| Debbie's Ranch (part one) by Scott Kauffman r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal summer 2008 fiction |
Eddie McCoy was an hour’s drive out of Battle Mountain, Nevada, heading north on U.S. 95 for
the Oregon border, when he slowed his Ford pickup and eased it onto the shoulder. He cut the
engine, and the cylinders misfired and rattled on for a few seconds more before a final, smoky
cough belched from the exhaust pipe. Eddie opened the door and stepped down into the sand,
leaving his keys in the ignition. He limped around the truck bed and on out into the desert, his
head down, his hands clasped behind his back, the look about him of a man who had reached
the end of something.
A hundred yards from the truck Eddie came upon a shoulder-high boulder. He pulled himself up
and sat, his legs dangling over the edge. A crimson fan of light was unfolding before the Rockies
as the sun came up, blood red and as squat as a knifed-out heart somebody had put his boot to.
Eddie reached into a shirt pocket for his Winstons and shook one out. He was edging a
thumbnail under the matchbook cover when he noticed her. Eddie took out his cigarette. Pointed
at him from the midnight-blue cover was a bent over, thonged bottom. Looking around from in
front of the bottom smiled a woman with shoulder-length hair the color of dirty snow, “Debbie’s
Ranch” etched above her head in an arc of pink script.
He shook his head. “Now, who in Hell ever heard of a cathouse advertising themselves with
matchbooks? Like they was a bar or a restaurant. Some filling station a dad might consider
stopping by for a Pepsi with his kids.”
Eddie rubbed a callused thumb over the woman’s bottom, shapely as any in a cowboy dream.
“Well, I guess there’s a somebody out there who’s thought of everything you ain’t and are
unlikely to ever will.”
He had gotten off I-80 a mile south of Battle Mountain the evening before, so dazed from the
day’s driving he almost missed the exit. Twenty-four hours earlier, the clerk behind the desk in a
Motel Six on the other side of Cheyenne had asked him when he checked in if he cared to
reserve the room for a second night. The Weather Service was calling for a freak summer
snowstorm to hit before the next nightfall.
“Room’s will be gone before you know it.” The clerk nodded at Eddie’s feet. “Hellfire, son. We’ll
have folks sleeping where you’re standing.”
Eddie showered, and after he came out he sat on the bed wrapped in the towel and considered
waiting out the storm in his room, catch up on some sleep. One turn through the channels on
the chained-to-the-wall television settled his decision for him otherwise. Re-runs of sitcoms with
no plots he thought dumb and had refused to watch the first time they’d been on. Mindless
game shows with mindless contestants. People jawing about their problems who wouldn’t know
a real one if it came up and kicked them in their rumps grown wide from sitting around jawing
about their problems. He was up and on the road before dawn.
His truck had no air conditioning, and by evening Eddie was dehydrated from driving first
through the mountains and then the high desert. He hadn’t eaten anything since the jelly
doughnut he’d scarfed down in the motel lobby when he was checking out, and now he could
hear his stomach growling even with the wind blasting through both rolled-down windows. The
gas gauge needle was riding on “E” and had been for fifteen minutes. There were no cars
before him and none behind, and with his bum leg, unless somebody stopped, he’d be crow bait
before he limped into the next town.
Five days before, Eddie had blinked his eyes open at 4:44. The same time as he did every
morning. No alarm clock needed. He reached for Lisa, but because he was sleeping on the
couch, his hand found only air.
Eddie unwound the sheet he had wrapped himself into during the night and swung his legs to
the carpet and went into the quarter-bath off the kitchen. When he came out, he switched on
the overhead stove light and from a cupboard took out a can of Fancy Feast. He stooped and
divided it between Satchmoe and Sophie. The kitties were sitting by their respective bowls, in no
hurry to get at their food and instead watching him, their ears perked, judging by his voice, his
stroke of their coats, whether they would spend the day napping on their sun nook or hiding out
in closet corners. On his way to the sink, Eddie emptied their water bowls in the one potted fern
out of a dozen he’d not managed to kill. He filled the bowls and returned them and walked back
to the bedroom.
He opened the closet door and with his toe poked at the pile of clothes heaped on the floor. He
bent over and picked out a blue-denim shirt, and before he reached his arms into its sleeves he
held it to his nose. As Eddie buttoned up the front, he sucked in the Rolling-Rock belly he’d been
working on. He pulled on his gray canvas trousers, abraded and threadbare at the knees, and
reached for his steel-toed boots. Before lacing up the left, he reached in a finger and traced the
scar slicing his Achilles tendon.
