“They keep him pretty stoned,” Chip said. “Plus he’s kind of old.”
A couple of lion handlers—lion tamers didn’t seem accurate—in khaki shirts and pants were stationed at either end of the glass, trying to look alert and vigilant. “Old Metro,” Chip said. “He was born in a zoo. Never known much of anything different. Now he’s a big corporate symbol. And he’s bored as fuck. Isn’t that perfect?”
“Chip? What’s up with you?”
His cousin turned toward him, a leftover smile on his face. “What?”
“Are you OK? You don’t look so OK.”
“Ray.”
“What?”
“I go by Ray now. ‘Chip’ is a little boy’s name.”
“That’s going to take me a little while to get used to.”
“Feel free to start anytime.”
“Ray,” Ryan said, trying it out.
“See, that’s not so hard. You ever get back there much? The old hometown?”
“Holidays, mostly. Thanksgiving, Christmas.” His mother usually started in on him around August, trying to extract promises.
“I think I was born there by accident. You know? I can’t make any sense of it. Like Superman’s spaceship landing in the Kents’ cornfield.” Chip laughed. His laugh always sounded fake. “Not that I’m, you know, Superman.”
Metro the Lion yawned. He lowered his head and began chewing on one of his front legs. He worked away at it, making wet, repulsive sounds, then tore loose a patch of fuzzy hair that floated loose.
Chip—it wasn’t going to be easy to think of him as anyone else—said, “They have this lion ranch a few miles out of town. Sometimes he gets to go hang out there with his lion girlfriends.”
Ryan thought maybe the lion was OK with being a corporate stooge. He got regular meals and his own personal assistants. He’d probably lived longer than most lions in the wild, and he’d avoided the humiliation of younger, hipper lions running him off. He showed up for work when he had to and he slept well at night. He had a certain amount of job security.
Chip nodded to the lion attendants. “Hey man. How’s that tooth doing?”
“Lots better,” one of them said, in the cautious, officially friendly manner of someone who was used to dealing with people who looked like Chip.
“Glad to hear it.” To Ryan he said, “He had an abscess. The lion,” Chip explained. “They had to bring in a team from U.C. Davis vet school. It was on the news. You imagine being the guy who sticks his hand in that mouth and starts in with the drill?”
Ryan said he couldn’t. “When did you change over to Ray?”
“While back. You blame me? Would you want to be fifty, sixty years old and have to answer to Chip?” They were walking again, Chip leading the way. His walk was still loose and careless, just a bit more sore-footed. “You can get jobs at the lion ranch, maintenance, grounds jobs. I’m going to try and get on. Call home and tell my folks I work with lions. Wouldn’t that freak them out?”
“Sure. Why lions? What’s the big draw?”
“Well I’m a Leo. My astrological sign, ruled by the sun.” Chip nodded to emphasize the significance of this. “Always loved the sun. I come here and I find out I’m like, a natural desert rat. All those years freezing my ass off. Even when it’s cold here, it’s a mountain kind of cold. Totally different.”
Ryan guessed he wasn’t going to come any closer to solving the grubby mystery that was his cousin. He was wondering if there was a way to give Chip money without its seeming crude or hurtful.
“So, do you have a car?” Chip asked. “A rental?”
Ryan said that he did. “You need a ride somewhere?”
“I was just thinking, if you have any time when you don’t have to do convention stuff, you and me could take a drive. Show you around a little. You don’t want to spend your whole trip hanging around this place, do you?”
“I don’t know, Ray”—he managed the name—“I probably better wait and see how it goes. We have to meet clients, do a bunch of demonstrations, things like that.” It was best to get those excuses right out there. “Though it’d be great to see some of the place. Reno, what do they call it, ‘the Biggest Little City in the World’?” He’d seen it on the postcards they put in the hotel room. He didn’t really get it.
“I always thought you and me should go someplace together.”
Ryan kept walking. Cautious. “Yeah?”
“Like, a road trip. Bust loose. See the world.”
