The Golden Turtle

Dennis Reinholt had been in business six weeks when the dome went up, and from the front window of his record store on Sierra Street he could see the top of it, gold against the December sky, rising above the roofline of the building across the street like a second sun that had gotten stuck halfway to the horizon.

He was twenty-two. He had signed the lease in October, moved the stock in from the garage where he had been selling records out of cardboard boxes since the summer, and opened the door on November first with two hundred dollars in the register and four thousand albums on the shelves and a handwritten sign in the window that said OPEN. His grandmother Clara had given him the first month’s rent. His mother Agnes had given him the sign, painted in neat block letters on a piece of masonite she had cut herself. The rest was his.

The record store was one room, narrow and deep, with bins running down both walls and a counter at the back with the register and the turntable where Dennis played whatever he was listening to that day. Today it was Coltrane, A Love Supreme, the bass and the drums and the saxophone filling the room with a sound that did not match the weather or the season or the town but matched Dennis’s mood, which was restless, which was curious, which was the mood of a twenty-two-year-old who had chosen to stay in Reno when everyone he knew was leaving.

They were all leaving. His high school friends, his university friends, the people he had grown up with in the west-side neighborhoods where the postwar houses sat in their neat rows. They left for San Francisco or Portland or Los Angeles, for cities that had things Reno did not have, for music and art and politics and a sense that the future was happening somewhere and that somewhere was not here. Dennis understood the impulse. He had felt it too. But his grandmother had opened a dress shop on Virginia Street in 1920 and stayed forty years, and his mother had married a rancher and stayed, and the Reinholts were people who stayed, and Dennis had decided that staying was its own kind of statement, that you could make a place into the thing you wanted it to be instead of leaving to find the thing someone else had already made.

He locked the store at six and walked the three blocks south to the new theater. The opening was tonight. Not the grand public opening, which was tomorrow, but the private reception, the one for donors and city officials and the people who had written checks to make the building happen. Dennis had not been invited. He was going to stand outside and watch.

The building filled an entire block on South Virginia Street, on the ground where the old State Building had stood until the wrecking ball took it down last year. Dennis remembered the State Building, a heavy stone structure with columns, the kind of building that looked like it had been there forever and would be there forever, until one day it was not. The city had demolished it to make way for this: a concrete theater with a golden geodesic dome on top, five hundred panels of gold-anodized aluminum catching the last light of the afternoon and throwing it back at the sky.

People called it the Golden Turtle. Dennis could see why. The dome sat on its concrete base like a shell on a body, curved and self-contained and slightly alien. The architect was from Oklahoma City, the firm of Bozalis, Dickinson and Roloff, and the design owed something to Buckminster Fuller, the geodesic geometry, the idea that a sphere was the strongest possible structure, that you could enclose the maximum space with the minimum material if you let mathematics do the work.

In front of the building, on a low pedestal, stood the statue from the old State Building. A pioneer family, bronze, a man and a woman and a child, the woman looking forward, the man carrying a rifle, the child between them. The sculptor was Byron Johnson, the statue dated 1939, and it had been saved when the State Building came down, rescued from the rubble and placed here as a marker, a piece of the old building kept alive in front of the new one. The theater had been going to be called the Apollo. Instead they named it the Pioneer Theater-Auditorium, after the statue, after the family, after the idea that this town had been built by people who came here with nothing and made something.

Dennis thought about his grandmother. Clara Reinholt had arrived in Reno in 1920 from Cincinnati for a divorce and stayed to open a dress shop. She had come with nothing except a trunk of clothes and the knowledge that she could sew and sell and survive. She was sixty-eight now, retired, living in the house on Plumas Street, and she had watched this town change around her for forty-seven years, had watched buildings go up and come down and go up again, had watched Virginia Street reinvent itself every decade, from divorce colony to gambling strip to neon corridor, and she had stayed through all of it because staying was what the Reinholts did.

Cars were pulling up to the theater entrance. Men in dark suits, women in long coats. Dennis stood on the sidewalk across the street with his hands in his jacket pockets and watched them go in. The dome glowed above them, gold in the dark now, lit from below by spotlights set into the concrete plaza. Fifteen hundred seats inside, he had read in the Gazette-Journal. A stage big enough for a full orchestra. Air conditioning and modern acoustics and everything the town had never had before.

A couple walked past Dennis on the sidewalk, heading toward the entrance, the woman’s heels clicking on the concrete.

“It’s extraordinary,” the woman said.

“It’s a dome,” the man said. “With a theater under it.”

Dennis smiled. It was both of those things. Extraordinary, and a dome with a theater under it. The town was like that. It built things that were extraordinary and then shrugged at them, as if building something extraordinary in the middle of the desert was not remarkable, as if it was just what you did here, what you had always done, since the first lot was auctioned on Virginia Street in 1868.

He stood there twenty minutes, watching people arrive, watching the dome glow, listening to the muted sound of music from inside when someone opened the door. Then he walked back to Sierra Street, back to his store, dark now with the CLOSED sign in the window, and he stood on the sidewalk and looked at his own small building, one room, narrow and deep, no dome, no spotlights, no fifteen hundred seats. But it was his, and it was open, and tomorrow he would unlock the door and put a record on the turntable and wait for someone to walk in who wanted to hear something they had not heard before, and that was enough. That was his version of the golden dome. Small and imperfect and his.

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