A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  he lit a cigarette & the smoke trickled into the air, wispy & thin, acrobating all around itself the way cigarette smoke has a tendency to do.

  ‘we live in a world of order,’ he said, & the people listened. ‘but when order ain’t working, the only remaining option is chaos.’

  chaos. the word rang through the local bar like a gunshot, the invitation they’d been waiting for, their seats scuffing the ground as their asses slid forward so their ears could get half an inch closer to his mouth.

  ‘you got some kind of plan?’ the man behind the bar said. ‘or are you just gonna sit there blowin’ smoke?’

  & he blew some smoke from his cigarette, taking his time because when he smoked a cigarette, he meant it.

  ‘the gold in the hills of nevada makes its way to the penthouses of new york,’ he said. ‘& there’s only one way to get it there,’ & he nodded to an approaching train, its steam rising, wispy & thin, acrobating all around itself the way engine steam has a tendency to do.

  ‘aw, you’re so full of shit you can taste it,’ the man behind the bar said, & boos followed like he knew they would, because hopeless begets hopeless & misery loves when its friends come along drinking.

  ‘look,’ he said, & they did. ‘i think you got two options in this world, & only one of them’s a choice. you die, or you live. you accept your fate, or you rebel against it.’

  & the men of the bar were silent like he knew they would be, because no matter how thick your skin or how wide the barrel of your gun, we all bow our heads when we stand before the Great inevitable.

  ‘we make our stand at midnight,’ he said. ‘we’ll see who’s standing with us.’

  & he finished his beer & he ashed his cigarette & he slammed the door on his way out because when he made a point, he meant it.

  in towns like this, the future had come & gone. in towns like this, the only reason to stay was to cling to the rubble they called history.

  under the blanket of night, every man from the run-down bar gathered around their robin hood, including the man behind the bar who said ‘shit’ every time the wind whistled, because arrogance is most often a mask for cowardice.

  ‘i’ve seen a cardinal,’ he told me.

  & i smiled. ‘the night is ours.’

  to the rest, he barked orders & marched the men to the tracks, &

  when the train came steam-shooting, metal-whistling into the canyon,

  the men made their charge.

  & i ran alongside him,

  horse legs pumping,

  hooves & grunts & wheels against tracks,

  breathing life into the cold night in the forgotten town.

  & it was cold,

  but people were desperate,

  & for a moment i’d have sworn,

  i saw robin hood smile.

  ‘fire!’ he screamed & ‘fire!’ they did, & bullets bounced off the hinge like sparks.

  & the train shot steam, because it knew robbery.

  & ‘fire!’ they did again,

  but the hinge got stronger.

  tenth mile, quarter mile, half mile,

  the horses began to offer their resignations,

  & the well of bullets ran dry,

  the night began to thicken,

  wet with rain & red with the blood of near-misses,

  & the well of hope began to run dry,

  so he made his move.

  atop his horse,

  alongside the train,

  next to the fields,

  outside the town,

  he gave himself up, because to be a hero is to sacrifice.

  & for a moment, i’d have sworn,

  i saw robin hood smile.

  ‘fire!’ he shouted.

  & he launched himself at the hinge, & he timed it just right, & he landed with a thud,

  & he swung down the butt of his rifle & the crack was deafening.

  & the hinge gave way,

  & the rear cars were left behind,

  away from the penthouses of new york,

  as the world went marching on.

  a town with no hope got their gold.

  & they all cheered & they gathered & they celebrated

  their hero,

  ‘robin hood of the run-down bar.’

  & he pictured their getaway to mecca,

  their hideaway at melbourne,

  the golden sun shining on the faces of the golden,

  & he smiled.

  ‘open it,’

  they said,

  ‘let us see our prize!’

  & with the rifle that freed the cars,

  he shot the lock

  & opened the door

  & they all cheered.

  & then they all stopped.

  because the gold in the hills of nevada makes its way to the penthouses of new york

  along the same route that the fertilizer of nevada makes its way to the grasslands of virginia.

  & sometimes what shines like gold,

  is actually shit.

  —arthur louis pullman

  9.

  NEITHER OF THEM said anything to me as I finished.

  It was him; the penmanship and formatting were unmistakable. The part that didn’t make sense with the story of his life—or at least the version that I was told—was the date. April 29, 1970, was five years before his novel was published. According to my family, he was building railroads in California, never leaving the state, not writing cowboy fiction in a bar in Utah.

  But if he’d stopped into the bar in 2010, he’d done it on the forty-year anniversary of the writing of this story, to the day.

  Confusion like hot air burned my face, woozy and light. I thought of my father—he must have known something about this. If my grandfather had been running around the country, surely those were the kind of stories he would have told his son. How had no one ever told me?

  The worst part was that it all did sound almost familiar. The story, the storytelling, the cardinal, the gold—tiny pieces of it showed up in fragmented images I had in my head of time with my grandfather before his disease worsened and I gave up on understanding him. They were all there, pieces of moments I almost remembered, but had let myself forget.

