Eva sat between the two men. She kept a good eye on the road, since both Joel and Douglas were busy looking out at the scenery. She and his father kept up a running dialogue about the families of whichever farm they happened to be passing at the time. Her work with the County Extension Service kept her in touch with many of the other farmers’ wives. During the summer, she and her friends spent several days a month at the university in the next county taking courses on gardening and agribusiness—what she called “my careers.” Joel listened, but this morning he kept his thoughts to himself. He didn’t need to look to see if they were talking to him. If they said something funny, he laughed when they did, but he felt like crying or cussing—anything to relieve the tension.
Along the edges of the road, the weeds and sand blurred by, creating green and brown stripes that ran along beside them, but the farther he looked away from the moving pickup, the slower the fields passed. Toward the east, dominating the land, the Floridas didn’t move at all. They followed the pickup across the miles the way the sun did. A moving vehicle could eventually outdistance them, but always in this massive desert, as soon as the traveler passed one range of mountains, another would appear on the horizon. Joel slowed at the intersection and turned east toward the Columbus Highway. This was the same route he had traveled every day for eight years on the way to the county school. Across the road from the school, they stopped at the Pay and Save Store for gas. The sun was well above the horizon now, beginning to turn white against the bleached-out blue of the sky. Everything was cast in stark detail.
Douglas got out of the pickup and began pumping gas. Mrs. Tucker, the owner, came out of the store shading her eyes.
“Mornin’, Eva! It’s been a long time!” she greeted Eva happily.
Eva got out of the pickup and hugged her. Then Mrs. Tucker peered into the pickup at Joel. Her old wrinkled face smiled at him. “Eva, this ain’t your son!”
Joel grinned. “It’s me, ma’am.”
She came around to his side and Joel politely got out. She stood with her back to the sun and peered up into his face. “My! My! You’re a pretty one now, aren’t you?” she cooed. She turned her cheek up to him and stood on tiptoe. Embarrassed, Joel leaned down and kissed her. Her cheek was so soft against his lips he could barely feel it. When he straightened up, he saw that her eyes had filled with bright tears. She was smiling. “You know my boy was killed last year, Joel?” She continued to smile. “I miss him so bad, sometimes. I hope you make your parents happy, Son.”
Douglas finished filling the tank and paid Mrs. Tucker. “He’s a good boy, Ina. Thanks for opening up for us. I hope it wasn’t any trouble.”
She waved an old hand stiffly through the cold air, clutched her sweater about her, and smiled. “No! Proud to. I was up already.” She pecked Douglas on the cheek and turned around. Joel watched her move slowly back to her store. These days, she didn’t sell much food—just bread and canned goods—and when school was in session, candy bars and soda pop to the kids. Even when Joel was in first grade, Mrs. Tucker was an old woman. Her son was at least in his fifties when he died, but Joel thought that to her, he would always be her boy. She was a fine old lady, though, and he had always liked her. As Joel watched her small frame disappear through the darkened door of her store, he saw how much more stooped and thin she was, and he remembered the spry laughing woman she had been, remembered the time she’d had the upper grades over in the back of her store, where her son had a pool table set up. She had filled it with snacks and brought the big color television from her house so the kids could watch the astronauts fly around in space. She’d gone down in the last few years, Joel saw, but, like most people in this part of the county, she hung on to her old ways, her old property, not understanding the changes going on all about her.
They turned onto the Columbus Highway and headed south again. But now the terrain was rougher. The Floridas were east of them about ten miles, and the land on the east side of the highway was rockier—too rocky for farming, but still good for cattle. The grass in the foothills was more lush than anywhere else in the county because of the way the mountains collected the rain clouds as they moved toward them. Some of the biggest ranches in the county belonged to the ranchers who owned the Florida foothills. Out here, it was easy to see thirty or forty miles down the highway toward Columbus, New Mexico, and its sister village, Palomas, Mexico, just across the border. The highway went straight for awhile like the railroad tracks that ran beside it and seemed to disappear into the Tres Hermanas Mountains due south of them. Douglas pointed out some of the farms and ranches along the way. They didn’t often get out in this part of the county, and Joel thought it looked a little more dismal than the desert near their farm. The fields were larger, planted with only one crop, and not rotated very often. “That’ll ruin the land for sure,” Douglas often said.
