At the Jim Bridger: Stories

by Ron Carlson

  I was mightily relieved to be away from the dark, smoky cabin and the greasy personage of Leo Rosemont, whose major activity was to sip whiskey while he talked about what he’d do to each of his former bosses on the various road crews and logging crews and at the telemarketing group and two restaurants where he’d worked. He’d already done some of it and was proud of vandalizing their private property, their lunches and cars, and the clever way he’d harassed them via telephone, scaring the wives and children of these men. I was scared of Leo Rosemont from the get-go.

  At four P.M. every night for the rest of September, including Saturdays and Sundays, after having a coffee and factory-made Danish inside the Gas and Go, I walked from behind that solitary building through the dusty, litter-blasted sage toward the lights of the River of Gold Casino.

  My pattern was the same each of the twenty days, and it never varied, even the night that Baby finally came to understand my feelings for her and we stopped off the shoulder at the top of Incon Canyon on the way back to the river cabin, the very gravel spur where we first met, and in that dark place she showed me the love that seemed my very destiny. In the casino my pattern was simply to stop by the roulette table and see Baby, and if the pit boss was down by the craps table, she would palm Leo Rosemont’s aluminum sleeve over a stack of twenty-five-dollar chips and slide it to me in return for my twenty dollar bill. I’d play the ten one-dollar chips right up and put the fake stack in my pocket. If the pit boss was up behind her, I’d play ten and leave, stopping by three hours later during her second shift. Every night with this simple plan, I pocketed exactly $250 in the black and gold chips. I stuffed the chips, still in their tube, into the front pocket of my pants, and I delivered them to Leo Rosemont every night at midnight when we got back. I was not to cash any of the chips.

  When I had my score, I was to depart the casino, and I did, taking a tall Coke in a plastic cup from the waitress station adjacent the bar, and I walked into the lonely night.

  This was the strangest job I ever had, but I walked out into the dark with my pockets bulging and the knowledge that at eleven Baby would pull the Nissan behind the Gas and Go and find me sitting back there on a dairy crate and we would head for home, such as it was.

  Mr. Cuppertino liked Plinko. About once a week contestants on The Price Is Right would get to play Plinko, where they earn the big Plinko chips by guessing the digits in the prices of spray starch and wheat nuggets, and then they drop the chips into the huge Plinko board and the chips bounce down toward the money slots. It was fun to watch the way the discs pinged off the nails, hopping from side to side, slowly working toward the ten-thousand-dollar slot or the one-hundred-dollar slot. Roberta Gilstrand stood below in pink Capri pants with her graceful hands on her hips. “They got the thing fixed just about right,” Mr. Cuppertino said. “It’s a fair go. That ten thousand is a long shot, but it happens. I’ve seen it happen.”

  He’d advise the players about where to drop their chips, saying, “Left, dear, left, to the left, further left,” but the people always dropped them down the middle, time after time. We rooted for the Plinko players, but then we rooted for everybody except the people who bid one dollar over the last guy. We were watching a young sailor drop the Plinko chips one morning when Mr. Cuppertino asked me if I would help him with a little project. He was going to refurbish the twelve units of the El Sol, and he needed someone to drive a truck to Hotel Surplus in Phoenix and back.

  It was a big yellow truck with a twelve-foot box, certainly the biggest truck I’d driven, and Mr. Cuppertino was gleeful because the whole deal only cost him nineteen dollars for the day. He’d been happy since he’d taped the cardboard sign to the locked office door: BACK AT 5. “God, I love a road trip!” he said as we wound through the rocky canyons and down onto the desert floor and the hazy unending metropolis of Phoenix in the flat noon light. “It’s good for a person to get out. Mickey knew that. We drove all over the Midwest; her folks lived in Fort Wayne. That’s way up there. You can’t bury yourself in an office and hand out keys your whole life.”

  The larger world seen from the elevated cab seemed big and bright to me, too. Sleeping on the damp floor of the river cabin had not made me an optimist, but now with my written record almost done, and the sunshine crashing down everywhere, I felt almost well.

