Rebecca Holcomb

Rainbow Club

We were traveling down Hwy 93, a lonesome cut through the Nevada desert. S, my sister, sat passenger seat in the van and I sat on the floor in the back. Fishing poles dangled above my head and the plates stacked in a milk crate at my side rattled. The van was converted into a living arrangement, the bed situated where seats used to be, the interior jammed with miscellaneous camping things and belongings. But the air conditioning was out in the van, so if I tried to cram by body in the only available space on the bed, I would suffocate, or that is what Ray, my dad, said when I asked if could sit on the bed for the duration of the drive to Cave Lake. S, almost two years older, at age thirteen, got the front seat for this trip. She knew I would acquiesce to her unspoken demands around Dad, knew that her calling of shotgun would go undisputed as Mom loaded our sleeping bags and tent in the van, telling us to be good for Ray, hugging us like she may not see us again. Everyone knew that this time to Ray was a redemptive act. Our once a year “let him act like we were his” trip.

As he drove, he talked about his year. How he had won big in Jackpot and then headed to Death Valley that fall. Then he took the van to Valley of Fire, checked his mailbox in Overton, decided to stay the winter before coming back to Wendover to see us. I didn’t know where these places were. I knew Jackpot was a town similar to Wendover, with small-scale casinos that comped his rooms, him being a “professional” gambler. Mom took us to Jackpot once to visit him. There, he taught me how to breathe on my side while swimming in the casino’s pool. Many years later, I would join a college swim team, and even though I was new to competitive swimming, my coach would put me in the butterfly race. To swim faster, I would imagine my dad watching how I was now the kind of swimmer that took breaths over the top of the water, instead of on the side: how my arms, legs, and torso moved in unison, propelling me across the length of the pool. In this fantasy, he would be sitting in the bleachers, his nose crinkled at the smell of chlorine. But once I got going during the meet, the fantasy shook itself free from my mind, and I became not a girl with a dead dad, but a capable body competing against other bodies. And though my heart wasn’t in it at all—the bangs and jumping blocks and frantic gulps of air, at least I could forget that winning was always the last thing on my mind. I quit the team mid-season

My dad talked to us like we understood his migratory life, his checks and balances. The juxtaposition of nature and casinos. The natural world that consoled him after losing and embraced him after winning. When I reflect on him, I see him in images. As a stranger calculating cards in a timeless world, or a cantaloupe halved and gutted just enough for a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

I kneeled in between the passenger’s seat and the driver’s seat so I could listen to him talk. The desert air rushed in the van from the manually cranked windows, whipping my brown curls into my dark eyes. I knew they had green in them, but my stepdad, Ron, liked to call them “shit brown,” or when he felt like being nice, “cow eyes.” We didn’t tell our real dad about our stepdad; it was escapism at its finest out there with Dad on the road. The sun seeped in from the windshield and toasted my skin, already darkened from a summer spent outside in the desert with Missy, my dog. S’s disapproving face turned away from us as she looked out the window; her light freckles and green eyes, blazing in contrast to her red hair. I wondered what she thought.

Maybe she was telling herself a story, the sagebrush and horizon caught in a blizzard. That’s it, she was envisioning snow during the summer, as she didn’t like the heat or outside, preferring to spend her time with friends, blasting Spice Girls from her older girl room. Something was wrong with her; she was losing her imagination as she became a grumpier version of herself with each passing birthday. Unlike me, she didn’t imagine the rivulets of heat dancing off the pavement twenty yards ahead of the van as a small desert oasis, surrounded with antelope, their eloquent necks appreciatively bowed, their lips grazing the water’s surface, about to drink—only to be run off the road with the approaching van. Unlike me, she never fooled herself.

When we arrived at the campground we immediately began setting up. S and I had to pitch our tent and I let her decide its location. She and I wrangled the poles into the designated loops while Dad started a fire for dinner. While he cooked, we walked down to the dock and looked at the water, reflecting the red sky.

“Maybe Dad will let us swim while he cooks,” I said. “Don’t be stupid. He won’t let us.”

“What’s your problem?”

“Dad doesn’t love us, Beck, so stop pretending.” The surface of the lake turned a bit darker, and her words held a strange bitterness.

“Why would he bring us then?” I said and grabbed her hand to go back.

S and I watched his movements as we approached. He was over six feet tall, had blue eyes, and sported a full white beard. He was agile as he moved the lid off the Dutch oven to stir its contents. He wore deep blue denim pants, a fly fisherman’s vest, and a casino’s patch—The Rainbow Club—was sown on the front of the trucker hat that topped his head. In his seventies, more than twenty years older than our mother, he could be our grandfather. It was embarrassing under normal circumstances, his older ways and aging appearance. In public he would tell people, “These are my girls,” and naturally people would be confused, seeking specifics.

