Battleborn: Stories (4 page)

It’s not her fault. That man, the one who knows a ’66 when he sees one, that’s not the man she married. That’s how it has to be. You understand, don’t you?

I smiled at her. No, ma’am, I said. I wouldn’t shit you. You’re my favorite turd.

She laughed—she’s generous that way—and said, A car. That’s the last thing we need around here.

When I was a boy, my father took me hunting. Quail mostly and, one time, elk. But I was no good at it and he gave up. I didn’t have it in me, my father said, sad and plain as if it were a birth defect, the way I was. Even now, deer come down from the mountains and root in our garden, stripping our tomatoes from the vine, eating the hearts of our baby cabbages. My father says, Kill one. String it up. They’ll learn. I tell him I can’t do that. I spend my Sundays patching the holes in the fence, or putting up a taller one. The Church of the Compassionate Heart, my wife calls it. It makes her happy, this life of ours, the man I am. Layla helps me mend the fence. She stands behind me and hands me my pliers or my wire cutters when I let her.

But here’s the truth, Duane Moser. Sometimes I see his eyes above that bandanna, see the grasshoppers leaping in the lights, hear them vibrating. I feel the kick of the rifle butt in my sternum. I would do it again.

Truly,

Thomas Grey

P.O. Box 1230

Verdi, Nevada 89439

—

December 20

Duane Moser

4077 Pincay Drive

Henderson, Nevada 89015

Dear Duane Moser,

This will be the last I write to you. I went back to Rhyolite. I told my wife I was headed south to camp and hike for a few days. She said, Why don’t you take Layla with you? It would be good for her.

Layla slept nearly the whole drive. Six hours. When I slowed the car and pulled onto Cane Springs Road she sat up and said, Dad, where are we?

I said, We’re here.

I helped her with her coat and mittens, and we took a walk through the ruins. I told her what they once were. Here, I said, was the schoolhouse. They finished it in 1909. By then there weren’t enough children in town to fill it. It burned the next year. She wanted to go closer.

I said, Stay where I can see you.

Why? she said.

I didn’t know how to say it. Crumbling buildings, rotted-out floors, sinkholes, open mine shafts. Coyotes, rattlesnakes, mountain lions.

Because, I said. It’s not safe for little girls.

We went on. There behind the fence is the post office, completed in 1908. This slab, these beams, that wall of brick, that was the train station. It used to have marble floors, mahogany woodworking, one of the first telephones in the state. But those have been sold or stolen over the years.

Why? she said.

That’s what happens when a town dies.

Why?

Because, sweetheart. Because.

At dusk I tried to show Layla how to set up a tent and build a fire, but she wasn’t interested. Instead, she concentrated on filling her pink vinyl backpack with stones and using them to build little pyramids along the path that led out to the town. She squatted over them, gingerly turning the stones to find a flat side, a stable base. What are those for? I asked.

For if we get lost, she said. Pop Pop showed me.

When it got dark we sat together, listening to the hiss of the hot dogs at the ends of our sticks, the violent sizzle of sap escaping the firewood. Layla fell asleep in my lap. I carried her to the tent and zipped her inside a sleeping bag. I stayed and watched her there, her chest rising and falling, hers the small uncertain breath of a bird.

When I bent to step out through the opening of the tent something fell from the pocket of my overalls. I held it up in the firelight. It was a cloudy stump of amethyst, as big as a horse’s tooth.

I’ve tried, Duane Moser, but I can’t picture you at 4077 Pincay Drive. I can’t see you in Henderson, period, out in the suburbs, on a cul-de-sac, in one of those prefab houses with the stucco and the garage gaping off the front like a mouth. I can’t see you standing like a bug under those streetlights the color of antibacterial soap. At home at night I sit on my porch and watch the lights of Reno over the hills, the city marching out at us like an army. It’s no accident that the first step in what they call developing a plot of land is to put a fence around it.

