Battleborn: Stories

MAN-O-WAR

The 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.

He took the quartz into his own hand now and pointed it at Magda’s abdomen. “You want to tell me who did this to you?” He spit on the crystal and with his thumb buffed the spot where the saliva landed.

“It was my boyfriend,” she said. She snapped another cracker in half with her tongue. “But he only did it because I asked him to.”

Harris felt instantly sick. “Why’d he leave you then?”

“Because he’s a fucking momma’s boy. He’d just finished when we saw BLM coming. That ranger goes to Ronnie’s church. We’re not supposed to be together.” She smiled. “He said he’d come back for me.”

“Hell of a plan.”

“You think I don’t know that? He just took off.” She folded another cracker into her mouth.

“He could have killed you, hitting you like that.”

“What were we supposed to do? His mom was threatening to send him to Salt Lake to live with his grandma just for going out with me.”

“What about your folks?”

“Forget it.”

“Jesus,” Harris said softly.

“I tried him.” Magda laughed. “La Virgen, too. Nothing.”

Harris decided to let the girl be a while. He turned on the AM jazz station and had his evening smoke on the porch. Through the screen door came Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Fats Waller, Artie Shaw. When he returned, Magda was biting into the last saltine in the sleeve. “Can we turn this off?” she said, and without waiting for an answer hit the power button on the radio.

Harris went to the pantry and brought out the whole box of saltines. He set it on the coffee table. “You want, you can take these with you.” She eyeballed the box. “I’ll give you a ride,” he said. “We got to get you home.”

“I know. It’s just… I’m still feeling a little sick.” She combed her fingers through her hair. “I wonder would the ride upset my stomach even worse, you think? Probably I should stay here, just for the night. If that’s okay with you, Bud.”

This was a lie, he knew, though her face gave up nothing. He didn’t like the prospect of explaining to the authorities why he was hiding a runaway. And there were her parents to consider. If he had a girl, he’d beat the living shit out of anyone who kept her overnight while he was looking for her. The county was full of men—fathers—who’d do the same or worse.

And yet he said nothing, only sat for a moment with his hands on his knees and then walked to the linen closet to get the girl a quilt and a clean pillowcase. He’d take her home. First thing in the morning. The girl smiled up at him as he handed her the linens. What was one night?

His sleep was fitful and often interrupted. He had to piss constantly these days and crossed the hall as quietly as he could, hoping the girl would not notice. When he did sleep he dreamed vile scenes of stomachs and fists, babies and blood. Once he woke sure he’d heard the throaty chafe of Magda’s voice at his bedroom door. Levántate. Around four a.m. he started to a faint knock, imagined. An erection strained against his shorts. It’d been some time since he was blessed with such and so he quietly took advantage. After, he slept soundly through the remaining nighttime hours.

Harris rose in the early violet of the morning, antsy with a feeling like digging on a fresh plot of land. He dressed in clean blue jeans, white cotton socks, boots and a fresh white T-shirt. He tucked an unopened pack of filterless Camels into his breast pocket, poured himself a mug of coffee and walked quietly through the living room to the porch, so as not to wake the girl.

Carrie Ann had been gone since the spring of 1991, having cleared her Kewpie dolls and floral china out of the curio cabinets, wrapped them in newspaper, married a state trooper she’d met in Fallon while she was—yes—staying at her sister’s. She’d long since moved with the man to Sacramento. Their miracle baby was almost sixteen. And still Harris accommodated her by smoking outside.

He’d stirred the shit a little when, a new bride, she forbade him from smoking in the house. He went on about a man’s home being his own and hadn’t he earned the right, but in truth he didn’t mind being shooed outdoors. He was even patient later, when she implied that his smoking—combined with his single glass of bourbon in the evening—was the reason they were having such a hell of a time conceiving again, that he ought to take better care of himself, and finally that he didn’t give a shit whether they made a baby or not. But it could not be said that Harris made things easy for his young wife. He never held Carrie Ann’s temper against her—in his head he forgave her before she even apologized—but just the same he never let on how it soothed him when she let off steam, that seeing her angry was effortless next to seeing her hurting. And where was the harm, he figured, in letting his hotheaded wife guilt herself into a steak dinner, a foot rub, a blow job?

