BY THE time Rick’s shift was over at the café, all the money was gone and Nat sat in the corner booth drinking a cup of coffee with the spare change that remained, the feeling of despair and shame that washed over him so acute that he nearly burst into tears, not only from the despair and shame but also from fear and rage and the realization that he wanted, in the sharp clarity of that moment, to be back in Battle Mountain, a state of mind that entered him fully like demonic possession. But when he had been given the loans, Johnny Aguirre had told him that there was no backing out of them, that if he left or ran or tried to disappear he would ultimately be found and it would be much worse for him than if he remained in Reno to face what was coming, whatever that turned out to be. He had been told this soon after he had missed the first payment and had been told it again when he had missed the second. And yet the feeling of homesickness had come upon him again and again while Rick was in prison, each time like an endless well. Sometimes, during those months, he would stare at the telephone where it hung above the stovetop and the impossible urge to call his dead brother would come upon him with a sudden violence that would nearly bring him to his knees. He had never told Rick about such thoughts and he knew he never would. It felt, sometimes, as if a silver wire fled back from the present and into the dark backdraft of the past, not growing thinner with the years but only longer, some great measure of absence that began at his heart and reached not to that night of the anaconda but rather to all the golden days and nights before it, a time that he knew was lost to him and would never be regained.
And now that feeling had returned. Even though Rick was back, there was the undeniable sense that something had changed from when they first arrived in Reno two years before. Then, it felt as if they had stepped across a threshold into some unimaginable world, even though they had no money and could barely afford a loaf of white bread and a package of bologna once they rented that first apartment on Fourth Street. But even that had held a kind of magic, not only because it was the first place Nat had ever lived outside of the trailer but because, in comparison, the apartment felt so tangible and solid that he found himself wondering how something as flimsy and insubstantial as a trailer could survive—had ever survived—the Battle Mountain winters that swept down from Golconda Summit each season and dragged away anything that was not in some way shackled to the earth. And yet he and his mother and his brother, for a time, had lived there together, and someone had lived in the trailer before them and would likely live there after them as well.
They had no furniture in those first months and talked often of driving back to Battle Mountain to collect their beds and another load of personal effects, but they could think of no practical way to transport their mattresses back to Reno. And in any case, Nat did not mind sleeping on the floor enough to care. Not then. He had come to Reno at Rick’s urging but he also knew that it was the start of his life, of his adult life, and that Reno held possibilities for him that Battle Mountain never would. Back home, he might one day have gone to work for one of the mining companies on the flanks of the mountains. Rick’s own father had moved their family to Battle Mountain because he landed just such a job. It was possible that, without Rick, Nat would have found himself at fifty or sixty having never gone beyond the town in which he had been born, that he might have spent all his life at the dry bottom of the same sand-filled bowl. Even had his brother lived, that might have been true.
But he had gone beyond the limitations of that dry plain and at first it had seemed like he was fulfilling some kind of destiny that he could barely imagine was real. Even landing jobs had proven easy. The day after they arrived, Nat was hired by a tire shop, and later that same week Rick found a job in a warehouse from which he would return, over the course of that month, with stories of the various scams and games and hustles of Reno’s nightlife. He learned where to buy pot and where to find black beauties and cross tops and, finally, where to score cocaine, a near-mythical substance that neither of them had even seen outside of a movie screen. That spring they discovered the slot machines at the MGM Grand and they also discovered Grady’s and the 715 Club, beginning there and eventually bar-hopping from the upper end of South Virginia Street all the way down to the Peppermill and Spats and the Met, Rick leading the way and Nat following, both of them drunk on Mad Dog and sometimes stoned and later still high on diet pills and occasionally on cocaine, all of it moving around them and they a part of that flow because they were in the city now, the Biggest Little City in the World, and it was, in comparison to everything they had known, like stepping into the center of a lightbulb and grasping the hot glowing electric filament.
HEY.
Nat looked up from the coffee as Rick slid into the booth across from him.
How long you been here?
Hour and a half, Nat said. How’s the new job?
Eight hours of dishes. What do you think?
The sound of the casino floor was muffled but there was still the chattering and banging, the ringing of bells, the bleeping.
You hungry? Rick said. I get a discount.
Naw, Nat said. I’m pretty dang tired, actually.
Long day in the mines?
Something like that.
Rick’s apron hung limp over his shoulder. His eyes darkly ringed.
You don’t look much better, Nat said.