They turned east toward the Floridas, finally, onto a gravel road that led high up into the foothills. This close, the mountains were craggy and ancient-looking. Juniper bushes hung onto a precarious life in the cracks of rocks high up, where it was impossible to climb. The rocks were so cracked from the dry sun and cold nights that rock slides were common from hikers. Very few people ventured into these barren mountains, since they offered sparse deer hunting. But Joel remembered the field trip the upper grades at school made up here one year.
They had borrowed a tractor and a flatbed trailer, making an all-day trip for the twenty or so students, and he had thought how close it felt on the back of the trailer, to be sitting shoulder to shoulder with Nicky and the guys, joking around and singing the silly songs they had learned from Miss Bussay in chorus. When the school principal had said “a field trip,” he had imagined that they would be free to roam all over, collecting plant samples, then taking them back to the school and using the microscope to study them, and learning how they survived in the desert without irrigation. His favorite book at home was a book on cacti his mother had given him from one of her college classes. The desert by his own house was lush with mesquites and yucca, some round, flat cacti, creosote bushes, and sparse, gramma grass. He had been excited to be going so far into the foothills that day. But the principal and the eighth-grade teacher made them stay around the flat rocks and bare desert within a few hundred yards of the trailer.
He couldn’t remember much else about that day—except for the incident that left him troubled for several days afterwards. He’d been so damned embarrassed. He laughed at himself, thinking of it. It didn’t take much to excite a bunch of guys going through puberty, eagerly comparing the growth of hairs on their crotches every few weeks. Earlier that year, sitting out underneath the trees that ran along the school’s football field, Joel and a few of the guys had learned to jerk off. They had been introduced to the technique by Kenneth Stroud, who was by far the most sexual guy Joel had ever seen. The circle jerking was a pitiful affair, most of the guys not yet matured enough to “come,” and only a few of them had stayed with Kenneth, when he got them to shuck their pants and form a circle. One or two guys watched and giggled. Bill Crawford, Nicky Coleman, Leo Johnson even, and Joel stayed in the circle. Kenneth showed them his cum, which he caught in the palm of his hand and called “jizzum.” Joel managed to get off a few drops, then got up quickly and dressed. Then the day of the field trip, Kenneth got Cliff and Bill and Joel and a few other guys to watch Aileen Parker and Betsy Weller undress in the shadow of a large boulder and rub each other. Their nakedness captivated Joel. Their tits were firm like muscles on a guy’s chest and although not yet very big, were kind of nice. He liked that. But then Aileen opened her legs wide and parted herself, revealing a bright pink area, turning the bright-eyed boys into giggling, excited monkeys. She let Kenneth rub it in front of the other guys, and Joel had turned away, embarrassed for her.
He had left the rest of them and happened on Leo Johnson, who had been watching the whole thing from a place he’d been hiding in. Leo said it was kind of sad that the girls would let the gu
ys see them naked. Joel agreed, and found that Leo was the only guy who seemed to feel the same way.
He shivered suddenly, remembering Leo. He hadn’t thought about that particular shared feeling with him in a long time. Everybody at school laughed at Leo. Then, in high school, the teasing grew worse. If you wanted to see a real queer, the guys said, just find Leo Johnson. Poor Leo. Joel had always felt sorry for him, had tried to be his friend, but Joel thought that Leo caused most of his own problems, preferring to play with the girls instead of joining the guys out by the football field. The teachers who made the boys in the three upper grades play football and baseball wouldn’t allow anything bad to happen, but Leo was afraid, anyway, and he was constantly screwing up when they played. He was always chosen last on any team, and when the school played sports against the other country schools, the teachers let him work the concession stand with the girls. Joel had always been confused by how Leo could be such a sissy considering that his four brothers were real toughs. And of course, the other students could be cruel if a guy didn’t fit in.