  But it wasn’t there for no reason; I hadn’t found this place for no reason. The clue, I realized, must be hidden somewhere inside of it. That’s why he’d led me to this bar. The forty-year-old story would tell me where to go. The penthouses of New York and the grasslands of Virginia didn’t make sense—he wouldn’t have had time to travel there and back to Ohio, and besides, it’s not where the characters would have gone. If he was the narrator of the story, he’d be making a “hideaway at Melbourne,” or . . .

  A word from the first clue struck me: safety in mecca.

  When I looked up from the story, Little Ray was walking across the bar with a burger and fries. “Kind of a depressing ending, huh?” He set them in front of me. “I always thought it was a bit dramatic, but shit, writers’ll be writers.”

  I nodded to the burger, distracted. “I’m vegetarian.”

  “Not in Green River, you’re not.” He pushed it over to me, and I smelled it in my stomach, empty but for three days of old nuts and Snickers bars. Hating myself, I ate.

  “So how is ol’ Arty?” Ray asked. “Still so full of shit he can taste it?”

  “He’s dead.” Hamburger spilled out the sides of my mouth.

  Ray hung his head. Even Pete shuffled at the information. I saw Ray open his mouth to protest, but thought better of it, and instead smiled into a glass of whiskey he’d set in front of himself. He pushed one in my direction. “Peaceful sleep’s not the end of night,” he said, tilting it toward me. “By morning we’ll dance with the angels of light.”

  The words rang in my ears, warm and familiar as I drank. “Who said that?”

  Ray smiled as he hit the bottom of his glass. “Just now? I did.”

  Ray’s silent memorial lasted another two minutes. He poured another drink. He dr
ank it. He opened his mouth to speak. Again, he gave up, and turned his back to me.

  Mara had moved to a table in the corner, surrounded by three older men, and somehow still looked comfortable. It was reckless, but she didn’t look nervous. She looked almost like she was having fun.

  I waited until Ray drifted back across the bar before turning to face Pete. “Pete, I don’t wanna bother you—”

  “Y’already are.”

  I composed myself, trying to pick off the most gnawing curiosities drumming inside of my skull. “Do you know what my grandfather was doing here?”

  “What’s anybody doing anywhere? Trying to get somewhere else.”

  I slid the story toward him. “Do you know what he means by ‘Mecca’?”

  Pete cleared what sounded like years of phlegm from his throat. “Mecca of the Midwest is Denver.”

  My heart leapt. Denver. He’d make his way to a hideout in Denver. It fit my grandfather’s progress perfectly. The story was a clue, and that was the solution. My trip didn’t have to end tonight.

  I fought to keep my pulse down. “What about my grandma?” I asked. “When did you meet her?”

  “’S a lot of questions.”

  I shifted in my seat. With his eyes closed, it was impossible to tell if he was angry or just making an observation.

  “No,” he said. “Never met no grandma. Guess I didn’t know it was like that.”

  “What about Orlo Kopek? Did you ever meet him?”

  “Yes.” Pete sighed. “I did.”

  My fingers started tingling with excitement. “Do you know where he is now?”

  “I do.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Elgin Cemetery, out on Hastings.”

  The roller coaster inside my chest swung around into an enormous dip. There it was again, the sorrow of realizing that someone I didn’t know, someone I needed, had passed on. But sorrow morphed to curiosity, and I asked, “When did he die?”

  Pete grunted again. “September 15, 1974.”

  A familiar beanie head bobbed over the bar. I saw Ray speaking to her, and Mara’s full-scale charm offensive in response. Naturally, she drew every eye along the bar, hanging up over it, balancing on her elbows. Ray glanced nervously back toward me and they both caught me staring.

  “I have to go,” Mara mouthed, gesturing to her wrist where a watch might have been, then outside. I glanced down at my cell phone: it was 3:55. The train left in five minutes. “Come say good-bye?”

  I nodded and stepped back from the bar.

  “Hold on.” Ray stopped me. “One thing I’m confused about. If Arty died five years ago . . . what’re you looking for?”

  He asked loud enough that several tables at the bar noticed, looking up at me. I rolled the question around my head, the door standing behind me, the story sitting in front of me. “I’m just trying to understand.”

  Ray seemed satisfied by the answer. “Well, thank God,” he muttered. “What’s it they say? Mystery’s only a mystery if someone’s still tryin’ to solve it?”

  “That’s right,” I whispered, and with one glance back up at Ray, I snatched the string-bound pages off the table and took off for the door.

  If someone behind me shouted about me stealing their Arthur Louis Pullman story, they did it after I was already out onto Green River Street, sprinting toward the train. Mara started after me, letting off an excited cry. “What did you get!” she shrieked, her footsteps directly behind mine on the abandoned street. “Why are you going back to the train?” I didn’t answer, and we sprinted back to the platform.

