Battleborn: Stories (3 page)

But the whiskey in our coffees was doing its job. I was feeling loose. So I told him what I could. I told him of the heavy earth scent after a desert rain, three or four times a year. That it smelled like the breathing of every thankful desert plant, every plot of soil, every unfound scrap of silver. That it had a way of softening you, of making you vulnerable. That it could redeem.

After dinner we watched Razor Blade Baby until she killed off her last life. Andrew walked us out to our bikes and helped us unchain them. He kissed me then, or rather we kissed each other, right in front of Razor Blade Baby. It was an inevitable kiss. A kiss like I had caught the hem of my skirt on the seat of my bike while trying to mount it, and toppled. A kiss like we had fallen into each other, which I suppose we had.

Afterward, Razor Blade Baby and I rode home to 315 Lake, headlights lighting us from behind. When I closed my front door, my cell phone rang.

“Come outside.” It was Andrew, his voice breathy, sweetly slurred.

“What?”

My doorbell buzzed. I pulled the curtain of my living room window aside, saw him swaying slightly on the porch, glowing phone pressed to his ear.

“Or come and live with me,” he said.

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“So are you. Let me in. We’ll move to L.A., down by the ocean. You can ride your bike up and down the coast. Or forget L.A., we can live here, in the mountains. In the desert. Whatever this is. That thing you said about the rain. You and me, Claire. Just let me in.”

And I wanted to let him in. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I was swaying now and reached for the wall to steady myself, trying to stop the swirl of Picon in my head, my chest. Tried not to think of the words written there under the paint.
When you go, all that matters is who’s there with you. Believe me.
I rested my head against the front door and wanted badly to open it. But the story was too much, wherever I began: the borrowed revolver on the floor of a cabin near Bozeman, Montana. The sweet sizzle of Himmel Green’s skin as it melted into Leopold’s. Helen Spahn’s withering uprooted tendrils. Bottles’s dry bleached bones. My parents’ own toxic and silver-gilded love. Razor Blade Baby, the simple fact of her.

“Good night, Andy,” I said. “Please don’t call me again.”

When I hung up, I heard the sound I had already come to know: a quick creak in the floorboards above me. Razor Blade Baby’s body shifting. The unpressing of her ear from the floor.

•   •   •

W
hen Razor Blade Baby came to my door the next morning—this morning—I did not say, No. No, thank you. We rode our bicycles to the old Hilton Theatre, down Lake Street. Her hair flapped behind her as though lifted by George Spahn’s Pennsylvanian swarm.

I bought a hot dog before the matinee from the concession stand. I covered it with mustard, onions, kraut, jalapeños. Razor Blade Baby nervously fingered a Ziploc bag of peeled carrot sticks hidden in her purse.

Here in the theater I know I ought to try, ought to carry that weight, ought to paint over the past. But I can only do my best. I hold my hot dog near her face. “Want a bite, Razor Blade Baby?”

“Claire,” she says. “I could be your sister.”

And though we have known this since she moved in—well before—this is the first time either of us has said it aloud. And I admit now, it sounds softer than it felt. There is something thankful in the saying.

I nod. “Half sister.”

The lights in the theater dim. Technicolor figures—ghosts, cowboys, Gregory Peck—move across the screen. In
Duel in the Sun
Pearl Chavez asks, “Oh, Vashti, why are you so slow?”

“I don’t rightly know, Miss Pearl, except I always have so much to remember.”

