Blue Highways (31 page)

Not everything that happens in Ely happens at the Hotel Nevada, but it could. The old place is ready for it. But that night the blackjack tables were empty, the slots nearly so, and the marbleized mirrors reflected the bartender’s slump and a waitress swallowing a yawn. Yet I did see these things:

Item: a woman, face as blank as a nickel slug, pulling dutifully on the slot handles. She had stood before the gears so many times she herself had become a mechanism for reaching, dropping, pulling. Her eyes were dark and unmoving as if unplugged. The periodic jangle of change in the winner’s cup moved her only to reach into the little coffer without looking and deposit the coins again.

Item: a man moseyed in wearing leather from head to toe; attempting cowpuncher macho, he looked more like a two-legged first baseman’s mitt. With him a bored blonde. “I’m a very competitive person. I’m in it to win,” he said, and the blonde yawned again.

Item: in a glass case hung a cross-section of bristlecone pine. At its center a card said: 3000
B.C. BUILDING OF THE PYRAMIDS
. A seedling today could be alive in the year 7000. That put a perspective on things.

Over another beer I watched faces that would be lucky to see
A.D.
2000. When I left, a man in a white goatee whispered, “No games of chance, cowboy?”

“Haven’t finished losing the first one,” I said.

T
RADITION
persists in Nevada. You can see it, for example, in the whorehouses of Ely. Prostitution is legal in White Pine County because miners, in order to work efficiently in the ground digging for this and that, traditionally require whores.

The next morning, I overfilled my gas tank, splattering no-lead around, because I was eavesdropping on a conversation about the going price of a trick. A man with a white beard (there are more per-capita white beards in Nevada than any state other than Alaska) said to a tourist with a prissy little mustache
à la mode,
“I don’t know all the prices, but I heard girls at the Big Four are getting twenty-five simoleons for a straight.”

Another white-beard said, “Used to be ten.”

“Hell, it used to be five. We got old just in time, didn’t we, Boyd? Could you do a dollar’s worth of damage now?”

“Couldn’t do a lick of damage.”

A young man replacing a wiper on the tourist’s Camaro said, “A lick’s all either of you could do. You coots keep your jeans zipped. Last night couple girls got to swinging knives because one had more hours on her check.”

“Calling them ‘hours’ now, are they?” Boyd asked.

The tourist, trying to be one of the men, said, “Got a friend in Denver whose wife charges him five bucks a jump. She’s buying furniture with it.”

“Now that’s
real
whoring,” Boyd said. “These girls are just trying to make a living. Why don’t your friend take on the neighbors over the back fence. She could buy a Florida vacation too.”

When I went to the road again, clouds obscured the sun and a damp wind came out of the north. The mountainsides along highway 50 west of Ely were shot through with abandoned mining tunnels, the low entrances propped open by sagging timbers; they were the kind of old-time mines that Walter Brennan might come limping out of, chortling his crazy laugh. Magpies, looking like crows dressed for a costume party, swooped from fencepost to post and flicked wings in the mist. The highway was a long, silver streak of wet. Up into the Pancake Mountains, driving, driving, wishing the day would dry off—after all, this was the desert. But the sky remained dark as dusk.

I looked out the side window. For an instant, I thought the desert looked back. Against the glass a reflection of an opaque face. I couldn’t take my attention from that presence that was mostly an absence. Whitman:

This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,

This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.

Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he’s going or to understand what he sees? Hoping to catch onto things, at least for a moment, I was only following down the highways a succession of images that flashed like blue sparks. Nothing more.

The experience of the desert anchorite Saint Anthony is typical of men who go off into deserts: hunger, solitude, and vastness engender not awareness or redemption so much as phantasmagoria. Under desert bushes Saint Anthony saw naked girls, behind stones dragons, and in shadows the deformed demons of Satan. My guess is that he was finding the consequence of his own imagination.

I had only a vacancy of face on the window, so maybe a simple slice of salami would dispel it. At Hickison Summit, a long rise formerly called “Ford’s Defeat” because a Model T needed to be pulled up it by real horsepower, I stopped at a wayside set back in a box canyon of wet juniper and sage. The scent of plants saturated the mist. Alexander the Great, I’ve heard, was preserved in honey, Lord Nelson in brandy, and Jesus in aloe and myrrh. If I can choose, I’ll take my eternity in essence of sage and juniper.

