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.”