Battleborn: Stories (9 page)

Carter fetches the diaper bag and mixes a bottle using the jug of distilled water he bought at the store. He feeds his son, burps him, and passes the child to Marin. She paces with him around the site, waiting for him to fall asleep. Val, Jake and Carter sit in camp chairs near the fire. Jake smokes a cigar.

The little girl—Sophie is her name—climbs into her mother’s lap and squirms there. She asks, What does that baby like?

Val strokes her hair. I don’t know, Bug. Why don’t you ask Marin?

Who’s Marin?

The baby’s mommy.

The girl considers this and then takes leave of Val, scrambling into dusty stride with Marin. Marin? she says. What does your baby like?

Marin considers the question. He likes milk, she says. And baths in the sink. And binkies.

And toys? asks Sophie.

And toys, says Marin.

What does he do?

Not much, really. Eats and sleeps, mostly. Poops.

Marin thought this would make the girl laugh, but it doesn’t. Sophie considers the information, then says, Because he’s just a baby.

That’s right.

Can I hold him?

Marin glances at Carter. He is watching them. Of course you can, says Marin.

Marin directs Sophie to sit in her folding chair and extend her arms along her lap. She lays the child in this cradle and rotates the girl’s hands at the wrist so they curl around the baby. There, she says. Just like that. Carter watches. Sophie is stern faced, taking this responsibility seriously. Though her feet swing a little, gleefully.

Marin retrieves her beer from the mesh pouch of the chair. You’re good at that, she says, then immediately regrets it when the girl smiles a smile so wide it requires the active involvement of all her facial features. Christ, thinks Marin, what a thing to say.

Just then, Sophie’s brother emerges from time-out. The boy processes the scene—the baby in his sister’s lap, all adult eyes on her—and says, No fair. I want to hold the baby.

Sophie is pure joy. You can’t, Aidan, she says.
I
am.

Aidan says, But—

Carter stands. The baby has to go to sleep now, he says. It’s his bedtime.

Marin scoops the child from Sophie’s lap and follows Carter to the RV. Inside, Carter tries to set up the Pack ’n Play they’ve brought—never
playpen
—so the baby can sleep there. Val and Jake have two tents, one for themselves and one for the children. It will be too cold for the baby to sleep outside, which is why Carter and Marin were offered the RV in the first place. But now it appears the Pack ’n Play is too wide, the space in the RV too narrow. Carter allows the half-expanded structure to fall noisily to the floor.

Now what are we supposed to do? he says.

As though Marin designed the Pack ’n Play. As though she engineered the RV. She says, What about the bed?

Carter considers the bed Val has folded out for them, converted from two bench seats and the dining table. Will he roll? he asks.

How surprised Marin is to be asked this. How satisfying it feels that Carter does not have the answer.

No, she says, shaking her head casually. He can’t roll.

Okay, Carter says. He builds a barrier of pillows and sleeping bags at the edge of the bed. He swaddles the child and lays him on his back—always on his back—in the center of the bed. As Carter pulls the door of the RV quietly closed, he pauses with a hand still on the knob. The smell of Jake’s cigar has made its way to them. Those pillows, says Carter. You sure he’ll be okay?

He’ll be
fine
, she says. He can’t roll.

Of course he can’t roll. She wouldn’t have suggested putting him on the bed if he could. The baby is too young to roll. He won’t roll for weeks. The books say so. The pediatrician says so. He can reach his arms above his head and sometimes he sort of scissor-kicks his legs inside his sacklike pajamas, but he cannot roll.

But the baby
can
roll. Once, she laid him on his back in the center of their bed back home, in the adobe house. He was asleep. Carter was at work. She hopped into the shower. She had to. She had a cheesy something behind her ears and in the creases of her knees. She washed her hair and used the lather from the shampoo to wash her body. She did not use conditioner. She did not shave. She kept the bathroom door open. Five minutes, tops. She stepped out of the shower and looked into the bedroom and the baby was not where she’d left him.

