Old New Borrowed Blue

Old New Borrowed Blue

1. Old Bar

I had never met anyone like Jon Rich. Not in Los Angeles, not at USC. Certainly not here in Pogonip, Nevada. No surprise there. Pogonip is not in the middle of nowhere. It would take a state referendum to reposition it to the middle of nowhere. It was, instead, off to one obscure side of nowhere.

Pogonip has a population of way more than you would think from standing on Main Street but way less than anyone who grew up here would proudly claim. I have seen, even in the few years I have lived and worked a beer tap here, that there is an almost perfect linear relationship between the state of the local mining industry and the size of the local population. When I moved here, the Arapahoe Copper Company was just winding down its pit mine four miles to the south. In one harsh blow, the town and the valley lost a full third of its residents. They moved to Reno or Salt Lake City, or managed to secure a transfer to one of the other ACC mines in Arizona, Colorado, Mexico. What they did not do was hang on in Pogonip hoping for boom to follow the bust.

My graduation present (graduate with honors from the University of Southern California, thank you) was The Quitclaim, the most fashionable, most chic, and most popular saloon for sixty miles around. Of course there is limited competition. Pogonip hosts two other public houses: The Goshawk Tavern and Tim's. Luckily for public morality Pogonip also is home to five houses of worship. We used to have a brothel, but now the nearest one is in Winnemucca.

The bar was not wrapped and handed to me after I took my diploma from the Dean. I was actually planning on working in either the film industry or in PR, but I wanted to see some of the countryside after four years of staring at a laptop screen. I crammed the trunk of my old Camry with survival supplies and drove off without clear intent. I walked Yosemite, I ate donuts in Seattle, I kayaked the Snake. Across the high desert of the Great Basin, I stopped at every tiny cluster of buildings. In a place I had never heard called Pogonip, I parked in front of a bar on a dessicated dusty day to seek a drink, but the door was locked. I took a step back and under the unlit overhead neon of The Quitclaim saw the large For Sale sign.

It was one of those moments when the Girlie Imp of the Perverse on my shoulder gets up on tiptoe and whispers suggestions into my ear. Like the time she told me I could easily jump from the roof of my parent's house into the pool. Or the time my sophomore year of high school she told me to let Mike Dodd slide my Capris and panties off in the backseat of a Lexus LX. This time, as I peered into the dark space through a dirty front window, she simply and softly said: This is yours.

And just like that, I was the owner of a tiny bar in a tiny town. Contained in the 'just like that', of course, was combining my graduation present of cash from my parents with presents of cash from each set of grandparents with the last dregs of my savings and a not-small loan from the local bank, the Miner's Trust and Cooperative.

The papers signed; the keys obtained. I stood in the middle of my new domain.

The bar on the western wall was twenty feet of polished wood. Mirrored so the liquor bottles on the shelves would stand out doubled. The floor was a horrible carpet the shade of chocolate-pomegranate swirl. Four tables with wooden chairs, five slot machines, one antique jukebox, one pool table desperate for new felt, modest food prep area. Two restrooms, and probably most important to me at the time, a huge upstairs apartment. Two bedrooms, living room, office, full kitchen and bath.

I ordered liquor and kegs, hired some local kids to scrub the place upside and downside, had the slot machines replaced and the pool table refelted. Everything that could be painted got a new coat. Got a refurbished nacho oven and a new refrigerator and freezer.

I flipped the switch on the red OPEN light in the windows and began my new life.

**********

I dated Becky, who lived in Elko. It was a fair drive, but that was okay. It forced us to develop the relationship slowly. We lasted a little over two years. Becky came to me one day and told me that she had realized that she was really bisexual. We parted on goodish terms. I just did not like anyone pouring coffee into my teacup.

Rochelle lived in Battle Mountain and had worked the trailers in Winnemucca for ten years. She quit the life to become a midwife. Then she found Jesus and her hymen miraculously regenerated. That didn't bother me because I wasn't responsible for Jesus being lost in the first place. She signed up for a mission to Ecuador to convert the heathen, cancelled her lease, and deleted her email. I took the hint. I never told her that I thought converting the Catholics down there to another kind of Christianity was just moving people horizontally and didn't really advance her cause -- whatever it was.

