Battleborn: Stories

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  Magda was trying with no luck to teach Milo to fetch a stick, oblivious to the dazzle going on behind her. When they’d dismounted from the truck that afternoon, Milo was sulking under the porch. It was Magda who finally coaxed her out. She’d used his Leatherman to cut the thorns off the mesquite branch she was now hurling into the rocky yard. But Milo only ambled over to the stick, lay down beside it and soothed her bloody gums by gnawing on it for a while. Magda was stubborn. She slapped her thighs and said, “Come, Milo. Milo, come!” over and over again. When the dog finally did come, she came slow and stickless. Finally, Magda lost hope. She sat beside Harris and looked out on the lake bed. “What were you doing out there?” she said.

  “I live out here.”

  “You live here. What were you doing out there?”

  He thought a while. “I’ll show you,” he said. “Stay right here. Don’t move.”

  He went around the back of the truck and muscled the old tailgate down, an action that seemed to get more difficult each year. Harris had been coming out to the lake bed every July fifth, searching for fireworks near the burnt remains of plywood and grocer’s pallets, since 1968, when he was one of those wild jackasses. Since he woke up with an ache behind his eyes and realized he’d left a paycheck’s worth of Roman candles out on the lake bed and called his future ex-wife, Carrie Ann, and whispered into the phone so his mother wouldn’t hear, “Morning, Honeybee. Where’d you stash my keys?” He told Magda all this, more or less.

  “You had a wife?” she said. “Where is she now?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. Then, “Sacramento.”

  “City girl.”

  “I guess.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was a long time ago.” He turned to the girl, gripping a shell pack as big as his torso. The Man-O-War.

  For the next forty minutes, Harris scrambled up and down the adjacent hill setting the fireworks, sometimes returning to the shed for a tube of PVC pipe, sandpaper or duct tape. His back flared as he bent to wedge a stub of pipe into the ground or twist two fuses together. His sinuses stung with the brackish smell of sulfur. He glanced down the hill at Magda. She sat on the first porch step, leaning back, her arms propped behind her. He saw Carrie Ann sitting in that same spot, waiting for him to get home, passing her time knitting or shucking corn. Harris pressed the image below the horizon of his mind. They were fine now, him and Carrie. She’d gotten her baby. Harris sent the child birthday cards with fifty-dollar savings bonds inside. Love, Uncle Bud, they read. He couldn’t complain, not in good conscience. They’d been given a second chance, Carrie and he, and were free to do with it what they pleased.

  With the fuse hissing behind him, he hurried down the hill and sat beside Magda. She had her T- shirt lifted up under her breasts and one palm pressed to her bare stomach. She was bent, examining her midsection, looking for something.

  “Watch,” he said, nodding to his handiwork on the hill.

  But she kept her face turned down to her abdomen. “It’s probably dead, don’t you think?”

  “Come on, now,” he said, too late to be of comfort. “Don’t think like that.”

  “It is,” she said. “I know it.” He began to speak, but the first shell ignited then and shot into the air above them, sparks streaming behind it. They both started at the sound and Harris, with the quickness of a gasp, put his arm around Magda. The little comet went dark for a moment, then exploded—boom—into a sizzle so big it seemed to light the whole sky. The sound ricocheted around the valley and returned to them—boom.

  “See that?” he said. “That green? That’s barium powder.” He pressed her into him and held her there. She did not pull away.

  Another shell rocketed into the sky—boom—raining down a brilliant hissing red.

  He bent his face to her ear. “Strontium,” he whispered.

  “I’ll be glad,” she said. “If it’s dead, this will all be over.”

  He held her tighter and said only, “Shh,” before the next shell shot up, even higher than the others, as if propelled by the sound. It expanded—boom. Multicolored tendrils radiated from the center and made loops in the air like buzzards, descending. Silence took root between them.

  A fourth shell and a fifth shot from the hill. They burst—boom—boom—into two spheres of light, one a steady-burning fountain of blue, and the other wiry spokes of purple turning orange.

  “What’s that one?” Magda whispered.

