by Heather Abel
The secretary read this without comment or change in expression, accepting his excuse while clearly disbelieving it, because surely she’d show a flicker of facial sympathy for a kid who actually went to the doctor as often as David claimed to. With her signature on his note, David ran down the Greek Amphitheater, a gloriously euphemistic name for some cement steps on which the student body was required to gather biweekly to admire the bodies of cheerleaders below. At the south exit—farthest from the parking lot—he stepped through the metal detector, showed the note to the security guard, and he was free of this particular prison.
He walked westward on Pico, crossing Fourth Street, skimming a line of homeless vets who were waiting for lunch outside the Santa Monica Civic Center. David had been inside this theater only once, when he was six or seven and Joe had taken him and Rebecca to see Pete Seeger perform. Rebecca had brought with her five records—two Weavers albums, one Almanac Singers, three solo Pete, including, she’d showed David excitedly, the live one where he sang “We Shall Overcome” at Carnegie Hall. After the concert, she’d insisted on waiting at the stage door as everyone else from the audience headed to the parking lot and drove away. It was raining, and Joe was impatient. “He won’t come,” he kept saying. “This is a ridiculous waste of time.” But Rebecca refused to leave. It had made David nervous, how cavalier she’d been with Joe’s time. After an hour, the door opened and there was Pete, saying, “What have we here?” and taking the records from her hands. She probably had them now in her dorm in Berkeley, worshipped them like some raggedy scrap of shirt from a saint.
As he further developed this fantasy—Rebecca kneeling before her narrow bed, unwrapping layers of Guatemalan scarves, uncovering the LPs beneath, kissing the autograph on each one—he arrived at the corner of Pico and Ocean. And from here he could see it: a beckoning band of blue.
“¿Vamos a la playa?” David asked himself out loud, stepping into the crosswalk against the light.
“¡Sí, sí, vamos!”
He stayed at the beach all afternoon, sitting by the lifeguard station when it was just him and the old guys with metal detectors, buying a churro on the pier when school ended and students overran his spot, standing at the ocean’s edge when the sun sank over it and his shadow grew enormous and cartoonish on the sand behind him, grew skinnier even than his real self, already a fucking Kokopelli of a guy. He finally headed to the bus when he couldn’t take another minute without human interaction, even if the only human he could interact with was his mom.
When he unlocked the apartment, the lights were off and he could still hear waves, although the ocean was seven miles away. From the open windows came the white of LA night, strobe lights on clouds.
“David, hon?” Judy said from the couch, a T-shirt draped over her eyes. “I have such an interminable headache.”
The apartment was three rooms: David’s bedroom, the bathroom, and the living room/kitchenette. David crossed the living room to reach the sink and fill the kettle, dropping a Good Earth tea bag into a mug with the teachers union insignia and the words if you think the system is working, ask someone who isn’t. When the water boiled, he brought the mug to his mom’s side table. With his free hand, he pushed aside tissues, stacked Marge Piercy above Margaret Atwood above Dick Bolles to make space. What color is your parachute, Mom? Still haven’t figured that one out? He sat on the floor beside the couch. Clicked off a machine that had the sole purpose of emitting oceanic sounds.
Judy pulled the shirt from her head and turned toward him. “I didn’t think you’d be home this early. It’s Friday night. You have plans to go out later?”
“Nah. I’ll be here. We could make fun of Baywatch together.”
She reached to squeeze his arm. “You never seem to see anyone anymore. I worry, you know.”
“Nah, it’s cool. I’m good.”
“You’re good? I shouldn’t worry?”
“Don’t worry. How was your day? Headache-inducing?”
“Alright, hon, I just need to sleep, that’s all.” She switched on the machine: waves again.
He retreated to the bedroom, turned on a Mini Maglite, lowered his blinds. Friday was Fire Day, and this was his best approximation, since lighting a match had, the week before, set off the smoke detector. He lay on his bed. The way the flashlight shone from his dresser, he could see only the highest of the photos taped to his walls. The oldest photos. Back when Suze and Caleb were together and they stood with their arms around each other and grinned at him.