  I had everything written down except the final week. That week, just as we’d done for the two previous, Baby Grayson and I went to the River of Gold Casino every night, and we used Leo Rosemont’s aluminum sleeve like a perfect tool and took ten twenty-five-dollar chips from the casino. On the tenth night, I broke my silence with Baby and asked her how she felt about all of this. We were headed for home, rising off the flat toward the summit, and she said, “About what?”

  “Taking this money. Leo. Me.”

  “I like it,” she said. “If we’re careful, we’ll get new lives out of this.” It was something Leo had told us.

  “What do you want in a new life?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know. A new life.”

  “What about me?” I asked her. I had started talking and it was easy to cross the line. “How do you feel about me?”

  “Pretty good,” she said. “You’re doing good.”

  “Do you love Leo?” I asked her.

  She guided us through the three switchbacks at the top. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

  “He’s not always real good to you,” I said. “Is he?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s okay.”

  I couldn’t read what was going on, but my heart was beating. “Look,” I said. “Pull over at the top and I’ll check the radiator.”

  She did that and I stepped out into the canyon dark. You could hear the river, and the car ticked as I went around the front. I didn’t even open the hood, but I went right around to Baby’s door and I opened it so she could get out.

  “What is it, Eugene?” she said to me.

  The truth that had been waiting for ten days burst from me. “I want you.” I pulled her up and kissed her soft face. Her body against me was beyond imagining.

  “What do you want?” she asked, genuinely confused. But she was kissing me back and her fleshy arms were around my back. We squirmed against the car like that for two or three minutes, as far as you go with clothes, and I became certain I had her cooperation. “We can do this,” she said to me. “If you want to.” She started draping her clothing over the trunk of my Nissan. “No problem,” she said. “Come on.” And she directed me through the rest of our roadside session with a fervor that I savored as much as her warm body under mine.

  Twenty minutes later in the car, I straightened her hair with my fingers as she drove and she flinched, saying, “What are you doing?”

  “Just fixing your hair,” I said. “I don’t want Leo to know.”

  She looked at me, sweetly, blankly, and her expression scared me. “Okay,” she said. “Whatever.”

  “No,” I said. “Leo mustn’t find out. Don’t let Leo know what happened.”

  “Okay by me,” she said, and then she braked there for Rock Creek and turned off the hardtop into the forest and the trail that led to the dark cabin.

  That night, as always, Leo took the stack of chips from the aluminum sleeve and looked at it and smiled. Then he held the sleeve in the short glow of the candle and examined it slowly, and then he’d say the number of days left. He always said the number of days left, and the night that Baby first gave herself fully to me there on the summit turnout, he said, Nine days to go. Some nights then he’d offer me a little Ten High and some nights he’d just start in repairing the aluminum sleeve, using his magnifying glass and his penknife and the small jars of m odel-airplane enamel. I watched Baby hang her vest on the chair and unbutton her blouse going into their bedroom, and the door swung back till it was half closed.

  “You meeting any people over there at the River of Gold?” he asked me.

  “Nobody.”

  “Bartender? Cockta
il waitress?”

  “Like you told me,” I said, “I don’t talk to them, and I don’t sit at the bar.”

  “How many words do you say between leaving and coming back?”

  “I don’t know,” 1 said.

  “Guess,” he said.

  “Two hundred,” I said.

  He thought a minute, then looked up from re-scribing edges in our device. “You get coffee at the Gas and Go.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That kid is going to remember you.”

  “No more coffee,” I said.

  “That’s a better plan,” he said. He set the hollow cylinder down. “You talk to Baby?”

  “Some,” I said. “I tell her it went all right when she picks me up.”

  “Good,” he said, palming the chips stack by stack. “You know my name?”

  “Leo,” I said.

  “My last name.”

  “I don’t know it,” I told him. He looked me over and said again, “Good. You still headed west when we’re done?” I had told him I was going to take my share and go west.

  “Yes I am.”

  “Good deal, my man. Nine more days and you’ll be off to your new life, whatever.”

