by Adam Johnson
After class, Cheryl and I file out the door together, and I fall in with her as she heads toward the Snack Shack.
I put my hands in my pockets and try to be smooth. “Pretty lame video, huh?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I kind of liked the part where they tagged the bears.”
“Bears can be troublemakers,” I say and watch as she digs through her woven shoulder bag. She balances it on the jut of a hip, and I check our the red marks on her shoulders from her bra straps, smile at the way her sunglasses start to slide off her nose, and she lets them fall in the bag as she digs around. But I don’t really see anything nymphomaniac about her.
She pulls out a pack of menthols. “Smoke?”
“I didn’t know you guys were allowed to smoke,” I tell her.
“What are you talking about? Allowed by who?”
“Aren’t you all Christian?” I ask. “I mean, the body’s like the temple, right?”
“I’m not even going to respond to that,” she says. “First of all, Jesus doesn’t even care about the body—he’s into your soul. And besides, nobody ever told Jesus what to do.”
“Jesus doesn’t care what you do with your body?”
Cheryl takes her time lighting the cigarette. “I make my own decisions,” she says and then heads off, walking all cool because she knows I’m watching.
When she’s gone, I take the long way to the student parking lot, past the south lawn where the cheer team usually practices this time of morning. I like the way their skin flashes through those blue and gold outfits, and I sometimes hang my fingers in the fencing and stare. Today, though, the high kicks and girl tosses seem different. Today their uplifted arms and bright smiles make them look falsely optimistic, and according to my pamphlets, possibly suicidal.
I drive to the gravel pits, where I have them dump a quarter ton of sand in the bed, and then head to our job site in Chandler, my rear tires rubbing the fenders the whole way.
The neighborhood we’re working in has only half walked out of the desert, and the house is one of those sprawling adobe numbers with fat, curved sides and wooden hogan ladders. The guy who owns the place is some hotshot named Treen. I don’t like him, but he wants three hundred feet of pink wall around the lot and a strange, yellow decorative wall out front. This is enough work to carry my father for some time.
I mix mortar while my father, in an open khaki workshirt, eats a doughnut, smokes his rojo, and butters block at the same time, tapping the rows into level with the butt of his trowel. I shovel sand, cement, lime, and dye into the mixer, then polish off a grape soda as I fire the hose nozzle into the spinning drum. It’s funny how the ingredients always refuse to mix for a while. Gray, red, brown, and white flop, clump and clot in the tumbler before finally blending into a smooth, pink mortar.
I crumple the soda can and drop it in the half-finished wall, listening as it jangles its way to the bottom. We throw snack wrappers, smoke packs, fast-food trash, and Hamms beer bottles into the hollows in the wall formed by the holes in the block. I tossed a broken wristwatch into a wall once, and another time, I ditched a stupid paperback I was reading called Battlefield Earth! And somewhere in the city of Phoenix is a wall that holds a lost set of my father’s car keys. Sometimes I imagine people in the future tearing down our walls and trying to figure out who we were by what they find inside.
We both start laying block, and we find a groove, working on opposite sides of the waist-high wall to move faster. We don’t usually work face to face, and for some reason, I start inventing stories, one after another, to try to crack my father up. He must know I’m making it all up, but he keeps laughing, and I can’t fully explain my need to lie. I say I heard on the radio that they switched two monkey’s heads in a lab in Switzerland. I describe how a cocky filmmaker was eaten on “Shark Week.” Leonard Nimoy is secretly buying the space station Mir. There’s a cult of Christian nymphomaniacs recruiting in Tempe, I tell him. They all smoke menthols.
At lunch, we spread our shirts on the ground in the shade of our freshly jointed wall, and we are leaning back to eat burritos and drink beer when Treen comes over. It’s clear he’s been lying on pool furniture by the red lines across the backs of his legs and arms. He’s wearing swim trunks and a sweater in the heat, one so thin and loose I know it costs hundreds of dollars.
