The Year We Left Home (23 page)

He said to Chip, “Your parents were glad to get word of you. Said you’d been out of touch for a pretty good spell.”

Chip let that one pass. Ryan guessed he’d had his reasons for staying away and staying hard to find. He didn’t exactly look like he’d come up in the world. Chip said, “I was sorry to hear about your sister.”

“Thanks.” Ryan felt some part of himself tighten, then fall away.

“How’s she doing these days?”

“Not great. Not terrible.” Not herself. Not recognizably anyone else.

“Is she—”

“Is it OK if we don’t talk about her? I mean, not right now.”

“Sure, man. Sorry.”

Ryan felt Chip watching him as he stared into the gaudy complications behind the bar, the backlit shelves of stacked glassware and liqueur bottles, things nobody ever drank, like Chartreuse and Benedictine. “Hey,” Chip said. “You done with that one? How ’bout we take a walk? This place makes me feel like I’m inside somebody’s damned rib cage.”

The casino floor was brighter and much noisier than the lounge, and Ryan tried to get his eyes and ears up to speed. “Would you look at all this,” he said, giving up on any better effort to try and fix it with words. A huge expanse of green felt tables and chandeliers and its
multitude of little figures engaged in their separate dramas—fanning cards, throwing dice, acting out pantomimes of winning and losing. Here two old men in cowboy hats and worn-down boots and bolo ties, small-time ranchers on a holiday, Ryan guessed, joined the crowd around a blond woman got up in a pink satin cowgirl outfit, all fringe and sequined stars and white chaps, who was using a microphone to promote some upcoming stage extravaganzas. A pack of Japanese businessmen in dark suits had taken over a blackjack table. There were junketing senior citizens, bikers, women who might have been hookers—he could understand the confusion—women who might have been men, and hard-eyed men who might have been cops, or else convicts.

“You been downstairs yet?” Chip asked. “Come on, you got to see Metro.”

“Metro?” Ryan repeated, deafened. His ears were still full of din.

“Yeah, you can’t say you were at the Grand until you see Metro. He’s the lion.”

“I thought you never came here,” Ryan said, still trying to make sense of what Chip was saying. Lion?

“Got to make an exception for Metro.” Chip led him down an escalator. The moving stairs and the echoing racket gave Ryan a feeling of vertigo, floating between two spaces. He was able to notice more about Chip now without being obvious. He was dressed like a bum, there was no other way to say it, in wash pants of industrial green, a flapping shirt with a faint plaid pattern over a white T-shirt. On his feet, gnarled flat sandals with leather toe rings. He looked down on his luck and used to being that way.

The basement level was a shopping arcade of sorts with a floor of gleaming tile. Signs directed them to the beauty and barber shops, a bowling alley. Store windows displayed clothing whose only real purpose was to look expensive: sporty cashmere blazers trimmed in gold buttons, pearl necklaces, suave leather handbags, golf and tennis outfits in candy colors. It was less crowded than the casino floor upstairs and it was easier to make themselves heard. “Why a lion?”

“Come on, man, MGM? You ever go to the movies? The part at the beginning where the lion roars? They got a whole movie theater down here, show stuff like
Doctor Zhivago.
” Chip picked up the pace. “Here you go. Here’s the guy.”

The lion reclined on a mat of artificial grass like an indoor putting green, like the unnatural irrigated lawns they favored in these parts. A collar around the lion’s neck was secured to a cement post with loops of chain. More posts and a waist-high Plexiglas barrier kept him well away from any crowds, but still, it was closer to a lion than Ryan guessed he’d ever been. The lion had a shabby look. His mane reminded Ryan of ancient fur coats stored in mothballs. His muzzle was gray and he blinked without looking at anything around him. Just another day at the lion office, his expression seemed to say.

“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 street, 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.”