A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  “And why are you so insistent about this?

  “What?”

  “Running away from home, just to check up on where your grandfather went five years ago?”

  “I, well . . . I guess because everybody, in my family, and . . . everybody remembers him for running away. And I think he deserves better than that.”

  She frowned. “Very interesting.”

  “‘Very interesting’ meaning ‘stop talking now,’” I said.

  “No.” Mara looked at me and squeezed her face to the center. “Very interesting meaning very interesting.”

  “Oh.”

  “Jesus, you’ve gotta stop doing that.”

  “Doing what?”

  “That thing where you assume everything I say is sarcasm, or that you know everything about me because you saw a movie with a quirky Indian-British girl once.”

  “Afraid you’re going to be exposed as quirky and British?”

  “No,” she said seriously. “It’s just a terrible way to get to know somebody, pretending like you already do.”

  We turned, and the largest sign on the street pulled my head upward toward it. I felt a wave of familiarity wash over me, a smell or a sound or just a feeling, a silent and unconscious déjà vu. I shuddered, remembering the logo from the shirt in Elko reading “BIG RAY’S SALOON.”

  “That’s it!” I pointed, suddenly sure of myself, as if I’d been pulled to it by my grandfather.

  “Yes.” Mara’s eyes widened. “That is it. That’s the one Leila told me to—”

  “Leila?”

  “My sister.”

  “Why would she—”

  “There’s people in there!” Mara was covering her eyes against the glass.

  I tried to piece together what it meant; the T-shirt at Sue Kopek’s house, the history Mara was searching for, the bar still open at four in the morning. “Hold on, I don’t know if we wanna—”

  Mara pushed the door open before I could finish.

  8.

  THE BAR WAS dark inside, lit only by candles on the center of tables and a few lamps in the corners. I counted twelve people, maybe more hidden by shadows. There was a low conversational hum in the room, voices mumbling in incomprehensible unison. The door slid shut, and a few eyes flickered toward us, then quickly back to their candles and their conversations, undisturbed by the two underage patrons of the bar.

  “Is this it?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was his name? Your grandfather?”

  “Arthur.” I could feel eyes on me, intensely judging, like drops of cold water against my skin, but when I scanned the room, no faces were looking my direction. “But he would have been with two men, Orlo and Jeffery.”

  “Right. We’ll split up, then.”

  “Why?”

  She smirked. “No one’s going to talk to a girl that’s got a guy with her, are they?” Before I could open my mouth to respond, she had slipped into the darkness.

  I studied the people seated around the candles—almost entirely men, in T-shirts and overalls, hunched over the tables, staring scornfully at each other. It was a strange time to see anyone at a bar, let alone this many people. I tried to listen in on the conversations, but their voices didn’t carry to me. The noise died immediately.

  I drifted along the outside of the room, studying the walls. They were covered in old photos and drawings, crooked and chaotic and stretching from the floor to the ceiling, into and out of every crevice and corner. A single candle lit each wall, light dancing over the faces in the frames.

  I couldn’t understand what I was looking at. There were paintings, drawings, pencil sketches of people, places, and things, but nothing to unite them or make sense of them. The photos were seemingly pulled from different eras and image qualities, some in bright color, others fraying grayscale. The only common thread between the photos were the eyes of the subjects—the longer I stared at them, the more intensely they seemed to study me back.

  A clock somewhere deep in the room counted off sixty seconds as I stared at the wall of photos. I noticed a pattern in the way they were hung, sloping inward, drawing toward a black-and-white image hung in the center by a string, a man standing on the Green River street I’d just walked. He was wearing a ruffled white shirt and squinting into the sun, his face electrified by confusion.

  I stared into it, and I saw myself staring back. It was a photo of me.

  “Hey there, pal, can I help you with something?”

  I turned and stumbled backward. The bartender was seated on a stool by the register, looking at me with one eye. I imagined he was trying to guess my age. In front of him, an enormous figure hunched over the bar.

  “I’m, I’m sorry. Are, uh—are—where are we?”

  He looked around, confused. “We’re at a bar.”

  I nodded.

  “You coming through on the train?”

  I nodded again.

  “Where you headed?”

  “Um . . .” I shifted my weight. “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Salt Lake, then?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “How come guys like you are always so ashamed to admit they’ve got Mormon girlfriends? Trust me, buddy,” he said, standing up to fill a drink order, “I get it.”

  I almost laughed. “Uh, no. Not that at all.”

  “Good. That’s smart. Work here forty years, and you see a lot of men go down like that. I always say, Try all you want, gettin’ these religious girls to love ya, but can I give you five cents’ worth of advice?”

  I shrugged again, unsure if he was even still talking to me.

  “She will always love God.” He looked me dead on. “And you will never be God.”

  I smiled at the floor. “I have no interest in being anyone’s God.”

  “Smart kid.”

  Across the bar, Mara had taken a seat next to an older man in a camouflage jacket, sipping a full glass of beer.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” the bartender asked. “You know, this is a bar.” He must have seen me watching Mara, because he added, “You look troubled.” I knew I was, and I hated myself for it. She was a girl I barely knew, with a man five times her age, but unwelcome jealousy pulled my eyes toward her, noting every smile and sideways glance.

