Restitution City
They came to Restitution City for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the water that came up out of deep wells in the dry terrain was naturally fizzy, said to contain a higher degree of antioxidants and minerals than the average spring water. Plus, it was easier on the pocket than the foreign waters with the fancy names. The other reason a traveler might be drawn to rest his heels in town for a couple of nights was the Rodeo Bar, which took up a two-story building on the edge of Main Street. In the 1800’s, it had been a saloon, but in the time since, many businesses had inhabited the space, none of them having much to do with entertainment. Then in the 1980s, two brothers came along from the East and seeing the potential bought the whole building and decided they’d put live cowboy music in there. They added a mounted buffalo head to the décor, courtesy of a hunter passing through from northern Montana, and tacked up a couple of ponchos. They frequently waxed the knotted pines that served as tables on which sat bowls of unshelled nuts. The bands came from all over, not just their home state of North Dakota, but Idaho as well and Texas. But the most popular bands, they’d learned from experience, played the Dakota Blues, a particular strain of twanging quarter notes that sounded like it came straight up from the sand.
Maybe there were other reasons people came to Restitution City, for the place itself, not really a city but a small dusty town, had myths of people who had changed their fates and the fates of others who happened to be in their orbit.
You could say it was the peak of the otherwise badland terrain. It wasn’t unusual to see wild horses in bright plumage roaming the prairies there because not too long ago a circus let them lose after it could no longer afford to feed them.
The town sat at the foot of a rise in the middle of the state. You could say it was the peak of the otherwise badland terrain. It wasn’t unusual to see wild horses in bright plumage roaming the prairies there because not too long ago a circus let them lose after it could no longer afford to feed them. The horses didn’t have enough meat on them to tempt even the dog food factories and hobbled together in groups, tiny bells on their bridles. The feather plumes that were still rooted in their manes were as close as the landscape could get to producing a flower.
Maybe the Rodeo Bar had an appeal because it was a place people could go where they could forget that they disliked each other. Most nights the same patrons appeared, farmers of the dry bean, merchants who ran the shops in town, and younger people who hadn’t made up their minds to leave Restitution City or had already left and returned.
Julia McKeon came most nights, sitting at a table at the back in a man’s car coat and a pair of cowboy boots. She would lean over into the music, her elbows on her knees and close her eyes, alone in a solar system of notes and shapes. The steel guitar especially seemed to affect her, as if someone was playing out her soul. But she wasn’t sitting alone. On her left was her boyfriend, Bart, who was a cowboy many years ago in Wyoming and still dressed like one except he no longer wore a hat. No one knew what he did for a living now. The few bare crops he raised were not worth much, though it was known he had a skilled hand with wood and could carve out a fancy pinto or mustang with a good piece of ponderosa pine. His hands, rough and huge, were creased on the surface with small cuts. He sat and leaned a little back from the music as if he didn’t think it was very good and Julia seemed to disappear even deeper inside her own thoughts.
It was winter on the prairie, and almost everyone was drinking heavily. Bart was downing straight room temperature bourbon, and Julia had in front of her a glass of gin and lime.
If you could tattoo dreams against a wall, you’d see what Julia was thinking, the music igniting in her great spiraling thoughts that rose to the ceiling like smoke rings. Things she hardly dared to think about when she wasn’t at the bar, for instance that maybe her life could enter other terrains, that like the dust, she could roll across landscapes and deserts and her soul would stay with her. And how she learned this was from the music, the steel guitars with their roiling scales and high twanging cries forming a tight lasso around her, notes reaching through the plains and the small hills and the thick dust, suggesting any number of places she could unspool herself and start again.
She looked up from these thoughts at Bart, who was sitting hunched up with his hands around his drink. He was about ten years older than her, and everyone knew how they met, that she had tried to hang herself once in her father’s barn and he’d come in to steal kindling and found her there, hanging by one of her father’s leather belts and cut her down just before she expired. Her father still wanted him prosecuted for trespassing. In a good light you could see the deep red crease on Julia’s neck. When Bart got mad at her, which was most of the time, he’d point at the mark with his finger and say, “There-that’s what happens to you when I leave you alone.”
