The Optimistic Decade

by Heather Abel

  He was flicking the wheel faster. “I don’t know. I think it’ll be fun. Everyone’s psyched about the rally. Friends from my school are coming.”

  Were they? If girls who looked like Tate were psyched about the walkout, if you could know about nail polish and Nicaragua, if everyone understood all that the Silvers understood, then what would be left for Rebecca? “Well, I’m not going.”

  “Alright.” David shrugged. “So let’s explore.”

  She looked up from her book, and David was a lion, yellow and glorious.

  A crush could begin that suddenly; it could bubble up from dry ground. One day, there was nothing of note, just the sandy dirt of the desert West. And then the next, the ground was gooey, viscous, a trap.

  “There’s nowhere to explore,” she said and felt herself blushing.

  “Come on, Zoomy. This way.”

  She followed him through a toddler’s pink crepe-papered birthday party, toward Will Rogers’s ranch house, where people waited to use his toilet and see his spurs. They climbed over a white rope with a swinging no trespassing sign and walked around to the far side of the house, hidden from parental view. There was no lawn here, just dirt and a scallop of brown ivy against the wall.

  Boulders spilled steeply toward . . . well, toward what? Through a thicket of eucalyptus, she could only see dusk and its warnings.

  David rushed ahead, prancing rock to rock, but Rebecca froze on a boulder that was too far from the next. If she tried to leap this distance, surely her sandals would slip and she’d fall, slamming against rocks on her way to the ground. When David noticed her hesitate, he made his way back to her and stood on the rock she was aiming for. “You can jump,” he said, extending his hand toward her. “I’m here.”

  She reached out and held his warm hand. She smelled the gaminess of manure and saw eucalyptus leaves, slippery as waxed paper, blanketing the rock he was on.

  “Come on, chicken,” he said, tensing his grip. “Jump.”

  Yet instead of jumping, Rebecca jerked her arm toward herself, still holding him tightly, forcing him to lunge forward, stumble, and fall.

  The sigh of leaves and then silence, and then David screamed from the ground below.

  It was a moment she would mull over in the nights to come, although nobody would ever ask about it, not even David, who just said to his parents, “I slipped.” She’d pulled him to her, pulled him close. Hadn’t she cared that he would fall? How greedy that first bloom of desire.

  She ran to Ira, who called out to his friends for help, but there wasn’t a doctor among them; they’d all explicitly let their parents down. Joe, playing the part, inspected palms, rolled up David’s corduroys and checked for swelling. After prescribing aspirin, ice, and comic books, he carried David to the car. Georgia folded blankets. Ira flicked Rebecca’s shin, saying, “Pumpkin, if you really want to go to the rally, we can.”

  They sped east on Sunset, past restaurants they would never try. Billboards, skimming by like shuffled cards, advertised movies they would never see. There was a different Los Angeles outside the sun-streamed studios and frozen yogurt and Brentwood Country Mart and Pappagallo espadrilles and everything Rebecca heard about and didn’t understand. There was a true Los Angeles that only Rebecca and David knew, and it sang songs that would never become commercials. It sang, We shall not, we shall not be moved and We shall overcome. Deep in my heart, I do believe. This Los Angeles walked toward the disappointingly small crowd at the Century Plaza Hotel, a gathering which would never be documented, because there’d just been another shooting on the 405, and every news camera had been sent to cover that story instead. Rebecca pulled on her sweatshirt, because she knew that it was actually cold in this Los Angeles, that if she stood holding a placard and distributing newspapers on an August afternoon, the fog would roll in, and the sky, sand, and ocean would bleach the color of hard-boiled yolk, and how would she ever get warm?

  five

  Wolf

  It was the fourth full day of camp. The most fragile day of the summer. Like clockwork, kids complained of altitude headaches. A splinter the size of a tapestry needle threaded through a palm. A spider bit the soft epicanthic fold of a sleeping child, who woke screaming that she couldn’t open her eyes.

  Caleb spent the morning in the infirmary teepee, helping Nat apply iodine and pink calamine lotion. When Don peeked in—“Just looking for you . . .”—Caleb was holding his handkerchief to a bloody nose. “Not right now,” he said. In these early days of camp, they communicated largely through notes on yellow paper, tacked to the porch.

  Regardless of injury, all kids visiting the infirmary were given honey-and-lemon Popsicles for hydration. As they sat sucking, Caleb, cross-legged on the pile of rugs in the center of the teepee, brushed away mouse shit and told an apocryphal story about a baby wolf born in the Canadian Rockies. This wolf pup was descended from two wolves who escaped the high desert of western Colorado in the 1950s, when all American wolves were being systematically exterminated. (“What does that mean?” “Killed.” “Oh.”) Now this pup, Caleb said, had never seen Colorado, but somehow he dreamed of it every night. He dreamed of a wide plateau and a tall mountain with the white shape of an animal on its side. One night, when his mother and siblings were sleeping, curled up against each other, this pup took off. He headed south for five weeks, crossing the border when the immigration guards were eating lunch, and he stole their lunch and kept running. He ran through Montana and Wyoming. He spent all winter running.

