“The worst kind of news,” he says to me, as he walks from the house to his sports car.
He’s a starved-looking man, bony, white hair, but wealthy. California money well spent on forty-foot masonry towers, one at each corner of his unfinished mansion, dominating the Nevada hillside.
This summer, I’ve been a twenty-year-old construction worker without a chance in the world—told every sweaty day how best to furnish his rising stature. But today, even I can see that he’s been tapped by something profound, as vast and unyielding as the desert ground itself: sand, pebbles, flares of grass, all teetering as he walks in the summer heat to his car.
“I can’t make sense of it,” he says, turning back around.
He tells me that his son, my age, was killed by a drunk driver the night before. Apparently he was riding around with some friends when the maniac’s car smashed into the passenger-side door.
“It should’ve never happened,” he says, sweeping his hand over the torn-up hillside. “It’s not what I had in mind when I moved up here.”
Today, the heat is unbearable, the old man teetering towards his car. Today, I learn that I have a chance, that death makes no exceptions. It grants everyone the same desperate franchise. It’s everywhere, especially in the heat, sneaking in the hot, hard air, empowering him as it empowers me, charging us with the cruel ownership of our choices.
Earlier in the day, during a doctor appointment, I met a young woman in an air-conditioned elevator. She was clean and beautiful. I wanted to fuck her. I wanted to taste that privilege. I had dreams of a moonlit rendezvous.
“Hot, huh?” she murmured in a voice like water.
“Come with me,” I answered the burgeoning scheme in my head. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
But that was then. Now, I’m a refugee in the shade.
“The worst kind of news,” he says to me.
His car makes a dismal smoke in the sharp heat. He leaves me in the hot air of his unfinished garage, sitting alone in the dust.
Scott Neuffer is a writer and musician who lives in Nevada with his family. He’s also the founder and editor of the literary journal trampset. Follow him on Twitter @scottneuffer @sneuffermusic @trampset