“You ain’t dreamed of doin’ nothing since the day you bought this.” He took out his finger and
knotted the laces. “Maybe it’s time you started.”
Eddie returned to the kitchen and scooped uncooked oatmeal into a bowl and poured over it last
week’s milk. He walked out to the picture window in the living room and, as he ate, watched a
full moon set over the duck pond across the street.
At the midmorning break, Eddie shut down his arc weld and walked into the supervisor’s office,
his work cap in hand behind his back and asked for a couple of weeks off.
“Surprised you hadn’t asked for any before now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You came in the day after the funeral.”
Eddie shifted his cap to his other hand. He looked at the office door window, its smoky, pebbled
glass opaque. “I like to stay busy. Keeps me from wandering where I shouldn’t.”
After his shift let out, Eddie gassed up the truck and from a rack of roadmaps took one for the
eastern half of the country. He’d have gotten one for the western states too, but the attendant
said there wasn’t sufficient demand for the station to justify stocking them.
When he got home, Eddie walked next door to Jude and Christina Hardy’s. In their mailbox he
laid a note with feeding instructions for the kitties and dropped his key on top of the note and
crossed back across their lawns. Eddie put a TV dinner in the oven and went into the bedroom
and packed a duffle bag and his toilet kit. At his dresser, Eddie studied her photograph, twisting
his wedding band back and forth on his finger as if it were a lock whose combination he couldn’t
quite get. He took it off and laid it before the frame, a thumb resting for a moment on the gold
rim. Ten minutes later Eddie had eaten his half cooked supper and was in the truck, his Thermos
of black coffee on the seat beside him, headed up Route 7 toward the Turnpike.
* * *
At the Battle Mountain exit, Eddie turned right and followed the sign pointing to town and
stopped at the first filling station he came to. He pulled up to one of eight rows of pumps and
turned off the ignition and sat back in his seat. He looked at the gas gauge and tapped it with a
knuckle. The needle didn’t so much as flicker.
He got out of his truck and walked around to a pump and studied the prices before he crossed
the cement concourse and pushed open the door to the station. Behind the counter were two
teenage boys, one slouched against the cash register, the other, his arms raised like a prize
fighter, jabbing into the air with quick left stabs as he recounted a street fight he had witnessed
the night before. The two wore identical sky-blue shirts with “Earl” stitched above the breast
pocket of one and “Sam” above that of the other. Out of each ink-stained pocket protruded an
air gauge and half a dozen pens. All twenty of their fingernails were broken and jagged and
greasefilled. They wore khaki-colored baseball caps, which bore above the bill a red and yellow
“Sanderson’s Shell” decal. Out from under the caps spilled their oily, collar-length hair. Earl was
cultivating a wispy mustache, and both were badly pimpled from a filling station fare of Cokes
and Snickers and Lays, their faces red-budded like cactus flowers ready to pop.
Sam, the boy behind the cash register, straightened when Eddie came in. “Yes, sir?”
Eddie reached into a back pocket for his wallet and took out two fives and a ten and lay the bills
on the counter. “Twenty on number thirteen pump.”
Sam reached for the money with one hand and rang up the purchase with the other. “Yes, sir.
Twenty on lucky thirteen.”
Eddie turned to go, but halfway to the door he stopped and looked out the plate glass window.
The boys watched him.
“Will there be anything else?” Sam asked.
Eddie didn’t answer. He was studying his truck, which had taken on an odd hue under the
florescent lights, as though by some magic of desert air its paint had turned translucent and
beneath it his truck glowed, softly, like a lanterned candle.
“I hope he ain’t going to get weird on us,” Earl whispered. He reached up and took down the
restroom key that was hanging behind them and slid it under the counter. He looked out at
Eddie’s truck. “Fornicate hisself all over our head like that one dude done last week.”
Eddie turned to the boys. “There some place abouts I can grab a bite to eat?”
A smile slowly spread across Earl’s face. He jostled Sam with his elbow. “Notice them plates?”
Sam nodded.
“Go ahead,” Earl hissed. “Tell him.”
“There’s Debbie’s.”
“Good place to eat?”
“None better,” Sam said. “Ask them about their desserts they serve with whipped cream
delight.”
Earl raised a hand to the other boy’s shoulder and turned his back. He seemed to have caught
something in his throat.
“Which way is it?” Eddie asked.
Sam pointed out the window. “Go left when you pull back on the highway. ‘Bout two mile down
the road. Big red sign out front right before their turnoff. Can’t miss it.”
Earl hacked all the harder.
