I drive—I always drive. Jules and Danny sip road beers, him in the front seat of my car, her in the back. Danny turns the music down and asks Jules what’s become of Drew.
I have to strain to pull a memory of Drew—the scene trash Jules went home with last night—to this side of my hangover. Jules mashed into the couch with a skinny boy in tight pants, hibiscus flowers and sparrows and bug-eyed koi creeping up his forearms. Or later, her arm looped through mine, nodding indiscreetly to where the guy stood by the door with his coat on, drinking a tallboy, waiting. Jules yelling over the music to Danny, saying she didn’t need a ride home. Drew is a ghost. A placeholder in a parade. Like all of Jules’s boys, Drew is real only to Danny.
“Working,” Jules says. “He’s in that band, the Satellites. You know them.” She gestures with her Coors Light, part of a twelve-pack she stole from the party. “We saw them at XOXO. They opened for that emcee from Sacramento. They’re like indie slash electro slash power pop.”
“Keep that can down,” I say.
“Which one?” asks Danny. “What does he play?”
“I don’t know. Synth? I think there was a keyboard in his room.”
“If I get a ticket you guys are paying it.”
“Synth,” says Danny. “You sure? Where does he work?”
He’s trying to make her admit something. He should know better. Jules has never been ashamed of sleeping around. That would defeat the purpose. She shrugs and sips her beer, looking out her window at the gnarled piñon pines clinging to the mountainside, or Reno down beyond the guardrail, shrinking away from us.
Danny takes a drink. “You don’t even know where he works?”
She smirks at me in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t have a chance to ask.”
“How was it?” Danny’s only ever been with one girl. He’s twenty-four years old and still fascinated by the fact that people sometimes fuck people with whom they aren’t in love. This is what he likes to hear—the anonymity, the baseness, how a person can do what Jules does. A good friend, she is always willing to oblige.
“Not bad,” she says. “Oral, oral, missionary, doggie-style, money shot. Nothing flashy.”
Poor Danny. He lives with his parents and Jules is the kind of girl who makes sure every man she meets falls in love with her, in case he comes in handy later. She tilts her beer on end, finishing it. Danny does the same.
“Keep that shit down,” I say. Then, because I sound, just for a moment, like the me I was before Jules, I say, “The Satellites are basically a sloppy Joy Division cover band.”
She shrugs and looks out the window. “They are what they are.”
I met Jules in our capstone seminar the fall before we graduated. She was a BFA student, a painter. Even though the seminar is basic humanities, you’re supposed to take it within your college. The nursing seminar was full and I didn’t want to wait for the next semester, so I’d begged my adviser to let me into another section. It wasn’t until I got into the art auditorium that I realized how much I hated the other girls in nursing, their white shoes, the face-framing layers in their hair, their gel pens and highlighted, color-coded note cards.
On the first day of class, Jules called to me from the aisle of the auditorium like she knew me. I remember her ugly brown boots unlaced and splattered with paint, her short, bleached-out hair. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know her; I didn’t know anyone like her. She made her way over and sat beside me and gave me a flyer for a show downtown where her friend was deejaying.
“I thought you might be into this,” she said. “Last time he was in town he absolutely killed.” I didn’t know it then, but I’d been sitting in lecture halls for three years, staring straight ahead, rounding out the bell curve, waiting for someone like her.
She sat beside me whenever she came to class. I missed her when she didn’t, and she often didn’t. She invited me to more shows and gallery openings, showed me the flyers she’d redesigned herself because the bourgies at the gallery had used some bullshit motel art on theirs. I always went. One day she came into class and convinced me to leave with her before our professor arrived. We took the Spirit bus downtown to the Eldorado and spent the afternoon drinking gimlets and playing the penny slots. She taught me how to smoke. It was the best day I’d ever had.
Jules liked that I was a local. I made her feel authentic, which is especially important to Californians. Soon she was taking me along with her to after-parties and all-night diners with whichever guy had orbited into her life. Nick who worked at Sundance Books, Brady from the co-op, her Life Drawing TA, Corbett, a visiting “electronic installation artist” from Ireland, with his insufferable chronic irony. They asked me stupid questions, like did I come here when I was a kid, and did I know the Heimlich, and what would I do if they started choking. One time I said, “Nothing,” and Jules laughed like a dream I had of her once where she laughed so long and hard that her laugh lifted us both above the city and over the mountains, hand in hand, flying.
That was three years ago. Later, Jules got drunk and told me that she’d only called out to me that first day because she’d thought I was some girl from her sculpture class.
