Woman Enters Left

by Jessica Brockmole

  All along, she’s been sending them letters and asking them to write to her at the general post office here. Every day she drops envelopes by the campground’s office, to go out with that morning’s mail. Every day. Between all the picnics and recollections and thumbs on my lips, she’s writing to her husband. I was a fool to think that anything was, well, anything.

  BERYL

  Who comes to Nevada anyway?

  FRANCIE

  Sinners and prospectors.

  BERYL

  Aren’t those the same thing?

  FRANCIE

  If I meet a prospector, I’ll let you know how we get along.

  —Excerpt from the unproduced screenplay When She Was King

  Chapter Six

  1952

  Driving up to the entrance of the Prickly Pear Ranch gives Louise goosebumps.

  She has no reason to remember it, this faded, crumbling dude ranch out in the middle of nowhere. There isn’t even a real road leading to it. Just a dusty track that leaves her red Champion rattled and pale brown. She unpins the hat from her head and steps from the car.

  It isn’t much, this ranch hidden way back here. Certainly not the “oasis” she remembers from the sign. A sloping fence marks a property scrubby with weeds. A few low, white buildings crouch cramped around a central courtyard. In the middle is a rustily sputtering fountain. She can see the dip of a pool beyond, empty, tiles edged in green. She knows there must be stables and she slips off her sunglasses and shades her eyes until she spots a slanted wooden structure, half a breath from falling down. She pities any horses inside.

  A lizard scampers up the side of one of the bunkhouses. A man steps out, and Louise puts her sunglasses back on. He’s a cowboy, and not the fringed and embroidered Hollywood version. He wears a snap-button shirt and blue jeans so well-worn that one pocket is torn. He’s maybe fifty years old, maybe sixty. Hard to tell. He stops on the porch, scratches his head, adjusts his belt buckle. Beneath the battered brim of his Stetson, his eyes are bright blue.

  He notices her, because he pushes back his hat and blinks. “I didn’t know we had anyone arriving today.” He throws a cigarette butt over the railing.

  She tosses her hat on the front seat of the car. “I’m not.”

  “Arriving?” He raises his eyebrows. “Not anymore.”

  The courtyard is deserted. She hears nothing but the wind and the wheezing gurgle of the fountain. She doubts that anyone has arrived in quite a while. “I’m just here to look around, if that’s okay. I’m not staying.”

  He coughs and lights another cigarette. “Don’t know why.”

  “Why I’m not staying?”

  “Why you want to look around.” He picks a piece of tobacco from between his teeth. “But suit yourself.”

  His accent isn’t western. It doesn’t sound like long days in the saddle, like bonfires, like moonshine and cattle and lariats. There’s something more refined in it, maybe even a touch foreign, like he’s a Prussian count slumming it on the range. If you believe the movies (and who doesn’t?), dude ranches are for the elite, the wealthy city folk seeking the wild roots of America. Maybe his way of talking is deliberate. Part of the atmosphere. She knows a restaurant in L.A. that only hires waitresses who can fake a French accent. Very chichi.

  She picks up her purse. She’s not dressed for a dude ranch, not in her white dress and cork sandals. She’s not dressed for the desert, period. She slings the purse up into the crook of her elbow and works her way across the weed-choked lawn to what remains of a flagstone path. Her heel catches, and she feels ridiculous. The old cowboy leans against the porch rails, smoking and watching her. She wishes he’d go away.

  She walks past the long white buildings to the fountain huddled low in the dirt. It looks far too grand for a crumbling dude ranch, or at least might have been once upon a time. Up close, she can see it’s only cheap plaster. Neptune with his trident sits amid halfheartedly spurting water. The tip of his nose is broken off.

  She crosses the courtyard. She can see the pool tucked behind. It’s dry and missing more than a few tiles. Deck chairs are stacked like driftwood.

  The cowboy follows her, walking along the bunkhouse’s long porch. “This place used to be nice,” he says.

