by Skip Horack
Lionel grinned. “Doing the Kerouac thing?”
“I guess.”
“I’ve tried that. You leaving today?”
“Hope not.”
“So don’t.” He slapped at Sam’s ribs and stood. “You two come with me. No sense in staying at this shithole.”
Then Lionel was gone before I could even thank him. I moved my bags and the dog bowls to my trunk, and he sat in his diesel dually pickup while I went to see Bev. She lit a long cigarette when I came through the door, looked put out that Lionel hadn’t murdered me. I laid my key on the counter, and she pointed her cigarette at me like a wand. I waited for her to speak, but she never did. The glowing tip of her menthol was tracing tiny circles in the air between us.
“All right,” I told her. “This has been fun.”
The weather outside was nice. Cold but not too cold. I started the LeBaron and followed Lionel onto the highway, then we cut left and crossed over the railroad tracks. He was driving a red Dodge. A sunbaked sticker on the bumper read KEEP NEVADA WILD!, and the double tires on the rear axle gave the dually a tarantula quality. It was a giant red spider, skittering.
Sam had his head hanging out the window, taking it all in with me. The day before, the salt flats of Utah had rattled him. As we crossed that white wasteland from time to time he would peek at me with a look like, Hey, um, are you seeing all this?
And that was the same look he gave me when we reached Lionel’s trailer. It sat on a dust lot next door to a small vinyl-sided building doing business as Rhonda’s Ranch. A ramshackle scrap-wood deck wrapped around the trailer, as if the single-wide had come crashing down atop a kid’s clubhouse. Upright sheets of corrugated tin fenced the length of one property line —a windbreak, I figured —but Lionel’s border with Rhonda’s Ranch was free and clear.
Lionel parked his truck by some cinder-block steps that led up to the deck, and I stopped in the road. He slid from the cab onto the hardpan, then kicked a ball of chicken wire that went bouncing across the lot like a silver tumbleweed. A pair of soil-filled washtubs were sprouting high thistle, and he signaled for me to squeeze the LeBaron in between them, pumping both arms, a marshaler directing a plane into a hangar.
A cockroach came struggling out of a dashboard vent, one of those thumb-sized, hairy-legged tree roaches. A stowaway that had probably been living within the guts of the LeBaron since before I left Grand Isle. I looked over at Sam, expecting him to pounce, but he was still watching me. “We’re doing this,” I said. And Sam kept on staring, listening but not understanding, as I lifted my foot off the brake and we made our way forward.
Two couches took up most of the space in the living room of the trailer, but there were also books and bookshelves everywhere. There was no TV, just a radio in one corner playing outlaw country, a computer looping through a psychedelic screen saver in the other. Both couches were covered in a brown, leatherette material that was ripped in places and showing synthetic clouds of white batting. Thin gold curtains masked the windows, tinting the sunlight amber, and stationed between the couches was a long, low coffee table made entirely of welded iron.
Lionel pointed at the table. “Watch out for that,” he said. “It’s a shin buster, savvy?”
We each sat down on a couch, and Sam laid himself on the caramel carpet, his back pushed against the door. Lionel took off his cowboy hat and placed it among the paperbacks spread across the iron coffee table. Thrillers and mysteries mainly, plus some field guides for animals and plants. His blond hair was longer than I’d realized —longer than mine, even —but he had it tied up in a messy screw of a topknot. A ceiling fan above us was rotating slowly, and all those books gave the trailer the musty smell of a library, a Cybermobile. Sam had shut his eyes, and I asked if it was all right for him to be in there with us.
“Leave him be,” said Lionel. “He’s fine.”
“You really don’t care?”
“I really don’t.”
“It’ll be two nights at most. If that’s okay, I mean.”
He nodded and removed a can of Copenhagen from the front pocket of his shirt. “You thirsty? Water? Pop? Milk?” He tapped the side of the can against his belt buckle, then whipped his hand, thumping his index finger on the lid to pack the tobacco tight. He waved the can at me, but I passed.
“Maybe some water,” I said.
“Sure thing.”
