The Water Museum Read Free Page A

to the west. It depended on the moxie of the painters, didn’t it. How high were they brave enough to climb? How long were their ropes? His line was: “Junction’s numbers are what hopes and dreams look like.” For these were the best moments of their lives. These were the doorways into imagined futures. Doors they thought were swinging wide, though perhaps only their grandfathers knew the doors were actually slamming behind them.
    So 58 abuts 90; 92 bleeds downhill into a feminine-looking 88; 68 is the funny one, but what do you expect? The 8 is two stacked flowers with white petals and yellow hearts—hippies even out here. Some of the numbers seem to have small beards, but these are cascades of dung from peregrine and buzzard nests.
    It was 1949 that was the first time people believed the tradition was going to die out. By then, they had made postcards of the numbers, and Frankie’s folks sold them in a wire rack beside the cash register. None of the GIs seemed to want to return home. Those Mountain Men who’d made it back from Guadalcanal and Arles were out there bombing around the USA in jalopies and on motorcycles. Nobody wanted to come punch cows or dig uranium at Arco or try to grow alfalfa or run sheep up on the highlands. That was when the ranches began to die out. Things slowed down, and the first old-timers pronounced The Death of America and The End of the Way Things Were Supposed to Be. But they were off by a few decades. It was really the 1960s that killed them all. Freeways appeared far from New Junction’s city limits, and tourists jumped out of the valley and drove the big roads instead, taking their money with them.
    Benson Hill closed in 2000. At least Frankie’s daughter graduated before that. “Oh my Lord,” Frankie thinks. Every once in a while she remembers that she is going to be a grandmother.
    She doesn’t like it when The Professor talks about all the stories. It just reminds her that ’Junction is blowing away, bit by bit, and Benson Hill is closed and the Colorettes are gone, and the Sinclair with its grand view of the butte is where Stick used to work and she can still see him smoking and staring up at the numbers and then she sees Son in his silly white bell-bottoms. It’s not right, is what she thinks. Is a town dead when the old men die, or when the children leave?
    Ralph and Miss Sally are playing with The Professor. The numbers game. Frankie wishes she had one of those iPod things to shut their voices out. Son Harding used to like crazy new music back then—Yes and Alice Cooper. She’d listen to that right now if she could.
    She drops big blues in front of each client, steaming hot. Dabs of butter running in yellow rivulets down their sides. “One Butte with Lava,” she says as she delivers each muffin.
    Ralph says, “Nineteen forty-one.”
    “Oh well. What a year! We were, of course, at war. Benson Hill boys were patriotic, I tell you. They went in high numbers to the Pacific theater.”
    Frankie is thinking, Sonny always told her he’d take her all the way to the ocean—any ocean—if she’d leave Stick and run away with him. Crazy boy. Wrote her the only poems she ever got from anybody.
    The Professor: “That number was painted by a young cowboy with jug ears. Name of Wally Wachtel, known as Big Double for the two W’s in his name, don’t you know. And his poor old ears. The only big things about Wally were his ears and his hat.” He laughs. “Wally undertook that project after the prom. Climbed up there alone. If you were to climb on up there, you’d see across the white number four is the name of his sweetheart, Pru Speich. Poor dumb bastard misspelled ‘Pru’ and wrote ‘P-R-O-O.’ Still there. He was shot in the head by a Japanese sniper in the Philippines. His body never came home.”
    Ralph: “Well, ain’t you a bundle of joy.”
    The Professor: “Natural selection, my friend.”
    Ralph tosses some money on the counter.
    “Christ,” he says.