  “The blue is copper,” he said. “Pure ground copper.”

  The last four shells whizzed into the air, all at once. When they burst—boom—boom—boom—boom—Magda jumped a little and buried herself into him. Harris turned to see her face, his home, the whole wide valley lit by dazzling yellow light. He held her.

  “And that one?” she whispered.

  “That,” he said. “That’s gold.”

  • • •

  That night, Harris watched her sleep. His own worn bedsheet was roped around her, twisted through her arms and between her legs. Alone in his bed—he had insisted—she looked delicate as a salt crystal. Moonlight fell in through the window, catching the angles of the specimens on the nightstand. In this light her belly looked bigger. Was that possible? In these few days? Or was she right? His wife had said, I knew it. I felt the baby go. Had that stupid kid done the job? No. Though he’d seen what the boy did to her, saw with his own eyes the blood bloomed up under her skin—she looked bigger. She did. She would need a doctor. A hospital. He would make the calls. They would drive to Reno. The doctor would tell her, Yes, you are getting bigger. The doctor would tell her, It is not over. It is only just beginning. She would need vitamins. Though he knew better, deep down in the bedrock of himself, he couldn’t help it. He thought, She will need a stroller. She will need a car seat. How the barren cling to the fertile. We, he thought, we will need a crib.

  • • •

  Harris took one last pull on his cigarette and stubbed it out on the sole of his boot. It was morning. He dropped the butt into the Folgers can. He would wake Magda soon, tell her to get dressed, that they were going to Reno. But instead of going inside, he scanned the lake bed, as he had every day since she came to him. From where the house was perched, high up on the alluvial fan, the valley below seemed to unfurl and flatten like a starched white sheet. The sun was rising, illuminating the peaks of the Last Chance Range to the west, starting its long trip across the Black Rock. He stopped. Something was different in the distance. A small white cloud of dust billowed on the horizon. It grew. At its eye was a speck. A truck.

  “Morning,” said Magda, startling Harris as she joined him on the porch. She caught sight of the dust cloud unfurling below them and squinted. “What’s that?”

  “You tell me,” said Harris. “Probably been crossing the lake bed since sunup. Circling right about where I found you.”

  “Oh, fuck,” she said. “It’s my dad.” She began to pace the porch like a wild animal. “Fuck, fuck. Fuck.” She looked as though she might cry.

  Then, as if it had heard her, the truck turned toward Route 40, toward Red’s Road, the washed-out path that dead-ended at Harris’s driveway. His heart beat like a herd of mustangs charging at his rib cage.

  “Get in the house,” he told her. “He doesn’t know you’re here. Go to the bedroom. Shut the door. Don’t come out. I’ll take care of it.” He half believed this.

  The truck lumbered up the long, steep gravel driveway, the way you’d drive if you were concerned about dusting out your neighbors. Harris rummaged frantically through a wheelbarrow. He found a large hunk of iron ore, heavy and angular, easy to grip.

  He kept the ore in his right hand and sorted through the rocks with his left, wanting to seem busy when the man arrived. He organized the rocks in piles on the ground according to size. The truck was halfway up
the driveway—close enough to see them—when Harris heard the swing and schwack of the screen door. He tried not to turn too quickly, but jerked his head, panicked, only to see Milo ambling out to him. He almost hit her.

  The truck—a black Ram, a dually with some sort of decal looping across the rear window—stopped at the edge of what Harris considered his yard. A man climbed out. He wore a rodeo buckle the size of a serving platter, a wide cream-colored Stetson, sunglasses and ornately tooled caiman shit kickers.

  Harris knew the man. His name was Castaneda. Juan, Harris thought, though he couldn’t be sure. He’d worked with him at the mine. He was a foreman, like Harris.

  They’d spoken. On breaks in the pit. On the Newmont bus back into town. They’d talked sports—Pack football, March Madness. They’d discussed the fine tits on the teenage girl behind the counter at the Shell station where they parked. Castaneda had talked about his kids. Harris had seen pictures, grimy creased things pulled from a leather billfold. All girls. Beautiful, Harris had said, and meant. And this man, he’d smiled wide as the ocean and said, I know. Harris gripped the ore so tight his fingertips went white.

