Sean Theodore Stewart
FLAT RATTLE BOOMTOWN
I carry a rattlesnake around my neck and the trumpet is the only thing that can charm him. I blow my horn for all it’s worth through full-bodied bars of I Ain’t Got Nobody. Slow tunes don’t bring the curious in off the dirt street, so we take the tempo way up.
The rattlesnake likes it too. I sing the first bit and he coils himself around my neck. When I bring the trumpet to my lips, he slides down my back and to the floor. The rattlesnake flits off into the room and slithers with erratic movements through the saloon. He darts around table legs and under chairs. Though it seems random at first, there is purpose to his track. He is tracing some ritual he understands to be dance or worship.
No piano at Reg’s. Regina is not willing to splurge all at once to have one brought out from the Sears catalog, so she pisses away her profits on whatever musicians Antioch can produce. Mostly me and Linus the Fiddler. Lucky that Linus and I are twins in one way. His twig body doesn’t resemble my barrel chest, his locks my sparse crown. But our singing voices could fool our mothers. Regina says I’m more the showman, so I sing the intros. Linus takes over when it’s time to play my horn. Seamless. It’s best when we can add a banjo or a pair of spoons, but Linus and I are a good thing. Or the rattlesnake thinks so anyway.
We wrap up the song. Regina points a fistfight out the door. I throw back a double, savor the warmth filling my gut. Funny the attention a lull in a rowdy room can command. When I empty my spit valve and turn back, I’m staring at three dozen glazed-over faces. They’re far-gone, but they want a song.
I look at Linus. The kid really sweats. Eighteen, but his legs keep him from the war. I can tell by the way he plays his fiddle that he would go if they’d let him. “Want to do I May Be Gone For A Long Long Time?” I say. He nods.
The rattlesnake killed my wife. I wonder if I should still be blind-mad the way I was. I grip the horn. I trill through a scale, make sure it’s still in me.
As I open my mouth I see the rattlesnake, stock still, fully extended in front of the bar. Folks are stepping over him to fill their mugs. His eyes are stuck on the bell of my trumpet. He’s ready. I get right into the song, changing the words as I go. The popular tunes nationwide sing of the end of the war, The Great War. Here in Antioch, we don’t want to think it ever could.
I blow the horn. The rattlesnake thrills.
* * *
They say we are not good men. We are the ones not asked to fight. Antioch is a boomtown and none of us are doing anything to stave off the inevitable bust. We don’t have any inclination to put down roots. Maybe some of us did once.
Antioch exists because the potash is here. We used to get it from the Krauts, cheap and easy. That’s over now. What was worth eight dollars a ton is worth one hundred and fifty dollars a ton. We pull it from the salty alkali lakes here. A density of three percent is necessary to mine it. Jesse Lake boasts nineteen percent.
I am a timekeeper over at the Hord plant. It sits on five acres and announces itself to the horizon, five stories tall. There are three other plants here, but to most it’s the Hord plant and the Coal plant. Neither the Hords nor the Coals knew what potash was eight years ago. Now they are flush from it.
The potash comes up as a brine from the lake. A spider system of redwood pipes. The brine goes in the evaporator. What comes out boils in three massive tanks. Then we put it in the dryer with clinkers to get it to separate. When it’s done, we grind it to powder and bag it for shipment. It’ll be used for any number of things. Those wanting to feel like part of it all say our potash will make explosives. But probably it will make fertilizer.
As timekeeper, I don’t get my hands dirty much. The foremen for each section of the process come talk to me. I make sure the entire thing runs. Rhythmic. It feels like playing music on an unwieldy instrument. Though the audience is less encouraging.
I got the job because I worked as a timekeeper before, out in Omaha. I stumbled on Antioch while I was touring with a more regular lineup. Jazzy Jake and the Boys. We played places all over Eastern Colorado and Western Nebraska. Old Man Hord brought us to Antioch to play a barbecue he was throwing for his workers, which at that time was most of the town. We played real well.