She ran to the bed, naked, dripping wet. Then she saw him. Half wedged beneath her own plump pillow. Still breathing. Thank
God
, still breathing. She lifted the pillow. He must have rolled in his sleep. How true, she thought, once the panic began to recede, once the baby was laid safely in the Pack ’n Play, once she was dry and dressing. To be capable of a thing only in a dreamworld. This was two weeks ago, nearly. She never told Carter.

Outside, Jake and Val put the children to bed in their tent, finally, and the adults settle into the story world of old friends. Marin gets another beer. Bent over the cooler, she can feel the warmth of the fire on her back and her husband watching her. She won’t look to him. Not tonight. She won’t see his once-fine face drooped with disappointment. She will not,
will not
look to him. She feels as though she has been looking to him her entire life.

Around the fire it is old times. Remember? they ask. Remember walking home through South Campus? Remember filling Sandy’s mailbox with crushed beer cans? Remember our illiterate landlord on the Strand? Remember that note he left us; oh, how did it end? They all say it together, roaring:
I will not be tolerated
.

Jake brings out a pipe and a baggie from a cloth coin purse. He offers it to Carter.

Carter says, No, thanks, man.

Jake extends the pipe to Marin. Em?

Em. He used to call her that.

Marin takes it. What the hell? They smoke a bit, Marin, Val and Jake. After some time, Marin exhales and says, Remember when we used to climb up on my roof and smoke?

Jake smiles and says, Remember watching the fireworks from up there?

Marin says, Remember Tarv?

Christ, Tarv!

Jake’s roommate. Tarv had gotten fucked up and was doing a happy jig to celebrate how fucked up he’d gotten when he stomped through the rotted roof of Marin’s apartment building. Marin and Jake climbed down the ladder as fast as their laughter would allow them. They left Tarv wedged in the building, his leg dangling through a neighbor’s bedroom ceiling. Remember, remember, remember. Whatever happened to Tarv? How did they turn out to be anyone other than who they were on that roof?

There is a little stretch of quiet and in this they can hear the distant voices of other campers and the hoot of a night bird. On the ground at Jake’s feet Dingus runs a dream run, then whimpers, then is still. Val stands and announces she’s going to bed. Everyone tells her good night. Marin looks at Carter, the firelight making long shadows on his face. He ignores her. For a moment she cannot remember why. She grows afraid. He is staring into the fire and she looks at it too. Her
husband
will not even
look
at her. Why? Where is he?

Marin tamps down her fear and goes to pee in the darkness. She can see stars while she’s peeing, and these stars remind her of the town they will return to. She realizes she has no one there and grows afraid again, out in the trees with her pants down.

Once, early on, Marin took Carter to visit her hometown, the T of two state routes in the Mojave desert. They drove there and spent a night at the motel where she and her childhood friends used to jump the fence to swim in the kidney-shaped swimming pool. He was the first man she’d brought home in a very long time. Jake had not been interested in that sort of thing.

That night, Marin and Carter swam in the pool, alone. He held her in the soft water and kissed her, the rough beginnings of his beard chafing against her neck and her jaw and her collarbone. When the pool lights turned off, he lifted her to the edge and untied the knot at the back of her neck. He took her nipples into his mouth, first one, then the other, and after he said, I’ve been wanting to do that all night. Then he pulled the crotch of her bathing suit to one side and fucked her like he hasn’t since.

We used to play a game here, she told him, when they were finished. I forget what it was called. But the premise was this: Marco Polo without the calls. Someone was It and the rest of them would say nothing. The pool was small, but it hadn’t seemed so then. Back then it seemed extravagant. Of course, visiting with Carter she saw that it was the least the town could do.

In the game, the It would have to
feel
where they were. No talking. No calling. Just old friends in the too-warm water. There were times when the It would be right in front of you, and you would be holding your breath, and It would reach out and touch the lip of the pool instead of you. To get away you had to slip down into that silky chlorinated dream. How inadequate that felt, to It. To be so sure you were reaching for a friend. Someone who knew you. And to touch only concrete. The lip of a swimming pool. It ought to mean something.

She has to get back. She finds a firelight in the night and makes her way to it, hoping it is theirs.

Jake is there, alone. She sits beside him. Hey, she says.

Hey, he says.

Carter go to bed?