For five years, the business limped along. I managed to pay my people and the bills, but it was often tight. Then one afternoon I was walking back to the bar from the grocery store when a shiny red Peterbilt turned onto Main Street. It was pulling a lowboy trailer on which sat a large yellow tracked vehicle of some kind. The tractor growled into a lower gear and slid out of town. One of the mechanics from the auto repair shop next to the bar came to watch it disappear into the distance.

"What was that, Pete?"

He looked at me with a small smile. "That there's a drill rig. Exploratory size. They drill out core samples down a fair way."

"Looks brand new," I said.

He nodded. "Not cheap. Whoever's running it means business."

They did, too. Within six months the Elko Daily Free Press announced that the Bayliss Mining Group had discovered a large deposit of lithium in the range to the north of Pogonip. This was apparently big news, for the story appeared in the Reno and Vegas papers and made it into national cable news programs. The experienced miners and those who were versed in the culture of mining were initially puzzled, being as they were used to mining companies wanting ore bodies of gold, silver, copper, zinc, manganese, and other shiny metals you might hold a bar of in your hand.

But lithium? Nobody had ever heard of a belt buckle made of lithium. When the news spread that Bayliss was surveying a pit and preparing to remove a million tons of overburden as a start and was planning to hire a hundred or so workers, the Pogonip mine industry kibitzers suddenly were all about the element. Lithium was the future. They had always believed in it. They claimed that lithium was the reason the well water up in the northern part of the valley tasted salty sweet and the children raised here were all above average and they had always had a premonition that there was a bonanza just waiting.

You tend bar, you hear these things. The pulse of the tipsy community.

That was the confluence of events which brought Jon Rich into my life.

**********

It was a slow night in late spring. Chilly outside, felt like freezing but wasn't quite. Sky as clear as a mountain lake, stars so bright they didn't even twinkle. He came into the bar wearing one of those tan canvas coats. Practical, unassuming. Didn't have a cowboy hat so I knew he wasn't a local. Well, that and because I knew all the locals.

He was tall and broad. Substantial. Eyes like green stones you'd pick for a ring. Dark curly hair. Shit, I half wanted to fuck him right on the bar, and I'm solidly on the other team. He looked around the place -- didn't take long -- and came over to where I was standing polishing glasses like the classic innkeeper. I noted that he came directly to me instead of to Wiley, my bartender, who isn't a bad looker himself. I got the impression that the new guy was straight.

He sat and ordered a Manhattan.

"Does this look like the kind of place that would make you a Manhattan?" I asked.

He turned his head, reexamining the place, then nodded at the rows of liquor bottles behind me. "Yes," he said definitely. "Please." He unzipped his coat and put his elbows on the bar.

I brought out a shaker from under the bar and scooped some ice into it, then added a measure of my middle-tier Canadian whisky, some vermouth from a bottle which had been in the same place when I bought the enterprise, and a dash of bitters so old the label was faded into illegibility. He watched intently as I shook it vigorously and strained it into a glass. I put the drink in front of him. He eyed it carefully.

"What?" I said.

He pointed to my creation. "One stirs a Manhattan. Not shakes."

I wrinkled my nose. "What are you? James Fucking Bond?"

His eyebrows lifted sardonically as though it were possible he was. Undercover. "No cherry?"

"Does this," I asked, "look like the kind of place that puts cherries in its Manhattans?"

He shrugged again and took a drink. "Not the best I've ever had. Not the worst."

"Oh, really?" I said. "Where was the best?"

"Little bar on East 26

th

, across the street from where the Manhattan --" He nodded pointedly to his glass, "-- Club once stood."

"You know why places like this don't make fancy drinks?" I asked him.

"Because you can pull five beers in the time it takes you to mix a cocktail?"

I gave him that look that said: Don't answer rhetorical questions on your first day in town. Then I said, "No, because then we would attract the kind of jerks who order fancy-ass drinks and annoy everyone in earshot bragging about how they have had better somewhere else."

He ignored my jibe and continued: "Your bitters look to be pretty old. You know modern bitters are not like they used to be. About twenty years ago the makers had to tinker with the recipe because they couldn't get some of the more exotic roots and berries."