  She doubts it. She’s seen The Women. She’s flipped through Town & Country in the dentist’s waiting room. Manicured lawns, turquoise swimming pools, cherry-garnished cocktails served by rugged bartenders in leather boots. She knows that dude ranches are only one sandy step from the East’s lush resorts. Even when this place was brand spanking new, it was an imitation.

  “How could it be nice with only one tennis court?” she asks flippantly.

  He regards her beneath the brim of his hat and finishes his cigarette.

  The bunkhouses all have their doors thrown open. Inside, curtains are drawn, beds are unmade, dust lazily drifts across the doorways. The place is deserted, at least as far as she can see. The old cowboy might be the only occupant of this whole disheveled ranch.

  “You know, movie stars used to come here.” He blows a lazy smoke ring, one that floats up to the sagging roof of the porch. “You look like a movie star.”

  “I’m not.” She tilts her head down. “I’ve never been here.”

  “Liar,” he says.

  She looks up.

  “You can’t see the tennis court anymore.”

  She takes off her sunglasses then and drops them in her purse.

  “Glass of lemonade?” he asks.

  She nods.

  “Or whiskey.” The cowboy tosses the cigarette butt off into the dirt. “Whatever the customer wants.”

  —

  The lemonade is tepid, but deliciously sour. She doesn’t take him up on the whiskey, not yet.

  “I grow the lemons myself,” he says. “Also chili peppers. Do you like Spanish omelets?”

  “I’ve already eaten lunch.”

  “I haven’t.” He sets down the tin pitcher. “Juana!” he calls. “We have any tomatoes?” He disappears into what she guesses is the kitchen, leaving her alone with her lemonade and a terrifyingly taxidermied bobcat.

  He’d called it the mess hall, like they’re in the army, this central room with long slab tables and antler-bedecked chandeliers. It’s both dining hall and lounge area, with tooled leather couches around a wagon wheel table at the other end. A small bookcase holds cast-off copies of popular novels. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Frenchman’s Creek. The Ides of March. The Grapes of Wrath, which she hasn’t read in a decade. Things to read on the porch with a big glass of iced tea. She picks up the dog-eared copy of the Steinbeck and thumbs through it.

  Perched along the top of the bookcase are Gurley candles, the same collection of kitsch that her father pulls out every Christmas. This display boasts a red-steepled church and an alarmingly large host of choirboys on a rectangle of batting. This dry bit of Nevada has probably never seen snow, but the little bunch of choristers stand ankle-deep in it to sing. There’s no Christmas tree, not here in the desert, but a potted cactus is strung with blue lights. And to add to it all, the stuffed bobcat wears a jaunty Santa hat.

  The mounted head of a bighorn sheep presides over the room. She tries to imagine guests in times past sitting on these benches, eating barbecued chicken or cornbread or dripping slices of peach pie. With the windows open and a hint of a breeze pushing through the room, it’s halfway pleasant. If it weren’t for that bobcat, that is.

  Almost every square inch of the walls is covered with framed photographs, mostly of horses. There are indeed a few photos of Hollywood types—he wasn’t lying about that. Some actors from B-list Westerns, a has-been actress she knew from the Studio Club, a pair of lowbrow comedians, and one furiously macho director she once had the misfortune to work with. The photos are autographed and addressed to “Steve” or “Marjorie” or just “the Prickly Pear.”

  She hears footsteps. Without knowing why, she slips the battered copy of The Grapes of Wrath into her purs
e.

  The cowboy reappears with a bowl of biscuits. “She’s making up something small. It’s too hot today to cook much of anything.”

  Louise slides onto a bench with her drink. “Really, I’m not hungry.”

  He takes off his Stetson and hooks it over the horn of the bighorn sheep. “Do you want more to drink?” He plugs in the cactus’s lights.

  She shakes her head. She’s seen the rest of the ranch. She’d like to avoid the bathroom.

  “Are you Steve?” she asks, nodding toward the pictures.

  “It’s as good a name as any,” he answers, which isn’t really an answer at all.

  She’s worn a fake name for the past dozen years. Maybe “Steve” isn’t his real name either. Out here, he could be a washed-up actor, he could be a lunatic, he could be a fugitive. Maybe all three. She inches her purse closer to her.