After a sandwich and some wine, I walked up the canyon. In the evergreens, a pipping of invisible birds and the slow drip of rain. The stones were wet through and through, but their blanched surfaces didn’t glisten; even the desert rocks seemed designed to hold moisture.

Wind and water had cut the canyon wall into peculiarly sensuous shapes, and on rocks the elements had left blank, Indians of a thousand years ago carved sacred designs. The Bureau of Land Management had fenced off the petroglyphs, but stick figures, concentric circles, and rectangles stood out clearly from the damp stone. To the Indian, these cuttings were not pictures or objects so much as events: they carried life.

At the west end, where the fence came close to a ritualistic chiseling, I reached over and traced my finger along an incised abstraction now polished by years of hands. A cryptic engraving. Then I saw that the design wasn’t at all abstract, but rather a graphic rendering of a female pudendum, a glyph even Cro-Magnons carved. In a time so long ago no descendant can remember any of it, an Indian had cut his desire, or coming of age, or hope for regeneration into the pink sandstone. It was as if I touched another dimension—a long skein of men, events, places.
It was as if I had reused the image.

I walked back to the Ghost and drove to the highway. The sky began to open and the mist to dissipate. On the map I noticed a thermal spring to the south. I wandered around side roads before Spencer’s Hot Springs appeared on a knoll under the snowy Toquima Mountains east of Austin. When I saw the blue pools steaming, there was no question in my mind. With only five Nevadans to the square mile (in actuality many fewer when you discount Las Vegas and Reno), I figured I could get by undisturbed. Behind a cover of thistle and spiny hopsage, I stripped and dished up the hot water, let it cool slightly, then poured buckets of it over me. I even slapped on hot, gritty, blue-gray mud to loosen the sinews. Then I rinsed clean as men before must have done, dumping over me water warmed by the molten heart of the earth.

T
HEY
hanged a horsethief three times one day in Austin, Nevada, because the hangman couldn’t get the length of rope adjusted properly; but he was a conscientious public official and kept at it until he got it right. About the only thieving going on now was syphoning gasoline out of automobiles by people who came through at night and found the stations closed. After dark, the next gas was a couple of hours away.

Austin, in a canyon on the west slope of the Toiyabe Mountains, was a living ghost town: forty percent living, fifty percent ghost, ten percent not yet decided. It was the seat of Connecticut-sized Lander County mainly because only one other place, Battle Mountain, could you honestly call a town. But now Battle Mountain, with six times the population, thanks to the interstate and new power plant, wanted the government up there, where old mines were starting to produce again as the price of silver rose. Time was working against Austin. Once the county seat went, so would Austin, they said. A man commented: “We’ll be all but finished down here. Twenty-five years ago a fella wrote a book about us called
The Town That Died Laughing
. Stick your head out the window and listen to all that laughing. You ask me, I don’t believe one damned bit in change.”

On three sides of town, prospect holes riddled the mountains and dripped out mine tailings like ulcerated wounds; to the west, several hundred feet down, lay a flat desert valley disappearing into the Shoshone Mountains on the horizon. Main Street, also U.S. 50, made a straight and steep run through Austin, then down the mountain and off across the desert. The side streets were hard-packed, oily sand, some with gradients that would test a donkey, and the rutted sidewalks, washing down the slope, still had their Old West canopies. Because Austin is without level land, many of the houses had been built into terraced cutouts so that from their porches people looked down onto the roofs of buildings along Main Street.

I liked Austin. The house chimneys slipped a wispy smoke from juniper hearth fires, and the cracked brick and stone of the storefronts, more or less, had been left alone. An 1890 photograph showed things little changed other than the defunct one-car railroad running up Main. Here, too, the Nevada story: 1862, a Pony Express rider looking for a lost horse finds a rock loaded with silver ore; 1865, six thousand people and as many mining and milling companies, hundreds of them fraudulent; 1878, the mines virtually played out; a century later, three hundred people—about the same number as in the old cemetery at the edge of the mountain, where the names were English, Polish, Italian.