He twisted the metal lid off the can, then maneuvered a wedge of Copenhagen behind his bottom lip. Once he had his dip situated he replaced the lid and snapped his fingers to clean them. Specks of fine cut careened off the coffee table like fleas at war. He’d already grabbed himself a Dixie cup to spit in, lining the inside with a paper towel to keep it from spilling or splashing, and now he went into the kitchen and filled a plastic bowl with water. He placed the bowl on the carpet beside Sam, doubled back to the sink and topped off a glass jar for me.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the water from him.
“Yup.” Lionel returned to the couch opposite mine. He’d untied his hair, and it was hanging in his face now. He flicked his head back, then spit into his cup. “Ouch. How’d you lose that?” He was looking at my left hand.
“Working. Out on a rig in the Gulf.”
“I imagine that’d do it.” He rolled the spit cup against his cheek and frowned. “So you’ve come to talk to me about your brother.”
“Yeah. And again, I’m sorry for dropping in on you like this. Just seemed easier than calling or writing or whatever.”
“Driving to Nevada is easier?”
“No. But I don’t have to be in San Francisco till Thursday, and I thought you might still be living here. It wasn’t that far out my way to swing by.”
“Not truly on your way though neither. Not from Louisiana. And how come now? All these years later?”
I took a sip of water. “Because Tommy has maybe got a kid in San Francisco, and I wanted —”
“A kid? What?”
“The mother tracked me down six weeks ago.”
He rocked back on the couch, laughing. “You’re lying! That smooth-dog!”
I shook my head. “She says Tommy went home with her from some beach party in San Diego one night, and y’all shipped out not long after that.”
“And you’ve been talking to them?”
There was no soft way to explain all my amateur detective work, so I kept things vague. “Not that much with the daughter. But yeah, the mother and I have been.”
“They’re needing money, that or one of your kidneys. You’re caught in some psyops.”
“It was all my idea, going out there.”
“It’s still fucking weird.” He ran his hand across his mustache. “What all you know about the mother?”
“She’s a poet. Teaches at San Francisco State.”
“Oh boy. She married?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“What’s her name? I was king of the beach party.” He picked up one of the books on the coffee table. The Shape of the Journey, it was called. “And I read some poetry now and again too.”
“Nancy Hammons.”
“Never heard of her. Christ. San Francisco, poet. Gonna be a wild ride.”
“You’ve been there?”
“I’ve been everywhere, man.” He tossed The Shape of the Journey back on the table. “Suppose it’s true what’s she’s claiming —want some advice?”
“Yeah. I know. Run the other way.”
“Then I won’t say no more.” He scratched at the side of his neck. “You seem like a frayed rope. How old are you?”
“Thirty in January.”
He smiled. “That mama chose a bad time to fling this at you. Thirty packs a sting. Shit, I was a Mormon before I turned thirty. A good one, in fact. I’d door-to-doored for the LDS in God-awful, fecking B
elfast for two years.”
“I’m working through it.”
“It’s the day-to-day living that wears you out. Any idiot can face a crisis.”
I nodded. “True enough.”
“Chekhov. Read them Russkies, Roy. Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. They teach us how to suffer like men. Copy?”
“Copy,” I said, thinking of my Russian. Viktor.
Lionel whacked at the coffee table with the toe of his boot. “I don’t have any pictures of him or the guys or nothing. I was never keen on all that.”
“That’s okay,” I said. Hell, I couldn’t even look at that FOR OUR TOMMY album yet. “I just thought we could talk some.”
“I’m in.” He put on his hat. “But let’s go out back.”
I followed him outside and saw five long dog kennels lined up across the rear of his property, right where the dust of his lot ended and flat scrubland began. As Sam presented behind us there came the howl of multiple hounds, heads bent back as they moaned, but Lionel whistled and they quit. He sank into a rusty folding chair, and I did the same. We were sitting side by side now. Rhonda’s Ranch was off to the left, close enough to hit with a rock.
