Blue Lonesome

5

He left the city early Sunday morning and spent two full days on the drive to Beulah, Nevada. Taking his time, enjoying the scenery and the bagful of jazz cassettes he’d brought along for company. There was no hurry. This wasn’t just some quixotic adventure; it was a kind of healing vacation. Burned out and in need of R and R, just as he’d told Harvey Sitwell. A day in Beulah, at the most two, and then no matter what he found out he’d be free of Ms. Lonesome once and for all.

His route the first day was up through Yosemite, then down Highway 395 past Mono Lake and Mammoth Lakes to Bishop. The second day he took the desert highway from Lone Pine across the Panamint Mountains into Death Valley. Hot there, but not so hot that his Subaru’s air-conditioning had to be cranked up high. Sparse traffic, too. For long stretches it was as if he had the barren distances all to himself.

He’d heard it said that people are seldom indifferent to Death Valley; that you have one of two distinct reactions to it. Either you find it unsettling — endless miles of dead, sun-blasted landscape, where on windless days the utter absence of sound is so acute it creates a painful pressure against the eardrums. Or it strikes you as an almost mystical place — a living rather than a dead one — of majestic vistas and stark natural beauty. In the two hours he spent crossing the bowl of it, his reaction was overwhelmingly the latter. The monument both awed and stimulated him — so much so that two-thirds of the way into the Funeral Mountains that made up the northeastern boundary, he stopped and stood for a long while in the shade of an outcrop, looking out over the valley floor, watching the colors of rock and sand hills and salt flats change subtly with the inching shift of the sun. When he got back into the car, it was with reluctance. This was a good place for Jim Messenger, one he would return to. Its vast empty spaces dwarfed his problems, made them insignificant and therefore more tolerable.

It was late afternoon when he reached Beatty, just across the Nevada border. He stopped there for a leisurely dinner, then pressed on. The last fifty miles to Beulah was across open, rumpled desert: low hills spotted with sage and greasewood, cut through by shallow gullies and deeper arroyos. Larger hills shimmered nakedly against the darkening horizon — brown at first, then bright gold, dark gold, purple, and finally black as the sun dipped and vanished.

His first impression of Beulah was of a cluster of winking lights spread across higher ground. He was still fifteen miles away when he first saw the lights, and he thought they must belong to some other town; but until he was within five miles of them they seemed not to grow any brighter, any closer — as if they were moving away from him at the same speed he was approaching.

The terrain grew hillier, more rumpled; the highway eased into a long, gradual lift. More lights, widely scattered, winked and shimmered in the surrounding desert — the cattle ranches he’d read about probably. Then the lights of the town began to separate, to take on neon color and definition. The road steepened more sharply, and at the top of the rise he saw the first motel sign. Before he reached it his headlights picked out another sign: WELCOME TO HISTORIC BEULAH.

The motel was a Best Western called the High Desert Lodge; he turned in to its driveway. A talkative, gray-haired woman named Mrs. Padgett and the inevitable bank of slot machines waited for him inside. He took a room for one night. The place wasn’t crowded; if he needed to stay over, a second night’s lodging would be no problem.

In the room he unpacked his toilet kit, put a clean shirt and a pair of slacks on hangers, and then lay down on the bed. He had no desire to go out again. Tired from all the driving; and there would be plenty of time tomorrow to look the town over, see what it had to offer, before he asked his questions.

He was aware of a need to draw out his stay here as long as he could, to postpone what was likely a final dead end. That was why he hadn’t questioned Mrs. Padgett. As much as he wanted his freedom from Ms. Lonesome, letting go of her would not be easy. It would be like losing a small part of himself. A nonessential part, a little piece of self-indulgence, but something meaningful just the same.

