gunman (revised)

[mnaz]

Halfway up another granite corrugation, another Nevada moon-scrape, you pass an odd Forest Service sign: “Entering Toiyabe National Forest.” Naturally you expect trees. The road goes higher, the engine strains and still no trees. But you trust the Forest Service. Surely you'll spot a juniper. Candidates emerge on the bleak granite, tree-like forms and lumps, all of them more bleak granite. Still climbing, 6000 feet, 6500 . . . Could this wind-strafed mountain ever taste a warm day? And where are the trees? They were everywhere up north, they even grew through concrete, so maybe you expect too much. Still, at least one tree seems a prerequisite to a title of "forest" . . . Still climbing, 6500 feet, 7000, summit ahead. More bleak candidates. Some sort of Forest Service swindle afoot.

Only two more corrugations to Tonopah, where they all stop due to exhaustion. That is Tonopah's economy, exhaustion, after the silver mines expired. The town sits halfway between Reno and Vegas, and no one makes that drive in one shot except the odd possessed gearjammer throwing dice at the subconscious. And few at either end have a good word for the road between, the subtle grades of unfinished, solar-wash exile, an acquired taste.

You stop at a saloon across from a crumbling historic hotel, exhausted as you are, and the guy next to you has a theory about peace.
"When I leave town I want to leave town."
"When I'm out there I don't want to see anyone."
"Especially some gun-toting Forest Service goon asking for a permit."
"We're two-hundred miles from anything, and I hope it stays that way.”

Now he sounds familiar. He's been to your roads, incensed at bounds imposed on boundless, in some ways your mirror image. He sits next to you and preaches, on his bleak granite, in that exhausted saloon.

~

West again, and the pace slows as you gain speed; you'll never outrun these mountains. Beyond one ridge others appear, like freighters on the open ocean . . . Duration of view is the rule, despite doing seventy. Count lofty snow-glaze furrows over streaking salt flats at your leisure, note their assembly into a greater whole. No reason to watch ahead. No one is coming . . . A ten mile straightaway tempts haste, a test of speed, the dark side of the west though hard to dismiss. Haste promises swift resolution and darkness claims to destroy greater darkness, and all from the same energy on back roads over God's country bounded only by fences of mind.

You hold a lone bluff in fixated gaze. Peripheral vision fades to amorphous spots, and that bluff becomes only object, same as any object intensely beheld. Try it sometime. Is it a gateway? They abound here, illustrate the field parted by a center stripe. Your machine buzzes and you trust the buzz, your numb velocity, convinced you'll never stop until you crest a rise and a tiny town appears . . . Not so much a "town" as a dirty mishmash of debris and tin trailers, half-abandoned. You doubt if seventy people call the place home, but you spot a crude barrack of a motel next to a bar and diner combo in a box facade and a boarded assay office.

You see etchings into the hills, and lately you've missed too many. So you stop at the diner and hand over a twenty for a room with a concrete floor and no TV. The tobacco regime isn't bad and the fan works. It's perfect. You might stay a week, recapture a gateway or two . . . So you study your topo-atlas, which notes every rail siding and frontier footnote with a black dot, most of them vanished places. You notice a dot called "Morton Mill," the only footnote on a no-name playa, and resolve to go find this mill.

~

The next day you climb a good dirt road beside a wash into the junipers and branch south on a rough trail littered with rocks. None of the locals knew about this road, but your atlas, notoriously sketchy at times, showed it as a bold line. You stay left per the map at a single cottonwood water-hole and descend into a rocky morass. You can see the playa now, but it would take forever and a spare tire. So you return to the cottonwood for a dash of bourbon . . . Enveloped in a a world of smudged auburn and ivory, a scene remarkably like a crude sketch you made with four chalk pastels before you came down. So which way now?

You try the right fork, which also craps out, but this time you eke out six more miles to a crest, halted not far beyond by a deep washout. You're close now, but no sign of the mill. Its remains must be tucked behind a rise or long ago scattered to sky and wind. The playa reclines, so take your cue . . . You study jumbled dark orange badlands and a sheer cliff across the basin. The far side rises much more steeply than your side, but why? Fearsome forces unknown. From theories of faulted, thrust rock adrift on a molten sphere to God-fearing tales of Almighty wrath. Yes, you met a man who thinks God hurled great objects at earth with enough force to change its rotation axis and cause rock upheaval. Either way, violence far beyond a human scale. But these hills are beaten down, their violent origins concealed, though a few reach high enough to hold small trees and a title of "mountain."

A few hours pass, and open peace unties knots. People ask if you take a gun out here, to shoot at glint, or maybe lizards. Probably a good idea, but if you took a gun it might alter your reactions beyond recognition, so no. It's in the interest of science . . . In time you retreat back down the bad trail to the lone cottonwood. You feel every rock on your tires, so go slow. And as you wander the next basin the yellow fire-orb goes like a death star at the rim, diabolical orange as it roils, boils and fattens, seeps in unexpectedly. You turn and roll back down the long wash to town.

~

Back in your crude motel you lay out the topo-atlas on the bed again, study maps and consider the next gateway. It's hot these days, with little breeze. Find another offshoot, a place where you'll see no one. See if you hold your own against silence . . . You're about to head over to the bar when you hear shouting, so you rest a while longer. Probably nothing. But the commotion persists. More yelling, and trucks peel in and out of the lot. Something has gone wrong. One could argue that your timing is bad, to find shattered peace in this obscure place, or fortunate, as in not making it over to the lot minutes earlier.

From your room you hear only the loudest outbursts, so you crack open the door and hear a man's voice at the end of the hall, and a woman's reply.
"Whatchu worried about? He's gotta gun?”
“Yes he does.”

You close the door, then a minute later you hear a man, perhaps the same man, scream "FUUUCCKK!” in the most intense, chilling rage you have ever heard. You still have no idea what's going on but quickly pack your things, ready to bolt. You open the door a crack and a woman at the end tells you to stay put. Then you hear gunshots, a string of loud pops behind the motel. Some fool with an assault rifle is blasting rounds with gusto outside your window, and you're the only guest. So you kill the lights and stay low. Luckily the truck is on the other side of the motel from the shooting, and when it stops you make a break for it. A cop at the door tells you to stay back, and you flee. It is midnight and the next town is sixty miles, but there's no choice. A lunatic blasting rounds outside your window doesn't fit with your travel plans.

At a pancake joint the next morning you see on TV news that a gunman in Mineral County shot two people, and both are expected to live. And when you stop a year later to revisit the scene you learn that a man named Roy caused the trouble that day, a man with a foul temper and history of broken pool cues, who burned his house to the ground in his standoff with the law after the shootings. In the boom years he used to come down from the hill and buy the town a round, back when it was bigger and the ore had some bite. He'll do hard time now, harder than before. Sudden darkness in peace and light. Hard to fathom.

[mnaz]

note: i finally googled these shootings (9 years later) and found the reno tv news account of what happened out there on highway 95 in the middle of nowhere-- or what the "authorities" think happened. the shooter was 69 years old, and the motive still remains a mystery ...

[creativesoul]

really cool write-

[mnaz]

thanks creativesoul. as i sped away from the shooting (and standoff) at midnight, it was hard for me to believe what had just happened. i suppose i could have stuck around-- they apprehended this guy a couple hours later. but it was too risky. you never know which way these nutjobs will point the gun next.

i went back to this place a year later, and the bartender told me that the shooter had a bad temper, but didn't have too many answers about what happened.

i never did get my money back for the room ....