by Jaime Clarke
We sent up a hurrah as we passed under Mr. Malagon’s window, letting him know that we were working in solidarity toward the objective laid out on day one. We imagined Mr. Malagon smiling to himself, maybe hobbling to the window to get a look at the parade of conviction.
While Sprocket inventoried the tools that had been deserted a day earlier, checking the list of implements against the master list in his job journal, we broke into teams of five, each team incorporating two or three sophomores. The workforce had swelled noticeably, so that we decided on two overall teams: one to tape and bead the upstairs, and one to do the same downstairs.
We wouldn’t get any farther than deciding teams, though, before our intentions were derailed.
“Look who’s out of the hospital,” Roger said.
We stood still, all of us, as Warren approached, a girl we didn’t recognize following a few steps behind him. His clothes were filthy, the knees of his pants blackened by dirt. He clearly had not showered since he’d left. Warren waved hello when he saw us, and some of us waved back, the girl waving too. Warren reached back and clutched the girl’s hand, pulling her close.
Chapter Eleven
Warren’s eyes brimmed with excitement as we fired questions at him, his sour- breathed answers fogging up the dining hall, though we were too entranced to care. The girl sat quietly, her enormous green eyes taking us in. She, too, traveled in a cloud of dust, but her earthen odor wasn’t as offensive as Warren’s. She swung her bronzed legs under the chair, and some of us tried harder than others not to stare. She could’ve been sixteen or she could’ve been twenty-six; her weathered skin made judging her age problematic.
Warren’s odyssey had been triggered by his habitual insomnia, a condition he did not have to delineate for any of us. Though he would not identify the fight between Roger and Lindy as the catalyst, he alluded to it. “My stress level was up here,” he said, his hand above his head. He thought a walk might help tire him out, so he stole out of bed and out of his residence, cutting behind the community center and crossing the outer loop. “I was going to walk the loop,” he said, “but the moon was so bright that I could see in every direction, so I wandered off toward the Grove.”
From the Grove, Warren bounced out into the desert, drawn by the remarkable moonlight. He described meandering in a blinding light, the monotonous landscape drawing him farther and farther away from Garden Lakes.
“Then it got darker,” Warren said. He reached into his front pocket and pulled out a homemade gunnysack made of two back pockets from an old pair of Levi’s hemmed together, a zipper (presumably from the same pair of Levi’s) threaded across the top. He unzipped the primitive pouch and plucked out what looked like a black pill, popping it into his mouth. He extended the open pouch. “They’re olive pits,” he said.
Hands pinched a pit out of the sack. “Nice and salty,” he said, rolling the seed around with his tongue.
We passed the pouch as Warren continued.
“I couldn’t see much then,” he said, “except for this piece of driftwood about twenty feet in front of me.” The driftwood had baffled Warren. “How did it get so far from the water? And what was it before it drifted into the ocean?” The second question had held more possibility for Warren, knowing as we all did that arid parts of the earth were once covered by water. But before he could investigate, a truly unbelievable occurrence had distracted him.
“Right there in front of me,” Warren said, hopping out of his seat and tracing an imaginary circle at his feet, “like it was reaching out to me.” A thrill ran through us, and he paused, setting the scene. “There’s a tall cactus over here”—pointing off to his left—“and a wash just past the cactus. On my right are creosote bushes, all dried out with their flowers turned to fuzz. I turn around to see how far I am from the outer loop and realize that I can’t see Garden Lakes at all. I can feel myself starting to panic, and I think I’m hallucinating about vanilla ice cream when this . . . thing”—Warren clasped his hands together and spread them slowly—“starts growing.”
Those of us who had had Mr. Bisesto for biology knew what Warren was talking about—the queen of the night, a flower that bloomed one night a year, emitting a strong scent of vanilla. Mr. Bisesto annually told the story of how he once spotted the rarely seen night-blooming flower on a retreat in California.
“So I see this sign and I keep going,” Warren said. He walked farther into the desert that night, trekking onto the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation, south of Maricopa. He moved unmolested through the reservation, encountering no one, until he reached a dirt road running alongside to the freeway. Frustrated by the circuitous route he’d taken, he mapped out the easiest path back to Garden Lakes, using the I-10 as a guide.
“But I decide to walk in the opposite direction,” Warren said. “I don’t know why. I just do. I look one way and go the other, back into the desert.” He walked parallel to the freeway, though he moved to the interior of the land, away from the headlights caroming around him. “I ended up getting lost,” he said. “I couldn’t hear the freeway or see any headlights, but I kept on going. It all seemed like a mistake. That’s when I found Axia.” Warren gestured toward the girl, who smiled. We didn’t understand her name when Warren said it, but were too shy to ask him to repeat it. Axia was not Tohono O’odham; she was not even Native American, a fact we did not know until later. We assumed otherwise as Warren continued with his story, about how he came upon a band of Tohono O’odhams—“thirty or forty, a bunch of them kids”—under a ramada. “They had these tools and they were using them to pop the tops off of the cacti,” he said. He stood and demonstrated the motion, hoisting an invisible pole in his hands like a shotgun and crooking his elbows.