Somewhere in their bickering Harris decided to cut back, to exercise a grown man’s discipline. But what was once discipline had over the years become mindless routine, four smokes a day: morning, after lunch, midafternoon and sundown. His cigarettes helped mark the passage of time, especially on days that seemed all sun and sky, when he scolded poor Milo just to hear the sound of his own voice. The dependable dwindling of his cigarette supply reassured him that he hadn’t been left out here, that eventually he would have to ride into town and things would still be there, that the world hadn’t stopped whirling.

Magda was awake now, and he could hear her shifting on the couch. He rubbed his cigarette out on the side of the Folgers can he kept on the porch and dropped the butt inside. In the living room, the sun was filtered through the yellowed paper window shades, lighting the room warmly. Harris let the screen door swing shut behind him. Magda’s lids lifted at the soft schwack.

She arched her back, stretching catlike. “Morning,” she said.

“Coffee?” he said.

She made a face and pulled the old quilt up under her arms. She’d slept in her clothes. “Mind if I shower?”

“We should get you back.”

“Come on, Bud. I reek.” She looked up at him, smiling sweetly. “You don’t want to ride in that cab with me.”

It had been a long time since a woman had tried to convince him of anything. “Be quick,” he said. “Hot water don’t last but twenty minutes. Pump leaks.” She shuffled down the hall, still wrapped in the quilt. He called down after her, “I apologize for the hard water.”

“It’s all right,” she said, poking her head out the bathroom door, her shoulders already naked. “We got hard water, too.”

Steam soon billowed from underneath the door, thickening the air in the hall. Water beaded on the metal doorknobs and hinges. Harris heard the squeak of her bare feet pivoting against the porcelain. From what he’d seen of her while she slept, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the rest. He busied himself cleaning the coffeemaker and filling Milo’s water dish, though the dog preferred to drink from the toilet.

Eventually, the pipes squealed closed and the bathroom door opened. Harris turned to see Magda standing in the doorway, one of his thin maroon bath towels tucked around her like a cocktail dress, her hair wet-black, curling at her shoulders, her bare collarbones. She held her dirty clothes in a wad under her arm. Milo limped to her. The girl bent and scratched the dog under the chin. Without looking up, she said, “Mind if I borrow some clothes?”

Harris was uneasy at the idea of her pilfering his drawers, her fingers running over the flecks of mica among his graying underwear. But better that than him choosing clothes for the girl. “Go ahead,” he said. “Bedroom’s on the left.”

“Bud.” She turned, smiling, strands of wet hair clinging to her skin. “This house’s got four rooms. I been in three of them.”

When Magda emerged from the bedroom she wore a black T-shirt, a pair of tall white socks pulled to her knees with the heels bulging above her ankles, and Bud’s royal blue swim trunks. They were old, like everything in this place—except Magda herself—with yellow and white stripes running up the sides. They were short, even on her small frame. She must have hiked them up.

She stood in the doorway dipping the pad of her middle finger into one of his dented pots of Carmex and running the finger over her lips until they glistened.

“What are we doing today?” she said.

“Doing?”

“Let’s go swimming,” she said. “Bet you know all the hot springs.”

“Swimming? Sweetheart, this ain’t sleepaway camp.”

She sat cross-legged in the recliner, setting it rocking and squeaking. “You’re too busy?”

The only thing he’d been busy with in two years was her. “Somebody’s bound to be looking for you.”

“Nobody’s gonna come looking for me,” she said. She got up and walked out the door.

Harris wished something painful she was right. He wiped his hands dry on a dishrag and followed her out to the porch.

