Claire Watkins: Battleborn: Stories

Danny fiddles on the organ. He hardly plays anymore, and his fingers are clumsy. Plus, he says, half the keys don’t work. Jules plucks a spray of fake flowers from its Styrofoam holder and takes it to the back of the room. She motions to him. Danny does his best at “Here Comes the Bride,” though some of the notes are dead. Jules begins a slow, stumbling walk down the aisle.

Danny motions me to the altar. This is a nowhere place, the stone walls too thick for jilted seers, the door too heavy for cuckold ghosts. I stand and fold my hands, solemn as a groom. I sway ever so slightly, awaiting my bride.

Jules arrives and Danny joins us. We three stand quiet for a moment at the altar where his parents were joined, at the place that made all this possible. Jules drops the bouquet on the floor behind her. She takes my hands in hers.

We are quiet; then Danny says, “Jules, do you take Iris to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, as long as you both shall live?”

“I do,” she whispers.

“And Iris, do you take Jules for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?”

“I do.”

Jules squeezes my hands.

Danny sweeps his arms into the air triumphantly. He says, “You may kiss the bride.” The air is gone from the room.

Jules pulls me to her, firmly. She kisses me. Her breath is hot and her lips are keen. Her tongue moves over the front of my teeth like the ocean might, or like someone beckoning, saying, Come here .

I kiss her back and we are weightless with the warmth of the mouth, floating in the taste of bloody meat and horseradish. My hands holding her hips lightly, her fingers pressing on the back of my neck, her bottom lip held ever so softly between my teeth. This means something, I think. It has to. She pulls away.

“Dudes,” Danny says, “that was fucking beautiful.”

A laugh spreads across Jules’s big bright face, ravenous the way a wildfire is. “I know, right?”

I laugh too. These are my friends. These are the funny, empty things we do so we can be the kind of funny, empty people who do them.

• • •

At the Bonanza’s glassy bar we switch to whiskey and video poker. We hit the buttons as slow as possible, like Jules taught us, trying to stretch our money long enough to get a few free drinks, long enough to make it worth our while. Willie Nelson is on the jukebox, a muted soccer game on TV. We pluck olives and cherries and slices of lemon and lime out of their plastic bins when the bartender isn’t looking. The front doors are propped open, and outside the wind is picking up. “It’s because you grew up in Reno,” Jules says, answering a question I don’t remember asking. “You don’t know how great this town is.”

There are plenty of good reasons to find yourself in Virginia City. The first time we came, we came because Jules wanted to stand in the spot where Mark Twain stood. She wanted to see what Mark Twain saw. Danny and I watched her. She stood on that plank walkway, quiet and reverent, looking out over the foothills, searching for something. I’d never seen her like that, before or since. There was none of that reverence in the chapel and it seems now that there should have been. Yes, today is a day for reverence, for some goddamn sincerity of emotion. I’m drunk. When did today become that day?

Jules comes close to a flush, and calls us over for luck. We each put a finger on the red plastic draw button. This is our ritual. How many times have we layered our three hands atop the last card, stacked our fists like totems on the lever of a slot machine, laid our hopeful fingertips on one last deal?

Danny says, Wait . He pops a maraschino cherry into his mouth, then one into Jules’s. Her teeth glow pink with cherry brine. Poor sweet Danny. We can’t help who we love.

The wind blows a swarm of golden mesquite leaves inside. Jules says, “One. Two. Three.”

The queen we needed winks up at us. The payout is close to four hundred dollars.

Jules and Danny scream and throw their arms around each other. They slap the bar. They say, Fuck, yeah . They say, You like that? I’m feeling severe. Danny stands on his stool and fishes the last olive from the bin. He is less and less himself these days. He holds the olive in front of Jules, the juice dribbling down his wrist. She reaches for it gleefully but he pulls it away and slips it into his mouth.

“We should cash out,” I say.

Danny only smiles, revealing the little plug of olive pinched between his teeth. Jules laughs that helium laugh of hers and takes Danny’s face in her hands. She presses her mouth to his. I watch. I expect their kiss to be urgent and ambitious but they’re unhurried, dreamy. She moans gently as he arches her back against the bar. He slips one hand under her shirt and holds his whiskey in his other, like he’s been doing this his whole fucking life. Afterward, he’s slack-jawed and electric eyed and Jules munches happily on whatever is left of their olive. “We should cash out,” I say again.

Jules mumbles, “Yeah,” and at the same time Danny says, “Fuck that,” and taps deal again.

“What are you doing?” I say.

He laughs and says, “Having fun.”

“No.” I grab his wrist. “Cash out.”

Jules says, “Hey, hey.”

“Get off me,” says Danny. A bit of whiskey slops onto his shirt. He pries my hand from his arm. “This isn’t about you.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “You. Me. Nothing she does means anything. Tell him, Jules.”

The machine blinks below us. Jules looks at me pityingly. The little mesquite leaves are whirling in the doorway like insects hungry for light. Suddenly there is that sincerity I thought I’d never see again; there is a glimpse of that foothill searching. “Don’t do this,” she says softly. A tiny golden leaf flutters and lands on her cheek.

“Do what you want,” I say. “You don’t mean anything to me.” I walk outside, wishing it were true.

It seems impossible that it’s still daylight but here is the sun, reaching behind my eyes, stinging the place where cords meet brain, where meaning is made out of light and the absence of light. I need to sober up.

Last year, the day after Halloween, we came to Virginia City. Danny wanted to go to church. “It’s Sunday,” was all he said. Jules and I teased him about this, because Sunday didn’t mean a damn thing to us. But we went, telling ourselves we were going for the same reason we did anything back then, for the fuck of it. We walked along the gravel road to Saint Mary’s, bumping into each other, trying to kick the same rock out in front of us, pretending nothing had happened, that nothing would ever happen.

Inside, the church was eerie quiet and smelled like melted wax. Danny put a dollar in the box and crossed himself. He showed us where to kneel and how to touch the soft tip of our longest fingers to our heads and hearts and shoulders. The sun came through the stained glass and it was warm and so beautiful. In the light Mary was weeping in yellows and blues and Jesus was weeping in reds and one guy was holding a big key and another half a loaf of bread and another a lamb. I didn’t know what that meant and still don’t. I wish I were Catholic. I remember kneeling, thinking, More of this. That’s all. That’s what I prayed for then: divine preservation of something I would never understand, the safeguarding of something I’d already lost.

I have to drive us home. I’m sick of Reno, sick of going to the same bars and seeing the same bands. I’m sick of eating the same two-dollar slices of pizza and buying the same sworn-off cigarettes from the same glass-faced machines. Sober up.

I can’t get us back, I know, but I wanted to have lost something that meant. Danny and Jules come outside as if summoned, blinking and bewildered. Jules says, “Iris.” It’s like I’ve never heard her say my name before. How tender it sounds coming from her. How pitiful.