At the Jim Bridger: Stories

by Ron Carlson

  I needed to document what had happened and who had done wrong, while I could still remember when things had happened and who had said what. My head was ringing with these things, and I was setting them down in ink in my notebook to quiet myself down. I had a thick Shaeffer fountain pen and two bottles of brown ink, and the pages swelled under my writing. The days were filled with the sense that I would soon see a county cruiser in front of my room, and I would be certainly arrested. However, I also knew that the cruiser would be the best of the two things that could happen. The other would be Leo Rosemont himself rapping softly on the red motel door with the handle of his old revolver.

  My first entry was dated September 4: I, Eugene Miner, was bit by a dog at the Statecore Refinery and quit that job. Driving up Incon Canyon north toward the summit, I met Baby Grayson, who had car trouble. She was headed south.

  The next entry, dated September 5, takes off from right there because it had been midnight when I saw her headlights in the pullout, and I wanted my record to be dead-on accurate.

  There had been a whirlwind of stuff happening to me that week, but I didn’t put any of it in my record. That was two lifetimes ago. I had been a night watchman at the River Oaks Refinery, a horrible job that I thought 1 deserved. I was just putting one foot in front of the other. There was a pack of wild dogs in the plant that roved around, nine or ten big dogs, and when I came to every corner, I’d peek around for them. These dogs came out at night and ran the place; every time I saw them or if I heard them, I went the other way. The night I met Baby Grayson and all my life took this turn, those dogs had split up and that’s how they got me. I heard them coming up one alley and I ran down the other, where three of the savage animals waited. They weren’t German shepherds and they weren’t rottweilers or Labradors, but they were some big dogs, all different, up from Mexico I guess, and 1 was bitten more than twice, but I wasn’t eaten alive, which was their intent. I climbed onto the scaffolding above a row of turbines, and I crawled along the catwalk a quarter mile to the guard shack and my old Nissan. I left my badge and my bloody thumbprint on the steel desk and thereby quit.

  A half hour later I was almost to the top of Incon Canyon when I saw headlights in the pullout and I stopped to see what it was. There’s never a car there. Her Subaru was steaming heavily, and I could see she’d hit a deer even before I walked back and found him twisted on the shoulder, dead. She wouldn’t get out of the car, but I talked to her through her window in the dark.

  “I’m a night watchman,” I yelled, thinking she might feel safe with a member of a security force. I went to show her my badge, but of course it was back at dog hell. “You’ve smashed your radiator in and you’re surely going to burn up your engine!”

  “I’m okay,” she yelled back. “I’m just going to Rock Creek.”

  “You won’t make it to Rock Creek without burning up your engine!” I said.

  “Did I kill that deer?”

  “You did,” I told her. “Look at your temperature gauge,” I said. “You’re going to burn this right up. I can give you a ride to Rock Creek if you want! You can get your car tomorrow!”

  “It’s downhill,” she said. “I’m okay. He jumped right out of nowhere! Thanks for stopping!” And she pulled back onto the winding two-lane and started down for Rock Creek, which was nineteen miles.

  It’s dark at the top of Incon at midnight. The stars come down and rattle the sky real good and you can hear the river working, but it is a lonely place. I didn’t need any more lonely places. My leg was throbbing and I felt a new place on the back of my thigh burning. My trousers were about used up. After a minute I went back to the little buck and pulled him well off the road. My prayer was stupid like everything else I was doing those days. I said, “I’m sorry about what happened to you. Good-bye.”

  When I was in the Nissan, I found myself turning around and heading back down toward Rock Creek. Either I would get rabies and perish in this desolate place or I would come across that woman in the burning Subaru.

  I found her about six miles down, and when I pulled up behind the rusted vehicle, she got out of the car and met me halfway. She was wearing a red vest with a name tag on it and black trousers; it was her casino work clothes. “It’s me,” I said. “Did it seize up and die?”