Jake nods to the RV. Baby was crying, he said. You didn’t hear?

I never do.

Well. Jake stands. He laughs a little, to himself.

What? she says, standing and stepping toward him.

Remember when you pushed Miles into the fishpond? he says. At Corinne’s parents’. Remember?

Marin nods. She remembers everything. She moves closer to Jake. She can smell cigar on him. She can see miniature reflections of the fire in his eyes. She can see herself underneath him.

He provoked me, she says, and hooks her fingers in the waist of his shorts.

Jake smiles and tilts his head to the right slightly, the way a curious bird might. Then he steps back, allowing her hands to fall from his waistband, shaking his head. He tosses something—a twig? a pine needle?—into the fire. My God, he says, kindly. What a nightmare you must be.

Jake goes to bed and Marin sits in his chair and props her feet on the warm rocks near the fire. She puts her face in her hands. She lived alone once, for a year and a half, in the building where Tarv fell through the roof. Sometimes, in that aloneness, she did weird things. She walked around her apartment wearing a piece from a Halloween costume—a pair of white silk gloves, usually, or an eye patch—or as many pieces of jewelry as she could, or a bathing suit under her regular clothes. She took pieces of metal into her mouth to get a feel for them. A coin, a pin, an earring. In her bathroom mirror she flicked her eyeliner pencil twice on her upper lip to make the two tines of a dashing, charcoal-colored mustache. She would say words that she liked out loud.
Pith
.
Coalesce
.
Dirigible
. She wasn’t lonely. It wasn’t that. She was the opposite of lonely.

It has gotten late, somehow. Marin kicks dirt inadequately over the coals of the fire and goes to bed.

In the RV she wedges herself on one side of the bed. Carter is on the other. Between them, the child. Eleven weeks old tomorrow. As long as Carter’s forearm. What does the child do? Lift his head. Reach. Speak in a tonguey language of all
l
s and
o
s. Lie between them. On the drive to the airport this morning, the sun still not risen from the horizon, Carter said, quietly, This is not how I pictured things.

There is so little room on this arrow of bed. She can feel the bundle of child beside her. She is light with youth, with once-love, and also heavy with the disintegration of these. In this specific gravity she slides into sleep.

She dreams she is wrestling with the copper retriever, groping in its mouth for the tennis ball. Grappling with Dingus on a rockless beach. Rolling through reeds. Green-gray follicles succumbing in the wind. They tumble. She is up to her elbows in the warm, wet lining of Dingus’s dog cheeks. She is laughing, rolling over mounds of perfect hot white sand. In her sleep she says, What does your baby like? In her sleep she says, This is not how I pictured things. In her sleep she rolls on top of the child and suffocates him.

She wakes, too terrified to scream, and begins to dig at the blankets. There are so many of them—hundreds. The soft, papery blankets of babies, the substantial bulky blankets of adults. They all smell of wet dog. Carter is there. Right there. He moans. Between them—somewhere—is the mass of her child. Their child.

Then her hands touch skin. A very small body. She feels it in the dark.

Breathing. Alive. Yes, alive.

She lifts the baby, not gently, and presses him to her. The child begins to cry.

Carter sits up in the darkness. Where? he says, thick-tongued and sleepstruck. Not what. Not who. Where?
Where are you
?

MAN-O-WAR

T
he fifth of July. Milo slunk out and sniffed around the dry lake bed while Harris loaded his find into the truck. The bitch was a pound mutt—mostly Lab, was the old man’s guess—and the abandoned stash was a good one, like last night’s festivities never got to it. At least fifteen Pyro Pulverizer thirty-three-shot repeaters, a load of Black Cat artilleries and Screamin’ Meamies, some Fortress of Fire and Molten Core mortars, probably three dozen Wizard of Ahhhs and one Man-O-War, a hard-to-find professional-grade shell pack, banned even on Paiute land after an Indian boy blew his brother’s face off in ’99. It was a couple grand worth of artillery, all told. The largest pile Harris had ever found.