  “Are, uh, um—” I forced my attention back to the bartender and sputtered the first question that hit my lips. “Are you Big Ray?”

  He smiled slowly. “Naw, kid. I’m Ray, but not Big Ray. Big Ray’s not around anymore.”

  “Not around . . . today?”

  “Or tomorrow, or any day. He’s dead.”

  My stomach curled. “I’m, uh, I’m sorry.”

  “Well, unless somehow you are fifty years of cigarettes and steady drinking, then you ain’t what killed him,” the living Ray said. “No point in feeling sorry.”

  “Did you know him?” I asked, already sure of the answer.

  “Good question.” He set down the glass. “How well do y’ever really know your father?”

  I nodded. “When’d he die?”

  Ray looked me over curiously, unafraid of eye contact. “Who are you anyway?”

  “I’m Arthur.”

  “Okay, Arthur.” He spent another long moment watching me, before tapping the bar. “Pete’ll know. Hey, Pete, when’d Ray die?”

  I looked at the man who was hunkered over the bar; his eyes were closed, a full beer untouched in front of him. He was old, very old. He was also incredibly tan, but I couldn’t tell if it was natural, or if his skin had just been punished by so many years in the sun that it was starting to resemble tree bark. He moved slowly, and looked so brittle, like the Earth was starting to reclaim him, piece by piece, on the bar stool where he sat.

  “January 15, 2012,” he rumbled back without moving.

  “And the bar, it’s been here since . . . ?” I asked, and Pete was silent.

  “You gotta ask him questions,” Ray instructed. “He doesn�
�t like talking much, so you gotta be direct. Pete, when was the bar founded?”

  “1941.”

  “See, man’s a goddamn encyclopedia,” Ray said, leaning over the counter. “Never forgot anything as long as he lived. Hey, Pete, how many homers’d Willie Mays hit in 1975?”

  “Mays retired in ’73.”

  “How many homers all-time?”

  “660.”

  “Goddamn encyclopedia,” Little Ray whispered, and walked back across the bar to fill an empty glass with beer, somehow sitting in front of Mara. She winked at me, then returned to the man next to her.

  I sat next to Pete in silence for several minutes. If I listened close enough, I could hear him breathing. His eyes were still glued shut. “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Four p.m.”

  “No, I mean in Green River.” He didn’t respond, so I repeated, “How long have you been in Green River?”

  “Since 1941.”

  “Do you see the people that come into the bar?”

  “Some of them.”

  “Would you remember someone if they came in?”

  “Some of them.”

  I turned back to the photos. “What’s with the pictures in here?”

  Pete didn’t answer.

  “I’m sorry, uh, why are the photos in here, so, strange?” He remained silent. “Do you not wanna talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He sat up, his movement like a mountain deliberately shifting to a new permanent position. His eyes stayed buried. “Because I’m not here to enlighten anybody with talking. All you people, all you do is talk, and talk, and fuckin’ talk. Could hear the whole world if you’d shut up for a second.” He took a long, wheezing breath. “They’re photos. That’s all.”

  I felt tiny sitting next to him, but something about the way his eyes stayed closed was comforting. I swallowed and set a more direct course. “Were you in this bar five years ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you remember meeting someone if you did meet them?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked around the bar, checking to make sure Pete was the only one listening. My heart raced. “Five years ago . . . did you meet a man named Arthur Louis Pullman?”

  I held my breath. The dead air of the bar felt heavy on me, as if pressing me into my seat.

  “No,” Pete said finally.

  “He was helping someone move here. Orlo and Jeffery were their names.” He didn’t move. “Is it possible they came in here and you weren’t here?”

  “No. I’m always here.”

  “Maybe you just didn’t meet him?”

  “I meet everyone who comes into this bar.”

  “But is it possible you didn’t?”

  He grunted. “Talk, and talk, and fucking talk.”

  The air shattered around me. If he hadn’t stopped here five years ago, he must have gone somewhere else. Maybe he never made it to Green River in the first place. Maybe he never meant to.

  I didn’t say anything to Pete as I got up from the bar. I walked a circle around my seat, considering where I was, caught between the train forward and the train home.

  Without thinking, I wound my way back around to the door, staring at the photos on the wall. I replayed my conversation with Pete in my head, trying to make the timeline make sense. He hadn’t been here five years ago. Pete met everyone that came into the bar, but he’d never met my grandfath—

  No, that wasn’t what he said. That wasn’t what I’d asked. I thought about my grandfather’s first poem: we are eternal, we’re together . . . & we always have been.

  My eyes froze on the photo in the center of the wall. It wasn’t a hallucination . . . it just wasn’t me.

  “Pete.”

  He grunted.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but—”

  “Y’already are.”

  “But you said my grandfather, Arthur Pullman, you didn’t meet him five years ago?”

  “I told you already. No.”

  I swallowed and stared directly at his shadow. “Did you see him in here five years ago?”