Sam lay down on the deck between us, contemplating the hounds, caged brothers and sisters who seemed to want him for their prison gang. “My mountain lion dogs,” said Lionel. He skipped his thumb along Sam’s spine. “Treeing Walkers.”
“You’re still a hunting guide?”
“Only sometimes. Trying to get back into it, by and by. I let life get away from me for a while there, spent some lost years in the bottle.” He wiggled his spit cup. “Things I could keep a grip on in the navy eventually got too slippery.”
I was fishing for something to say but coming up empty.
“Are you a drinker?” he asked.
“Not to where I can’t not.”
“Good man.”
Morning had faded and the day was warming, the sky a few shades lighter than Lionel’s turquoise shirt. Not far from the kennels stood a large work shed constructed from the same corrugated tin as the windbreak running to our right. The shed’s wide doors were chained and padlocked. I looked over at Lionel. “Why did you call him Ahab earlier?”
“Ahab was what he went by.”
“But what about Orion?”
“The constellation?”
“No. As his nickname.”
He shook his head. “No way anybody would ever get called that. We weren’t X-Men.”
“You told us it was Orion. I’m not wrong.”
“Who’s us?”
“Me and my parents.”
“Nice folks, your parents. They know you’re here?”
I told him about Mom and Dad, and he winced.
“Fuck, man. Orion? Don’t recall ever saying that. Sorry. Sixteen years is a long time.”
I was getting frustrated. “Tell me about Ahab, then. Why that?”
A Peterbilt had rolled into the gravel lot behind Rhonda’s Ranch. I watched the rig’s rawboned driver walk around to the front door of the windowless building and go inside. A long while passed before Lionel spoke. Long enough to make me wonder if he was about to lie to me.
“Okay,” he said. “You need to understand, those names some of us got pinned with, they didn’t mean jack, not really. School, they called me. As in Old School, because I was older. Before that it was Cowboy.” He plucked his finger against the brim of his hat. “So I want you to know it’s not rocket surgery.”
Just then, beneath a WIFI AVAILABLE HERE sign, a side door to Rhonda’s Ranch opened and a grown woman in pigtails waved at us. She was wearing a short plaid skirt and white knee socks.
“Trick or treat,” said Lionel.
“That’s tomorrow.”
“Every day be Halloween over there. They got costume after costume.”
The trucker came out with the woman, and they walked to his rig, climbed up into the cab. The door slammed shut, and Lionel spit. “If the gal’s willing, some dudes prefer that,” he explained. “Don’t like making it on a whorehouse mattress.”
I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about that lingerie girl Sierra. What a world. A place where money can buy you pretty much whatever. A bride, even.
The Walker hounds were at it again, but this time Lionel didn’t hush them. “I’d been nine years on the West Coast when your brother was awarded his Trident and assigned to my platoon in Team FIVE,” he said. “Then the kid was on operator fast track once Saddam invaded Kuwait. Most of the already-deployed SEALs were stuck in the Philippines or floating on amphibs with Marines, and none of them were gonna be sprung for the desert. So uncommitted, on-deck stateside platoons were the first ones to go, by and large, and we got sped through the final phases of our pre-deployment workup so we could head over.” Lionel turned his chair to face mine. “He was my baby boy. I was the one who dubbed him Ahab.”
“Ahab like in Moby Dick?”
“Nah. Ahab like in ‘Ahab the A-rab’ by Ray Stevens.”
“The country singer who had all the joke songs?”
“They weren’t all joke songs. The man recorded ‘Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down’ before either Kristofferson or Cash.” Lionel made double fists and started punching them together. “So there was a one-star carrier group commander up at North Island, old Vietnam jet-jock type, uglier than a hat full of assholes, but he had this daughter. Misty. Crazy gal, but a fine thing. She came home from college for the summer and was living with Daddy in Coronado. Ahab wouldn’t ever talk about it, but rumor was MPs caught him and Misty somewhere they had no business being, doing the deed. They decided to spare him from having his balls cut off —but then one of them told me, and from then on, I’d see your brother, especially around any officers, I’d sing a Ray Stevens song. Not ‘Misty,’ that would’ve been too obvious, but the rest of them. ‘The Streak,’ ‘Harry the Hairy Ape,’ that one about the squirrel getting loose in the church.”
