The board-and-batten walls of the single-room shack that was the assayer’s office rattled from the wind, and the fire in the stove was dead. From a twin bed, Al Ward, sixty-seven years old, bone-thin, with gray hair and blue eyes, looked out the window to falling snow. He pulled the blankets and sleeping bag over his head and tried again to sleep but sleep wouldn’t come. In the darkness he asked himself the same question he asked every morning. If he were in Reno, eating breakfast at the Cal Neva, would he order coffee, French toast and bacon like a normal person or a Hornitos on the rocks? The same question and always the same answer: tequila on the rocks with a beer back.

He pushed off the covers and looked at the empty woodbin. The shack was frozen because he had a cracked woodstove that burned too fast and he hadn’t brought in enough wood. But that was the way of mornings. Tequila instead of breakfast and Al staring at the empty woodbin, cursing himself until his bladder forced the day upon him.

The days on the derelict mining claim were always the same. He’d bring in firewood, drink coffee and eat breakfast, work on a song, take a nap, drink more coffee, and then set out on the same walk he took each afternoon. Dinner at dusk, which at this point was four p.m., and afterward he’d play guitar until he grew tired. He’d then get back in bed and read ten-year-old issues of National Geographic and Sports Illustrated by the light of a propane lantern and chase radio stations on a small battery-powered radio.

A day and a night.

The clock next to his bed read 6:33 a.m. Why couldn’t he sleep until noon like he had most of his life? If he could, then half of his day would be over by the time he opened his eyes. But in old age he had trouble sleeping. He slept in fits and woke early, exhausted but awake. Everyone said getting up was easier the older you got, but that hadn’t been the case in his life. It was a brawl each morning just to get his feet on the ground.

In wool socks and long underwear, he put on sweats, tennis shoes, a canvas coat, and walked outside carrying a plastic milk crate. Snow and wind blew into him and he made four trips to the shed to fill the woodbin. He started a fire and poured water into a saucepan from a two-gallon jug sitting on a shelf above the sink. He lit a Coleman propane camping stove and set the saucepan on it. The counter where the stove sat was made of two-by-fours and plywood and had a stainless-steel sink that drained through a PVC pipe down under the floor into a washout of mine tailings below. The assayer’s shack had no electricity or running water. The toilet was an outhouse behind the shed.

On another shelf was a ceramic dish that held a silver wristwatch and two rings: a silver horseshoe with fake rubies that he put on his left index finger, and a silver horseshoe with fake diamonds that he put on his right. He took off his sweats, set them under the covers of the bed, and dressed in a pair of Levi’s and a black-and-red-plaid Pendleton wool shirt. He brushed his teeth and, when the water had heated, made instant coffee.

A butterscotch-blond Telecaster sat under his bed, and leaned against a wall was a classical six-string guitar with a dented back that he’d gotten from a thrift shop in Las Vegas. At a Formica table near the woodstove, he worked on a song called ‘The Night the Primadonna Club Burned Down’, the lyrics written in a spiral notebook. There were a dozen of these notebooks stacked in a cardboard box in the corner of the room. Above the lyrics he had scribbled Uncle Vern, Swimming in the River, Vern and Gail, Primadonna Club, and a list of dates he had worked on the song.

As a kid his uncle Vern had been a goofball with no real rebellion or anger in him. In high school he’d played football in the fall and run track in the spring. He got decent grades and had a steady girlfriend named Shelby Rosen. When he graduated, his father helped get him on a line crew with the Southern Pacific Railroad, a union job he both liked and felt lucky to have.

During his first working year, he lived at home and slept in his same childhood room. When the second year came, he took a vacation to Tempe to see Shelby at Arizona State. He asked her to marry him at a Mexican restaurant called El Charro in Phoenix, and she accepted. The plan was that she would finish that term of college, they’d get married, and she’d get her degree in Reno. Vern came home so excited that he rented them a one-bedroom house off Wells Avenue, moved in, and waited.

But he had never lived on his own, and as the year passed he became increasingly lonely. He began going out with a coworker to the bars and casinos of downtown Reno. Vern, who had never had a sip of alcohol in his life, began to drink. When Shelby returned to Reno that summer she ended their relationship after he had arrived at three of her family functions intoxicated. That following winter he was terminated from the Southern Pacific Railroad for drunkenness. His bosses had given him three warnings and had sent him to a company doctor. His bosses liked him, but the doctor deemed Vern incurable and he was let go. By twenty-three he had been fired from a half-dozen jobs and began the life of a day laborer. By twenty-six he had lost both parents and settled into washing dishes in casino restaurants and living in a weekly motel east of downtown called the Sandman.

A mile from that motel, Al and his mother lived in a duplex she owned on Humboldt Street, they on one side and a tenant on the other. Each unit had a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room and a basement. Their basement was Al’s bedroom, a cramped concrete box of a room with a utility sink, a dresser, a desk, a bed and two small windows below the ceiling.

During the summer, when Al was a kid and out of school, Vern would stop by and they’d go to the river to swim. On the way they would buy two quarts of beer and a bottle of Orange Crush and go south of the River House Motor Hotel to a place on the Truckee River shaded with cottonwood trees and a deep pool for swimming. His uncle would be haggard and undone. He’d sit on a flat rock at the river’s edge and speak in rambling half-thought-out sentences. But after the first quart and the first swim, he’d begin to recover. A window would appear, a clarity would come, and Vern would again be himself.

‘Tell me what you did yesterday.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘I just walked around downtown,’ Al said.

‘All day?’

‘I guess.’

‘Who did you see?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you see Jimmy the Broom?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Does he still have a black eye?’

Al nodded.

‘Shit, I can’t believe someone would hit an old guy for sweeping a sidewalk. But that’s people for you.’ Vern looked at Al and smiled. ‘Man, I’m stuck washing dishes, and you got no job, and you get to walk around downtown all summer seeing people. You live the life.’

Al nodded.

‘Why are you so quiet, then?’

Al shrugged.

‘You get in trouble?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What did you do, cough too loud?’

‘She’s never happy with anything,’ Al whispered.

Vern took a long drink of beer. ‘Yeah, I know that.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, you know what they say about chicks who get on the straight and narrow?’

Al looked at him. ‘What do they say?’

‘That they leave every bit of their goodtime in the backseat. I mean the only friend your mom’s got is a nun, and you know them. They wear the black-and-white underwear, and they spend their time looking for people like you and me to beat up on. That’s the truth… Shit, Al … your mom … well … someone grabbed her goodtime and ran off with it.’

Al dove into the river and swam around and then got onto a rock across from Vern and lay in the sun. But by then Vern was halfway through the second quart and the window began to close. By midday a new quart would be bought and Vern’s words would slur, his sentences would fall apart, and his logic would again fade. By evening he would be incoherent and stumbling drunk.

He was nearly beaten to death in an alley off Virginia Street when he was twenty-seven. His wallet and room key were stolen, the hearing in his right ear was damaged, his face battered. He never again looked the same. There was still a handsomeness to him, but the beating had aged him. His youthfulness, the hope that he might pull out of it someday, began to disappear.

Two years later the phone in the duplex rang at three a.m. It had never rung that late before. Al’s mother was on the phone less than five minutes. He could hear her footsteps in the kitchen afterward and could smell coffee brewing. He put on his clothes and...