I can’t see you behind a fence. When I see you, I see you here, at Rhyolite, harvesting sticks of charcoal from the half-burnt schoolhouse and writing your name on the exposed concrete foundation. Closing one eye to look through the walls of Jim Kelly’s bottle house. No, that’s my daughter. That’s me as a boy getting charcoal stains on my blue jeans. That’s you in your Chevelle, the ’66, coming up Cane Springs Road, tearing past what was once the Porter brothers’ store. I see you with M, flinging Fritos and meat and half-full cans of Coke and Bud Light from the car like a goddamn celebration, a shedding of your old selves.

It’s almost Christmas. I’ve looked at the prescriptions, the letters, the photos. You’re not Frankie, I know this. It’s just a coincidence, a packet of pictures flung from a car out in the middle of nowhere. The car is just a car. The world is full of Chevelles, a whole year’s worth of the ’66. You know nothing of Hadley’s Fuel in Beatty, of a boy who was killed there one night in late spring when the grasshoppers sounded like a thunderstorm in your head. I don’t owe you anything.

When I woke this morning there was snow on the ground and Layla was gone. She’d left no tracks. I pulled on my boots and walked around the camp. A layer of white covered the hills and the valley and the skeletons of the old buildings, lighting the valley fluorescent. It was blinding. I called my daughter’s name. I listened, pressing the sole of my shoe against the blackened rocks lining the fire pit. I watched the snow go watery within my boot print. There was no answer.

I checked the truck. It was empty. In the tent I found her coat and mittens. Her shoes had been taken. I scrambled up a small hill and looked for her from there. I scanned for the shape of her among the old buildings, on the hills, along Cane Springs Road. Fence posts, black with moisture, strung across the valley like tombstones. Sickness thickened in my gut and my throat. She was gone.

I called for her again and again. I heard nothing, though surely my own voice echoed back to me. Surely the snow creaked under my feet when I walked through our camp and out to the ruins. Surely the frozen tendrils of creosote whipped against my legs when I began to run through the ghost town, up and down the gravel path. But all sound had left me except for a low, steady roaring, the sound of my own blood in my ears, of a car rumbling up the old road.

Suddenly my chest was burning. I couldn’t breathe.
Layla. Layla.
I crouched and pressed my bare palms against the frozen earth. The knees of my long johns soaked through, my fingers began to sting.

Then I saw a shape near the burnt remains of the schoolhouse. A panic as hot and fierce as anything—fiercer—rose in me. The slick pink vinyl of her backpack. I ran to it.

When I bent to pick it up, I heard something on the wind. Something like the high, breathy language my daughters speak to each other when they play. I followed the sound around behind the schoolhouse and found Layla squatting there in her pajamas, softly stacking one of her stone markers in the snow.

Hi, Dad, she said. The snow had reddened her hands and cheeks as though she’d been burned. She handed me a stone. Here you go, she said.

I took my daughter by the shoulders and stood her up. I raised her sweet chin so her eyes met mine, and then I slapped her across the face. She began to cry. I held her. The Chevelle drove up and down Cane Springs Road, the gravel under its tires going
pop pop pop.
I said, Shh. That’s enough. A child means nothing out here.

Truly,

Thomas Grey

RONDINE AL NIDO

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

—
Bhagavad Gita

S
he will be thirty when she walks out on a man who in the end, she’ll decide, didn’t love her enough, though he in fact did love her, but his love wrenched something inside him, and this caused him to hurt her. She’ll move to an apartment downtown and soon—very soon, people will say, admiringly at times, skeptically at others—she will have a date with a sensible man working as an attorney, the profession of his father and brothers, in the office where she is a typist. They will share a dinner, and the next weekend another, then drinks, a midday walk through the upheaved brick sidewalks of her neighborhood, a Sunday-morning garden tour of his. On their fifth date she will allow him to take her to bed.