Treen eyeballs the beer but says nothing. I can tell he’s more nervous about my father’s tattoos—the red lantern on his shoulder, the blackbird fanning his back, a string of foreign characters down his spine. From here, Treen stares at the golden burst of what is supposed to be a Chinese dragon’s head on Dad’s chest. It always looked more like a goldfish to me.
But there’s not much for Treen to be wary of. My father’s a pretty nice guy who sat on gunboats for about ten years, where he probably battled some serious boredom, engaged the enemy’s tattooists, and then surrendered in general before returning home to leave my mother and me.
“Look,” Treen says and points where we are to build the next section of wall. “My neighbors are shit-heeling me. They said they would pay for half the cost of the wall, and now they’re backing out.”
I try to visualize a shit-heeling.
“They know they’ve got me,” Treen says. “They know I’m going to build the wall anyway. I’m wondering if there’s a way we can make their side of the wall crooked or crappy or something.”
This appeals to my father’s sense of justice. “Sometimes,” he says, “the joints on a wall come out looking smooth and clean. Sometimes they’re uneven and messy.”
“Can you do that, make them crappy?”
“Can do,” my father says.
I think this idea is a mistake. Our walls are solid and true, built to last, not like most you see today, cracking from lack of rebar, skimpy mortar, or thin footings. You only get one chance to build a wall right.
“Was it the color?” I ask Treen.
“What?”
“The neighbors,” I say. “Did they hate the pink?”
“It’s not pink,” Treen says. “It’s called Anasazi Sunset.”
The rest of the day, my father and I work quietly, on opposite sides of a wall we are on tiptoes to finish. I groom my joints, while Dad lets the mortar slop where it may, the two of us running rows until the wall completely outgrows us, and all I can make out of my father is the pitched blade of his trowel. There’s a strange comfort to spending the afternoon a few feet from someone you cannot really hear or see, though I can’t quite explain it. You just know they’re there, even when they don’t seem to be there.
* * *
On Thursday, I sit by Loren in City Hall, and we play more games.
Mr. Doyle has us pull words from a purple velvet bag that looks suspiciously like the kind that come with bottles of Crown Royale, and play a kind of charades. The words begin simple enough. There’s “friend” and “goal.” A man in a suit acts out “share” by holding imaginary objects close to his heart before giving them away to each of us. We receive our invisible gifts with two hands, to prevent spilling.
But the words start to get weird—next come “sacrifice,” “testify,” and “redeem.” My word is stupid. I reach into the fuzzy bag and draw a folded slip that reads “hope.” I have no idea what to do with this.
I walk to the head of the table, and unable to think of any way to convey hope, just stand there in front of those creepy, outward-slanting windows that invite you to fall into the parking lot below.
“Balance,” the old woman shouts.
“Sober,” someone says.
I wave these responses off, but with the sight of my lifted arms comes “wings,” “soar,” and “guardian angel.”
I decide to divide the word into two parts, “hoe” and “pee.” I begin to work my imaginary hoe through crop rows, emphasizing my elbows and the straightness of the tool. I get “garden,” which prompts “grow” and “blossom.”
Loren shouts “weed.”
I try
the “pee” part of the formula by tracing an imaginary arc of urine with my little finger, extending it from my crotch out toward the confused redirectees.
The old woman shouts “police horse,” and Mr. Doyle says my time is up.
When it’s Loren’s turn, she sets down her sport cup and comes to stand before us with her word. She looks down at her feet, concentrates, then works her lips as if she’s evening her lipstick. What she does next makes everyone lean back and inhale. She bends down, throws her legs high, and executes a perfect handstand—palms pressed wide on the tan carpet, spine curved hard, legs together.
No one takes a shot at what this might mean, except me. “Jesus,” I say.
Like that, she pops back up, and is shaking her hair straight before anyone can react. “Beautiful, Ronnie,” she says.
Clearly troubled, Mr. Doyle comes to check the piece of paper. He opens the folded square, eyes the two of us, then puts it in his pocket. “This is a good time for a breather,” he announces.