“Come on now. We have to get you home.”

“I’m not going home.”

“Why not? Because you did something dumb? Because your novio’s a son of a bitch? That don’t mean nothing. Plenty of girls your age get into this situation.”

“Bud,” she said, turning to him and squinting in the sun.

“What about your parents? They’re probably scared out of their minds.”

“Bud,” she said again.

But he went on, partly because she needed to hear it and partly because he didn’t at all mind the sound of someone else’s voice saying his name over and over again. “Shit, kid, if I was your dad—”

“You’re not.”

“I’m just trying to say—”

“Bud, you’re a fucking idiot,” she said, laughing that mean laugh into the open expanse of valley. “You think I’m worried about my boyfriend? The Mormon virgin?” She laughed again. “I told Ronnie we got pregnant by taking a fucking bath together. Want to know what he said? ‘I heard that happens sometimes.’” She lifted the T-shirt and swept her hand across her belly, her bruise, the way a person might brush the dirt from a fossil to expose the mineralized bones underneath.

Harris said, “Who, then?”

“Don’t ask me that.” She put her middle finger into her mouth and scraped some of the black polish off with her bottom teeth. “Please don’t.”

They stood staring a long while, her at the valley and him at her. He watched her come right up against crying, then not, instead saying, “Fuck,” which was what he wanted to say but his mouth had gone dry.

“It’s all right,” he said, finally. “Let’s go for a swim.”

She looked to him. “Really?”

“I’ll get you some shoes.”

They left Milo behind and took Route 40 in the direction of town for fifteen miles, and even though Harris kept saying, “It’s all right,” he could tell Magda didn’t trust him. She sat stiff, with her right hand on the door handle, and wouldn’t look him in the eye until he took the Burro Creek turnoff and Gerlach began to shrink behind them.

Some heifers were grazing on the long swaths of bluegrass and toadflax that had sprung up on either side of the spring, bright plastic tags dangling from their ears. The truck rolled to a stop at the edge of the alkali field, and a few of them lifted their heads to notice, but most kept their mouths pressed to the ground, chewing the dry grasses. Harris shut off the truck. “Here we are.”

“It’s beautiful, Bud. I didn’t even know this was out here.” Magda got out of the truck and shuffled through the tall grass in Harris’s bed slippers. Harris followed her to where the water ran downhill from the spring to a clear, rock-bottomed pool.

“It’s Indian land,” he said. “Technically.”

She pulled the slippers and socks from her feet. “Those Indians have all the luck.”

He sat and watched her dip herself into the water, clothes and all. Wet to her waist, she turned to him. “You coming?”

“Nah.”

She stumbled on a loose rock and slipped farther down into the water. “Come on. Aren’t you hot?”

Harris shook his head, though he was burning up.

Magda pinched her nose and dipped her head under, pushing her hair from her face with her free hand. When she came up she said, “That feels good.” She paddled a weak breaststroke over to a half-submerged boulder and hoisted herself onto it. She lay there on her back, the wet clothes pasted to her body.

Harris looked away. He dug his fingers into the dirt around him—a habit—looking absently for something to catch the glint of the sun. Magda sat up and said, “What were you like as a kid, Bud?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Come on. It’s just us. What kind of stuff did you do?”

“Regular kid shit, I guess.” He sifted a handful of dirt through his fingers.

“Like?”

“I used to sleep outside. With my friends. My best friends were these brothers. Lucas and Jimmy Hastings. Their folks had a cattle ranch, out by where the fairgrounds are now. We’d go out on their land.”

“But what did you do?”

“We just talked, I guess. Shot the shit.”

“About what?”

He pinched a dirt clod between his fingers. “About moving away. We were just kids.”

“To where?”

