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The sign out front reads: Mojave State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
You remember that, even though you can’t see it from inside the building.
The hospital sits at the edge of the desert, squat and square. It’s made of dusty stucco, smooth white plaster, and shiny linoleum. You’ve been here a long time, months and months, or maybe years. It’s hard to tell. The weather is always hot. There are no clocks on the walls. Sometimes people say it’s Christmas and a limp slice of turkey drowned in watery gravy appears on your dinner tray.
You wake up in the mornings when the tall orderly stomps down the hall ringing his bell and throwing open the doors. Breakfast is cream of wheat the consistency of wallpaper paste, followed by a cold bath. You get your shot from the redheaded nurse and sleep again until the floor stops sinking under your feet. If you wake up in time for lunch, there’s stewed prunes and a baloney sandwich. Sometimes it’s potted meat instead. Sometimes it’s only mayonnaise.
The uncertainly shaped length of time between lunch and dinner is spent outside. No one ever comes with you. They like to stay in the dim stuffiness of the activity room, playing cards and dominoes, but you like the sunshine. You like the yard. It’s ten steps by sixteen and a half, surrounded by a tall brick wall. Tufts of dry grass poke out from the dirt. You like to sit in the middle of it, looking straight up, watching the sun burn in the pale sky.
That’s what you’re doing the day the cowboy rides into town.
tuckaTHUCKtuckaTHUCKtuckaTHUCK
There’s the sound of someone driving up: the clunking of a beat-up engine and the crunch of gravel under tires. It feels too early for the grocery truck, but maybe you slept the week away again. The noises get louder and louder as the engine and tires get closer and closer. After a while, you get up to investigate. There’s a hole in the wall. It isn’t big enough to squeeze through, even when you’ve just had your shot and are very small, but it’s big enough for looking. You press your eye to it and watch as the white hospital van comes galloping down the road.
It slows to a trot as it nears the chain link fence, then stops with a lurch. The curly-haired orderly climbs out to unlock the gate, and the van rolls through onto the grounds and up to its usual parking spot next to the building. The engine cuts out, leaving only the sound of the scuttling honey ants and the sun baking the earth. The curly-haired orderly takes his time closing the gate and stops to light a cigarette before catching up. The skinny orderly gets out of the driver’s side and unlocks the back of the van.
Your head tilts to the right. Sometimes people have to be dragged out of the van kicking and screaming. Other times they’re carried out on the stretcher, asleep with their eyes open.
Not today.
Today there’s a white cowboy hat. It’s the first thing you see as the man in the back of the van stoops to hop out. His boots send up a little puff of dust when he lands. They’re work boots, the heavy kind with round laces. Their leather is cracked and brownish-grey. The man is dressed in denim overalls and a faded checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He looks around, one hand on the brim of his hat.
You hear music. Spanish guitar and a tin whistle.
The peephole opens up dizzily into an establishing shot of the desert—the bumpy hills and the scrub and the stunted Joshua trees—and then contracts, panning back to the cowboy. The sun is beating down on the back of your neck, but your arms are suddenly covered in goosebumps. You push closer to the peephole as the three men pass through your line of sight, and then you straighten up, listening hard. There’s the bleat of the buzzer followed by the jangle of keys. You hurry inside for a better look.
Dark spots swim down the hallway ahead of you like shadowy fish as your eyes adjust to the indoor lighting. You follow them on your quietest feet, past the padded room and the closet where the floor polisher lives, up to the barred door that separates the rest of the hospital from the front desk. The fish swim on ahead.
No one notices you watching. Sometimes if you stand very still, you turn invisible.
The cowboy is taking off his hat as the orderlies escort him to the head nurse. His hair is blond and cut short. He has the beginnings of a beard. His face looks kind. Tired, but kind. The head nurse takes out a stack of paperwork. When it’s almost time for dinner, the light comes in through the grilled window and puts a veil on her, but right now it’s only the side of the desk that’s mourning. She squints at the clipboard the orderly brought and asks it questions.
Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. The cowboy’s clothes didn't lie. You can hear the soft drawl in his voice when he answers for the clipboard. That’s right, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.
The pinched lines around her mouth start to go away, and her voice softens. Please fill out these forms, Mr. Conagher. She lets him hold the pen, and she almost looks apologetic when she takes his watch and wallet and puts them in a brown envelope.
Not to worry, ma’am. I know you’re just doing your job.
She turns to lock the envelope in the cupboard, and the cowboy glances over your way.