THE LAST THING WE NEED

July 28

Duane Moser

4077 Pincay Drive

Henderson, Nevada 89015

Dear Mr. Moser,

On the afternoon of June 25, while on my last outing to Rhyolite, I was driving down Cane Springs Road some ten miles outside Beatty and happened upon what looked to be the debris left over from an auto accident. I got out of my truck and took a look around. The valley was bone dry. A hot west wind took the puffs of dust from where I stepped and curled them away like ash. Near the wash I found broken glass, deep gouges in the dirt running off the side of the road and an array of freshly bought groceries tumbled among the creosote. Coke cans (some full, some open and empty, some with the tab intact but dented and half-full and leaking). Bud Light cans in the same shape as the Coke. Fritos. Meat. Et cetera. Of particular interest to me were the two almost-full prescriptions that had been filled at the pharmacy in Tonopah only three days before, and a sealed Ziploc bag full of letters signed
M
. I also took notice of a bundle of photos of an old car, part primer, part rust, that I presume was or is going to be restored. The car was a Chevy Chevelle, a ’66, I believe. I once knew a man who drove a Chevelle. Both medications had bright yellow stickers on their sides warning against drinking alcohol while taking them. Enter the Bud Light, and the gouges in the dirt, possibly. I copied your address off the prescription bottles. What happened out there? Where is your car? Why were the medications, food and other supplies left behind? Who are you, Duane Moser? What were you looking for out at Rhyolite?

I hope this letter finds you, and finds you well. Please write back.

Truly,

Thomas Grey

P.O. Box 1230

Verdi, Nevada 89439

P.S. I left most of the debris in the desert, save for the medications, pictures and letters from M. I also took the plastic grocery bags, which I untangled from the bushes and recycled on my way through Reno. It didn’t feel right to just leave them out there.

—

August 16

Duane Moser

4077 Pincay Drive

Henderson, Nevada 89015

Dear Mr. Moser,

This morning as I fed the horses, clouds were just beginning to slide down the slope of the Sierras, and I was reminded once again of Rhyolite. When I came inside I borrowed my father’s old copy of the
Physician’s Desk Reference
from his room. From that book I have gathered that before driving out to Rhyolite you may have been feeling out of control, alone or hopeless. You were possibly in a state of extreme depression; perhaps you were even considering hurting yourself. Judging by the date the prescriptions were filled and the number of pills left in the bottles—which I have counted, sitting out in the fields atop a tractor that I let sputter and die, eating the sandwich my wife fixed me for lunch—you had not been taking the medications long enough for them to counteract your possible feelings of despair. “Despair,” “depression,” “hopeless,” “alone.” These are the words of the
PDR
, forty-first edition, which I returned to my father promptly, as per his request. My father can be difficult. He spends his days shut up in his room, reading old crime novels populated by dames and Negroes, or watching the TV we bought him with the volume up too high. Some days he refuses to eat. Duane Moser, my father never thought he would live this long.

I think there will be lightning tonight; the air has that feel. Please, write back.

Truly,

Thomas Grey

P.O. Box 1230

Verdi, Nevada 89439

—

September 1

Duane Moser

4077 Pincay Drive

Henderson, Nevada 89015

Dear Mr. Moser,

I slept terribly last night, dreamed dreams not easily identified as such. Had I told my wife about them, she might have given me a small quartz crystal or amethyst and insisted I carry it around in my pocket all day, to cleanse my mind and spirit. She comes from California. Here is a story she likes to tell. On one of our first dates, we walked arm in arm around downtown Reno, where she was a clerk at a grocery store and I was a student of agriculture and business. There she tried to pull me down a little flight of steps to the red-lit underground residence of a palm reader and psychic. I declined. Damn near an hour she pulled on me, saying what was I afraid of, asking what was the big deal. I am not a religious man but, as I told her then, there are some things I’d rather not fuck with. Now she likes to say it’s a good thing I wouldn’t go in, because if that psychic had told her she’d be stuck with me for going on fourteen years now, she would have turned and headed for the hills. Ha! And I say, Honey, not as fast as I would’ve, ha, ha! This is our old joke. Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our life against that which we thought it would be by now.

I’ll tell you what I don’t tell her, that there is something shameful in this, the buoying of our sinking spirits with old stories.

