At the Jim Bridger: Stories (20 page)

Some afternoons Mr. Cuppertino would come out between arrivals and sit by me, and he told me about the various changes the place had seen under his hand. There had been an old swimming pool in the center of the courtyard which was now a patch of grass. It had been nothing but trouble. He told me the years and the colors he’d painted the place, red, turquoise, and the tan it was now. He showed me places on the old metal chairs in which we sat where those layers could be seen in the scratches. He’d been at the El Sol forty-five years and now his wife was dead and he wondered why even bother. A car would pull under the metal shade canopy off the office and Mr. Cuppertino would push himself out of the chair and say, “I’ll go over and get my thirty-two bucks from these folks and be right back.”

He had asked me what I was between, was I married, where was I headed, but I’d ducked most of it saying I was taking some time before heading home to Montana. I made the Montana part up; I just wanted someplace cold that would be understandable to avoid. But I also realized I made the home part up, too, because sitting there at the El Sol was pretty much it for me. My bridges were burned and reburned, and I was fairly sure in my scared little heart that those fires would eventually come for me, too.

What I was really doing was handwriting one complete chronological record of the five-week scam by which my associates and I had stolen $5,100 from the River of Gold Casino outside Incon, New Mexico. I was working on this project from early in the morning dark until about nine or so; I could
only stand to work on the thing in the morning. I had a packet of notes I’d made on envelopes before I even knew what I was going to do with them, and my leaky memory, warped as it was by my love for that woman. I’d sit in the morning dark and write down in my new green spiral notebook everything that happened on September 5 and then everything that was said or done on September 6 and then where we were and how the plan evolved on each of the days, which were still so alive in my mind. So alive that it upset me to write them, yet I had to write them. I could never do a complete day in a morning. I kept thinking that I was working too slow, but it was the only way I could continue. Every time I mentioned someone, I wrote out the full name, such as Leo Rosemont or Baby Grayson, and when I came to my name I wrote it out full, too. I quoted what they said and what they were wearing. By the end of October at the El Sol I was halfway through September.

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.