Claire Watkins - Battleborn - Stories

The Chinaman and his nephew stood on the bank, checking each other for wounds. The boy was trembling. I approached them. They watched me a moment, then fled.

Errol looked from the gash to me. He motioned for me to come to him, but I could not. “You see,” he said, serenely. “It’s so clear. They had it all along.”

I fled. I could not endure the fact of his believing, believing, believing beyond the rotten end. That’s all I can say about it.

XVII. EPILOGUE

When I finally came upon San Francisco Bay, it was so dense with abandoned vessels that their masts made a leafless forest atop the water. I found work as a torch boy for the Knickerbocker Fire Engine Company, and with them I fought the Christmas Eve fire of 1849 and the Saint Valentine’s blaze. When finally I had earned enough money I bought passage aboard a thousand-ton sidewheeler called Apollo , where I was the only human cargo among sacks and sacks of gold bullion. Eventually, I disembarked in Boston Harbor. I intended to return to Ohio from there, but it was many years before I was able to meet my mother, the woman whose son I had abandoned in the wilderness. I went to church, and to school. By the time I had the courage to see her I was a grown man.

While in San Francisco, I read in the California Star that in Angel’s Camp two tongs, father and son, had been captured by a mob of citizens and tried for the crime of robbery and attempted murder. They were hanged, said the report, though I knew that would be their fate the night I sat hiding in the woods above Sacramento, listening to nocturnal beasts moving through the scrub, when the snow ring around the gibbous moon triggered my final augury. As to last words, the Star reported that the tong boy recited a passage of Homer.

In the years following the rush, it became fashionable for Easterners to decorate their parlors with gilt-framed daguerreotypes of forty-niners. In these years I’ve seen many such portraits of Argonauts posed proudly with pan or pick or troy scale, their whiskers cut back in a semblance of civility. Each time I encounter one I hope to see my brother in it, although I know it is unlikely he ever had himself pictured off. And it is a false art, I realize. Most of the men used props on loan from the portraitist. Some were models sitting before drop cloths in New York City. But a great deal of what I like about those faddish daguerreotypes is that they show no trace of the darkness I remember of the diggings, none of the loneliness or the madness or the hunger. Even the pistols in the men’s belts seem tucked there in jest. I’d very much like to see my brother there someday, in his red miner’s shirt with his hat tipped back, a fresh sash at his collar, brandishing a fine new pickax and a lump. I’d like to see him poised at the center of a gleaming gilded frame, as if color was every bit as bountiful as we’d been told. I’d like to see him posed with his endless belief and at last surrounded by bright soft gold. And maybe if I saw him there I might see the Argonaut believer within myself, too, for we looked so similar in the territory.

What I now know of Errol I know from a postcard he sent our mother twenty-five years ago, which was postmarked Virginia City, N.T., and said only that the lode had a hold of him.

We were at a house party last night, Danny, Jules, and me, leaning over a low, sticky coffee table playing Texas Hold ’Em like always, when Danny mentioned that his parents got married in secret up in Virginia City, in the back room of some casino, to escape the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He’d never told me this in all the years we’ve been friends. Jules got stuck on it, saying over and over again, “What? That’s so fucking crazy!”

Danny leaned back and got all quiet and smug the way he does when he knows he has something you want. “You can still see the room.”

And Jules said, “You guys, we have to see this place. This means something. Iris?”

And I was drunk or high or both by then, so I said, “Yeah, sure. We’ll drive up there.”

I meant it then but didn’t this morning, when I woke up to the underwater thuds of a fist pounding on the window of the only bedroom I’ve ever had. I cracked my blinds to see Jules straddling a furrow of my mom’s failed vegetable garden, her fingers folded into metal horns, yelling, “Virginia City! Fuck, yeah!” Danny stood behind her bleary-eyed, holding a Mountain Dew. When Jules gets stuck on something she doesn’t let it go. I used to love that about her.

I drive — I always drive. Jules and Danny sip road beers, him in the front seat of my car, her in the back. Danny turns the music down and asks Jules what’s become of Drew.

I have to strain to pull a memory of Drew — the scene trash Jules went home with last night — to this side of my hangover. Jules mashed into the couch with a skinny boy in tight pants, hibiscus flowers and sparrows and bug-eyed koi creeping up his forearms. Or later, her arm looped through mine, nodding indiscreetly to where the guy stood by the door with his coat on, drinking a tallboy, waiting. Jules yelling over the music to Danny, saying she didn’t need a ride home. Drew is a ghost. A placeholder in a parade. Like all of Jules’s boys, Drew is real only to Danny.

“Working,” Jules says. “He’s in that band, the Satellites. You know them.” She gestures with her Coors Light, part of a twelve-pack she stole from the party. “We saw them at XOXO. They opened for that emcee from Sacramento. They’re like indie slash electro slash power pop.”

“Keep that can down,” I say.

“Which one?” asks Danny. “What does he play?”

“I don’t know. Synth? I think there was a keyboard in his room.”

“If I get a ticket you guys are paying it.”

“Synth,” says Danny. “You sure? Where does he work?”

He’s trying to make her admit something. He should know better. Jules has never been ashamed of sleeping around. That would defeat the purpose. She shrugs and sips her beer, looking out her window at the gnarled piñon pines clinging to the mountainside, or Reno down beyond the guardrail, shrinking away from us.

Danny takes a drink. “You don’t even know where he works?”

She smirks at me in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t have a chance to ask.”

“How was it?” Danny’s only ever been with one girl. He’s twenty-four years old and still fascinated by the fact that people sometimes fuck people with whom they aren’t in love. This is what he likes to hear — the anonymity, the baseness, how a person can do what Jules does. A good friend, she is always willing to oblige.

“Not bad,” she says. “Oral, oral, missionary, doggie-style, money shot. Nothing flashy.”

Poor Danny. He lives with his parents and Jules is the kind of girl who makes sure every man she meets falls in love with her, in case he comes in handy later. She tilts her beer on end, finishing it. Danny does the same.

“Keep that shit down,” I say. Then, because I sound, just for a moment, like the me I was before Jules, I say, “The Satellites are basically a sloppy Joy Division cover band.”

She shrugs and looks out the window. “They are what they are.”

I met Jules in our capstone seminar the fall before we graduated. She was a BFA student, a painter. Even though the seminar is basic humanities, you’re supposed to take it within your college. The nursing seminar was full and I didn’t want to wait for the next semester, so I’d begged my adviser to let me into another section. It wasn’t until I got into the art auditorium that I realized how much I hated the other girls in nursing, their white shoes, the face-framing layers in their hair, their gel pens and highlighted, color-coded note cards.