"I have got to get off the night shift," said Dave, cradling the receiver between cheek and shoulder while fiddling with his camera. He'd picked up the used Nikon SLR for $50 but found the light meter to be off, and he was tired of compensating. Buyer beware, his dad had warned; buyer repair is more like it, he replied. There was no way he could afford that bill, not to mention the ride to Flagstaff to find a decent shop, and he was feeling too tired to deal with the trip anyway.
"So get off the night shift," said the voice on the other end of the line, which belonged to his best friend of ten years.
"It's not easy, Jamie. I'm not making enough now, and that's with the pay differential. Days are a buck an hour less."
"Get something else, then. You want to pour Slurpees the rest of your life?"
"Aw, man. What else am I gonna get around here?'
"Don't limit yourself. You know if you want to give Vegas a try, you can crash with Linda and me."
"I don't know, Jamie . . . "
"Think about it, Dave."
"I'll think about it. Listen, I hear my dad pulling up. I gotta go." He put down the receiver, hoisted his long body off the sofa, and hunched over the camera at the dining-room table.
"How's it going, dad," he called out as he heard the back door slam.
"Heard the mercantile report this morning," came the growled reply. "Prices are down another ten dollars a head."
"You don't say," answered Dave, just to answer; he was concentrating on the camera, when a large pair of hands reached around and snatched it away. He spun in his chair and looked up at his father, glowering down from under a baseball cap, clutching the camera between dusty fingers.
"I said, prices are down another ten dollars a head."
"I heard you," said Dave. "Gimme that, you're gonna get dirt in the works."
"I need to talk to you."
"Put the camera down, then."
His father shook his head and laid the camera back down. "I need some help on the ranch," he said.
"So hire some help."
"Don't be cute. You know what I mean."
Dave knew, all right. He knew he was expected to come to his senses any day now, to grow up and realize that he was meant to do something in life. And being Roy Gabriel's kid meant that that something was ranching. But what Roy didn't realize was that Dave had grown up, and whatever he was meant to do, it wasn't ranching. . . .
"I already have a job, Dad."
Roy's eyes narrowed. "Night clerk at the 7-11?" he snapped. "You really think that's better than working for me?"
"It's the best I can do right now," said Dave through clenched teeth.
"Like I said: is it better than working for me?"
"All right," said Dave. "For now, yes, it is better. You happy now?"
"No!" shouted Roy, his face flashing with real anger. "I'm tired of letting you off the hook. What the hell do you find so distasteful about ranching? Are you afraid to work hard?"
"Hey, it's not like I sit at home with my feet up. I'm out there."
"You're out there ringing up candy bars and girlie magazines. You call that a future?"
"You call shoveling cow shit a future?" Dave was yelling now, too. "You wanna know something, Dad? I hate cows. I hate the way they look, I hate the way they smell, I hate the way they stand chewing their cud staring at you like the stupidest things that ever walked on four legs while you lead 'em off to get slaughtered. And I hate the way you worship living around 'em, like it's some great privilege. You want to worship 'em, go to fucking India."
"You shut your goddamn mouth about things you don't know about. Those animals you hate, this life you detest, gave you everything you have. It gave me everything I have, and it gave your mother everything she had."
"So she didn't have any more of a clue than you. Will you stop throwing her at me? She's gone, all right?"
Roy looked at Dave with an expression that started at disbelief, passed through contempt, and ended up at resignation. "All right," he said. "You do what you think you have to. But I have to have someone I can pay mostly in room and board. And if it's not you, then it's got to be someone else."
"Room and board, c'mon, dad. Where are they gonna stay?"
Roy stared at him.
"Oh, no way," he yelled, leaping up from the table. "That's my room, that's the only place I ever had."
"Believe me, I'm taking no joy in this. But this ranch is my life, and it's in danger. If you're not pulling your weight, you have to go."
"What do you mean, pulling my weight?"
"Well, if you can kick in enough to pay the extra for a hand, say . . . oh, nine hundred a month ought to do it."
"Nine hundred! That's more than I make after taxes."
"I have to consider how much I need to pay out before taxes." Roy shrugged. "I've been through this every way I know how, and I've got to have a live-in hand. Now, I'll overlook what was just said here and ask you one more time: will it be you?
"No," said Dave, miserably.
"Well, then," said Roy, "I'll give you till the first of the month." Dave slumped back into his chair, out of arguments; Roy reached out, as if to put a hand on his shoulder, then thought better of it and walked away, head down.