“Yeah?” Ryan said again. “That would have been something.” He was trying to imagine a time, past or present, when such a thing would have occurred to him, would have seemed like any kind of a good idea.
“Because you were like me, you had that same spirit in you, you didn’t want to hang around with the home folks watching paint dry. You knew there was more out there.”
“I guess so. Sure.” They were standing at the foot of another escalator, ready to go up. The noise of the casino sounded like the crowd at a distant football game, or the tiny screaming of people trapped by some catastrophe, fire or shipwreck.
“You ever spend any time in the desert? They got one here.”
He never had. I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name. Nothing he’d seen from the plane, or the drive from the airport, matched up with his idea of desert. It was all just highway and bare, baked earth. He hesitated, not wanting to tell Chip either yes or no. Of course he had free time. They set these things up so you could have all manner of expensive, stupid fun. He imagined sitting in bars or game rooms with his coworkers, watching them make idiots of themselves because they thought it was expected of them. Or keeping to himself because he would be too prideful and lonesome to do anything else. He saw Chip’s twitchy smile, how he was all too ready to be disappointed, and he was pretty sure that if he said no, he would never see him again.
“How about Wednesday afternoon?” Ryan said. “Around two?”
When he offered to pick Chip up, Chip said no, he’d just be at the hotel, that was easiest, which Ryan took to mean that wherever Chip was living, he didn’t want it known.
The convention itself bored him, after the first half day. He’d been to enough of them by now that he recognized the particular energy they generated, the self-created excitement of business and business talk that ran on for a time and then deflated.
He called his girlfriend back in Chicago and assured her he wasn’t doing anything lurid or carnal. He guessed it wouldn’t be hard to find that kind of thing if you went out to some of the smaller bars and casinos. The Grand seemed to keep everything pretty well policed, a glassed-in pleasure dome designed to make the extraction of money the most natural thing in the world.
He liked having money well enough, liked it better than not having any. He was twenty-nine years old and it was time to give thought to providing for himself, and maybe a family. His girlfriend wanted to get married and he thought he’d probably allow her to have her way. He had to smile, thinking of it. People said that if you could talk yourself out of getting married, then you should. He didn’t intend to try. His parents would be relieved that he’d taken this further step into adulthood. He guessed he’d be relieved too. When he was younger he’d never imagined himself married, because marriage was a known and fixed thing and his future was to be both splendid and vague.
You decided that your life would go in a certain direction, and maybe it did. Or maybe you were kidding yourself, and the world was mostly a matter of being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time.
Married! It was either the biggest decision or the biggest accident of them all. On Wednesday afternoon he called the valet to get his car and went down to the front entrance to wait for Chip. The glass was tinted and it gave the sky a dark and lowering look. When he stepped outside, fumbling with his sunglasses, the sky lightened to blue, but the heat rushed at him like a wall. The air was oven-dry. His lungs squeezed shut and he had to think about breathing. Down the stree
t, a thermometer in front of a bank registered ninety-five.
As before, Chip materialized without Ryan’s being aware of it, standing at the end of the turnaround drive, waving. In the plain light of day he looked even thinner, older, dressed as before in his scarecrow clothes. Ryan waved back and Chip stuck a thumb out, going my way?
Ryan started the car and pulled up to where Chip waited. “Hola,” Chip greeted him, sliding into the passenger seat. “Man, look at you, can’t you go thirty seconds without air-conditioning?”
“It isn’t air-conditioning yet.” The car’s vents were still sending out hot air. It served him right for trying to save a few dollars on a rental.
“This is a seriously cheap-ass car,” Chip announced, It was a little Dodge product, two-door, with a shift that wobbled and threatened to pop out of gear.
Ryan was tempted to ask Chip what he drove these days, that he was such a connoisseur of fine vehicles. The heat was making him surly. “You really like it here? What are you, a lizard?”
Chip laughed his haw-haw laugh. “You are such a pussy. This is high desert, we even get snow here, for crying out loud.” Ryan was waiting to pull into traffic, waiting for direction. Chip pointed. “Thataway.”