As the night wound down, I took a break to grab a whiskey. Old Man Hord found me at the bar.
“There is some story behind this bandleader,” he said.
“I’m sure it’s not very striking,” I said.
“Don’t see many up-and-coming band leaders your age,” he said. “I can tell you’ve lived some life. Honest life, I mean.” He nodded around at the workers. They were coated in grime and sweat. They chided one another and guffawed. They drank. They danced.
“I could use a seasoned man like yourself,” Old Man Hord said. “Someone who can command some respect.”
We had a month left of touring. Maybe more after that. And, for the first time in my life, I didn’t have a boss.
“Sorry, Mr. Hord,” I said. “This feels honest enough to me.”
I grabbed my whiskey from the bar and climbed the stage. I decided to slow it down. I wanted to feel a little surge of the power it was possible to be the vessel for on stage. I wanted to watch the sleep push into their eyes. The mood of the entire night shifting for reasons none of them would identify.
“Let’s play If You Were The Only Girl In The World,” I said.
The band was surprised. It was a real turn. We played it. We didn’t take the tempo up. We played it slow, and we played it well. And as we hit the final verse and the stillness of the crowd crystallized, like in a photograph, I looked around. I was seeing the barbecue, but really I was seeing the dust we would kick up on our way out of this hole of a town. I was seeing languid faces, but really I was seeing the tour after this one—the one that would save me from going back to what Old Man Hord called ‘honest life.’
Then, as I kept looking around the room, as we wound down the ballad, as I blew the very last note, I saw her face in the crowd.
I still do, whenever I play, like a tongue-flick of forgiveness.
* * *
I walk out to the road that runs east to west, eventually bumping into civilization in either direction. They’re paving it now. They are using the mud remnant from processing the potash. The journey over the plains, once all but forsaken, is being smoothed by the leftovers of our industry.
I hear the heavy bootsteps next to me and know it is Old Man Hord. We stand in silence. We watch the paving. I wonder if civilization will win-out in this place after all. I wonder if Old Man Hord considers the same thing.
“Did you hear about that drowned boy?” I say, at last.
There is a pause and a snort before he speaks. When he does, I can hear the catch in his rough voice. Standing next to me, he has been crying. I should have kept my mouth shut. I don’t indicate I’ve noticed. I watch the men work their spades over the drying mud.
“I heard his brother pushed him from the boat,” Old Man Hord says.
I wonder if this is something he actually heard. More likely, his worldview whispered it to him as truth.
“That’s the way it happens,” he says. He is composed now. Hard. He puts a tense hand on my shoulder and turns me so I’m looking at his sandpaper face. “I need something of you, Jake.”
I say nothing.
“Truth is, you’re not the man I think most capable of what I need. But you’re blood.”
“Are you saying you need subtlety?” I say. “I didn’t think it was in your toolkit.”
“Jake, harvesting potash is a dangerous endeavor,” says Old Man Hord. “A lot of chemicals. A lot of heat.” He peers into my eyes, his bushy brows coming together. “There is a lot that can go wrong.”
He turns and surveys Antioch. Four major potash companies in operation. The plants loom over the shacks and the bars and the horse shit. There were five companies before the newest plant went up in flames about six months ago. Most people say the company rushed construction, that the boiler burst. Some people say other things about the fire.
I track Old Man Hord’s line of sight. He is staring at the Coal plant. The Coals are the only family in the region with the capital to compete with the scale of Hord’s operation.
“Government just issued a big contract,” says Old Man Hord. “Subsidizing the fertilizer companies. A lot of potash.”
Some of the Coals come to Reg’s pretty regular. Good folks, mostly. Make a lot of requests for songs I despise playing, but that’s alright.
“The contract went to another company, Jake,” says Old Man Hord. I startle when I realize he is looking right at me now. “The Hord Plant would sure be grateful if circumstances helped it find its way over.”
