Desert Boys

by Chris McCormick

  * * *

  To hear them say it, Amélie and Jean hadn’t seen an antelope but a ghost. Karinger kept asking for details.

  “Where, exactly?”

  “Way east, down by the 138.”

  “When?”

  “Just now—drove the twenty minutes over here right after spotting him.”

  “Him—you sure it’s a male?”

  “How do you tell?”

  “Well, horns or no horns?”

  “Horns, small ones.”

  “How big?”

  “I said small.”

  “Not the horns, the animal.”

  “Big, real big.”

  I took a different line of questioning.

  “What were you and Emily doing out in the desert in the first place?”

  “It’s Amélie, and we were just going for a drive, that’s all.”

  “How’d you know where to find me and Karinger?”

  “Didn’t—just saw your bikes on the side of the road by accident.”

  “So what’d you stop for—what is it you want from us?”

  “I’m beginning to ask myself the same question, jerk.”

  * * *

  Karinger convinced Amélie and Jean to drive back to the place of the sighting, but couldn’t convince me to leave our bikes behind and join them. I rode home, maneuvering Karinger’s bike alongside mine. The next day, I asked Karinger how the search went, if they saw the antelope. “Negative,” he said. “Waste of time. Should’ve rode home with you.” And that was the last we said of the matter.

  * * *

  At the end of summer, Jean moved away to college, and Karinger and I started high school. Four years later, my sister had gone back to Jean, as in denim, and moved East for law school. Karinger and I celebrated our diplomas before he left for boot camp. Then we had our last conversation, and time passed indifferently.

  * * *

  The unspoken rule: Keep your worlds separate. But once Jean finished law school and decided to stay in New York, and once I moved to San Francisco after college, the rule became enforced not by us, but by the width of a continent. This—we preferred self-enacted divisions—we didn’t like. So as we got older, we grew closer. We called each other more often, and Mom got sick and passed away, and I went back to the Antelope Valley temporarily, and Dad was doing fine, selling more furniture than ever, he said, though we had a hard time believing him. He was sixty-two and still nowhere near retirement. He didn’t need me at the house, but I ended up moving home anyway to keep him company, and made some money writing for the internet, which almost anyone can do. Jean kept saying how she felt bad for us—bad for Dad, mostly, which I joked sounded like a gloomy book by Dr. Seuss. Jean didn’t laugh. She was the kind of person who cried in the parking lot if the cashier at Target was over the age of forty. So one day she called and told us to pack our bags. “Family vacation,” she said, and when I asked her where she was taking us, she just said to start calling her Jean again.

  * * *

  Dad refused to get a passport. He didn’t want to be in Paris without his wife. He insisted we go ahead, and Jean asked a million times if he was sure.

  He was sure.

  * * *

  Naturally, Jean did all the talking. Having not taken a French class since high school, she must have spoken at a ninth-grade level. Still, I listened to the most basic French words fall out of her mouth, and something about the familiarity of her voice combined with the strange music of her speech carved out of me so much respect for her, I almost cried when she ordered, at a sidewalk café, two slices of quiche.

  * * *

  We scaled the Eiffel Tower and took selfies on the Champs-Élysées, which I stupidly hadn’t known was a street. (I’d thought it was a hotel.) This was my first time outside of the country, and I clung to Jean everywhere we went. People must have mistaken us for lovers. Jean looked beautiful—heavy lashes and eyebrows framed her big hazel eyes, and she had this naturally layered brown hair and year-round summer skin, and a wide mouth with lips so full, it gave her the look of a woman always on the verge of correcting something you’re about to say. People like a large mouth on a woman—even in Paris, I bet, and they probably looked at her and thought, why is this beautiful large-mouthed woman with him? Why is she with this young American boy with pale skin and an incomplete beard and skinny jeans unfashionably and unseasonably worn with boat shoes? Why is she with this idiot, who keeps calling her by a man’s name?

  * * *

  The flight the next day wasn’t scheduled until the afternoon, so Jean took me to a queer club that night and said, “I don’t know if there’s a place on earth more diametrically opposite to the Antelope Valley.” We ended up getting a table in the corner beneath large floating paper orbs of green light. I enjoyed watching the men dance, but the sheer mentioning of the name of our hometown seemed to tether our conversation to it, and our attention stayed there, and we spoke about home over the swelling wub-wub-wubs of the music. I told her about the name of the town, how the antelope weren’t really antelope at all. She seemed upset—she was drunk, to be fair, and so was I, and I said, “Sad, right? Even in Paris, we’re talking about the fucking Antelope Valley.”

