respect for the material itself. Every writer finds a way into the work: Chekhov leaned close and, with his ear cupped, caught the intimate conversations between lovers––and serfs and masters––watching them move in what seemed to be isolated chambers of their desires. Borges sealed himself into a diving bell of his own fantastic style, plunging deep into seas of time and culture. Alice Munro maps expansive topographies of relationships, mostly female, using her utterly and deceptively unique style to reveal the complex meeting points of personal history, geography, and destiny. And Mullins, for his part, gently threads the narrative of a single character through a hole of paternal loss, watching carefully as he passes through early boyhood up through adulthood (and we’re talking real adulthood, not the delayed adolescence so common in the culture today), uncovering in each story something about the mystery in the connection between the loss of a father and the formation of a sexual identity. The originality here is not the loud kind––stylistic high jinks, flashy explosive plots––but rather the quiet kind that comes from deep thought, from an impulse to tweeze apart the experiences found in the life of a character named Nick Danze.
Another great pleasure in this book comes from discovering David Philip Mullins’s own, unique Las Vegas—not the Las Vegas of so many movies and books (a hardcore playpen of debauchery and sin) or the Las Vegas of Hunter Thompson (the cold center of the dead American dream), but rather a city as seen from the vantage of a typical suburban kid looking through scrub and grass at the lights, feeling the magnetic draw of cheap thrills from afar. Throughout this collection the city shifts and changes as Nick matures. He moves in close, tempted by its allure, but never gives in to it as his mother does. And because we are moving alongside him, we’re given a huge gift: a new perspective on a place we thought we knew.
Don’t be fooled by the cool, clear voice of these stories. Mullins, like most good story writers, is by nature deeply subversive, unwilling to look away, voyeuristic in his impulse to glance through the keyhole at the action behind the door, risky in his willingness to once more take on the theme of male experience. I’m grateful to him for giving the world an indelible, unforgettable character. Far into the future, where literature will continue to live, many readers will be grateful, too.
—David Means
Arboretum
THE SAPLINGS STOOD IN NEAT ROWS ALONG EASTERN AVENUE, each leafless maple growing from a dark hump of soil that resembled a pitcher’s mound, or a small grave. They rose six, seven feet above the sidewalk. With flashlights and a trowel, we uprooted the shortest one we could find and carried it off to our plywood fort in the desert. I was in my early teens. It was late on a Sunday, and I had left my house in the middle of the night without permission. Surrounded by catclaws and schist rocks, the fort was a rickety structure that sat stark and uninviting in the middle of a dried-up arroyo. Kilburg had said that all the outside needed was a little greenery, a few trees.
Earlier that evening, I had learned that my father was going to die, and I was glad to be out in the open, away from home. Kilburg had convinced me to sneak out my bedroom window, to meet him at the end of our block at a quarter past eleven. Now he had me on my hands and knees, scooping rocks and hard-packed dirt baked solid after a rainless winter. The drought that had begun in December had yet to subside. This was more than twenty-five years ago, before interstate water banking, and people joked that their faucets might soon run dry. Summer was two months away, but even out at the fort—a twenty-minute walk into the Mojave wilderness that bordered our neighborhood to the south—the warm air had begun to smell of the chlorinated swimming pools and freshly mowed lawns that were partially at fault for the city’s water shortage. Beside me Kilburg massaged his aching stump. He could only stand for so long before he had to remove his prosthetic leg, a hollow, plastic thing, a mannequin’s appendage, from which he sometimes drank the Bushmills whiskey I borrowed from my father’s liquor cabinet.
“I don’t know about you, but I sure could use some action,” said Kilburg. The leg lay beneath him in the dirt; he sat crouched on it as though it were a log at a campfire. It had once matched the color of his skin but had faded to an unnatural ivory. In one hand he held a flashlight, and with the other he kneaded his stump in a slow figure eight, avoiding the spot in the center where the skin had been knotted together like the end of a hot dog.
“Action?” I asked. I scooped a clump of dirt over my shoulder and it hit the ground like a stale dinner roll. “What kind of action?”
The sapling was propped against the overturned paint bucket we used as a bongo drum. Behind us the fort stood at an angle, leaning westward, undeserving of its name: it wasn’t fortified in any way and appeared on the verge of collapse. Deep in what seemed an uncharted region of the Mojave—there were no trails, no cigarette butts or empty beer bottles left behind by the local high-school kids who partied in the desert—and concealed by the arroyo’s high, crumbling banks, it was at least unknown to the rest of the world. Building the fort had been Kilburg’s idea. We had spent an entire Saturday wrestling with the sheets of plywood we had found in his father’s tool shed, shaping a door frame with his ancient jigsaw and dragging the sheets one by one through the desert to hammer them together, and in the end our construction was nothing more than four unpainted walls and a low, flat roof, less complex than your average doghouse.
Kilburg shook his head at the ground, the way he did whenever I asked him a question.
“Action,” he said. “Chicks. Jesus, do I have to explain everything?”
“Oh,” I said, and felt like an idiot.
Travis Kilburg was tall and muscular, with long earlobes and a wide, open face. He wore a military buzz cut, and it seems to me now that his complexion always had a greenish tint to it—like the patina of an old bronze statue—his eyes dark and serious. Kilburg had diabetes and had lost his leg at the age of six due to a blocked artery. He liked to talk about sex, about the many girls whose virginity he had taken, though I knew that he himself was a virgin. We both were. We were fourteen years old. Neither of us had ever even kissed anyone. Kilburg was perhaps incapable of honesty, no matter what the topic, and I played along when he fabricated his exploits, nodding as he spun tales of seduction and conquest.
I stabbed the trowel into the dirt, leaning to grab a few pebbles from the hole. I didn’t mind doing all the work. It took my thoughts off the news my parents had delivered over dinner. According to my father’s doctor, a rare lung condition—a fibrosis—was responsible for his chronic cough, for his labored breathing, which in the last couple of months had grown louder and raspier. “Talk to him, Jack,” my mother said. “He has a right to know.” My father explained that his lungs were in bad shape, their tissue inflamed. Without at least one transplant, he told me, swallowing the words as he chewed, the fibrosis could prove fatal. “Will,” my mother corrected him, “will prove fatal. We just want you to understand what’s going on, Nick.” The only person I had ever known to die had been my grandfather on my mother’s side, who’d had a heart attack two summers earlier. After a long silence my mother suggested we move to California, near the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. My father’s doctor, a general practitioner, had told them that the respiratory specialists there were among the foremost in the world. Tearfully, my mother reminded my father that because of his age—forty-three—his name would be placed near the bottom of a long waiting list for a new lung. He needed a specific kind of treatment. A move to the coast, she said, might prolong his life, might save it. My father lowered his eyes toward his plate. He reminded my mother that Las Vegas was our home.
“You bring the booze?” Kilburg said now. He put a licked finger to the air. “It ’s about that time.”
“Just some schnapps.”
The liter of Bushmills I had borrowed in the past had been half-empty, and tonight