  I slept poorly in the river cabin. My legs ached at night and I listened for Leo and Baby, and every night the noises came. I knew with certainty that Leo would kill me if he found out about Baby and me, and that thought kept the sleep off me. I had made a mistake, but instead of wanting to retract it, like every other sad turn I’d taken, I wanted to push this one through, keep it up, take Baby with me to a new life. I could see us happy. We’d be good together, but the clock was ticking over my head. At that point, I had fewer than nine days.

  The Hotel Surplus Depot was two connected warehouses on a railroad siding on the west side of Phoenix, and there were great stacks of furniture inside, heaped like kids had done it. All the couches stood on end and the end tables themselves were piled up like boxes. There were two long rows of framed seascapes on the floor, the sun setting in every one. It was pretty interesting, all that used stuff. I’d never seen a mountain of a thousand lamps before. A handful or so other shoppers poked through, working in teams toward the dresser or shelving that wasn’t scratched too badly, and that’s finally what Mr. Cuppertino and I did, selecting a dozen nice walnut-paneled bedside tables and a dozen chairs padded with a blue fabric and as many heavy-duty towel bars. These were heavy chrome affairs with a kind of rack shelf. Mr. Cuppertino was lit up by these bargains. I mean, the chairs were six dollars each and the racks four. He was really tickled to find twelve relatively decent cover quilts in a blue floral pattern for three bucks each. I had to agree with him when he said, as we loaded the truck, “We done good. We pillaged this place. Those towel racks would list for forty bucks on The Price Is Right! They are known as the Waldorf Towel Caddie and they are not cheap.”

  It was a good feeling driving back with that big load of treasures. Mr. Cuppertino told me how he and his wife, Mickey, had done this in smaller vehicles over the years, waiting for a call from the manager of the Holiday Inn in Apache Junction and then going down for his leftovers. The Hotel Surplus Depot had only been going for about fifteen years, and it made things a lot easier. “We’ll do the carpet next spring,” he told me. “If you want to stay around.”

  Well, I’d been thinking about it. Those towel racks weren’t going to put themselves up, and Mr. Cuppertino told me he had a good power drill for the job. What I was thinking was: I’d like to put something on the wall and have it stay for a few years.

  It’s funny about writing things down. I was working in my notebook every morning, trying to get the bare bones of my times with Baby and Leo in there, just the facts, something the proper authorities could use. But I couldn’t do that. The way it works is that it’s never just the facts. Γ d write down the fundamentals, but when I came to the night: that Baby had dirtied the bottom of her feet by standing naked with me against the warm side of my Nissan, it all changed. I’d go on a little bit. You’re writing in the predawn dark and you go on a little bit. I put in there about the way she’d slow down at the summit every night after our first night and look over at me in the dark and I’d nod and we’d go at it without a word, except maybe a hurried “Here,” or words meant only to indicate we were still breathing, like “Okay” and “Well.” Every night we stopped there in the thinner air and she mostly led the way, and I wrote in the journal that she led the way—and more than one way. She put her hand on my hip and on the back of my neck with an affectionate familiarity. This was every night with the clock ticking on our dubious enterprise, and I became joyously convinced that Baby loved me, for she came at me with an ardor I’d never known, and she held nothing back. One night, and I don’t recall which it was in that crazy week, she looked at me from where I had her on the tailgate of my vehicle and she said, “You like this, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway and said that yes I did.

  It was after the third night when we were back in the car straightening our clothes as she drove down the canyon toward Rock Creek that I asked her Leo’s last name and she told me Rosemont without hesitating and I knew our collusion was complete. She told me that she had met him at the River of Gold Casino last spring. He had been nice to her—courtly, she said—and they started to date. She didn’t know he was living in his car after his release from Medium, which is what they call Incon Medium Security Prison. He’d been in there two years for being part owner of a meth lab somewhere in the hard desert outside of Gallup, and in prison he had learned fine arts and crafts, carving wood, and wording with some jewelry. It was in Medium that he got the idea for our aluminum sleeve.