After ten minutes or so lying there, he sprang up. Walked to his closet door, where his extra sweatshirt hung, and shoved it. “It’s pronounced Llamalo, fuckers,” he said. “Say it, Chris. Let me hear you. ‘Llamalo.’ No, not quite. Say it again, Ryan. ‘Llamalo.’ Can you step the fuck away from my locker? And du-uude, what’s wrong with you? Thinking it’s a gang like an idiot? Llamalo’s not a gang, dude. It’s a place. I’m worried about you, man. About all of you. It’s only the most incredible place on earth, and looks like you’ll never see it.”
“David,” called his mom. “Do you have the radio on? Can you turn it down, hon?”
three
Jordan’s River Is Deep and Wide
Before Llamalo existed, there was the Double L ranch, and before the Double L ranch just this: a high plateau where the desert rose up to meet the western slope of the Rocky Mountains.
The Ute Indians came up here to hunt, but they lived in the river valley below. When the white pioneers arrived in the final, optimistic decades of the nineteenth century, they didn’t pay much attention to the plateau. They were busy killing off the Utes and making the river valley profitable by introducing economies that always fucked someone over. They called their new town Escadom, after two Franciscan priests, Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and Francisco Atanasio Dominguez, who had led the first white expedition through Ute territory a hundred years earlier, in 1776. Escalante and Dominguez nearly starved to death, but they survived to write, in tones that couldn’t help but inspire young capitalists, of a “lush, mountainous land filled with game and timber” and “rivers showing signs of precious metals.”
Aemon Talc rode into Escadom a few years too late, after all the riverside acreage with its alluvial soil had been claimed for ranches and orchards. He followed the river north from town for a couple miles until the valley closed in, the cliffs on either side edging nearer. He forced his horse to walk switchbacks up the eastern cliff. When he crested the top, he saw that there was another world at this higher elevation. Everything wide and open. The mountains, which had seemed merely gallant from the river valley, here became holy in their magnificence, the nearest one looming thousands of feet above him. Although Aemon was standing two miles due west of this mountain, it seemed he could throw a rock and hit it; there was nothing in his way.
The view to the south held its own enchantment. Strips of brown and ochre and beige as far as he could see. Hundreds of miles of this desert until earth just became sky. To the north, the land rolled into the foothills of the Rockies, and beyond these hills he could see some high faraway mountains, slivers of white like chipped teeth. As for the western view, Aemon could draw it simply with a horizontal line across a piece of paper. Above, sky. Below, the pitch green of the mesa on the far side of the river, pinyon-juniper forest soon to be ripped up to rescue the coal trapped underground.
It was the most extraordinary feeling to stand on this plateau. There was nothing built by humans. None of the verdant, shielding shrubbery of the East Coast. Nothing to box him in. At dawn, the sun rose over the nearest mountain and lit the sagebrush pink. My soul soars here, he wrote to his mother. My optimism is held aloft by the open space. My hubris is held in check by the mountains. The plateau was flat enough for cattle, although you couldn’t call it flat. It rose up and fell down in little hills and shallow declivities and small buttes. Flat enough, though, to lead cows to the mountain’s foothills to graze all summer.
But there was a distinct
ive and unfortunate lack of water. No water to grow winter crops. No water to keep animals or even a small garden. All that survived were drought plants. Sagebrush. Rabbitbrush. Occasional stumpy juniper. Puny greens. A multitude of brown grasses. It was gorgeous land, but worth shit.
Despite that, Aemon applied for ownership under the Stock Raising Homestead Act, and the government gave it all to him for free. Six hundred and one acres, from the edge of the cliff to the toes of the nearest mountain. He joined up with some equally delusional newcomers, including Eustace Sorger, who became his closest neighbor, to build an irrigation system. The men began in the foothills of the northern mountains, at a high-altitude lake that was fed by streams of snowmelt during spring and summer. With pickaxes and horses, they dug a trench six feet wide, three feet deep, and long enough to carry water to each of their homesteads.
It took them years. And as the trench snaked through this parched plateau, it created a green necklace of fecundity; along its banks were wild roses, leaning willows, oyster plants, marsh marigolds. The irrigation trough split Aemon’s land in two. The land between the ditch and the mountain remained fallow. He flooded the land that stretched from the ditch toward the cliff, and he ploughed it flat, grew the sharp green of alfalfa.
