Desert Boys

by Chris McCormick

  “Sorry,” I said to Crocodile Dundee.

  When Karinger got back, the man came over with a huge metal driver in his hands. “You guys have got to be careful,” the man said. “I’m not a good enough shot to guarantee I won’t shank it in your direction next time.”

  “Sorry,” I repeated. Karinger didn’t say anything. The man tipped his hat and went back to his slot.

  “Can you believe that?” Karinger asked. “Old farts like that give golf a bad name.”

  “I thought he was pretty nice about it,” I said. “You really shouldn’t have gone out there. It’s dangerous.” I pointed to a sign that said so.

  Karinger was quiet.

  “You need help finishing your pile?” I asked. I hoped he would say yes so we could get on our way.

  “No,” he said, “I’ll be quick.” He went over to his slot and without much of a wait started hacking at the pile of golf balls. Some of them shot out at strange angles, but most of them hardly moved. He was chopping at them with his club. The 3-wood ripped hunks of grass out of the ground, leaving wet, muddy holes. Chunks of turf and mud splattered all over Karinger’s pants and T-shirt. Crocodile Dundee and a few other men ran over, yelling. Karinger, holding his weapon, grabbed my wrist with his free hand and we fled.

  “Sorry!” I yelled out as we ran. On the way home—through the desert, to avoid roads—Karinger didn’t say a word.

  * * *

  When we got back to the trailer, Linda told us she had a surprise in the bathtub. We went into the bathroom and opened the sliding door of the shower. A yellow kitten, alone, roamed. It had huge eyes, one blue and one green. Roxanne, toying with her single blond braid, appeared behind us and said, “Her name’s Kallie. Isn’t she cute?”

  Karinger said, “I thought we weren’t supposed to name them.”

  “Well, this one’s not going back to the shelter,” she said. “Mom says there’s something special about her.”

  “What kind of name is Kallie?” Karinger said. He looked at the kitten while he asked his sister.

  “It’s short for Kaleidoscope. She sort of looks like one.” She bent over to put her face near Kallie. “Don’t you?” she asked the kitten.

  “That’s stupid,” Karinger said. He let the word hang there for a second, and then left the bathroom.

  I stayed behind and played with Kallie. She made small squeaking noises by opening her mouth as wide as possible and shutting her eyes tight. Her head was too big for her body. She nibbled on my fingertips. I’d forgotten Roxanne was still there until she said, “Cute, right?”

  “So cute,” I said.

  “Guys?” Linda peeked around the door at us. “Where’s Robert?”

  “Being a baby in his room,” said Roxanne.

  “Go check up on him,” Linda told her daughter, who, groaning, obliged.

  Linda and Roxanne traded places, and before I could feel the awkwardness of our standing in a small bathroom together, Linda began to talk.

  “Robert can be sweet,” she said. “You should have heard his original plan for the nicer golf balls you guys have collected. He came into my bedroom one night with the saddest, reddest face, like he’d been crying for years on end. He’d be embarrassed if he knew I’d told you, you know. It’s just that he can be so sweet, is all. I told this story to your mother.”

  I thumbed between the kitten’s eyes.

  “He came in all sad and I asked him, ‘What’s the matter, baby?’ And he didn’t even get mad when I called him that. He just inched his way to my bed and flopped down into it with me. You have to understand how sweet this all was. When I told your mother, you should have heard her voice. ‘Really?’ she seemed like she was asking, and I said, Really. It was just so sweet.”

  I was nervous that Karinger was going to come back into the bathroom and discover his mom telling me his secrets. I decided I could only stay another minute.

  “So he’s in bed with me and he’s just so red—I’ve never seen anyone so red—and he asks me, so quietly, ‘Mom’—and he said it just like that—‘Mom? You think if I get enough of these nice golf balls—’”

  She paused for a moment. When she continued, something in her voice had changed.

  “He said, ‘You think if I get enough of these nice ones, Dad’ll come back and teach me how to play?’”

  I kept on with the kitten, afraid to look Linda in the eyes. The year before, I’d been a businessman—a neighborhood landscaper. I’d negotiated wages, for God’s sake. Now I’d regressed to the point of looking to a kitten for strength. Karinger was to blame, but I wasn’t sure how.