I wonder what they think of me now ? He thought about Jeannie Lynn, again, remembering that she had always hated Leo. She was the one who started calling him Leota, a name that had stuck like glue from the day Jeannie dreamed it up. And she was a hard one to figure too. She was damn near as tough as any guy at school, but you wouldn’t know it looking at her long, thick blonde hair and her tight, prim little waist.
Then he wondered, Is that why Tom is so upset? He thinks we’re like Leo Johnson? This question disturbed Joel, because that is precisely what they were like, if it were true about Leo being queer—
homosexual, Joel corrected himself, trying out the new word.
* * *
They found a shady spot by an old barn and Joel brought the pickup to a stop. This area had been long abandoned and the barn was leaning wearily toward the mountains. They were high enough in the foothills now that he could see the great depression of land that formed the Mimbres valley. Toward the northwest, the town was a glittering splash of silvers and browns, surrounded by green fields. He could definitely tell where the farms began and the desert ended this time of year; the crops lent a green haze to the usual browns, blues, and violets of the terrain. Douglas stood on the flat surface of a rock in the shade of the old barn, one hand resting against the wall, the other shading his eyes. “Hey, Son, look over there.” He pointed west; his arm made an arc along an invisible line toward the mountains north of town. “See that faint black line running along there?”
Joel followed the movement of his father’s hand with his eyes. “That jagged line or the straight one?”
“The straight one’s just the highway to Silver City. The jagged one. When your mother and I first came here back in ‘45, that was a flowing river.”
Eva laid out the lunch on the back of the pickup in the shade, and Douglas went on explaining that the farmers who settled the lower valley drilled wells until the river dried out. “Of course, nobody depends on it,” he said, “and I guess they never did. Back then the town was an eyesore, a coal stop for the railroads. Just a bunch of storefronts, most of them saloons or cat houses.”
Eva was sitting next to Douglas. She nodded. “My goodness, Joel, when your father brought me out here and showed me the place, I thought he’d lost his mind. We had Kathy and Tricia, and I was pregnant with Daniel Dean. I almost up and ran back to Texas. But we stuck it out.” She looked wistful for a moment and patted Douglas on the knee. Joel wondered if she was thinking about little Daniel and the other brother he’d never seen, both born dead in 1946, Daniel in January and the other one in June, so premature that they hadn’t even given it a name. Even though he was born in 1947, that time was ancient history to him. He had never thought much about what his parents were like when they were young. He had always felt so settled in their home and their farm, he’d never thought it hadn’t always been there.
“It was hard back then?” He squinted at his mother.
“Joel, you just wouldn’t believe it. We came out here with everything we owned. The land was nothing but mesquite and yucca. The year before you were born, your father helped me get started on my garden, after your Grandmother Reece died and I lost the first baby. Then we met a lot of other families who’d moved out here, the Hotchkisses, the Strouds, the Paulks, the Crawfords.”
“We got together, it seems like for dances every Saturday night,” Douglas continued for her. “Not your kind, Joel, just get-togethers where the wives brought all kinds of food and some of the people brought their guitars and fiddles. Men pitched in with harvesting, and crews would go around thrashing beans and sacking ‘em up in the fields. There were a few house-raisings, too. A crew of men could put up the shell of a house in a day. You know, it was people like us, the farmers, who tamed this valley. Pretty soon, people were moving in by the droves. The merchants, the churches,” he chuckled, “just sprang up like weeds.”
