And so once again I boarded flight 4325, the very same midday Reno-to-Vegas commuter flight I’d forced my way off months before, same Los Angeles–based flight crew. I recognized them during boarding, when I handed my extremely expensive ticket to the flight attendant I’d shoved. Worse, the attendant recognized me. Her colleague, the angry one with the exacting facial hair who’d opened the door for me, frowned my way as he patrolled to close the overhead compartments. I got a little panicky but took a Dramamine and fell asleep.
I woke forty-five minutes later in Las Vegas, a city I had promised myself I would never again step foot in, as long as I lived. I staggered groggily through McCarran—the only airport where I have ever heard the intercom say, Sir, alcoholic beverages are not allowed on the jet bridge. The airport was playing “Leaving Las Vegas” by Sheryl Crow, as always. I’m not complaining. “Leaving Las Vegas” is a perfect song, although the airport people, in cahoots with the all-powerful tourism bureau no doubt, ruined it by cutting the final lines:
No I won’t be back
Not this time
I chanted this lopped-off coda to myself as I bought a Cinnabon at Cinnabon, found the gate for my connection and waited to go home. I had tried to book another flight, any other to avoid connecting in Vegas, but it wasn’t possible, the ticket agent in Reno had said, not on the same day, not so close to the holidays.
“No worries!” I’d told the agent, handing over my credit card and in fact brimming with worries. That I’d be unable to escape that city, that it would grasp me as it had my foremothers and sisters. So, it was the city’s hand I felt close around me when the monitors announced my flight home delayed an hour. I tried not to panic, browsed a gift shop, bought a book called Uncommon Characteristics of Common Wildflowers of the Mojave Desert, and returned to the gate to read it. Our new departure time came and went. Folks pawed frantically at their phones, beating the rest of us to the cold hard truth of our situation. Soon enough an announcement admitted the flight delayed again, this time indefinitely, by a storm in Chicago. People called their people and cursed Chicago. I considered calling Theo. He was expecting me.
I considered messaging Nate, still a bouncer at a bar on Trop where we met fifteen years ago, though by the looks of his social media he now also trained UFC fighters and sold tubs of supplements. I recalled Nate’s huge and expressively curved dick, which I had used over the years to commemorate UNLV vs. UNR sporting contests and to annihilate the emotional aftermath of my brief visits to my family.
I did not call Theo, but neither did I message Nate. For this I rewarded myself with a trip to the international terminal for a massage and a pair of Uggs. Noodly and slick with oil, I wore the Uggs out of the store, walked in them from terminal to terminal, sheepskin wombs I used to ward off the babies all around me. I ducked into a bar and in no time was fairly drunk. The bar had plenty of TVs. It was almost Christmas, the local news all toy drives and house fires. Outside was the Strip, the physical manifestation of every bankrupt ideology of the twentieth century. Though I could not see it, I heard the young city’s psyche crying out from deep in the bowels of its gaudy icons, struggling for breath inside the tightening fists of the rich men who owned them. As I’ve said, I was quite drunk. I could not help but wonder what sort of ill culture births, almost overnight, a vice capital of such grotesque scale and such shallow memory? What future could there be in a city whose sparkling lore was all violence and infrastructure? Hoover Dam, atomic bombs. America’s most rapidly warming city, the news said. “Planners here are searching desperately for a replacement for pavement.” Furthermore, I learned from Uncommon Characteristics it was true what Noah said about the birds of the Mojave—half gone, what’s left mostly corvids.
Finally, a message: my flight canceled. Act of God the text from the airline said. I admit I interpreted this completely routine fuck-over by a tax-dodging monopoly as the hand of Fate. Las Vegas makes you think this way. Ask anyone not from here who lives here how that happened and I guarantee you’ll hear a harrowing saga writhing with the cruelest twists of fortune, highly questionable decision-making and the very worst luck. Drive off Strip in the morning, before school, witness the city’s daily migration, a beleaguered shuffle of women and children from one unstable housing arrangement to another, their luggage a distant cousin to the matching wheeled sets loaded and unloaded by shuttle drivers and bellhops all across a city where the population regularly doubles with visitors. See these belongings on their backs and piled on shopping cart wagons and stroller rigs. A decade after the massive upward redistribution of wealth that was the Great Recession, this city running out of water was still in survival mode and always would be.
Yet I knew it as well to be a city alive, ribald and shameless, embracing of grime and sex, each body therein a site of filth ready to receive the purifying fires of the sun. Maybe that was just me. You have to be careful in Las Vegas—the place will be whatever you need it to be. For me it was a thirsty city joyously screaming the song of the unbearable now. For me it was my mother’s city, and for this reason I had to get out.
