"Shootout"

[mnaz]

Duration of view is law of the land in the dead-heart of Nevada, even from a straightaway doing sixty-plus. I count the ghosts of mountains, the number of snow-lit furrows in a jewel glaze, all at my leisure. I run the salt-flat streaks, the ones beside me, through a patient filter. I stare at them from my straightaway, off to the side. I note their assembly into a greater whole, and I take my time. There is no reason to look ahead. No one is coming toward me, and no one will be coming, same as there was no reason for me to come.

A fifteen-mile straightaway tempts major speed; simple metrics, short of relativity. And the results of major speed have been posted for centuries now, naturally disastrous, although much clearer if granted the full text of history, start to finish. But I can't follow it. I lump speed in with darkness, gateways of heat, no light, though I can't write off either one. Darkness often claims to annihilate even greater darkness, and speed has a will to survive.

It's all from the same energy; adrenaline surge or bitter peace of lost opportunity, waves of cheatgrass, back roads all over God's country, bounded by arbitrary fences of mind. Machinery buzzes around me, buffers me from prehistoric silence. Gray spots start to encircle a lone butte in fixated gaze, a gateway, same as any object intensely beheld. Gateways abound. Distant paths. They illustrate the field, out where a center-stripe parts the sea and rubber meets road, leaving traces of my passage like a single flashing bulb in a Vegas consciousness.

I am in a desolate space, my heartland. Numb velocity and uncertain reach. I trust the solar assault. I trust the buzz. I'm convinced I may never stop, that is, until I crest a particular rise and a town materializes for no good reason; not so much a town as the remains of a dust-encrusted outpost, a mish-mash of decayed structures, scrap metal, and tin trailers, half of them abandoned. I doubt if more than 70 people call the place home. But I'm surprised to see a cafe/bar next to an assay office, rigged up in a crude box building with a northward lean, and a makeshift, barrack-style motel next door.

I notice distant paths beyond, into the hills. I've passed up too many of them already. So I stop in at the cafe, hand over a twenty for a motel room, and then pack in my stuff. As rooms go, it isn't much; a bare concrete floor and no phone or television. But the shower works and the tobacco regime isn't too strong. Hell, it's perfect. I might stay a week, try to recapture those gateways. I pour a shot of whiskey and spread out the topo-map. Soon, I have a notion to go next door to the bar.

I have no idea that I will return to this place a year later, to revisit a real-life meltdown. Earl is his name, and he has a passion for life, a penetrating stare. In the boom years, before the ore lost its color, Earl would come down off the mountain and buy the town a round of drinks. The town was bigger then, more self-assured. There is a flow to all things. When it is unobstructed, every man is a renaissance man. But Earl is a front-runner. When the resistance came, he entered uncharted territory. The flow of fortunes and alcohol became trickier over time. And Earl made it known when the world betrayed him, evidenced by broken pool cues and black eyes.

Inside my room, I rest on the side of the bed, as a slight 80-proof haze takes hold. I'm about to head over to the bar when I hear shouting from that direction, so I rest a while longer. But the parking lot noise is persistent and urgent; a collage of screaming and trucks peeling in and out of the lot. Something has gone seriously wrong. One might argue that my timing is bad, as in finding shattered peace in such an obscure place, or that my timing is fortunate, as in not making it to the bar a few minutes earlier. You decide.

I listen more closely. I hear only the loudest outbursts from my end of the motel. I hear a man's voice down the hall, "Whatchu worried about? He's got a gun or something?", and a woman's reply, "Yes, he does". A minute later I hear a man, not sure if he's the same man, scream out, "FUUUUCCCK!", in the most intense, chilling rage I have ever heard. I have no idea what's going on. I try to stay calm, but I also pack my things to be ready to bolt.

I step into the hallway for a look, but a woman at the far end tells me to stay in my room. That's when I hear the gunshots, a string of loud pops from behind the motel. It's harder to stay calm now. Earl is outside my window, firing off rounds at will, and I'm the only motel guest. He might send a few rounds my way. I kill the lights and stay low. I wait for a break in the shooting, then grab my bag and make a break for the truck. A sherriff's deputy warns me to stay back as I come out. It is late, and the next town is sixty miles off. So be it. A shootout never figured in my plans.

At a pancake joint next morning, I hear that Earl shot and seriously wounded a man and a woman, possibly the same two I'd heard in the hallway. In his psychotic rage, tomorrow was of no concern, and Earl even burned his own house to the ground after the shootings. On this clear Nevada morning, such clear light, I learn that both gunshot victims are expected to survive, and I imagine that Earl will be doing some hard time, harder than before. Sudden, irrational darkness in the midst of peace and light. Like much of the history of the West. Hard for me to fathom.

[Zlatko Waterman]

Barry Lopez can't do this.


http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/blopez.html

And I love some of his work.

You have an edge of darkness in this prose, a striding sense of narrative from sentence to sentence, and yet an intense, wandering vision.

