and you still had the whole day ahead of you. Sometimes Dad went with
us, and we'd march through the sagebrush military-style, with Dad
calling out orders in a singsong chant—hup, two, three, four—and then
we'd stop and do push-ups or Dad would hold out his arm so we could do
pull-ups on it. Mostly, Brian and I went exploring by ourselves. That
desert was filled with all sorts of amazing treasures.
We had moved to Battle Mountain because of the gold in the area, but
the desert also had tons of other mineral deposits. There was silver and
copper and uranium and barite, which Dad said oil-drilling rigs used.
Mom and Dad could tell what kind of minerals and ore were in the
ground from the color of the rock and soil, and they taught us what to
look for. Iron was in the red rocks, copper in the green. There was so
much turquoise—nuggets and even big chunks of it lying on the desert
floor—that Brian and I could fill our pockets with it until the weight
practically pulled our pants down. You could also find arrowheads and
fossils and old bottles that had turned deep purple from lying under the
broiling sun for years. You could find the sun-parched skulls of coyotes
and empty tortoise shells and the rattles and shed skins of rattlesnakes.
And you could find great big bullfrogs that had stayed in the sun too long
and were completely dried up and as light as a piece of paper.
On Sunday night, if Dad had money, we'd all go to the Owl Club for
dinner. The Owl Club was. "World Famous," according to the sign,
where a hoot owl wearing a chef's hat pointed the way to the entrance.
Off to one side was a room with rows of slot machines that were
constantly clinking and ticking and flashing lights. Mom said the slot
players were hypnotized. Dad said they were damn fools. "Never play the
slots," Dad told us. "They're for suckers who rely on luck." Dad knew all
about statistics, and he explained how the casinos stacked the odds
against the slot players. When Dad gambled, he preferred poker and pool
—games of skill, not chance. "Whoever coined the phrase 'a man's got to
play the hand that was dealt him' was most certainly one piss-poor
bluffer," Dad said.