Every Fourth of July kids from Gerlach, Nixon, Lovelock, and Indian kids from the Paiute res came out to the Black Rock with their lawn chairs, coolers of Miller, bottles of carnival-colored Boone’s Farm for the girls. They built themselves a bonfire, got thoroughly loaded, and shot off fireworks. The lake bed had no trees, no brush, no weeds to catch fire, just the bald bottom of an ancient inland sea. They dumped their Roman candles and Missile Heads and Comet Cluster shells and Komodo 3000 fountains in a heap away from their encampments, out of range of the fires, then trotted out there whenever they wanted to light them off.

Except out here the night got so dark and the kids got so loaded they’d forget where they stowed their fireworks. They’d forget they even had fireworks. They’d drink like men, like their fathers and uncles, like George fucking Washington, take off their shirts and thump their chests and scream into the wide black space. Pass out in their truck beds and let their tipsy girlfriends drive them home all in a line. Leave their stash for an old man to scavenge come sunup.

Harris moved quickly now, working up a sweat as the sun burned the haze from the valley. He unbuttoned his shirt. Finished loading and ready to leave, he called Milo. He slapped his thigh. He whistled. But Milo didn’t come.

Scanning, Harris could barely make out a shape in the distance, warped by the heat waves already rising from the ground. He drove to it, keeping an eye on Ruby Peak so he’d know his way home. Out here a person could get turned around and lose his own trail, each stretch of nothing looking like the next, east looking like south looking like west, not knowing where he came on the lake bed, and not knowing how to get home.

The shape in the distance was Milo, as Harris thought it would be, bent over and sniffing at a heap of something. The truck rolled closer and stopped. Harris got out, softly shutting the door behind him.

“Come here, dog,” he said. But Milo stayed, nosing the pile.

It was a girl—a young girl, Mexican—lying on her side, unconscious. Maybe dead. Harris circled her. She wore cutoffs, the white flaps of pockets sticking out the frayed bottoms. She was missing a shoe, a thick-soled flip-flop. A white button-up man’s shirt tied in a knot exposed her pouchy belly. Her navel was pierced, had one of those dangly pink jewels nestled inside. Rising below the jewel was a bruise, inky purple, the size of a baseball. Or a fist.

Milo licked at the vomit in the girl’s black hair, matted to her head. Harris pushed the dog away with his boot and crouched over her. He laid his hand on the curve of her calf. Her skin was hot; the early morning sun had begun to burn her. She was breathing, he saw then, but barely. Her lips were dry and cracked white as the lake bed itself. No doubt she hadn’t had any water in God knows how long. Her dark fingernail polish was chipped. Fifteen years old, maybe sixteen, but she was wearing a truckload of makeup and he couldn’t tell with these kids anymore.

Harris shook the girl gently, trying to wake her. He looked around and saw no one, only dirt and mountain and sky. He poured some water from his jug and wet her lips with it. It was an hour and a half to the trailer clinic in Gerlach, and they couldn’t do much more for her than he could. His knees popped as he hoisted the girl and positioned her body across the seat of the truck.

“Let’s go,” he said, and slapped his thigh. Milo came then, slowly: sharp ears, bad eyes, bad hips, a limp of one variety or another in all four legs. Harris squatted and lifted the dog to the bed of the truck.

The truck sped for six, seven miles over the white salt crust of the lake bed. Harris watched absently for dark spots of wet earth. When it had the chance, the Black Rock held moisture as if
it remembered when Nevada was mostly ocean, as if it was trying its damnedest to get the Great Basin back underwater. It would be near impossible to dig the truck out of the mud by himself, even with the squares of carpet he kept in the bed for traction. And there was no time for that.

The tires of the Ford crunched the dirt, leaving a pair of faint tracks. Harris turned and followed two tire-wide ruts of crushed sagebrush. The road shifted from weed to dirt to gravel. Harris bent and put his face to the girl’s. He felt her breath against his cheek. He turned once to check on Milo, her tail wagging against the fireworks he’d forgotten he’d come for.

The road shifted twice more: to State Route 40, that hot belt of shoulderless asphalt, and then to Red’s Road, the ten-mile stretch of gravel that led up the alluvial fan to Harris’s slumped brick house.