He holds my gaze long enough that he knows I can’t pretend I don’t understand what he is asking me to do. Asking is not the right word here. He stamps off toward Antioch.
I turn back toward the new road and think of all of the things that have happened to get me to this place, a place where I already know I will do this thing. Old Man Hord doesn’t need to speak the blame for it to poison the air between us.
I walk back to the shack from the road. The heat breaks as evening comes on. I open the door to survey the damage.
Whenever I leave the rattlesnake alone, he lets me know he is unhappy being left behind. He knocks over just about everything he can. Dishes, tools, cans of food, cases of bullets, my pillow, sheet music.
He sits coiled on the bed, unmoving. He watches me come in.
“Quit your pouting,” I say. “We’re playing tonight.”
* * *
Eryn and I met and married in the space of two months. Old Man Hord was her father. What his words couldn’t convince me of, his daughter could. I took the timekeeper position and his blessing. Pretty ceremony in front of Jesse Lake. I’m sure the photograph would have been something charming, but the cameraman’s horse spooked en route. They found him dead of a broken neck just outside of town, his camera his pillow.
She was like her father in that she had a way with folks. Her influence was a physical force in the room. Closest thing to music I’ve seen spoken word be. Sometimes in the night, we would spar. Lying in the dark, dust in the dry air, I would sing a lick of For Me and My Gal. She would come back with a fierce indictment of the hygiene of the new barmaid at Reg’s where I played. I could translate this as affection. Eryn would never admit to jealousy. I would reply by humming Paddy McGinty’s Goat. She would speculate on the sustainability of the workday her father demanded of his workers. I could translate this as ‘I missed you while you worked today.’ In this way, we cooed to one another into the blind night.
We lived in a ramshackle little place near the plant. We bought it with the last of my touring scratch. I didn’t want to owe Old Man Hord anything else. He refused to visit until we fixed the roof. Said it was an embarrassment to his success. But we liked seeing the stars from bed. Of course, we cursed each other when it rained.
The day my Eryn died, we were fighting over the proper way to fry ham. It was one of those quarrels that feels like a critical mismatch in compatibility to a couple newly living together. We decided to take a walk to give our heat some air.
I let her walk ahead of me into the field. I thought, ‘If you know so damn much, let’s see what life is like for you without me.’ I had a wretched habit of holding my affection hostage in moments like this, she the habit of refusing to ask for it.
It was a cool day for summer. The breeze rustled the grass. I cursed the treelessness of the place I had settled after all my travels. I cursed the burnt-piss stench of the potash plants. I cursed Old Man Hord, figuring everything had been his design.
I watched Eryn walk ahead of me. I studied the tangled knot she had missed in the back of her hair.
I knew then I would catch up to her and apologize. But I decided to enjoy this moment just before resolution. I watched her walk away from me and thought about the night we met.
‘I saw you watching me,’ I’d said. ‘You’re on a raised platform,’ she said, ‘it’s no miracle I glanced your way.’ ‘I was thinking of dancing with you,’ I said. ‘It’s a labor town. I’m a young eligible woman. So was every other stiff in here,’ she said. ‘Alright,’ I said. ‘Choose a song. I’ll play it and you can dance with whomever you like, just so I get to see you dance.’ ‘If I choose a song and you don’t know it,’ she said, ‘that will be very disappointing to me.’ ‘I will learn in a hurry,’ I said.
I didn’t know the song she chose. I went up on stage and made up a tune on the spot to fit the title. It had some lovey lyrics, but with an edge, and mostly it was bad. She danced the whole way through, no partner, looking into my eyes.
When my eyes dried in the field the day of our fight, I knew I hadn’t blinked. I smiled and quickened my pace to catch Eryn. I opened my mouth to call after her. The moment I did, I heard her close cry, as if it came from within my own lungs.
I ran. I saw the rattlesnake slither away, his rattle crumpled where Eryn had stepped on it by accident. I saw Eryn’s thigh, the bite marks emblazoned on the vein.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
They were the only words I could make myself say for the next hour as I lost her. There are so many other things I should have also said.