Now he caught her giving him a side glance. “Thought you were in Hicksville with the hicks.”
Bart didn’t think too much of the bar or the musicians who played, maybe because Julia held them in such high esteem.
Julia shook her head. “You’ve got a closed mind Bart.”
“No Julia I just don’t let the wind blow in whatever is out there.”
“How do you even know what’s out there?”
Bart finished the last swallows of his drink and took his time answering.
“I just don’t like the way you disappear when they start playing. You have that weakness in you. Jesus, if some emergency happened, I don’t think I could move you from the spot.”
But lately Julia had been thinking that Bart maybe wouldn’t care because he had gotten sulky and kept to himself and when she brought it up, he got defensive and said she was closed off to him, that he couldn’t access her the way he used to. He was always blaming her, squinting up his black eyes and making long lists of the annoyances she perpetrated against him, including all the time she spent in the public washrooms whenever they were out and the way she disappeared into the things she liked, so she seemed like a figment before his eyes, or something that kept slipping through his fingers.
The evenings at the Rodeo Bar always had a certain shape, the first numbers a rousing cavalcade that made people clap their hands and stamp their feet and order a lot of beer and then plateauing into ballads, while people grew dewy-eyed and thought of someone they wished they loved and drank something bristly. By late evening, the music got cranky, as the band tried to bring back the foot stomping rhythm, but everybody was so drunk they could barely stand up.
Usually, around that time, Bart would pull Julia out of her seat, tugging her hard by the arm, and half drag her outside to his pickup truck. There he would throw her against the fender and kiss her and she’d wipe her lips and spit out his bourbon breath and run away down the road, though he’d catch up to her in his truck and apologize and they’d drive silently through the gritty streets, the two of them following the path of a dead star.
Julia had a horse, one of the old circus mares that she’d caught in a field near her father’s house. She’d watched the horse carefully for half an hour and then lassoed her and now she tamely followed her around. She did not give the horse a name, for she could think of nothing that was worthy of such a gentle, kind animal. Bart was jealous, always threatening to “unwind” her as if the horse were something mechanical whose spring he could extract. The mornings that Julia rode in the fields, Bart watched from the fence, furious that they could have spent that time in bed.
He didn’t know that Julia lay awake nights on top of the covers, staring off into the little raised window above his sink, searching the invisible terrain as if it were a great sea leading to foreign lands.
He didn’t know that Julia lay awake nights on top of the covers, staring off into the little raised window above his sink, searching the invisible terrain as if it were a great sea leading to foreign lands. As time passed, she was beginning to understand that she didn’t have to barter her future for the life Bart had saved. Maybe she could remove her body from the town she was born in and from Bart and find a different future, where the lost hopes in Restitution City stopped forming these calcified ruins on the horizon.
When she looked at Bart, his breath rattling in his sleep she knew that he would always bind her soul to his and that it was no good, that in giving her back her life, he had locked in her soul as well, fastened its hinges and couldn’t even tolerate the few hobbled jumps she took on her horse.
But one night, maybe inspired by warm murmurings of early Spring, Julia packed up her circus horse with a couple of blankets and a knapsack, while Bart was agitating and whistling through his apnea. She rode against the dense, deserted buildings of Restitution City, past the pharmacy and grain mill and butchers and boot shops, past the doctor’s office and stationer’s and the taxidermist and finally past the Rodeo Bar itself, where the silenced music swelled like an invisible flower all around her. She and the horse crept past, her tarnished hooves on the pebbled ground. It was ten miles to Foster City and she knew if Bart figured out their direction, he could easily overtake them in his truck. But chances were he’d sleep till morning and once past town, Julia would detour off the main road and take the dirt paths through the hills.