Harris carried the girl inside. She didn’t stir when he laid her on the couch, nor when he slipped her remaining sandal from her softly curled toes. Milo milled underfoot, sniffing at the sandal on the floor where Harris set it. “Don’t even think about it,” he said. The dog retreated to sulk in front of the swamp cooler.

Figuring it would make her more comfortable, Harris unknotted the girl’s shirt. Though he’d already seen the twin juts of her pelvis and the slope of her stomach—she wasn’t leaving much to the imagination—his hands fumbled and his breath went shallow while he buttoned the wrinkled flaps back together, not sure what he would say if, at that moment, she woke.

But she woke only once that afternoon, delirious. It was all he could do to make her drink, tap water from the mason jar sliding down her stretched neck, wetting her chest, pooling in the divots above her collarbones. While she slept he checked on her often, felt for a fever, held a moist washcloth to her forehead and cheeks. He cleaned the puke out of her hair by dabbing at it with damp paper towels. All the while the bruise on her abdomen seemed to throb, to shape-shift.

There was only so much he could do. He tidied up the house while she slept, washed the dishes, made his bed, trimmed Milo’s nails. He could not remember the last time he’d had a houseguest, if the girl could be considered such. At least sixteen years. And though she was unconscious, having the girl there cultivated a bead of shame in him for the years of clutter he’d accumulated, with no one to get after him. The living room was walled with hutches and shelves and curio cabinets that had once been full of trinkets long since removed by Carrie Ann, off for another extended stay at her sister’s while he sat smoking on the porch, too angry or afraid to ask what she needed with her Kewpie dolls in Fallon.

And then she was gone for good. The shelves now held his rock collection: igneous feldspars, quartzes, olivines and micas on the east wall; sedimentary gneiss and granoblastics on the built-in along the north; shale, siltstones, breccias and most conglomerates along the west wall, minus the limestones, gemstones and his few opals, which he kept in the bedroom.

Plastic milk crates lined the edges of the room, full mostly of chrysocolla chunks pickaxed from the frozen rock above Nixon the previous winter. A few were marbled with nearly microscopic arteries of gold. Dusty, splitting cardboard boxes were stacked four and five tall near the coat closet and in front of it, full of samples to be sent to the lab in Reno for testing, to tell whether or not his claims had finally paid off, whether he might augment his miner’s pension. The rusted oil barrels on the porch and wheelbarrows out front overflowed with dirty schorl and turquoise and raw malachite in need of cutting and tumbling, specimens enough to supply a chain of rock shops from here to San Francisco.

Harris tried straightening up, but there was nowhere to put it all. Even the single drawer of his nightstand was filled with soapstone and milky, translucent chunks of ulexcite waiting to be labeled.

He kept an eye on the lake bed too, though whoever left the girl would most likely know better than to come looking for her. It was a hundred and six degrees by ten a.m. The only person with any business out here this time of year was Harvey Bowman, a Jack Mormon from Battle Mountain, and that was because the government paid him for it. But Harris knew full well that Bowman kept his BLM Jeep parked at the Mustang Ranch, a hundred and fifty miles away, where the trailers had swamp coolers chugging on the roofs and it was never too hot for sex. Bowman got laid more than Brigham Young himself.

The lake bed was dead. Whoever left the girl out there wasn’t coming back, and anyone who wanted to find her didn’t know where to look. For this Harris found himself strangely pleased.

For dinner he fixed a fried bologna sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup. He was in the kitchen, fishing a dill pickle from the jar with his fingers when the girl woke.

“Where’s my shoe?” she said, propping herself up with her arm.

“That is your shoe,” said Harris.

She looked down. “So it is.” Her face turned sickly and Harris rushed to her just in time for her to dry-heave into the pickle jar. The girl lifted her head and looked at Harris squatting in front of her. Her face hardened. Out of nowhere she stiff-armed him in the gut, toppling him back on his haunches. Biled pickle juice sloshed down the front of him.

The girl looked wildly to the door.

“Relax,” said Harris, rubbing his ribs where she’d hit him. “I’m not going to hurt you. I found you on the lake bed. This is my house. I live here. You’ve been out all day.”

