The Proof is in the Puffin: Part One

“Good?” he said with a hard laugh, standing in the bright sunlight.  “I haven’t ever done anything good.”

When I met Jay Adams three days ago, he was just sober enough to stay on his barstool.  We were at the Cowboy Bar in Montello, Nevada, and it was Friday night.  The pretty girl I had been sitting next to had left, and Jay rambled through the door and into her old seat.  Jay spotted me as an easterner, which probably wasn’t hard since everyone in the bar but me knew each other.  The bartender introduced Jay and me.  “I’m a pioneer,” Jay said thickly.  “Living in the 1800s.”  I looked at him and wondered whether he was speaking in some kind of pioneer gibberish or was just drunk.  Jay said he lived in a house he’d built himself on top of a hill at end of a two-mile road he’d cleared through the sagebrush.  I had to ask him to repeat himself a few times to get the story straight.  No running water, no electricity.  “There was nothing there before I came along,” he said.  “Nothing.  Just high desert.”

A thick white beard that looked like polarfleece covered Jay’s jaws and neck.  On his head was a stained, shapeless hat.  It resembled a taco shell that had been dropped on the floor.  His lined face, 70 years old, peeked between the hat and beard.  I asked if he ran cattle or horses, and he said no.  He used to drive a truck in Idaho.  The bartender told him I was working on a book, and Jay scratched his beard.  “I read a lot of western,” he said.  “Sometimes I lie there thinkin’ about it.”  Jay had moved to Montello from Idaho three years ago.  I asked him why.  “Freedom,” he said.  I told him I’d heard they had freedom in Idaho.  He swore incomprehensibly and drank from his can of Keystone Light.

“Listen, now,” he said.  “Whip- . . . whippersnapper.  I’m new here, so I’m not an old-timer, but I’m not . . . my ears . . . I’m not . . . I don’t have webbed feet.”

Jay, I was to learn, was not a master of the idiom.  What he meant to say – I think – was “I’m not wet behind the ears,” a phrase that hearkens back to newborn cattle and describes someone who lacks experience.  Western novels use the phrase.

“Are you going to write the truth, or do you want to fuck around?” Jay asked me.  I told there was too much bullshit in print already.  He clapped me on the back and muttered something in a language peculiar to drunk pioneers.  He said that I ought to go up to his hillstop see the place he’d built.  I told him I was headed back to the Utah line, but that I’d circle around to Montello in a couple days and stop by.  Jay thought that was a good idea.  I took out a pen and wrote directions to Jay's place on a napkin.

“Alright.  You going to come up to my place?” Jay asked.

“Yeah, probably so.  But it’ll be a couple days.”  I started to stand up.

“Because I’m real,” he said.  “None of this NBC bullshit.  The proof is in the puffin.’”

I paused.  “What?" I asked.

“The proof is in the puffin."

“The proof is in the puffin?”

“The proof is in the puffin.”

“Wait a minute.”  I wrote “THE PROOF IS IN THE PUFFIN” on my napkin and showed it to him.  “Is that right?”

Jay looked and nodded his hat brim.  “The proof is in the puffin,” he announced to the whole bar.  “Jay Adams.”  I wrote his name under his slogan.  Puffing is right, I thought.  This guy wants to write himself into a Louis L'Amour novel.  I started for the door.

“Until you get up there, you’re an asshole,” he called as I walked out into the dark.

In the afternoon light three days later, I stopped by some crumbling concrete walls in Montello.  My napkin directed me to go east from the bar, then go left to the "whoremonger’s ruins," go two more roads, then right to the top of the hill.  I had already tried to follow these directions once, and had circled back to what I suspected were the whoremonger's ruins. Not much point in trying again.  I drove back to the Cowboy Bar, figuring that someone would know where Jay lived.  I parked my truck in the gravel and walked toward the door.