In a small backroom with walls, ceiling, and floor going off at a variety of angles, not one of which was ninety degrees, I had a hamburger. After dinner I walked the town over, but the damp night got to me, and I went into Clara’s Golden Club—one of six bars—to shake the chill. It was a fine, worn place with trophy heads (the dusty deer wore a tie); against the east wall stood a century-old backbar supported by four Corinthian columns of mahogany. The silver on the mirror had cracked apart, breaking the faces that watched from it, and sections of brass bar rail were scuffed through.

Clara, toes snugged under a drowsing sheep dog, wore a shapeless lavender sweater and a clerk’s green visor to hold back her gray hair. She wrapped coins at the empty blackjack table. Behind her a sign:

NO ONE UNDER 21 NEAR TABLE

MIN $1.00 FINE MAX $5.00

The way her shoulders bent over the clinking coins brought to mind Madame Defarge, knitting needles clicking ceaselessly, overseeing the fates of men.

I ordered a draft. Everyone at the bar—cattlemen, sheepmen, miners—wore the Nevada uniform: a down vest. Periodically, someone threw a coin on top of the ten-foot backbar. I asked a man, whose brow opened and closed like a concertina as he talked, what was going on.

“Crazy,” he said. “They been doing that to bring luck for years. No telling how many silver dollars behind that mirror. Who knows what else? One time, a double-eagle was the smallest piece of change you got in Austin.” He shifted around to talk. “Go out to the mountain edge and look at Stokes Castle. Everything’s falling down now, but you can get an idea of the money we used to have here. Took fifty million dollars in silver ore out of these mountains before they went empty.”

A man named Vern said, “Mines gonna come back, Johnny. Soon as the price of silver gets high enough.”

“Been slinging that for a hundred years,” Johnny said. He put his arm on my shoulder. “Right here’s the only mine worth talking about now—these Californians and New Yorkers. Mining and ranching together don’t equal half what these boys bring in to the state. I read that in print.”

A woman playing the slots stepped to the bar for a rum. Her T-shirt once carried a message, but soap and sun had bleached it to unreadability.

“You wouldn’t play those if you were deaf,” Johnny said.

“I’d play them if I was dead.” She returned to her relentless pulling.

I asked what he meant. “People play slots because of sound. Gears turning, money jangling like in an old trolley. Same reason pinball machines got noises. Bandits wouldn’t turn a dime if they didn’t rattle and roll.”

Johnny and Vern took the bar dice and rolled horses to see who would plug the jukebox. Johnny won. “Don’t play the dirty one, or my wife’ll get wind of it again.” Vern made the selections and went to the toilet. The music came on. Country and western.
Thump, thump, thump.
“Dang him!” Johnny said. “He played that dang song. Now he’ll tell the wife I paid for it.” Johnny yelled toward the back, “Dang it, Vern!” A cackle from the jakes. Johnny didn’t talk during the music. I think he was listening. As best I could make out, this was the dirty part: “I got the hoss, she’s got the saddle”…
dum-dum-dum
… “together we gonna ride, ride, ride”…
dum-dum-dum
… “all night long.”

We ordered another round. Johnny said, “Bag of flour sold here once for a quarter million dollars. That’s why the town seal’s got a bag of flour on it.”

“What?” He repeated it very slowly. In my mind I saw a furred, aquatic animal balancing a sack of daisies on its nose. “I don’t follow you.”

“In bonanza days, after the Civil War, a grocer made a bet with a fella on an election. Whoever lost had to carry a fifty-pound bag of wheat flour up Main Street. Now just walking that street taxes a man. Grocer lost. So he carried fifty pounds up Main to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body.’ He was a Southerner. After he got to the top, he auctioned the bag off and gave the money to charity. Man who bought it auctioned it off and gave the money to charity. And so on. Made ten thousand dollars that day off the same bag. Later, another town got wind of it, and they wanted in. Last time that flour got auctioned was at the nineteen oh four World’s Fair in St. Louis. That dang bag raised better than a quarter million dollars, and that’s why the official town seal is a bag of flour. It’s over in Reno now.”