Before they met, he’ll have been a social worker, and after they make love he will tell her this, and about the terrible things he saw in that other life. He’ll begin—At CPS, there was this woman. She had this little girl. Beautiful. Two years old—then stop and lean down and put his lips to her hair. Do you really want to hear this? he’ll ask, as though just remembering that she was listening. He’ll feel her head nod where it rests on his chest and go on. About the Mexican woman who let her beautiful, bright two-year-old daughter starve to death in a motel room near the freeway. About the teenage boy, high on coke, who broke into the apartment next door and slit his neighbor’s throat. About the man who worked at the snack bar at the Sparks Marina, who lured a retarded girl into the men’s bathroom with a lemonade. About the father who made his son live under their porch in Sun Valley, about the hole the boy bored up through the floor so he could watch his stepmother brush her hair in the morning.

He will talk, and she will listen. It will be as though she’s finally found someone else willing to see the worst in the world. Someone who can’t help but see it. For the first time in her life, she will feel understood. When he finishes one story she’ll ask for another, then another, wanting to stack them like bricks, build walls of sorrow around the two of them, seal them up together. An uncontrollable feeling—like falling—will be growing in her: they could build a love this way.

Then, feigning lightness, she’ll ask him to tell her about something he did, something terrible. When he was a boy, maybe. It will be late. Watery light from a waxing moon will catch the corner of the bed, setting the white sheets aglow. Two candles—the man’s idea—will flicker feebly on the nightstand, drawing moths against the window screen. He will tell her about his younger brother and a firecracker and a neighbor’s farmhouse in Chatsworth, of straw insulation and old dry wood that went up like
whoosh
so fast it didn’t seem fair, of running around to the front door and ringing the bell—she will find this curious, the bell—and helping the neighbor, an elderly woman, down the front steps. Now you show me yours, he’ll say, and laugh. He will have a devastating laugh.

By then, there will be much to tell—too much. A pair of expensive tropical lizards she’d begged for, then abandoned in a field to die when their care became tedious. Birthstone rings and a real gold bracelet plucked from a friend’s jewelry box at a sleepover. Asking an ugly, wretched boy with circles of ringworm strung like little galaxies across his head to meet her for a kiss at the flagpole, laughing wildly when he showed. These she’ll have been carrying since girlhood like very small stones in her pocket. The sensible man will be waiting. Who can say why we offer the parts of ourselves we do, and when.

•   •   •

O
ur girl is sixteen years old. Her palms press against the stinging metal of a heat rack. Her best friend, Lena, a large-toothed girl from Minnesota, stands across from her, palms pressed against the rack, too. Their eyes are locked, and a skin scent rises between them. This is their game, one of many. In the pocket of our girl’s apron rests a stack of fleshy pepperoni, their edges curling in the swelter. Behind her, the slat-mouthed pizza oven bellows steadily. A blackened sheet of baking parchment floats in a dish of hot grease. The grease has a name, and as our girl tells the story this name will return to her, along with other details of this place, which had until now left her—the flatulent smell from a newly opened bag of sausage, the flimsy yellowed plastic covering the computer keyboards and phone keypads, the serrated edge of a cardboard box slicing her index finger nearly to the bone. Naked in her own bed with a man for whom she feels too much too soon, our girl will recall the name of the grease—Whirl, it was called—and the then-exquisite possibility of searing off her fingerprints.

Lena, her friend, finally pulls her hands from the rack, shaking the sting from them. You win, she says.

Our girl waits a beat, gloating, then lifts her palms from the surface, lustrous with heat. She folds a pepperoni disk into her mouth. Let’s go again, she says.

Soon, our girl is cut loose for the night by the manager, a brick-faced, wire-haired woman named Suzie. She goes to the back of the restaurant, to a bathroom constructed from Sheetrock as an afterthought. At a row of metal sinks outside the bathroom, two delivery boys wash dishes. One of the boys, a nineteen-year-old named Jeremy, has convinced himself that he loves our girl, though she has already once declined an invitation to watch
Dawn of the Dead
in the single-wide trailer he has all to himself on his mother’s boyfriend’s property.