I wanted there to be a place for me. That is what I’d said on the phone to Theo at the beginning of this day, the day after Noah broke my heart in Sparks. I’d said, “Maybe could you put me in a place?” I told him about this idea I had of sitting and looking out at a lake, a wool blanket draped over my legs. Theo thought there could be such a place, but it required prior authorization. We’d have to make a place ourselves. He promised to look into cabins on the lake. A “Yellow Wallpaper” scenario, that felt like now, my shoulder already in the groove. I thought of calling Lise, but knew she’d say if I had been to visit our mom in any of her “places” I would know there was no such “place” for me.
Maybe not, I thought. But also—driving a rented car (the cuboid model driven in commercials by husky rapping hamsters) over the mountains toward Tecopa—maybe so.
It is unrealistic to expect even fossil water to pull you back into your body, yet this is a frequently documented effect of very hot springs. I admit I had impossible needs driving out to Tecopa, needs inflamed through Spring Mountain pass and down into the Joshua tree forest on the other side, combusted by a passing glimpse of the Christmas Joshua done up as it is every year in sacred trash, its arms draped in garlands and tinsel, tines speared with glittery ornaments.
According to my book, the Joshua tree, Yucca brevifolia, used to be cunnilingued on the regular by the ridiculously long tongues of giant ground sloths. I’m paraphrasing. Its sloth lovers extinct, the Joshua tree now finds itself in a loveless marriage to a common, dirt-colored moth. My book called this a miracle.
I pulled up to the public baths in Tecopa, open twenty-four hours and bicameral, separated by sex. As girls, my sister and I often followed my mother into the women’s side, eager to gawk at the secret bodies in the waters there. These were bodies you could read, stories on the skin in sun and scars, stories of pain, deformity, malignancy, the evidence of many operations. I remembered the awe I felt for those old naked women, my neighbors. I never saw bodies like them anywhere else—as marked, as resilient, as expressive. You could see time on them, their rippling fat, wrinkles, their hair everywhere. I remembered vividly how each woman seemed impossibly sturdy, an effect perhaps of the refraction of light through the mineral water, or of their big old bushes. Their bodies were the first books I read and those books were mostly about work. Child-rearing, housework, yard work, waiting tables, prospecting. Markings of birth about the breasts, thighs, belly and—though I did not know this then—inside. Most deformed of all were the feet, mangled by one long story—centuries long—in which a girl brings a man a drink.
But now it was the middle of the night and just me at the baths. I stuffed some bills in the coffee can at the entrance and went in. I turned off the lights and undressed in the darkness, feeling my body, reading by Braille the scar threaded across my lower abdomen, smirking above my pubic hair. I stroked my stretch marks, a weathering of shimmery purple across my stomach and thighs and hips.
The water’s murmur bounced off the cinder blocks. I sank into the scalding pool and floated.
I wanted to take everyone I knew and float them in the hot springs, starting with everyone hurting. Everyone clenched against winter. Everyone bent from work. Everyone on their feet all day. Everyone floating outside their body. I wanted to look at death, to know it, to feel in my bones that it came for me, yes me, so that I might act accordingly.
It is not uncommon to fear dissolve while floating.
It is not uncommon for lost people to return in dark skies and minerals.
Cancer served me very well. It was as though I got grabbed ahold of by the neck, like God grabbed me by the neck and said “You want to look at your life and, uh, get it back in the productive mode? You want to really live it, or do you want to continue to rape, pillage and plunder?”
I wondered, watching the steam rise all around me, up and out the open roof of the bathhouse and toward the insane stars.
The first thing to leave you in the desert is time. Dawn found me sleeping in the backseat of the cube in the bathhouse parking lot. My soak had brought on the sleep of the dead, even though it was freezing and the back of the Cube was surprisingly cramped for such a dumbly bulky vehicle.
I checked the time—a few more hours until my rescheduled flight to Detroit. I might have gone by the Tecopa house, might have checked on it, but instead I drove up the road, past the tufa caves, to Shoshone. In front of the Crowbar I was greeted by a nine-foot stalk rising from a massive dusk-violet agave. Agave deserti, commonly called the century plant, another misnomer. It sends up its stalk not after one hundred years, as most assume, but a measly thirty. Its bushy yellow panicles spread open to the desert air and then it dies young. Oldest trick in the book.
The diner side of the Crowbar was open, but the bar wasn’t yet. Still I begged my waitress to make me a Bloody Mary. After some hemming and hawing she made it a double. I slurped it down with a pair of runny fried eggs, two flaccid strips of bacon, coffee and toast. The waitress—a salty mother of four from Amargosa Junction—suggested I visit the museum next door. I downed another Bloody first.
“Can I help you?” An old lady docent propped up on a stool behind the cash register at the museum eyed me.
I glanced in the back to make sure the mammoth was still there. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just looking around.”
I could see what she saw: a day drunk in brand-new Uggs. The soak had cleansed my soul but the rest of me was filthy, ripeness radiating from my crotch and armpits, my hair gathered into a single unforgivable white girl dread. She parted the shades of the window by the register and peered out to the parking lot, to the cube with no food or water inside it. She tried to figure me out and did: tourist with a purse full of rocks.
