Claire Watkins - Battleborn

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.

“Good night, Andy,” I said. “Please don’t call me again.”

When I hung up, I heard the sound I had already come to know: a quick creak in the floorboards above me. Razor Blade Baby’s body shifting. The unpressing of her ear from the floor.

When Razor Blade Baby came to my door the next morning—this morning—I did not say, No. No, thank you. We rode our bicycles to the old Hilton Theatre, down Lake Street. Her hair flapped behind her as though lifted by George Spahn’s Pennsylvanian swarm.

I bought a hot dog before the matinee from the concession stand. I covered it with mustard, onions, kraut, jalapeños. Razor Blade Baby nervously fingered a Ziploc bag of peeled carrot sticks hidden in her purse.

Here in the theater I know I ought to try, ought to carry that weight, ought to paint over the past. But I can only do my best. I hold my hot dog near her face. “Want a bite, Razor Blade Baby?”

“Claire,” she says. “I could be your sister.”

And though we have known this since she moved in—well before—this is the first time either of us has said it aloud. And I admit now, it sounds softer than it felt. There is something thankful in the saying.

I nod. “Half sister.”

The lights in the theater dim. Technicolor figures—ghosts, cowboys, Gregory Peck—move across the screen. In Duel in the Sun Pearl Chavez asks, “Oh, Vashti, why are you so slow?”

“I don’t rightly know, Miss Pearl, except I always have so much to remember.”

July 28

Duane Moser

4077 Pincay Drive

Henderson, Nevada 89015

Dear Mr. Moser,

On the afternoon of June 25, while on my last outing to Rhyolite, I was driving down Cane Springs Road some ten miles outside Beatty and happened upon what looked to be the debris left over from an auto accident. I got out of my truck and took a look around. The valley was bone dry. A hot west wind took the puffs of dust from where I stepped and curled them away like ash. Near the wash I found broken glass, deep gouges in the dirt running off the side of the road and an array of freshly bought groceries tumbled among the creosote. Coke cans (some full, some open and empty, some with the tab intact but dented and half-full and leaking). Bud Light cans in the same shape as the Coke. Fritos. Meat. Et cetera. Of particular interest to me were the two almost-full prescriptions that had been filled at the pharmacy in Tonopah only three days before, and a sealed Ziploc bag full of letters signed M . I also took notice of a bundle of photos of an old car, part primer, part rust, that I presume was or is going to be restored. The car was a Chevy Chevelle, a ’66, I believe. I once knew a man who drove a Chevelle. Both medications had bright yellow stickers on their sides warning against drinking alcohol while taking them. Enter the Bud Light, and the gouges in the dirt, possibly. I copied your address off the prescription bottles. What happened out there? Where is your car? Why were the medications, food and other supplies left behind? Who are you, Duane Moser? What were you looking for out at Rhyolite?

I hope this letter finds you, and finds you well. Please write back.

P.S. I left most of the debris in the desert, save for the medications, pictures and letters from M. I also took the plastic grocery bags, which I untangled from the bushes and recycled on my way through Reno. It didn’t feel right to just leave them out there.

August 16

Duane Moser

4077 Pincay Drive

Henderson, Nevada 89015

Dear Mr. Moser,

This morning as I fed the horses, clouds were just beginning to slide down the slope of the Sierras, and I was reminded once again of Rhyolite. When I came inside I borrowed my father’s old copy of the Physician’s Desk Reference from his room. From that book I have gathered that before driving out to Rhyolite you may have been feeling out of control, alone or hopeless. You were possibly in a state of extreme depression; perhaps you were even considering hurting yourself. Judging by the date the prescriptions were filled and the number of pills left in the bottles—which I have counted, sitting out in the fields atop a tractor that I let sputter and die, eating the sandwich my wife fixed me for lunch—you had not been taking the medications long enough for them to counteract your possible feelings of despair. “Despair,” “depression,” “hopeless,” “alone.” These are the words of the PDR , forty-first edition, which I returned to my father promptly, as per his request. My father can be difficult. He spends his days shut up in his room, reading old crime novels populated by dames and Negroes, or watching the TV we bought him with the volume up too high. Some days he refuses to eat. Duane Moser, my father never thought he would live this long.

I think there will be lightning tonight; the air has that feel. Please, write back.

September 1

Duane Moser

4077 Pincay Drive

Henderson, Nevada 89015

Dear Mr. Moser,

I slept terribly last night, dreamed dreams not easily identified as such. Had I told my wife about them, she might have given me a small quartz crystal or amethyst and insisted I carry it around in my pocket all day, to cleanse my mind and spirit. She comes from California. Here is a story she likes to tell. On one of our first dates, we walked arm in arm around downtown Reno, where she was a clerk at a grocery store and I was a student of agriculture and business. There she tried to pull me down a little flight of steps to the red-lit underground residence of a palm reader and psychic. I declined. Damn near an hour she pulled on me, saying what was I afraid of, asking what was the big deal. I am not a religious man but, as I told her then, there are some things I’d rather not fuck with. Now she likes to say it’s a good thing I wouldn’t go in, because if that psychic had told her she’d be stuck with me for going on fourteen years now, she would have turned and headed for the hills. Ha! And I say, Honey, not as fast as I would’ve, ha, ha! This is our old joke. Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our life against that which we thought it would be by now.

I’ll tell you what I don’t tell her, that there is something shameful in this, the buoying of our sinking spirits with old stories.

I imagine you a man alone, Duane Moser, with no one asking after your dreams in the morning, no one slipping healing rocks into your pockets. A bachelor. It was the Fritos, finally, which reminded me of the gas station in Beatty where I worked when I was in high school and where I knew a man who owned a Chevelle like yours, a ’66. But it occurs to me that perhaps this assumption is foolish; surely there are wives out there who have not banned trans fats and processed sugar, as mine has. I haven’t had a Frito in eleven years. Regardless, I write to inquire about your family, should you reply.