In the bathroom the plastic shelves are stocked with fluorescent lightbulbs and printer paper and a dozen two-gallon plastic tubs once used to store a cream sauce the franchise no longer offers. She removes her hat, her apron, her once-white tennis shoes and ankle socks. She unpins her name tag from her patriotically colored collared shirt, and pulls the shirt off over her head. Yellow grains of cornmeal sprinkle into her eyelashes and along the part in her hair. She steps out of her khaki pants, stiff with dried doughwater and dark, unidentified oils.

She stands before the mirror in her bra and underwear, listening to the hollow, slow-motion clangs at the triple sinks. She steps out of her underwear. Suzie bellows from up front, and someone’s nonmarking sole screeches against the tile. In the sink, using the granulated pink soap from the dispenser, our girl scrubs the smell of herself from her panties. Later, the dampness left from this washing will remind her of the pizza parlor and of poor pathetic Jeremy the delivery boy, and other remnants of a life she already wishes she could forget.

She waits for Lena on the bench in front of the counter, watching carryout mothers waddle from and to their idling cars with their pizzas and their slippery, foil-wrapped cheese sticks. Six and a half hours ago, in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart across the highway, Kyle Peterson, a tenor sax in their school’s jazz band, dumped Lena, his girlfriend of nearly a year, for the first-chair flutist, a freshman and a thinner, looser version of Lena. Two hours later, our girl wiped mascara from under Lena’s rubbed-raw eyes in the Sheetrock bathroom and asked her whether she wanted to get the fuck out of this shit town. Two hours after that, when she was certain her mother and stepfather had left for their Friday-night twelve-step meeting, our girl dialed her own phone number. She told the machine, I’m going to Lena’s after work to stay the night, and, I love you, which is what she always says after she lies to them. By the time Lena gets off, they’ve both got an uneventful adolescence’s worth of recklessness welling inside them, and one of them has a driver’s license and a like-new Dodge Neon and it’s just the tip of summer, which means there are college boys from places like Chicago and Florida and New York City wandering the Strip, sixty miles away, boys who came to Las Vegas looking for girls willing to do the things she and Lena think they are willing to do.

At eight o’clock Lena changes out of her uniform and wets her hair and underarms at the bathroom sink and then the two walk out into the parking lot with their soiled uniforms balled under their arms, their apron strings trailing along the asphalt, as though they don’t have to be back for tomorrow’s dinner rush, as though they don’t have to be back ever again.

On the road, all there is is desert and night and the taillights of the cars ahead of them. The radio comes in and out. Once, without taking her eyes off the road, Lena says, I should have done it with him. I don’t know why I didn’t. Our girl says nothing, only nods. When Lena swings the Neon around the final curve of the mountain range separating their town from Las Vegas, they see light sweeping across the valley floor like a blanket made of lights, like light is a liquid and the city is a great glistening lake.

Lena sucks a little saliva from her over-large teeth and asks is it okay if they turn the radio off. She has never driven in the city. Our girl says, That’s cool, because the radio is suddenly nothing compared to the billboards and limos and rented convertibles and speakers embedded in the sidewalks emitting their own music into the air, and because she’ll say anything to soothe Lena, to keep her driving.

Our girl directs Lena to park on the top floor of the parking garage at the New York New York. It is June 2001. This is the Las Vegas that has recently given up on becoming what they were calling a family-friendly vacation destination. The waterslides and roller coasters and ice-skating rinks that were once part of the megaresorts have been torn down to make room for additional hotel towers, floor space, and parking garages like this one. Lena pulls hard on the parking brake, the way her mother taught her. She moved from Minnesota her freshman year, when her mom was offered a job as the Nye County health nurse. Her parents have been divorced since before she can remember. She sees her father, an accountant, on Christmas and Easter, and lives with him in St. Paul for five weeks during the summer. Lena doesn’t know anything about what was once Wet ’n’ Wild or MGM Grand Adventures. Our girl spent her birthdays and end-of-year field trips in such places and could be saddened by their vanishing, could consider it the demolition of her childhood. But thoughts like these will not come to her for years.

