Afterward, I called the cops. I did the right thing, they told me, the cops and Bill Hadley in his pajamas, even my father. They said it over and over again. I sat on the curb outside the store, listening to them inside, their boots squeaking on the tile. The deputy sheriff, Dale Sullivan, who was also the assistant coach of the basketball team, came and sat beside me. I had my hands over my head to keep the grasshoppers away. Kid, it was bound to happen, Dale said. The boy was a troublemaker. A waste of skin.
He told me I could go on home. I didn’t ask what would happen to the car.
That night, I drove out on Cane Springs Road to Rhyolite. I drove around that old ghost town with the windows rolled down, listening to the gravel pop under my tires. The sun was coming up. There, in the milky light of dawn, I hated Beatty more than I ever had. The Stagecoach, the hot springs, all the trees looking so naked against the sky. I never wanted to see any of it ever again.
I was already on my way to college and everyone knew it. I didn’t belong in Beatty. The boy’s family, his mother and sister and stepfather, moved away soon after it happened. I’d never see them around town, or at Hadley’s. For those last few weeks of school no one talked about it, at least not to me. Soon it was as though it had never happened. But—and I think I realized this then, up in Rhyolite, that dead town picked clean—Beatty would never be a place I could come home to.
When my wife asked about your pictures, she said she didn’t realize I knew so much about cars. I said, Yeah, sure. Well, some. See the vents there? On the hood? See the blackout grille? That’s how you know it’s a ’66. I told her I’d been thinking about buying an old car, fixing it up, maybe this one. Right then she just started laughing her head off. Sure, she managed through all her laughter, fix up a car. She kept on laughing. She tossed the bundle of photos on the seat of the truck and said, You’re shitting me, Tommy.
It’s not her fault. That man, the one who knows a ’66 when he sees one, that’s not the man she married. That’s how it has to be. You understand, don’t you?
I smiled at her. No, ma’am, I said. I wouldn’t shit you. You’re my favorite turd.
She laughed—she’s generous that way—and said, A car. That’s the last thing we need around here.
When I was a boy, my father took me hunting. Quail mostly and, one time, elk. But I was no good at it and he gave up. I didn’t have it in me, my father said, sad and plain as if it were a birth defect, the way I was. Even now, deer come down from the mountains and root in our garden, stripping our tomatoes from the vine, eating the hearts of our baby cabbages. My father says, Kill one. String it up. They’ll learn. I tell him I can’t do that. I spend my Sundays patching the holes in the fence, or putting up a taller one. The Church of the Compassionate Heart, my wife calls it. It makes her happy, this life of ours, the man I am. Layla helps me mend the fence. She stands behind me and hands me my pliers or my wire cutters when I let her.
But here’s the truth, Duane Moser. Sometimes I see his eyes above that bandanna, see the grasshoppers leaping in the lights, hear them vibrating. I feel the kick of the rifle butt in my sternum. I would do it again.
December 20
Duane Moser
4077 Pincay Drive
Henderson, Nevada 89015
Dear Duane Moser,
This will be the last I write to you. I went back to Rhyolite. I told my wife I was headed south to camp and hike for a few days. She said, Why don’t you take Layla with you? It would be good for her.
Layla slept nearly the whole drive. Six hours. When I slowed the car and pulled onto Cane Springs Road she sat up and said, Dad, where are we?
I said, We’re here.
I helped her with her coat and mittens, and we took a walk through the ruins. I told her what they once were. Here, I said, was the schoolhouse. They finished it in 1909. By then there weren’t enough children in town to fill it. It burned the next year. She wanted to go closer.
I said, Stay where I can see you.
Why? she said.
I didn’t know how to say it. Crumbling buildings, rotted-out floors, sinkholes, open mine shafts. Coyotes, rattlesnakes, mountain lions.
Because, I said. It’s not safe for little girls.
We went on. There behind the fence is the post office, completed in 1908. This slab, these beams, that wall of brick, that was the train station. It used to have marble floors, mahogany woodworking, one of the first telephones in the state. But those have been sold or stolen over the years.
Why? she said.
That’s what happens when a town dies.
Why?
Because, sweetheart. Because.
At dusk I tried to show Layla how to set up a tent and build a fire, but she wasn’t interested. Instead, she concentrated on filling her pink vinyl backpack with stones and using them to build little pyramids along the path that led out to the town. She squatted over them, gingerly turning the stones to find a flat side, a stable base. What are those for? I asked.
For if we get lost, she said. Pop Pop showed me.
When it got dark we sat together, listening to the hiss of the hot dogs at the ends of our sticks, the violent sizzle of sap escaping the firewood. Layla fell asleep in my lap. I carried her to the tent and zipped her inside a sleeping bag. I stayed and watched her there, her chest rising and falling, hers the small uncertain breath of a bird.
When I bent to step out through the opening of the tent something fell from the pocket of my overalls. I held it up in the firelight. It was a cloudy stump of amethyst, as big as a horse’s tooth.
I’ve tried, Duane Moser, but I can’t picture you at 4077 Pincay Drive. I can’t see you in Henderson, period, out in the suburbs, on a cul-de-sac, in one of those prefab houses with the stucco and the garage gaping off the front like a mouth. I can’t see you standing like a bug under those streetlights the color of antibacterial soap. At home at night I sit on my porch and watch the lights of Reno over the hills, the city marching out at us like an army. It’s no accident that the first step in what they call developing a plot of land is to put a fence around it.
I can’t see you behind a fence. When I see you, I see you here, at Rhyolite, harvesting sticks of charcoal from the half-burnt schoolhouse and writing your name on the exposed concrete foundation. Closing one eye to look through the walls of Jim Kelly’s bottle house. No, that’s my daughter. That’s me as a boy getting charcoal stains on my blue jeans. That’s you in your Chevelle, the ’66, coming up Cane Springs Road, tearing past what was once the Porter brothers’ store. I see you with M, flinging Fritos and meat and half-full cans of Coke and Bud Light from the car like a goddamn celebration, a shedding of your old selves.
It’s almost Christmas. I’ve looked at the prescriptions, the letters, the photos. You’re not Frankie, I know this. It’s just a coincidence, a packet of pictures flung from a car out in the middle of nowhere. The car is just a car. The world is full of Chevelles, a whole year’s worth of the ’66. You know nothing of Hadley’s Fuel in Beatty, of a boy who was killed there one night in late spring when the grasshoppers sounded like a thunderstorm in your head. I don’t owe you anything.
When I woke this morning there was snow on the ground and Layla was gone. She’d left no tracks. I pulled on my boots and walked around the camp. A layer of white covered the hills and the valley and the skeletons of the old buildings, lighting the valley fluorescent. It was blinding. I called my daughter’s name. I listened, pressing the sole of my shoe against the blackened rocks lining the fire pit. I watched the snow go watery within my boot print. There was no answer.