(For Bill . . .)
BACKSTORY: Born in the desert and raised in the dripping greenery of Oregon rain, I spent most of my life in the exaggerated landscape and mindscape of the contemporary American West. My dad, and his dad before him, sold parts for heavy equipment: the immense construction, mining, and farming machines that have—for better or worse—literally shaped the West. We road-tripped relentlessly, visiting guys in shops and warehouses, on jobs and farms. We trailed the smells of diesel, grease, and Orange Goop hand cleaner from Death Valley to Seattle.
I loved these travels and continued them throughout my adult life, camping in the Nevada desert, crossing the California border on Amtrak’s Coast Starlight train at dawn, driving all night on I-5, Highway 20, the old Highway 395 winding around Mono Lake’s freakishly beautiful moonscape. My haughty teenaged disdain for country music fell away. I rediscovered Johnny Cash. He mined the stoic loneliness of the Western mythscape and harvested its regret in a way that spoke to me deeply.
The opening clause of “Reno” is a direct, six-word quote from the song “Folsom Prison Blues.” The story is otherwise independent. Incidentally, that famous, brilliant Johnny Cash song itself may have been inspired by Gordon Jenkins’s “Crescent City Blues;” Jenkins apparently received a settlement on an infringement lawsuit against Cash.
I SHOT A MAN IN RENO. The loudspeakers. They blared at me, clogging up the streets with noise, trying to get me to come in. Come in and see their weapons, their jewelry, their gold. There’s no such thing as bad credit. Give your son a legacy that will last! But I didn’t want to buy a weapon. I didn’t want any jewels. I didn’t want any of it.
That day I drove all the way down from Lakeview, boiling in the pickup. It didn’t have A/C so I splashed water on myself while I drove. I’d gotten good at doing that, driving with one hand while I poured a gallon jug over my head or slapped some water under my pits. I kept a good five gallons on the passenger side all the time.
I drove out to my sister’s place in Cedarville on the way back. Three girls were playing in the front yard. I sat in my rig and watched their game. Two of the girls whispered on the porch steps while the third one, the little one, stood above a whirling sprinkler, shivering, her eyes closed. The two girls pushed her down in the mud. The little one crawled, crawled around in the mud, chanting something. She kissed the backs of their hands and stood up. Then all three of them ran around under the sprinkler, shrieking.
The two girls looked about ten or eleven maybe, wearing halter tops, wearing blue jeans that sat low on their hips. The little one had mud all over her Mickey Mouse T-shirt. She tried to stop them from dancing with each other.
“Am I in now?” she asked. “Can I be in?”
Tabby was pretty easy to pick out. She was that third girl, the younger one; her hair was short. Brittney was harder. Both of the older girls looked the same to me: same pink lips, same squashed bug of a nose, same hair parted in the middle and flowing out long behind them. Then one of the older girls slapped Tabby across the cheek and laughed. That one must be Brittney, a lot skinnier than last time I saw her.
I picked up the two stuffed burros off the passenger seat and walked up to the girls on the lawn.
“Hi,” I said, “How are you girls doing?”
I held out the burros. The girls didn’t take them. Water began to bead up on the little animals’ gray fur.
“These are for you,” I explained. Then I turned to Brittney’s friend. “Sorry I don’t have another one.”
They still didn’t take the burros out of my hands. The water was starting to soak through. Thankfully it wasn’t one of those sprinklers that goes tch . . . tch . . . tch and then sprays back all over everyone. I can’t stand that sound. This kind bubbled up in a spiral and kept spinning. Very quiet.
“Um . . . who are you?” Brittney asked, adjusting the small nubs under her halter top.
“I’m Terry,” I said. “You remember me from Grandma’s in Lakeview?”
She looked down and kicked the muddy grass with her foot.
“I brought you a burro,” I said, “like I send at Christmas. You guys must have a big collection of these things by now, huh?”
“Um . . . okay, I don’t like know what you’re talking about, so . . . just . . . wait here.” Brittney ran up the porch stairs. Her friend followed fast.
The little one looked up at me. Her voice came out higher than I was expecting, higher and sweeter and younger. “I like donkeys,” she said shyly. She held her arms in a cradle shape. I put both of the burros in the cradle and she smiled, rocking them.
My sister shoved her head out the window. “Tabby,” she said, “come in the house and play with Brittney. Now.”
The girl didn’t move.
“Get in here!” her mother warned.
Tabby ran past and waved the burros at me. She whispered, “Don’t worry, I’ll put them somewhere safe!”
My sister locked the door behind her and walked down the steps. “You look like you could use a bite to eat,” she said, “my treat.” She waited for me on the road in front of the house. I didn’t want to leave the twister of water on the cool, wet lawn. I stood there for a minute, but she wouldn’t stop waiting until I joined her on the hot asphalt. “We’ll take your truck,” she decided, “and I’ll walk home after.”