“Reno, mostly. Or Salt Lake. Sacramento. San Francisco. New York. They were all the same to us back then. The big city.” Harris laughed at himself a little, recalling. “We used to stay up all night, just listing the places you could take a girl in a city. One of us guys would say, ‘To the park.’ And another would say, ‘A museum.’ And another would say, ‘The movies.’ That was our favorite, the movies. Whenever somebody said the movies, we’d all together say, ‘The movies,’ all slow. Like a goddamn prayer.”

Magda slipped from the rock into the water and went slowly under. Harris let himself watch this time, watched her belly submerge, her small breasts with his T-shirt clinging to them, then her shoulders, her jaw and lips. She arched her back under the water and pushed herself to the surface again, leading with her sternum, the ruts of her ribs visible beneath the soaked cloth, her nipples tight and buttonish. Drops dripped from her brows, her eyelashes, the tip of her nose, the outcropping of her bottom lip. She gathered her hair in her hand and wrung the water from it.

“What?” she said, like she didn’t know.

Looking again to his fingers buried in the earth, he said, “I haven’t thought of the Hastings brothers in thirty years. Sounds stupid, to say that’s what we did around here.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “That’s what we do now.”

On the drive back, Magda unbuckled her seat belt and took off the slippers. She leaned against her door and stretched her bare legs across the seat between them. Soon she was asleep with her head against the window, one long line from her stretched neck down to the bottom of her bare feet. A damp mineral smell filled the cab. Their bodies bounced lightly from the washboard road, and her raisined toes sometimes touched his thigh. He went hard again. Good Lord, he thought, sixty-seven years old and behaving like an adolescent.

After a dinner of boiled hot dogs, Harris smoked his evening cigarette on the porch and watched the sunset burning in the distance. The sky settled into strata of pale blue atop gold and flame orange and a swath of clouds colored lavender and coral and an indigo so dark they seemed hunks of coal hovering above the range. Nearest the sun the sky was the wild red of a wound, like the thing had to be forced below the horizon. A single sandhill crane moved soundlessly across the sky. A sunset was nothing, Harris knew, dust particles, pollution, sunlight prismed by the slant of the world. Still, it was pretty.

Magda was trying with no luck to teach Milo to fetch a stick, oblivious to the dazzle going on behind her. When they’d dismounted from the truck that afternoon, Milo was sulking under the porch. It was Magda who finally coaxed her out. She’d used his Leatherman to cut the thorns off the mesquite branch she was now hurling into the rocky yard. But Milo only ambled over to the stick, lay down beside it and soothed her bloody gums by gnawing on it for a while. Magda was stubborn. She slapped her thighs and said, “Come, Milo. Milo, come!” over and over again. When the dog finally did come, she came slow and stickless. Finally, Magda lost hope. She sat beside Harris and looked out on the lake bed. “What were you doing out there?” she said.

“I live out here.”

“You live here. What were you doing out there?”

He thought a while. “I’ll show you,” he said. “Stay right here. Don’t move.”

He went around the back of the truck and muscled the old tailgate down, an action that seemed to get more difficult each year. Harris had been coming out to the lake bed every July fifth, searching for fireworks near the burnt remains of plywood and grocer’s pallets, since 1968, when he was one of those wild jackasses. Since he woke up with an ache behind his eyes and realized he’d left a paycheck’s worth of Roman candles out on the lake bed and called his future ex-wife, Carrie Ann, and whispered into the phone so his mother wouldn’t hear, “Morning, Honeybee. Where’d you stash my keys?” He told Magda all this, more or less.

“You had a wife?” she said. “Where is she now?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. Then, “Sacramento.”

“City girl.”

“I guess.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was a long time ago.” He turned to the girl, gripping a shell pack as big as his torso. The Man-O-War.