  In the dark I saw her put something in her pocketbook, which though I didn’t exactly see it I was sure was a handgun. “I do need a ride after all,” she said. “That car won’t go any further tonight.”

  And so, in the September 5 entry, I describe my giving Baby Grayson a ride down to the shabby cabin at Rock Creek where I met Leo Rosemont, the other principal in my record. By the time we got down there and followed the little two-track through the dark aspen grove to their place against the river, my two legs were both beating hot pain. It was forty miles back to the hospital, and I thought this might just be it for me. I’d drop this nervous woman off at her little forest hovel and pass out somewhere down canyon. I could feel the beads of sweat burning along my hairline already; those dogs had got me good, twisting their big bad teeth in my ass.

  Baby and Leo’s place was a mean little shed about to slump into the river, and there wasn’t a light on when we pulled up in the weedy yard. The starlight off the tin roof and the flashing river lit the whole place a spooky black and white. Baby got out of the car and told me to wait a second while she went in and turned on the lights. Her husband was probably asleep, she said. “Leo,” she called. “Leo!”

  Baby disappeared into the dark shelter. My wounds were beating against my bones as I waited in the car, and then I heard the brush behind me, and a voice said, “How’s it going, Bob?” A figure was standing by the rear tire.

  I recoiled and struggled from my vehicle into the fresh dark. I saw light fill the little square windows of the house as I stood. Before I could greet this man or shake his hand or even say my real name, the pain rose up my legs, broke over me, and I went down.

  I didn’t put that night in the record, how Leo Rosemont hauled me into their hovel and cut my pants off me and scoured the five holes that had been torn in me by the giant dogs from hell with hydrogen peroxide and Betadine and rub bing alcohol as well as great splashes of domestic vodka. There was a lot I didn’t put into my notebook as it thickened, but I recalled it all, even the smells, the way the grit felt on my cheek when I woke on the floor that next dawn.

  Every day at the El Sol when I finished what I could of my writing, I blew the brown ink dry and hid the notebook by clipping it to a hanger inside my watchman jacket in the closet. I went outside and stood in the sun for a moment before walking down to the Blue Door. I was grateful for the sun and that one moment when it pressed against my face for another day. I was riven with regrets, and I actively hurt with my love for Baby, but I was going forward with my plan. And the record, though it wouldn’t make me eligible for any citizenship awards, would be a true thing, not screwed sideways like everything else I touched, everything so far.

  What Mr. Cuppertino liked about The Price Is Right was the “Showcase Showdown,” where the two contestants bid on their own bevy of prizes. “Oh, for God’s sake!” Mr. Cuppertino would cry when the little woman would say $12,500 for the bedroom set, the two motor scooters, and the trip to Orlando. “It’s fifteen,” he’d say. “Nothing is ever twelve. You can’t get a dinette and floor wax for twelve!” And Mr. Cuppertino was always right. He was full of wisdom for that show. I liked watching it with him in the sunny room. The people on the program were always jumping up and down and screaming and clapping both hands over their mouths as they thought of their bids. Every time Roberta Gilstrand would appear standing beside one of the red motor scooters or running her hand along the side of a new car, Mr. Cuppertino would say, “There she is.” He told me that if he were my age, he’d write for tickets and go down to Los Angeles and court that gal with every bone in his body. “I wouldn’t waste my life up here in Globe with a crazy geezer like me watching TV!”

  I found that
walking a little bit helped keep the shadows in my mind from closing in, and so in the afternoons when I couldn’t sleep, I walked the town and thought about Baby Grayson, whom I had loved desperately a few desperate weeks before. The days in Globe were warm in October, and I walked to the top of Solomon Hill and looked over the dusty mining town as it spilled out below me. My thoughts on these walks were not orderly the way I was laying down the events in the book, but they came in a mess, moments with Baby that did not wait for an invitation to appear, they just crashed through, things she said, things she did.