  Jean thumbed the water on the outside of her glass. “Have I ever told you the story of when Emily and I went out looking for one of those antelope-whatevers? We were with a guy.” I told her I knew; the guy she was talking about was my friend Robert Karinger. I reminded her about our meeting in the desert. “Weird,” she said, “I don’t remember that.”

  Here’s what she remembered: She and Emily and a guy Emily brought along drove out at twilight to the eastern edge of the desert. The sky was the beautiful sky you hope for during a sunset, blue and orange upstrokes from behind the mountains. And there, on its hind legs, gnawing at the flower of a Joshua tree, stood an antelope. A pronghorn. Its black nub of a tail swatted yellow flies you could make out in the last of the light. When the animal landed on all fours, it turned to look at the car. Then the pronghorn came walking right up to the road, sauntering, and put its face up against the passenger window, the one by Jean’s face, as if saying hello.

  The animal waited there for a while, its black eye staring dumbly into the car. Jean and Emily and the boy in the backseat spoke in the reverent tones of witnesses. Jean was the only one afraid. “Emily wanted to open the window and stroke its nose,” she told me. “The boy in the backseat, well, he got out of the car on the opposite side, and walked slowly around the back of the car to where the antelope was standing. He came up behind it, real slow. The antelope knew he was there, and put out his back leg. Not a kick—just slowly put out his leg, I swear to God, like a hand. And this boy, he held on to the hoof. First he just had one hand on it, as if they were greeting each other. Then he wrapped his other hand around the ankle. He just held the leg for a long time, started petting it, until Emily went out of the car and stroked the antelope’s nose. And the antelope—the pronghorn—let it all happen, back leg out, nose down. And I just watched and watched, afraid that as soon as I opened the window, he’d dart off. Eventually I did open the window, and I was right. The antelope shook free of the boy and ran off into the desert. And the boy—I can’t believe he was your friend—he kept saying on the ride back how the antelope must not have liked something about me. Emily was fine, and he was fine. But something about me scared the animal off. And the boy kept saying we shouldn’t tell anybody about this, like it was a secret between us. I think both Emily and I had a little crush on him. He was young—I didn’t remember he was that young—but he was a beautiful, white-haired, serious boy. And so, yeah, we agreed that we wouldn’t tell anyone, that we would keep the antelope—the pronghorn—a secret.”

  The green light of the bulbous lanterns sharpened her features, lengthening the shadows of her cheekbones and nose. She had the look of something between a Halloween-store witch and our thinning mother toward the end of chemotherapy. The wub-wub-wubs seemed to increase in frequ
ency and in volume, and although Jean continued to speak, I stopped straining to hear her. Soon we would catch our flights—Jean to New York, me to the Antelope Valley—and I didn’t know when I would see her next. Suddenly I imagined this was the last moment we’d ever share, and because I knew she would go on to remember it differently than I would, I ached to do something so spectacular and unordinary that, if every other memory of Paris were to be corrupted, at least we’d have this.

  I stood, accidentally knocking one of the green orbs into a sway, and held out my hand. “Jean,” I said, the French way. And soon, while everyone else in the club beat their bodies against the thick air between them, I held her—my sister, depending on the swinging light, or my mother, or Karinger—and danced, slowly, to another kind of music. “Je t’aime,” I said through her hair, into her ear.

  “I love you, too,” she said into mine. “Moi aussie, je t’aime.”

  * * *

  When you spend a life leaving a place, only to return to it again and again, the returns become increasingly shameful. One way to deal with this shame is to create theories, theories that either justify your returns or else allow you the possibility of leaving—actually leaving, once and for all.

  This time, my theory is this: The antelope—the pronghorn—somehow knew that Emily and Karinger were different from Jean. Emily—married, pregnant with twins—continues to live in the Antelope Valley, just off Avenue N where the water tower looms in the foothills. Karinger became a husband and a father after joining the marines, and I’m convinced he would have lived in town the rest of his life if he hadn’t gone off and died in a different desert. My theory, I guess, is that the pronghorn knew Emily and Karinger were meant to stay, and Jean was meant to leave. All places, maybe, bear these two kinds of people, and ours just happens to have a way to tell the difference.

