At the Jim Bridger: Stories

by Ron Carlson

  The last time I’d seen Leo Rosemont, he’d been mad. In the morning dark at the cabin, I heard the two of them struggling in their bed. Baby was noisy in a struggle and I knew the rhythm of her cries very well, but that last day it was different, broken and odd, and I understood that he was hurting her. Suddenly the sounds stopped and I heard Leo’s footsteps. With my eyes closed tight, I felt his rough bare foot on my face. “Hey, boy.” He rocked his foot. “Let’s have a meeting.” I opened my eyes and said, “What?” but he kept his foot hard against the side of my head. He was naked. “The truth has come out, and your ass is grass.” With that he gave me a little kick, shoving off. I sat up and he returned in a pair of Levi’s. He sat at the splintered table and lit a cigarette. “You’re fired,” he said. “Did you think Baby wouldn’t tell me?” He blew a tremendous column of smoke at the ceiling, a gray plume in the raw light. “It never works with three, that I’ve seen. Three just don’t work.” Baby padded to the doorway wearing only her white work shirt, and she crossed to Leo and sat on his lap with her head tucked up under his. “It works with two mostly and with four, but not three. You think you want her, that she’d be better off with you, away from the likes of me. You could take care of her. You’re only about half dumb, and you’ve got a bad case on this cutie, right? And me, I think she’s mine, of course, boy, because she is. She’s exactly the kind of woman who needs to stay away from the likes of you. You, my friend, are a sinking stone. You’re sunk here.”

  Leo leaned forward and crushed his cigarette onto the rough plank, and I saw Baby cling tighter. “But I’m not going to kill you, so that’s the good news. But you’ve lost your share and you’ve lost your car and you got to get off the property in the next five minutes, and if I ever see you again, I will hurt you.” He pointed his long dirty finger at me and I stared at it, past it, at the side of Baby’s streaked face, but she did not turn.

  I squirmed into my clothes and tied my shoes tight, and I stuffed the black cowboy hat on my head. I stood and said good-bye, but neither of them replied. So I dropped out of the front door and hurried down the lane as if headed for the canyon road.

  Three hours later I heard the Nissan growling along the dirt lane, and I saw it bump away toward the canyon highway. Her days of driving to work were over. 1 lay in the leaves all that time. When it grew quiet again and I could only hear the river and the voices in it, I walked back to the terrible cabin, and on my hands and knees, I fished all the black and gold casino chips from the center hollow of the wooden spool table where Leo Rosemont had stashed them. He should have considered my point of view as I lay on the floor every night. It was no wonder with Leo and Baby raising a lusty racket that my eyes stayed open, and that from that vantage I spied the edge of one of the chips where it lodged in that cracked wooden cylinder. I stuffed newspapers into the space and covered just the top with a scattering of chips; he wouldn’t find them gone until he and Baby cashed out. 1 shouldered my little day pack full of my clothes, such as they were, and about a pound of casino chips—$5,100—and I hit the highway and hitched west.

  At the El Sol, I spent the whole morning in a sour sweat hiding out in Mr. Cuppertino’s apartment. At noon he told me that Leo Rosemont had finally gone out, probably to find some lunch, and so I slipped down to my room. I was at the curtains every ten minutes, but my car did not return. Finally I lay on my bed and my thoughts lay upon me like cold stones.

  After nine P.M., Mr. Cuppertino came in with a white paper bag of sandwiches in one hand and something in his other that I recognized: my spiral notebook. He put them both on the kitchenette table and spread the food onto two napkins under the hanging lamp: pastrami sandwiches, dill pickles, and two paper cups of coffee with sugar packets. Mr. Cuppertino sat down and touched his fingertips together. “Let’s eat something,” he said. His eyes were bright, tired. I went to the window and peeked out yet again, and this time I saw my Nissan right in front of my room. “Oh my God.”

  “It’s your car,” he said. “Isn’t it? It’s in the story as your car. I got it back.”

  I sat with him. “What?”

  He tapped the thick notebook in which I had written what I had written. “I’m sorry. It’s not my custom to go into a guest’s room, but in this case I needed to be sure about what I was going to do.”

  I was sitting down again, dislocated, my heart lifting at my shoulders and neck. “I’ve made ten mistakes, big ones,” I said. “I had a sore love for the woman involved. It was the wrong thing.”

  Mr. Cuppertino closed his hands like a book and delivered me a long hard look. “Well, my friend, this has been a good month for me in a dismal year as shitty as I’ve known. I told you that Mickey’s death was bad news, but you should have seen the seven months before. She was an angel and she died, so I figure what I just did to reclaim your vehicle ranks as real small change.” He leaned back and pulled his old pistol from his pocket and placed it on my notebook. “When you walked up to the old El Sol a month ago, Joey Cuppertino was about giving it up.” He worked his fingers against his closed eyes and went on. “I started to figure you might want to stay on. We could paint this place and plan our trip out to California. That’d be good for both of us.” He lifted half of his sandwich and tipped it once at me before taking a bite. “You could move into Unit 12 at the end with the big kitchen. Old Globe is dusty and dry but, Eugene, there’s worse.”

  So we painted our way through the old El Sol, unit by unit. We started every day right after The Price Is Right “You know what the toughest item in a showcase is?” he asked me.

  “A boat,” I said. “I’ve seen some big-money boats.”

  “A trip,” he said. “Seven days in Egypt; that could be anything.”

  When I told him I was not going to jump up and down and act like an idiot, he told me to relax. “If we jump, we jump.” He’s right. You can’t really tell how you’ll react until you get there.