"It's not all for booze," I said. "Most of it's for research on cyanide leaching."
"Dad doesn't need to do research on leaching," Brian said. "He's an expert." He and Lori cracked up. I glared at them. I knew more about Dad's situation than they did because he talked to me more than anyone else in the family. We'd still go Demon Hunting in the desert together, for old time's sake, since by then I was seven and too grown up to believe in demons. Dad told me about all his plans and showed me his pages of graphs and calculations and geological charts, depicting the layers of sediment where the gold was buried.
He told me I was his favorite child, but he made me promise not to tell Lori or Brian or Maureen. It was our secret. "I swear, honey, there are times when I think you're the only one around who still has faith in me," he said. "I don't know what I'd do if you ever lost it." I told him that I would never lose faith in him. And I promised myself I never would.
*
A few months after Mom had started working as a teacher, Brian and I passed by the Green Lantern. The clouds above the setting sun were streaked scarlet and purple. The temperature was dropping quickly, from searing hot to chilly within a matter of minutes, like it always did in the desert at dusk. A woman with a fringed shawl draped over her shoulders was smoking a cigarette on the Green Lantern's front porch. She waved at Brian, but he didn't wave back.
"Yoo-hoo! Brian, it's me, sugar! Ginger!" she called.
Brian ignored her.
"Who's that?" I asked.
"Some friend of Dad's," he said. "She's dumb."
"Why is she dumb?"
"She doesn't even know all the words in a Sad Sack comic book," Brian said.
He told me that Dad had taken him out for his birthday awhile back. In the drugstore, Dad had let Brian pick out whatever present he wanted, so Brian chose a Sad Sack comic book. Then they went to the Nevada Hotel, which was near the Owl Club and had a sign outside saying BAR GRILL CLEAN MODERN. They had dinner with Ginger, who kept laughing and talking real loud and touching both Dad and Brian. Then all three climbed the stairs to one of the hotel rooms. It was a suite, with a small front room and a bedroom. Dad and Ginger went into the bedroom while Brian stayed in the front room and read his new comic book. Later, when Dad and Ginger came out, she sat down next to Brian. He didn't look up. He kept staring at the comic book, even though he'd already read it all the way through twice. Ginger declared that she loved Sad Sack. So Dad made Brian give Ginger the comic book, telling him it was the gentlemanly thing to do.
"It was mine!" Brian said. "And she kept asking me to read the bigger words. She's a grown-up, and she can't even read a comic book."
Brian had taken such a powerful dislike to Ginger that I realized she must have done something more than shanghai his comic book. I wondered if he had figured out something about Ginger and the other ladies at the Green Lantern. Maybe he knew why Mom said they were bad. Maybe that was why he was mad. "Did you learn what they do inside the Green Lantern?" I asked.
Brian stared off ahead. I tried to see what he was looking at, but there was nothing there except for the Tuscarora Mountains rising up to meet the darkening sky. Then he shook his head. "She makes a lot of money," he said. "and she should buy her own darn comic book."
SOME PEOPLE LIKED to make fun of Battle Mountain. A big newspaper out east once held a contest to find the ugliest, most forlorn, most godforsaken town in the whole country, and it declared Battle Mountain the winner. The people who lived there didn't hold it in much regard, either. They'd point to the big yellow-and-red sign way up on a pole at the Shell stationthe one with the burned-out Sand say with a sort of perverse pride. "Yep, that's where we live: hell!"
But I was happy in Battle Mountain. We'd been there for nearly a year, and I considered it homethe first real home I could remember. Dad was on the verge of perfecting his cyanide gold process, Brian and I had the desert, Lori and Mom painted and read together, and Maureen, who had silky white-blond hair and a whole gang of imaginary friends, was happy running around with no diaper on. I thought our days of packing up and driving off in the middle of the night were over.
*
Just after my eighth birthday, Billy Deel and his dad moved into the Tracks. Billy was three years older than me, tall and skinny with a sandy crew cut and blue eyes. But he wasn't handsome. The thing about Billy was that he had a lopsided head. Bertha Whitefoot, a half-Indian woman who lived in a shack near the depot and kept about fifty dogs fenced in her yard, said it was because Billy's mom hadn't turned him over at all when he was a baby. He just lay there in the same position day in and day out, and the side of his head that was pressed against the mattress got a little flat. You didn't notice it all that much unless you looked at him straight on, and not a lot of people did, because Billy was always moving around like he was itchy. He kept his Marlboros rolled up in one of his T-shirt sleeves, and he lit his cigarettes with a Zippo lighter stamped with a picture of a naked lady bending over.
Billy lived with his dad in a house made of tar paper and corrugated tin, down the tracks from our house. He never mentioned his mom and made it clear that you weren't supposed to bring her up, so I never knew if she had run off or died. His dad worked in the barite mine and spent his evenings at the Owl Club, so Billy had a lot of unsupervised time on his hands.
Bertha Whitefoot took to calling Billy. "the devil with a crew cut" and. "the terror of the Tracks." She claimed he set fire to a couple of her dogs and skinned some neighborhood cats and strung their naked pink bodies up on a clothesline to make jerky. Billy said Bertha was a big fat liar. I didn't know whom to believe. After all, Billy was a certified JDjuvenile delinquent. He had told us that he spent time in a detention center in Reno for shoplifting and vandalizing cars. Shortly after he moved to the Tracks, Billy started following me around. He was always looking at me and telling the other kids he was my boyfriend.
"No, he's not!" I would yell, though I secretly liked it that he wanted to be.
A few months after he'd moved to town, Billy told me he wanted to show me something really funny.
"If it's a skinned cat, I don't want to see it," I said.
"Naw, it ain't nothing like that," he said. "It's really funny. You'll laugh and laugh. I promise. Unless you're scared."