Every morning in Vegas he woke to the sound of country music, a tinny staticky twang issuing from the kitchen. It was not a welcome sound. He buried his face in the pillow, pulling the covers over his head, eventually gave up and slid off the sofa and into a robe. Jamie and Linda would be getting ready for work, dashing back and forth and slurping coffee, and he'd weave his way through them and set himself down with the want ads.
"I can't believe he fucking threw me out," he said, more than once.
"I can't believe you're still obsessed with that," said Jamie. Linda would just shrug and smile, too polite to do otherwise, but Dave knew she considered him an imposition.
"Pounding the pavement, huh?" she'd ask, trying to sound cheerful, when she needed to say something.
"Oh, yeah," Dave would say. "Pounding the pavement."
This was true enough; he was pounding the pavement. It just felt as if he were the one getting pounded, all his leads for anything better than clerk or night watchman evaporating into the thin desert air. So, he'd just wander, past clusters of low-rise apartments and strip malls, into a more settled, perversely green neighborhood, and finally into the UNLV district. He went on the last few blocks to the Strip just a couple of times, pumped a few dollars into the slots and tired of the sizzle quickly; more often he stopped after reaching campus. He loved hanging out, sitting on the steps of buildings and watching girls cross the quad, staking out a corner table in the student union and nursing a Coke and just trying to fit in. He was twenty, a year younger than Jamie and Linda, and sometimes he felt as if he were already running out of time in his life.
Eventually, he found a job, parking cars at a restaurant called La Napoletana just off the Strip. It was a plaster-and-stucco monstrosity, supposedly modeled after an Italian villa but with electric candelabras and deep pile carpeting and flocked wallpaper. It tended to attract a middle-aged to blue-haired crowd with a certain fat-assed swagger (but no money for tips), and despite its ambition it compared badly to his uncle Mike's little lunch counter back in Johnston, which was looking better to him by the minute. His boss, a spiteful-looking man named Frank Malatesta, ran a tough shop, and liked to find everyone's sort spot under the guise of friendly ribbing. When Dave revealed where he was from, Malatesta dubbed him "Cowpoke," not the best choice considering recent events. All in all, it was hell. But his money was running low, he needed to do something, and he was so sick of job hunting that sticking with this one seemed the lesser of two evils for now.
At least his route to work took him through campus, where he took to spending the afternoons before his shift started. His rounds included the visual arts center, where the lobby was filled with works from studio courses. One day, the flyer in the union promised photography, and he was there in a flash, walking the length of every wall and partition, studying each photo in turn: its choice of subject matter, its composition, its play of light and shadow. There were a few things he liked -- a series of portraits especially, its subjects looking past the lens, directly at him, from a plain white background, defining each shot themselves -- and a lot he didn't -- desert scenes shot by people who wanted to be Edward Weston but didn't have a clue as to how. "I can do this," he whispered aloud, "I can do better." Outside, he lingered in the shade for a while, looking around him with a little less awe.
He ended up ten minutes late for work that afternoon. "Goddammit, Cowpoke," shouted Malatesta, "I got a business to run here. I want my valet on duty at five, not jerking off out back."
"Is that the spot to jerk off around here?" he muttered, breezing through the entry on his way to the lockers.
"I heard that," Malatesta called after him. "That'll be an hour's pay. And you better watch your step, Cowpoke."
"Don't call me Cowpoke," said Dave, ready to blow his lid. But he made sure he was out of earshot all the same.
"It's just a job," Jamie said later. They were drinking beer in the living room and talking in low tones so as not to wake Linda down the hall.. "He's supposed to be a prick, it's his role."
"You got a funny idea about jobs, man."
"I've worked more of them than you."
"Yeah, well, it's not really the job anyway, it's what I'm missing. Today I'm walking past these photos, row after row, and I'm waiting to be let in on the secret -- this is what is takes, this is what I need -- but it's not there, it's just a bunch of pictures on the wall, the kind my dad could take. It's bogus."
"And so you want to be a part of something bogus?"
"No, what's bogus isn't college, it's this idea we have that it's beyond us. These people with the stuff hanging, they're not some kind of masters, or even close. They're just taking some time to work on their shit. Why couldn't that be us? How'd we end up on the outside?"
"It's not some kind of guarantee, Dave. It depends on the circumstances. And where we're from, circumstances are tough."
"I know, I know. We both know. Firsthand." He took a long pull on his beer.
"It really bothers you when he calls you 'Cowpoke,' doesn't it?"
"Fuck, yes. Why shouldn't it? I have a name."
"But it wouldn't bother you if you didn't worry about it being true."
"Aw, c'mon, Jamie, that's bullshit."