In the early-morning sunlight Beulah had a drowsy, mildly schizoid appearance. New, modern buildings standing cheek by jowl with wooden false-fronts, aging brick structures, a three-story gray stone hotel that had to be well over a century old. Traffic lights, dust-dulled cars, and lumbering motor homes parked and passing through, a gaudy, red-neon stallion rearing high above the entrance to the Wild Horse Casino; and meandering among the low, tawny hills that flanked the central part of town, rutted dirt roads that looked as if they would be more hospitable to ore wagons and buckboards than to any twentieth-century vehicle. Beyond the outskirts to the north, the main highway ran straight across empty desert flats, narrowing until it became a pencil-thin line where a pair of black-shadowed mountain ranges seemed to converge in the far distance.

A dry breeze fanned Messenger’s cheeks as he walked from the motel to where a two-block-long main drag lanced off to the west. The air was still night-cool, heavy with the scents of sage and dust, but a gathering heat licked hard at its edges; another couple of hours and it would be hot enough to draw sweat. Everything — sky, desert, man-made objects — had a clarity and brilliance that made him squint. But the combined effect of it all was appealing. One of those mornings and one of those places that made you glad to be alive. And made you ravenously hungry too, he was surprised to discover. It was the first time in as long as he could remember that he’d had any kind of appetite before noon.

Mrs. Padgett had told him the Goldtown Café was the best place in town for breakfast. The café was on Main, just off the highway intersection, its plate-glass front window advertising “beer-batter pancakes, Nevada’s finest.” Inside he found an atmosphere at once similar and dissimilar to that in the Harmony Café. The smells were the same; despite the ever-present slot machines, much of the decor was the same. But there was more conversation, more laughter, more obvious pleasure in eating among the men and women filling the booths and strung out along the counter; and the faces, whether they belonged to locals in Western garb or travelers on their way to or from Las Vegas, seemed on the whole more cheerful, more open and inclined to make eye contact.

He wondered if the significance of this was that a city like San Francisco enclosed people who seldom if ever left it, weighed so heavily on them and made them so guarded after a while that they closed themselves off without even realizing it — turned into Hemingway’s metaphoric islands in the stream. Whereas an environment like this was so big, so unbounded, that it allowed for an expansion rather than a contraction of self. He’d felt such an expansion in Death Valley. Not that you had to live out here to keep the self from shriveling. It was the perspective that mattered, the knowledge that there were places you could go that actually could help to lift your spirits.

He ordered the pancakes and a side of ham. Ate every scrap and took refills on his coffee. When he paid the bill he asked his waitress, a heavy-bosomed strawberry blond whose name tag read Lynette, for directions to the library.

She said, “Block south and two blocks east, on Tungsten. But it doesn’t open until ten.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure thing.” Her smile was friendly, even a little flirtatious. Nothing closed off about her, either. “You going there to see Mrs. Kendall?”

“Who?”

“The librarian. Ada Kendall.”

“No,” he said. “I want to return a book I found.”

She said, “Oh,” without comprehension, as if he’d just spoken in a foreign language. “Well, you have a nice day now. Come back and see us again.”

“I will.”

A sunburst wall clock and his Timex both read 8:15. He walked back to the High Desert Lodge, picked up his car, and went to explore the rest of Beulah.

There was not much of it: a dozen or so blocks of side streets, the largest buildings on any of them a two-story stone courthouse and a sprawling new high school gymnasium. Private housing seemed to be a mix of mobile homes and mostly older houses built of board and batten or cinder block. A few of the outer streets were unpaved, rocky and serrated like the desert roads and overlaid with a white, powdery dust. Lava dust, he recalled from one of the guidebooks he’d read. The Subaru’s tires churned it up into feathery wisps that seemed to hang suspended in the now still air.

He drove out into the desert on two of the country tracks, one to the east and the other to the northwest. The latter took him past a long-abandoned hillside mine: gaunt head frame, two crumbling shacks, dunelike mounds of ancient ore tailings. Here and there he saw little clusters of buildings, cattle feeding on dry scrub. Hardscrabble places, for the most part. Life out here couldn’t be easy for 90 percent of the residents. But he didn’t have to wonder why they stayed.