“We have maps,” she offered. “Do you have a map? They’re free. You’ll need a map.” Emphasis mine, probably.
“I pretty much already know where everything is,” I said. “I used to live here. My mom used to run this place.”
She asked my mother’s name. I told her.
“Yep,” she said. “I know who you are.”
I can’t tell you how good it felt to hear that. I bought a rock and one of the books by the cash register, a new copy of Caruthers. He’s in all the gift shops out here. The docent rang me up and then an idea struck across her face. She sprang up from her stool. “I was in the archive the other day and found something your mom wrote.”
She stepped into the back office. “You can share it with your big sister,” she called, “wherever she ended up.” She thought I was Lise.
She returned with a purple mimeograph. I glimpsed the title of the short-lived newspaper my parents put out. She folded the page and slipped it into Caruthers.
“How’s she doing, your sister?”
“Honestly she’s kind of a mess,” I said. “Walked out on her husband and baby.”
Dottie, her name tag read.
“Yep, well.” Dottie shrugged. “It’s a messy business being alive.”
Back in the Crowbar, the bar was open and dark as a cave. I sat at the bar and read the obituary my mother wrote for my father. The picture accompanying it was darkened by ditto ink, but I knew it by heart. My father standing beside the road sign at the Tecopa turnoff. Lise and me barefoot, her in his arms, me in the dirt. We look like tourists but we are the very opposite. This is the only place we’ve ever known. The ground is strewn with hazards: stickers and goatheads, mesquite thorns. Scorpions. Rattlesnakes. You can almost see them. My mother took the photo, told us where to stand and how. She kept the original in her jewelry box under her chips. Was it so much to ask, to walk beside them one more time in the place where the Family gave way to our family?
It was. I drove back over the mountains to Vegas, returned the Cube to the rental car center and dragged myself and my belongings toward the line for the airport shuttle. Waiting there, I received another sign. This Way to Rideshare Pick Up Zone.
As the poet says, I could have made it mean most anything. What I made it mean was: get an Uber and have it, them, take me to Red Rock, the off-Strip casino themed after the ecosystem it paved.
My sister Lise was right where I left her, weaving through slots in a sexy-referee outfit, tray balanced on her hand as if a part of her. She looked me up and down like one of her tiresome regulars. “Make sure you’re playing or I’m fucked,” she said when she came back with my free drink, nodding to the security camera overhead. She knew where they all were and where they were was everywhere.
I played—Vegas for spending money—and Lise brought me drinks. I thought what a sad marvel it was that casinos had rebounded so well, given how most of us now walked around with little casinos in our pockets. I drank until I thought, Good for you, casinos! Thanks for having me! I drank until the end of Lise’s shift, telling her my big gnar in what fits and fragments the corporate surveillance allowed.
She was tender and pitying as one can be while remembering a dozen slot junkies’ drink orders, said finally, “I’m sorry you blew up your marriage for an overeducated JewBu who didn’t love you back.”
“It wasn’t for him,” I tried.
“I get it.” She hugged me with her free arm. “JewBus are hot. Leonard Cohen, Goldie Hawn. You always had a hard-on for the dead Beastie Boy.”
“I liked him before he died.”
“But you liked him more after. They’re easier to love, the dead ones.”
At that she had to scoot.
I didn’t mention the likely demolition of the Tecopa house, not during Lise’s shift or on the drive home. Her apartment building was built in a Las Vegas vernacular best described as rooms-by-the-hour meets doomsday prepper, the complex encircled by a high cinder-block wall lined with crispy obelisks of dying juniper doing a bad job of masking the barbed wire on top. I was reminded how expensive it was to be poor. Lise’s thin-walled, roach-infested apartment cost more than I paid for my four-bedroom foursquare in Ann Arbor. For what she paid in rent she could have gotten her own house, or at least rented a place that was clean. But she had debt, student loans and bad credit, and a more affordable place would not have her. “I just don’t make food here,” she said as she flipped on the kitchen light and the cockroaches scuttled under the fridge, annoyed.
I showered, which took forever, filthy as I was, then dressed in some of Lise’s clothes and joined her for a smoke on her balcony. She’d changed out of her uniform but still had her makeup on. Her feet were propped on the balcony’s flimsy railing in my Uggs.
“So this is what brand-name Uggs feel like,” she said, her toes wiggling approvingly.
She’d arranged for us to have dinner that night with Lyn and their joyfriends Dre and T.
Lyn arrived at the restaurant fully baked, ordered platter upon platter of vegan meze. I cried and stuffed my face with grape leaves while Lyn gave me a pep talk. “I love you, Claire, but all this bullshit, all this pain, for what? ‘The American West?’ Marriage? To be chattel? No way, José! Oh em gee, what a racket! Marriage should be abolished. It’s a trap! It’s property law, as in you are the property. Adults can love adults! We can share property with whoever. That’s why we have contracts—hello! No bosses, no masters, no husbands! Read Lucifer the Lightbearer! Read Emma Goldman. Read The Ethical Slut. Marriage is a church!” I detected our mother’s disgust in that word.
