At the Jim Bridger: Stories by Ron Carlson

act that would have at one time been as alien for me as intergalactic travel or applying to barber college. I bought a car. It was a four door limegreen Plymouth Fury III, low miles. I bought a pair of chinos. These things gave me exquisite pleasure. I was seventeen and I had not known the tangible pleasure of having things. I bought three new shirts and a wristwatch with a leather strap, and I went driving in the evenings, alone south from our subdivision of Spring Woods with my arm on the green sill of my lime-green Plymouth Fury III through the vast spaghetti bowl of freeways and into the mysterious network of towers that was downtown Houston. It was my dawning.
    Late at night, my blood rich with wonder at the possibilitiesof such a vast material planet, I would return to our tumbledown genius ranch house, my sister off putting new legs on the periodic table at M.I.T., my mother away in Shreveport showing the seaport workers there the way to political and personal power, my brother in his room edging closer to new theories of rocket reaction and thrust, my father sitting by the entry, rapt in his schematics. As I came in and sidled by his table and the one real light in the whole front part of the house, his pencilings on the space station hinge looking as beautiful and inscrutable to me as a sheet of music, he’d say my name as simple greeting. “Reed.”
    “Duncan,” I’d say in return.
    “How goes the metropolis?” he’d add, not looking up. His breath was faintly reminiscent of sardines; in fact, I still associate that smell, which is not as unpleasant as it might seem, with brilliance. I know he said
metropolis
because he didn’t know for a moment which city we were in.
    “It teerns with industrious citizenry well into the night,” I’d answer.
    Then he’d say it, “Good,” his benediction, as he’d carefully trace his lead-holder and its steel-like wafer of 5H pencil-lead along a precise new line deep into the vast white space. “That’s good.”
     
    The San Jacinto Resort Motel along the Hempstead Highway was exactly what you might expect a twenty-unit motel to be in the year 1966. The many bright new interstates had come racing to Houston and collided downtown in a maze, and the old Hempstead Highway had been supplanted as a major artery into town. There was still a good deal of traffic on the four-lane, and the motel was always about half full, and as you would expect, never the same half. There were three permanent occupants, including a withered old mannamed Newcombe Shinetower, who was a hundred years old that summer and who had no car, just a room full of magazines with red and yellow covers, stacks of these things with titles like
Too Young for Comfort
and
Treasure Chest.
There were other titles. I was in Mr. Shinetower’s room only on two occasions. He wore the same flannel shirt every day of his life and was heavily gone to seed. Once or twice a day I would see him shuffling out toward Alfredo’s American Cafe, where Jeff told me he always ate the catfish. “You want to live to be a hundred,” Jeff said, “eat the catfish.” I told him I didn’t know about a hundred and that I generally preferred smaller fish. I was never sure if Mr. Shinetower saw me or not as I moved through his line of sight. He might have nodded; it was hard to tell. What I felt was that he might exist on another plane, the way rocks are said to; they’re in there but in a rhythm too slow for humans to perceive.
    It was in his room, rife with the flaking detritus of the ages, that Jeff tried to help me reckon with the new world. “You’re interested in sex, right?” he asked me one day as I took my break at the counter of Alfredo’s. I told him I was, but that wasn’t exactly the truth. I was indifferent. I understood how it was being packaged and sold to the American people, but it did not stir me, nor did any of the girls we went to school with, many of whom were outright beauties and not bashful about