Claire Watkins: Battleborn: Stories

It was a fine party, good food. I wore a poufy emerald green cocktail dress with pink flats, a pink ribbon in my hair. My friends, trying their very best for normalcy, sometimes pointed across the room and asked, “Claire, sweetheart, did you bring your auntie? You look just like her.”

“Oh, no,” I would say, swallowing the last bit of prosciutto or salmon dip or whatever it was. “That’s Razor Blade Baby. She goes everywhere with me.”

That night Razor Blade Baby and I left the party and started our walk back to 315 Lake. It had been raining heavily up in the Sierras for two days straight, and the Truckee was raging — the highest I’d ever seen it. The water was milky and opaque, and in it tumbled massive logs that had probably lain on the river’s bed unmoved for years. Across the bridge two concrete stumps with rebar worming out the tops stood on either side of the street like sentinels, all that was left of the original arch. We stood there for a long while, Razor Blade Baby and I, sort of hypnotized with the high water thrashing by, not sure whether it was safe to cross or what we’d do when we reached the other side. I imagined taking very small steps down the wet, slippery bank and wading into the current, my pockets weighed down with silver.

At home I got stoned and thought — as I often do after tracing my fingers over the frosted glass of my cabinets, my butcher-block countertops, sanded and varnished by his hands, all that’s left of him, in my life anyway — of calling J. But I was no more capable of giving him what he needed than I was the day he left.

I didn’t call. Instead I smoked myself deeper into oblivion and watched my hot breath billow at the ceiling, Razor Blade Baby no doubt on the other side, and fell asleep.

• • •

I believe I fell in love with one of them, these producers. He e-mailed me, said his name was Andrew, that he wanted to have dinner and talk about a film he wanted to make about my father, about how he was Charlie’s number two in charge (true), how he came to live in an abandoned shack in the desert (true), how he got sober and testified against Charlie, then fell off the wagon again, blacked out, and woke up in a van, on fire (mostly true). I agreed to let him buy me dinner, as it is almost always my principle to do.

I met Andrew at Louis’ Basque Corner on Fourth Street. Razor Blade Baby came along. I take all the movie guys to Louis’, or I used to before Andrew. Now I take them to Miguel’s off Mount Rose, also very tasty.

“What’s good here?” he said. He had an easy, loose smile.

“Picon Punch,” I said. “If you come here and don’t order the Picon Punch, you didn’t really come here.” This was my bit. My Picon Punch bit.

Picon Punch is the deep brown of leather oil. Only the Basques know what’s in it, but we all have a theory — rum, licorice root and gin; top-shelf rye with club soda and three drops of vanilla extract; well vodka, gin and a splash of apple juice; Seagram’s, scotch and a ground-up Ricola cough drop — all theories equally plausible, none of them the truth. One Picon Punch will make you buy another. Two is too many. That night we had three each.

For dinner we ordered the sweetbreads and two Winne-mucca coffees and ate at the bar playing video poker, Deuces Wild. Razor Blade Baby played Ms. Pac-Man in the back.

We talked quietly, closely. Every once in a while Razor Blade Baby floated over and stood at my elbow. I did my best to shoo her away. I gave her another roll of quarters and found myself leaning into Andrew. He smelled of strong stinging cinnamon, like a smoker who tried hard to hide it.

A casino can make an average man lovely. The lights are dim, the ceiling low and mirrored. The machines light his face from below in a soft sweet blue. As they turn to reveal themselves on the screen, the electric playing cards reflect in his eyes as quick glints of light. The dense curtain of cigarette smoke filters the place fuzzy, as if what the two of you do there isn’t actually happening. As if it were already in the past. As if your life wasn’t a life but an old nostalgic movie. Duel in the Sun , perhaps. You don’t want to know what a casino can do to a man already lovely.

It wasn’t long before we were turned facing each other, and my right leg, dangling off my stool, found its way between his legs, nestled into his groin. We finished off the sweetbreads with our hands, sopping the small sinewy pieces of young lamb glands in onion sauce.

He asked about my father. I wanted to tell him what I told you, but that’s nothing that can’t be found in a book, a diary, a newspaper, a coroner’s report. And there is still so much I’ll never know, no matter how much history I weigh upon myself. I can tell you the shape of the stain left by H. T. P. Comstock’s brain matter on the wooden walls of his cabin, but not whether he tasted the sour of the curse in his mouth just before he pulled the trigger. I can tell you the backward slant of Himmel Green’s left-handed cursive, but not whether Leo loved him back. I can tell you of the silver gleam of Helen Spahn’s tumors, but not whether she felt them growing inside her. I can tell you of the view from George’s front porch, of the wide yellow valley below, but not what he saw after he went blind. I can tell you the things my father said to lure the Manson girls back to Spahn’s Ranch, but I can’t say whether he believed them. I can tell you the length and width and number of the cuts on my mother’s wrists, and the colors her skin turned as they healed, but I couldn’t say whether she would do it again, or when. Everything I can say about what it means to lose, what it means to do without, the inadequate weight of the past, you already know.

But the whiskey in our coffees was doing its job. I was feeling loose. So I told him what I could. I told him of the heavy earth scent after a desert rain, three or four times a year. That it smelled like the breathing of every thankful desert plant, every plot of soil, every unfound scrap of silver. That it had a way of softening you, of making you vulnerable. That it could redeem.

After dinner we watched Razor Blade Baby until she killed off her last life. Andrew walked us out to our bikes and helped us unchain them. He kissed me then, or rather we kissed each other, right in front of Razor Blade Baby. It was an inevitable kiss. A kiss like I had caught the hem of my skirt on the seat of my bike while trying to mount it, and toppled. A kiss like we had fallen into each other, which I suppose we had.

Afterward, Razor Blade Baby and I rode home to 315 Lake, headlights lighting us from behind. When I closed my front door, my cell phone rang.

“Come outside.” It was Andrew, his voice breathy, sweetly slurred.

“What?”

My doorbell buzzed. I pulled the curtain of my living room window aside, saw him swaying slightly on the porch, glowing phone pressed to his ear.

“Or come and live with me,” he said.

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“So are you. Let me in. We’ll move to L.A., down by the ocean. You can ride your bike up and down the coast. Or forget L.A., we can live here, in the mountains. In the desert. Whatever this is. That thing you said about the rain. You and me, Claire. Just let me in.”

And I wanted to let him in. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I was swaying now and reached for the wall to steady myself, trying to stop the swirl of Picon in my head, my chest. Tried not to think of the words written there under the paint. When you go, all that matters is who’s there with you. Believe me. I rested my head against the front door and wanted badly to open it. But the story was too much, wherever I began: the borrowed revolver on the floor of a cabin near Bozeman, Montana. The sweet sizzle of Himmel Green’s skin as it melted into Leopold’s. Helen Spahn’s withering uprooted tendrils. Bottles’s dry bleached bones. My parents’ own toxic and silver-gilded love. Razor Blade Baby, the simple fact of her.