  I was at their cabin for three days laid up with my dog bites, two of which I should have had stitched up, it turns out. Leo Rosemont gave me huge capsules, which I took with short shots of Ten High bourbon whiskey. He had a variety of chemical substances. Baby Grayson folded some blankets on the floor under the one window into a makeshift bed, and that was the name of that tune. You fall in love with your nurse, believe me. I was ripe for it anyway, being against rock bottom and all bit up and feverish, and then Baby bending to me with crackers and soup every time Ī was awake. She was short and fleshy with the sweetest face on earth. Even with Leo Rosemont in the room (and I already knew he was bad news folded double), I gave myself over to my feelings and with my every expression I presented those feelings to her.

  In the afternoon Baby Grayson would change into her work clothes, buttoning her blouse as she walked through the room, and go off in my Nissan to the River of Gold Casino up over Incon Pass. She was a dealer. Standing in the cabin, snapping her chewing gum and pinning on her name tag, she’d say, “I pay the rent.”

  It was hard to believe rent on such a place could be much. There are a lot of versions of the end of the road, and this was a bad one, a lonely tumbledown two years from falling off the eroding cutbank into the actual river. There was no sound except for the wind in the pines and the rush of the river. I could hear conversations in that garbled friction, voices working all night long. I also could hear Leo Rosemont and Baby in the little bedroom every night and then again in the gray mornings as they huffed and slapped. Her voice was full of alarm and resignation to me where I lay under the chilly window with my clustered wounds burning.

  The third day, when I could finally sit up, though I could only just perch on the edge of the chair, Leo Rosemont and I had a talk. It was September 8, and I wrote the interchange in my journal or record, whatever it was. The only table in their place was an old wooden cable spool covered with spills and candle wax and about a dozen golden salt and pepper shakers saying River of Gold on them and a giant Tabasco bottle, gummed up and half full, and a yellow plastic flashlight with grease prints on it, and three glass River of Gold ashtrays, which brimmed with butts, and Leo Rosemont’s bottle of Ten High, which had about an inch left in it. This was a rough-hewn table where you had to be careful where you put your coffee because there were four or five holes in the thing where stuff would drop through.

  “Well,” Leo said to me as he poured a lick of whiskey into his cold coffee and handed the bottle to me. “You may survive after all.”

  “I appreciate your help,” I told him. I’d sized him up from my nest on the floor, and Leo Rosemont was about six-one and he would have run about one-eighty. His hair was a shiny black and he always had a four-day beard, like some kind of stain. There were blue shadows under his eyes that made him look serious and tired, and he spoke as slowly as anyone I’ve ever met.

  “Glad to be of service,” he said. “Those were some worthy dog bites you suffered.”

  I went ahead and put some whiskey in my coffee.

  “You saved Baby with a ride and we were able to assist you,” he said. “That’s fair right there.”

  “It is,” I said. I was sitting wrapped in the rough blanket.

  “We could do one more turn that way,” he said. “If you’ve got a couple weeks.”

  “I’m unemployed,” I told him. “But I’m going to need to get a pair of pants.”

  It was that day that Leo Rosemont laid out the little plan he’d cooked up. He showed me a stack of black and gold casino chips and asked me what it was. I told him it looked like a stack of ten one-dollar chips from the River of Gold Casino. He told me to look close. I did. It was a stack of the things. Then he smiled and lifted it, and what carne up in his hand was a perfect hand-crafted, hand-painted aluminum tube that had covered what remained: a stack of the black and white twenty-five-dollar chips. “If it fooled you,” he said, “this thing is good to go.”

  They did need me for it, which gave me the strangest feeling I’d had in a long time, and I didn’t put the feeling in the record, and maybe I should have, because it was a good and powerful feeling. I was part of something. They needed me, and on that far side of the pernicious events to follow, it didn’t feel like anything too bad, just a kind of windfall that would keep me in proximity with Baby Grayson, my new angel. After midnight, early on the morning of September 9 of this year, when Baby came home from work, we sat around that nasty round table and went over the details. I put those details, every one, in my written chronicle.