Legend had it that Bart came from a family of bad tempers, that his grandfather, half- Cherokee, was thrown in the hoosegow many a time for spitting in the face of the law men who tried to stop him stealing his neighbor’s cattle. And his father, who made moonshine, was known to carry on tirades once he was drunk, screaming at the moon, his lungs filled with bile. So, Bart came by his acid temper naturally, his rage burning his belly and coming out through his throat and mouth as natural as a belch. People passing on the road would often hear him bellowing at Julia and through the window of his house they might have seen him shaking her so hard that her braids came loose from their elastic bands and her teeth chattered. He was not a man that people liked to cross because he had a strong body from years of carrying trunks that he cut up for his sculptures.
But Julia didn’t think of this, of what it would be like if Bart caught up with her, though the black tempers of men were something she was familiar with since her father had belted her so many times that she had lacerations like crisscrossed swords on her hindquarters and the small of her back. But she knew, because she sensed these things, that you couldn’t get back at a man on his own terms, not if you were a thin girl lacking muscle, but you could just take yourself away, disappear like a faded star so that they had nothing to swipe at anymore.
Julia had studied these things for a long time, the dispositions of men and the polarities between them and her. And because of that she lived in a world that seemed too neatly divided, hell from heaven. She felt the presence of other modes of being only when she heard the steel guitar or sat on her horse and felt her spirit wrap around her own.
But when dawn settled over Restitution City and most of the people had not woken up yet to the bales of hay they had to pitch with their hangovers and the crescent moon still hung in the sky, Bart woke up with a start from a dream. In it a white horse with silver wings took off from the roof of the Rodeo Bar, flapping its wings through the high reaching notes of the steel guitar, singed by the heat of the sun and scorched by flaming clouds. It grew and grew until it was the size of a plane which rained blood on his house and land so that the small field in which he grew corn and asparagus was sopping wet up to his knees, his boots sunk deep within its muck.
He woke up with a sore tooth, as if the higher keys of the guitar had left a hairline fracture in the enamel. That’s when he noticed that Julia was gone, the place on top of the sheets cold and barely wrinkled. He jumped out of bed, pulling on his shirt, jeans and boots and set out after her in the truck, screaming in fury when the gear shift briefly stuck and then finally wheezing onto the road.
He didn’t know what direction to take so he headed into town, stopping on every street, peering around corners. When he got to the Rodeo Bar, he jumped out of the truck and tried to open its locked doors. The shades were down, and he couldn’t see inside. He got back in the truck and took the road to Foster City.
Julia was already in the mountains, and she was singing to herself one of the tunes of the night before, whose rhythms she could barely remember. The mist had lifted from the trees and a gentle blue light touched the leaves around them as if they were part of a great glowing sky. She thought of her mother who she hadn’t thought of in years, for she died when she was only a child, and of a song that she sang to her as she sat on her lap, something with shortening bread. She thought of her mother’s pale face and kind eyes, like a great pillow in her mind she would have liked to lay her head on, surrounded by a vast white cradle while the horse, who slowly rocked her as she stepped over the stones, was taking her toward something that felt like home.
In Foster City, she’d heard about a bar where women danced with each other, held hands and locked arms and to Julia, who had no friends, who found in Bart a bearing down on her like a great rocky cliff which had no soft edges, this seemed like paradise. As the sun rose higher in the sky and delivered more heat, she was glad of the comfort of the trees, their branches giving shade and camouflage. It was already almost dusk when she came out the other side of the trees to Foster City.
“I don’t want to go back to you Bart,” she said. She expected him to scream and shout but perhaps his anger was still unformed, like an uncompleted sculpture, so he went back to his car and stuck his head under the hood, and uncertainly she went on.
But Bart had put his nose to the ground and had picked up on the whiff of the dry breeze her direction, as if, though she burrowed through the low hills, she had left some scent from her trail wafting over the path. The sun loomed large above his head, throwing shadows from his truck on the ground and the heat from his radiator blew steam above the roof. When he got to Foster City, he decided to stop there long enough to search store by store and opening the hood of the truck to work at the radiator, happened to look up as Julia came striding out of the hills, her untied hair hallowing her head.