For the next forty minutes, Harris scrambled up and down the adjacent hill setting the fireworks, sometimes returning to the shed for a tube of PVC pipe, sandpaper or duct tape. His back flared as he bent to wedge a stub of pipe into the ground or twist two fuses together. His sinuses stung with the brackish smell of sulfur. He glanced down the hill at Magda. She sat on the first porch step, leaning back, her arms propped behind her. He saw Carrie Ann sitting in that same spot, waiting for him to get home, passing her time knitting or shucking corn. Harris pressed the image below the horizon of his mind. They were fine now, him and Carrie. She’d gotten her baby. Harris sent the child birthday cards with fifty-dollar savings bonds inside. Love, Uncle Bud, they read. He couldn’t complain, not in good conscience. They’d been given a second chance, Carrie and he, and were free to do with it what they pleased.

With the fuse hissing behind him, he hurried down the hill and sat beside Magda. She had her T- shirt lifted up under her breasts and one palm pressed to her bare stomach. She was bent, examining her midsection, looking for something.

“Watch,” he said, nodding to his handiwork on the hill.

But she kept her face turned down to her abdomen. “It’s probably dead, don’t you think?”

“Come on, now,” he said, too late to be of comfort. “Don’t think like that.”

“It is,” she said. “I know it.” He began to speak, but the first shell ignited then and shot into the air above them, sparks streaming behind it. They both started at the sound and Harris, with the quickness of a gasp, put his arm around Magda. The little comet went dark for a moment, then exploded—boom—into a sizzle so big it seemed to light the whole sky. The sound ricocheted around the valley and returned to them—boom.

“See that?” he said. “That green? That’s barium powder.” He pressed her into him and held her there. She did not pull away.

Another shell rocketed into the sky—boom—raining down a brilliant hissing red.

He bent his face to her ear. “Strontium,” he whispered.

“I’ll be glad,” she said. “If it’s dead, this will all be over.”

He held her tighter and said only, “Shh,” before the next shell shot up, even higher than the others, as if propelled by the sound. It expanded—boom. Multicolored tendrils radiated from the center and made loops in the air like buzzards, descending. Silence took root between them.

A fourth shell and a fifth shot from the hill. They burst—boom—boom—into two spheres of light, one a steady-burning fountain of blue, and the other wiry spokes of purple turning orange.

“What’s that one?” Magda whispered.

“The blue is copper,” he said. “Pure ground copper.”

The last four shells whizzed into the air, all at once. When they burst—boom—boom—boom—boom—Magda jumped a little and buried herself into him. Harris turned to see her face, his home, the whole wide valley lit by dazzling yellow light. He held her.

“And that one?” she whispered.

“That,” he said. “That’s gold.”

That night, Harris watched her sleep. His own worn bedsheet was roped around her, twisted through her arms and between her legs. Alone in his bed—he had insisted—she looked delicate as a salt crystal. Moonlight fell in through the window, catching the angles of the specimens on the nightstand. In this light her belly looked bigger. Was that possible? In these few days? Or was she right? His wife had said, I knew it. I felt the baby go. Had that stupid kid done the job? No. Though he’d seen what the boy did to her, saw with his own eyes the blood bloomed up under her skin—she looked bigger. She did. She would need a doctor. A hospital. He would make the calls. They would drive to Reno. The doctor would tell her, Yes, you are getting bigger. The doctor would tell her, It is not over. It is only just beginning. She would need vitamins. Though he knew better, deep down in the bedrock of himself, he couldn’t help it. He thought, She will need a stroller. She will need a car seat. How the barren cling to the fertile. We, he thought, we will need a crib.

Harris took one last pull on his cigarette and stubbed it out on the sole of his boot. It was morning. He dropped the butt into the Folgers can. He would wake Magda soon, tell her to get dressed, that they were going to Reno. But instead of going inside, he scanned the lake bed, as he had every day since she came to him. From where the house was perched, high up on the alluvial fan, the valley below seemed to unfurl and flatten like a starched white sheet. The sun was rising, illuminating the peaks of the Last Chance Range to the west, starting its long trip across the Black Rock. He stopped. Something was different in the distance. A small white cloud of dust billowed on the horizon. It grew. At its eye was a speck. A truck.