  “Morning,” said Harris. Then, too quickly, “Help you?”

  “Morning,” said Castaneda, removing his hat but leaving his sunglasses. There was not a gray hair on his head. “Hope so.” He approached with a bounce. “Harris, right? How’s the sweet life, brother?”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “You strike it rich yet?”

  Harris kept sorting, kept his wieldy rock in his right hand. He lifted his head and looked to the man, then to the white-hot lake bed and then, squinting against the sun, to the hill behind his house. At its crest he could just make out the PVC pipes from last night, toppled and scorched. “You come out here to prospect?” he said. “’Cause this is BLM land on all four sides. You’d be digging for Uncle Sam.”

  “Prospect? Ha. No, sir. I’m no rock hound,” said Castaneda. “I’m hunting chukar. Thought an old-timer like you might know the good spots.” Castaneda nodded to his truck.

  “Chukar.” Harris stood upright and faced the man. He wiped sweat from his top lip and caught the acridity of nicotine on his fingers. “Don’t know of no chukar around here.” Because there weren’t any chukar around here, not until White Pine County at least. Only thing you could hunt out here was rattlesnake.

  “Well, shit,” said Castaneda. He reached behind him and adjusted his belt. “Probably got the wrong gun for chukar anyway.” He brought around a revolver, a .44 glinting in the summer sun. He held it limp in his palm, as if he only wanted to show it off. But Harris knew better than that. Standing there with a rock in his hand like a goddamn child, he at least knew better than that.

  Just then, Milo began to snarl and bark. But she didn’t bark at Castaneda, with the gun flat in his palm, looking earnestly to Harris. She was disoriented, maybe heat blind. The dog was barking at Harris.

  Castaneda raised his voice above the dog. “I don’t know what she told you,” he said.

  “Who?” said Harris.

  Milo kept on.

  “Don’t make this hard,” said Castaneda. “She’s a good girl. She’s just got an overactive imagination.”

  A sudden tinny blood taste came to Harris’s mouth. “There’s nobody else here.”

  “Oh?” said Castaneda, smiling now. “You lighting off fireworks all night by yourself then?” He began to laugh. This was where Magda got her laugh. “There’s nowhere else for her to be, brother.”

  Harris took a step toward the man, the ore hot in his hand.

  Castaneda nodded to the rock. “Don’t.”

  “You son of—”

  He raised the hand that held the gun. “You don’t want to take that thought any farther.” Harris stopped.

  Castaneda tucked the gun into the waist of his Wranglers. He walked past Harris, stepping carefully over the piles of specimens where they’d been set in the dirt. An oily aftershave smell followed him. He went into the house. Minutes later—too fast—Castaneda emerged with Magda, his hand on the small of her back. Her face was limestone; it was granite. She did not look at Harris. Castaneda walked her around to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door in the manner of a perfect gentleman.

  “Wait,” she said before getting in. “I want to say good-bye.” Her father nodded and took his hand from her. She walked over to Milo. The dog went quiet. Magda squatted and rustled both her hands behind Milo’s limp ears. She put her mouth to the dog’s muzzle and said something Harris could not hear.

  “She wants to stay,” Harris called in a strange-sounding voice.

  Casteneda grinned and turned to Magda. “Is that so?”

  Magda shook her head and looked to Harris pityingly, as though it was he who needed her.

  Harris gripped the iron ore. Why not? he wanted to ask her. But he knew. What could this place give to anyone?

  Magda returned to her father’s truck. Castaneda took her hand and helped her in. Before he shut the door he smiled at his daughter and rubbed his hand along the back of her neck. It was brief—an instant—but Harris saw everything in the way the man touched her. His hand on her bare neck, the tips of his stout fingers along the black baby hairs at her nape, then under the collar of her shirt. His shirt. From where he stood, he saw all this and more.