At break Loren and I take off, heading south toward the Maricopas, the closest thing I know to Mexico on a Thursday night. My truck is full of block and tools, and when we reach a certain speed, sand whips in the windows and bites us.
To the east, the moon is swollen, rising, so that it is framed in the truck window past Loren’s face, which is fixed somewhere just short of regret.
“I should tell you,” she says. “My husband can tear a phone book in half.”
“Are we talking Rural or Metro?”
“We’re talking about the Yellow Pages.”
I laugh, and with that, some reservation leaves her face.
Loren opens lukewarm wine coolers for us and tunes the radio to a Mexican station. I point out the snakes that appear in the edges of our headlights, sprawled across the shoulders of the road to warm themselves on the asphalt. The road begins to bob and switch, and where the foothills of the Maricopas rise, we pull off the main road, the tires moaning through the sugar sand of an arroyo until I shift into four-wheel.
To the south are cliffs that appear obsidian, and the distant heat lightning they reflect seems to flash from deep within them. Loren’s eyes are drawn to where we came from, to the orange dome of Phoenix. I wander through rolling hills and washouts until we are deep enough into the dark carpet of the desert that the faint whoosh of cars on the road vanishes.
I park near an outcropping of black rock that rims the swell of several dunes. There is silence when I cut the motor, and Loren is wide-eyed at what lies before us. Chollas stand fuzzy and glowing against the indigo sand, and saguaros look cut from smoky, purple-green glass.
The sand hills loom ahead, and after climbing out, we move through the crumbly, pink chalkstone and caramel-colored joshua trees that lead the way. From somewhere, a light breeze brings the clean, dusty smell of wet granite. Smoke trees waft in the dark, stirring elf owls and their strange double calls.
“It’s like a whole nother world,” Loren says.
“This is happening every night out here,” I tell her.
We move on into the desert, taking deep steps up the moonlit faces of the dunes, and sliding down their bluish, shadowy backs. We sink and climb, sometimes on all fours, our hands and feet moving through a cool layer of air that hovers over the sand. When there is nothing to be seen but dunes, we lie at an angle along a crest, the stars overhead seeming to wobble and migrate, shifting design as easily as the high, formless clouds that cruise below them.
Loren rolls on top of me, straddles my midsection.
“I’ve done some things,” she says, “and Jack’s done his share, believe me. But I’m not really one to run around, alright? I’m just telling you that.”
“Do you love him?”
She puts a hand on my chest to support her weight, and with the other, touches my cheek. “What do you know about love?”
She smiles, but it’s a little bitter, too. I shrug.
“Do you ever think about leaving him?”
“That’s not so easy.”
“I don’t know. My dad left us at the same time he left the navy. Then he moved in down the street, and I saw more of him than ever.”
“Oh, tiger,” she says. “I’m not sure if that’s a sad story or not.”
My shirt and pants are starting to fill with sand. I touch Loren’s side, feel the last, stunted ribs of her cage. “It’s the only story I got.”
* * *
In the morning, I wake to the whine of my mother’s hair dryer across the hall and the phone ringing downstairs, so I head down to the kitchen in my boxers, where I find Greg, in his undershirt, hair wet, talking on the phone and peeling an orange.
“It’s for you,” he says when he sees me. He passes the receiver. “Some woman, maybe your teacher.”
“Morning, sunshine,” Loren says when I answer.
I cup my hand over the phone. “Maybe it’s none of your business,” I tell Greg and head out the front door to stand in the driveway for some privacy. But lots of women in the neighborhood are out working in their yards. The fire station is two blocks down, and this is the time of the morning when the young firemen go jogging down our street.
“What’s going on, is something wrong?” I ask Loren.
“I can’t just call you?”
“It would be kind of weird if my mom answered. How’d you like me to call and have Jack pick up?”
“Would you like to speak to Jack? He’s in the next room eating his protein flakes. I’ll get him if you want.”
Across the street, Mrs. Goldwyn is raking leaves in her sweats and next door, Mrs. Sekera prunes in polka-dot gloves. They both look at me in my boxers.
“You know what I’m saying,” I tell Loren.