I told Lyn I’d read The Ethical Slut.
Lise said, “Read it? She’s living it!”
“I’m living The Awakening,” I corrected. “And a little bit of Charlotte’s Web.”
Lyn said, “You know, I hope you get free, Claire Bear. As you know, I was mindfully single for a long time. Slutting it up, like you. But I was still insisting on vulnerability and intimacy and honesty and porousness from myself, none of this”—their hand circled the sad clock of my face—“pioneer girl bullshit.”
“Don’t be dumb,” said T. “We’re getting married. We’re going to have a Wiccan ceremony for the whole polycule.”
Dre nodded avidly. “It’s going to be dark and it’s going to be divine!” Dre was my favorite, their gorgeous equine face, their long Jesse fingers with nails painted robin’s-egg blue. The three of them cuddled in the booth, Lyn basking in the love-light beaming at them from both sides, conceding that they’d wear medieval garb and do a three-way Celtic hand binding.
That reminded me. Lyn’s father, Ron, had died in a motorcycle crash outside Denton, Texas, in the fall. On his way to Florida. Probably quick, the Texas cops had told Lyn.
“I’m sorry,” I told them.
“Fucking Texas,” Lyn said. “Fucking Florida.”
We were quiet for a time, then Lise held up her phone, the portal from whence all bad news springs. “Darren says G-ma wants to see us tomorrow.”
“Fuck that,” said Lyn. “I’ve got plans.” They were going with T and Dre to Dre’s parents’ for Christmas Eve dinner, then to T’s parents’ to open presents, then home for sex and a good night’s sleep before they went up to Mount Charleston on Christmas morning to eat mushrooms. “You’re welcome to come to the mountains,” Lyn said.
“We have to see G-ma,” Lise demurred.
I said, “Who’s we?”
G-ma, our grandmother Mary Lou Van Osbree Orlando Frehler (“Grapes Grandma” to Ruth), still lived on Fairway Drive. My aunt Monica’s house had been foreclosed, so she and her son, my cousin Darren, lived in the Fairway house, too. Both were addicts, but G-ma refused to live anywhere else.
“I get it,” Lise said on the drive home from dinner, “she only has one daughter left.” Aunt Mo had been prescribed opiates for her Crohn’s disease around the same time our mother got hers for her Lyme disease. Soon enough they were snorting it, their sisterhood invigorated by their shared commitment to getting high. People think addicts are dumb because being high makes you seem dumb, from the outside, but from inside you’re brilliant because you had the ingenuity to get high no matter what and the courage to leave everyone else behind. Well, not everyone. They got my cousin Darren hooked on that shit when he was fifteen.
I admit these were the broad strokes. Truthfully, I didn’t know what all horrors had gone down in the house on Fairway Drive since I’d moved away, what all horrors continued to go down. I didn’t want to know.
“It’ll be grim,” Lise admitted. “Worse than last time. Darren’s on bad meds. Every time I go over there I have to go straight to an Al-Anon meeting after. But . . . it’s Christmas!” This was a decades-long private joke referring to our favorite bad movie of all time, a holiday rom-com starring Keira Knightley’s midriff in which “It’s Christmas!” is offered as rationale for all kinds of bonkers and borderline sociopathic decisions. We watched the movie that night, our tradition, after which Lise called and asked Darren to tell his mom and G-ma that we’d be coming by the Fairway house tomorrow.
We spent the morning before the visit shopping for them at WinCo. SlimFast, milk, Kix, eggs, ground beef, Hamburger Help Me, a pallet of Diet Pepsi, cinnamon-scented pine cones and chocolate oranges for their stockings.
“I’m kidding,” Lise said, tossing the chocolate oranges back on the shelf. “There are no stockings.”
I schlepped the groceries up G-ma’s driveway, where the Datsun 280Z Lise had been born in sat balanced on a rusty jack. Yard art, trash, flower beds full of beach glass and seashells, crab grass overtaken by cane and sprinkled with shards from a busted window patched with cardboard. Lise knocked, and a brigade of little yappy dogs sounded the alarm. Scraggly terriers and a one-eyed Chihuahua climbed the couch to the front window and snarled at us through the cardboard.
We stood there with them barking at us for a long, long time. I peered into the porthole in the front door where a doorknob might’ve been, were the entire scene not a menacing, surreal extravaganza of poverty, pain and neglect. Instead of a doorknob the door was held closed by a blue satin ribbon. The dogs yapping away. I peered in the window, saw movement, somewhere, blinding flashes. Then the face of a corpse filled the window, its skin ashen, yellow-gray, sunken eyes rolling, smacking lips collapsing in on toothless gums.
I staggered back, stopped myself from crying out. The skull face smiled, knew me.