  “Sure,” Linda continued. “I told him, ‘Sure, your dad will come back. Of course he will.’ But Robert’s not a child anymore. He knows I can’t promise a thing like that. He could tell I wasn’t being honest, and he’s been upset ever since. You should have heard your mother when I told her this story. ‘How sweet,’ your mother said in that cute accent of hers. And it was. It was really, really sweet.”

  * * *

  That night, when Linda was asleep, I joined Karinger in his bedroom to play video games. They used to be mine. For my birthday that year, I’d been given new games on the condition that I hand my old ones over to Karinger. While we were playing I asked, “Why’d you freak out earlier?”

  Karinger kept playing. His mouth was open and his eyes were watering. He hadn’t blinked in a while. I asked him again.

  “I didn’t freak out,” he said. “Those old men are why people hate golf.”

  “You were kind of stupid.”

  “Look. Can we play this game or what?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But can we go back and apologize tomorrow?”

  “Wow,” Karinger said. “Are you serious?”

  “You messed up their grass pretty bad. It’s not easy to grow grass out here, you know.”

  That last part was true. In the desert, it takes a certain knowledge and work ethic to keep a lawn green. One skill my dad taught me was how to maintain a desert lawn, how to keep the mower’s blade high. Too short and you can burn the grass at the roots. I never told Karinger any of that. I felt guilty talking about my dad when I was with Karinger, so when I was, I pretended our dads abandoned the Antelope Valley together.

  Karinger paused the game and looked at me. The random yellow hairs on his face had multiplied since the morning. “You’re going to leave, too,” he said. “I can see it in your face. One by one, I’m going to watch everyone leave this place, aren’t I?”

  “You can leave, too,” I said. “Don’t you want to?”

  And as soon as I asked, I knew the answer was no.

  * * *

  “Let’s go make that apology,” Karinger said. He stood over me, backlit by the lamp in the ceiling.

  “What time is it?” I asked. Outside, the sky was still dark.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “There’s no wrong time for an apology.”

  “Robert,” I started, but I didn’t really have anything to say. I didn’t want to walk over to the golf course in the middle of the night.

  “The groundskeepers will be around,” he said. “They’re the ones who have to fix the holes in the grass we made, right? They’re there all night, and we’ll apologize to them directly.”

  “Your mom—”

  “Sleeps through everything. Besides, you were right last night.”

  “I was?”

  “Yeah. I feel really bad about the grass thing. I can’t sleep until we go out there and say sorry.”

  I got up and put on a sweater. I was about to leave the room when I noticed Karinger had his 3-wood and his grocery bag in his hands. I asked him why he was bringing his equipment.

  He said, “After we say sorry, we’ll be able to hit balls while no one else is out there. We’ll have the whole place to ourselves.”

  I thought of Crocodile Dundee yelling at us for retrieving bad hits. I had to admit it would be fun to be out there alone, with an infinite number of chance
s to hit a good shot.

  “Don’t forget your stuff,” he said, and I didn’t.

  * * *

  Under the stars, the gate looked like the entrance to an old zoo. It was locked. Karinger tapped his club between the gate’s metal bars. He was thinking. I suggested coming back in the morning. He wasn’t listening to me. He was listening to the rhythm he was making with his club against the gate. Finally he slid the 3-wood between the bars and did the same with his plastic grocery bag. “Here,” he told me, and he took my club and bag and put them through the gate, too. He went to the KNICKERBOCKER boulder. He knocked at the rock with his knuckles and listened to the sound. “Guess I was wrong,” he said. “It is real.” He pitched himself up onto it. The baggy shirt made his stealth a surprise, and I watched the secret muscles in his forearms press against his skin. Karinger latched on to the top of the gate and heaved himself up over it. He landed on the other side with a thud that sounded painful. Immediately, though, he said, “Your turn.”

  “I can’t,” I said. What I had meant to say was: What’s the point? There was nobody there. No groundskeepers, no Crocodile Dundee.

  “Your turn,” he repeated.