Lena has a tube of waterproof mascara and a peacock blue eyeliner pencil in her purse. Our girl has vanilla-bean body spray and kiwi-strawberry lip gloss and gum in three different incarnations of mint. All these they trade in the front seat of the Neon until both are eyelined and fragrant and fresh-mouthed. From the parking structure they walk through the New York New York. The shops in the casino are façaded with half-scale fire escapes and newsstands and mailboxes with graffiti replicated on the side. They sell Nathan’s Famous hot dogs or tiny Statue of Liberty erasers and key-chain taxicabs and all varieties of shot glasses.

Our girl leads the way. The floor is busy carpet or plastic cobble. Tacky, her mother would call it, dully. The ceiling is lit to suggest stars glittering at twilight, as is popular along the Strip at this time. A bulbous red glittered apple rotates above a stand of slots. Our girl ignores the directional signs, which point down circuitous routes pitted with pocket bars and sports books. Once, Lena touches her lightly, thinking they’ve lost their way. Our girl says, Trust me, and Lena does.

Outside there is a breeze threading through the warm night and a jubilant honking of cars and all those billions of bulbs flashing in time, signaling to the girls that they are, at long last, alive. Across Las Vegas Boulevard is an enormous gold lion posing regally in the mist of a fountain. The lion is the property’s second; the original—a formidable openmouthed beast forged in midroar—was replaced because it frightened some Chinese tourists and was considered bad luck by others. Down the expansive block is an unimpressive aging Camelot, and beyond that a black glass pyramid, the apex of which emits a thick rope of light supposedly visible from space. The girls set off in the opposite direction, toward an ever-expanding ancient Rome and, across the palm-lined, traffic-clogged boulevard, the Eiffel Tower, where our girl’s stepfather poured concrete during phase two. They cross a Brooklyn Bridge, its waters strewn with coins, and pass before the wood-toothed mouth of a grinning Coney clown that will be demolished long before either girl reveals the happenings of this night to anyone.

The weekend crowds are dense on the sidewalks and mostly foreign or Midwestern. This allows the girls to amuse themselves at intersections by grasping hands, stepping off the curb against a red light, and glancing backward to see the crowd follow in their wake, taxicabs honking wildly. They have a teenage sense of their surroundings: They wander unknowingly into the photos of strangers, and twice Lena tramples the heel of a Japanese tourist walking in front of her. But they feel men and boys before they see them, poking each other in the ribs, perking for button-ups and baseball caps and oversize jerseys, whirling around at the sound of a skateboard.

Soon, propped on the rubber handrail of a down-bound outdoor escalator, our girl stares unblinkingly at a cluster of young men headed in the opposite direction. When they pass, Lena turns and waves to them, but our girl dismounts the escalator coolly and without turning, wielding the fearsome magnetism of ambivalence. When they reach the top, the young men turn and descend the escalator.

The young men outnumber the girls by two. Our girl likes the way the four of them form a slowly closing semicircle around her and her friend. She likes, too, how they all look the same, in their baggy jeans and pastel collared shirts. They are dressed as most boys their age or slightly older dress, as though their tops and bottoms were mismatched pieces from two separate puzzles, one marked boy and the other man. One of them introduces himself as Brad, another as Tom, another Greg, and the last, Allen. Except for Allen, they say these names too often and like candies too large for their mouths—This is
Brad
.
Brad
, shake her hand. Don’t be rude,
Brad
—and because of this it becomes clear to everyone that these are not their real names. Everyone except Lena, who waves and says, Nice to meet you, Brad.