Battle Mountain
After such a hard road, it was time for a detour

By Walter Kirn
Sunday, February 10, 2008

If you're a gentleman, you stop the car, but you don't let her get out and walk no matter what she says, particularly if night is coming on and the nearest town is Elko, Nev., that final frontier of gruesome Western freedom, where brothels operate next to family restaurants, mug shots are legal IDs in liquor stores, and a young woman alone beside the highway may as well do the state patrol a favor by stuffing her underwear in a plastic bag along with her dental records and driver's license and wrapping herself in yellow crime scene tape. In that luckless strip of sagebrush between Winnemucca and the Utah line, what my father called "the rule of law" is as weak as a cellphone signal in the desert or a free margarita in a casino. Unarmed is forewarned in northern Nevada. I know because I lived there once, working in a Battle Mountain gold mine after I dropped out of junior college. The money was good, especially with overtime, but the strippers, the slot machines and the sawed-off shotguns made it hard to hang on to my paychecks and dangerous to try. I only felt safe in Elko when I was broke.

"Pull over," my girlfriend said. "I mean it. Now. I'm so completely over this it hurts."

"Let's take two more of whatever we took in Reno and talk this out."

"Just stop the car. I'm gone."

"And I'll be the main suspect once you are."

"I'll gouge out your eyes with a nail file."

"No, you won't."

"You'll stop me how?"

"Let's quit talking hypotheticals. That's our big problem. We're always talking crap."

The fact was I'd already started slowing down, but the landscape's emptiness and darkness offered Holly no way to judge our speed. Plus, she'd removed her contact lenses before all her bawling could wash them down her cheeks. They lay snug in their plastic holder in her left fist, on whose ring finger was a $2,000 diamond, which supposedly appraised for 5 but that I'd bought for 1 by paying cash and throwing in an unused stolen phone card good for three solid hours of chat with Panama. If I granted her wish, dropped her off and drove away, the long-haul trucker on parole who'd surely be by in the next 10 minutes or so would pawn the thing by dawn. I might be able to buy it back for nothing, but the better alternative would be for Holly to let me drive her 200 miles east to Salt Lake City and give back the ring when I dropped her at her girlfriend's house and then pushed on to Denver or wherever. Our wedding, which we'd never officially scheduled, had been off since I'd caught her with Jason at Halloween, so, ethically speaking, the diamond was mine again. Why were we still together? Mysterious. After a year of talking marriage and kids but not how to pay for them or why we wanted them other than that we'd run out of other daydreams, admitting that our love had no future had freed us somehow.

A honeymoon in reverse was what it felt like, especially during our last drive through Oregon, when we sailboarded in the Columbia River Gorge and toured a winery on magic mushrooms. A friend of mine who flipped houses for a living had convinced us to sell our small condo down in Phoenix, where he'd told us that the boom was over, and fix up a bungalow he'd bought in Portland, where he'd told us the boom would never end. Forty percent of the profit was the deal, but the deep, X-shaped cracks in the bungalow's foundation suggested that the sale wouldn't come soon, and neither Holly nor I are patient people. We both grew up traveling, children of the military, and the longest we'd ever spent in one location was our two years in Whitefish, Mont., where we'd lived parallel lives as river guides and, briefly, as the spouses of two rich cousins whose parents were partners in a local ski resort. That's where we'd met, at the bar in the chalet, where our family connections allowed us endless tabs but also guaranteed that we'd be caught. We took the good with the bad -- no option, really. We were drunk, we were both better-looking than our mates, and nature made the big decisions for us.

"There," I said. "We're stopped. Let's take those pills. Then, once we're calm, I'll turn the radio down and you and I will have a conversation about finally cutting up the credit cards, improving our diets and living off the grid, the way we both said we wanted to that month when we got the huge electric bill."

"Push your button," she said. "Unlock my door."

"I have a great uncle with land in central Washington that's planted in every fruit tree you can name. The climate there's perfect for solar. We'll go all solar."

"I'll roll down my window and climb out," Holly said.

"Sorry, but I control the windows, too. It's an Audi, remember."

She went back to cursing and wailing for a while as I gazed through the windshield down the curving grade that had caused me to set my parking brake so we wouldn't roll into a canyon and tumble end over end among great boulders until our fuel line ruptured and we caught fire. Early on, just weeks out of our marriages, when we were more of a scandal than a couple, such a violent flameout had felt certain and may even have been the dark key to our wild sex life. We were glorious, sinful refugees back then, forced from our homes onto the open road by the massed ill will of a small town whose waitresses no longer refilled our coffee cups and whose handful of mental health professionals weren't taking any new patients. One woman, an Episcopalian priest whose feminist views and notorious marijuana use made us think we'd found a confidante, explained to us that the prominence of our exes meant she might lose her congregation if she accepted us for counseling. Holly, who still believed in shame, apparently, asked the woman, "Is that what Jesus would do?" and stared her down until she gave her answer. It was "No," but spoken without embarrassment, and that was the last time we set foot in a church except when we got robbed in Flagstaff once and had to ask directions to the food bank.

