"Nevada," a sneak-peak from The Dad with a Flamethrower.

​The following is an excerpt from a draft of my upcoming novel, The Dad with a Flamethrower.

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          “Don’t ever be afraid, son. Cautious, apprehensive, even wary; those are okay. But never afraid. I didn’t raise you to be fearful.” Words my dad told me on another cold, autumn day came back to me unbidden.
            Before I even went into middle school I was convinced I was going to die. Well, worse than that: trapped in a wilderness purgatory. No one knew where we were. Dad and I had diverted off the beaten path on our drive to visit Grandma and Grandpa so I could shoot some jackrabbits before the first snowfall. The day had been a total washout for seeing any jacks so Dad let me take a few shots with my .22 at a Coke can.
            Despite the wasted day and no mound of dead bunnies to pose next to with my trusty rifle from Kmart, it had been a good day. What boy wouldn’t like to spend the day in the ruins of the Western frontier with his father? I was thinking about the nice warm dinner we’d have at the diner and wondering if they would still have any of the pie I saw at breakfast left over. Dad was listening to a tape of Buck Owens when it happened.
            A jagged tooth of steel stuck up from a cattleguard and dug itself into the tire. It immediately deflated, but Dad proclaimed it safe to drive on until we got back to the road. Dinner would be after dark, though. Even in the 2020s that place had zero cell reception, let alone in the 1980s.
Not even halfway to the road the flat tire split completely and departed the wheel in the worst place possible. Overconfidently, I recalled the one time a few months earlier I changed a tire in the garage under close supervision (and lifting assistance) and thought this would be no problem.
            Half an hour later my dad tossed the pieces of a broken tool box back into truck. “That didn’t work. We need to find ourselves a piece of wood, like a plank. Even something with one flat side, like a split log, will do.”
            “How about a rock?”
            “See any?”
            I looked around as if I was going to find something on the side of the road. We were an hour outside Austin, Nevada, on Highway 50, America’s Loneliest Road, and far off the paved highway. What remained of daylight underneath the low, overcast sky was fading fast. Snow flurries were falling on the distant peaks. Not a single tree was in sight. The only vegetation was low cheatgrass and sagebrush, not the kind of stuff you could use to support a jack.
            To my juvenile mind all we had to do was drive to where the road was more solid. Soft mud or not, the back wheels were mired and we needed the shredded tire replaced to crawl free. There wasn’t any wood around. Earlier in the day I marveled at all the godforsaken wilderness that Nevada had to offer and how its sparse flora gave the steppe a mystique the Mojave Desert didn’t have. Near sunset, it was like being trapped in a nightmare.
            I used to have these night terrors as a kid. They were different but all had a similar theme. I was confronted by a problem of such magnitude that I was helpless to even understand the scope. My arms couldn’t wrap around a cylinder the size of a municipal water tank, the million gallon size, or I had to dribble a basketball the size of the Moon. If I didn’t, I would die. Or like now, in one of the dreams I was trapped in a vast, empty space with no hope of ever getting out.
            At nine years old I didn’t have the perspective to know that there was always some kind of solution. Even laying down and dying was a solution but not a satisfactory one to my dad. So like in my dreams, I wandered around aimlessly. I listened to the harsh scratch of sagebrush limbs on my parka. That hopeless crushing feeling wrapped itself around my chest. Was I dreaming? Except for the details it sure seemed like it.
            As I got older and computers went from something my mom used at work for typing to an interesting toy, the game Hover that came with early versions of Windows reminded me of the desert that afternoon. Distant, cold mountains and a dark, foreboding sky. Wandering around aimlessly on some sort of quest through a maze that looked the same at every turn. Funny how one unrelated thing can trigger your mind like that.
            All I could think to do was wander. That’s what I did in the dreams when I was trapped in that awful place of beige walls and silence. Rocks. I stopped and stared at this child’s knee high mound of 50lb rocks. They were too heavy for me to carry but if I got my dad and brought him back here…
It clicked in my brain. Rocks stacked like that were done by a human. Peering around a sagebrush, I saw that the rocks made up the foundation for a headframe above a mine shaft. Dad’s stories about the mining history of Nevada on the drive all came rushing back to me. In the grass lay the timbers of the headframe itself. They were far too stout to be useful without a chainsaw, but enough debris lay scattered around.
            Someone had torn open the cover of the shaft to go inside. There were parts of a rickety ladder, shoring, and more lying in the grass. The wood was still strong after all this time too! I gathered up the biggest armload I could and drug it through the brush.
            I appeared on the road a few yards south of the Bronco, huffing and puffing, with long green streaks on my jacket. Dad walked over from where he was searching for suitable rocks in a washout gully and looked me over. “Your grandma is going to just love scrubbing that out.”
            I just gestured at the wood. “Will this work?”
            Half an hour later the spare tire was on and we were a mile down the road where the gravel resumed. “I was kinda scared back there,” I confessed. It was an understatement. Coyotes had been howling in my mind. Mom and Grandma would never have known what happened to us if we hadn’t figured it out. I though we were so far away from civilization that someone like us in thirty years would find the rusted out Bronco. My dad had to know what I had been thinking.
Dad was a fighter pilot, tough as nails. He flew two tours in Vietnam and spent his whole adult career in the air. He’d look at me with a sad, disappointed look in his eye and wonder aloud why I sitting in silence afraid. “Fear is God’s way of warning, boy,” he said. “You get up on a roof and look down to see that the ground is spinning. You got a few choices right then. Stop and figure out how do whatever it is you’re doing safely. Two, square your head away and get it done.” He bent over to look under his Ford Bronco.
            “That’s only a couple.”
            “What?”
            “You said ‘a few.’ You only said two. A couple is two.”
            He smiled. “That’s right. The third is that perhaps you never belonged up there on the roof in the first place.” A pause. “Don’t ever be afraid, son. Cautious, apprehensive, even wary; those are okay. But never afraid. I didn’t raise you to be fearful.”
             I must have fallen asleep on the ride back. The rest of the day is a blur. A brief snatch of being told to shower quickly so we could eat before the diner closed. Even the quick visit with my grandparents is lost now. That piece of advice is where the vivid memory ended.