First thing she did was hit her head on the gun rack. “For the love of God!” she yelped. “I thought Mom told you to get rid of them things!”
“Mom never asked where the venison came from, she just cooked it,” I said. I breathed in and breathed out, without saying anything, to stay calm. Then I said, “Dad left them to me fair and square. It was right there in the will.”
“I’m not talking about the . . . I mean. . . . They let you have guns?”
“I have every kind of permit ever invented,” I said. I reminded myself to breathe in and then breathe out again, nice and calm. I’d only seen my sister once since I got put in the SRC six years before. She and Mom came to Graduation Day. There was a party with cookies and punch, and a banner that said “Congratulations Greg, Terry, and Pam.” All three of us were getting out that day. Pam and I moved into the same halfway house. Greg’s brother took him out to Winnemucca.
“Of course you do, of course,” my sister said. “You and Daddy always had that in common, going down to Willy’s, getting your toys.”
I spent a load of time at Willy’s World of Weapons as a kid. Willy would come out from behind the long counter and shake my dad’s hand. “If it isn’t Ernie Thompson,” he’d say, like it was a complete surprise, “and the little one, too.” He’d shake my hand like I was a grown-up, a real customer, and bring me an orange soda from the cooler in the back room. Then Dad and Willy and I would play cards or sharpen knives or clean weapons. We’d discuss the finer points of how to go about things if you were left-handed like Dad and me. I’d hunt through bins full of dusty marbles, plastic Army men, Confederate flag stickers, Bic lighters decorated with Day-Glo skulls and devil-ladies in red bikinis. Willy would bring out anything I wanted from the display cases: silvery handcuffs from a real-live policeman; crusty holsters that Billy the Kid or Annie Oakley or Elvis used to own; blades from Japan that you could throw through the air and they’d rip the other guy to ribbons; a bag-looking thing that had been on a real American’s face while he was getting tortured in Vietnam. Willy let Dad have that one for free. The three of us closed up the shop and burned the thing in the back alley. But a lot of the time, we’d just sit there, quiet, glad of the air conditioning.
“We asked you to come,” I said to my sister. “You just didn’t want to.”
“Of course I didn’t,” she snapped. “That old man smoked like a chimney. I hated that place.” She jumped out of the cab. “This truck smells like wet dog!”
My sister was a great one for getting mad. When we were kids, she was always mad at Dad for blowing his hand off in the war, not during action but messing with explosives in the supply tent. He was still a crack shot with his wrong hand, up ’til the day he died. He taught me how to clean and load and fire a weapon with one hand, either hand, leaning in with other body parts for support. “In combat, you can’t count on your right hand,” he’d say, waving his stump. My mom made him a T-shirt with iron-on velvet letters that spelled out “Born-again Southpaw.” He wore it all the time.
Now my sister got mad about the gallon jugs, so I put them in the truck bed. She wiggled away from the gun rack and fussed with her lipstick. Then she got mad that there wasn’t a seat belt over on her side.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Nobody rides in this rig but Ratbait, and she’s dead.”
Cedarville smelled funny. Not like cedar, more like paint. Flakes of old paint so small I was breathing them in. And new paint. New paint to cover the real smell of things. New paint to cover the false fronts on Main Street. My sister took me to Susan’s Frosty, where they made the best burger in the state, but I couldn’t eat it. We sat inside at first, but the place was packed with hippies coming back from the desert. You could tell they hadn’t showered in a long time and they were trying to cover it up. I can handle a little B.O. but what I can’t handle is patchouli.
We took our burgers outside and sat at a green plastic table next to the street. Three tiny dogs all piled onto my feet and tried to climb up me until an old lady untied their leashes and took them away. After that I couldn’t eat. I can’t stand dogs anymore. It doesn’t matter what breed. They all remind me of Ratbait.
I watched my sister finish her burger. “You should get another dog,” she told me, chewing. “That Ratbait was a big girl and she was a stinker. To high heaven! Whew.” She made a motion of fanning bad smells away from her face, her long nails shining in the sunlight. “What you need is a nice short-hair breed, you do know, don’t you, that they’re less dandrous? Like a little pug. Wouldn’t you just love to have a nice little pug?”
“What the hell would I do with a nice little pug?” I asked.
“For starters, you might have someone to talk to,” my sister answered.
People in your family can push your buttons; this is something I learned in outpatient, even though I didn’t see my family very often. Carolee, my social worker, said it’s important to hear your own breathing and take a minute before you say something. Before you do something, something you might get sorry about later.
“I work with many fine animals,” I said eventually, “and I am happy to know the fine people of this world. Ratbait was a companion, it’s true. She was a true companion.”