The camera zooms into a close-up so quick it makes you dizzy. His tired eyes are blue. You can’t remember the last time you saw anything so blue. They hold steady on you for one-two-three seconds before flicking down and up again. He looks careful, like he thinks you might call him out for a gunfight. He’s probably used to that. You close one hand around the bars and give him a little wave with the other to show you’re unarmed.
His shoulders relax, and he gives you a little wave back. His smile is lopsided, just like Robert Mitchum’s. The shadowy fish come racing back to you, diving down your throat as you swallow with dry-mouthed excitement. They swim around in your stomach in tight, fast circles.
The head nurse whips around and spots you.
“What are you doing out of the activity room?”
The lines around her mouth are back, cut in deep. The skinny orderly and the curly-haired orderly both start forward, ready to knock the fish out of you. You quickly let go of the bars and shrug. No problem, no problem.
There will only be trouble if you stay and watch. You spare one last look at the cowboy and head back to the yard. You sit down again on the warm ground, watching a line of honey ants troop across the dirt and thinking about The Searchers, and High Noon, and then about A Fistful of Dollars. That was one of the last movies you can remember seeing. You shiver, remembering the dark, cool theater. On the inside of your eyelids, the Stranger frees old Silvanito and shoots Ramón dead.
You wet your lips and send the theme song warbling over the wall until it’s time for dinner.
The cowboy isn’t in the chow hall that evening, or the next morning, or the evening after that. You wonder if maybe you only imagined him, or if production was cancelled, but Manny says that John with the Stutter heard from John with the Angels that there’s a new guy in Ward 3 who’s friendly with the nurses when he isn’t sleeping.
It’s a while before you see him again, but one morning there he is, nodding off over his breakfast while you’re standing in line with your tray. He’s gone by the time you have your bowl, but you pass him in the hall later when he’s waiting outside the doctor’s crypt. He looks up from the paperback book he’s reading and blinks his tired eyes. He seems to recognize you and smiles again. You smile back and bite your lip. Howdy, he says, and you’re about to say hello when the crypt door swings open.
“Come in, Mr. Conagher.”
The cowboy closes his book and gives you a nod before standing up and going inside. The crypt door closes again before you can warn him about the ghoul. It’s probably fine. Not everyone gets their brains eaten in there.
He obviously survives because the next day, or maybe the next, or the one after that, he comes out to the yard. You hear footsteps inside, in the hallway. There isn’t any yelling, so there’s no reason for an orderly to be coming to drag you in for lock-down. You dig your fingers into the dirt just in case as the door opens.
“Mind if I join you?”
You hum your okay, your voice croaking in your throat. People don’t talk to you very much. The nurses and the orderlies and the doctor like it better when you’re quiet. Nod your head for yes. Shake your head for no.
A short afternoon shadow reaches out toward and touches your knee. You look up to see the cowboy standing with his hands on his hips, squinting at the sky.
“Whew. Sure is bright out here.”
You hum again, even happier this time.
His eyes are covered in glass, but it cracks when he smiles. He turns his hands up, soaking in the sunshine.
“Now this is nice. And here Nurse Kelly was saying it was too hot to come out.”
You frown and clear your throat. “No such thing.”
He laughs, just softly. It’s a nice sound. “Ain’t that the truth. You wouldn’t happen to be from Texas, would you?”
“Los Angeles.”
You used to be able to see the name when it came off your tongue, lit up in neon lights, but you can’t any more. The cowboy doesn’t seem to notice.
“Hot days there too, the way I hear it.” He crouches down and holds out his hand. “I’m Dell Conagher.”
You take it. His palm is warm and rough.
“Susan,” you say, thinking of Susan Hayward in Rawhide. That was a really good movie.
Dell Conagher blinks, then he smiles and shrugs. He sits down next to you.
“All right. What’s a nice Los Angeleno like you doing in a place like this, Susan?”
You have to think about that. You’re here because this is where you were when the van stopped. They put you in the van at the other hospital. Before that was the jail. There are dark patches in between. A lot of injections. Eventually you follow the trail back to what came before, to the last bright spot in your memory.
“I set the whole city on fire.”
“Is that so?” He doesn’t sound disbelieving or disapproving. He just sounds interested.
You close your eyes and beam. “It was beautiful.”