“I just called to say I want to see you. Jack’s got an exhibition and then a late-night revival.”
The firemen come by, five young men in tight blue shirts and nylon shorts, trotting with radios in their hands.
“Okay, I’ll pick you up at eight,” I tell her. “What did that guy say to you?”
“What guy?”
“The guy who answered the phone.”
“He asked me if I was your girlfriend,” she says.
“What’d you tell him?”
“I told him to go write ‘I will not be nosey’ a hundred times.”
The garage door opens, and my mom comes out, lugging the big briefcase.
“Who are you talking to?” she asks.
“Nobody.”
“Nobody, out here in your underwear?”
“A girl.”
“Okay now, a girl. That’s more like it.”
Mom spots Mrs. Sekera. “Did I miss them?”
“Boy, did you,” she answers.
* * *
In Civic Responsibility class, Cheryl passes me a note. We are watching a video on being nice to animals. The teacher apparently forgot that we’d seen this one before, and during the part where the man in red suspenders throws the chickens into the pit, Cheryl lifts an arm, as if scratching the red spot on her neck, and holds a folded paper out for me. I almost have to reach into her hair for it.
The note is really a flier for the Power Team, a weight-lifting group coming to campus today. The posters are all over school: four muscle-bound men hold the corners of a Volkswagen Beetle, while another reclines in a folding chair beneath.
Cheryl turns to me in the dark. Backlit by the video, her eyes and teeth are extra white. “The other day, were you just messing with me?”
“You mean, about the cigarettes?”
“Because I was serious about not letting people tell you what to do.”
“I wasn’t making fun of you,” I say.
“If you’re serious about finding the strength to do your own thing, you should come check out the Power Team.”
“The Power Team?”
“Yeah,” she says. “They cut through all the hype. My dad is on the team, and he’s living proof of how much someone can change.”
&nbs
p; “So your dad’s like a weight lifter?”
“More of a motivator. Can I count on seeing you there?”
“Sure,” I tell her. “You bet.”
We all still gasp when the video shows footage of “retired” racing greyhounds.
After class, I run into my old friend Terry Patuni at the fence where the cheer team is practicing. There are several guys there smoking. I stand next to him, and we put our fingers in the mesh. The team is making a pyramid by kneeling on each other’s backs. “Why don’t they ever line up the other way,” Patuni asks, “so we can see their asses?”
“Yeah, what’s with that?” I say, and it feels kind of good to just hang out with him. We used to be better friends, but I wouldn’t move in with him, and then I was kind of a prick once at the end of our senior year. My dad needed extra help one Saturday, and I brought Patuni along. His father is dead, and for some reason, I kept guffing it up with my dad, making it look like we were best pals.
We go eat a discount lunch in the Food Studies kitchen, which is kind of unnerving because they watch you eat it. Today it’s lasagna, and I’m no expert, but it’s either overcooked or needs more sauce. There’s always something wrong with the food that we can never pin down, but it only costs a dollar fifty, and it’s better than those sixty-forty soy burgers and vitamin-fortified tater wedges they pawned off on us in high school.
Patuni is pretty worked up about the Power Team, going on and on about it. We eat on metal stools above a Formica island, and he keeps showing me the flier. “Look at the pecs on those guys,” Patuni says. “Think of the babes you’d pull.” He keeps leaning his stool back on two legs, which is against the rules in the Food Lab.
“I think I’m going to check out this Power Team thing,” I say, acting like there was never anything weird between us. “You want to do it together?”
He squints at me, shrugs. “Sure, yeah.”
On the exit ballot, I rate the meal an 8.5, while Patuni cuts them with a 6.
In the gymnasium, we sit on retractable wooden bleachers and wait for the exhibition. Only about thirty people show up, mostly guys, but Patuni points out that there’s nobody from the college here, and we take this lack of official endorsement as a good sign. There are several weight sets on the basketball court, including a bench press on the free-throw line with black plates stacked deep enough to bend the bar. We’re trying to act cool, but really, we can’t take our eyes off all that iron.