Aunt Mo opened the door, bewildered in her bathrobe, colostomy bag bulging at her hip. I stepped through this doomed threshold uninvited. The dogs snarled. The smell.
Darren had told no one we were coming. “Karma’s a bitch!” he shrieked, taking the cube of diet soda into his bedroom and slamming the door.
Lise shrugged, hugged G-ma and ghastly Aunt Mo. I could not bring myself to follow suit. Mo retreated behind the shredded comforter nailed up to replace the door someone—Darren?—had ripped off its hinges. Every surface in the room, I knew, was covered with pill bottles, ashtrays, stoma bags, unread newspapers and unopened mail. When I was a kid it had been art supplies, sewing, decoupage during Oprah. I missed Oprah, missed my aunt, there in her house.
G-ma showed me where she slept, an alcove off the kitchen that had been Aunt Mo’s sewing zone when she worked as a seamstress for the casinos. I remembered her working late into the night embroidering uniforms with logos, stitching the names of high rollers on satin jackets. Now they give out plastic swipe cards.
G-ma showed us her current project, a mess of doilies crocheted with obscenities. Shit happens. Life’s a bitch and then you die. “The little old ladies on Death Row won’t sell them,” she said.
“She means the senior center,” Lise explained, “on Decatur. G-ma was ‘disinvited’ from the craft fair over there. But I’m gonna get her set up online once I get my new phone. WE’LL SHOW THOSE UPTIGHT OLD BIDDIES, G-MA! YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE A MILLION DOLLARS ON ETSY!”
“I don’t do it for the money,” said G-ma smugly.
Aunt Mo’s embroidery spools were still on the pegboard on the wall, lustrous cones of thread in rainbow rows. The rhinestones of G-ma’s Willie Nelson pin winked in the light of the TV. Something else flashed, two prisms in the windows throwing rainbows on the walls. My aunt Mo taught us to sew in this room, me and Lise and Darren. I remembered the hum and chug of the sewing machine, how it tried to lurch away when I pressed the pedal. I looked around for the trunk bursting with bolts of fabric, but it was gone. The sewing machine, too.
“He pawned it,” said Lise, reading my gaze.
The house was freezing. “Is the swamp cooler on?” I asked. G-ma couldn’t hear me. I went around the corner into the kitchen to investigate and found a hole in the ceiling where the swamp cooler had been. Beneath it, the oven was open and on. I sat with G-ma under her electric blanket and watched a show she loved about murder. I held one of her hands, skin soft as suede with blue veins traversing ridges of bone, each witchy finger weighted with sterling silver. I wondered if my dad had made any of her rings, touched his lapis between my collarbones.
Darren didn’t come out of his room for the rest of the visit, except to take a shower. “Be fair to him, Claire Vaye,” G-ma said at a commercial break, the pipes screeching.
“To Darren?” I shouted. “You mean in my book?”
G-ma shook her head. “To my buffalo.”
“She means Theo,” said Lise. “This is her nickname for him. Really for all large, dark, hairy men.”
G-ma raised her eyebrows, making her appetites known.
“She calls Grandpa Joe a buffalo too,” Lise said. Grandpa Joe was my G-ma’s abusive fourth husband.
Darren emerged from the bathroom, soaked. He’d apparently showered with his clothes on. He looked at me with scorn, then stomped back to his room. His room had been my mom’s. Before he slammed the door I saw briefly inside it, saw the guitar chords she’d drawn on the wall, a bed with no bedding and a horse blanket over the window, the only light the anemic glow of Darren’s phone.
I said, “I can’t be fair, G-ma. I don’t even know what that means.”
G-ma said, “Eh?”
“SHE SAID SHE CAN’T BE FAIR!” Lise shouted.
G-ma said, “Why the hell not?”
“I hurt too much,” I said.
“Eh?”
“SHE HURTS TOO MUCH!” Lise shouted.
G-ma considered this, tapped her lips with her index fingernail painted pearly amethyst and brittle as a beak. She rose slowly and beckoned me into the bathroom with her. I thought she had to pee and needed help, but she swatted me when I tried. She wore head-to-toe denim every day, jean jacket, jean skirt, because, she said, Neil Young had once complimented this very ensemble. He had put his hand in her pocket, she was saying now, showing me the pocket, putting my hand in it. She shakily raised one booted foot up onto the closed toilet and with much effort lifted her heavy denim skirt. She showed me her fishnet stockings and the adult diaper beneath. “Beauty must suffer,” she said. She had, she said. She’d been smacked around quite a bit in her day, not just by Grandpa Joe, who’d used a knife just once. I said thank God he was an ex-con and not allowed to have a gun. She said we girls could be shocked all we wanted but she was of the opinion that she had deserved a smack here and there, since she’d been stepping out. I tried to disagree—“We’re not doing that anymore, G-ma”—but she kept on peeling her fishnets down, then tugging her diaper, by some witchy dexterity not snagging her rings. In Nebraska, she said, her father had been a preacher. Did I know that? Yes, he’d been a preacher and yes this was the Dust Bowl times when she was a little girl and yes daddy had let the men in his congregation have their way with us, with me and my sister. My great-grandfather offered this, I gathered there in the bathroom with Law & Order blaring in, as a type of therapy for adulterers and would-be adulterers in his congregation. Considered it his calling to invite men to rape the younger two of his four daughters. That’s why the sisters didn’t get along, G-ma said. She moved through all this quickly, far more quickly even than I have put it here, as if she was annoyed to have to catch me up, there, straddling the wobbly toilet with her denim skirt hiked up and her fishnets around her ankles, peeing standing up the way she’d taught me in Zion, her piss golden brown and mighty. “And that’s how I came to Las Vegas.”