  The truck pulled away and began its descent to the bald floor of the valley. Milo resumed her barking. Harris told her to shut up, but she went on. Rhythmic, piercing, incessant. The old man had never heard anything so clearly. He felt a steady holy pressure building in him, like a vein of water running down his middle was freezing and would split his body in two. He lunged at the dog. He wanted ore to skull. He wanted his shoulder burning, his hand numb. He wanted the holes that had been her ear and eye growing wider, becoming one, bone crumbling in on itself like the walls of a canyon carved by a river. He wanted wanted wanted.

  He took hold of the scruff of the dog’s neck. He tried to pin her beneath his legs but she yelped and wormed free, and instead he fell back on his ass. He dropped the ore in the dirt. Milo scrambled behind the wheelbarrow where he’d been sorting. He reached up and grabbed the wheelbarrow’s rusted lip and tried to pull himself up. The wheelbarrow tilted toward him, then toppled, sending Harris to the dirt again. Rocks rained down on him. A flare of pain went off in his knee and in the fingers of his left hand, where a slab of schorl crushed them.

  He sat breathing hard, surrounded by heavy, worthless minerals. He took his wrecked fingers into his mouth. Then he fished his Zippo from his pocket and lit a cigarette. He breathed in. Out. The Ram shrank to the blinding white of the lake bed. He stayed there for some time, smoking among the hot alluvial debris, the silt and clay and rocky loam. He watched a fire ant stitch through the gravel and into the shadow of the overturned wheelbarrow; then he watched the truck. A pale cloud of dust behind it swelled, then settled, then disappeared. She was gone. And all the while Milo’s unceasing yowl ricocheted through the valley, returning to him as the boom of the fireworks, the levántate Magda never whispered, the twin cackles of the Hastings brothers bounding over the cattle range, as every sound he’d ever heard.

  THE ARCHIVIST

  There was no salve for the space he left. If there had been—if science had developed an ointment for heartache or a pill for the lovelorn—I wouldn’t have used it. I wanted pain. I wanted cataclysmic anguish. For that, our old ritual.

  So every night I’d get home from my job as a clerk at the public library and draw a bath with water as hot as I could stand. On the kitchen chair beside the tub I’d put a cheap bottle of cab, a book, a pack of cigarettes, a joint and a sleeve of peanut butter cups I’d bought at the Winner’s around the corner, where I bought the wine.

  One night, especially plowed, I called my older sister, Carly. I told her Ezra and I were through. I said,
“For real this time,” which I said every time. She said she’d be right over. “Bring the baby,” I said.

  I waited for Carly in the bath, drinking wine from my blue-flecked enamel camping cup. Once, Ezra called the cup my cowboy mug, and with him gone I couldn’t stop seeing it that way. I felt insufferably rustic whenever I drank from it, and yet I didn’t stop drinking from it. That’s what he did to me: permeated, saturated, submerged me in him. Now, I submerged myself. I surfaced, took a cigarette, and breathed him into my foolish hungry lungs.

  I started smoking the night we met, when Ezra stood up from the bar where we’d been playing video poker, said, “I’m gonna go outside” and put two fingers to his lips, that smoker’s sign language. It looked like he kissed them softly, the thick pads of his fingertips. I had a good man at home, waiting for me. I said, “Me too,” followed him outside and smoked the first cigarette of my life. I was twenty-six. The street was dark except for a Winner’s down the road, glowing like a beacon. Ezra leaned in and gave me a light. Then he pushed my hair back from my face. “I give this a week,” he said. “You?” “Two,” I said. “Tops.” He smiled this absolutely lethal smile and we smoked silently against the quaking of the freeway and the darkened machinery of the recycling plant across the street. I asked my boyfriend to move out the next day. I knew then that I would follow Ezra anywhere he’d let me.

  • • •

  Carly let herself into the apartment and called for me. The baby squealed. Carly lost one of her fallopian tubes to an ectopic pregnancy when she was my age. Between that and her husband Alex’s reversed vasectomy, my niece is a regular miracle. I love her more than a person ought to love one thing.