  In Globe I began helping Mr. Cuppertino with the motel. It started with rne getting up from time to time to register the guests and take their money. At the El Sol almost everyone paid in cash. On Wednesdays I turned the Dumpster so it could be accessed from the alley. And every other day or so I’d sweep or clean the windows in the office and stack the magazines. I was about halfway through my work inscribing my journal, just past the part when I began taking money out of the casino. I would finish the whole thing in two weeks. Then I’d have to make some big decisions.

  Mr. Cuppertino hated people on The Price Is Right who would bid just one dollar over the last guy. It struck him as being unfair, and he had written a letter to the show about the practice, urging them to adopt a fifty-dollar margin. In response they had sent him two tickets to the show, which he had pinned to the office bulletin board. Whenever we were watching the program and someone pulled the one-dollar stunt, he would shake his head and say, “That snake!” even if it was a woman.

  During commercials he’d ask me about myself, the same questions every day. Why isn’t a young guy like me married? Isn’t my family worried about me? What line of work was I in? Didn’t I think Roberta Gilstrand was the most beautiful woman in the world?

  He wanted to know if I was in some kind of trouble or needed some help. We’d become friends, kind of, and I agreed with his view about those assholes on The Price Is Right who bid a dollar over the last guy, and Mr. Cuppertino kind of wore me down. Every morning I was writing the miserable things I’d done with Baby and Leo, and then I’d end up sitting in his office watching the people on television jump up and down, which was just a pure pleasure akin to solace certainly, and I began to tell him things. I had a faint feeling that he would be the one who finally would turn me in and end my life with eternal jail, but I let things come out bit by bit.

  I told him I fell in love with a woman and was nursing my broken heart. This was true. I told him I didn’t know what had become of her. This was true. But I feared the worst. True. It had been an unfortunate triangle involving a guy who was cruel and unscrupulous. This was understated but true. I told him a good deal of my troubles were my fault. True. I told him I was staying on a couple more weeks just to gather my wits. This was essentially true.

  Mr. Cuppertino asked me if I was afraid.

  I asked him did I act like I was afraid.

  He said I did, and I told him I was. This was true, and it was a relief to express, but it didn’t diminish the fear that was my steady companion.

  At night in Unit 7 of the El Sol in Globe, I lay in bed like one gigantic ear, every bump and scrape starting my heart. Every footstep was Leo Rosemont shuffling up to break down my door, say I told you so, and shoot me dead. When you live on the blade of your fear for weeks, you start to think that you can’t wait for the enemy to be made real. I would have welcomed Leo Rosemont into the room any of those night
s, but to make his phantom go away forever.

  What we had done, of course, is cheat. A casino is a little house of money and Leo’s plan was to bleed some of that off. Leo, himself, had already been banned from the casino. They got me some clothes from the St. Vincent store in Incon, a kind of cowboy outfit including a fairly decent Stetson, black, and just about the right size. “When we’re all long gone,” Leo Rosemont told me, “they’ll be talking about some guy in a black hat. A handsome dude who must have charmed little Baby out of her panties and then out of her little mind. That sweet girl would have never crossed the line otherwise.” Then he laughed and we started in.

  Baby and I would drive up to Incon every afternoon for her shift at the casino. She let me off half a mile away, behind the Incon Gas and Go, for the first time on September 13 at ten minutes to three o’clock. It was our pattern and I put it in my book. I did not put in there about how I felt about my days alone with her, how the very first time we drove away from their evil hovel with me dressed up like Tex from Texarkana, I was lit and floating in unspeakable joy. My heart rattled, but I closed my teeth against it. We had a thirty-minute drive in the lonesome canyon, which to me was a vivid roaring backdrop for my love. I rode in silence, trusting time to reveal to Baby Grayson how I adored her and what that might mean.