“Morning,” said Magda, startling Harris as she joined him on the porch. She caught sight of the dust cloud unfurling below them and squinted. “What’s that?”

“You tell me,” said Harris. “Probably been crossing the lake bed since sunup. Circling right about where I found you.”

“Oh, fuck,” she said. “It’s my dad.” She began to pace the porch like a wild animal. “Fuck, fuck. Fuck.” She looked as though she might cry.

Then, as if it had heard her, the truck turned toward Route 40, toward Red’s Road, the washed-out path that dead-ended at Harris’s driveway. His heart beat like a herd of mustangs charging at his rib cage.

“Get in the house,” he told her. “He doesn’t know you’re here. Go to the bedroom. Shut the door. Don’t come out. I’ll take care of it.” He half believed this.

The truck lumbered up the long, steep gravel driveway, the way you’d drive if you were concerned about dusting out your neighbors. Harris rummaged frantically through a wheelbarrow. He found a large hunk of iron ore, heavy and angular, easy to grip.

He kept the ore in his right hand and sorted through the rocks with his left, wanting to seem busy when the man arrived. He organized the rocks in piles on the ground according to size. The truck was halfway up the driveway—close enough to see them—when Harris heard the swing and schwack of the screen door. He tried not to turn too quickly, but jerked his head, panicked, only to see Milo ambling out to him. He almost hit her.

The truck—a black Ram, a dually with some sort of decal looping across the rear window—stopped at the edge of what Harris considered his yard. A man climbed out. He wore a rodeo buckle the size of a serving platter, a wide cream-colored Stetson, sunglasses and ornately tooled caiman shit kickers.

Harris knew the man. His name was Castaneda. Juan, Harris thought, though he couldn’t be sure. He’d worked with him at the mine. He was a foreman, like Harris.

They’d spoken. On breaks in the pit. On the Newmont bus back into town. They’d talked sports—Pack football, March Madness. They’d discussed the fine tits on the teenage girl behind the counter at the Shell station where they parked. Castaneda had talked about his kids. Harris had seen pictures, grimy creased things pulled from a leather billfold. All girls. Beautiful, Harris had said, and meant. And this man, he’d smiled wide as the ocean and said, I know. Harris gripped the ore so tight his fingertips went white.

“Morning,” said Harris. Then, too quickly, “Help you?”

“Morning,” said Castaneda, removing his hat but leaving his sunglasses. There was not a gray hair on his head. “Hope so.” He approached with a bounce. “Harris, right? How’s the sweet life, brother?”

“Can’t complain.”

“You strike it rich yet?”

Harris kept sorting, kept his wieldy rock in his right hand. He lifted his head and looked to the man, then to the white-hot lake bed and then, squinting against the sun, to the hill behind his house. At its crest he could just make out the PVC pipes from last night, toppled and scorched. “You come out here to prospect?” he said. “’Cause this is BLM land on all four sides. You’d be digging for Uncle Sam.”

“Prospect? Ha. No, sir. I’m no rock hound,” said Castaneda. “I’m hunting chukar. Thought an old-timer like you might know the good spots.” Castaneda nodded to his truck.

“Chukar.” Harris stood upright and faced the man. He wiped sweat from his top lip and caught the acridity of nicotine on his fingers. “Don’t know of no chukar around here.” Because there weren’t any chukar around here, not until White Pine County at least. Only thing you could hunt out here was rattlesnake.

“Well, shit,” said Castaneda. He reached behind him and adjusted his belt. “Probably got the wrong gun for chukar anyway.” He brought around a revolver, a .44 glinting in the summer sun. He held it limp in his palm, as if he only wanted to show it off. But Harris knew better than that. Standing there with a rock in his hand like a goddamn child, he at least knew better than that.

Just then, Milo began to snarl and bark. But she didn’t bark at Castaneda, with the gun flat in his palm, looking earnestly to Harris. She was disoriented, maybe heat blind. The dog was barking at Harris.