  I climbed onto the rock and up to the top of the gate. Falling from there to the cement on the other side was the hardest part. Karinger reached up and I reached down. He helped pull me to the pavement. When I landed, I still held on to him. My feet rang like my hands sometimes did when I hit a ball in a weird place on the club’s face. It stung a bit. It didn’t hurt as bad as I thought it would.

  Some of the smaller lights were still on, but the large stadium lights down the field were all shut off. Huge sprinklers showered the grass two hundred yards out.

  “No one’s out here,” I said. “Let’s just go find someone. And if we can’t, let’s go home.”

  “We’ll go hit a few balls,” he said. “Someone is bound to come find us. Then we’ll apologize, and all will be right with the world.”

  “I’m going to leave now,” I said.

  “Don’t,” Karinger said. I thought he was going to continue. I thought he was going to try to bully me into staying. I thought he was going to call me weak or lame or gay. But he didn’t. He just said, “Don’t,” and stopped there.

  We found the giant muddy divots he’d carved out of the ground earlier. In them was a sandy mixture of seeds and dirt one of the groundskeepers must have planted. Karinger put down his grocery bag and took slow practice swings with his 3-wood. I did the same with my club.

  “Let me have a ball,” he said, and I tossed him one from my bag. I didn’t even ask why he didn’t use one of his own.

  He put his club behind the ball and took a quick swing. The impact sounded solid. The ball shot off into the dark, disappearing among the stars before we could see it land.

  “Wow,” I said. “Great shot.”

  Karinger was still holding his stance, the club over his shoulders.

  “Really,” I said. “That was awesome.” I shivered even though I was wearing a sweater. Karinger stood there in a T-shirt like a trophy.

  Then he pulled his club over his head and hammered away at the grass again with everything he had.

  “Robert!” I said. I whispered it as if there were people around to hear us. “What is wrong with you?”

  Karinger threw his club away into the field past the safety line and fell to his knees. He started clawing at the mud and grass with his bare hands.

  “Stop,” I said. I looked to see if anyone was around. “Robert, please.”

  He stretched his arm out to snag his plastic grocery bag. He started to dump its contents into the hole he’d made. Whatever was in that bag, he planned to bury. I thought, Kallie could fit in a bag like that.

  With both hands, I lifted the 2-iron over my head. For a second I believed I might actually bring it down on Karinger’s skull.

  But he emptied the bag, and what fell out—all the good white balls we’d collected—toppled into the hole, one on top of the other.

  “Oh,” I said, dropping my 2-iron.

  Karinger gathered the strips of mud and grass he’d unplugged from the ground. He placed them over the golf balls in the hole. He pressed with both hands and all his weight.

  “Help me,” he said. He was crying—the first and last time I’d ever see that. I put my hands over his and we pushed the mud down together. For some reason I started crying, too, and the shame of that only made it worse. No matter what we did or told ourselves for the rest of our lives, this moment revealed the truth: We were not tough boys.

  When the ground was as flat as we could make it, Karinger got up and walked over to pick up his wooden club, which he broke over his knee. Out of the broken shaft he made a cross and laid it over the mound. He said, “This is the last I’ll ever mention him,” though that wouldn’t, of course, turn out to be true. Then Karinger spoke to his father under his breath, and I couldn’t make out the words.

  The sprinklers came on and we dashed out from the grass toward the gate. It didn’t take long for us to realize that without the boulder, we wouldn’t be able to hop over the fence and make our escape. The night was cool, cold because we were both dripping wet. Maybe we could have laughed, but we didn’t. Karinger stood with his head down and his eyes closed. I stared at him. In his baggy shirt, which was even bigger now that it was soaked, he looked like a kind of monk. We were quiet for some time. Then the east lit up, and we waited for men to open the gate.