Aemon named the irrigation trough “the Jordan River,” after the river that flows through the Holy Land, but everyone usually just referred to it as “the ditch.”
Aemon named his ranch “the Double L” for his daughters, Laura and Linda, whom he also named. He enjoyed naming. He named his son Conway, and when Conway married, Aemon named his grandchildren, the two boys who died in infancy (Aemon and Aemon), the three girls who, being girls, wouldn’t inherit his ranch, and the sixth child, who would. He named this boy Donald Aemon Talc. Aemon named each species of the multitudinous brown grasses. He named the oyster plants and the bindweed. He’d have liked to have named the nearest mountain, but it was already called Escadom Mountain, and the river was already called Utefork, after the dead Indians. He named the endless land to the south of the plateau “the Dobies,” because it looked like adobe clay out there. The plateau itself he called “Aemon’s Mesa,” his hubris not entirely held in check.
He built his little white house to face Escadom Mountain, so that as you came upon it from the wagon path that led from the top of the cliff, you saw its back side. On the front of the house was a porch that faced the irrigation ditch and two miles of high-desert scrub and then, bam, the mountain. In his old age, when his son took over the ranch duties, Aemon would sit on his porch for hours, just looking at the mountain.
Caleb Silver ran down these porch steps, hurried northward on the path along the irrigation ditch. It was his ditch now. He was hunting for bindweed, and when he found it, he squatted, unfolded his pocketknife, and sliced through the vine. He tugged at the tail of the creeper slowly, so as not to break it. He could feel little pop-pop-pops as the plant released its hold on the earth. He looped the vine between his left elbow and palm, like coiling a hose. Then he turned and walked back along the ditch until he was standing by two Russian olives planted by Aemon across from the little white house.
Looking toward the mountain, he could see a few blue tarps from the sleeping platforms, glints of sun reflecting off the corrugated tin of the shacks, a flapping sheet that hung from some wooden posts, the yurt’s white canvas like a circus tent, nothing that disturbed the view any more than ships out at sea disturb the view of the ocean.
Over the years, he’d built nineteen structures between the ditch and the mountain. Eight sleeping platforms, like wooden stages with posts at each corner, to which you could tie tarps for rain, and a railing between the posts, upon which campers hung towels for privacy. Six arts-and-crafts shacks with three walls and a bit of tin roof. Four composting toilets, shrouded behind sheets. One yurt, from a mail-order catalogue. Caleb had partially hidden the structures whenever possible behind hills or brush, and he’d situated each at a distance from the next so there was no sense of crowding or orderly civilization; much of a camper’s time here was spent walking through the sagebrush from one to the next. Empty, the place had the feeling of a long-abandoned mining or refugee camp, a failed experiment, ruins.
But today, the campers would arrive at last. Caleb was alone at the ranch, except for the kitchen ladies, in the kitchen, and the laundry ladies, smoking in the parking lot, ashing on the tips of the orange cones that separated that patch of dried dirt and sagebrush from all the rest of the dried dirt and sagebrush. The counselors had driven the two hours to meet the campers, who flew in pods from airports around the country to Grand Junction. Caleb stayed behind, because who would the kids want to see when they got off the bus? Caleb, of course.
He rolled up his sleeves, crouched, and then reached into the water to tie one end of the vine around a wheel that diverted water to a smaller drainage. He dropped the rest of the bindweed in the water, where it uncoiled, dancing and flailing in the current like a living thing.
Caleb wiped his hands on his pants and walked around the house to the swath of land between it and the parking lot. He’d named this “the Great Overlook” because it offered a harmonic sweep of the endless Dobies. His steps were wide with anticipation. Grasshoppers sprang out of his way. Pinyon jays shouted, Will you look at that? Willyou willyou? He looked down the road, but nothing was coming.
He waited until he saw it. The school bus caterpillering along the dirt road in a haze of dust. “Took you long enough,” he said aloud, although nobody was with him as he leaned forward on tiptoes.