“You’re lucky Mom and Uncle Riley took her in after Dad—I mean, that dog was huge and she went crazy whenever you weren’t around. Three years we’re talking! But what could we do, any of us?” I watched the bits of mashed-up hamburger and pickle and lettuce stewing around in my sister’s mouth. She waved her fingers over her mouth area, shielding it, but you could still see all the food inside.
She swallowed and kept going. “Who was going to hold it all together? Me, that’s who. A single mom at the time if you’ll remember! With a toddler and a newborn! If Uncle Riley, may he rest in peace, didn’t have the bigness in his heart to take in Mom and that dog of yours, if he didn’t happen to have that big place up in Lakeview, well, I don’t know how everyone expected me to—”
A boy wearing pants made of seashells and silver bells walked out of the restaurant and knocked me into the table, wafting smells of sweat and spices over me. He kept walking.
“How rude,” my sister said.
“It’s all beautiful,” the boy told his friend, stretching out his back before jumping into her van.
I looked at my sister with her blotchy lipstick and mouth full of food. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help during all that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, I always figured someone in this family would get put in the SRC,” my sister said. She laughed a little. “I just always thought it’d be Daddy.”
I breathed in nice and calm. In my mind I could picture a big red button, a shiny, candy-like button, right in the middle of my chest. I could picture my sister reaching over and pushing the button so hard it went through my ribcage and fell out my back.
“Dad was a good man,” I said, very slowly, so she could understand.
My sister stood up and grabbed our plastic trays with the food and paper on them. “I have to get a move on. You need gas before you head out?”
We drove to the gas station and she got her friend there to fill up my rig. I turned and hunched my body around my jeans wallet—I made it out of Levi’s pockets in twelfth grade—and pulled out ten bucks. That was the end of my money, but I sure as hell didn’t let her see that. Still, she wouldn’t take it. She waved her hand like a queen.
“No, no,” she said, “You come all the way up here. This is my treat.” Her fingernails were long and curved, but cut flat at the ends, with a white strip. Her wedding ring caught the sun’s rays in short flashes, like she was sending coded messages to invisible spacecraft.
I said, “I stayed at Mom’s last night. You should get up to Lakeview sometimes. She’s not looking so good.”
My sister fussed with her purse and didn’t say anything.
“She asked me why Dad didn’t visit. I told her he’d been gone six years, six years this week. We even went down to the cemetery.” The headstone had both their names on it, even though Mom wasn’t dead yet. It had her birthday carved on it, then a dash, and then a blank spot.
My sister said, “You’re taking the 395 back down to Reno? If you leave now, you’ll get back before dark, easy.”
“I don’t live in Reno anymore,” I told her. “I got my own place out by the reservation.”
“Walker?” she asked. She sounded fake-surprised, like she hadn’t gotten my Christmas cards from the past three years, like Mom wouldn’t have told her anyway. “What on earth are you doing out there?”
“Not Walker,” I said, “Pyramid. Closer to work.”
“What kind of work can you do out there?”
“I’m in ponies, wild ponies and burros,” I said. “Don’t you read my Christmas cards?”
She looked at me for a long time, like I was some kind of spider she’d never seen before. Then she walked across the road.
“If you drive down through Gerlach instead,” she shouted, “watch out for the gravel! They’re doing construction.” She waved, a fast wave with all her fingers wiggling. I waved back.
I got the gallon jugs and put them back in the cab. Taking the 395 down to Reno wasn’t a bad idea. I could probably make it down there on one tank of gas, and in town I could get some money easier than out by my place.
The ranch had to lay some people off a while back. That’s why I’d been working for free, which was why I ran out of money. I didn’t tell Carolee; there’s no point worrying people. When I first got out of the SRC, it took her fourteen months to find me a job. That’s more than a year. Besides, I loved the ranch and the ranch loved me. The ponies and the burros loved me. The folks I worked for, they liked me, too. They kept saying they might be able to hire me back someday.
The only thing for it was to sell something, and I had a Glock 27 that lived in the glove box. I never thought I’d sell one of Dad’s weapons, but sometimes in life you have to give things up for the greater good. A few years before he died, Dad got the little Glock from a friend’s son, a sheriff out near Klamath somewhere. It didn’t have much sentimental value.
So I drove straight through. I drove straight through Susanville and all the way down to Reno without stopping. I used up all the water in the gallon jugs, pouring it on my skin. Then I got thirsty. Smells stuck themselves onto my body, wedged into my small places, down my back, the crooks of my elbows. Sage, cooking in the hills. Roadkill, roasting on the tar. People, sweating in their cars. I’d never be able to eat with all these smells sticking to me. Or sleep, probably. I hadn’t been able to sleep for a few days. That happened sometimes. That happened a lot.