He took another drink and licked his lips. "Do me a favor and hide those bitters for my personal use, will you?"

This time I laughed. "Does this look like the kind of place that would use up a bottle of bitters more than once a decade"

And so on. He had a quick retort to all my tired quips and bar cliches, and pretty soon I stopped using my professional chat and actually talked to him.

Jonathan Rich was from New York City. Degree in geology from Cal Berkely, now employed by Bayliss as a site developer and here in town to... develop the site.

He shied away from specifics when I steered the conversation toward the mine project. He had worked in the industry for long enough to know that details he let slip - positive or negative - might be used to speculate in his employer's stock.

"Where are you living?" I asked. "Company got a plan for you?"

He shook his head. The Manhattan glass had long been replaced by a pint which was down to about an inch of Great Basin Ichthyosaur IPA. "I'm in the motel Pogonip whatever it is down the street. I'll start looking for a house or something. Luckily, I don't need much. I'll be on the site all day every day."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that although the vacant housing stock hereabouts was high, the quality was low. As a matter of fact, I had just completed the purchase of the best available house for sale, a three-bedroom, two-bath just two streets away from the bar. Okay, it was on the very edge of town, but still, that was only two streets away. And it meant that I was currently moving out of my old digs, the apartment over the bar. I made another snap decision. Like that had been working out so wonderfully for me so far in this life.

"There is an apartment for rent upstairs," I said. "Two bedrooms. Great landlord."

His eyes moved automatically to the ceiling, the ancient patterned tin ceiling I had painstakingly wire-brushed and painted silver, like he could see up into the offering. "Live above a bar?" He said it mostly to himself. It was obviously an option which had never occurred to him.

"Come on, I'll give you a tour."

I led him up the stairs. "There's an outside entrance, too. You wouldn't have to come in through the bar unless you want. Here we are." I opened the door at the landing and allowed the first complete stranger to enter my private space since the first time I had Rochelle over.

He walked the rooms, which were fortunately clean and uncluttered. I had already moved to my house, and all that remained here was a big leather couch, some piles of books, some half-empty boxes with dishes and small appliances. The bathroom sparkled, and I was just basking in the sight when Jon turned and moved close enough, probably unintentionally. Still, my instincts kicked in. I put up one hand.

"By the way, your landlord is a lesbian," I said.

To his great credit, he did not immediately launch into the heteronormative male response to that statement: You are too beautiful to be a lesbian. Or: Maybe you just haven't had the right (insert euphemism for erect penis) in you yet. Or: When you see my (euphemism again), baby, you will turn.

He just sighed and said, "My luck."

I didn't press him on that statement, if it was a statement. It obviously contained a lot of hidden. He turned the taps in the kitchen, opened one or two windows, checked the signal strength on his phone. I pointed out the internet jack. I told him the rent, which did include utilities but did not include drinks downstairs.

He fell quiet for a time, listening. "Good insulation. I can barely hear the bar. What's that tune?"

I could just make out Marty Robbins on the old jukebox. I had an updated sound system with speakers in several locations, but the jukebox got just as much play. Plus, I got a quarter for every song.

"El Paso. Don't listen to the lyrics. You'll cry."

"I'll take it," he said. "Do you need a reference? Wait - let me guess. Does this look like the kind of place that needs a reference?"

I smiled. "Venmo or PayPal?"

**********

2. New Friends

As he predicted, Jon was not in the apartment much. He rose with the sun, made a lunch, grabbed a coffee and something to eat at Kitty's Diner, and drove out of town. He returned well after sunset, went into the Dairy Spot and had a burger, then back to the apartment for a shower and bed. Repeat and repeat.

The first Sunday of his stay, he came downstairs dressed in nicer clothes that what I had seen on him before. It was nine o'clock in the morning, and he stood incredulous, gawking at the dozen or so patrons already shooting the shit in the booths or idly pulling the levers on one of my slot machines.

"You're open Sundays?"

"The Great State of Nevada has absolutely no restrictions on the operating hours of bars, taverns, or saloons."

"Wow," he said. "Which one are you?"

"A joint."

"I like it," he said. "Nice joint you got here."

