The following is from Willy Vlautin’s The Horse. Vlautin is the author of the novels The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete, The Free, Don’t Skip Out on Me, and The Night Always Comes. He is the founding member of the bands Richmond Fontaine and The Delines.
The mine was in the high desert of central Nevada at 6,500 feet. It was thirty miles from the nearest ranch and fifty miles from the nearest town, Tonopah. On the porch outside the assayer’s office, a rusted Chevron thermometer read ten degrees. Al went down the porch steps into an already darkening day. Snow dusted the canyon walls and gravel road, the wind blew, and he began the same walk he did each day: a mile to the remnants of the last miner’s house and back.
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In the early 1900s more than three hundred men had worked and lived at the mine. They had built makeshift homes along the canyon walls. Over the following decades the mine had opened and closed four different times before being decommissioned in 1956 and left abandoned.
Al passed the fragments of three different brick buildings and then the mine itself, where a yellow engineless 1960s school bus was shoved vertically into the main shaft. On the opposite side of the canyon were the remains of a half-dozen other buildings. Below them, pushed into a gulley, was a burned-out 1980s travel trailer that his great-uncle Mel and his dog, Curly, had escaped from one night when its propane heater had caught fire.
It was dusk when Al made it to the last structure, a wooden storage shed caved into itself. He took a pocketknife from his coat and notched a line into a four-by-four stud next to over eighteen hundred other small notches. For nearly five years he had done this same walk. Every day he wasn’t too sick or depressed or the weather didn’t forbid him, he walked.
The woodshed next to the assayer’s office was half full of cottonwood, pine, and aspen logs. Al made three trips filling the woodbin by the stove. He then carried his spare two-gallon water jug to the spring twenty yards behind the office. Underneath a metal cover he dipped the jug into the four-foot-round concrete pipe his great-uncle had installed. Why it never froze completely, Al didn’t know, but even when the temperature was below zero, only a thin layer of ice covered the spring water.
Inside he took off his coat and coveralls, put his sweats back on, relit the woodstove, and sat in the duct-taped vinyl recliner next to it. In a spiral notebook he worked on the lyrics to a song called “Black Thoughts I Only See.” Above the title he had written Mexicali, Dog, The Falling Apart Years, The Wall. The band he was in at the time, the Gold ’n Silver Gang, had been on the road for two weeks when they stopped at the Little Acorn Casino outside of Campo, California, for a three-night engagement. The morning of the second day the band decided to drive to the border town of Mexicali. The band members, all under thirty, wanted to find a red-light district. Al, who had just turned fifty-six, had no interest and decided to walk the streets of Mexicali as a tourist.
He drank daytime beers, looked in shops, and sat for a long time in a courtyard. For lunch he ate at a sidewalk restaurant on the edge of the tourist area. It was then that he saw a dog across the street. A mutt-shepherd that was brown and black and white in color and had one ear that stood up and one that flopped over. He watched the dog as it lay down in the shade of a white stucco building, panting in the midday heat. Even as cars drove by and people passed, the dog stared at Al and Al stared at the dog. But his meal came and he ate and soon he forgot about the dog across the street.
It was hours later, as he headed toward the border gate to meet the band, that he saw it again. By then he had gone in and out of a half-dozen stores, drunk in two bars, and crossed a dozen streets. He stood near the twenty-foot-tall rust-colored border fence, knelt down, and invited the dog to him. And the dog came. It had mange and was underweight, one of its eyes was clouded with goo, and it had a thick pink scar along its muzzle.
Al spoke to the dog and began to pet it along its neck. The dog licked his arm. Time stopped. It was as though the dog and Al were the only ones alive. The chaos and sadness of the outside world disappeared around them. They were just there, together. But a group of American tourists passed. The sidewalk was narrow and a man with a walker bumped into Al and an obese woman in a pink Disneyland T-shirt, white pants, and tennis shoes brushed against the mutt and screamed.
The dog ran off.
Al decided then he would save it. He would bring the dog back with him. So instead of going to the van to meet the band at the scheduled time, he turned from the border gate and headed back into Mexicali. For two hours he frantically searched the streets and alleys and courtyards, but he never again saw the dog. It had vanished. When he got back to the van, the band members wouldn’t speak to him. He was docked a hundred dollars and put on probation, and they barely made it in time to that night’s gig.
*
Al put down the pen and read the lyrics.
Black Thoughts I only see
A man finds a dog in Mexicali, Mexico, half dead and starving
He sneaks it across the border hidden in his truck
For months he nurses it back from dying
But the dog has never trusted anyone and escapes the first chance he sees
The man stays up all night worried and searching
The dog wants to go back to the man but gets lost in the gullies
Three days on the run and he gets shot by some kids hunting
He hides in the brush and cries for the man, the only friend in his life he’s ever seen
While the man puts up flyers in laundromats and stores and always keeps searching
Black thoughts are again haunting me Black thoughts I only see
Black thoughts, a bottle, and memories of Maxine
It was dusk when he woke. The day was over. The recliner creaked as he stood, and outside the wind continued to howl. He opened a can of Campbell’s condensed chicken noodle soup, put it in a saucepan, added water, and heated it on the Coleman stove. He ate and loaded the stove with wood and got into bed and read National Geographic by the light of the lantern.
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From The Horse by Willy Vlautin. Used with permission of the publisher, Haper. Copyright © 2024 by Willy Vlautin.