He went to her, his hands black from working with the carburetor. The horse ambled back as Bart came closer, and Julia tried to focus as hard as she could on what she had hoped for in Foster City: a white-faced fairy who looked like her mother and the slow rise of a moon that would enfold them.
“I don’t want to go back to you Bart,” she said. She expected him to scream and shout but perhaps his anger was still unformed, like an uncompleted sculpture, so he went back to his car and stuck his head under the hood, and uncertainly she went on.
That night she polished her boots and made her way on foot to a small, dark building on the edge of the town. She ducked down a narrow tier of steps to the sunken bar in its cellar. Inside there was the stomping of feet and a great crowd of women, some with hairy faces but others as smooth as clouds, their heavy cowboy boots stamping up and down to the music, moving their bodies in a gentle gyration to the steel guitars. And she saw her straight away, an angel in front of her, her face pale and fair, her hair like a dark wet rope plaited round her small head. She was alone, drinking from a can of Coors and tapping the toe of her steel-rimmed boot to the music, which seemed to travel through her like an unfurling sail.
Julia approached her and without saying a word, led her to the dance floor, where the rotating lights were throwing shadows on the floor, so their features, cut by the strobe, appeared to them in dismembered parts. It came easy enough for Julia to lodge her head on the woman’s broad shoulder which smelled wonderfully of flannel and talc. A group of people were watching them, half camouflaged by the strobe so that she didn’t notice Bart among them, until he had jettisoned himself to the middle of the floor like a dervish and, pulling Julia roughly by her wrists, dragged her out, the young woman looking after her with a foreign look of disappointment on her face.
He pulled Julia up the stairs and outside where she struggled away and dropped to her knees.
“I’d sooner die than go back to you.”
“Die then” he said and threw her down.
She kneeled there under the stars, the sounds of the steel guitar, reaching her like pin pricks from the inside of the bar and she covered her eyes.
She heard Bart getting into the truck and he started the engine, which coughed and fumed but didn’t move, the car vibrating on the tires.
“Get out” she screamed, and he managed to engage the motor and sped away spraying the dust in her face so that she could barely breathe through her nostrils. She felt too dirty to go back to the bar and she thought of the woman she had danced with wilting like a frail flower after the appearance of Bart. She went back to the stable where she had left her horse and re-saddled her and slowly padded out of town, uncertain of a destination.
Halfway to nowhere she saw Bart stalled on the road. He was leaning against the doors of the truck, as if hoping for something that would never come and she trotted up to him. He waited a moment, his arms crossed and then came toward Julia, his hands reaching for her throat and the horse whinnied, backing away from him and suddenly like a glider, rose into the sky.
And Julia rode the horse across the horizon, galloping freely now to a great canyon at the other end of the sky, a blue light pitched so low it made a gentle slope in the sky through which she and her horse could travel, just as she felt, like an iron vise, the grip of Bart’s hands around her neck.
Bart was brought to trial but not convicted since the people of Restitution City knew he had saved Julia’s life long ago and therefore murdering her only made them come out equal. This was justice, or close enough.
And the Rodeo Bar went on with its most popular bands and the people listened and stamped their feet, their thoughts entering a fuzzy cloud above their heads, their bellies filling with beer and the steel guitar twanging above them—pure notes that flew out from the windows and up through the sky into the heavens, as if personally requested.
Pia Quintano is a NYC-based writer/painter who has happily lived many places other than New York City. Loves to explore microcosms with her writing, wherever they occur, and the sirens of the lost particularly compel her to write. She has crossed the country many times by train and has often thought about the people in the towns she has passed through. What does the sound evoke for them? Even in New York City, the sound of an overhead train brings back ideas of travel, hidden aspirations, and vague longings.