I woke up in a motel room on the edge of Virginia City with the sun punching through the blinds like a personal grudge. The air conditioner spat warm air.

My mouth tasted like roadkill left out in the rain. I had ten bucks left and a half-pint of something that claimed to be whiskey. I drank it in the bathroom, staring at a face assembled from spare parts.

The mirror didn’t lie. It never does.

The regulars at the Delta were already lined up like broken statues. I took a stool near the end and ordered a beer. The bartender knew me by the color of my eyes and the way I didn’t tip much.

Behind me, the slot machines sang their idiot song. People poured money into them like they were feeding a god that hated them.

I used to think a man could stand alone against the whole rotten machine, one guy with a bottle and a bad attitude, swinging at the world.

There was a time I believed that. I even tried it once, years ago, in a bar fight that ended with me on the floor and three cops laughing.

The glory of dying for something never showed up. Just the taste of blood and the bill for broken teeth.

It didn’t sit right in me then, and it doesn’t sit right now.

The army is bigger. The army is the rent, the empty fridge, the women who leave before breakfast, the desert wind that strips the paint off everything.

I drank slow.

A woman with red hair and a tired mouth sat two stools down. She looked like she’d been beautiful once, as a car looks before the rust takes over.

We didn’t talk. Talking ruins it.

I watched the way she held her glass, careful, like it might break if she squeezed too hard. That’s how most of us hold things out here.

Later I walked the streets. The town glittered like cheap jewelry under the hard blue sky.

Tourists from California wandered around with cameras and hope. Hope is the real sucker’s game.

I passed a window where a guitar sat wearing a price tag that said more about the owner than the instrument.

At the edge of town, the sagebrush starts and the road goes nowhere useful. I sat on a low wall and watched a woman smoke a cigarette.

The tourist train crawled away in the distance, long and slow, heading toward Gold Hill. I thought about hopping it, but it wasn’t really going anywhere.

Suddenly, the idea felt old, like a coat that no longer fits.

Night came on fast as it does in the high desert. The temperature dropped, and the street lamps got brighter.

I went back to the motel. The clerk barely looked up.

I locked the door, sat on the edge of the bed, and listened to the ice machine down the way coughing up cubes. Somewhere a couple was arguing in Spanish, and elsewhere a television laughed at its own jokes.

I poured what was left of a bottle of red wine into a plastic cup. I hate wine. I drank it anyway.

Outside the window, the lights flickered like a dying animal. I thought again about that single man, the one who could fight and later tell the story of death’s glory.

He never existed, or if he did, he died quietly and alone, and the story got told by someone else who made it sound better than it was.

I finished the wine.

I lay back on the thin mattress and closed my eyes. Sleep came the way it always does—late, cheap, and without any promises.