The cowboy’s a good listener. He sits quiet and patient, nodding along as you tell him about how you were born when they were filming Gone with the Wind. Atlanta wasn’t really burning, but everyone thought it was. They called the fire department when they saw the smoke rising from the set, and the firetrucks came. Mama went into labor because she was afraid the apartment would burn down, and Tio tried to take her to the hospital, but you wouldn’t wait until she made it out of the building. She had to pull up her skirt in the stairwell, and there you came, halfway between the third and fourth floors.
You tell him how you were twelve the first time someone paid you to light a fire. It wasn’t the first-first time. That was in the church, when you were an altar boy. No one knew about that. No one but Mama, because she found you standing out back, watching the fire rise up to heaven like the whole building was a votive candle. Maybe she told Tio. It was Tio who brought you to see his friend, and they gave you ten dollars and the gasoline.
Whoosh! It was like a cartoon. There were so many colors and all of them were dancing. It was the most beautiful thing you ever saw, alive and breathing, and so so hot. You learned how to do it even better. Kerosene. Butane. All the things that fire likes to eat. Sometimes Tio’s friend paid you, and sometimes it was other people, but it wasn’t the money that mattered.
The cowboy listens to all of this, chewing on a piece of dried grass. After a while, he smiles and nods like he understands exactly what you mean. “It’s good, doing what you love.”
You like the way he says that word. Love. You see it like the card in a silent movie, in big loopy letters, stuttering white on black, and your heart stutters too. His hands lie perfectly still in his lap. They look just how the right one felt when you shook it—like they’re strong, like he works hard with them. You can see where the tan on the back of his neck ends just under his collar.
“Have you ever seen Fantasia?” you ask, thinking of the moment when the conductor starts the music.
“I liked that one,” he says.
You look back up at the sun. “Me too.”
These are things you learn over the days that follow:
Dell the cowboy is a morning person. He’s already awake and playing solitaire in the activity room when the tall orderly rings his bell. He calls cream of wheat sorry would-be grits and rubs his eyes a lot when he’s waking up after his shot.
Dell the cowboy is from Bee Cave, Texas, where it once hit 122 degrees in July of 1936. That’s 50 degrees in Celsius, which Dell feels is a cleaner system of measurement, and isn’t 50 a nice round number for the kind of heat that’d make the devil break a sweat?
Dell the cowboy is allowed to have crayons. The brown-haired nurse gives him a fresh box from the locked cupboard. The cardboard is crisp and the wax tips are sharp, but the crayons slide around with gaps in between. There’s no black, no red, no orange. No angry colors allowed, the nurse says, and she blushes when Dell smiles that little smile like they both know how silly it is.
He draws a lot of very straight lines. Machine parts. Buildings. Complicated pieces that fit together.
“Are you an artist?” you ask.
He says he's an engineer, and that he was working at Caltech before he went a little loco.
You laugh. No one in here’s an engineer. They were cooks or janitors or nothing at all. Besides, there aren't any cowboys from Caltech. Cowboys never come from anywhere, they just ride into town with a gun and a name. Sometimes not even the name.
“Some S-O-Bs in the jet propulsion lab stole my designs. I might’ve brought a little wrath of God down on them.”
He shakes his head, looking rueful.
“I got a long fuse, but sometimes it goes ‘bang’.”
“Bang,” you say. Then you say it again, almost able to see it pop in the air. You start to repeat it, but you stop when the brown-haired nurse frowns at you.
‘Bang,’ Dell mouths at you when she turns away, and you laugh again.
You aren’t allowed to have anything pointy without supervision after what happened with the man with the rabbit head, but it’s okay. You like watching Dell work. The drawing of the barn on his family’s ranch in Texas comes to live under your mattress, along with the one of the inside of a clock, and the one of the tuba-shaped gun that shoots pink bubbles. Your name is on that one, as a consultant’s credit. Dell feels strongly about professional courtesy.
He shouldn’t be in here. You tell him that, but he shakes his head.
“This is good. I need some time to get my mind right.”
He turns that Robert Mitchum smile on you. His eyes are bluer than the crayon, and you can see your face in his pupils, smiling back.
“Besides,” he says, with a look so sweet that you want to find out what color his mouth tastes like, “if I wasn’t here, we wouldn’t have met.”
You didn’t know this was a musical until the strings in your stomach are plucked. The first twang goes straight through you, all the way to the tips of your fingers and toes. The chord that comes after makes you tingle just about everywhere. You would bet good money that he knows how to play the guitar.