I found the rattlesnake after a week of looking. Recognized him by the rattle. I caught him. I used a pair of tongs to break out his fangs. I heated a knife in the fire and cauterized the bloody wounds in his mouth. The smell of burnt flesh filled the shack I now lived in alone. I threw him in my horn case and latched it shut.
I decided to keep the rattlesnake alive until I could think of the cruelest way to kill him. I started a list with ‘burn him alive.’ But this list went on for weeks and in the end, I couldn’t see the point. Now Antioch knows the rattlesnake and I are a twofer. I play the trumpet. The rattlesnake dances.
* * *
Reg’s is full tonight. Rowdy. Maybe it’s something in the wind. Maybe boredom will finally rip this town off the map. Or finally, put it on one.
It’s me, Linus, a flute, and a pair of spoons. We sound good tonight. The rattlesnake lets us know. The place is all clomping feet, but he whirrs through it all, ecstatic.
I’m drinking.
Old Man Hord has asked me to do things in the past. Smaller things. Run a worker out of town. Break a horse’s leg. Smaller things. I think maybe it was just practice for this Coal plant business.
I pay a kid to run my whiskey glass to the bar and bring it back full. He has been busy much of the night.
We play I’m Always Chasing Rainbows. We play Where Do We Go From Here.
I tell the kid to just bring me the bottle.
We play faster and faster. Every time I start blowing my horn, I drive the tempo forward. Linus raises his eyebrows at me, but he keeps up. We play If He Can Fight Like He Can Love, Goodnight Germany so fast that Linus can’t spit out the words. I watch the rattlesnake move like it never has. It’s a blur. When the song finishes, I see the drunks have backed up a few steps. There is a space in front of the stage.
I take a pull from the bottle. I take another.
“Come here,” I yell. The drunks look at one another. They hesitate. “Come on, come on,” I say. “We won’t bite you. We’ll play you something special.”
I make wild motions with my hand. I stagger, but I catch myself. The drunks step up to the stage. I can smell them. I’m sure they can smell me. I look at Linus.
“We’re going to do Till We Meet Again,” I say. “And Linus.” His name is sticky in my mouth. I purse my lips to make sure I can still play. “And Linus,” I say again. “I want to see if that goddamn rattlesnake can fly.”
* * *
We play Till We Meet Again so fast that I wake up at home with a split lip and a mulekick headache. I don’t know if the lip is from a fist or just from bungling my mouthpiece. I feel the rattlesnake coiled at my feet.
I don’t remember the after.
Not until I hear the shouting outside. Voices calling for buckets. For runners to the lake, to the pumps. It hurts to move, but I turn my face up toward the hole in the roof. A soft orange glow bleeds onto the dark clouds.
* * *
I stay for a few weeks. I play a few more shows. I play the songs as they were written. The rattlesnake moves with lethargy. The air in Antioch tastes like ash.
I return from the Hord plant one day and find the rattlesnake has molted. Its flaky skin is shed all over the room. I barely make it outside before I bend in half with hacking. I vomit until I see blood.
I leave the snakeskin and most everything else. One little pack of Eryn’s things and the rattlesnake wrapped around my neck. I walk out of town. I leave the horn.
When I feel the new smooth pavement beneath my feet, I stop. The pack feels heavy. I wonder if these things of Eryn’s will be enough. I wonder if she watches me abandon our home.
The rattlesnake tightens its coil. I turn to look back at Antioch. The rattlesnake shifts itself and slides its body like a caress in front of my eyes.
I see new scales.
Sean Theodore Stewart's stories have appeared in Epiphany, Guesthouse, Salt Hill, The New Territory, and Bayou. He holds an MFA from the University of Idaho, where he served as Fiction Editor of Fugue. He is originally from the Sandhills of Nebraska and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Samantha, and their pups, Ramona and Molly.