I imagine you a man alone, Duane Moser, with no one asking after your dreams in the morning, no one slipping healing rocks into your pockets. A bachelor. It was the Fritos, finally, which reminded me of the gas station in Beatty where I worked when I was in high school and where I knew a man who owned a Chevelle like yours, a ’66. But it occurs to me that perhaps this assumption is foolish; surely there are wives out there who have not banned trans fats and processed sugar, as mine has. I haven’t had a Frito in eleven years. Regardless, I write to inquire about your family, should you reply.

Our children came to us later in life than most. My oldest, Danielle, has just started school. Her little sister, Layla, is having a hard time with it. She wants so badly to go to school with Danielle that she screams and cries as the school bus pulls away in the morning. Sometimes she throws herself down to the ground, embedding little pieces of rock in the flesh of her fists. Then she is sullen and forlorn for the rest of the day. My wife worries for her, but truth be told, I am encouraged. The sooner Layla understands that we are nothing but the sum of that which we endure, the better. But my father has taken to walking Layla to the end of our gravel road in the afternoon to wait for Danielle at the bus stop. Layla likes to go as early as she is allowed, as if her being there will bring the bus sooner. She would stand at the end of the road all day if we let her. She pesters my father so that he sometimes stands there in the heat with her for an hour or more, though his heart is in no condition to be doing so. In many ways he is better to my girls than I am. He is far better to them than he was to me. I am not a religious man but I do thank God for that.

I am beginning to think I dreamed you up. Please, write soon.

Truly,

Thomas Grey

P.O. Box 1230

Verdi, Nevada 89439

—

October 16

Duane Moser

4077 Pincay Drive

Henderson, Nevada 89015

Dear Mr. Moser,

I have read the letters from M, the ones you kept folded in the Ziploc bag. Forgive me, but for all I know you may be dead, and I could not resist. I read them in my shed, where the stink and thickness of the air were almost unbearable, and then again in my truck in the parking lot of the Verdi post office. I was struck, as I was when I first found them out near Rhyolite on Cane Springs Road, by how new the letters looked. Though most were written nearly twenty years ago, the paper is clean, the creases sharp. Duane Moser, what I do not understand is this: why a Ziploc bag? Did you worry they might get wet on your journey through the desert in the middle of summer? Then again, I am reminded of the Coke and Bud Light. Or am I to take the Ziploc bag as an indication of your fierce, protective love for M? Is it a sign, as M suggests, that little by little you sealed your whole self off, until there was nothing left for her? Furthermore, I have to ask whether you committed this sealing purposefully. She says she thinks she was always asking too much of you. She is generous that way, isn’t she? She says you didn’t mean to become “so very alien” to her. I am not so sure. I love my wife. But I’ve never told her how I once knew a man in Beatty with a ’66 Chevelle. I know what men like us are capable of.

Duane Moser, what I come back to is this: how could you have left M’s letters by the side of Cane Springs Road near the ghost town Rhyolite where hardly anyone goes anymore? (In fact, I have never seen another man out on Cane Springs Road. I drive out there to be alone. Maybe you do, too. Or you did, anyway.) Did you not realize that someone just like you might find them?

I have called the phone number listed on the prescription bottles, finally, though all I heard was the steady rising tones of the disconnected signal. Still, I found myself listening for you there. Please, write soon.

Truly,

Thomas Grey

P.O. Box 1230

Verdi, Nevada 89439

P.S. On second thought, perhaps sometimes these things are best left by the side of the road, as it were. Sometimes a person wants a part of you that’s no good. Sometimes love is a wound that opens and closes, opens and closes, all our lives.

—

November 2

Duane Moser

4077 Pincay Drive

Henderson, Nevada 89015

Dear Mr. Moser,

My wife found your pictures, the ones of the Chevelle. The one you maybe got from a junkyard or from a friend, or maybe it’s been in your family for years, rotting in a garage somewhere because after what happened nobody wanted to look at it. I kept the pictures tucked behind the visor in my truck, bound with a rubber band. I don’t know why I kept them. I don’t know why I’ve kept your letters from M, or your medications. I don’t know what I would do if I found what I am looking for.