The brown-haired nurse is busy reading her magazine. You lean in close to Dell and whisper in his ear that he’s a lot better looking than Gene Autry. When you draw back, there’s a hint of pink on his cheek. You didn’t know that cowboys could blush. He glances over to make sure the nurse still isn’t looking, then whispers back that it just so happens you’re the prettiest firebug he’s ever met.
Dell’s a better singer than Gene Autry too. He does it quietly so that the orderlies don’t come out to the yard to investigate. His voice is low and raspy and makes you shiver in the heat of the afternoon. He sings Sioux City Sue, his fingers sometimes strumming in the air and other times tapping on his thigh. He sings Wake Up Little Susie, and Susie Q, Darling I Love You, and one time when the doctor made him have a second shot and the glass over his eyes is too thick to crack, he sings Goodnight, Irene.
“Goodnight, Irene...goodnight, Irene...I’ll see you in my dreams...”
It sounds like a campfire song, all smokey and gray. You breathe it in, feeling it burn just right. You wish it was night time in Texas, where Dell says the sky is so big it swallows a man up. You wish the stars were out and the wind was blowing, sending fireflies up to the moon. You wish you had said your name was Irene.
Dell’s eyes are closing when you reach out and take his hand. It’s cold even though he’s been sitting out in the sun, but it warms up when you squeeze it. His fingers slide between yours, holding on tight, and the two of you stay just like that until it’s time to go in for dinner.
Not everyone knows that Dell is a gun for hire, but some of them figure it out. The nurses let him use the ladder to fix the light in the bathroom that the curly-haired orderly keeps saying he’ll get to. He talks to the young doctor about his transmission and installs the new air conditioner in the old doctor’s office. One day after lunch, he asks if maybe you’d like to take a stroll somewhere cozy instead of sitting in the yard, and when you say yes, you really would, he strolls with you all the way down the hall to the laundry room, where he spent the day before tuning up the water heater with the skinny orderly.
He looks both ways to make sure no one’s coming. The laundry room door is supposed to lock when it shuts, but Dell slides a length of wire from behind the hinges. The door pops right open, and he holds it for you like a gentleman.
You can barely keep from clapping your hands together in delight before you quickly step inside. Dell follows behind you and eases the door shut for real. The latch makes a sound like a flint wheel. Your heart is beating like crazy and you’re smiling so hard it hurts your cheeks. No one’s supposed to be in the laundry room when there isn’t a work shift. The darkness inside is the good kind, full of glinting metal and the smell of bleach and soap.
Dell has to stand on his tiptoes to kiss you.
It’s a Hays Code kiss, as soft and sweet as cotton candy. You can taste the prettiest pink on his lips and feel the buttercup yellow of his beard against your chin. His hands are tingly mint green, one on your hip and the other on the back of your neck. You grab his warm shirtfront, backing up and dragging him with you until you collide with a washing machine.
He breathes out a laugh, a little flash of silver in the air that makes you shiver.
“Well, how-dy.”
He kisses you again, pressing so close that the censor probably has to take out some scissors and snip this part out of the movie. The next part too, when the tip of your tongue sneaks past his lips. And the part where his hands start moving all over you and he keeps whispering things like “Is this all right?” and “You sure?” and “How about this?”
It’s all right. You’re sure. You like it. You’re squirming, pulling at him, getting under his shirt and feeling the hot skin of his bare back as he puts his mouth on your neck and slides a hand down your pants. You’re aching, wanting it so badly, and he gives it to you.
“That’s it, honey,” he says. “That’s it….”
The censor surrenders and the whole movie fades to black.
Afterwards, you sit on the cool tile floor. Your legs are made of Jell-O and you can’t stop smiling. Dell is lying down with his head in your lap. You run your fingers through his hair over and over, rubbing it the wrong way to feel the bristle and then smoothing it down again. You can feel him thinking, like the way a machine hums when it’s plugged in. You picture the inside of his head like the drawings he makes, all very straight lines and pieces fitting neatly together, running on forever like a roadside fence. He turns his face towards you with a sigh, and when you trace your fingertips over his lips, you can feel him smiling too.
Fourteen more afternoons in the yard. Twelve more songs. Five more strolls to the laundry room.
That’s it. That’s all you get.
The nurses start smiling at Dell even more than they did before. He’s less tired in the morning, and the glass is off his eyes. He says they’re not giving him a shot any more. You pace in the hall when he goes into the doctor’s crypt. You can hear them talking about whiskey and golf, and when Dell comes out, the ghoul is laughing and patting him on the shoulder.