G-ma couldn’t walk far, so Lise offered to walk her dog, the one-eyed Chihuahua who answered to the name Bobby Flay. The terriers were assholes, Lise said, “Not my jurisdiction. Look at the anal glands on this one.”
I fled outside with her, grateful for the excuse.
Lise, Bobby Flay and I walked the tarry road past yards gone to dirt, crumbled breeze-block, men rolling under and out from under cars. They eyeballed us. Maybe that was my imagination. I waved to an abuela in a lawn chair. She did not wave back.
“Who are you kidding?” Lise said, tugging Bobby Flay along. “You think these people are saying to themselves, ‘Why, there’s my neighbor in the two-hundred-dollar Uggs. She sure is one of us.’ ”
As if in rebuke, two kids, a brother and sister it seemed, biked up to pet Bobby Flay and talk to him in Spanish. The girl had huge chestnut eyes, Ruth eyes.
After they took off, Lise said, “I want to have a kid. I’m not gonna! But I want to . . .”
I said she could have mine.
She stopped. “You’re being an idiot.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. I told her about the Tecopa house, told her everything. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything sooner,” I said. “I don’t know why I didn’t.”
We’d circled the neighborhood back to Fairway Drive.
“So the Tecopa house might be bulldozed. That’s what you’re saying?”
“Probably it already is.”
“And you knew about this months ago. And you’re just romping around Cali with some brocialist? Why didn’t Mikey get in touch with me? I’m friends with him on Facebook.”
I shrugged. “Because I’m the oldest, I guess.”
She yanked Bobby Flay up the driveway and began to untie the ribbon looped through the hole meant for a doorknob. The nasty terriers went berserk. G-ma began shrieking at them to shut up shut up, Aunt Mo too, even Darren. I could not go back in that house and I did not want Lise to go in there, either. Before she could, I gave her the article I’d been given at the museum, the obituary.
“What is this?”
“Read it.”
She left the door closed, did not go in. She handed me the leash and we walked to the curb. I sat, picked up Bobby Flay like a baby deer and nuzzled him, reading over Lise’s shoulder. The terriers shut the fuck up at last.
DEATH VALLEY—The great deserts of the West have a past that is filled with the meandering lore of heroes. Men who came from somewhere else to carve a legacy out of this vast beautiful and terrifying land.
Families like the Chalfants, the Fairbanks, the Browns and the Lowes. The Lee family left a long line whose members still populate the somewhat tamed but ever-changing desert. They saw riches and opportunity while wandering through this immense country—and all of them found themselves awestruck by the sheer presence of God.
These legends, somehow or another, never got their feet unstuck, and began marrying and producing little ones, who called Inyo County home, and, several generations later, folks would whisper, “She’s from the Lee family, you know.”
And all these heroes, who gave their names to our mountains and valleys, met the equalizer in the end. Death came to call and no one could refuse.
Another hero of Inyo County has passed away recently. He did not come from one of the “old” families, but he left behind a small tribe of his own. Paul Watkins, miner, musician, writer, geologist, heavy equipment operator, artist with a crystal or a piece of turquoise, con man, orator, ladies’ man, died on Aug. 3, 1990, at the age of 40, following a six-year battle with cancer and leukemia.
I waited while she read on through our mother’s telling of our father’s story. His first visit to the desert, bumped along with his two brothers and three sisters in the back of the family station wagon. Helter Skelter. Our father’s turn as star witness for the prosecution. The van fire. Music. Jewelry. Mining.
Although Paul was “just a little guy” he was much admired for his strength and agility. I overheard this conversation in the bar one night:
Supervisor: “Yea, get little Paul. He’s a con man but he sure can mine.”
Foreman: “How you gonna con a rock?”
His first marriage, to a Las Vegas girl. His book and its aftermath. At the ripe age of 25, lacking anything better to do, he took up womanizing, and, due to his good looks and way with words, he was quite successful. The dissolution of the first marriage.
It was during this time that I met Paul. He was tending at the Crowbar in Shoshone when I came in. I was absolutely floored. Love at first sight.
