Drive along Route 95 toward Vegas, turn right on a dusty road just fifteen miles south of Tonampa, and you’ll find a cluster of buildings that are fifteen years shy of being a ghost town. There’s still a motel with kitschy mining decor. A taxidermized bear sits in the lobby, patchy with gaping stitches. Shakey’s Pizza, so named for its owner’s malaria-induced tremors, has come and gone, replaced by a payday loan center. The last mine closed in 1956. There are fewer and fewer kids, and they move farther and farther away. Or they take too many trips without ever leaving home.
That isolation kept Mike busy. He lived in a brick building just off the old main street, a former tavern back when the mines were full of silver, and ran his business on the ground floor, fixing all manner of things, saving locals a long trip to Reno or Vegas. Mike could always discern the flaw in each new item – a coffeepot with a short circuit, a flickering light fixture, faulty pinch rollers in a VHS player.
Mary brought her vacuum three times for repair. Twice when the suction grew too feeble to suck the spiderwebs from beneath her cabinets and she had to use a damp rag to pull cottony egg sacs off the bristles of her broom. The third time, the vacuum reeked like roadkill in late July. She changed the bag but still, it stunk. Mike dissected each piece, wiping them with ethanol, or blasting them with pressurized air. A few blue specks of what may have been a golden gouda had filtered into the machine, but Mike returned it to Mary, good as new.
Mary invited him over for a cheese plate. Before long, Mike moved in with Mary. The main street tavern became just a repair shop. In the waning years of Mary’s youth, they had their one and only baby. If that baby needed any fixing, if there was acne on her cheeks and stork bite on her eyelids, Mike couldn’t see it.
The list of things Mike could fix shrank. There was a time when Mike would fix computers. Hulking CPU towers with whirring fans. He wasn’t much of a computer guy, but he could find a blueprint or diagram and tinker well enough that he got things where they needed to be. Now, he can’t even fix a car radio or a John Deere tractor. Proprietary technology baked into the firmware. They say the fridges are “smart” now too, so he can’t fix those either.
Some things he could never fix. He was never a healer. That was Janessa’s domain, and half the time she’d shake her head and send them on their way to Tonampa, where a nurse practitioner could see them, and then that nurse might still shake her head and send them to the closest hospital in Reno. When things were really dire, an ambulance would speed to Reno in just three hours, but those hours were still too long when Mike’s baby grew ill, flaring her ribs, sucking in her belly skin like a mine caving in.
You can fool yourself, thinking that the town needs you, that it’s worth staying and fixing what you can. Until no one can fix the one thing that ever really mattered and now you’re back in an empty house surrounded by old TVs and dead freezers.
Years pass.
A nurse in Tonampa tells Mike to get his heart fixed. Get a watchman. A pacemaker. But he doesn’t have the right kind of insurance and frankly, he sees the writing on the wall. The Amazon truck comes twice a week now. When something breaks, the neighbors order a replacement on their phone – one of those newfangled ones with proprietary technology – and have it delivered to their door.
Mike doesn’t bother fixing things anymore. He drives around town in his truck on trash days, salvages broken appliances and furniture, and builds a mountain where the mine was. He paints it in patches, seafoam green and flamingo pink and eggshell white at the peak, sometimes pilfering the cans left for drop off at the one-room library’s hazardous waste day. Mike builds in the sun until his ears peel. He builds in snow and rain.
Look at all we’ve squandered, he shouts, when Janessa stops by, or when Mary walks her dogs in the fields of the nearby foothills, witnessing from a distance the one person who knows her hurt.
Some days he simply sits on the peak of his refuse, looking down on the dwindling town and the dust motes swirling by. He’s sitting there without any blueprint, hoping his heart lasts long enough to see his mountain of unfixable things collapse into the mine, the earth roaring as it swallows rusted shrapnel, glass shards, and plastic pebbles – a subterranean mosaic enfolding him, blocking air, flaring his ribs, to make room for more.