But out there at Cave Lake, and Deer Creek, and Angel Lake, these places that sprung out of the desert, surrounded by peaks and complicated turns, no one asked such questions, and so he sang. Most of his songs came from his Appalachian upbringing, a distant past, a family and life he ran away from to head out west when his now-grown kids were still kids, leaving a family and a farm.

He was singing, “Waltzing Matilda,” an old song about a man who stole a sheep and who commits suicide to evade imprisonment from the authorities hot on his trail. Years later, I would look up the origins of the song. It’s from Australia—but, at the time, I thought the song was about a man waiting for his true love, Matilda. Appalachia or the Outback, Ray was a proud man, one who used his cunning to evade traditional roles.

We didn’t finish the odd soup. It was delicious, but different to us. Mom cooked highly processed foods like mac n’ cheese and rice o’ roni for simplicity. No problem, I finished mine off trying to impress him. S refused. He tried to guilt her, saying how when he was a boy his daddy would have beat him stupid if he didn’t finish his dinner. But he didn’t know that our mom did the same thing. She too would tell us about the neglect and abuse she suffered as a child. Being so hungry that she ate a piece of gum off the sidewalk, or the time her mother threw a bucket of scalding water on her. Over the years M, my mom, would make allusions to kidnapping and atrocities that had no linear timeline and couldn’t be traced, presenting them randomly at gatherings when she felt like it. Everyone was intrigued, but it infuriated me, the way she would start a story but couldn’t remember anything, only to drift away from what really happened in search of lightness or a change of subject. But of course, when we were young, she had no trouble relaying tales about Dad that I was beginning to suspect twisted my sister’s perceptions of him for good.

S didn’t argue, but sat despondent, before he slammed his fist down on the table, telling her to finish her goddamn soup. She started crying and scooped the remaining green sludge into her mouth. Afterwards, she and I washed the dishes, and I asked her if she was okay, the freezing water coming out of the spigot seeped into my boney hands and traveled up my arms.

“Yes, just stop.” She shook off my attempted hug.

Dad was in a better mood when we walked back with the cleaned dishes from the spigot. We were going crawfishing. He went to the van and pulled out a long pole he had constructed. It was a series of old fishing rods joined together with tape, and at the end of the pole a circular net was attached—a tangle of red string overlapping a halo of wire. I walked to the back of the van while he looked for the crawfish bucket and saw a hunting bow. I asked about it, having the sense to never touch anything unless he explicitly granted permission. I understood that each and everything he owned had been in his possession for a long time. The speckled blue cup he poured his steaming coffee into every morning, the cast iron skillet he cooked with, the frayed tarp with the small holes he had begrudgingly pulled out and placed on the ground for our tent, wondering out loud why Ron was too cheap to buy a tarp for us.

S said, “Our dad does have a tarp, but mom forgot to pack it.”

“That man is not your father,” he said.

My dad wasn’t the kind of person to run to the store to replace things when they broke, he always tried to fix them first. This was practical to me, even from an early age I understood it. Ron, however, would throw a fit when things broke, find the culprit and berate or punish them.

Anytime something broke, it was always someone else’s fault. But there was never a shortage of new with Ron, as with Ray, and I understood this was one of the reasons why my mom left him when I was four. The newest thing I had seen in my father’s possession in a long time was this bow. Everything else was familiar, even his mannerisms: the way he had the same yellow topped Carmex tucked in his front shirt pocket. The way he would twist the lid and lightly slather his lips with his index finger while driving.

He told me the bow was made from a rare kind of wood. He started carving it that winter and bending it. He planned to sell it for a lot of money when he was done.

“You’re not going to use it to hunt?” I asked.

“No, I quit hunting years ago, that is a young man’s sport.”

A mountain man who did not hunt. Who was my father anyway? An old cheap bastard like mom said, or the kind who made ribs out of wood like a strange magician?

Once in preparation for a trip to Angel Lake, he went into a store to get some canned goods and came out cussing the owners. The price of canned goods was too goddamn high, what a racket they were running. We drove to another store that day to knock off five cents, but that store was only two cents cheaper. He was cussing all the way to Angel Lake over it. To him, most everything in the world was a form of exploitation, and because of this fact, every purchase he made was calculated with precision. But to spend months working on something, deploying some artistic skill unique to his past, to have carved something out of what was naturally assigned, so perfect and smooth, only in hopes for monetary gain, didn’t that go against some code he only hinted at? Shouldn’t that bow go to his daughters?

I was in charge of holding the lantern. S carried the bucket, and Dad held the pole. For such a small amount of stuff, it felt as if it took us a long time to get going from the camp.

Possibly because everything had to be locked up in the van besides our tent. Dad distrusted everyone in the campground.

I knew that other people cut up dead fish and left them in the water for a time to attract the crawfish. But Dad saw that as a waste of a fish. When we got to the edge of the water, it was strategy that allowed us to catch them.