Castaneda raised his voice above the dog. “I don’t know what she told you,” he said.

“Who?” said Harris.

Milo kept on.

“Don’t make this hard,” said Castaneda. “She’s a good girl. She’s just got an overactive imagination.”

A sudden tinny blood taste came to Harris’s mouth. “There’s nobody else here.”

“Oh?” said Castaneda, smiling now. “You lighting off fireworks all night by yourself then?” He began to laugh. This was where Magda got her laugh. “There’s nowhere else for her to be, brother.”

Harris took a step toward the man, the ore hot in his hand.

Castaneda nodded to the rock. “Don’t.”

“You son of—”

He raised the hand that held the gun. “You don’t want to take that thought any farther.” Harris stopped.

Castaneda tucked the gun into the waist of his Wranglers. He walked past Harris, stepping carefully over the piles of specimens where they’d been set in the dirt. An oily aftershave smell followed him. He went into the house. Minutes later—too fast—Castaneda emerged with Magda, his hand on the small of her back. Her face was limestone; it was granite. She did not look at Harris. Castaneda walked her around to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door in the manner of a perfect gentleman.

“Wait,” she said before getting in. “I want to say good-bye.” Her father nodded and took his hand from her. She walked over to Milo. The dog went quiet. Magda squatted and rustled both her hands behind Milo’s limp ears. She put her mouth to the dog’s muzzle and said something Harris could not hear.

“She wants to stay,” Harris called in a strange-sounding voice.

Casteneda grinned and turned to Magda. “Is that so?”

Magda shook her head and looked to Harris pityingly, as though it was he who needed her.

Harris gripped the iron ore. Why not? he wanted to ask her. But he knew. What could this place give to anyone?

Magda returned to her father’s truck. Castaneda took her hand and helped her in. Before he shut the door he smiled at his daughter and rubbed his hand along the back of her neck. It was brief—an instant—but Harris saw everything in the way the man touched her. His hand on her bare neck, the tips of his stout fingers along the black baby hairs at her nape, then under the collar of her shirt. His shirt. From where he stood, he saw all this and more.

The truck pulled away and began its descent to the bald floor of the valley. Milo resumed her barking. Harris told her to shut up, but she went on. Rhythmic, piercing, incessant. The old man had never heard anything so clearly. He felt a steady holy pressure building in him, like a vein of water running down his middle was freezing and would split his body in two. He lunged at the dog. He wanted ore to skull. He wanted his shoulder burning, his hand numb. He wanted the holes that had been her ear and eye growing wider, becoming one, bone crumbling in on itself like the walls of a canyon carved by a river. He wanted wanted wanted.

He took hold of the scruff of the dog’s neck. He tried to pin her beneath his legs but she yelped and wormed free, and instead he fell back on his ass. He dropped the ore in the dirt. Milo scrambled behind the wheelbarrow where he’d been sorting. He reached up and grabbed the wheelbarrow’s rusted lip and tried to pull himself up. The wheelbarrow tilted toward him, then toppled, sending Harris to the dirt again. Rocks rained down on him. A flare of pain went off in his knee and in the fingers of his left hand, where a slab of schorl crushed them.

He sat breathing hard, surrounded by heavy, worthless minerals. He took his wrecked fingers into his mouth. Then he fished his Zippo from his pocket and lit a cigarette. He breathed in. Out. The Ram shrank to the blinding white of the lake bed. He stayed there for some time, smoking among the hot alluvial debris, the silt and clay and rocky loam. He watched a fire ant stitch through the gravel and into the shadow of the overturned wheelbarrow; then he watched the truck. A pale cloud of dust behind it swelled, then settled, then disappeared. She was gone. And all the while Milo’s unceasing yowl ricocheted through the valley, returning to him as the boom of the fireworks, the levántate Magda never whispered, the twin cackles of the Hastings brothers bounding over the cattle range, as every sound he’d ever heard.