The Year We Left Home (24 page)

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 stuffy, 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.”

“It’s cool, relax. Did you see this? It’s black opal. Very high quality stuff. Friends of mine live here. It’s absolutely fine with them if I hang out while they’re gone. They went camping. Out at a dig. They do that, go all over the state, rockhounding. It’s a way of life.”

“They call and tell you to stop by?”

“You see any phone lines out here, slick?”

“All right,” Ryan said. “Christ.” He was getting thirsty, although he tried telling himself he wasn’t. Warm Coke was starting to sound pretty good.

“Come on out back, you can see for about a hundred miles.”

It wasn’t a hundred miles but it was a good long ways into empty air. Chip led him past the straggling edge of the homestead and its discarded piles of possibly useful junk, and up an incline. Even this mild climb coated Ryan’s neck with new sweat. He should have thought to bring some kind of hat. They stood on the loose and pebbled dirt, which was in the process of turning itself into sand, in the next geological era, and looked out at a line of distant, pale green that marked a draw or some temporary watercourse, not yet gone dry for summer. In the farthest distance, very small, another mountain range, like something made of toy blocks.

“You know what you’re looking at?” Chip asked, and when Ryan shook his head, he said, “My home planet.”

“How do you figure?”

“It just feels right. I dunno. Clears my head, being out here.”

Even with sunglasses, Ryan felt the glare bearing down on him. “Kind of a lonesome place.”

“Yeah, well, I never had much luck with people anyway.”

Ryan kept quiet. There wasn’t any point in contradicting Chip just so he could hear himself say something nice. Chip poked at the dirt with his sandal, sending a few small stones skidding down the hill. “It’s
no-bullshit
real
out here, man. Live or die. Eat or be eaten. The basics. What more does anybody need?”

“How about, Chicago-style pizza and cold beer.”

“Always with the funnies. I’m making a serious point here. Modern life, it’s turned us soft. We lose . . .” Chip stopped, searched the empty air with his free hand for the rest of his thought.

“Connection?” Ryan suggested.

“Yeah, something like that. All the survival skills get beat out of us. How do you think Indian tribes lived out here? You think we could hunt, or build shelters, or make our own clothes? We wouldn’t last two weeks.”

“We don’t have to do any of that,” Ryan said. “I survive just fine, I went out and got a job so I could take care of myself. You might give it a shot.”

Chip went on as if Ryan hadn’t spoken. “We’ve lost touch with, ah, actual, physical stuff. What’s more real, a computer, or a rock that’s been in the ground for five hundred thousand years?”

“Now you’re confusing
real
with
natural.
”

Chip waved this away. “See, that’s what happens when I try to explain. It always turns into an argument.”

“I’m not arguing with you, Ray.” It was a lost cause.

“Human beings,” Chip said, “have evolved too far from their animal origins. I get so tired of trying to figure out words. Maybe I’ll just quit on them. Make animal noises. Bird noises.”

“I’d miss talking to you.” Which was true, in some perverse way.

Chip squinted at him, as if trying to tell if Ryan was making fun of him. “You’re OK, you know? You’re a pretty righteous dude.”

“Thanks.” They were back to
dude
again.

“I mean, you could have turned out to be a real dick. Because you always had the smarts and the good looks and the women chasing after you—”

“Oh yeah, sure,” Ryan muttered, embarrassed at being the object of Chip’s envy. You wanted to be envied, of course, but by somebody cool.

“—but you never acted like that put you in some special category,
you know, better than anybody else. You didn’t have to look me up out here. I appreciate that.”

“You’re family, Ray.” True enough, although it sounded weak or insulting to fall back on that as a reason: Even though you’re a freakish loser, we feel some obligation toward you. Which was pretty much the case. “I need to be heading back to the hotel pretty soon here.”

“Right. No problem.”

“You said something about Cokes?”

Chip turned and skidded down the hillside, his sandals wobbling in the dirt. “Couple a Cokes, coming up.”

Ryan walked back to the car and opened the doors to let some of the heat out. He was trying to think what report he could send back home to Chip’s anxious parents.
He really loves the weather out there. And officially, he’s only twenty percent disabled.

Chip came around the side of the building, holding four Coke bottles by their necks. “Here, I got us a couple each since they’re kind of small.”

Ryan took them. They were somewhere between warm and tepid. He opened one and drank down half of it. “The pause that refreshes. Thanks.”

“One sec, I gotta . . .” Chip headed back inside the stucco building. Ryan wasn’t looking forward to the inside of the Dodge. The steering wheel and the vinyl seats looked hot enough to melt skin. Behind him on the road, the sound of a car engine, still some distance away. He stood and watched it until it became visible. A baby blue pickup truck with a tarp stretched over the bed. It slowed and heaved itself into the dirt lane, pulling up behind him.

It did not occur to him to feel apprehensive.

Two things happened, one right after the other: A man swung out of the pickup truck and crossed the distance between them at a shambling run. Then Chip emerged from the rock shop with a green army knapsack, cradling it in his arms.

“All right, asshole,” the man said, pointing first at Ryan, then at Chip, or not pointing, really, since there was a gun in his hand and
that was what he was using for emphasis. Ryan looked at it without real comprehension. He was still trying to figure out why someone he’d never met was calling him an asshole.

“Hey there, Otto,” Chip greeted him. He’d stopped short, not moving from his place near the door.

Otto?

“Put that down. Now, dirtbag.” Otto waved the gun around. He had a big black beard and wore a straw cowboy hat. His face was red and sweating and twitchy.