“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.
THE ARCHIVIST
There was no salve for the space he left. If there had been—if science had developed an ointment for heartache or a pill for the lovelorn—I wouldn’t have used it. I wanted pain. I wanted cataclysmic anguish. For that, our old ritual.
So every night I’d get home from my job as a clerk at the public library and draw a bath with water as hot as I could stand. On the kitchen chair beside the tub I’d put a cheap bottle of cab, a book, a pack of cigarettes, a joint and a sleeve of peanut butter cups I’d bought at the Winner’s around the corner, where I bought the wine.
One night, especially plowed, I called my older sister, Carly. I told her Ezra and I were through. I said, “For real this time,” which I said every time. She said she’d be right over. “Bring the baby,” I said.
I waited for Carly in the bath, drinking wine from my blue-flecked enamel camping cup. Once, Ezra called the cup my cowboy mug, and with him gone I couldn’t stop seeing it that way. I felt insufferably rustic whenever I drank from it, and yet I didn’t stop drinking from it. That’s what he did to me: permeated, saturated, submerged me in him. Now, I submerged myself. I surfaced, took a cigarette, and breathed him into my foolish hungry lungs.
I started smoking the night we met, when Ezra stood up from the bar where we’d been playing video poker, said, “I’m gonna go outside” and put two fingers to his lips, that smoker’s sign language. It looked like he kissed them softly, the thick pads of his fingertips. I had a good man at home, waiting for me. I said, “Me too,” followed him outside and smoked the first cigarette of my life. I was twenty-six. The street was dark except for a Winner’s down the road, glowing like a beacon. Ezra leaned in and gave me a light. Then he pushed my hair back from my face. “I give this a week,” he said. “You?” “Two,” I said. “Tops.” He smiled this absolutely lethal smile and we smoked silently against the quaking of the freeway and the darkened machinery of the recycling plant across the street. I asked my boyfriend to move out the next day. I knew then that I would follow Ezra anywhere he’d let me.
Carly let herself into the apartment and called for me. The baby squealed. Carly lost one of her fallopian tubes to an ectopic pregnancy when she was my age. Between that and her husband Alex’s reversed vasectomy, my niece is a regular miracle. I love her more than a person ought to love one thing.
My sister came into the bathroom and said, “Oh, honey,” her face creased with empathy. She set the Miracle on the floor beside the tub and surrounded her with pastel toys, which the baby ignored. The Miracle played exclusively with adult things. Keys. Eyeglasses. Cell phones. Just a year old and already she was a severe child.
Carly had lately taken to gathering the Miracle’s feathery blond hair into a ponytail at the top of her head, a hairdo which resembled nothing more than the sprout of a cartoon turnip. The Miracle seemed not only aware of this resemblance but appropriately suspicious of it. She eyeballed me where I sat in the tub.
Carly discreetly removed the wine and pot from the chair. She left my cigarettes, the peanut butter cups, a National Geographic and the cowboy mug, which I discovered was inexplicably, disappointingly empty.
I listened to her in the kitchen, recorking the near-gone bottle and placing it on top of my refrigerator. “Red wine contains resveratrol and antioxidants,” I called to her. “It’s good for the heart.”
Carly returned to the bathroom and sat on the closed lid of the toilet. She crossed her legs and unwrapped a peanut butter cup. She looked like our mother, sitting that way. She had our mother’s legs, her long fingers. She touched her mouth the same way our mother did in pictures. Our mother was a beauty and an alcoholic. She died when I was ten and Carly was fifteen. She drove drunk into a power pole near Reno High at ten o’clock in the morning. For as long as I can remember, my sister has wanted to be the good mother we never had.