  Here, Caleb drew out the suspense. The wolf was hungry. He grew skinny. He was stalked by hunters on foot and on ATVs and snowmobiles. The wilderness was interrupted by towns and cities and endless subdivisions, and the wolf had to sneak through them at night. Everyone who saw him attempted to shoot him. Caleb described the entire Missoula police force chasing him down Main Street in their cars, lights flashing. The kids listened dreamily, juice dripping on their hands.

  The story reached its denouement on a beautiful spring day as the wolf, no longer a baby, climbed over Escadom Mountain, smelled the sage and the rabbitbrush and knew he was home. That night, he looked for cover and found a cave at the foot of the mountain, not far from Llamalo. “Just over there,” Caleb said, pointing. Exactly the den his forewolves had lived in.

  “Is he still there?”

  “I’ve never seen him. But I think we could this summer. Maybe if we take a hike and get really, really quiet. You think you might want to do that with me?”

  All the injured kids nodded, and then Caleb left to check the answering machine in the office. Invariably, on the fourth day, parents left anxious messages. He called them back and reassured:

  She’s doing wonderfully. He’s settling in very well. She’s having a fabulous time. We could find a way for you to talk to him if you absolutely need to, but we really don’t recommend it. Phone calls really set us back. I hear you, I do, but there’s nothing to worry about. Sure, she’s made friends, plenty of friends. I’ll make sure he writes today.

  By the time Caleb finished, the campers had already eaten lunch and rested and hiked to the river. Heading across the alfalfa field to join them, he heard his name, the birdsong of this place.

  “Caleb? Caleb!” Too-wit, Too-wit!

  Don again, standing up from the lawn chair outside his trailer.

  “Right.” Caleb walked toward his ranch manager, grinning. “You were wanting something. I’m sweltering. Walk with me to the river and we can talk on the way. I need to jump in today.”

  Don looked away. “Have a few errands this afternoon. Thought you might want to come along.”

  Caleb stared at Don. Don knew that Caleb never left camp during the first days of summer, when it was up to him to untangle the thread so that it might unspool smoothly through the warming weeks of July and August.

  Don pursed his lips. “Thought we could catch up.”

  “Catch up?” They’d spent every day together for eight years, left notes like lovers.

>   Don looked pained to have to explicate. He cleared his throat, spit. “Something we might discuss best over errands.”

  This was so curious, so unlike him, that Caleb relented. “Okay, okay. We’ll go. But I have to be back by six at the latest. I’ll drive. Need gas anyway.”

  As they walked together to the parking lot, he wondered what Don might want to say in such privacy. It could only be money. After all these years, Don must want a raise.

  And could Caleb give him one? He had plenty of time to calculate finances, because Don didn’t speak as Caleb drove him the twenty-five minutes to Frank’s Farm and Feed, where they walked through the peeping chicks and scarlet-runner seedlings in cardboard boxes to find the yellow-and-green bottles of Roundup. Don remained silent for the fifty miles to Montrose, where he bought the de-wormer he couldn’t find at Frank’s. Before they headed back to camp, they stopped at a taco truck for dinner, and finally Don talked, but only about the counselors (he said they were a nice bunch, all in all) and the campers. And the weather, which was too dry even for July—fire weather. They talked about the sow Straw Bale, and whether the kids should be given the option to watch her butchering. Then they were droning northward through a white desert with the truck windows open, conversation impossible over the engine. Caleb thought about how the white flatness was not actually flat, the earth wearing away like skin cells under a microscope. Nor was it white, really, but the very lightest shade of every color as it bleached to white.

  By the time they entered the tiny valley town of Escadom, the last bit of sun was bouncing off windows and horse trailers, and Caleb was feeling tenderly toward Don, who was too proud to ask for a raise even after these hours alone together. To give him more time to speak, Caleb drove slowly along the two commercial blocks. Past the movie theater that had shut down eight years earlier, past the Mexican place that had shut down then as well, and all those restaurants that had closed before they’d even opened. Past the Motherlode, the only remaining dining establishment, where the only remaining residents, the coal miners or ranchers or grocery store owners who didn’t lose their jobs eight years ago, ate the steak-and-mash special or the chicken à la king and waited for the house band, Tammi’s band, to start up with “Islands in the Stream.”