I returned to my job in Las Vegas and could not stop thinking about this man, whose name I did not even know. Finally, I drove to Shoshone and feeling more than a little foolish, found Paul and introduced myself to him. We were married two years later. In 1984 we had a daughter, Claire Vaye Watkins. Paul began working for the county road department, the Caltrans. Paul hated both jobs with a passion and we both began to drink more and more. I found myself pregnant again.
The cancer. The trips to LA for diagnosis and treatment, courtesy of volunteers piloting “Angel Flights.” The outpouring of financial and moral support from the community back home. I often wondered where I’d have been if I was in a city and a stranger to my neighbors, as I so often had been in Las Vegas.
The remission.
The Visitor’s Center. The paper. The Chamber of Commerce.
The cancer’s return. Bone-marrow transplant and chemotherapy. Graft-versus-host disease.
After ten months of this grueling ordeal, it became obvious Paul’s life was coming to an end. After a week-long struggle with the huge medical institution, I was able to fulfill a promise I had made to Paul—that he not be left to die among strangers in the hospital.
The discharge to Malibu, to die surrounded by friends and loved ones.
Paul gave away his special stones and gifts to those he had wanted to. He talked at length with his two daughters, bidding them farewell . . .
He died peacefully while holding my hand at 3 p.m. August 3, 1990, at the young age of 40.
Goodbye, sweet Prince. May you find the God you’ve sought for so many years.
“Where’d you get this?” Lise asked through tears.
I told her.
“So you went out there—yesterday? And didn’t bother to check on the house?”
“Essentially.”
“Didn’t even drive by?” Without waiting for an answer, she scooped Bobby Flay from my lap, hustled up the driveway and chucked him into the house, shouting “I’M BORROWING YOUR TRUCK G-MA!”
To me she said, “Get in. My car won’t make it over the pass.”
It was Christmas Eve, the only night this city is still. It had always been my favorite Las Vegas moment, the orangey glow of the streetlights on the wide asphalt avenues, sometimes snow falling. It wasn’t snowing now.
Lise did not seem soothed by the silent city. She was quiet but trembling, wouldn’t look at me. Hypnotized, I watched a bolo tie (Grandpa Joe’s?) sway from the rearview mirror until the city disappeared behind the range and I could feel her breathe again. We passed the Christmas Joshua tree. Willie Nelson came on the radio. “On the Road Again,” the song we used to sing in this truck with Darren and G-ma on the way to Zion. It seemed to me our sleeping bags should still be in the bed. I turned to check but the bed was empty.
Lise glanced at me.
I said, “What’s the last thing you want to hear when you’re going down on Willie Nelson?”
She was unamused.
“It’s Christmas,” I said.
“You stole that joke from David Sedaris,” she said. Then, “G-ma’s right. You’re hurting Theo.”
“You talked to him?”
“He’s my brother.”
“I’m glad you’re talking to him. I’m glad he has someone. Glad you have each other.”
Lise said, “I want him to be in our family still.”
“I’m not trying to be rid of him.”
“But you’re going to divorce him?”
I said I didn’t know.
She whipped the swaying bolo off the rearview and flung it at my feet. “Well,” she said, “you should probably fucking figure it out.”
Stampmill Road, the road to the Tecopa house, the so-called Watkins ranch, is less a road than a gravel wash choked with tamarisk. On our approach we met a new blockage, some strange form. A gigantic iron arch, upon inspection. Some Mad Max Burner deal welded of mining equipment, rusted tools and car parts. It probably spewed fire. A 1980-something Mercedes was parked beneath the arch, blocking the road. The car was filled to the windows with dirt. “Artists or tweakers?” Lise asked.
She parked the truck and we heard dogs barking. Plywood, chain link and barbed wire ringed what had once been our nearest neighbor, someone too old then to possibly be alive now. Whoever lived there now, their dogs did not sound happy and they did not sound small.
I said, “Maybe we should go back. This is somebody’s house.”
“It’s ours,” Lise said, approaching the compound, which truly looked like a kiddie pornographer’s doomstead, or worse. Lise located an illuminated doorbell inset in a mannequin’s belly button and rang it. We heard voices on the other side of the chain link. The dogs swarmed behind the gate, a pack of huge loping hounds with moppish lap dogs underpaw, mutts all. They barked like mad but their tails were wagging, I saw now. Behind the dogs, eventually, emerged a woman. Thank God, a woman! A pretty one, even—a ruddy white Pre-Raphaelite with brunette ringlets whispering away from her face, maybe twenty. We told her who we were: her former neighbors, in short. That we’d once lived down the road they’d blocked. She unlocked the gate, let us in, then cinched the chain closed behind us with a heavy-duty padlock.
I said, “You sure are locking up tight.”
“It’s for the dogs,” she said.
“Coyotes?” asked Lise. “They got a few of our dogs when we were kids.”
“Coyotes,” she confirmed, “and people too.” She patted the eager collie mix aswirl at her feet. “Long story.”