  10.

  april 29, the 2010.

  i can hear hooves,

  the grunts of wheel against tracks,

  in towns like this,

  there’s only history.

  the only life is,

  the son of the name on the bar.

  he tells me of his passions,

  the wild love affairs of his dreams

  the mundane almost-affairs that he wakes to find.

  with men like this, love never comes easy,

  not for lack of wanting but for wanting too much.

  he tells me he’s fallen ill over a church girl

  & i tell him it’s best to cure his sickness immediately.

  ‘she’ll always love God,’ i say,

  ‘& you will never be God.’

  for the better, we decide, as we’d make shit Gods.

  he asks me of love,

  i tell him all i know.

  love is & always has been a mystery,

  but a mystery we’ve signed our lives away to solving.

  he asks what would happen if we ever stopped.

  ‘a mystery,’ i tell him,

  ‘is only a mystery if someone is trying to solve it.’

  i pray you never stop looking

  —arthur louis pullman

  Part Four.

  Denver.

  1.

  april 30, the 1970.

  “As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, ‘Pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven.’”

  jack said that, & for all his failures, i don’t know that he’d ever said anything more true.

  we are on the road to heaven.

  i always felt there was some Greater love waiting for me just around the bend of the orange horizon.

  i can hear the trumpets sounding from the fast-approaching mountains to let us know that we’re finally free, finally far enough away from everything behind us that it doesn’t have to be a part of us anymore. i always love this moment because of that, & i think you do too.

  i can see it written in your face, sun-splattered, my great angel in the window, as we’ve taken the entire cabin over, our congregation holding worship in the observation—

  55 miles per hour—

  4 feet above the earth—

  men & women dancing, 6 hours becoming forever & never, everything & nothing at the same time, time expanding & contracting, as we cross the colorado-utah border.

  orlo pours me a drink, ‘do you really think this’ll happen?’ & duke answers for me, ‘of course it will,’ duke is sure, ‘it has to,’ duke is arrogant, ‘the truth is on our side,’ duke is right & the truth righteous, & the truth is never arrogant, but orlo doubts, ‘what if it doesn’t?’

  ‘then up the waterfall,’ i tell them. ‘up the waterfall we shout.’

  & you look on through all of this, sun-splattered, my great angel in the window, & we smile in secret like the world is just one big laugh, no worry & doubt, just one big joke we tell each other, over & over again, every single day. a joke that only we know.

  i always love the moment where the desert gives way to the mountains, because it reminds me that the highest peaks are borne of the lowest valleys,

  that the radical only exists in proximity to the mundane,

  because life can only be viewed relative to its opposite.

  i always love the pull of the train, the immovable & unstoppable engine of life.

  i always love the moment when my stomach turns with nerves & excitement & energy, the great anticipation of a greater life. this morning, my stomach is turning twice as fast, because i’m moving full speed to mecca, full speed with you.

  the world will tell us we’re wrong,

  & the evils will speak their certainties,

  & your mother will be furious,

  but those things don’t have to be a part of us anymore,

  because we’re on the road to heaven.

  & from the fast-approaching mountains, i hear angels calling in your voice, telling me,

  this road gets steeper

  & the curves get sharper

  & the tread on our tires will wear down thinner than the skin on our fingertips,

  but just so long as we keep going,

  we’ll find ourselves in paradise.

  �
�arthur louis pullman

  2.

  WE FLUNG OURSELVES, panting, back into Mara’s booth in the observation car and stared at the door behind us. No one had followed us.

  “What in the fuck was that?” She stared at the pages in my hands. “What did you steal?”

  I toyed again with the information in my head, finally deciding, “Nothing.”

  “Arthur,” she said, lurching back, reverberating through the empty car. “First you jump onto a moving train, then you steal something from a bar, and you’ve made me an unwilling accomplice in both!” She was angry. Her face was almost unrecognizable behind the expression, the same red spots above her cheeks, but this time everything was sharp and unforgiving.

  “I’m sorry,” I sputtered. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to involve you in any—”

  “I don’t care about that,” she said. “I care about you not telling me what I’m involved in.”

  I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t.

  “Well?”

  I swallowed, still certain that anything more that I told her would find a way to hurt me later. It was the same lesson I’d learned, in hundreds of different forms, time and time again—when you tell someone something, then they have it, for good. And they can use it for whatever they want. Regardless of whether it hurts you, regardless of their intention, regardless of whether they’re your best friend or your girlfriend—the more you give to someone, the less you have of yourself. And if you give too much, you end up with nothing.

  Mara hadn’t flinched, convinced she could outlast me.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m sure you don’t have to worry about this, because people like doing things for girls like you, but people like me can’t exactly—”

  “Girls like me, people like you—what the fuck are you talking about? What world do you live in? More importantly”—she didn’t lower her voice—“who do you think I am? What are you afraid I’m going to do if I have this super-top-secret information from you?”

  I didn’t say anything, but silently rushed to imagine the ways she could hurt me.

  “You know it’s not a weakness, right?” she asked. “Being honest with someone? It might feel good.”

  I swallowed again.