When I was in high school I worked the graveyard shift at a gas station in Beatty. It’s still there, on the corner of I-95 and Highway 374, near the hot springs. Maybe you’ve been there. It’s a Shell station now, but back then it was called Hadley’s Fuel. I worked there forty, fifty hours a week. Bill Hadley was a friend of my father’s. He was a crazy son of a bitch, as my father would say, who kept a shotgun under the counter and always accused me of stealing from the till or sleeping on the job when I did neither. I liked the graveyard shift, liked being up at night, away from Pop, listening to the tremors of the big walk-in coolers, the hum of the fluorescent lights outside.

Late that spring, a swarm of grasshoppers moved through Beatty on their way out to the alfalfa fields down south. They were thick and fierce, roaring like a thunderstorm in your head. The hoppers ate anything green. In two days they stripped the leaves from all the cottonwoods and willows in town, then they moved on to the juniper and pine, the cheatgrass and bitter salt cedar. A swarm of them ate the wool right off of Abel Prince’s live sheep. Things got so bad that the trains out to the mines shut down for a week because the guts of the bugs made the rails too slippery.

The grasshoppers were drawn to the fluorescent lights at Hadley’s. For weeks the parking lot pulsed with them. I would have felt them crunch under my feet when I walked out to the pumps that night, dead and dying under my shoes, only I never made it out to the pumps. I was doing schoolwork at the counter. Calculus, for God’s sake. I looked up and the guy was already coming through the door at me. I looked outside and saw the ’66 Chevelle, gleaming under the lights, grasshoppers falling all around it like rain.

I tried to stop him but he muscled back behind the counter. He had a gun, held it like it was his own hand. He said, You see this?

There was a bandanna over his face. But Beatty is a small town, and it was even smaller then. I knew who he was. I knew his mother worked as a waitress at the Stagecoach and that his sister had graduated the year before me. The money, he was saying. His name was Frankie. The fucking money, Frankie said.

I’d barely touched a gun before that night. I don’t know how I did it. I only felt my breath go out of me and reached under the counter to where the shotgun was and tried. I shot him in the head.

Afterward, I called the cops. I did the right thing, they told me, the cops and Bill Hadley in his pajamas, even my father. They said it over and over again. I sat on the curb outside the store, listening to them inside, their boots squeaking on the tile. The deputy sheriff, Dale Sullivan, who was also the assistant coach of the basketball team, came and sat beside me. I had my hands over my head to keep the grasshoppers away. Kid, it was bound to happen, Dale said. The boy was a troublemaker. A waste of skin.

He told me I could go on home. I didn’t ask what would happen to the car.

That night, I drove out on Cane Springs Road to Rhyolite. I drove around that old ghost town with the windows rolled down, listening to the gravel pop under my tires. The sun was coming up. There, in the milky light of dawn, I hated Beatty more than I ever had. The Stagecoach, the hot springs, all the trees looking so naked against the sky. I never wanted to see any of it ever again.

I was already on my way to college and everyone knew it. I didn’t belong in Beatty. The boy’s family, his mother and sister and stepfather, moved away soon after it happened. I’d never see them around town, or at Hadley’s. For those last few weeks of school no one talked about it, at least not to me. Soon it was as though it had never happened. But—and I think I realized this then, up in Rhyolite, that dead town picked clean—Beatty would never be a place I could come home to.

When my wife asked about your pictures, she said she didn’t realize I knew so much about cars. I said, Yeah, sure. Well, some. See the vents there? On the hood? See the blackout grille? That’s how you know it’s a ’66. I told her I’d been thinking about buying an old car, fixing it up, maybe this one. Right then she just started laughing her head off. Sure, she managed through all her laughter, fix up a car. She kept on laughing. She tossed the bundle of photos on the seat of the truck and said, You’re shitting me, Tommy.