Tall Tales and Damn Lies

Loser's Evening Prayer

Telluride was colder than we thought it would be. The sign said 8,750 feet but the town climbed steadily toward the end of its box canyon. It also walked up the slight northern slope insteps of Neo-Victorian houses, touching the base of the cliffs there, a charming town, with wood smoke hovering in a low autumnal cloud. The big mine at the top end of town is all that’s left of a thousand little mines and scrapings, a thousand horror stories. Now there wasn’t a horror story to be seen, just money sprinkled here and there and everywhere.

DC had been gone an hour or two when I woke up. It was getting dark. I had all the sleep I was going to get and my ears were still plugged and my throat was raw so I figured I may as well get up and track him down.

As it happened, he was at the Floradora, exactly where he said he would be. He was sitting at the short end of the L-shaped bar that ran along the left side of the room, in front next to the wall where he could see the television set . It was obvious he hadn’t seen anything on the screen for some time. He was drinking whiskey with water and had that soft, glazed look about him. He didn’t look up when I sat down next to him.

Since it was cold outside I had put on everything I could find in the camper in the way of shirts and coats. I even pulled on my crushed Resistol that was too tight and always left a red crease in my forehead. By the time I got sat down I was sweating.

The same guy was tending bar who was there the night before. I ordered an Irish coffee and looked over at DC.

“What’s happening?”

DC turned his head and looked closely at me for a minute and then, as if he suddenly recognized me but didn’t want me to realize that he hadn’t noticed me before, said “Nothing. Feeling any better?”

“No.”

“Too bad.”

“I’ll live. Who’s playing?”

DC looked at me again and then glanced up at the television set.
“I don’t know.”

“Where are you at on those,” I said, pointing to his whiskey glass.

“I would say quite far ahead.”

The bartender set a dainty white glass perched on a stem in front of me. There was a mound of aerosol whipped cream floating in it.

“That’ll be two fifty,” he said.

“Could you just put that in a mug or something?”

He eyed the glass. “Sure. That’s the something.”

He walked down to the other end of the bar. I watched his feet as he walked. His left foot rolled under each time he stepped on it.

“I see he is still just a great big shitheel,” I said.

“He’s all right. He just has a dry sense of humor.”

“Yeah.”

What the hell, let it go. I just wanted to have a nice, comfortable evening. Besides, I was sick.
Clearly DC was not going to be telling any stories tonight. That was a disappointment. I liked DC’s stories, they had a curious power. But I noticed a lady sitting to my right, just around the corner of the bar, who also seemed to have a curious power.

She was wearing no makeup and had on those shapeless clothes that earth mothers like to wear. But from what I could hear of her talk she didn’t sound like an earth mother. She sounded like she shaved her legs. The more I listened, the more interested I was. Maybe I would feel better after all, I thought.

She noticed.

“Want to read this?” she said, handing me a section of the Denver Post.

I said thanks and we passed the rest of the paper back and forth. Then she started to read the TV section out loud, reading the capsules for the upcoming soaps and sitcoms and she was very funny. DC had even started to take interest and almost everyone along the bar was laughing. She had started in reading them to a younger bearded guy who was sitting next to her but she kept turning to me. Maybe it was my imagination. She had magnificent eyes but her hair made her look very old. It was a strange combination. She wasn’t old, her face and hands were smooth and soft and her eyes, like I said, were luminescent. But her hair was black and stiff with gray strands. It looked very thick and raw. Her hair contrasted so sharply with the smoothness of her face I got a mild shock, like an optical illusion when I looked at her. The contrast drew your eyes to her as if they had to keep checking on what they were seeing being real.

We started talking and were soon immersed. She leaped to the middle of things, as if she were taking me into her confidence and I was hers immediately. She asked if I had noticed the big fellow sitting at the middle of the bar, a griseous Nostradamus in a battered slouch hat with huge white, embattled hands, fingers the size of Ballpark franks, very still and scrubbed to a shining translucency. He was someone you couldn’t ignore, an octogenarian amid a wash of children, sitting silently like an aged sire, sitting among the most recent litter, sitting silently. His hands completely hid his glass. He came in the bar right after I did. Of course I noticed him.

She said he had asked her to marry him. His name was Jim Redstone. She had felt sorry for him. Girls in the bars of Telluride thought him wacky, but the men, all younger, always gave him a straight-eyed, quiet greeting. Women shunned him. But one night Rachael - the lady’s name was Rachael - felt sorry for the old dude and thought she would just talk with him, so they spent a lot of time over some whiskey and in the end Jim asked her to marry him. Said he knew he was an old man and wouldn’t last much longer and didn’t have much. But he did have his cabin and his land, free and clear, and whatever he had was hers after he went. He had no mineral claims left. He had sold them for land and cows, then sheep. She didn’t have to love him, just stay with him. He wanted someone to talk to. The mountains were so cold during the winter and he never had a woman of his own, never had anybody he could spoon up to under the quilts when the coldness covered the earth with its white limerick. He just wanted a woman to keep him warm and take care of him, a woman who would listen to his stories with some gravity and pause. He was a man after all, and he noticed the smirks he got from all the girls in town, all those smartass little girls who didn’t have any idea.