“Thanks,” Eddie said and went out.
As he filled his gas tank, Eddie cleaned the dirt and the smashed, sun-baked bugs from the
windshield. He went to the dispenser and grabbed a handful of paper towels. When he turned
around, he took one step back toward his truck and stopped. A set of yellow eyes were pointing
at him from behind the front grill. Eddie let go the towels, and the evening wind that had begun
to rise at sunset scattered them across concourse and out into the desert.
He walked to the front of his truck and stooped and reached up under his bumper with the
handle of the window squeegee and pried out the carcass of the jackrabbit he’d thumped a mile
this side of the Nevada line. Eddie grabbed the fur on the back of its neck and walked it to the
trash container and dropped the rabbit in, pushing on its hindquarters with the squeegee
handle to get it down the hole. “Let the dead bury the dead.”
He climbed back into his truck and pulled up to the road and stopped. At first the boys weren’t
certain if he would go left, but he did.
“Think he’ll come back pissed?” Sam said.
“How long have you been pumping gas here?”
“Be a year in December.”
“So far, any of ‘em ever come back? Even that minister with his wife and kids in tow?”
Sam shook his head. He drummed his fingers on top of the register and looked down the road,
the glow of Eddie’s taillights already swallowed by the coming of night, the red desert dust filling
the air.
“Miss Debbie ought to be aputting us on commission for all the business we’re sending her
way,” Earl said. “At least let us take it out in trade now and again with one of them big-tited
girls of hers.”
Sam grinned. “You are one horned-up toad tonight.”
“No different than any other.”
When he saw the twenty-foot-tall billboard, Eddie took his foot from the gas pedal and touched
his brakes. The lower row of bulbs had either not yet come on or burned out and not been
replaced. The top row was lit, though, and beneath the lights “Debbie’s Ranch” was written in
script.
A hundred feet beyond the sign he came to a gravel drive and stopped. He leaned over and
cranked open his passenger window. He saw no buildings, no window lights, just a blue neon
“D” that hovered in the dark. Eddie shifted into first and followed the drive to a parking lot
where the only other vehicle was a dust-covered Ram Charger. He switched off his headlights.
Outside his windshield, heat lightning flashed above the desert floor, illuminating within tall,
Telarian skeins hundreds of cacti, T-shaped like graveyard crosses. Along the horizon, he could
make out the silhouette of the western most Rocky Mountains he had come out of late that
morning as the snow had started to spit on his windshield.
When he climbed down from his pickup, the sand carried in the wind stung his eyes almost shut.
He lowered his head and limped as quickly as he could across the lot to the front door. Inside,
Eddie took out his bandana and wiped the grit from his face, and he stood there a moment, his
eyes graying a dark lit by brass lanterns hung from overhead beams.
The room had about it a queer odor, something similar to an alchemy of cow manure and
Channel Number 5. The sides of the adobe building swayed and had two-inch cracks running
from floor to ceiling, and its walls were buttressed with piers not all a part of the original Spanish
architecture. Hung on the walls were oil paintings framed in black patina as finely cracked as old
enamel glazing. Portraits of formally dressed men and women who stood out in front of the
premises, a woman in one holding a Winchester .30-.30 carbine in the crook of her arms.
Beneath the prints a collection of pioneer antiques. A foot-pedaled Singer sewing machine. An
ancient stereopticon.
At a table near the bar sat a pot-bellied, wide-butted rancher, maybe ten years older than
Eddie, outfitted in too-tight jeans and ostrich-leather cowboy boots. He wore a snap-button
shirt made of red-checkered gingham, and an inch-thick dewlap of fat rolled over his neck collar
he had drawn tight with a black string tie. A woman with orange-dyed hair and dressed in a
rainbow-colored robe and matching turban sat dealing him cards, five times larger in size than
cards from an ordinary deck and oddly printed. No spades or clubs. No hearts. The only card
Eddie could make out had on it a hooded skeleton holding a scythe.
On the other side of the room sat two women, smiling at him with a casual carnality. One,
looking at him from over her shoulder, wore a pink, long-sleeved evening gown, similar to one
he had seen on television when he managed to stay awake for the Academy Awards, except
this woman’s dress was cut so low in the back the crack of her bottom showed. The other wore
something like a one-piece bathing suit. Banana yellow, frilly and lacy, the woman’s enormous
breasts all but spilling like cantaloupes out onto the table. The two kept on talking even as they
appraised him from head to toe but mostly in the middle, eating him with their predacious eyes,
and for the first time in months Eddie felt a welling inside his trousers.
