Two miles down the county road, I pick Sera up as thunderheads like battleships dock on the edge of the valley. We drive across the river to the highway. Then east to the foothills of Chimney Rock where we park in front of log cabins and old Indian forts. The mosquitoes biting but it doesn’t matter.
Board a covered wagon pulled by two chestnut quarter horses. A grizzled old man with a beard that looks as though made of broom bristles tell us about the history of the land. He smokes a red while driving the wagon, talking about buffalo, the Pony Express, and the death rate of the Pioneers. To the south, over the Wildcat hills, the ships begin to fire.
We play horseshoes and drink two dollar beers while we wait for the beef to cook. Civil-war style tents set up across the pasture behind us, an army of ten-year-olds camping out under the stars. Coffeepots hang from a spit and roast over open flames.
Ribeye steaks served with all the conservation of an American. It doesn’t matter the size of the person, each plate holds a sixteen-ounce slab of meat. We sit at long picnic tables under shelter and drink red wine from clear plastic cups.
“Last week, in South Dakota,” Sera says. “We chased down three buffalo with four-wheelers and rounded them up. Buffalo can outrun a horse, and this bull and cow and baby kept getting out, so we had to help our neighbors get it in. The bull turned on one of our guys but we managed to turn it back.”
No one has stories like Sera. I make a joke and she kicks me under the table with her boot. After our steaks we eat homemade ice cream cones in front of a campfire, where an Indian-looking man plays an acoustic guitar and leads us in sing-a-longs. From where we sit we see the lights on Chimney Rock.
Driving away from the place, the lightning moves in overhead. I drive slow to keep us from the ditch as we watch the white light strobe in patches across the sky. Above us and surrounding the pasture land and hills. We talk about its power.
Then on to the Pink Palace. The sign in front of the barren town of McGrew reads Pop: 293 but it’s less than that. We drive down main street where there was once a bank, a general store, a place to take torn clothes. And those buildings are still there, but they haven’t been open for twenty years and the town hasn’t functioned independently for fifty. The only thing that’s left is a bar. A bright pink-painted two-story building with neon lights in the windows.
People stare when we walk in. We’re too clean for the Pink Palace, too young, too unmarred by life. I recognize some guys standing by the bar that are in their mid-30s, my sister’s old friends, but they’re drunk past the point of making the connection and we don’t shake hands or say hi. We take a table and order whiskey. Sera makes a jukebox move.
Two guys our age are playing pool. We’re wearing cowboy boots and feel like we’re in the right place. So we put our quarters down and shake hands with Scott and Ira, instantly friends, and while we wait with our sticks in hand we talk about lives, origins, and what we all do. It’s good and we smile at these strangers, friends and happy in this dead town.
They’re good and beat us four games in a row. Around the borders of the bar, the older people look angry and frozen. When I start to imagine where they go after the bar closes I ask Sera if she wants to leave. She drapes her jean jacket over her glass of whiskey and we smuggle it out to my car. All the lightning was just advertisement for the rain and while we drank it had made mud out of the dirt roads. I drive slow toward her house, my tires spraying water like a boat on a lake.
We stop on the road and get out. She walks in front of my headlights and into the ditch. We are only a few hundred yards from her house, and she wants to see her horses. When we get to the barbed-wire fence she holds it open for me like a pro-wrestler holds open the ropes. There is still lightning in the clouds.
They walk up to us as we approach. I count seven quarterhorses. A bay gelding with an off-center white star on his head and white on his nose smells the back of my hand and his nose is soft like a baby. I stroke his neck with my open palm and he bends his head down to sniff my cell phone, then neighs and walks off, into the dark pasture, with the lightning in the clouds and the fresh smell of rain on the grass. Before I take Sera home we make plans to ride the horses tomorrow.
