Claire Watkins: Battleborn: Stories

“Dude, but check it,” says Danny, slapping the bar, eating it up. “My dad didn’t care, right? He wanted to get married anyway. But my mom believed that shit, I think. Even though she agreed to marry my dad, she wouldn’t do it in Reno. She said they had to come up here so no one would know. So it could stay secret.”

“Is that what she said?” I want to know. We’re done eating, just picking at Jules’s fries. Why hasn’t Danny told me this before?

He shakes his head. “My dad told me. My mom doesn’t talk about it.”

Our check comes. Bernie the barkeep says our drinks are on the house. Thanks a million, Bernie.

Outside, the boardwalk and the street are crowded. We’ve just missed a mock gunfight, and the smell of fired blanks still hangs in the air. People are milling around, dazed from the excitement of vigilante justice. Jules and Danny walk ahead of me, weaving through the crowd. We stop to watch two horses pull a covered wagon down Main Street, an old man holding the reins loosely, two sheepish-looking bandits in the back. The horses’ hooves make a satisfying clop-clop on the asphalt. I pull my thin jacket closed. It’s cold up here and it’s only September.

Outside the Silver Queen, a sign promises the actual Silver Queen. We’ve all seen her before, but Jules wants to go. Danny shrugs and says, “Since we’re here.” I’m just glad to get away from the crowd. We walk through the narrow, dim casino to a mural of a woman, at least fifteen feet tall. She’s sort of Frida Kahlo — looking, only white. Her gown is made out of hundreds of the shiniest pure silver dollars you’ll ever see. Rows of them ring her neck and wrists, and stack to make a crown nestled in her brown updo. Jules hands us beers from her purse and takes one for herself. The beer is warm, and something about that warmth feels good.

Jules reads the plaque and tells us the silver is from the first strike of the Comstock Lode, which we already know. The silver dollars glint like the scales of a fish. I want to touch them, but the whole thing’s been covered with Plexiglas to keep people from prying the coins from the wall with their fingers. Who would do something like that? We would.

Jules gives me her camera and poses in front of the mural with her hands on her hips, just like the queen herself. Danny joins her. I set my beer on a stool in front of a slot machine and watch them through the camera’s viewer. They grin, posing with their Silver Bullets in front of the Silver Queen, their arms around each other.

These are my friends. These are the funny, ironic things we do so we can be the kind of funny, ironic people who do them.

I stand way back with the camera, boozy and flushed, listening to the clicks of its machinery and the prerecorded metallic ping, ping of phantom coins emptied from the slot machines. Danny and Jules shift through the poses of old friends, figments of the way we were. I take another step back, trying to get the whole thing in frame.

• • •

Jules and I were friends for a while before I introduced her to Danny. Danny and I had been friends forever, since we were kids. He used to joke that my new friend Jules was imaginary or — hilarious — my secret lover. I didn’t keep them apart on purpose; it seemed then that there was simply no opportunity for us all to get together. But now I know that somewhere in me I never wanted them to meet. I thought that if they had each other they wouldn’t need me. I didn’t want to be left behind.

But we three hit it off. On weekends we bought astronaut ice cream at the planetarium and lay in the grass with our heads resting on each other’s stomachs. We drank from Jules’s flask and felt the chalky sweetness of dehydrated ice cream dissolve on our tongues. Summers we went up to the lake. We swam fifty yards out to the broad flat boulders off Chimney Beach and felt the coarse glacier granite against our bare feet. We jumped into the warm green water, one by one by one. Sometimes Jules and I took off our tops. She flung hers aside and I kept mine balled in my hand. Danny pretended not to notice, or not to care. The three of us lay there on the rocks, letting the sun touch us dry.

Nights we went to little clubs — XOXO, the Green Room, Imperial, the Hideout. We danced together in the pulsing colored lights, shoulder to shoulder, a perfect triangle. We spilled out onto the street or into the alleys for a cigarette or a joint or a bump or just some air. When it was cold, I watched the steam rise from our sweat-soaked bodies, from Jules’s bare arms and shoulders, from the wet slope of Danny’s neck. We walked home together, crunching frost beneath our feet or listening to the early morning songs of birds.

Then, the beginning of our dissolving. Danny and I met up with Jules at a house party last Halloween. By the time we got there she was already wasted. She’d dressed as a robot and her cardboard body was crushed; most of the knobs and gauges that we’d pulled from the busted washing machine in the alley behind her studio and the gas stove in her apartment had been knocked off. She’d developed runs in her shimmery tights and her greasy silver face paint was smeared in places. The day before, Jules had convinced Danny to be Peter Pan. He had a green paper hat with a red feather, and a plastic dagger she’d lifted from a window display at Walgreens. I wasn’t dressed as anything, and all night people kept asking me, “What are you supposed to be?”

Toward the end of the night I found Danny and Jules in the empty kitchen, talking. I sat at the table with them and we had a round of shots from shot glasses shaped like skulls, which Jules later slipped into her purse. Danny and Jules talked about music and art and women Danny knew the year he lived in Berlin. That’s what he called them, women. I knew I shouldn’t, but I hated hearing him say things to her that he’d never said to me. I hated how she listened.

That night Jules went home with one of the sweet-smelling coffee boys from Café Bibo. Afterward, we got free fair-trade lattes for a few Sunday afternoons in a row. But after Jules left, Danny curled up on the rank-ass couch out on these kids’ porch with a bottle of green apple vodka that wasn’t his, saying, “Man, there’s just, fucking, there’s never any time.”

When I walked Danny down the hill to his apartment he was incoherent and stumbling, almost crushing me with his weight. The sun was coming up. I helped him inside and went to get him a glass of tap water and a slice of white bread. That’s all he had. When I came back he’d passed out in his costume. He’d lost his hat. Before I left I took a wet paper towel and in the half-light wiped silver face paint from his neck and hands and mouth. I’ve been waiting for them to leave me behind ever since.

• • •

I can see why Danny’s mom thought even God wouldn’t be able to see her in this little chapel. It’s a secret place, situated in the far back corner of the smoky mirrored labyrinth of the Bonanza. Danny holds the heavy door open for us. I smell him as I walk inside. He looks beautiful in here, in this light.

The chapel is more cave than church. The walls are made of big cold hunks of stone, and the ceiling is so low that I can reach up and touch it. There’s an organ in the corner, two displays of yellowed silk flowers at the altar with milky white candles sticking out of them. There are maybe twenty khaki-colored metal folding chairs, separated by a bolt of threadbare red carpet. A dusty wooden crucifix hangs on the wall. The place probably hasn’t changed in thirty years.

I sit in the front row and try to imagine Lucy and Dick at the altar. They were younger then than we are now. Did Lucy think, as she said her vows, of her old beau Wally, strapped to a bed in his father’s house?