"Plans for the day?" I asked.

"Couple of the crew want to fish the river." The Bayliss contingent had quickly grown to a dozen.

"You fish?"

"God, I hope not."

I got my long coat off the hook and pointed down to my short skirt. "Let's tour the facilities."

"And pick up slack?" he asked.

I knew there was a reason I liked this guy.

I still owned the Camry but had added a 4WD Silverado. I took him to the eastern side of the valley rim and over, to where there was once a smelter. The locals tell me it gave out about 1935, but huge concrete footings and rusted iron structures remained, most of which made no sense to me. Jon, on the other hand, knew the function every scrap must have once performed. We wandered through this broken playground as he described what the operation might have looked like in its day.

I drove along the river, but we did not sight his men, so we stopped at a wooden bridge. We walked halfway across and looked down into the foamy stream.

"Not much of a river," he said. The Mogany River was about twenty feet wide at this point. In a lot of other parts of the country it would have been called a creek.

"It's the only one we have," I said. "Don't go shitting on it if there are locals about."

I had already told him my, non-local, story. He had in turn told me his. When he had graduated, he got the Bayliss job and was sent to Chile, to work with a development team and learn the business. He spent four years there and fell in love with a woman from Norway who ran an import-export operation. When he was transferred to the Pogonip property, he asked her to come with him. She declined. One of her imports was her ailing mother, who was living with her in Calama. Jon tried to convince them both to move with him, but he finally and reluctantly parted ways with her.

The tour over, we were in the living room of my house watching a Giants baseball game and testing my oven against a frozen pizza. We sat together on my new sofa, soft cloth instead of cold leather, and drank Rainiers and ate corn chips and salsa waiting for the pizza timer.

I glanced at him and saw that he was eyeing me like I was the pizza and my cheese was bubbling.

"Down boy," I said. "Remember -- we both like girls."

He gave me a guilty smile. "I'm really sorry. I just...."

"Think I'm too beautiful to be wasted as a lesbian?"

"Well, you are beautiful. Uh -- I should go." And he started to rise.

I waved him back down. "For calling me beautiful and desiring me? That's all okay with me. Just no touching."

He sighed. "Yeah, touching. I wish."

"Jon, we need to get you laid."

**********

And just like that, I was the hip lesbian aunt matchmaker. But that was okay, because I had already acquired the target.

The DeLuca family was revered in the area. They had been some of the first settlers, carving out their stake in a huge ranch, the still-sizeable remnants of which was about ten miles south of town. The parents had two sons and a daughter, who all lived in houses built on the ranch.

I had met Sandra DeLuca through rodeo. She owned and trained a string of barrel racing horses which she sold to amateur and professional riders across the United States and Canada. I learned to ride after buying the bar, and I thought I might try the sport. I rented one of her older horses and she showed me the basics. It was tremendous fun, but I realized that to be really good at it I would have had to grown up riding and also have a large pool of excess money to invest in it. Neither was true. I did get involved with the sport by volunteering to set the course and run the timer at the annual rodeo, where Sandra would sit next to me and critique the contestants.

"Why aren't you out there yourself?" I asked her one day during a break in the competition.

She spoke about time, and injuries, and time again, and family. I realized she had no good reason. Something in her words and tone told me it must have been Aaron.

Just before I came to Pogonip, Aaron Malley's family moved into the valley to manage an alpaca operation. Aaron appeared in Sandra's freshman class, and from what I have heard and what she has told me, she fell immediately and hard for the handsome young man from Arizona. They got married the week after graduation. It wasn't shotgun necessary, as they were childless for the three years of their marriage.

Three years. Aaron had gotten a job selling new and used heavy equipment for a firm with stock in Vegas and Reno, so he spent long stretches of every other week in Reno, or Vegas, or Sacramento. On his return drive from Reno one late night on a two-lane stretch, a hay truck crossed the center line and caught him head on. His Ford sedan was no match at all for the Mack. The driver of the hay truck was bruised and had a broken nose. Aaron was smashed in his car. By the time the local fire department pried the Ford apart, there was nothing to revive.

Sandra's spirit was as crushed as her husband's corpse. When I started my barrel racing lark, she had just started to reenter Pogonip society.