One of the things I like most about your writing, and why I would buy a book of these pieces if I picked it up at Borders and read two or three while I stood there in the corporate glare and abrasive gaze of their Santa Barbara body-pierced employees ( the overweight gay men are the nicest bunch . . .) is that you have dusted out a nugget of Southwest ( and, as here, Nevada) essence which isn't "local" writing.

You see ( or your camera/metaphysical "grokking" eye sees) as a traveler-- not a "tourist"; you are a traveler, the way Iain Sinclair magically travels through London, his own city but multifarious in its implications.

( "Downriver"-- an excellent voyage through Thatcherite London)

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/ ... nriver.htm


So that the psychotic shooter volleys offstage, and the cheatgrass and the gray prove the law of duration all over again before the reader's "eyes."

As a relief for the "numb velocity", you momentarily drop anchor amid the polluted civilization you strive to glaze with the landscape.

And bang! What else but the explosive munitions of mental derangement?

When I taught for a year at UNR (Reno) , my students came from deep in the heart of the state, from the spidery, etching-tracked roads in the hardened and windcarved mud.

You've got their essence here too.

Well done.



--Z

[Zlatko Waterman]

mnaz:

An excerpt from the Barry Lopez interview found at the link posted above:


(paste)

You say you start a story with no idea of where it's going. Is it a sort of stream of consciousness that takes you?

No, I don't think it's stream of consciousness and I don't mean to be flippant about it because it sounds casual to say: Well, I don't know where it's going, I just sit down and start. As though, either you were brilliant or you had a great connection to the universe and it just poured through you.

The preparation for a short story for me is largely unconscious in that I can't sit down and put on a piece paper: I'd like to talk about these events, my experience and sort of work my way toward a feeling of well-being in humanity or something. What happens to me, because I work with narrators that are more 19th than 20th century, in the sense that the narrators are not me and I don't mean that as a clever kind of mask, you know: This is not about me. It really is not about me, except the part of me that is my imagination. So, the way a story most often starts for me is I will hear -- actually hear -- a sentence. And that will be the first sentence of the story. And then I will maybe have that sentence in my head for two seconds or 20 years sometimes. But I'll sit down at the typewriter and type that sentence and then I'll get what the next sentence is and I'll have a feeling for where this is going. But the narrator of my story -- because most of my stories are first person narrators -- they're all different people. But they are generating where the story is going. I've sometimes consciously thought: Well, you know, most of my first person narrators participate in the same ethical universe of which I'm a part. I'm not writing in the first person voice of Hannibal Lecter. But I did once think: I wonder what would happen if I tried to write in the first person and had as the narrator somebody I didn't like and I despised? So I did. And that story is in Light Action in the Caribbean. It's the story called "Rubén Mendoza Vega."

I expect that most adults who read work of mine will know that I am aware that most of us have been on our knees in a room alone at some point in our lives wondering: Why push it any further? Why not just God take me now and end this misery? And every one of us has experienced to some degree -- and some to a terrible degree -- cruelty visited upon us in an unjust way. So I expect people to know all of that and what I want to do as a writer is write credibly about the other thing. That is: Is it possible to have a worthy life? Is it possible, for most of us who are not saints, to live in a place where we feel ethically comfortable with what we're doing and feel capable of love and capable of receiving love? Can we actually attain those things or are we just part of the disaster downline from the industrial revolution and the Age of Empire. And I think it is and that's what I write about.

When I wrote this character, Rubén Mendoza Vega, I thought I was writing [about] somebody I despised. And on the surface he is. He's a pedant. He's completely unaware of his own son's suffering and why his son committed suicide and he's an insufferable self-referential personality. But what I realized after the story was over was that I have some compassion for him because [beyond the] elaborate ruse of footnotes and bibliography is a man living in denial. In the end of the story I really don't despise him. I feel compassion for him and just want to take him aside and say: Why don't you just let all this stuff go? Just let it all go and think: Why did your son take his life? Maybe one of the reasons that he did is something that could be the pry bar to open up your own life and at the end of your life now have a real life instead of being the pedant that you are.

( end paste)



--Z

[mnaz]

Thanks, Z.

It's funny.... I started this one with only the first sentence in mind and the scenes which inspired it, which I've experienced in large measure the last few years. I've done this on a few other sketches too. Barry Lopez is right. It's not a bad way to go. One "hears" a resonant phrase, a sentence, and writes it down. Nine times out of ten, other spare parts become apparent to add to this primary "building block", and a "whole" can be pieced together, greater than the sum of its parts, as the saying goes.

The land and life over the obsession of "controlling" or "profiting from" either. That shows up in my scribbles, from time to time.

Anyway, Zlatko..... thank you for your insight and for the links. I enjoyed the Lopez interview. I only have one of his books, "Desert Notes", a short one, only 78 pages or so. I might look for more next time I make it to the bookstore.