It was the light from the lantern, really.

The two with the bucket and the pole went ahead of the light and situated themselves near the water’s edge, the pole extended over the surface, ready. When the time came, the person walked up with the light. Something about the light caused the little grey missiles to shoot off along the sandy bottom as though electrocuted. The person with the pole lowered it to stop the crawfish’s launch along the bottom of the lake with the net. It wasn’t a scooping motion, it was a blockade, and you had to estimate the direction they would go. The crawfish were fast, and it required focus to hold that pole out and ready, to bring it down at just the right moment.

I was not trusted to hold the pole without help. I was tasked to swing the lantern out over the water, the light illuminating their frenetic launches.

The night was going well. But then I stumbled on the path, my foot hit a rock, and the lantern fell into the dryer grass to my left—the grass not close to the water. S and my dad were up ahead. The fire sprung out of the darkness. I watched as the flames began to curl up and lick the other blades of knee-high grass. How fast it grew. I stood there paralyzed. Dad looked back and saw it too, he ran down the path and threw his flannel over the area and stomped on it, but it took many more stomps with his leather boots to make sure it was out completely.

Up until this point, my dad had never reprimanded me explicitly, and I never wanted to get on his bad side. I knew there was something mean about him, sprung from loneliness or spite.

Perhaps I knew this because Mom reminded us how he left us, how we sometimes had nothing in the house because he pawned it away for gambling money. Mom was a maid at the Casino where my stepfather managed the money. When they got married, she stopped working. Ron was a good man and Ray was not.

One night in the garage, after I found her crying, she told me that Ray was coming to pick us up to go camping—that she didn’t want to keep us from him, but she didn’t want us to go. I defended him because on a child’s level, I loved swimming and fishing. It was simple.

“Stop thinking he is good. He wanted me to get an abortion for the both of you,” my mom said. Ten years old in a cold garage, an abortion is this, and your father is that.

When he taught us to gut a fish, I held the knife as steady as I could while my sister blatantly refused, disgusted by the oily guts. When he came to town to gamble, I wouldn’t argue with our mom about not wanting to see him. And why she insisted on our relationship—only to cry in the garage and tell her ten-year-old daughter she was unwanted by him—I still don’t understand to this day. But I suspect she wanted us to know him, because she never met her father, nor knew who he was. The small girl in her was vulnerable because she never knew her father’s name. The “if only” she passed on to us.

“What the fuck were you doing?” he yelled after he had the flames out. “Doesn’t your mother teach you to appreciate things? Now I have to pay to get this fixed.”

He bent down, collecting the broken lantern, and when he rose his face was blanketed in a darkness I had never seen before. That moment was the first time my chest tightened expectantly as I waited for something to break. The awareness that if he hit me, then he really was capable of hurting the one person who hadn’t formed their opinion of him just yet.

He stood looming over me, caught in a silent anger, wrestling with something adult and incomprehensible, before he turned and stomped off down the path. S held my hand back to camp.

He was already in the van, where he slept, when we got to the camp. We climbed into the tent in silence. Normally, nighttime was for a fire and stories about his past. The horse he named Blackjack who saved him from a mountain lion by refusing to go down a path where it lurked, no matter how hard he kicked it. A turnip truck in Montana where he fell in love with our mom. Though later, Mom would confess she met him while gambling. Rocky mountain oysters—he enjoyed telling us about those—how they would cook them in garlic and butter over an open fire. The seventy-pound catfish he caught singlehandedly in a river in Arkansas.

I don’t know why we never talked about the things that kept him moving the way he did.

I don’t know how he became the landless, rootless, and at worst, homeless, symbol of my imagination. But I do know that one night—curled up in his lap in front of a fire after he told us stories about remarkable feats—I asked him if he ever got lonely living the way he did. He talked about the mountains and how they comforted him in moments of loneliness, how the darkness surrounding the edges of the trees inspired a stability in him, and this stability was one he could never equate with people. But he faltered when he ran out of things to praise and looked at me the way he did when he knew I was beginning to catch on to the lies he told himself, and in a kind voice, perhaps his true voice, called me wise.

In the morning, he was singing. If I was upset at the way he yelled at me, or if we were having no fun at all, we had better act the opposite, just like how he was trying to act like a daddy but didn’t know how.

He sang:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong
Under the shade of a coolibah tree,
He sang as he watched and waited ’til his billy boiled
You’ll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me

Up rode the squatter, mounted on his thoroughbred,
Up rode the troopers, one, two, three,
With the jolly jumbuck you’ve got in your tucker bag?
You’ll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me.

The swagman tells the officers that he won’t go with them after poaching the sheep. He is doomed to be a ghost of that stream thereafter, as he jumps in and drowns to evade imprisonment.