"It is not bullshit. You're just so pissed off, you can't see straight. And it's not even at whatsisname down at the restaurant. You've got some unfinished business with your dad." Dave was ready to pipe up again, but Jamie held up his hand. "Listen," he said, "I know I was the one who said come on up, but maybe it was a mistake. I think you want to go back."
Dave felt himself reddening. "I'm not gonna stay on your couch forever," he mumbled. "Don't worry."
"I'm not tossing you out, Dave. I'm just telling you what I've noticed, listening to you for the last three weeks. I don't think you hate the ranch like you say. I think you hate the idea of him dictating to you, and I think you're mad about what happened. But what if you meet him halfway?"
Dave closed his eyes and sighed. Jamie was half right; he hated Vegas, all of it except for the university which was beyond his reach anyway, and he did want to go back. But he didn't want to go back to the same circumstances, and he couldn't imagine any other. "Meet him halfway to where?" he moaned. "If I go home I get sucked into working the ranch and I'll never save a dime, but there's no way I'll ever save the bucks for school if I don't live at home. I'm fucked either way."
"Then find another way. Talk to him, see if he'll budge."
"Waste of time. Nothing budges him."
"You gotta try," said Jamie, and as Dave let this sink in he thought back to that last day at home, to the anguished look on Roy's face as he walked away, and he knew it was true. It might not work, in which case he might be back parking cars for good, but he had to try, and so he nodded his agreement.
"So do you have a plan?" he asked.
"Hell, no," said Jamie, laughing. They finished up the six-pack, talking mostly about home, and then it was time to make the place presentable for the morning.
He took the first bus back to Flagstaff a day later, changing there for the local to Johnston and arriving in early evening. Emerging from the bus stop, a simple shelter thrown up beside the hardware store, he passed a phone booth and thought about it for a moment before deciding he didn't want to start by asking Roy for help. So, he hoisted his duffel onto his shoulder and headed away from the small deserted downtown, toward the highway.
About half a mile down the road he heard a car coming up behind him and stuck out his thumb. The car, a big white Olds, slowed as it passed then pulled onto the shoulder, crunching gravel; the driver, a thick-set guy in a black shirt and suit jacket, waved for him to get in. Dave hesitated for a second then, not wanting to be paranoid, climbed in. Turned out that the guy was in town campaigning for the big theme park, the same one Roy was so worried about. He was polite anyway, although he tried way too hard. They reached the turnoff for the ranch in under ten minutes, the guy smiled and pressed a business card into Dave's hand then roared off, and Dave, too tired to care, stuffed the card into his pocket without looking.
There was just one light on in the house, in the living room. Dave let himself in through the front door, which was rarely used, and headed straight across the entry to the source of the light. He stepped through the doorway, dropped his bag, and found Roy sitting in front of the TV, cradling a beer in his hands.
"Hi, Dad," he said.
Roy turned around, surprised but sort of sluggish. "Oh, Dave. You're home," he said, and Dave could tell he wasn't on his first beer.
"Jesus, Dad," he said. "You never drink during the week."
"I'm fine, I'm fine," Roy said, annoyed. "What happened? Why are you back so soon?"
"Well, that's what I wanted to talk about. I decided -- wait, do I even have a place to stay? Did you rent the room?"
"No, I didn't rent it." Roy put the beer down beside him and straightened up, as if trying to recover his authority. "What did you decide?"
"I decided you were right. Or I was wrong, is more like it. I was wrong to slam ranching, and I was wrong to bring up Mom. I'm sorry. I want to come back, and I'll help you out however I can."
Roy shook his head. "I don't think you understand," he said, and he appeared to be shaken.
"Yes, I do. I didn't before, but I do now. This place is all you ever dreamed of. But Dad -- it's not my dream. It can't be. I want to go to college and I'll do whatever I have to -- work the ranch in the day, go back to my job at night, save a dollar at a time until I'm ready, and until you can get by without me." He sat down across from Roy and looked him straight in the eye. "Please, Dad, you've gotta give me another chance."
"I can't do that, son." Roy looked back at him, his own eyes brimming with tears. "I sold the ranch."
Dave just sat there, the accumulated weight of the past ten days crashing down on him at once and pinning him in place, blinking dumbly at this latest blow. "You sold the ranch," he said at last.
"I'm so sorry," said Roy. "But your going was the last straw. That development is coming to town whether we like it or not, and when I got an offer I thought, why fight this? I'm getting too old for this kicking around. Besides," he added, apologetically, "there'll be money for school when the deal goes through, if that's what you want."
"You sold the ranch," Dave repeated, dully. Roy just shrugged and hung his head, beyond giving or receiving comfort, and retired upstairs, leaving Dave to sit in the light of the single lamp and contemplate what he had squandered.