“And ‘Ahab the A-rab.’ ”
“Bingo. Before long we all just settled on that. He pulled chicks, Ahab. He could get laid in the middle of Temple Square.”
I waited for Lionel to keep going, but he was through. It was only the hounds now. They worked themselves into one last frenzy, then shut down as well.
“Yup,” said Lionel. “It’s a nothing story. I probably thought Orion would seem bigger.”
I nodded, but in truth I did like hearing about Tommy sneaking around with a girl. The chapter of his life that came after Dry Springs but before he was summoned to war. There were two Tommys. The rural, bangs-in-the-face rebel I am so afraid of forgetting, and the on-top-of-the-world, cut-from-iron SEAL I barely even knew.
“Okay, but that wasn’t all you said to me. You remember?”
He shrugged. “I did a lot of drinking that trip. I remember that.”
“You said he went out like a hero. Those were your exact words, more or less.”
“Really?”
“If there’s stuff you’re not supposed to tell, I understand —but I swear it would stay with me.”
Lionel crossed his arms and leaned forward. “There’s nothing to tell. It was after dark, and we were on a mission rehearsal when a chip light came on in our helo. Mayday, autorotation. But the pilots still had some control over her, so the crew chief ordered us out with him before they’d have to ditch and do their egress. Ahab must’ve hit the water too hard and blacked, got swept off by the current. I don’t know.”
“That’s the same as what the navy told us.”
“Well, that was what happened. I’m sorry, man. You were just a kid. It’s like me saying his name was Orion, I’d wager. My drunk ass thinking something bigger might be better for you.”
I made a quick, laughing sound. “For half my life I’ve been carrying around what you told me th
at night.”
“Fuck.” Lionel stomped his boot on the plywood of the deck. “Still, that don’t mean he wasn’t a hero —having it go like it did.”
He seemed upset, and I doubted he was acting. Not now, at least. His eyes were on the deck, and he looked as if he was waiting to be sentenced. This wasn’t what I had wanted. I had no intention of crossing the country just to spread poison. Lionel had been Tommy’s friend. For all I knew he had told me what I’d needed to hear back then.
“It’s all right,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
I passed most of the day in the shed with Lionel, helping him install KC lights across the hardtop of a jeep he kept parked in there. A two-seater military Willys from the forties, about as simple to monkey with as a lawn mower.
It was nice to take it easy and work at a problem I knew could be solved. Earlier Lionel had pointed to a far range of high mountains and told me they were the Rubies. Apparently he spent a lot of time with his Willys in those mountains, and I’d been lucky to catch him in town. He said he paid a kid down the road to collect his mail and tend to the hounds whenever he was away —his own little Jack Hebert —and besides monthly bills to send out and retirement checks to deposit, that was about it for Lionel’s obligations and responsibilities.
I’ve heard some say that there are water people and mountain people, and though a man might certainly enjoy both, his soul is forever aligned with one or the other. If that is true, then with me it’s water. I appreciate the beauty of mountains, but after a while among them I’m sure I would ache from an awareness of being landlocked, hemmed in. Even on an oil rig, with all of us living on top of one another, no real privacy to be found, I could look at Gulf waters and feel a loosening.
Lionel, on the other hand, clung to mountains. He’d let on that he was almost two years sober thanks to AA, and that once he got sick and tired of always being sick and tired, nature —more specifically, the Ruby Mountains —had been his choice for a higher power. Something greater than himself. He told me he found solitude without loneliness in the mountains, and I remember the way he squinted at those distant Rubies while we talked. Like he couldn’t wait for our conversation to end so he could bolt up there before winter snows came. I sensed he had gotten more than his fill of water during his career in the navy, and I’ll admit that what freedom I see in sparkling depths is mostly an illusion. That water traps me more than it liberates me. That gazing from some island or some rig, I’m not any more free than a man staring out the window of a jail cell. But you are what you are.
