It was late afternoon when he reached Beatty, just across the Nevada border. He stopped there for a leisurely dinner, then pressed on. The last fifty miles to Beulah was across open, rumpled desert: low hills spotted with sage and greasewood, cut through by shallow gullies and deeper arroyos. Larger hills shimmered nakedly against the darkening horizon — brown at first, then bright gold, dark gold, purple, and finally black as the sun dipped and vanished.
His first impression of Beulah was of a cluster of winking lights spread across higher ground. He was still fifteen miles away when he first saw the lights, and he thought they must belong to some other town; but until he was within five miles of them they seemed not to grow any brighter, any closer — as if they were moving away from him at the same speed he was approaching.
The terrain grew hillier, more rumpled; the highway eased into a long, gradual lift. More lights, widely scattered, winked and shimmered in the surrounding desert — the cattle ranches he’d read about probably. Then the lights of the town began to separate, to take on neon color and definition. The road steepened more sharply, and at the top of the rise he saw the first motel sign. Before he reached it his headlights picked out another sign: WELCOME TO HISTORIC BEULAH.
The motel was a Best Western called the High Desert Lodge; he turned in to its driveway. A talkative, gray-haired woman named Mrs. Padgett and the inevitable bank of slot machines waited for him inside. He took a room for one night. The place wasn’t crowded; if he needed to stay over, a second night’s lodging would be no problem.
In the room he unpacked his toilet kit, put a clean shirt and a pair of slacks on hangers, and then lay down on the bed. He had no desire to go out again. Tired from all the driving; and there would be plenty of time tomorrow to look the town over, see what it had to offer, before he asked his questions.
He was aware of a need to draw out his stay here as long as he could, to postpone what was likely a final dead end. That was why he hadn’t questioned Mrs. Padgett. As much as he wanted his freedom from Ms. Lonesome, letting go of her would not be easy. It would be like losing a small part of himself. A nonessential part, a little piece of self-indulgence, but something meaningful just the same.
In the early-morning sunlight Beulah had a drowsy, mildly schizoid appearance. New, modern buildings standing cheek by jowl with wooden false-fronts, aging brick structures, a three-story gray stone hotel that had to be well over a century old. Traffic lights, dust-dulled cars, and lumbering motor homes parked and passing through, a gaudy, red-neon stallion rearing high above the entrance to the Wild Horse Casino; and meandering among the low, tawny hills that flanked the central part of town, rutted dirt roads that looked as if they would be more hospitable to ore wagons and buckboards than to any twentieth-century vehicle. Beyond the outskirts to the north, the main highway ran straight across empty desert flats, narrowing until it became a pencil-thin line where a pair of black-shadowed mountain ranges seemed to converge in the far distance.
A dry breeze fanned Messenger’s cheeks as he walked from the motel to where a two-block-long main drag lanced off to the west. The air was still night-cool, heavy with the scents of sage and dust, but a gathering heat licked hard at its edges; another couple of hours and it would be hot enough to draw sweat. Everything — sky, desert, man-made objects — had a clarity and brilliance that made him squint. But the combined effect of it all was appealing. One of those mornings and one of those places that made you glad to be alive. And made you ravenously hungry too, he was surprised to discover. It was the first time in as long as he could remember that he’d had any kind of appetite before noon.
Mrs. Padgett had told him the Goldtown Café was the best place in town for breakfast. The café was on Main, just off the highway intersection, its plate-glass front window advertising “beer-batter pancakes, Nevada’s finest.” Inside he found an atmosphere at once similar and dissimilar to that in the Harmony Café. The smells were the same; despite the ever-present slot machines, much of the decor was the same. But there was more conversation, more laughter, more obvious pleasure in eating among the men and women filling the booths and strung out along the counter; and the faces, whether they belonged to locals in Western garb or travelers on their way to or from Las Vegas, seemed on the whole more cheerful, more open and inclined to make eye contact.
He wondered if the significance of this was that a city like San Francisco enclosed people who seldom if ever left it, weighed so heavily on them and made them so guarded after a while that they closed themselves off without even realizing it — turned into Hemingway’s metaphoric islands in the stream. Whereas an environment like this was so big, so unbounded, that it allowed for an expansion rather than a contraction of self. He’d felt such an expansion in Death Valley. Not that you had to live out here to keep the self from shriveling. It was the perspective that mattered, the knowledge that there were places you could go that actually could help to lift your spirits.
He ordered the pancakes and a side of ham. Ate every scrap and took refills on his coffee. When he paid the bill he asked his waitress, a heavy-bosomed strawberry blond whose name tag read Lynette, for directions to the library.
She said, “Block south and two blocks east, on Tungsten. But it doesn’t open until ten.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure thing.” Her smile was friendly, even a little flirtatious. Nothing closed off about her, either. “You going there to see Mrs. Kendall?”
“Who?”
“The librarian. Ada Kendall.”
“No,” he said. “I want to return a book I found.”
She said, “Oh,” without comprehension, as if he’d just spoken in a foreign language. “Well, you have a nice day now. Come back and see us again.”
“I will.”
A sunburst wall clock and his Timex both read 8:15. He walked back to the High Desert Lodge, picked up his car, and went to explore the rest of Beulah.
There was not much of it: a dozen or so blocks of side streets, the largest buildings on any of them a two-story stone courthouse and a sprawling new high school gymnasium. Private housing seemed to be a mix of mobile homes and mostly older houses built of board and batten or cinder block. A few of the outer streets were unpaved, rocky and serrated like the desert roads and overlaid with a white, powdery dust. Lava dust, he recalled from one of the guidebooks he’d read. The Subaru’s tires churned it up into feathery wisps that seemed to hang suspended in the now still air.
He drove out into the desert on two of the country tracks, one to the east and the other to the northwest. The latter took him past a long-abandoned hillside mine: gaunt head frame, two crumbling shacks, dunelike mounds of ancient ore tailings. Here and there he saw little clusters of buildings, cattle feeding on dry scrub. Hardscrabble places, for the most part. Life out here couldn’t be easy for 90 percent of the residents. But he didn’t have to wonder why they stayed.
At ten he drove back into Beulah. Tungsten Way was an unpaved side street, the library set at the far end and housed in a metal-sided mobile home, on the front of which a wooden porch had been built. Inside, walls had been removed and stacks erected, close together to accommodate a greater number of both hardcover and paperback books. A brace of ceiling fans stirred the air sluggishly. In the summer the cramped space would be like the inside of a kiln. Even now, with the outside temperature not much above eighty, the fans going, and the front door propped open, it was dustily close in there.