Desert Boys

by Chris McCormick

  I found the plan exhausting. Intuiting this, my mom gathered my dishes and said, “There’s no rush. You’re on vacation. But for your dad’s lunch break, you know, we have to time it right.”

  So I showered and dressed—without my mother’s help, I’m proud to say—and joined her in the driveway.

  We waited for twenty minutes in a long line of cars inching to the intersection at Sierra Highway and K, expecting to find an accident or construction at the light. But when we finally passed through, I couldn’t spot signs of either. Outside the Starbucks, the drive-through line looped around the building, all the way out into the parking lot designated for Target garden center customers. Inside, however, the coffee shop was empty. “Don’t they know it takes longer in the drive-through?” my mom said once we’d gone back outside, triumphantly sipping caramel Frappuccinos and peering at the line of drivers waiting beside us. “Nobody wants to leave the car anymore,” she said, “not even for a minute.”

  In an act of defiance, we decided to walk the three-quarters of a mile across the enormous parking lot separating us from our next destination, the shoe store. The weather reports might’ve called the temperature in the low 90s, but between the unobstructed sun and the asphalt, surrounded by the gleaming bodies of minivans and SUVs, and equipped with nothing but a melting milk shake to press against our foreheads, the heat was unbearable. We got maybe a fifth of the way to Payless before my mom stopped, shielded her eyes with a flattened hand, and asked if we could go back to get the car.

  * * *

  I was trying on my third pair of flip-flops when a woman who wasn’t my mother called my name. I recognized the accent, but didn’t realize who she was until she brought me in for a hug. Mrs. Watts—née Teresa Estrada—moved her long braid from one shoulder to the other and stood back to see me in full.

  “Your skin looks good,” she said. “You look younger now than you did in high school.”

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling a zit form on my nose. We talked about college and how I was enjoying the Bay Area, where she had some family, actually, in Richmond.

  “How’s business?” my mom asked, a clumsy attempt to join the conversation. The extent of their relationship was that they’d met a handful of times over the years. They were both immigrants, loved their God and their families, and were notoriously good cooks. But these not-insubstantial overlaps hadn’t been able to spark a friendship, for whatever reason. I doubted Teresa would’ve approached my mother if I hadn’t been there.

  “Business is wonderful,” Teresa said, though the way she stuffed her hands into the front pockets of her jeans hinted that she’d rather not talk about work. She and her husband ran a landscaping company, whose blue-and-white trucks I’d seen around town since before I knew Watts. “I’m on my way out,” she said, citing the curled receipt drooping from the plastic bag at her feet, “but I wanted to say hello.”

  “Well,” my mom said. “Hello.”

  “Hey,” Teresa said, “I want to have you over for dinner. The whole family.”

  “Oh,” my mom said, putting on a ridiculous performance of gratitude. “I wanted to have your family over for dinner!”

  “No, no—I offered first!”

  “Well, Daley’s only here a couple more days,” my mom said, “so maybe the next time he’s home—”

  “Hey, this is actually perfect,” Teresa said. “Daley and Daniel probably want to spend some time together this trip, right? This way they can do that without you having to sacrifice any time with your son, no?”

  I couldn’t pin down why Teresa was being so pushy. Did she want to have dinner with us, or was she simply competing in a mom-off, where the object of the game was to embarrass the other mother with sweet, undying insistence? Had Watts put her up to this?

  “Oh,” Teresa went on, affecting a pained sympathy. “Tomorrow night’s probably too short notice for you.”

  “You know,” my mom said, planting her feet. “Tomorrow night should be perfect.”

  “Okay, great,” Teresa said. “I’ll make sure my son will be available. He’s in school, too, I’m sure you know. Summer school, even, for the emergency medical training.”

  “That’s right,” my mom said, seeing an opening. “And I’m sure he’s saving a lot of money by staying home and going to the junior college.”

  “He is,” Teresa said. She widened her stance and shifted her braid to the other side. “It’s a good thing he doesn’t have to take out all those loans you see in the news, crippling loans students can never pay back.”

  “I look at it this way,” my mom said. “A loan is just a bet we place on ourselves.”

  “True,” said Teresa, “but gambling can be a vice.”

  The conversation went on this way for a few minutes, during which I found a suitable pair of flip-flops. After Teresa left, my mom pretended to look at the small selection of jewelry at the front counter, giving her enough time so that we didn’t run into Teresa again in the parking lot. When the coast was clear, we got back in the car.

  * * *

  At lunch, my dad had some bad news for my mom, who was in the middle of an enthusiastic pitch for the next night’s dinner plans: He wouldn’t be able to make it. “Tomorrow,” he said, “there’s supposed to be some kind of rally on the Boulevard. Apparently, tons of people are going to be in town all weekend, so we’re being asked to work late. I guess my boss thinks the protesters will finish marching, turn to each other, and in one passionate voice declare, ‘Now let’s buy some furniture!’”

  My mom didn’t laugh or even seem to hear him, clearly plotting what she was going to say to Teresa about her missing husband. Would appearing without him prove that she was somehow an inferior wife? Could she tactfully back out of the plans?

  While my mom’s machinery was at work, I asked my dad about the rally on the Boulevard.