  Pete didn’t move.

  “Did you meet him before that?”

  I noticed Ray staring at me from across the bar, cautiously.

  Pete opened his eyes, and for the first time, he looked human. They were blue, soft pools of life in the middle of his hard, frozen face. He looked at me like he was noticing everything there was to notice, and when he finally spoke, his voice was low and unwavering, shaking the organs in my chest. “Tell me something, kid. Do you have any idea what you’re doing here?”

  I reached into my pocket. In front of him, I set down the photo of my family, my grandfather’s final recorded moment. “I’m just trying to understand.”

  Pete studied the photo silently before closing his eyes once more. “Well, at least somebody knows.” He took a sip of his beer. “Ray,” he called. “Get him the story.”

  Ray moved quickly toward us. “All due respect, Pete—” Pete slid the photo toward him.

  Ray’s eyes shot back and forth between the child in the picture and my face across the bar. Feature by feature, his anger melted into disbelief. “He’s had grandkids? Arty had fucking grandkids?”

  Arty. I’d never heard anyone call my grandfather Arty. “You knew my grandfather?”

  “Yes,” Ray answered, followed by a slower yes from Pete.

  “When did he come in?” I asked. “April 29, 2010?” My voice met my heart rate.

  “You’re gonna have to be more specific,” Ray said, now holding the photo to his face.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Pete grunted. “Arthur Louis Pullman stopped here eighteen times.”

  “I, I don’t—my grandfather never left California.”

  “Well.” Pete’s voice was slow and steady. “He sure as hell wasn’t your grandfather then.”

  “He wasn’t my grandfather . . .”

  Pete didn’t answer.

  “When did you meet Arthur Louis Pullman?”

  “August 15, 1967.”

  I shook my head violently. “That would have been over forty years ago.”

  “Yep.” Ray nodded. “Straight from the goddamn encyclopedia.”

  It was as if time had slowed down.

  I wanted to scream back at him, No! You don’t understand! My grandfather wasn’t— but I didn’t have an end to the sentence. I knew nothing about his life before I was born. No one in my family did, and by the time that I was old enough to have a conversation with him, he was well on his way to forgetting. We didn’t talk about the past at my house, because to him, it didn’t exist.

  And that was the piece I’d been missing, too obvious to even consider. No one in my family knew anything about his early life, but if he’d been here before, if he’d done this before, it meant there were parts of that early life that were important. If he’d come to Green River before his book, before his wife, before his disease began to claim his brain, and returned before his death, then there must have been something here he was looking for.

  He was reliving. He was reliving a trip, a moment in time, a life that my family knew nothing about. All of my confusion, my doubt, my excitement, my questions, and my stress multiplied and began to collide behind my eyes, as every image of my grandfather became too large to comprehend.

  I wanted to throw up.

  Ray sensed my uneasiness.

  “But, I mean, maybe it’s a different one, kid.” He took a few steps backward. From the wooden cupboard, he produced a crumpled stack of paper, hand-tied together by string. “He’s your gramps. You’d sure as hell know better than a bunch of geezers like us. Still,” he said, dropping the pages in front of me. “You’d better have a read.”

  A date was scratched into the top, my grandfather’s cursive, too irrational for reality, but too perfect for coincidence.

  April 29 . . . the 1970.

  april 29, the 1970.


  the green river bandit.

  the sun was still high over the great west plateau when we burst in the door & bellied up to a local stool at a local bar because in towns like this the time of day was a secondary concern to the temperature of the beer & the temperature of the beer was cold.

  in towns like this, the future had come & gone. the march of industry had plowed through & left the streets forgotten, a series of storefronts & promises now broken & decaying in its wake.

  first it was the gold,

  then it was the train,

  next it was the missile,

  & one by one, they found a town more remote, an area more plentiful, a people more desperate.

  & now, in towns like this, the only reason to stay was to cling to the rubble they called history.

  the man behind the bar, the name on the cracked sign out front, placed two beers in front of us & echoed the misery that rang throughout the canyon.

  ‘no business,’ he said, & we nodded.

  ‘no money,’ he said, & we nodded.

  ‘no hope,’ he said, & we kept our heads steady.

  ‘we bring some of that,’ jeff told him, cause jeff was quick to warmth. & the man behind the bar laughed. ‘your two beers ain’t doin’ shit to solve our business problem.’ ‘no,’ jeff told him, ‘but a little hope might.’

  & when he talked, people listened. they knew his reputation because reputations were the only thing that mattered in this part of the world & his reputation was good. the soldier of the slum town, they called him. robin hood of the run-down bar.

  ‘when i look at you, i see a town that’s seen too much. i see a town that was promised life & then left for death, run down to its last dollar,’ & people listened. ‘but i also see a people either too strong or too stupid to say die & the truth is i never knew the difference.’

  every eye in the room watched as he hoisted the glass of beer to his lips because when he drank he meant it.

  ‘we live in a world with systems of equality,’ he said, & the people listened. ‘but when the equality ain’t working, the system loses its power.’