She led us along a narrow path. The labyrinth seemed mostly trash and bamboo in the darkness, though in the morning I would see that what I first registered as a run-of-the-mill Mojave Desert junkyard was an elaborate cloister of sculptures and paths made from casino debris and discarded Vegas kitsch. She led us to a plush red carpet laid over what felt like gravel and then through a gauzy sort of tunnel of prickly plants, then a boneyard of dead neon. Lise took my hand from habit.
At some point we were indoors, though it was not easy to tell when that happened. The house, or cabin—it had no trailer creak—was maximalistic to the point of mania, at once decadent and trashy, every surface bedazzled, too much to take in, phantasmagoric, a never-ending dinner party. I gave in to the blur of colors and textures and structures, focusing finally on the table beneath a humongous chandelier, where our hostess invited us to sit.
“It’s Tiffany,” said a voice belonging to another woman—person—a queenly femme person I had not noticed, poised regally at the far end of the table in a completely sincere caftan.
Lise complimented the chandelier, said it looked familiar.
“Used to be in the lobby at Caesars.”
We learned more about where we were, an art farm called Villa Anita, an ever-changing and extemporaneous livable sculpture built by a collective of mostly women artists, two of whom sat with us: Deena, the Pre-Raphaelite who’d let us in the gate, and the magnificent Carlotta, older than Deena by at least three decades, and divine. The two were lovers, I sensed. Also, that Carlotta was in charge. She summoned an androgynous mothlike person, J, from the studio in the back of the cabin where they’d been making jewelry.
J was maybe also Carlotta’s lover, I thought, listening to their happily codependent patter. “Baby,” Carlotta faux-beseeched J, “drinks, please—wine and beer!” J complied gamely. Meanwhile, Deena took a fluffy lapdog named Tito into her arms and went to fetch someone called Erin from “somewhere on the back forty.” Soon she returned with Erin, still wearing their welding mask. The group fed us, brought us drinks, told us stories. Carlotta was a fashion designer and photographer. They shot billboards, owned a nightclub—“I pioneered putting girls in cages!” Carlotta once cut Mick Jagger’s hair. She and J flipped Debbie Reynolds’s house for $80,000. Erin had lived in a tree in West Virginia for a year. Carlotta was once invited to a lunch with Michael Jackson, who was considering hiring Carlotta to design him some clothes, but there was a very young boy at the restaurant with Michael, so Carlotta and assistant turned around and left.
They took us through the years they spent transforming a foreclosed railroad tie house into Villa Anita. They made it up as they went along, a maze of bottle walls, bottle cottages, gardens and groves, revamped trailers, outdoor showers, horse trough plunge pools. They let the objects lead the way. If they came into a fishing boat they tipped it skyward into a cathedral. Whenever they went to Vegas they filled a Hertz truck with Las Vegas detritus. Used to be, in the seventies, that they’d have to haggle with the thrift stores, but now managers begged them to trundle away what they couldn’t sell.
“We’ve been rolling in junk since the recession!” Carlotta crowed.
Erin had been Carlotta’s assistant until bugging out to Tecopa. Now she painted and made Dalí–meets–Noah Purifoy sculptures “in the desert yonder, at sites never to be disclosed and unlikely to be come upon.” J came out to Villa on a recommendation from an art professor, made jewelry and grew food. Deena came because of Instagram and ran the social media accounts for each in the happy pack of dogs rescued from the sides of various Mojave highways: Tito, Yenta Placenta, Moose McGillicuddy, Dhillon aka Dill Pickle, Betty Magoo of the Long Island Magoos, Guido, and Dwight White or, more formally, Mr. Poodle, Mr. Puffs, or Clarence T. Puffs Esquire and several other honorifics I now forget. The outer spheres included various nomads and healers and volunteers from the internet, we were told, but those sitting around the table—Carlotta, J, Erin and Deena—were the core Villa Anita family.
That’s what they called themselves. Lise and I glanced at each other every time they said it. Before we could get a sense of whether this was a family with a capital F, Carlotta offered to put us up for the night and I accepted.
“Some weird people come out to your old homestead,” Deena offered, leading us to our quarters in the bottle cottage. “We’ve been protecting it for you.”
After she left, Lise said, “What are we doing here?”
“What’s your problem?” I said. “These freaks are offering us their bottle cottage. Be gracious.”
Lise took in the bottle walls, the brown and green glass like gels tinting the moonlight, the dirt floor, the absurdly suggestive velvet nightclub furniture, Erin’s trippy paintings and sculptures screwed to every surface including the ceiling. “Is this a good idea?”
I shrugged. “They’re on Airbnb. How bad could they . . . be? Anyway, it’s not like we can go down to the house in the dark. Let’s stay the night, have breakfast. We’ll go down to the house in the morning.”
After a moment my sister consented. “We’ll make a ceremony of it,” she said.
“Perfect,” I said, though I could think of nothing worse.