We foolishly imagined Warren walking into a nest of Indians like the ones we’d seen in Westerns, with scowling faces, their headdresses piercing the air. We knew only two varieties of Native Americans: the kind that wore colorful T-shirts emblazoned with brand names, and the kind from the movies. Warren assured us the group looked “like you and me, except for the color of their skin.”
The Native Americans were, in reality, a family that had come together to harvest the fruit from the saguaro cacti and pay homage to their ancestors.
“What, like a rain dance?” Hands asked.
Axia laughed, revealing a snaggled top tooth.
“No, not a rain dance,” Warren said. “The Tohono O’odhams are very informal about their rituals. This was the nearest thing to the wine festival ritual that celebrates the new year. I learned about it from Axia. The family didn’t speak English.”
Figs could feel Hands staring at him from the next table over. He ran his lie about the grocery guys finding Warren frontward and back, parsing his words for the loophole that would set him free from everyone’s scorn. If he could just explain everything to Hands, he was sure Hands would say he would’ve done the same. It was the same as telling everyone that they’d seen Mr. Malagon when they hadn’t. Figs would momentarily elude our inquiry, though, as our thoughts were preoccupied with Axia.
Warren continued his tale, how the family brought him back to their olive farm (and how the olive pits we were all sucking on had not been pitted by a machine but had been sucked clean by the olive farmers, which caused us to spit the seeds out; “They’ve been roasted,” Warren said), how he learned Axia was not Native American, but had been traveling around the United States by thumb.
“I left when Axia left,” he said.
Our eyes shifted to Axia. We could see the young girl she was through the dirt and grime that clung to her skin and clothes. We imagined her in a blue and green plaid skirt, the uniform of all the girls in our dreams. Axia’s hair hung in clumps, and it could’ve been any color in the world. She began to fidget, her hands adorned with chewed fingernails moving restlessly in her lap.
“She can’t stay,” Hands said, breaking our trance.
Warren’s look cut through Hands.
“I’m sorry, man
,” Hands said, “but you know the rules. We’ve got work to do.”
We wanted to protest but knew what Hands said was true. The extraordinary circumstances that had brought Axia to Garden Lakes would have to be ignored if we were to accomplish our goal. We would have to classify Axia as the enemy in order to persuade ourselves that turning her out was the correct thing to do.
Some were more easily persuaded than others.
“Why not let her get a shower and some rest?” Figs spoke up.
“I don’t understand why she has to leave,” Warren said.
Figs held up his hand to quiet Warren. He turned to Hands. “If we can all agree to keep on schedule, there’s no reason why she can’t stay,” he said. “I’m sure we could use her help.” He addressed Axia: “Would you be interested in helping us?”
“She’s an excellent worker,” Warren piped up.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Hands said. “The question isn’t if she can stay, but when she’ll go.”
“Can I smoke in here?” Axia asked. She pulled a tarnished gold cigarette case studded with turquoise from her pocket. Her question emboldened Hands.
“There’s no smoking in any of the buildings,” he said, sounding eerily like Mr. Hancock.
Axia got up and strode through the dining hall, perching outside the window to light one of her hand-rolled cigarettes.
The sophomores excused themselves to start lunch prep as the exchange reheated. Figs argued that Axia’s arrival was an interesting twist to the program, but Hands viewed it as a clear breach of what Garden Lakes stood for.
“How can you say it’s a breach?” Figs asked. “The whole point of being a fellow is proving yourself. Here’s a chance for us to prove ourselves.”
“What will it prove?” Hands demanded to know.
“That no matter the circumstances, we know how to make good decisions,” Figs said.
We’d never beheld such a disagreement between the two, and it was hard to know when to chime in or whose side to ring in for. Hands garnered Smurf’s allegiance, who agreed that allowing Axia to stay would be a violation of the rule against having visitors. “Look at what happened to me,” he said, playing his expulsion for laughs. The joke missed its mark, though, and the debate stalled.
“I don’t see any harm in her spending the night,” Figs said.
“Me neither,” Warren said.
Figs’s proposal met with a smattering of approval. Hands was about to object, but Figs spoke over him. “I say we let her shower, get something to eat, and rest. Why don’t you”—he indicated Hands and Smurf—“go to Mr. Malagon and see how he feels about her staying.”
Realizing his advantage, Hands agreed.
“But first,” Figs said, “we have to deal with the schedule.”
We bolted back plates of sandwiches, stuffing apples and oranges and bananas and bagel halves into our pockets to sustain us through an afternoon shift at 1959 Regis Street. The sophomores were charged with manning a water line to combat the white-hot heat billowing through the rooms, filling and refilling any container they could find with cold water for our water breaks. Our minds were not on the job at hand, though, but on Axia, who had been given the keys to the house relinquished by Quinn so she could clean up and rest. We imagined her brown body turning under the water, the days’ and weeks’ worth of filth falling away to expose the girl she’d been before she took up a life on the road. We willed ourselves to concentrate on applying the first coat of compound in an attempt to cover up the constellation of nails spread across the walls in every room.
