noise of their hoofs against the metal . . .”
In the end it was the horses, thirsty or not, that kept Spahn’s Ranch afloat. Spahn rented the horses to tourists for self-guided rides through the hills. Occasionally, a few of George’s old studio friends would throw business his way, sending for six or eight paints when a scene couldn’t have needed more than two. And so the horses became George’s main source of income, meager as it was. The Los Angeles County tax records show Spahn’s annual income in 1967 to be $13,120, less than a quarter of what it was in 1956.
In previous letters, George rarely wrote of Helen. When he did his lines were terse, referring to her only along with other ranch business: “Storm coming in. Your mother’s knuckles would have swelled. Lord knows we need the rain.”
That year, George continued to write even as his eyesight failed, his lines sometimes piling atop one another. He began to write of Helen more frequently, sometimes devoting an entire page to her blackberry cobbler or the fragrance of her bath talcum. These are the only letters in which George, otherwise a deliberate and correct writer, slips into the present tense.
In September, George reported discovering a tiny bleached skull in the hills above his cabin. “Bottles,” he wrote, “picked clean by coyotes.”
• • •
O
r here. Begin here:
When a group of about ten young people—most of them teenagers, one of them my father—arrived at the ranch in January of 1968, having hitchhiked from San Francisco, George was nearly blind. Surely he smelled them, though, as they approached his porch—sweat, gasoline, the thick semisweet guff of marijuana. The group offered to help George with chores and maintenance in exchange for permission to camp out in the empty façaded set buildings. Though he’d broken down and hired a hand a couple weeks earlier—a nice kid, a bit macho, went by “Shorty,” wanted to be, what else?, an actor—George agreed, perhaps because he wouldn’t have to pay them. Or perhaps because the group’s leader—a man named Charlie—offered to leave a young girl or two with George twenty-four-seven, to cook his meals, tidy the house, keep up with the laundry, and bed him whenever he wanted.
My father didn’t kill anyone. And he’s not a hero. It isn’t that kind of story.
Nearly everyone who spent time at Spahn’s that summer wrote a book after it was over, Bugliosi’s only the most lucrative. We know, from the books of those who noticed, that a baby was born at Spahn’s Ranch, likely April ninth, though accounts vary. In her version, Olivia Hall, who’d been a senior at Pacific Palisades High School and an occasional participant in group sex at the ranch, wrote of the birth: “The mother, splayed out on the wood floor of the jail, struggled in labor for nearly fourteen hours, through the night and into the early morning, then gave up.” In
The Manson Murders: One Woman’s Escape
, Carla Shapiro, now a mother of four boys, says the struggling girl “let her head roll back onto a sleeping bag and would not push. Then Manson took over.” My father’s book reads, “Charlie held a cigarette lighter under a razor blade until the blade was hot and sliced the girl from vagina to anus.” The baby girl slipped out, wailing, into Charlie’s arms. My father: “The place was a mess. Blood and clothes everywhere. I don’t know where he found the razor blade.”
Charlie had a rule against couples. The group had nightly orgies at the ranch and before it in Topanga, Santa Barbara, Big Sur, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Oakland, San Francisco, the list goes on. You know this part, I’m sure. The drugs, the sex. People came and went. Tracing the child’s paternity was impossible, even if the group had been interested in that sort of thing. “There was a birth, I know that,” Tex Watson wrote to me from prison. “Hell, might’ve been mine. But we were all pretty gone, you know?”