• • •
In the car we pass billboards advertising casinos and tourist attractions. One says The World-Famous Suicide Table and another says Virginia City: A Town of Relics and Memories and Ghosts of the Past and another says Bonanza or Bust. Danny says, “That’s it. The Bonanza.” He looks so pleased with himself that I wonder if he’s making this whole thing up.
We crest the hill and see Virginia City below us, the little strip of Main Street restored to look like the Old West boomtown this once was, the sharp white spire of Saint Mary’s of the Mountains on one edge of town, the iron-gated cemetery creeping up the bald man-made hills of rock on the other. We’ve been here before, the three of us. But every time I see this view I’m struck by how the buildings huddle together on the hillside, how a small town’s like a big family.
We park on the street and stand around the back of the car with the trunk open while we each down a beer. Jules finishes hers first and belches. We toss the empties into the trunk. Jules takes three unopened silver cans from the twelve-pack and puts them in her purse. She puts the last three in mine. “I’m hungry,” she says.
We cross the street and walk for a while. Danny says he likes the hollow sound of our steps on the wood-plank walkway. He’s said this before.
Jules squeals and points and takes pictures of everything like a tourist: a man leading a fat brown horse down a gravel side street, two local women dressed as Old West whores in dyed ostrich-feather hats and corsets, the rotating stainless-steel arms of a machine pulling purple taffy in the window of a candy store. She stands for an absurd amount of time at the plaque about Mark Twain, running her fingers over his little bronze mustache. She pretends not to notice when Danny takes a picture of her there. It’s exhausting.
Danny points to the old-looking hanging sign for the Bucket of Blood Saloon, a sign we’ve seen half a dozen times though we’ve never gone inside. “How about that?” he says.
“That’s fucking awesome,” says Jules. Everything is fucking awesome. Inside, the place is painted all red and has red velvet drapes too big for their windows. Chandeliers dangle from the ceiling, and large oil paintings with ornate gold frames hang on the walls. As far as I can tell, we’re the only patrons not wearing cowboy hats. Jules nods to some old men at a nearby table. “Howdy,” she says. Fucking howdy.
Jules flirts with the bartender, an old guy with the silly striped apron of a nineteenth-century barkeep hanging from his neck. His name tag is handwritten and says Bernie. Jules asks him to fix her his favorite drink and he brings over a Bloody Mary, pungent with extra horseradish. He shrugs shyly and says, “That’s how I like ’em.”
“That’s how I like ’em, too,” she says.
Jules rocks forward on her stool. “It’s hard to picture your parents eloping.” It is. Danny’s mom, Lucy, is the head pediatric nurse at Saint Mary’s, and his dad, Dick, is a high school principal. They play Boggle and tennis together. Every Saturday morning Lucy organizes the recycling while Dick washes the car.
Our food comes, the meat slippery in the buns. “Tell us what happened,” I say.
“Yeah,” says Jules, her mouth full of burger.
“What do you want to know?” says Danny, chewing on the celery stalk from his drink, loving the attention. “When my mom was eighteen she was engaged to this guy Wally, who worked in a tire factory off Wells. He was a Jehovah’s Witness, like my mom’s whole family. Wally’s dad was an elder in their church and everyone wanted them to get married. And they were going to, too, but my mom met my dad at school and called it off.”
Jules says, “Fucking awesome,” and Danny’s happy to make her happy. I’ve seen her with so many men but none of them have ever looked at her the way Danny does.
He goes on. “But this guy Wally took it pretty bad. They found him butt naked in the Truckee. In March. And I guess he was saying some crazy shit. I don’t know. They should have checked him into a mental institution. I mean, he was eighteen. But his dad, the elder, decided that Wally’s breakdown was actually God talking through his son. At one point the whole congregation was at Wally’s bed, praying, talking about ‘the one hundred and forty-four thousand’ and ‘the Lord’s Evening Meal.’ All that shit.”
The bartender comes over and Danny orders another round of Bloody Marys and two fingers of bourbon for himself. Jules says, “Thanks a million, Bernie. You’re a doll.”
“Anyway, the elder went and talked to my grandma and grandpa about how God had revealed His Great Will and how my mom marrying my dad—a Catholic, of all things—was not, you know, in the divine plan. And the fucked-up part is that they believed him. They told my mom she couldn’t see my dad anymore. Then the three of them—my mom’s parents and Wally’s dad—sat my dad down and said he’d better stay away from my mom, or else. Fucking or else. They thought this kid Wally was some kind of prophet.”
“Which makes your dad what?” says Jules. “The Antichrist?” This is funny, Dick the Antichrist, soaping down the minivan in his too-tight running shorts and tennis shoes from Kmart.
“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.
Battleborn: Stories Page 20