SmokeLong Quarterly

Cal Stone tells Jigger McGrail good night. Jigger says, Forget what I said about the old lady. I was just feeling sorry for myself. What Jigger said earlier was that his wife Noelle had gotten so fat she disgusted him. Cal pulls his Bruins knit hat over his ears and says, I didn’t hear a thing. Jigger says, Nothing good ever comes of feeling sorry for yourself. Cal taps his knuckles on the bar, zips his parka, wraps his woolen scarf around his neck, and steps out into the frigid night. Jigger locks the door, takes a stool on the customer side of the bar, and drinks the first of the two 7 and 7s he’ll have before he trudges up the hill to his house.

He loses himself for a moment in the advertising sign above the bar. Two men steering a birch bark canoe in moderate rapids suddenly come upon a black bear on a granite ledge over the riverbank. The sign reads, You never know what’s around the next bend. In the bow of the canoe is a case of the advertised beer, Dugan’s. Over the rowers’ shoulders, the sun shines golden on the distant mountains. Jigger imagines himself, not for the first time, on that river somewhere out west. As a young man, he’d had the opportunity to homestead in Alaska, but that was when Noelle told him she was pregnant with the baby she would eventually lose, the baby boy they would have named John Jo, and he took the job bartending for Rosy Ryan here at the tavern. It’s so quiet Jigger can hear the hum of the ‘Gansett clock as he watches the second hand sweep past another minute. Jigger plays George Jones on the jukebox and tears up as he sings along. “Oh, they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise, Oh, they tell me of an unclouded day.” He puts out the parking lot lights and sees that Cal is still out there sitting in his rusted-out Celica with the motor running.

Jigger kicks off his boots in the mud room, hangs his jacket and scarf on the coat rack in the kitchen. He warms his hands at the gas heater and then turns down the flame. He peeks in on Noelle. She’s asleep, hooked up to her CPAP device. He empties the popcorn from the glass bowl she left on the coffee table and tosses the empty Chips Ahoy bag into the trash. He fills the sink with tepid water, washes the bowl with Ajax soap, and sets it to dry on the rack.

Noelle would like to have gastric bypass surgery, and Jigger knows the procedure might be the only thing that can save her, but they can’t afford it. He has told her, Why don’t you stop eating. That we could afford. She cried and told him that no one blames the cancer victim for her cervical tumor. I’m sick, goddammit. Can’t you see that?

As a boy, Jigger got in the habit of staring at maps to awaken and engage his imagination. And then one night twenty years ago while tracing red and gray highways with his finger on a Rand McNally Road Atlas, Jigger noticed a familiar empty space in Nevada, but on this night the familiar became extraordinary and magnetic. He picked up his Blackwing pencil and drew a dot in the middle of the void, and suddenly a town existed in what had been nothing a moment ago. He named the town O’Malley after his mother’s people. O’Malley, Nevada, population 602; elevation 2121 feet. And then he set out to build him a city, to people it, and to write its history: settled by Irish Travelers in 1904. And ever since that night he has been chronicling the lives of the citizens of O’Malley in spiral notebooks that line the bookcase shelves in the den where he sits now at a salvaged banker’s desk with his pen, his whiskey, and a blank page.

Jigger remembers first meeting Mary Murray. She was a senior at O’Malley High and claimed to have seen the statue of the Virgin in St. Stephen’s Church raise her head in supplication and fold her hands in prayer, and all the furor that she caused in the parish before she “recanted.” Now she’s Mary Murray Carrigan, widow, and she’s flat-out daft, according to many of her fellow citizens. She spends her quiet days annotating issues of the women’s magazines she’s been hoarding for decades.

These are hard times in O’Malley. The population has dwindled to 217. The turquoise mine played out years ago. Lucille’s Motel shut down and so did Einsohn’s Café. There’s no way to keep the young ones at home, and this sad truth is a source of civic shame. The town’s days are numbered, Jigger fears, but he also believes that there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will spring up again. He’s just not sure his own flagging energy could deal with an influx of settlers.

Mary Murray Carrigan is staring at an ad for a breakfast cereal called Pep in a copy of Women’s Day from the fifties. There’s a smiling woman in a housedress, heels, a frilly apron, holding a feather duster. Her dapper husband is hugging her from behind. The words below the drawing read: The harder a wife works, the cuter she looks. Mary has drawn a speech balloon over the wife’s head and is considering how the wife might reply. And Jigger waits to write down what Mary imagines. She holds her pen over the ad and closes her eyes. Jigger hears Noelle calling for him and he goes to her.

I’m cold, she says. He climbs into bed beside her.

I’m afraid, she says. He puts his hand over her heart.

Mary’s wife tells her husband, Nobody wears heels to Hoover the carpet, silly. Heels are for dancing.