Man-O-War

Excerpt

The fifth of July. While Harris loaded his find into his truck Milo slunk out and sniffed around the dry lakebed. The bitch was a pound mutt—mostly Lab was the old man’s guess—and the abandoned stash was a good one, like last night’s festivities never got to it: at least fifteen Pyro Pulverizer 33 Shot repeaters, a load of Black Cat artilleries and Screamin’ Meamies, some Fortress of Fire and Molten Core mortars, probably three dozen Wizard of Ahhhs and one Man-O-War, a hard to find professional-grade shell pack, banned even on Paiute land after an Indian boy blew his brother’s face off in ‘99. It was a couple grand worth of artillery, all told. The largest pile Harris had ever found.

Every Fourth of July kids from Gerlach, Nixon, Sulfur and Indian kids from the Paiute res came out to the Black Rock with their lawn chairs, coolers of Miller, bottles of carnival-colored Boone’s Farm for the girls. They built themselves a bonfire, got thoroughly loaded and shot off fireworks. The lakebed had no trees, no brush, no weeds to catch fire, just the bald bottom of an ancient inland sea.

Claire Vaye Watkins

Claire Vaye Watkins is a Nevadan and a Presidential Fellow at the Ohio State University, where she received her MFA. Recent stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Hobart, The Hopkins Review, Las Vegas Weekly and Granta.