The car’s innards clicked and began pumping cooler air, though not at a level that inspired confidence. Ryan steered them into traffic. More casinos, bars, hotels, their outsize signs looking wrong and ugly in daylight. “So where are we going?”
“A little drive,” said Chip unhelpfully. “Take this turn.”
Ryan followed Chip’s instructions, navigating through the business district, then onto a freeway ramp. They were heading north, as far as Ryan could tell, although the sun seemed to be shining in all directions, no escape from the burning heat of the afternoon. Chip pointed out mountains visible in the hazy distance, a subdivision of snazzy houses around an artificial lake. Ryan began to calculate times and distances. A couple of hours jaunting around with Chip was all he thought he could manage before he’d need his frosty hotel room, a cool shower, and maybe a nap. “You never told me. How long you’ve been in Reno.”
Chip was fiddling with the radio dial. “Damned cowboy music,” he announced, giving up and shutting it off. “What? What’s so funny?”
“You never like anything on the radio.”
“That’s because all they ever play is crap.” Chip reached in his shirt pocket for cigarettes. “OK if I smoke?”
“Crack your window,” Ryan told him. It was better to put up with heat than smoke. “Hey, if something’s none of my business, just say so. Don’t make me keep asking the same stupid questions.”
“Oh. Three years. Almost. I kind of moved around a lot. Sorry. Sometimes I have trouble remembering stuff. Focusing.” Chip got his cigarette going and sent some portion of the smoke out the window. He was quiet for a time. The road was leading them higher in a gradual grade. The Dodge shimmied whenever Ryan accelerated into the climb. The thing was seriously underpowered. He kept an eye on the temperature gauge in case he had to shut down the air. He wanted to ask Chip what he meant, trouble focusing, but he guessed it was one more answer he wasn’t going to get.
After a while Chip finished his cigarette and began the process of starting another. “Twenty percent disabled. That’s what they tell me. I guess that means I’m eighty percent normal, right?” He laughed again. “Me and the VA, we have what you’d call a hate-hate relationship.”
“You’re saying you get benefit checks.” Ryan was growing accustomed to Chip-speak, the jumpy rhythm of talk that lit on anything and everything and once in a while circled back to actual information. He guessed the 20 percent part was from the neck up.
Chip pointed back behind them and to the west. “That way’s I-80, it takes you into the Sierras and on into California. Over the Donner Pass, you know, the wagon train where everybody ate each other?”
Ryan said he thought he remembered something about that, though he wasn’t sure if he did. Scrub pines dotted the hills around them. Away to their left, ridges of pine forest rose on the mountain peaks, fold on fold. Chip said, “Yeah, they got stuck up there in the snow. Ate the horses. Ate the oxen. Ate the harness leather. Ate tree bark. Ate Ma and Pa. It’s how the West was won. Take this exit.”
Ryan signaled and followed the ramp. The road in front of them stretched, bare and vacant. A line of gravel-colored hills receded into the blue distance. It all had an unfriendly look that worried him. After two, three, six miles by the Dodge’s odometer, he said, “They have any gas stations out here? Because you know, rental cars, you can never be sure what might go wrong with them.” They hadn’t met one car going in either direction since the turnoff. Miles and miles of nothing.
“Relax. Be a tourist.”
“What am I supposed to be looking at, exactly?” He was beginning to envision little cartoons, bleached cattle skulls, vultures perched on giant cacti.
“Just a ways farther. Oh, you know what we should have brought? Water. I don’t suppose you have a plastic jug, anything like that?” Chip turned around to scan the backseat. “Should have thought of it earlier.”
“You’re saying we should turn around?”
“Since when did you become such a little old lady?”
“I’m just asking.”
“Seriously, dude, you had more spirit before you got those swell shoes.”