He got to his feet and slowly handed her the mason jar from the windowsill, and a dishrag to wipe her mouth. “Here.” She eyed the jar, then took it. Three times she drained it, sometimes coughing softly, and each time he refilled it.

“Thanks,” she said finally. “What’s your name?”

“Edwin Harris,” he said. “Bud,” he added, though he hadn’t been called that in years.

She looked around, assessing, it seemed, the house and its contents in light of their belonging to an old fart who wanted to be called Bud. Harris asked her name. “Magda,” she said. “Magdalena. My mom’s a religious freak.”

“Magda, you’re lucky to be alive,” he said. “The hell you doing out there alone?”

She dabbed her mouth with the dishrag and looked lazily about the living room, swirling the last bit of water around the bottom of the jar. “Drank too much, I guess,” she said, giving a little shrug. “Happy birthday, America.”

He nodded, and went to his bedroom for a clean shirt. Drank too much. That’s what he’d figured, at first. Kids partied on the lake bed year-round. Harris often heard the echoes of screeching and thumping they called music. Out here they could see the headlights of Bowman’s BLM Jeep coming from fifty miles away, if it came at all. The whole area was off-limits, but most kids knew as well as Harris did that paying one man to patrol the entire basin, from the north edge of the lake bed all the way to the Quinn River Sink, almost a thousand square miles, was the same as paying nobody.

He returned to the kitchen. This girl seemed different from those kids, somehow. She was beautiful, or could have been. Her features were too weary for someone her age.

Magda motioned to the dog, lying in front of the swamp cooler. “Who’s this?”

“Milo,” he said. “She found you. You likely got heatstroke. You should eat.” He brought her a mug of the soup and refilled her water.

She took a bit of soup up to her lips, nodding politely to the dog. “Thanks, Milo.” She looked around, not eating, spooning at her soup as though she expected to find a secret at the bottom of the mug. “You’re a real rock hound, no?”

“I do some lapidary work,” he said.

“You at the mine?”

“Used to be. I retired.”

Magda set her soup on the coffee table. She picked up a dusty piece of smoky quartz the size of a spark plug from the shelf beside her and let it rest in her palm. “So, what do you do out here?” she asked.

“I make by,” he said. “I got a few claims.”

“Gold?”

He nodded and she laughed, showing her metal fillings, a solid silver molar. “This place is sapped,” she said, and laughed again. She had a great laugh, widemouthed and toothy. “The gold’s gone, old-timer.”

“Gold ain’t all gone,” Harris said. “Just got to know where to look.” He pushed the mug toward her. “You should eat.”

Magda regarded the soup. “I don’t feel good. Hungover.”

Milo lifted herself and settled at Harris’s feet. Harris scratched the soft place behind her ear. “I drove you in from the lake bed,” he said, gesturing out front. “I got a standard cab. Small. You didn’t smell like you drank too much. Didn’t smell like you drank at all.”

Magda set the quartz roughly on the coffee table and leaned back into the couch. “That’s sweet,” she said dryly.

Harris walked to the pantry and returned. He set an unopened sleeve of saltine crackers in Magda’s lap. “My ex-wife ate boxes of these things.”

“Good for her,” said Magda.

“Especially when she was pregnant,” he said. “I suppose they were the only thing that settled her stomach. Used to keep them everywhere, on her nightstand, in the medicine cabinet, the glove box of my truck.”

Magda touched her belly, then quickly moved her hand away. She considered the saltines for a moment, then opened the package. She took out a cracker and pressed the salted side against her tongue. “You can tell?” she asked, her mouth full.

Harris nodded. “What, twelve weeks or so?”

The question bored Magda, it seemed. She shrugged as though he’d asked whether she wanted to bust open a geode with a hammer and see what was inside.

Carrie Ann had taken a hundred pictures of herself at twelve weeks. Polaroids. The film had cost a fortune. She wanted to send them out to family, but, as with so many of her projects, she never got around to it. So for months the photos slid around the house like sheets of gypsum. After she lost the baby, when he couldn’t stand the sight of them anymore, he collected every last one, took them to work and, when no one was around, threw them into the incinerator.