A white-haired man with a Colonel Sanders’ goatee stood behind a polished counter cut from
birds-eye-maple. Eddie walked over to him and sat on a stool upholstered in rawhide and ran a
hand through his hair.
“What’ll it be?”
Eddie didn’t look at him. He was trying to keep his focus on a square foot of wood-planked floor
halfway between him and the two women. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the turbaned
woman studying the cards before her, shaking her head as though what she saw met with her
disapproval. He told the barman to bring him a Rolling Rock.
The fat man sitting at the table with the turbaned woman twisted around and smirked. The
barman arched his white eyebrows. He studied Eddie’s washed out, button-down shirt and
craned his neck over the counter and nodded at his boots. “Shoot. I could tell you was an
Eastern dude soon as you come through my door.”
“A what?”
“Ain’t no Rock served west of Omaha, son.”
“No?”
“Hardly any served west of St. Louis.”
Eddie nodded thoughtfully, as though the barman had graced him with one of life’s smaller
epiphanies. “I guess I hadn’t been paying all that much attention. Last few days I’ve been tryin’
some of the brews I can’t ordinarily get.”
Eddie scanned the backbar, studying the signs advertising Budweiser and Blue Ribbon and Mail
Pouch Chewing Tobacco. “Just give me whatever you got on draught.”
“We only carry about ten.”
Eddie leaned forward and squinted at the tap handles.
“How ‘bout a nice cold Mich?” the barman said. “You got the look of about you of one of them
Reno-high-rollers.”
Eddie grinned. “In that case . . .”
“Tall Michelob comin’ at you.”
The barman walked down the counter and crouched. Out of a freezer beneath the bar he took a
frosted, fishbowl mug so large it took him both hands to hold. He stood and put mug beneath a
tap, whistling as he drew the beer.
Along the backbar hung plastic-bagged snacks of peanuts and cashews. A raunchy Penthouse
calendar. At one end, stood a tall jar with a rattlesnake coiled inside, the alcohol evaporated
down so the tip of its tail had rotted white and a bit of its spine showed. Above the row of beer
taps midway to the ceiling hung a chrome-plated reading light and beneath it a sign:
Our Pleasure Menu
Appetizers
Sensual Breast Massage
Lingerie Show
Power Shower for Two
Very Naughty Dancing
Entrees
Straight Lay
½ and ½
Reverse ½ and ½
Bondage for You or Me
The barman set the foaming mug before him. “That’ll be two-fifty.”
Eddie swallowed, his eyes locked on the Pleasure Menu.
“Two dollars and fifty cents,” the barman repeated, slowly and raising his voice, holding onto the
mug by its stem.
The fat man at the table looked up to the ceiling and shook his head.
“Sorry,” Eddie said and reached for his wallet and put down a five-dollar bill.
The barman let go the mug and picked up the bill. “That’s okay, son. His first time here, our
menu has a way of sucking a man’s wind out right down to his gonads.”
Eddie looked back to the menu. “Boy, you got that right.”
The barman went to the register. When he came back, he lay down Eddie’s change and went to
the sink at the other end and began to wash out the glasses he’d left soaping. Eddie lifted the
fishbowl with both hands and emptied half of it. Across the room, Eddie could hear the whispers
of the two women, but not the words. Their eyes never strayed from him. When he tried to get a
better look, the women in pink gave him a pout, and with her hand parted the slit in the gown
running along her thigh.
Eddie took another long drink of beer and stood and walked over to the old-time Wurlitzer
setting against the wall opposite from the two women and reached into his jeans’ pocket.
“It’s unplugged,” the barman called over to him.
Eddie turned around.
The barman was holding a glass up to a lantern, twisting it in the waxen light. He huffed on the
glass and wiped at it some more with his cloth. “Got us a live orcheestra coming on in a bit.”
“You got a band?”
“No, an orcheestra. One with violins and a cello and the whole shebang.”
“Shebanged before you get banged,” said the fat man at the table.
Eddie pushed the quarter back into his pocket. Above the jukebox hung a row of pencil
sketches. One of empty train tracks, a thin spire of smoke rising into the air far in the distance,
the mountains in the background resembling those he’d seen from out in the parking lot. One of
what looked like a portrait of the goateed barman. Pretty good likeness too. Another of a car
plunging over a cliff into nothingness, a girl behind the wheel, an older woman behind her in the
back seat holding up a bottle, the mouth of the girl open, her hair coming out in her hands like
bunches of charred straw. A voice behind Eddie spoke.
“See anything you like?”