  He notices, and grins wolfishly. It doesn’t make her feel better.

  He shrugs and says, “I came to work the mines in Searchlight after the war.”

  He looks too old to have been much help in the last one, so she asks, “World War I?”

  “As you Americans call it,” he says, and she hears that little accent again. It’s hardly noticeable, but she deals in the spoken word. Maybe he really is a Prussian count in blue jeans.

  “My father fought in it.”

  He pours out a lemonade of his own. “I know.”

  It’s said with a sly confidence. She mentally sorts through Louise Wilde’s official bio, but she doesn’t remember there ever being anything about her dad’s army record. Maybe a publicist let it slip. Maybe she did.

  “I’ve been to Searchlight,” she says. “It’s not much of a destination.”

  He straddles the bench, keeping one eye on the kitchen door, one on Louise. “I was disinherited. What’s a boy to do?”

  “There have to be easier ways to find fortune.”

  “You think it was all really about the fortune?” He’s suddenly serious. “I’m not the first person to wander into the desert in search of peace and absolution.”

  She quiets, just as serious. “Did you find it?” she asks. “Absolution?”

  He picks up a biscuit from the bowl, tosses it back and forth between his hands. “As much as I could.”

  From the kitchen, a woman sings in Spanish, in a voice as light as feathers.

  He runs a hand through his faded hair. “Is that what brought you way out here?”

  “I was driving past,” she says, as if that explains why she’d be on that stretch of 95 in the first place. “Driving past, and I recognized the sign.”

  He has to know the sign is unreadable. That there’s no way it could direct anyone down his rut of a road. But he nods as though it all makes perfect sense.

  “I don’t know why I’d remember this ranch out in the middle of nowhere. The road isn’t even on the map. I don’t know why I’d remember a tennis court that doesn’t exist.”

  “I once passed a church in New Mexico I could’ve sworn I’d seen before. I could even tell you what color the baptismal font was. Juana said I must’ve been there in a past life.”

  She looks around the mess hall, with its glassy-eyed animals, and can’t think of a place she’d want less to have spent a previous life. “You don’t really believe that, do you? That I was here in a past life, of all things?”

  He snorts. “That bullshit? No, I don’t.” He takes a long swallow of his lemonade, his throat rippling. “I recognize you. You were here in this life.”

  But he doesn’t explain further, because the door to the kitchen swings open and a woman appears, holding a plate in each hand. She’s swaybacked and not particularly pretty, with a gap between her front teeth and hair dyed an orangey shade of red. But at the sight of her, something settles in Steve’s face. He goes, in an instant, from watchful to content.

  She sets the plates down on the table and takes a pair of forks from her apron pocket. Steve touches the back of her hand, just once, just for a moment, but it’s enough to bring a smile to the woman’s face.

  Louise waits until Juana leaves, until Steve blinks and pulls that mask back up, that tough-as-nails, cool-as-cucumbers cowboy mask. “You said you recognized me,” she prompts.

  He nods and pulls one plate closer. Juana’s added a sliced sausage alongside each promised omelet. “You’re that actress, the one who does all the song-and-dance pictures.”

  Her hand creeps toward her purse, where her sunglasses are. “No, I’m not.”

  “You were in that cowboy one where you tap-danced along the edge of the horse trough.”

  “I’m sorry, that wasn’t me.” She fiddles with the clasp.

  “And you were on the cover of Life in a dress made of feathers.”

  That awful thing had molted with every step she took.

  He shakes salt over the whole deal, the omelet and the sausage. “You should try this. I remember you liked eggs.”

  She used to, back when she was allowed to eat them fried in butter, drizzled in hollandaise sauce, layered with cheese. “Wait, what do you mean, ‘remember’?”

  “I told you.” He cuts into his omelet. “You were here once upon a time.”

  “You must have me confused with someone else.” She waves away his words. “I’ve never been out this way. Filmed on location in Bakersfield once. Never in Nevada.”

  He chews through a mouthful of eggs. “You were little, but I didn’t think you’d forget. You were here with your father.”