All his friends were dead. He outlived them all. They went before him and now he was left alone and nobody knew about his life. So please, he asked, would she just come and live with him and take care of him until he died. They would be married and he would give her everything he had if she would only come and live with him, stay with him.

She could sense that nobody knew his weight or the core of events that circled through him. She understood what he said and it made her heart hurt. But she couldn’t do it, couldn’t keep his winters warm, not for his land or the cabin or for anything else. She felt her heart beat and in her stomach there was a hollowness, a horrible echo or premonition, like second sight. But she could not do what he asked even though part of her wanted to keep the old man warm. She could not, how could she? She was young and they had nothing in common. He was older than her father, older even, than her grandfather. She felt a snake coil about her as she thought of going to bed with him, sliding under the covers as the snow drifted down outside in huge silent flakes, touching his translucent skin, looking at his wrinkled face, his gnarled, now white hands touching her, hands misshapen and broken by years of labor, years of ropes and digging bars, hammers, shovel handles, years twisting wire and scraping earth, a thousand cuts, a million creases, more years, more time than the river took to move away the layered accumulations of thousand-million-year-old seas. She felt those hands on her body and trembled. She saw those eyes looking into hers with that sexual pleading, a mist of corridored time filmy across the blue, and she felt a tingle go up her backbone, felt the coldness in her center, the repulsion. No, not revulsion. But a spastic movement to push away, to keep this age from touching her, keep the years from entering her. Every sunrise for recorded years burning in the valleys of his face and the whine of winters and autumns in his breath and all that repeated over and over, time and again in more cycles than she would ever know. She could not, how could she?

He had known women, he said, dead now, gone away with the rush times when things were flush and he and a partner named Stoats had panned out enough to prove their claim and then sell it off and Stoats had left and Jim bought his spread. Yes, he had known women. Mind, these were not proper women (Rachael laughed) and he would not lie and say they were, but times were different. All the women he had known knew he was what he was. He had never said different. He thought they would do. He had his land and the sheep and cattle and some men to run and it never seemed a woman came within that circle who complimented him. His other half had never showed up and he had been too busy to go out looking, to go down from the mountains. Besides he thought he was a whole man and lived in himself and for himself. He knew he was old, he assured her, and he knew he looked old, but he would treat her kindly and softly and never abuse her. He would see that she had whatever she needed, books or music, maybe a piano, but she must be his alone. For that short time she must be his. He would not be around for long. She could surely do this thing for a couple of years. He was sure he had no longer, was sure his time was up. He looked at her and inside of him it stirred and the heat came up and he looked away because he didn’t want her to see it.

But she did see it and it was like a stab but she pulled back and put up a shelter and went beneath it and tried to talk to the old man as if he were not who he was and he listened and knew she had put up the shelter and was saddened because she had to use it but he thought he understood. If all those years weren’t good for understanding then they were good for nothing. He understood why she had to put up the shelter and talk to him as if things were not what they were, as if he were not what he was and as if he was not sure in his heart. It saddened him and angered him a little, but he knew about her, knew she felt the age touching her and so he backed away, turned away his eyes and listened to her talk as if what she said was the way things were. But of course they weren’t.

And now he could look away from her and listen to what she said and see the wolves circling around the moose, not sure if it was dead, not sure because it was still standing and smelled warm. But it was dead. It was too far to go and the moose knew it and died when it knew it but stayed upright. The wolves circled slowly. They did not move in until they could tell the life heat was gone.

When Rachael told me the story that night she told it as truly as she could and besides, I was looking at the old man the whole time. We saw him come into the bar and he did not say hello to Rachael but ordered whiskey and sat down at an empty stool in the middle of the bar and spoke to no one as he drank his whiskey slowly and looked straight into the mirror behind the bar. He was not sad and he was not pouting. He cradled his glass softly in his huge white hands and drank the whiskey slowly and let it run down inside him. But looking at him you knew he was decided. Finally I had to stop thinking about it. I stopped thinking about Jim and just listened to Rachael, looking at that optical illusion of her raw hair and smooth skin. A bunch of people came in the door and I could feel the cold air slide in from outside.

Loser's Evening Prayer
Copyright © 2009 K.R. Passey. All rights reserved.

Photos: The Telluride Corporation and Homer Reid Collection, from Telluride: From Pick to Powder, Richard L. and Suzanne Fetter