Joel ate his sandwich, listening to them reminisce. Families. Wives and children. He’d never thought of the passage of time for his parents, them in their younger days starting out, Kathy and Tricia, and himself—children they hoped to pass on a heritage to. And even though his sisters had children now, they all said Joel would be the one to pass on the family name. But now he wasn’t so sure. The Reeces were silent for awhile. Joel had been told many times about his parents’ desire for a large family, like the Strouds and the Johnsons had, and his father had often shaken his head sadly when he and Joel worked together in the field, telling him a farm like theirs needed a family. “You know we could handle a dozen children on this place, Son.” He felt weird out here with them suddenly, hearing in the wind through these unchangeable old mountains the ghosts of all the homesteaders who came, planning and building, from one generation to the next, and he realized he was changing right before their eyes, if not visibly, then under the skin, already able to think that maybe he had something in common with Leo Johnson.
* * *
After waking from the wet dream, Tom got up wearily and showered and dressed for church. He wanted to call Joel, as he usually did, and apologize for the shabby way he had treated him, especially since he had come to a conclusion. I wanted it to happen—with him. It was my fault. No big secret, and probably to Joel no big deal. And then he remembered with regret the hurt look Joel got on his face. It was quick, like the snap of a flashcube, bright and blinding, then gone in a split second, leaving the image of Joel’s face on his retina.
Now, sitting in church, staring blankly ahead instead of paying attention to his father’s sermon (which wasn’t making much sense anyway), he could only think of Joel’s hurt.
When his father shouted suddenly, he snapped awake, feeling disoriented. He began to li”….and think on this! Imagine that you have no church, and yet you still have all the problems that come from living. Without your spiritual home here on earth, how would you know if you are lost? HOW!” His father stepped away from the microphone and spread his arms heavenward, then waved his arms like a conductor. “My friends, rise. Let us pray for our lives.”
In the silence that followed his prayer, the preacher disappeared through a doorway. The congregation began moving slowly through the vestibule. Tom had stayed seated, unable to believe that he had missed the entire sermon, amazed at his own confusion. He kept his head bowed, faintly aware of the people slipping passed. When he looked up, the chapel was empty, and Joel and he were standing by the lectern. Tom could see himself, angry and confused, Joel confused and hurt. He saw Joel reach out, saw himself pull away.
Then footsteps echoed in the vestibule. Tom was startled, hoping and afraid it was Joel. He faced the doors, saw them open. In the splash of white noon daylight stood a figure, a slim sliver of black against the blinding sun.
“Tom?”
“Yeah?”
“We’re waiting. Boy you look funny.” Tom sighed and went toward the figure whose ugly, clipped voice he recognized as Paul Romaine’s.
“Waiting?”
“Yes, Brother. The whole bus.”
“Right,” Tom said resigned. “A wonderful trip to the City of Rocks State Park. Our Full Gospel Fellowship cookout.”
His sarcasm was lost on Paul, who pushed him eagerly. “Yeah. Fellowship under the lesser lights,” he sang happily.
Joel had once joked with Tom, calling it the Full Gospel Fullashit something or other, and Tom laughed at Paul’s enthusiasm, surprised at himself for thinking that, right now, full of shit seemed appropriate.
Sitting next to him uninvited on the bus, Paul jabbered in Tom’s ear while the rest of the teenagers filled the other ear alternately with church songs and camping songs as they bumped out of town. Tom pasted himself against the window watching the people on the street turn to look as the bus passed. With the window shut, the town was silent and, in the heat, shimmered brightly and disappeared, quickly giving way to the desert north of town.
Paul jabbed Tom hard in the ribs. “Hey! What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you excited?”
Tom dragged his eyes away from the window disgusted, but managed a weak smile. He shrugged. “It’s hot’s all.”
“Just think! We’ve got all summer for things like this!” Paul said, excitedly.
Tom looked closely at Paul for the first time in weeks. Paul was, ostensibly, his best friend at the church. His face was skinny, his mouth was sharp and beaklike, his teeth barely covered by thin, tight lips that seemed to stretch and dry out. His tongue constantly darted out to lick them, and he had a nasty habit of grimacing, too, curling his lips and baring his tiny rodent’s teeth. His mousy brown hair was clipped short and he used hair oil to excess, giving his head a tortured, ascetic look.
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