  “I heard it has something to do with zoning issues,” he said, his confidence waning with every word, “or a new business park development? The environment? I don’t really know, to be frank.” He resumed chewing the last of his burger. As a kid in Michigan, he’d been hit by a car while riding his bike, and had to have his jaw reset. Now every time he bit down, I could hear a snap. After the last snap, we got up and said good-bye.

  My mom and I were stuck at another achingly long red light on the drive home. As casually as I could, I asked why she didn’t seem to like Teresa Watts.

  “What?” She turned in the driver’s seat to face me, genuinely wounded. “I have nothing but respect for Teresa.”

  I said I didn’t mean any harm. From the outside, I explained, the two of them seemed to give off a kind of competitive, unfriendly vibe.

  “We’re mothers,” she said. “We believe our sons are the best. And we know there can only be one best.” After we traveled a few feet closer to the stalled intersection, she put the car in park—good for the brakes, she claimed—and pulled her short legs beneath her on the seat. “Stop acting like your father,” she said. “All these questions. You’re integrating me.”

  “I don’t mean to interrogate you,” I said.

  At home, I changed into my trunks and glided splashlessly back into the pool. I could hear my mother in the driveway out front, hosing down the car. Not just the desert, but all of California was in a severe drought, and as I lay floating on my back, I felt immensely guilty, remembering an old teacher of mine, a farmer, who’d once made us draw bar codes on our faucets to remember that water wasn’t free. But the guilt, as always, passed. I hoped tomorrow’s rally was in the spirit of environmentalism, but soon the hope passed, too, and I simply floated, focusing on nothing at all but my own breathing.

  * * *

  Saturday. In the kitchen, my mother grated cheese for a stuffed pastry called, depending on the dialect your kind of Armenian speaks, boreg or borek. My mom pronounced it with a hard g—so I did, too, and it was one of the twenty or thirty words in the language I spoke with any confidence. I used the word now as a re
placement for hello.

  “Good morning,” my mom said, taking a break to kiss me and then returning to her work. “I called in sick again so we could be together.”

  “You weren’t supposed to make anything for tonight,” I said, stealing a pinch of shredded cheese from a growing mountain of the stuff. “It’s Teresa’s dinner party.”

  “Just something small,” she said. She moved to the oven to check the bulb labeled PREHEATED. “Most of this is for us, but we’ll take a few over. Those Mexicans love anything with a lot of cheese, I think.”

  “Mom,” I said, reflexively offended. But she hadn’t said anything foul, really, except for the unnecessary inclusion of the word “those,” so I left it at that.

  “You’re already dressed,” she noticed. “You have plans?”

  The answer was yes. I’d decided to go to the rally on the Boulevard as soon as my dad mentioned it. I couldn’t imagine what a political rally would look like in a place where everybody’s politics aligned. I had to see for myself.

  “You have to stay and be my taste tester,” my mom said.

  “I’m sure they’ll be as delicious as they always are,” I said, which was true. “But my boss at the newspaper emailed me.” A lie. “He said I should go to that rally on the Boulevard and take notes for a feature. I’m heading out now, actually.”

  “You’re going by yourself?” The way she spoke—accusatory and bewildered all at once—made going to the rally alone seem like the most ridiculous thing in the world. And so, for the second time in as many responses, I lied.

  “An old friend is one of the organizers.”

  “A girl or a boy?”

  “A girl,” I said, knowing she’d prefer it that way.

  “Why doesn’t she just come here after the event? I can make tea, and you two can sit by the pool. I won’t bother you.”

  “Well, we’re doing something,” I said. “We’re not just sitting around, talking.”

  “Talking is doing,” she said. Then—“Ugh”—she nicked the top of her thumb against the grater, sucked the shallow wound, and, leaving her fist against her mouth, grumbled, “What is this rally, anyway?”

  I went to the drawer where we kept the Band-Aids and peeled one from its packaging. “Immigration reform,” I guessed, taking her cut hand in mine.

  “Not too tight,” she said. I kept my attention on her thumb, but I could feel her looking at my face. All my life she’d paid a comical amount of attention to me, but this trip was the first time I felt as though she were studying me, analyzing my every move, for … for what? I couldn’t say. I finished applying the Band-Aid without looking her in the face.

  “What immigration?” she said.

  I went to the trash can under the sink to throw away the wrapper. But the trash can had moved since the last time I was home. Now it stood near the sliding glass doors that opened out onto the backyard. “Oh, you know,” I said, strangely disoriented. “The rights of immigrants, I’m assuming. The stuff you hear about in the news every other year.”

  “Maybe I should come,” she said. “You did promise you’d spend the whole weekend with me. Plus, I know a thing or two about immigration.”

  “I don’t think it’s a forum,” I said.

  “A what?”

  “Like, I don’t think we’re going to talk. I think we’re marching.”

  “That’s the first mistake. Nobody talks anymore.”

  “I thought you were upset that nobody gets out of the car anymore. At least we’re doing that. And anyway, the march is supposed to spark a conversation. I think the conversation that follows the march is the point.”

  “So I can’t come?”