The afternoon shift was one of our most successful, and we knocked off thirty minutes early as a reward, to allow us to scrub up for dinner. We compared smears of joint compound on our extremities and in our hair to prove that a good shower was warranted, but we secretly wanted to be presentable at dinner.
Hoping to meet up with Hands at their residence, Figs reached over Assburn and handed Sprocket his trowel. “One at a time,” Sprocket complained, but Figs persisted, dropping the tools into their corresponding plastic boxes.
Figs was unable to locate Hands, though, Hands’s dry towel hanging untouched in the bathroom. He asked Lindy if Hands had come in, and Lindy remarked that he had seen Hands talking to Smurf in front of Mr. Malagon’s house. Figs peered out the window in the direction of Mr. Malagon’s, but the sidewalk was empty, Hands and Smurf having moved into the house to continue their discussion.
“It’s too dangerous now,” Smurf said. “We should tell everyone.”
“Tell them what?” Hands asked, aggravated. “Tell them that you lied about Mr. Malagon being sick?”
“What about you? You’re in this now.”
Hands moved them into the kitchen, away from the broken front door.
“I’ll say that I didn’t actually see Mr. Malagon,” Hands said. He smirked. “I’ll say that it was all coming from you.”
“But you said you saw him.”
“Figure of speech,” Hands said.
“I don’t understand why you don’t want anyone to know.”
“And I don’t understand why you do. Do you want everyone to think you’re a liar? A lie like this will make Assburn look like a saint. Is that what you want, people laughing at you and calling you names?” Hands had never understood why Smurf didn’t take more care of his reputation, and he needed Smurf to focus on just that for his threat to take hold.
Smurf leaned against the dusty kitchen counter. He regretted taking Hands into his confidence; the strain of keeping Mr. Malagon’s absence a secret had multiplied rather than lessened. “No, I don’t,” he answered.
“Good,” Hands said, softening his tone. “I want the same thing you do: for us to complete our fellowship and then go home. But we have to get rid of that chick.” Neither Smurf nor Hands could remember her name. “If they come out and find her here, we’re done for.”
Smurf took in what Hands was saying.
“Do you agree?” Hands asked.
“Yeah,” Smurf said, “but what about letting a few key people know about Mr. Malagon?”
“Good idea,” Hands said. “But you know what happens once you let someone know something. Everyone knows. Plus we’re not in the position of having to build a consensus. All we have to say is that Mr. Malagon says she has to go and that’ll be that. End of argument. Then we can call the school.”
Smurf guessed at how tough it would be to keep the secret about Mr. Malagon close once a few people knew. He agreed to go along with Hands’s idea and stood next to him as Hands delivered Mr. Malagon’s verdict during dinner. Axia’s absence had left us dejected—“She’s sound asleep,” Warren had reported after a collective query—and our egos were soothed by the knowledge that Mr. Malagon had ordered that she leave.
“Should we wake her up and tell her,” Figs said angrily, “or should we let her sleep?”
“Mr. Malagon said she could stay the night,” Hands said without missing a beat.
The idea encouraged various amorous plots, all of which depended on Axia’s waking from her nap. The gulf in communication between Figs and Hands had jettisoned our studies, but we knew we wouldn’t be able to sit in our living rooms poring over ancient texts or handouts while Axia luxuriated in Quinn’s old residence. Sensing this, or perhaps as a way to sharpen his skills, Hands suggested an after-dinner soccer match. We shouted excitedly when we touched the ball, cheering our teammates, in some cases chanting one another’s names.
Hands was the only player who knew the score at the end of the match, taunting the opposing players for another game. We played another three, our muscles aching, some of us bleeding, all of us hoping that Axia would appear to witness our skill and cunning. Even Sprocket was infected with a new enthusiasm, calling “Gooooaaaal!” if we scored, or barking “Out!” if we missed.
We would’ve played best of five, four out of seven, first one to ten—anything to dawdle long enough for Axia to wake, but she slumbered through the night.
&n
bsp; It was nearing midnight when we lay down our disappointed heads.
We came to breakfast the next morning, fatigued to the brink of hallucination, to find the sophomores camped around Axia, who was relating an apparently hilarious tale about a truck driver she’d hitched a ride from outside of Albuquerque. Warren sat next to her, punctuating her story with his sharp laughter.
The sophomores took their stations as we shuffled in, serving us an unusually gourmet breakfast consisting of omelets, raisin muffins, hash brown casserole, and handmade sausage patties spiced up with jalapeños and herbs. The sophomores whispered Axia’s name in response to our wonderment at the delicious spread.
Figs sat at Axia’s table, introducing himself. He stuck out his hand awkwardly and Axia shook it.
“Figs is sort of the captain of the team,” Warren said. The rest of us looked around for Hands or Roger, who might’ve had something to say about Warren’s anointment, but they arrived late, stumbling in as Axia, in answer to Figs’s questions, told her story.