The sun was setting when I pulled into town. The air had cooled but I still felt hot, hot and thirsty. I got off the freeway and parked right in front of Willy’s World of Weapons. The whole street shouted at me. Come inside. Give your lady an occasion she’ll never forget. Give her a 100-point diamond, set in white-hot white gold!
I took the little Glock out of the glove box and felt its heaviness in my left hand, then in my right, then in my left again. I released the magazine and then I drew back the slide, letting the cartridge plop onto the passenger seat, right where Ratbait should’ve been. I racked the slide, moving it back and forth one, two, three times, to make sure the little Glock was empty. At that point, my dad would always point a pistol in a safe direction and pull the trigger, to really, really make sure the weapon was disabled. Six years ago, he pointed it at his head. Maybe that was the only safe direction he could find.
The little Glock felt light and gentle this way. I put it in its black plastic box and headed to Willy’s World of Weapons. Willy’s huge, wooden sign with its peeling, red-painted letters and cartoon cowboy was gone. Instead, a light-up sign wrapped all the way around the building. Willy’s had loudspeakers now, too. The voices at Willy’s said different things from the voices across the street at The Diamond Rose. Buy this, buy that. But I didn’t want a timeless 24-karat gold reminder of love. I didn’t want a diamondette tennis bracelet. I didn’t even want a genuine bayonet from the Great War. I just wanted my dad back.
Inside, the bins were all gone. The long counter was new, deeper and more square-shaped, with shiny chrome around its edges. The guy behind the counter was young and he wore his hair long. In his ear there was an earring of a little silver feather. He was sitting on a stool, stabbing the buttons on his cell phone. I waited at the counter for a minute or two while he finished his game. He looked mean, mean like one of the orderlies at the SRC, mean like a mustang with colic.
Finally, he gave a big sigh and beeped the cell phone off. I put the black plastic box on the countertop and said, “Hello. What can you give me for a Glock 27?”
He didn’t open the box. “We don’t need nothing like that,” he said. “You can get one of those at Wal-Mart.”
“It’s law enforcement issue,” I informed him. I didn’t know what else to say.
He pushed the box toward me and stared at it until I picked it up. “Head east,” he said. “Pawnshop by the IHOP. We’re strictly collectors here.”
They sure didn’t used to be strictly collectors. They used to have everything, including orange soda. “Where’s Willy?” I asked.
“Whaddya mean, where’s Willy?” he said, laughing. “Willy’s a name on a sign, that’s all Willy is.” He stopped laughing and looked me up and down. “I got a willy I could show you.”
The sound of the loudspeakers leaked in from outside. Buy this, buy that. Buy a sword from 1623. Buy a classic Smith & Wesson. Support our troops: buy a flag.
“Willy is real,” I told him, nice and calm and slow, like I was talking to my sister. “He’s real and he’s my dad’s friend and I want to talk to him. Tell him Theresa Thompson is here.”
“You mean the old man?” asked the guy behind the counter. “I can’t go tell him nothing. He died since before I started working here. And his name wasn’t Willy. Frank or something.” He flipped open his cell phone and slumped back onto the stool.
I walked out the door and into the loudspeakers. Buy this, buy that, real gold never goes out of style. I got in my rig, loaded the little Glock, charged it, and put it in my left pocket.
I carried the empty black box back into Willy’s World of Weapons in my right hand. Buy an ice cream, buy a fig. Buy an emerald collar for your dog and a triangle-shaped flag for your daddy’s coffin. I watched the guy behind the counter play his game for a minute. I breathed in and breathed out, nice and slow. I felt calm. Really, really calm.
“You tell Frank that Ernie Thompson’s daughter sends her regards,” I told him. Then I shot him, all twelve rounds.
TIFFANY LEE BROWN is a writer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Oregon. She is the editor of 2GQ, the literature and media arm of the non-profit 2 Gyrlz Performative Arts, and is presently a guest editor for PLAZM magazine. Her work is published in periodicals such as Bookforum, Utne, Bust, Tin House, and Art Access, and in anthologies including The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order, Gargoyle, Slow Trains, Northwest Edge, and The Clear Cut Future. She has performed at the Portland Rose Festival, Wordstock, Burning Man, Performance Works NW, the Richard Foreman Festival, the Enteractive Language Festival, the Dark Arts Festival, and others. She is currently collaborating with book artist Clare Carpenter on A Compendium of Miniatures, to be published by 2GQ in late 2006. Tiffany would like to thank Soapstone for offering her the wonderful residency at which she was able to finish this piece, and Bill Palmer for his invaluable insights. Tiffany welcomes online visitors at www.magdalen.com and at 2GQ.org.