  Now she was cutting filo dough into little triangles, hands white with flour. I wanted to say that her kind of immigration—from Soviet Armenia through New York and Los Angeles, thirty years ago—was different from this kind, across the border with Mexico. This kind was more deeply entwined in contexts of racism, for one thing. Plus, I wanted to say, we had a two-party political system that, encountered with a phrase like “the largest growing demographic,” preferred to accomplish nothing, knowing that actual solutions would only hamper xenophobia and large anonymous political donations. In fact, I wanted to say to my mother, talk was the problem. All anyone did was talk.

  Then I remembered I’d entirely made up immigration reform as the cause for the rally. As far as I knew, people were marching for creationism in the classroom.

  I asked if the Band-Aid felt okay.

  “You think your mother is weak,” she said. “But I’ve survived more than a cut.”

  “I’m sure you have,” I sighed. I grabbed her keys from the nearby rack and jingled them to let her know I was borrowing the car. “I’ll be back before you’re done with the boreg,” I said on the way out. “So this isn’t me breaking my promise.”

  * * *

  Now, at least, the traffic was no mystery. Thousands lined the sidewalks and spilled out onto the Boulevard, a recently renovated stretch of small businesses and venues in the heart of town. Mostly those rallying were white men and women, and many wore camouflage in one form or another, which quickly snuffed out any hope I had that the event would save the environment. Some people carried seated children around their necks like airplane pillows. Invariably the children waved miniature American flags, and most of their parents carried homemade signs declaring their right to free assembly, signs I found eerie in their redundancy. I pulled off on a side street and had to drive a few blocks before finding a parking space. Then I trekked back to the Boulevard and joined the flow of the crowd.

  Although I’d lied about my boss at the Tribune sending me to the rally, I did bring a notepad, and more or less pretended to be a reporter. I asked some of the protesters why, exactly, they were out today. Every response was a variation on some vague patriot-babble: “Because I’m an American, and that’s what we Americans do,” or, “I just want to be out here to show support.” When I followed up by asking what it was, specifically, they were supporting, my interviewees responded with some version of, “I’m supporting freedom and democracy,” and the question returned to why that support was necessary today, and I found myself in an endless feedback loop of nationalistic vapidity. I kept checking the homemade signs, hoping to find a clear cause, but the signs were just as nebulous as the people who’d made them.

  My last attempt to understand the event came when I approached a middle-aged white man pointing a handheld, battery-operated fan at his face. I said, “What do you think is at stake today for your town?”

  “I hate to break it to you,” he said, “but this ain’t a town.” He threw his arms out, enveloping the Antelope Valley as thoroughly as the San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountains, and in so doing dropped his fan. Bending to pick it up, he said, “Look around. This is a city now.”

  “Well,” I started, but decided not to press the point. How do you explain what makes a city? Not the number of people or the sluggishness of traffic, but what? What I’d had in mind was something like my daily commute to the office at Lake Merritt, where I would stand in the aisle of the crowded 88 bus and listen to secrets traded and affirmed in the boundless languages of the world, where I’d hold on to the chrome bars so tightly that when my stop finally came, my hands smelled strikingly and perfectly of blood. A city got its smell on you, the smell of life itself, and no matter how inflated its population had grown, the Antelope Valley was no city.

  I thanked the man and went on my way. The day was hot and dry as usual, but a thin cloud cover kept everyone marching in relative comfort. Along the grass meridian bisecting the Boulevard, beach umbrellas and foldout tables had been set up, and opportunistic capitalists were selling bottled water and snacks. Although I was enjoying the reporter character I’d invented for myself, I suddenly began to feel sick. I’d always imagined that I was born in the wrong place, that I was a metropolitan kid playacting the small-town boy. But now the truth set in: I was a small-town kid pretendin
g to be a big-city reporter, and the inversion of my mask, along with the heat, had me dizzy. I went to buy a bottle of water.

  At one of the umbrella-covered kiosks, I found a stack of flyers for the day’s event, held down against the wind by a rock. DON’T BELIEVE PHONY POLL NUMBERS, said the headline, beneath which came a few hundred words debunking the media’s declaration of the war’s growing unpopularity. The protest was a general assembly of the new, so-called American Popularity Party. Just as I was beginning to understand the day’s event, I spotted Roxanne Karinger. Although she looked not unlike a hundred other girls at the rally—blond, self-tanned, and pretty—I knew it was Roxanne. She stood the same way Karinger did, perfect posture except for the toes pointed inward. If she’d been alone, I might’ve gone to her and started the long work of mending my friendship with her brother. But she was with her mother, a woman who had been, until the fight, something of a second mom to me, not that I needed one, and suddenly I felt so absolutely silly for carrying a notepad and a pen that I dropped them where I stood and walked back to the car, ignoring the voice yelling after me, “Sir! Hey! You’re littering! You can’t just litter!”

  * * *

  Again we were in the car, but this time I was behind the wheel. Half past seven and the sun was still up. Dinner started thirty minutes ago, but the traffic and the daylight made it impossible for me to feel rushed. My mom didn’t seem to share the sentiment. She bounced in the passenger seat, rattling the lid of the porcelain dish in her lap, telling me to cut the line.