Claire Watkins - Battleborn

But she woke only once that afternoon, delirious. It was all he could do to make her drink, tap water from the mason jar sliding down her stretched neck, wetting her chest, pooling in the divots above her collarbones. While she slept he checked on her often, felt for a fever, held a moist washcloth to her forehead and cheeks. He cleaned the puke out of her hair by dabbing at it with damp paper towels. All the while the bruise on her abdomen seemed to throb, to shape-shift.

There was only so much he could do. He tidied up the house while she slept, washed the dishes, made his bed, trimmed Milo’s nails. He could not remember the last time he’d had a houseguest, if the girl could be considered such. At least sixteen years. And though she was unconscious, having the girl there cultivated a bead of shame in him for the years of clutter he’d accumulated, with no one to get after him. The living room was walled with hutches and shelves and curio cabinets that had once been full of trinkets long since removed by Carrie Ann, off for another extended stay at her sister’s while he sat smoking on the porch, too angry or afraid to ask what she needed with her Kewpie dolls in Fallon.

And then she was gone for good. The shelves now held his rock collection: igneous feldspars, quartzes, olivines and micas on the east wall; sedimentary gneiss and granoblastics on the built-in along the north; shale, siltstones, breccias and most conglomerates along the west wall, minus the limestones, gemstones and his few opals, which he kept in the bedroom.

Plastic milk crates lined the edges of the room, full mostly of chrysocolla chunks pickaxed from the frozen rock above Nixon the previous winter. A few were marbled with nearly microscopic arteries of gold. Dusty, splitting cardboard boxes were stacked four and five tall near the coat closet and in front of it, full of samples to be sent to the lab in Reno for testing, to tell whether or not his claims had finally paid off, whether he might augment his miner’s pension. The rusted oil barrels on the porch and wheelbarrows out front overflowed with dirty schorl and turquoise and raw malachite in need of cutting and tumbling, specimens enough to supply a chain of rock shops from here to San Francisco.

Harris tried straightening up, but there was nowhere to put it all. Even the single drawer of his nightstand was filled with soapstone and milky, translucent chunks of ulexcite waiting to be labeled.

He kept an eye on the lake bed too, though whoever left the girl would most likely know better than to come looking for her. It was a hundred and six degrees by ten a.m. The only person with any business out here this time of year was Harvey Bowman, a Jack Mormon from Battle Mountain, and that was because the government paid him for it. But Harris knew full well that Bowman kept his BLM Jeep parked at the Mustang Ranch, a hundred and fifty miles away, where the trailers had swamp coolers chugging on the roofs and it was never too hot for sex. Bowman got laid more than Brigham Young himself.

The lake bed was dead. Whoever left the girl out there wasn’t coming back, and anyone who wanted to find her didn’t know where to look. For this Harris found himself strangely pleased.

For dinner he fixed a fried bologna sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup. He was in the kitchen, fishing a dill pickle from the jar with his fingers when the girl woke.

“Where’s my shoe?” she said, propping herself up with her arm.

“That is your shoe,” said Harris.

She looked down. “So it is.” Her face turned sickly and Harris rushed to her just in time for her to dry-heave into the pickle jar. The girl lifted her head and looked at Harris squatting in front of her. Her face hardened. Out of nowhere she stiff-armed him in the gut, toppling him back on his haunches. Biled pickle juice sloshed down the front of him.

The girl looked wildly to the door.

“Relax,” said Harris, rubbing his ribs where she’d hit him. “I’m not going to hurt you. I found you on the lake bed. This is my house. I live here. You’ve been out all day.”

He got to his feet and slowly handed her the mason jar from the windowsill, and a dishrag to wipe her mouth. “Here.” She eyed the jar, then took it. Three times she drained it, sometimes coughing softly, and each time he refilled it.

“Thanks,” she said finally. “What’s your name?”

“Edwin Harris,” he said. “Bud,” he added, though he hadn’t been called that in years.

She looked around, assessing, it seemed, the house and its contents in light of their belonging to an old fart who wanted to be called Bud. Harris asked her name. “Magda,” she said. “Magdalena. My mom’s a religious freak.”

“Magda, you’re lucky to be alive,” he said. “The hell you doing out there alone?”

She dabbed her mouth with the dishrag and looked lazily about the living room, swirling the last bit of water around the bottom of the jar. “Drank too much, I guess,” she said, giving a little shrug. “Happy birthday, America.”

He nodded, and went to his bedroom for a clean shirt. Drank too much. That’s what he’d figured, at first. Kids partied on the lake bed year-round. Harris often heard the echoes of screeching and thumping they called music. Out here they could see the headlights of Bowman’s BLM Jeep coming from fifty miles away, if it came at all. The whole area was off-limits, but most kids knew as well as Harris did that paying one man to patrol the entire basin, from the north edge of the lake bed all the way to the Quinn River Sink, almost a thousand square miles, was the same as paying nobody.

He returned to the kitchen. This girl seemed different from those kids, somehow. She was beautiful, or could have been. Her features were too weary for someone her age.

Magda motioned to the dog, lying in front of the swamp cooler. “Who’s this?”

“Milo,” he said. “She found you. You likely got heatstroke. You should eat.” He brought her a mug of the soup and refilled her water.

She took a bit of soup up to her lips, nodding politely to the dog. “Thanks, Milo.” She looked around, not eating, spooning at her soup as though she expected to find a secret at the bottom of the mug. “You’re a real rock hound, no?”

“I do some lapidary work,” he said.

“You at the mine?”

“Used to be. I retired.”

Magda set her soup on the coffee table. She picked up a dusty piece of smoky quartz the size of a spark plug from the shelf beside her and let it rest in her palm. “So, what do you do out here?” she asked.

“I make by,” he said. “I got a few claims.”

“Gold?”

He nodded and she laughed, showing her metal fillings, a solid silver molar. “This place is sapped,” she said, and laughed again. She had a great laugh, widemouthed and toothy. “The gold’s gone, old-timer.”

“Gold ain’t all gone,” Harris said. “Just got to know where to look.” He pushed the mug toward her. “You should eat.”

Magda regarded the soup. “I don’t feel good. Hungover.”

Milo lifted herself and settled at Harris’s feet. Harris scratched the soft place behind her ear. “I drove you in from the lake bed,” he said, gesturing out front. “I got a standard cab. Small. You didn’t smell like you drank too much. Didn’t smell like you drank at all.”

Magda set the quartz roughly on the coffee table and leaned back into the couch. “That’s sweet,” she said dryly.

Harris walked to the pantry and returned. He set an unopened sleeve of saltine crackers in Magda’s lap. “My ex-wife ate boxes of these things.”

“Good for her,” said Magda.

“Especially when she was pregnant,” he said. “I suppose they were the only thing that settled her stomach. Used to keep them everywhere, on her nightstand, in the medicine cabinet, the glove box of my truck.”