"Let's picture ourselves on a piece of land," I said. "First we buy an antique cider press. We buy it with money saved up from quitting smoking and sell the juice at farmers markets. Your beadwork, too. You need to take that up again."

"Let me go, Chris. Let me go right here."

"All because I took a cash advance and lost it on video poker last night in Reno. On a machine that you told me had a 'vibe.'"

"You shouldn't listen to me. That's the Paxil."

"Which you told the psychic at the street fair you'd quit taking seven weeks ago even though she saw it in your irises."

"That's carny talk."

"Look in the rearview. It's fact," I said.

She did. She swiveled the mirror at different angles, but none of them seemed to alarm her as they should have. A Leo, impossibly vain and self-deluded -- and not a good match for me, a clear-eyed Gemini. The street psychic had pointed this out, too, but she said our romance had a chance if we massaged each other with an oil blend that smelled of lilacs and pencil shavings. We sniffed the amber bottle but didn't buy. Fifteen bucks was half a tank of gas, and in our situation fuel and driving range, along with Diet Mountain Dew and prescription sedatives, are everything.

"If you're panicked about it, I won't accept a ride. I'll walk all the way to Elko."

"Two hours. Minimum."

"I can see a light from here."

I saw the light, too, in the east, across the canyon, but it didn't cast the sort of radiance that signals civilization on the horizon. It was one of those beacons of Western loneliness that designate a turnoff to a prison or help mark the flight paths of military jets. My father had flown this region in his AWACs, from Fallon to Ely and up to Pocatello, testing and tracking the equipment that ought to win all our wars by the first morning following the opening bombardment. He'd told me he'd seen a UFO once here -- the same darting craft on two successive nights. Fighters were scrambled from Hill Air Force Base in Ogden, he said, but the ship evaded them, mostly through startling vertical maneuvers that he compared to a popping champagne cork. He said he suspected the vessel was one of ours, and the thought seemed to soothe him. America was safe. Or safe from above, which was all he seemed to care about as an Air Force man and Jehovah's Witness. I was different. I feared the horizontal threats. Snakes to begin with, then cougars, then all the other ones. Even Holly, the first few times we spoke.

I took control and put the car in gear, but the moment it started rolling forward Holly sprawled across me, popped her latch, then lunged through her open door onto the shoulder. She wouldn't get far without both flip-flops, though, and one of them was still lying on the floor mat. I grabbed it and held it up for her to see, but she was walking off by then.

A semi rushed past with jointed double trailers heaped with glinting mining tailings. Its slipstream stirred a dust cloud and shook my chassis, but Holly proceeded straight ahead. I let her advance 100 yards or so, then crept up even with her, stopped, and tossed her flip-flop out her open window. She put it on and resumed her silly march, which I decided to indulge her in. We'd been together for almost a year, here and there but always side by side, working until we had the savings to party, partying until we had to work again, and finally wangling a no-down-payment mortgage on that Phoenix condo we had no business buying but our lender insisted we'd be glad we had. She knew best. We sold it at a profit, which we squandered, though not all in the first week, but we could do better next time, I had a feeling. Maybe this was the feeling that frightened Holly: that people's chances never quite run out these days, that there's always a new beginning around the corner when what you long for is a climax, a big ending. Because new beginnings mean new middles, of course, and middles are what bore her. Me too, but less so.

I let her walk for a while and fantasize. I let her imagine that everything was finished and savor the sense of doom and banishment that had drawn us together in the first place. I didn't want to let her die, though. That was a pleasure meant for sharing. To do so alone, without me, would be selfish -- the ultimate act of exclusion and infidelity.

I cruised up beside her and synchronized our pace: 3 mph. "Tired of this yet?"

"I was tired last fall. I'm past that now."

"Anytime you're ready to take a load off. Great classic rock station starting to come in."

"Maybe I'll call myself Smoky and sell my body. Maybe I'll dance topless for dollar tips and get all messed up on the hard stuff. That makes you see things. I've never actually hallucinated."

"I need a smoke. You ran off with the lighter."