You’ve got to tell folks what they want to hear sometimes, Dell says.
You don’t want to hear him tell you good-bye. You don’t want to hear him tell you that you can have his crayons, even as he's slipping them into your pocket after he cleans up his room. You don’t want to hear him tell you that he’ll be in touch, because you know he won’t.
Cowboys don’t keep in touch, and they don’t come back. They just ride off into the sunset.
There must have been a long take when Dell left. The camera would have watched from just behind the bars that separate the rest of the hospital from the front desk, staring straight through the open front doors and on through the gate. Maybe it caught some flicker in the steel blue of Dell’s eyes as he tipped his hat to the head nurse. Then, nothing but the sight of his straight back and square shoulders as he saddled up his white horse and set out west on the road leading out of the desert.
You don’t know for certain. You weren’t there. You didn’t want to get out of bed to see him go, and then something happened, and then you were in the padded room for a very long time.
When they let you out again, things go back to the way they were before. You wake up in the mornings when the tall orderly stomps down the hall ringing his bell and throwing open the doors. Breakfast is sorry would-be grits the consistency of wallpaper paste, followed by a cold bath. You get your shot from the redheaded nurse and sleep again until the floor stops sinking under your feet. If you wake up in time for lunch, there’s stewed prunes and a baloney sandwich. Sometimes it’s potted meat instead. One time it’s only margarine.
Every day after lunch, the brown-haired nurse comes to tell you that you have a phone call. She takes you to the nurses station and pretends to watch you, but mostly she reads her magazine. There’s always a voice on the other end of the line. It always sounds like Dell.
He’s got a job at the company his daddy used to work for. They asked for a recommendation, and he thought of you. He’s thinking of you. He misses you. He cut off his hand, he says, but don’t worry, it was on purpose.
You don’t say much back. You can’t trust voices that don’t have faces attached. The doctors are very firm about that.
The uncertainly shaped length of time between your phone call and dinner is spent outside. No one comes with you any more. Everyone else stays in the dim stuffiness of the activity room, playing cards and dominoes, but the sunshine makes you feel better. You sit cross-legged in the middle of the yard, hands on the warm dirt. You look straight up. You watch the sun burn in the pale sky.
That’s where you are when the wind blows Dorothy Gale into town.
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There’s the sound of someone driving up: the low rumble of a well-tuned engine and the crunch of gravel under tires. Maybe it’s the grocery truck, but it turns in the wrong direction before coming to a quiet stop outside the fence a long ways down from the gate. After a while, you get up to investigate. You can’t see anything through the hole in the wall. You look again, this time through the crack in between two bricks on the other side of the yard.
A girl in a purple dress climbs out of a purple truck. She goes around to the truck bed and takes out a pair of bolt cutters almost as big as she is. She looks left and right before sneaking up to the fence and snipping a neat hole in the bottom of it. The bolt cutters go back in the truck, and then the girl crawls through the hole in the fence.
You watch with interest as she sneaks up to the hospital, sprinting low to the ground just under where someone might see her from the windows. She flattens herself against the building and starts creeping closer to the wall outside the yard. You can’t see her any more when she gets close enough, but you can hear her breathing if you listen hard.
Finally, from just on the other side of the wall, she says: “Um, hi.”
You straighten up and say hi back.
“Are you...Susan?”
You hum.
She’s silent for a moment. “O...kay. The engineer sent me.”
A sound you’ve never made before comes out of your throat as your heart swells up like a balloon. You only know one engineer.
“Think of this as a job interview,” the girl says. “You’ve got five minutes to make it to the truck.”
Something solid and shiny comes sailing over the wall. You catch it, and your head tilts to the right as you consider the can of All-Purpose Aqua Net in your hands. Something smaller follows it, and you snatch it out of the air. The lighter is silver and smooth and fits just right in your hand. You run your fingers over it, tracing the initials engraved in the bottom corner: D.C.
You flip open the lid and drag your thumb over the flint wheel with a satisfying scratch. The flame leaps up, brilliant yellow and searing white surrounded by orange and blue. It dances joyfully in the air, singing and high-kicking. You stare into its eyes, and then at the dry grass poking out of the dirt. The cap from the Aqua Net falls to the ground. You shake the can, then line up a stream of aerosol spray.
A giddy smile spreads slowly across your face as you think about everything you and Dell have to catch up on.
Whoosh!
The world erupts into glorious Technicolor.