“Seriously, you need to quit calling me dude.” He’d had about enough of Chip’s abuse, which he had always allowed, perversely, because Chip was such a loser, such a monumental screw-up. But this depended on Chip being aware that he was indeed a screwup. And maybe he was, on some level, but it wasn’t exactly on display.
He was annoyed with himself too, for letting Chip make him feel as if he was still a schoolkid who’d never left home. He’d seen a little bit of the world by now, he’d been smacked around enough to have some of the sass knocked out of him. When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose. That was Chip, he guessed. The original rolling stone.
Chip lit a new cigarette and said, “Sometimes, grasshopper, the journey is more important than the arrival.”
“You suck, you know?”
“Right up there. See that? Can you get off my case now? You sure would have made a piss-poor pioneer.”
In the brown distance, a nearly paintless barn. Coming closer, Ryan saw a corral, empty, a house trailer and a cluster of small sheds. Facing the road, a flat-roofed stucco building with an overhanging porch constructed of posts and laths and tented burlap. He slowed the car to take it in. At one time there had been an attempt at decoration, misplaced. The boards of the porch held wagon wheels and pickaxes and a miner’s lantern, all meant to suggest antiques but now closer to outright junk. Garlands of crepe-paper flowers, bleached to thin colors, were twined around the posts. It looked like a shabby mirage at the end of the earth. A sign in the window, thickly painted, said ROCKS. GEMSTONES.
Chip directed him to pull up in the front. There was no other vehicle, nor any sign of life. At least it seemed to be the destination Chip had in mind. Ryan was relieved about that. It had occurred to him that Chip’s navigation skills were suspect. Chip was already out of the car and looking in at the windows, shading his eyes with his hand. He crossed over to the screen door, propped it open, and spent some time bent over the lock, testing and pulling at it and fishing in his back pocket for something Ryan couldn’t see. Finally he tugged at the door and it gave way. “Come on, I want to show you something.”
Ryan stepped out of the car to the dirt yard. “Did you just break in?”
“It’s OK, I know these guys.”
“What guys?” But Chip had already gone inside.
The sun was still just as strong but the heat seemed less, maybe because they’d climbed high enough for the altitude to make a difference. Ryan crossed the creaking boards of the porch, opened the screen door, and stepped across the threshold, blinking to adjust his eyes.
The space was dim and stuff
y, with a smell like a long-shut cupboard. Chip’s shirt stood out, a spot of blurred brightness. “Hang on, don’t move. I gotta go start the generator.” The screen door slapped shut behind him.
“Jesus,” Ryan said to the darkness. Shapes grew solid as his vision adjusted. A line of counters, shelving, a reflection or luster that might be glass. He heard Chip outside, banging around and mildly swearing. There was the sound of a motor starting, cutting out, and starting again. A bank of fluorescent lights hanging on chains clicked and wavered and grew brighter. An overhead fan began to rotate, stirring the heat.
The glass-fronted shelves above the counter held rocks and minerals of different sorts, some polished smooth, others looking as if they’d been kicked up by an earthmoving machine. One piece, the size of a loaf of bread, had a sparkling green and purple vein through its flattened side. Here was something he guessed to be rose quartz, a central nugget of it surrounded by crystal prisms. Another he was pretty sure was turquoise, though it was rough and cloudy. About others he had no idea. He guessed that even precious stones had to be cut and cleaned and faceted before they looked like anything you’d recognize. Or maybe these were only the kind of geological junk that some people found interesting for reasons of science. On the counter surfaces, different displays of equipment: saw blades, grinders, magnifying lenses, safety goggles.
He turned around and found himself inches away, at eye level, from a rattlesnake curled up and poised to strike, and only after he swallowed his heart down hard did he realize it was stuffed and enclosed in another glass case. He tried to laugh at himself. “Gha gha.”
Chip came back inside, looking pleased. “There’s a Coke machine. We just have to wait until it runs long enough to get the bottles cold.”
“Is this a ghost town, or does somebody live here? Are we trespassing? Just curious.”
The Year We Left Home: A Novel Page 18