  THE MISSING ANTELOPE OF THE ANTELOPE VALLEY

  Of course, they weren’t antelope at all, but pronghorns—pronghorns that looked, to the treasure-seeking settlers of the California high desert, like antelope. Upwards of eighty thousand pronghorns grazed the outer valley’s tussock grass before the completion of the Southern Pacific Railroad line in 1876. The pronghorns, which had coexisted with native human populations for eleven thousand years, refused to cross the railroad tracks. This confinement, along with a growing number of fur-hunters and, at the turn of the century, a series of bizarre weather patterns, all but killed off the valley’s misnomered namesake. The few that survived migrated inland and north, and nearly a hundred years passed before anyone in town saw an antelope—a pronghorn, that is—again. That person happened to be my sister.

  * * *

  We—Mom and Dad and I—called her Jean, as in denim, but she went around pronouncing her name as if it were the last syllable in “parmesan.” Everyone at her high school who’d seen a map of California was taking Spanish, but Jean found herself among the four seniors who’d kept with French, the other three being: Colette (Colleen Ditzhazy), Bertrand (Bert Strife), and Jean’s best friend, Amélie (Emily Goodson). Not until year two did Jean’s teacher mention that pronouncing her name “the French way” actually made it male, but by this time, Jean—as in parmesan—had already stuck.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, I was enjoying the eighth grade. My parents were so distracted by my sister’s college applications and general entanglement with what my mother called “womanhood” that I was left, by and large, to my own devices. Said devices were few but important, and consisted mainly of my best friend, Robert Karinger, and the expanse of uncultivated desert that stretched from the stone wall behind Karinger’s trailer park to the back loading zone of Albertsons, some three miles away. Outside my parents’ purview, we finished our homework and ran off into the wilderness. We hunted lizards. We studied the carcasses of feral cats. We searched the makeshift dumps for treasure. We slept, on warm nights, on his roof. We woke early and eavesdropped on Karinger’s mother and little sister through the EPDM rubber roofing. “Ethylene propylene diene monomer,” Karinger told me on our first night atop the trailer. He waved his open palm across the surface like a game show model. “All spread out over a layer of wood decking.” We pressed our ears against the bottoms of empty water glasses. All we could hear was the running shower and the occasional violence of the blow-dryer.

  * * *

  A decade afte
r her husband left, Karinger’s mother, an avid lottery player, won a sweepstakes for a new tract home on the west side of town. Soon, Karinger would be living in a big house with stairs and a rec room, and I made him promise I could stay over as much as I wanted. “Sure,” he said, “but we’ll have to make a concentrated effort to continue spending time outdoors.”

  “True,” I said. “When you’re right, you’re right.”

  * * *

  Jean was preparing to hear back from colleges just as Karinger’s mother made plans to move from the trailer park into the new house. While the movers did their business, Karinger spent nights at my place. “It’s decision week,” I warned him as he unfurled his sleeping bag on my bedroom floor.

  The day Jean was accepted to UCLA, the college of her choice, the French Club had a study session at the house. Colette hugged her, thinking probably of her own mailbox at home. Bertrand, aware of my father’s presence in the room, offered a neutered high five. Amélie—Emily Goodson—who’d been coming over to the house since I was a baby, grabbed Jean by the wrists and jumped up and down with her, squealing, for a full minute and a half. She had enormous breasts, and Karinger nudged me to pay attention. I was paying attention to Amélie, but for different reasons. Of all the French Club, I knew her to be the only one staying in the Antelope Valley after high school. I studied her for any signs of envy or devastation, and, when I found none, returned to watching Karinger watch her bounce.

  * * *

  Then came summer. As far as I knew, Amélie and Jean were spending every day at the mall. That was true of most teenagers in the Antelope Valley. Karinger was proud to say we were the only ones wise enough to understand the desert. “You can find a mall anywhere, can’t you?” he said. So when, after a long day of digging trenches and bunkers between Joshua trees for a game of paintball, we spotted a parked car reflecting the orange sun next to our dismantled bicycles, we were—at least I was—afraid. But I vaguely recognized the car, and when the doors opened to reveal Jean and, on the driver’s side, Amélie, my fear was replaced by a kind of bitterness. The one unspoken rule between my sister and me—keep your worlds separate—had been violated, and I was ready to call foul. However, Robert—“Karinger,” he reminded me with an elbow to the side—was all charm and accommodation. “Ladies,” he said. “What can we do you for?”