He sang while he cooked pancakes from a batter that was kept in a five-gallon bucket to sour. The plan for the morning was a hike. S wanted to stay back and read, and he wanted her participation. She stood her ground and was left behind while he and I went on the hike. He was obsessed with peregrine falcons, to the point where every large bird became one. On the hike, we saw two of them perched on a fallen log at the entrance to the trail. A woman and her child entered the trail and they flew away. He couldn’t believe how loud and annoying the woman was, the way mankind walked so loudly without respect for anything or anyone. How the woman was probably from goddamn California.

When we got to the top, I felt I could see the beginning and ending of all the trees and the sky, and I knew I loved this too, the freedom in it. I imagined what it would be like to be alone in it. Maybe this was why he lived out of his van. He looked out over the valley and said, “I’ll never live within four walls.” The child in me knew that real fathers had houses for their girls to come visit, they took the dogs for walk around the block, went to Disney. But my dog was special anyway, she required the desert, not a paved block and a tight leash. Missy was small, but she didn’t fear anything, not a lizard, a train, or a scorpion. Missy didn’t need much company anyway, she just took it upon herself to roam, though she always came home. Dad would have liked her, but he never wanted to meet her when he came by to pick us up, never wanted to come into the home he couldn’t provide. I realized he wasn’t a real dad. He was a man so infatuated with trees and sky and gambling that he didn’t fit in. A swagman who wanted love but couldn’t maintain it—and he would be forced, as the trajectory shows, to a tragic end.

*

That trip, I would catch a brown trout hidden in the reeds by the bank of the lake. S made friends with the girls in the camp over, which turned her mood around, and there was a chipmunk that loved to eat pieces of food I strategically placed around the campsite. We chopped firewood under Dad’s direction, went swimming, and watched the crawfish we had caught turn red in a boiling vat over the fire.

*

When I talk to my sister about this time in our life, or our father, she tells me I don’t remember it clearly— the memories or the timeline of things. Somehow, we always get back to her asking things like, “You don’t remember the Pueblo apartments or that shitty brown trailer with part of the floor missing and the cockroaches?” But she doesn’t get that she is referencing the wrong time, that I want her to remember how he tried to teach us something, and if she was only paying attention then she might have learned. Somehow, in her mind, our dad will forever be associated with that shitty apartment. The only thing I remember about those apartments was the day a kid went flying off the swing set and hit his head on the railroad tie. The way he stood up slowly and turned to me for help. The swift current of blood that covered his face in a red mask while gravel glistened from his crown. The whites of his eyes shocked through the curtain of blood.

I can still hear the way mom said, “He was a good man,” to the stranger on the other end, because it was the thing to say, though a part of her could have believed it, in that moment.

But in my memory, the phone call happens, and then the ashes arrive in the mail that afternoon. We open the black box together and realize humans aren’t smooth sand, but chunks of things with dust. Mom would gag, and S would stick her finger in the ashes, tears streaming down her face.

Mom would tell us he had a stroke while driving and was life-flighted to a hospital in Salt Lake, two and a half hours from our house, where he was in a coma for two weeks. No one knew he had a family, but eventually the hospital contacted his son in Arkansas, and the son apparently hired a private detective after his death to track down his daughters so they could send us his remains. I highly doubt the news and the arrival of his ashes by mail happened in the same day.

But I do remember how the day we learned of his death ended with us swimming in a pool at one of the casinos in town. My mom’s best friend’s husband was taking a break from work and walked out to the pool deck to say, “Sorry about your dad, kid.”

And I told Richie, “It is ok,” while I clung to edge of the pool.

Realizing years later, that when he replied, “No, it is not,” he, Richie the man in all black, fresh from the casino cage, was the only one to affirm that the day we found out my dad died, alone in a hospital two hours away, was different from any other day.

As a girl, I sometimes would get sad about having a dead dad and a crazy one as a replacement. During those times, I would try to connect back to those fleeting moments of wonder at the natural world and to reclaim the temporary connections I did experience with my dad. I would follow Missy out to the desert, past the point where suburbia stopped, and watch as she ran alongside a train speeding past. I would look out over an endless horizon devoid of houses and cars and time, and I would just stand there holding on to the moment, because for some reason, she always thought she could beat it.

Rebecca Holcomb is a PhD fellow at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette studying Fiction. She has an MFA in creative writing from Florida State University, an MAT from Northwestern State University, and a BA in English from Louisiana State University at Alexandria. She is currently book reviews editor for the University of Louisiana’s literary magazine, Rougarou. Her fiction appears in Hard to Find, an Anthology of New Southern Gothic, published through Stephen F. Austin’s University Press, and her nonfiction appears in The Yalobusha Review. Her chapbook, Nicotine Walls, was a finalist in both Fractured Lit and Diagram’s chapbook contests this year.