  It’s a hypothesis, anyway. In order to make it a theory, I have to run a test. So, in the late afternoon I tell my dad I love him, I’m heading out. I drive my mother’s old car east, away from the light and the railroad tracks, far out into the desert. I leave the road and go as far as the Toyota’s tires will take me before they fail, settling for good in the soft grip of the dirt. The headlights I leave on and the keys I throw thirty feet into an enormous heap of tumbleweeds. I remove my shirt and shoes, and sit. Far off, the sun falls—slowly at first, and then as quickly as a dropped coin—behind the San Gabriel Mountains. This is death country, and I am either going to survive it or not. Under the bleeding sky, I wait for the antelope, the pronghorn, the god of staying and the god of leaving, to show me what kind of man I am.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  How can I thank enough:

  Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee, my mentors and friends and greatest advocates, for all the brilliance and confidence over the years.

  Rick Moody, an unerring adviser, and Robert and Peg Boyers for introducing us at their wonderful New York State Writers Institute.

  Scott Covell, for teaching literature with humor and enthusiasm and high expectations, and for assigning books written by the living, which gave me the courage to try.

  The Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, which changed everything for me, and the program’s namesake, Helen Zell, for the financial and creative freedom granted by her extreme generosity and dedication to the arts.

  The faculty and staff who looked out for me at Michigan, especially Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Doug Trevor, Michael Byers, Sugi Ganeshananthan, Keith Taylor, Andrea Beauchamp, and the legendary Nicholas Delbanco.

  All the writers I lucked my way into befriending including my mythically great cohort at Michigan, but especially Brit Bennett, fellow country mouse, for help on this book at every stage.

  My earliest reader and closest comrade, Ezra Carlsen.

  Jenna Meacham, a true artist and friend, and the unstoppable Suzy Chandler, both of whom stuck with me through the awkward phases.

  Jenni Ferrari-Adler, my agent and trusted guide, for seeing through the haze before I could, and for motivating me to move forward.

  Everyone at Picador, especially Anna DeVries, hyper-sagacious editor and deus ex machina of my life, who turned a book I was proud of into a book of which I’m prouder; Elizabeth Bruce, synonymous in my mind with good news, for working so hard to smooth the publication process; Stephen Morrison, kind and inspired publisher, for providing safe passage for this book and so many others into the world.

  My family, for enough to fill another few books.

  Mairead Small Staid, who came into my life like an RKO outta nowhere, for making this book and its author so much better.

  And all my fellow desert kids, especially Bob Kniepkamp, Anthony Galura, and Nick Reuter, for being there.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHRIS McCORMICK was raised in the Antelope Valley. He earned his B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.F.A. at the University of Michigan, where he was the recipient of two Hopwood Awards. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  MOTHER, GODFATHER, BABY, PRIEST

  THE TALLEST TREES IN THE ANTELOPE VALLEY

  MY UNCLE’S TENANT

  NOTES FOR A SPOTLIGHT ON A FUTURE PRESIDENT

  YOU’RE ALWAYS A CHILD WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT YOUR FUTURE

  THE STARS ARE FAGGOTS, AND OTHER REASONS TO LEAVE

  HABIBI

  THE IMMIGRANTS

  THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF DESERT AGRICULTURE

  HOW TO REVISE A PLAY

  SHELTER

  THE MISSING ANTELOPE OF THE ANTELOPE VALLEY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  DESERT BOYS. Copyright © 2016 by Chris McCormick. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Selections from this book won Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan.

  “Habibi” was inspired by Anton Chekhov’s “Gooseberries.”

  The following stories first appeared, in different forms and under different titles, in the following publications:

  “The Tallest Trees in the Antelope Valley” in The Southeast Review.

  “Shelter” in Flyway.

  “My Uncle’s Tenant” in Fiddleblack.

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  eCover design by Henry Sene Yee

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: McCormick, Chris, 1987– author.

  Title: Desert boys: fiction / Chris McCormick.

  Description: First edition. | New York, N.Y.: Picador, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015044337 | ISBN 9781250075505 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250075512 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Boys—Fiction. | Young men—Fiction. | Male friendship—Fiction. | City and town life—Fiction. | Mohave Desert—Fiction. | San Francisco (Calif.) —Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.C38267 D47 2016
| DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044337

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  First Edition: May 2016