At ten he drove back into Beulah. Tungsten Way was an unpaved side street, the library set at the far end and housed in a metal-sided mobile home, on the front of which a wooden porch had been built. Inside, walls had been removed and stacks erected, close together to accommodate a greater number of both hardcover and paperback books. A brace of ceiling fans stirred the air sluggishly. In the summer the cramped space would be like the inside of a kiln. Even now, with the outside temperature not much above eighty, the fans going, and the front door propped open, it was dustily close in there.

Just inside the door, a thin, colorless woman in her sixties sat at a desk separated from the rest of the library by an old-fashioned bank of card files. A name plate on the desk said she was Ada Kendall. Another woman, fat and raisin-eyed, browsed in a section marked Historical and Romance Fiction. They both looked at him when he came in, casually at first and then with the interest and vague suspicion of small-town inhabitants for strangers who show up in a place strangers aren’t expected to visit.

“May I help you?”

“Well, I’m not sure,” Messenger said. He’d brought the copy of A Treasury of American Verse with him; he laid it in front of Ada Kendall. “Is this one of your books? It has a Beulah Library stamp on the last page.”

She frowned at him, frowned at the book. When she picked it up, opened it to the last page, it was with the tips of her fingers, as if she were afraid it might be contaminated in some way. “Yes, that’s our stamp. Someone’s torn the card pocket out.” She said the last as if she thought he might have done it.

“So it’s not a discarded book?”

“There’s no discard stamp,” she said.

“Then I wonder if there’s any way you can tell me who checked it out last.”

“That would depend on when it was last checked out.”

“I don’t know when, exactly. More than six months ago.”

“Whoever it was doesn’t seem to care about books or other library users. This book is in very poor condition.”

“Yes. But I—”

“The person will have to pay a fine,” Ada Kendall said. “A large fine. Where did you find it?”

“In San Francisco.”

“In... where did you say?”

“San Francisco. A woman named Janet Mitchell had it. At least, Janet Mitchell was the name I knew her by.”

Ada Kendall opened her mouth, closed it again; the frown, fixed now, had narrowed her eyes into a myopic squint. The raisin-eyed woman was no longer browsing. She stood watching him, Messenger realized, with a peculiarly eager intensity.

He asked the librarian, “Do you know anyone — a former resident of Beulah — named Janet Mitchell?”

“No.”

“Janet, then. Or Mitchell.”

“No Mitchells around here,” the raisin-eyed woman said. She moved over closer to where Messenger stood, as if to get a better look at him. It allowed him a better look at her, too; the intense expression was gossipmonger’s hunger. “No Janets either. Never has been, that I know of.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. Just a name she was using, one she made up.”

“Why would she use a name that wasn’t hers?”

“Well, she must’ve had her reasons.”

“What reasons?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to find out.”

“You think she used to live here? On account of that book?”

“It’s possible. I thought so, anyway.”

“What’s she look like, this woman?”

“Tallish, thin, ash-blond hair, striking gray eyes—”

“My God,” the raisin-eyed woman said, “I knew it, I knew it!” Ada Kendall said nothing, but her thin mouth drew so tight the lips vanished into a crooked line, like a crack in an adobe wall.

Messenger felt a prickling of excitement. “Then you know her.”

“San Francisco. So that’s where she went. I never would’ve guessed a place like that, would you, Ada? A desert rat like her?”

“No. No, I surely wouldn’t.”

“What’s she doing there?” the gossipmonger asked him. “What’s she have to do with you?”

“She was a... she was somebody I knew.”

“Was? She leave Frisco, go somewhere else?”

“She’s dead,” he said.

“Dead? You say dead?”

“I’m afraid so. She—”

“How? How’d she die?”

“She committed suicide.”

“Ada, you hear that? She killed herself!”

“I heard,” Ada Kendall said. “Lord have mercy.”

“Lord had His vengeance, you mean. How’d she do it, mister? How’d she kill herself?”

“She cut her wrists with a razor blade.”

“Oh my! Wait till John T. hears that!” And the raisin-eyed woman burst out laughing, an eruption of sheer, unrestrained glee.