most godforsaken town in the whole country, and it declared Battle
Mountain the winner. The people who lived there didn't hold it in much
regard, either. They'd point to the big yellow-and-red sign way up on a
pole at the Shell station—the one with the burned-out S—and say with a
sort of perverse pride. "Yep, that's where we live: hell!"
But I was happy in Battle Mountain. We'd been there for nearly a year,
and I considered it home—the first real home I could remember. Dad
was on the verge of perfecting his cyanide gold process, Brian and I had
the desert, Lori and Mom painted and read together, and Maureen, who
had silky white-blond hair and a whole gang of imaginary friends, was
happy running around with no diaper on. I thought our days of packing
up and driving off in the middle of the night were over. Just after my
eighth birthday, Billy Deel and his dad moved into the Tracks. Billy was
three years older than me, tall and skinny with a sandy crew cut and blue
eyes. But he wasn't handsome. The thing about Billy was that he had a
lopsided head. Bertha Whitefoot, a half-Indian woman who lived in a
shack near the depot and kept about fifty dogs fenced in her yard, said it
was because Billy's mom hadn't turned him over at all when he was a
baby. He just lay there in the same position day in and day out, and the
side of his head that was pressed against the mattress got a little flat.
You didn't notice it all that much unless you looked at him straight on,
and not a lot of people did, because Billy was always moving around like
he was itchy. He kept his Marlboros rolled up in one of his T-shirt
sleeves, and he lit his cigarettes with a Zippo lighter stamped with a
picture of a naked lady bending over.
Billy lived with his dad in a house made of tar paper and corrugated tin,
down the tracks from our house. He never mentioned his mom and made
it clear that you weren't supposed to bring her up, so I never knew if she
had run off or died. His dad worked in the barite mine and spent his
evenings at the Owl Club, so Billy had a lot of unsupervised time on his
hands.