The main street was wide—with sun-bleached cars and pickups parked at
an angle to the curb—but only a few blocks long, flanked on both sides
with low, flat-roofed buildings made of adobe or brick. A single
streetlight flashed red day and night. Along Main Street was a grocery
store, a drugstore, a Ford dealership, a Greyhound bus station, and two
big casinos, the Owl Club and the Nevada Hotel. The buildings, which
seemed puny under the huge sky, had neon signs that didn't look like
they were on during the day because the sun was so bright.
We moved into a wooden building on the edge of town that had once
been a railroad depot. It was two stories tall and painted an industrial
green, and was so close to the railroad tracks that you could wave to the
engineer from the front window. Our new home was one of the oldest
buildings in town, Mom proudly told us, with a real frontier quality to it.
Mom and Dad's bedroom was on the second floor, where the station
manager once had his office. We kids slept downstairs in what had been
the waiting room. The old restrooms were still there, but the toilet had
been ripped out of one and a bathtub put in its place. The ticket booth
had been converted into a kitchen. Some of the original benches were
still bolted to the unpainted wood walls, and you could see the dark,
worn spots where prospectors and miners and their wives and children
had sat waiting for the train, their behinds polishing the wood.
Since we didn't have money for furniture, we improvised. A bunch of
huge wooden spools, the kind that hold industrial cable, had been
dumped on the side of the tracks not far from our house, so we rolled
them home and turned them into tables. "What kind of fools would go
waste money on store-bought tables when they can have these for free?"
Dad said as he pounded the tops of the spools to show us how sturdy they
were.
For chairs, we used some smaller spools and a few crates. Instead of
beds, we kids each slept in a big cardboard box, like the ones