The Proof is in the Puffin: Part Two

“Jay Adams is nothing but a drunk,” the big lady said.  “And that place of his?  His old lady built most of it.  He talks like it was him, but she did most of the work.  Lost a finger doing it, she did.  I can’t remember which one.”

“Hey Dave,” she called over her shoulder.  “Which finger was it that Jay’s old lady lost?  Was it this one, or this one?”

Dave said he couldn’t hear her, and when she shouted at him again, he said he didn’t remember.  The mystery went unsolved and the lady resumed counting her money – a stack of twenties that she thumbed conspicuously at the bar.  She had just left the slot machines against the far wall and hoisted herself onto a barstool.  She had iron-gray hair and wore camouflage tee shirt the size of a tent.  The barstool disappeared beneath her.  Another woman pressed buttons on a flickering slot machine.  Next to the door, five or six people sat at a table drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, talking idly.  It was 2:00 on Monday afternoon.

When I had first entered the Cowboy Bar, I had taken a seat at the bar next to an old-timer who rolled his own.  A can of tobacco sat on the bar in front of him.  “How’re you doing?” I’d said.  It was more of a statement than a question, and the guy nodded.  “Hey,” he said.  I ordered a burger and a beer, then turned to the guy, who was smoking a tightly-rolled cigarette.

“I was here a couple days ago – I think I saw you then?”

“Yeah,” he said.  “But it’s library and water day, so I’m back in town again.”  That meant, I learned, that a bookmobile was coming to Montello from Elko, and that the guy was picking up water to take back to his home, where he didn’t have running taps.  I asked him if he knew where Jay Adams lived, and told him about the directions I’d tried to follow.  I asked him about the “whoremonger’s ruins.”  The concrete ruins, he said, were the remains of a whorehouse.

“Did it get shut down?” I asked.  “I thought whorehouses were legal in Nevada.”

The legality of prostitution depended on the county, he told me.  Whoring was illegal in Montello, and in Las Vegas and Reno, for that matter.  Nowadays, you had to go to Wells or Elko to get to a legal brothel.  He started to tell me how to find them, but I said I wouldn’t need directions.  But I don’t think he believed me.  He warned me against picking up street prostitutes – the ones in brothels got checked by the doctor once a week, he said, which didn’t make them clean but it was better than nothing.  I waved my hand dismissively.  “Just in case you get the itch,” he said.  He didn’t know where Jay Adams lived, but he referred me to someone at the table behind me who did.  Then he went to catch the bookmobile.

As I waited on my burger I sipped on my beer and tried to decide whether, if I had been in the old-timer’s shoes, I would have believed me about the whorehouses.  Probably not, I decided, although in truth I had no intentions of visiting one.  Too much risk of waking up with the itchy and the scratchy.  Then the lady in the camouflage tent sat down and started talking about Jay.  She told me about how his wife had done most of the work, but she wasn’t finished.  “He’s a drunk, and he’s a mean drunk,” she added.  “And that’s not a good combination.”

I ate my burger when it came, and stood to go.  But before I left someone said that Jay might not be at home.  Check the other bar, he advised.  So I got in my truck and drove a few hundred feet to the Saddle Sore Bar, the Cowboy Bar’s competitor and the only other commercial establishment in Montello that I’ve seen.

When I walked in the door, there were four people in the place – three lined up against the bar and one bartender, a young, clean-cut guy about my age.  They all stopped talking.  “Hello,” the bartender said.

A new devotee of the Cowboy Bar, I wasn’t going to waste time in this rival establishment.  “I’m looking for Jay Adams,” I said, and I kept walking along the side of the bar.  I found Jay at the end, and sat down next to him.

“Hey, Jay,” I said.  “Remember me?”

“Yeah,” he allowed, tapping his can of Keystone Light on the bar.  “I been thinking about you, wondering if you were going to come by.”  He spoke more clearly that he had last Friday night.  Maybe because I’d caught him earlier.

He wore the same soiled hat that I remembered and a pair of coveralls so dirty that they had become shiny, but the white-fleece neck-beard had been replaced by a white neck-stubble.

“You look good all shaved-up,” I told him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“The last time I was here, you wanted to show me your place,” I said.  “The house you built yourself, and the road you cleared two miles through the sage.”

