NOT A SINGLE TREE IN ALL THOSE ENDLESS MILES, NOT EVEN on the flanks of the mountains that rise above the desert floor in all directions, the road coming down from the west, descending Golconda Summit in a slow curve before slipping into a straight black line that shoots across the shadscale without deviation like the trace of a gunshot. It seems impossible that anyone would live in a place like this, a place without trees, but along the ruler line of the highway stand occasional homes that crouch in the dry and colorless dust as if hunching against the desert wind that blasts down the slope of that summit and into the flats. Whether those homes are abandoned or occupied it is impossible to tell.
When the town appears it is as if someone has taken a collection of such homes and gathered them into a grid a few miles wide. Humboldt and Broad and Main and Reese and Scott, across them the graph of numbered streets at the far edge of which rests a line of trailers and the blocky turquoise-painted Laundromat. The school is nearby, as are the three ponds, an area familiar to every child in the town as it becomes, with the start of Little League baseball season each year, a congregating point for bicycles and motorbikes, children and teens swooping and yelling and reeling everywhere. To the north, a short few blocks, is Front Street and along its length run Lemaire’s, the Quick, the Pak-Out, the Happy Ox, known to all as the Queer Steer, and two weather-beaten casinos, their flat fronts situated side by side: the Owl Club and the Nevada Club. A few blocks east of the casinos sits the Shell station, its sign suspended atop two white poles high in the air, the lightbulbs illuminating the S perpetually burned out so that the message it sends in bright yellow letters across miles and miles of desert is an invitation to hell.
For a long time there is only the anonymity of quiet movement: paint-stripped cars adrift on dusty streets, a few sweating figures on the sidewalks in front of the casinos. But then there you are: a boy come racing through the afternoon light in an undulating swoop between lines of boxlike homes, the fences of which guard patches of yellow grass. It is the dead center of the hot summer of 1974 and you sit on the handlebars of a bicycle piloted by your brother and you are smiling.
Your father has been in the ground four years and your brother—seventeen now—has become your entire world. On the hottest days he takes you down to the river near the iron shape of the Black Bridge and you build forts from the willow branches and swim and catch frogs and fish. A few weeks ago the two of you rode inner tubes from that bridge to the next, a journey of only a few miles stretched into a day so long and glorious that you will remember it ever after as the one perfect day of all your life. Today he has ridden you on the handlebars of his bicycle to the corner store, Lemaire’s. He bought you a candy bar as he picked up two packs of cigarettes, one for your mother and one for himself, and now you are riding back across town, again on the handlebars, your brother taking a long, looping route, up and down streets lined with the worn and beaten homes of kids you know from school and the empty shell of what was once the town’s only movie theater. You miss being in that giant dark room with your brother beside you. It did not even matter what film was playing. Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Robin Hood. One time he took you to see a movie called Magnum Force, telling you it had to be a secret. He was excited to see it and his excitement made you excited as well but in the warm dark space of the theater you grew bored and closed your eyes and drifted off to sleep. When you woke, it was to your brother shaking you softly and calling you by the nickname he had used since before you could remember: Hey, Champaign. Wake up, buddy. Movie’s over. You will remember that feeling for the rest of your life: that you are in exactly the place you are meant to be. You wonder now if you will ever feel that way again.
When the bicycle chain breaks you nearly come off the front of the handlebars. Bill shouts, Whoa! as you coast to a stop.
You jump down. What happened?
Chain slipped, he says. He looks down and then steps off the bike.
You hold the handlebars and he kneels. Dang, he says. Chain broke. He emphasizes this second word, so sharp is his sense of surprise.
Can you fix it? you say.
I don’t know. I hope so. He stands, looks up and down the street as if a bicycle repairman might be within his field of vision.
You are only four dusty blocks from the trailers and so Bill lets you ride on the seat as he pushes the bicycle, sometimes hurling the machine forward so that you can pilot it in its long coast to a standstill.
The trailers are arrayed in two short rows in the dry and colorless dust, each ringed with a variety of household goods like debris washed up from some ancient inland ocean: abandoned sofas and broken cars, discarded air conditioning units, bent and unusable folding chairs. Some hold to stretches of brief and haggard fencing wrapping an idea of yard filled with the broken stubble of dead grass. Many have ramshackle stairs leading up to their front doors, and all of them, each and every one, peel and rust and bake under the summer sun and the seemingly endless hot wind blowing down from Golconda Summit to the west.
You are walking beside the bike now, Bill pushing it forward across the dirt beside the road. It is then that you see him: a boy of about your age who looks up at you as Bill upends the bike in the dust, its wheels hanging in the air like twin zeros. Sweet bike, he says.
It was, Bill says, turning toward the trailer.
Chain broke, you say.
Bummer. The boy wears a bright blue T-shirt with a rubbery soccer ball iron-on that looks hot and damp in the summer heat. A red bandanna is wrapped around his forehead, most of it covered by dark shaggy hair that falls in wild curls nearly to his eyes.
Your brother has disappeared inside the trailer now and you and the boy say nothing while you stand waiting for him, both of you staring at the bike. When Bill reappears a few moments later, he is lugging the heavy red toolbox that had been your father’s.
That’s a cool bike, Rick says to him again.
Yeah, thanks, Bill says. He is already kneeling in the dust and has clicked open the toolbox but he looks up at Rick now. You new around here?
Yeah, we just got here.
Moving into Mrs. Brown’s?
Who’s Mrs. Brown?
That one, Bill says, pointing to the trailer.
Oh, yeah, Rick says. Me and my mom and dad.