  There was a train trip with Dad, ages ago. She was young enough that she still wore bangs and had baby teeth. She didn’t remember much beyond the clatter of the tracks, the postcards Dad let her buy in each town, the one time he let her finish his cup of coffee.

  “You know my dad?”

  “Marjorie—she owned the Pear back then—was always trying to convince one of her nephews to come out West and visit. Carl was the only one who ever did.”

  “And I came too?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  She shakes her head, but she’s not so sure anymore.

  Fork in one hand, he lights up a cigarette with the other. “I was head wrangler then. Would take you and your dad out riding, fishing, chasing lizards along the wash. You loved riding. A regular dudine. You insisted on going out even in the rain. We couldn’t argue with you.” He chuckles and wipes his mouth. “You called me ‘Mr. Steve.’ And I called you ‘The Empress.’ ”

  The Empress. He says the name like it’s something. Like she should know. And suddenly, just suddenly, she can feel it.

  Sunburns and scabbed knees. Too-big denim overalls. The sun on her bare head, the warm saddle against her legs, her fingers tangled tight in a white mane. “I rode a horse called Odin.”

  He smiles crookedly and forks up another bite of egg. “Nothing tamer than the god of frenzy for you.”

  Eating whole lemons fresh from the tree. Catching lizards and pocket mice. Bonfires and prickly pears and sand caught between her bare toes. “How young was I?” Young enough, apparently, that the trip comes back only in sensations, in tastes and smells.

  “Six? Seven?”

  The images quiet. “When my mom died.”

  Now all she can taste are tears at the back of her throat.

  Steve finishes chewing. “A hard summer.”

  Louise stands, leaves her purse and lemonade, and crosses to the window. It was. Unbearable. “She was young. Younger than I am now. And he loved her. It broke him in half when she died.”

  Outside a goat stands listlessly in the yard. Beyond the goat, she can see a single, crooked acacia tree. The bench creaks, but Steve doesn’t get up.

  “But we came out here before she died, not after. I remember sending her letters. Drawing pictures with crayons that were always half-melted.” She sifts back through those mental snapshots. The train station postcards, the horseback rides, the lizards and lemons. Sitting on Dad’s lap by a bonfire. Drinking his coffee on the train. Mom
never would’ve allowed that. “She didn’t come out here with us.”

  “No, ma’am,” he says. “She didn’t.” He’s done with his omelet and sits smoking. “She arrived later.”

  “In an old Model T.” And suddenly it makes sense. Their two trips—one by train, one by car—intersecting at this Nevada ranch. She knows Aunt Marjorie from family photos, a brassy-haired woman with an ample bosom and painted fingernails. “She didn’t stay long, though, did she?”

  Smoke curls around his fingers. “No, she didn’t.” He’s watching her closely.

  She remembers being in the Model T—in her nightgown?—with the smell of the warm leather and horsehair. Lying tight against Mom in a big bed tangled with blankets. Sitting in the yard with a lapful of evening primroses, tying them into a crown. “I remember so little.”

  “You were young. Besides, adults never tell kids the whole story.”

  The window is cold, or maybe it’s her. “What else is there to the story than a dad bringing his little girl to ride horses for a month?”

  “I know you saw him as your dad, but he was no different from anyone else who stayed at the ranch.” Steve stubs out the cigarette on his empty plate. “Your father came to Nevada to get a divorce.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You didn’t know about the divorce?”

  Louise sinks onto the sofa. “I think I’ll take that whiskey now.”

  He nods. “I think you’ll need it. You’re white as a ghost already.”

  “All these years, Dad’s never said a word about a divorce. You’re lying.”

  “If it makes you feel better, he didn’t go through with it in the end.”

  She wants to believe in a happy reconciliation, but she’s seen too many Reno-vations among her friends. Pulling out just before establishing residency—it didn’t make sense. “Why?”

  Steve scoots back his bench and stands. “Maybe I should fetch you that whiskey.”

  He disappears into the kitchen.

  She doesn’t need whiskey. She doesn’t need stories. She doesn’t need more reminders that she never really knew her mother. What she really needs is her dad.