The bus pulled up in front of the house and sighed as it stopped, a cloud of diesel. The first to step out were returning campers, clutching small boxes of juice. They looked around with unselfconscious grins. From where they stood, what could they see? The cement platform with nine picnic tables that he’d built off the back of the house, leading into the kitchen. The doors of the Talcs’ old barn, unable to close for a decade, swung wide. The teepee that Caleb had outfitted as a nurse’s station for sunburns and altitude sickness and cramps. A smidge of garden fence. The mountain above. He watched them scanning back and forth, looking for him, and he lifted both arms.
“Caleb! Caleb!” They ran toward him, these kids from Seattle, Scottsdale, Scarsdale, Amherst, Bethesda, Cambridge. They could see no other houses, no telephone poles, no Little League fields, no swimming pools. The nearest town was two sad blocks of boarded-up shops. They might as well have landed on the moon—except here was gravity, their feet pushing against the dirt as they ran.
He led them around to the front of the house, where there was a small lawn between the porch steps and the irrigation ditch. “Come on. Here we are. Here we are now.” It used to be dirt here, too, just hard earth and spiky plants, like everywhere else. Mustard grass, cheatgrass, peppergrass, those thorned, daggered plants that were completely misnamed—nothing like grass at all. But Caleb and Don Talc, his ranch manager, had irrigated and planted seed, and Caleb named the resultant green Suze’s Meadow. It was Suze who had always said that kids need a lawn, although she left before she ever saw it.
But he didn’t think about Suze now as he stood on her meadow. Or rather, he did, but only with a little zip of pride as he noted how little he was thinking of her these days.
Campers streamed in from the road, blinked against the glare, climbed over each other to sit beside friends. There were sixty-two of them, the largest group yet. A rush of kids on the mesa, a swarm of them, a flock. The youngest was seven; the oldest, seventeen. “Come sit. Come and sit,” he kept calling like a circus barker. He couldn’t contain his joy.
When all the kids and counselors were seated, he cupped his hands around his mouth. “Come on, Don, get over here. Come out, ladies. Charlene? Denise? You in there?” This was a cue, theatrical. The four kitchen ladies, with their curled hair and flowered aprons, trotted out of the house and down the porch steps, coming to a stop behind the last row of children; then Denise and the other laundry ladies join
ed the kitchen ladies. Caleb liked everything about these women from town, but especially their sartorial anachronisms—hair held up loosely by two combs; checked shirts tucked into high-waisted jeans; blue and green eyeshadow from lash to brow, shades of Dolly Parton. Looking at them, you’d never know it was 1990. Caleb could see Don, who’d been unloading luggage, walking in his uneven gait toward the Meadow. Everyone was here, and Caleb loved them all. He felt a fullness, which was also a calmness, a postadrenaline float of satiety.
“Over here, Don,” Caleb called, and Don swerved toward him, perhaps thinking that Caleb needed to give him some instruction. But Caleb, in a sudden impulse of happiness, draped his arm around Don’s shoulders. He could feel Don stiffen, the muscles tense and shift under his shirt, which was, despite small variations in shade and thickness of plaid, essentially the same shirt Caleb wore. They wore the same Carhartt pants, the same boots. Had he ever done that before—touched Don? He couldn’t remember a time. But it seemed the right way to begin this summer, a nod to the fact that it was just the two of them working up here all year—tall Caleb and slight Don, twenty years his senior, whose thin hair was the yellow of faded paper.
“Well, hello, everybody,” Caleb said, still with his arm around Don. “You’re not here for summer camp. You get that right? Maybe this morning, when you got dressed, you thought you were going to camp.” He paused. “Sorry. You’re here to take care of Llamalo.”
How relieved he was to be saying these words again.
Until they arrived, what was Caleb, really? A guy who’d moved to Colorado and bought a ranch—barn, winter corral, house with its back turned to the road, alfalfa fields gone feral and brown.
Until they arrived, Llamalo was simply a chassis—some wood, some dirt—and Caleb was nothing, just a man. He had nobody to whom he could point out the parabola of bird flight, nobody who needed to learn the word “junco,” nobody whose life he could strip bare of casual comforts, nobody whose mind he could blow. But now they were back, and Llamalo could become a tone, a muscle, the neuron path of memory, and Caleb could be what he was meant to be, the animating force.