He nodded.

“Want to show it to me?”

“Yep,” he said.  He picked up his beer and nodded at the bartender, and we walked outside.

I followed Jay past the concrete ruins, out of town, into the hills, and under a handmade sign that said “End of Trail.”  The sign marked the entry into Jay’s junkyard, where his gear was spread over a space the size of a baseball field.  Rusted barrels, rotted crates, gas cans, sheds, lumber piles, old trucks, old trailers, two slide-in campers, an old tractor and an engine block sitting in the dirt.  “I hauled all this stuff from Idaho,” he said.

Jay’s house was made of patched-together pressboard and windows that someone had given him.  Inside, the first room was cluttered with old stuff – tools, mason jars, cans, and equipment; most of it dusty.  The second room had a wood-burning stove and two armchairs sitting before it.  A propane lantern occupied the table between them.  The third and last room was a slide-in camper, like I have in the back of my truck, that Jay had built into the house.  Steps led to the camper’s entrance, and the roof that covered the second room also covered the camper.  Jay slept in the camper on a pile of blankets.  A wire ran from the camper to the ceiling over the armchairs, and an automotive bulb dangled from the wire.  Jay flipped a switch, and the bulb came on.  “See, electricity,” he said.

Back outside in the sunlight, we surveyed Jay’s hilltop.  Junk for 360 degrees.  The country beyond the hilltop was dry, but there was a patch of bright green grass near the house.  “What’s this?” I asked.

“My experiment.”

“Your experiment?”

“My experiment.”

“What are you experimenting?”

“I’m experimenting to see what’ll grow,” he said.  Once he found the right type of grass for the soil, Jay said, he would plant a wider swath of it.  “Most of this soil is bad,” he said.  “But see that valley?”  He pointed to a depression the size of a football field.  The index and middle fingers of his right hand were stained brown with cigarette smoke.  “That’s good soil,” he said.  Once I figure out what’ll grow, I’ll plant that valley.”

“What’ll you do then?  Run cattle on it?”

“Cattle, or horses.  Something.  I haven’t figured that out yet.”  He drank from the can he’d brought from the bar.  “I’ll have to put up a fence.  That’s what I ought to be doing, is putting up them fenceposts.”

“You’ll have to irrigate, right?”  I looked around and saw no wells, tanks or streams.  “Will you have to haul that water in?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“How much will that cost you?”

He didn’t know.  I got a beer out of my truck and we walked around Jay’s hilltop as he told me what various pieces of equipment were.  Grain wagon, work shed, welding machine, lumber from Idaho.  “Everything out here is hand-made,” he said.  “Nothing store-bought.”  I didn’t mention the barrels, crates, trucks, trailers, stove, chairs, or campers.

“Why’d you leave Idaho?” I asked.  “Is that where your wife is?”

“Yeah, it is,” he said.  “Too much control up there.  Too much government.”  He coughed.  “Communist.  The whole damn country is communist.”

“Nevada’s pretty conservative.  You ought to like that.”

He gave a hard laugh.  “Much beer as I drink, I ain’t too conservative,” he said.  We stood at the top of the hill, silent for a minute.  I liked him for that hard laugh.  Behind the pioneer puffery was hard self awareness, bitter and distasteful, but not forgotten.  He hid it with gruffness and beer.  There are parts of all of us, I guess, that we have to hide from ourselves.  Jay waved his hand, sweeping in his hilltop.  “Welfare,” he said.  “All of it welfare.”  He looked at the ground.

“Welfare?”

“Yep.”

“How’d you swing that?”

The laugh again.  “It’s easy.  Spend all of your money.”

“Well.”

With a jerk Jay was moving again, and we toured a little more.  We talked about Jay’s dogs and his ten or twelve cats.  “Yeah, the dogs keep them damned coyotes, foxes, wolves away,” he said.  I wondered what threat coyotes, foxes or wolves posed to Jay’s junkpile.  I reached for my keys.  “Jay,” I said, “thanks for the tour.  It looks like you’ve done a good job with the place.”  I reached out to shake his hand.

“Good?” he said.  He stepped toward me and we shook hands in the bright sunlight.  Then he looked away.  “I haven’t ever done anything good.”

Jay in front of his truck and house.