  Right away he’d gotten into some trouble in the casino, was barred from it, because of a dispute over a slot machine. A woman claimed he had distracted her with a story about her car in the parking lot and he had taken her place and her 640 credits on the Dollar Diamond Three Way slot machine she’d been playing. The security video showed she was right, and he was forbidden from the place. That had been almost three weeks before I had my ass chewed up by the wild refinery hounds and drove Baby home that fateful night.

  I put this story in the record even though I had it second hand from Baby, and I put in the last four nights, including all the rough stuff I heard and saw before Γ went back to the cabin one last time and then slipped away through the trees and hitchhiked down Incon Canyon to Red Post and took a bus here to Globe and the El Sol Motel. I finished with the date of October 4 and the name of this motel, the El Sol, and the name of Mr. Cuppertino, my new friend. My notebook was fat as a Bible, swollen with all the inky pages, so that I had to close it with a rubber band. I signed the story as I had written it, and I clothespinned it to the hanger and put the hanger in the jacket in my closet, and I zipped the jacket up, and I was done with it.

  There were various games that repeated on The Price Is Right—Bulls-Eye, Clock, Poker, Push Over, Groceries, One Away (where each digit in the price of the car is one away from the real number)—and while Plinko was Mr. Cuppertino’s favorite, he watched Groceries with real attention. He commented on all the products. “You ever had that toaster pizza?” he’d ask me.

  “I haven’t,” I’d tell him.

  “Let’s pick some up later and give it a try. Mickey would not approve, but this is my new life we’re talking about.”

  We agreed that we neither one of us wanted to win a year’s supply of spray-on sizing, which they gave away freely in any week, and Mr. Cuppertino swore aloud when they offered the jumbo bottle of Lightning-Rooter, which you pour in your drains to unclog them and which evidently had caused the motel some harm in years past. He liked the bakery goods, especially Aunt Dorothy brand this and thats, but he had no use for hair spray or the knickknacks like vases or picture frames or the set of miniature clocks that turned out to be worth nine hundred dollars.

  “I’d like to go out there,” he told me. On the screen, they were showing the
address to send away for tickets. “I’ve already got those two tickets.”

  “To the show?”

  “Right. That’d be a road trip. We’ll close up for a week or get George up from the Blue Door to run the place. I’d like to see Miss Roberta Gilstrand in person and get Bob’s autograph.” He looked over at me, then he scanned the upper corners of the office, all four. “We’re going to have to paint this place this winter. The latex they put out is about a four-year paint anymore.” He wove his fingers together. “This place about wears me out. You want a job?”

  It was a good thing to hear, but then something happened that stopped my heart and made the world go slow motion. It was my old car. My Nissan turned in off Durrant Street and pulled to a stop under the El Sol’s office canopy. I felt a voltage bring me to my feet, and without a word to Mr. Cuppertino, I slipped past him and the counter, through the curtained door into his private quarters, where I had never before ventured. I stood in his dark little living room, leaning against the wall, listening to the voices from the office: Bob Barker on The Price Is Right, Mr. Cuppertino doing business, and then, another voice that I knew very well, Leo Rosemont.

  A moment later Mr. Cuppertino stepped back and went past me to his stove for the coffeepot. Bringing it back, he said to me, “That’s the guy, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I told him.

  “Well, that’s a stroke of luck,” he said. “He’s checked in to number ten, and he says he’s looking for a fella owes him money. Medium build, short dark hair, name of Eugene, doesn’t know the last name. The guy may have a black cowboy hat.”

  “I’m sure that man intends to kill me.”

  “Because of that girl,” Mr. Cuppertino said.

  “Because of the girl and that I took a packet of money from him.”

  “Those are reasons,” he said to me. “Those are good ones.” My heart was driving me into my chair deeper and deeper. Mr. Cuppertino put a spoon of sugar in my coffee, which he knows I like, and we sat in his crowded parlor, and he talked to the contestants all through the “Showcase Showdown” while my mind raced, stalled, and spiraled.