Holly reached into a pocket of her suede jacket and passed my brass Zippo through the window. I flicked it, lit up a Merit Light, inhaled a couple of times, lit another one and handed it out to her. A heavy-duty Dodge Ram pickup whose bed was filled with hooded laborers slowed down across from us in the passing lane, and someone yelled something in Spanish that didn't sound obscene and may have even been a greeting. Holly waved, and one of the fellows raised a liquor bottle while another gave her a thumbs up.

"I like it out here. It feels like me. Go on ahead. I have both sandals. I'm good."

"Against the rules of breakups during road trips." In truth I was starting to think she might be fine, though, and wondering if I might be fine, too. No matter what happened to her once I abandoned her, chances were I'd never get the news, and this inching along on the shoulder was getting tedious, especially with cold beer up ahead. Plus, I had secret money in my pocket -- enough to win back what I'd lost in Reno and then some. Or to rip it up in a cathouse for a night, the one with the signs that read "Dancing and Diddling" in shivering pink neon. I'd practically lived at the place the month I turned 21 and left with a cracked rib. Blond girl named Heidi. The full Bavarian act. Pigtails. Leather shorts. Blue eyes. A screamer.

Holly seemed to sense my reckless impulse. She waved me ahead like she meant it, which you can tell with girls, even the flighty, dramatic types -- that instant when nothing you do is going to work with them because you're invisible now, you're history, and they've basically left the body you found them in and beamed their spirit to another one that you'll never get to touch.

"I'll drive you to town and get us separate rooms and won't even knock in the morning. I'll just head off." My voice had taken on a tone of compromise, of nobly doing the right thing.

"I'd rather not take the risk."

"This isn't risky, what you're doing now?"

"The risk is getting back in the way I always do. With you, with the guys before you, with everyone. I'm sick of it," she said. "And so are you. The games. Admit it. Admit that sometimes you just wish I'd eat your dust."

"And leave you in a shallow grave? He'll cut off your finger for that ring, you know. That's how they do it. They love to use their tools."

Holly shrugged, and the flush of passion I felt shocked me. To truly be willing to die to leave a man was as sexy, I realized, as a woman can get. And this was no ordinary dark stretch of road; this was I-80, 10 miles west of Elko, the traditional sacred hunting ground of middle-aged Caucasian maniacs. Plus, Holly was wearing the tightest jeans she owned, so smooth across the thighs and butt that even a nearsighted creep with lousy headlights could tell the moment he slowed to under 60 that she wasn't packing a can of pepper spray, let alone a serious weapon.

"Goodbye, Chris," she said through the window.

"I don't believe this. You have your cell?"

"I hawked it up in Boise. How do you think I bought the Percocet?"

"Call my phone the minute you reach town. Wait, I don't think I can do this. Get back in this car."

"Force me."

"Really?"

"You have to ask permission?"

"No. I don't."

"You did, though. I just heard you. I don't -- just watch."

Holly cut down an embankment toward a service road running parallel to the interstate that I'd blow all my tires trying to reach, assuming I didn't break an axle first. The night ate her up. No moon. No star glow. I drove along at the speed of a pedestrian, but it was empty chivalry by then, a purpose without a purpose, just dumb male custom. I drove a bit faster to see how it would feel and found that it felt like nothing in particular except a good way to attract attention from cop cars, which I didn't need with a pill-bottle-filled glove compartment, none of whose labels were in my name. That and the unregistered revolver I should have given to Holly, which I'd never let her know I owned. I'd strapped it in with duct tape beneath my driver's seat when Holly's ex left a death threat on my machine one night, and ever since, during all our restless time together, it had been my little advantage, my secret love toy. Sometimes when Holly was dozing in the car, I snuck it out and pointed it at her cheek, loaded, of course, but never cocked. Role playing. Harmless. Then I'd turn the barrel and aim it at my open mouth, my tonsils. She never caught on, though. She never woke up and saw me.

Now I was in Elko, with Holly behind me -- permanently, in one way or another -- and none of that twisty stuff mattered anymore. I parked outside the brothel, unsure if I had enough juice left to go in and get my money's worth. I felt for the pistol as I sat there meditating, and it was still there. I slipped it out. I opened the chamber, spun it, slapped it shut, and realized that sometimes it's probably best to let a woman out, even at night, on the highway, with kooks around.

I decided to go and find Holly to prove how lucky she was, though part of me was hoping she'd already hitched a ride, passed through town and was safely on her way to Utah. That wasn't the part of me she'd loved, though -- the gentleman, the good guy. The part of me I hid and who I miss now that I'm back in Elko with my new sweetheart, who swears that she'll never leave me. And she's right.

Walter Kirn is a novelist in Livingston, Mont. Among his books are Thumbsucker and Up in the Air. His latest novel is The Unbinding. He can be reached at 20071@washpost.com.