  Sometimes, on Friday nights during the fall and winter and spring, Caleb and Don and Denise ate here as well, as a threesome, a family, greeting the rest of town. Hi. Hi. How’s it goin’? You get that truck on blocks yet? Caleb always went straight to the bar to buy the first round, in gratitude for letting him belong in a place where he should never belong. He’d bring Denise her white wine on ice, Don his Jack and Coke, and another for himself. Don and Denise always chose a table in the back, and with them, instead of Don’s son, Donnie, sat Caleb, a Swarthmore-educated atheist Jew from Cambridge and DC, like it was nothing.

  Of course he’d give him a raise. As soon as he asked.

  Caleb turned down Fourth, the town’s highest-numbered street, and both he and Don raised their right hands in greeting as they passed Donnie’s friends Craig and Travis, soldiers in the town’s endless war against mosquitoes, in a teal Chevrolet Silverado. From the truck bed, a contraption the size of a fire hydrant shot a white malathion fog into the evening like a traveling Milky Way.

  Should he bring up the subject himself? Say, after all these years, Don, we should reconsider your pay. Caleb picked up speed as he headed up P Road, which followed the river out of town. Clouds chased each other westward. A dog emerged from the cattails along the water. Two trucks were parked in front of the VFW, its POW flag always at half-mast. They were fifteen minutes from Llamalo when Don began tapping one finger against his right knee. “So, I’ll tell you about that visit I had with Donnie.”

  “Wow. Tell me! How’s Donnie?” This is what happened whenever Don mentioned his son—Caleb going overboard to pretend everything was copacetic.

  “His girlfriend’s nice. Marci. Pretty. I mean, exhausted as all hell when I saw her, the baby not yet three months.”

  “That’s great! Good for him.”

  “Apartment’s fine. Small. But it’ll do.”

  Two horses galloping, a roan stallion and a chestnut something, coming to a stop in unison, starting again. A small cluster of cottonwoods swaying to shade a house that long ago burned down. Could anything be better than right here?

  But Don kept tapping his Morse code on his knee. And then Caleb realized Don hadn’t wanted to talk about a raise at all. There was something he wanted to say about Donnie, and Caleb was going to have to draw it out of him.

  “And Donnie? He’s doing good?” Caleb turned onto Sorgers Road, which zigzagged up the side of the cliff.

  “Something came in the mail a couple days ago. For you. A letter from him. I’ll bring it by this evening. I wanted to give you a heads-up.”

  “Great! Wow. A letter. What about? I mean, if you know.” This was where the hairpin was, and although Caleb knew that, he took the turn too fast, sliding the two of them down the bench seat.

  Don winced. “He told me to talk to you. When I saw him. Back in March, he told me.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “You know Donnie. Can’t let it go.”

  He left Caleb to grope. “Let what go?”

  Don turned toward his window, and his voice became quieter. “Thought it was unfair in the way it happened. Thought you were taking advantage of us.”

  Caleb downshifted as the truck strained up the last switchback and tipped onto Aemon’s Mesa. The temperature dropped five degrees. Escadom Mountain seemed to grow as they approached it. A white gash on its side, which usually took on a mammalian aspect—sheep or elk or buffalo—looked simply blobby tonight. He turned the truck away from their only neighbors, the Sorgers, and it was impossible not to think—and to assume Don was thinking—about how Press Sorger had grown up with Don but hadn’t lost his ranch when Don had.

  Which wasn’t Caleb’s fault.

  Caleb glanced away from the road to look at Don, the back of his neck pink, with white trails where the skin had folded while burned by the sun.

  “But we all agreed. We agreed on it.” Caleb couldn’t keep his voice from wheedling. He was angry. What they were discussing wasn’t opinion; it was fact. He’d offered a price for the land, and they’d accepted. This was an irrelevant conversation, and Caleb missed his imagined discussion about the raise. The chance to say “Sure, Don. Of course I can. More than happy.”

  “Made me promise that I’d come back and tell you his position. I didn’t see the point. I told him, past is past, done is done. But you know Donnie. Can’t let things go easy. And now he’s sent this letter.”

  “But you’re saying you agree with me, right? I just want to be clear. We all agreed.”

  Don turned to Caleb, his face expressionless. “There’s an article I want you to read about thermoformed plastic lining. I cut it out for you.” He began to talk about seepage in the irrigation ditch, water loss, cracks in the clay, his usual concerns. Caleb couldn’t follow. Did Don agree with Caleb or not? Was there a schism in their friendship, a crack he hadn’t known about?

  But by the time they parked and parted—Don heading to his trailer, Caleb to the Gathering—he’d reevaluated. Clearly, it was a good sign that Don had told him about Donnie, an excellent sign even, a sign of their closeness. Don was confiding, seeking commiseration: My son, his sad delusions. Whatever was in that letter, Don didn’t believe in it. Past is past. Done is done. Water seeped through cracks in the clay ditch bottom, and that was all that mattered now.

  At the Gathering, he unlatched the cattle fence and saw everyone sitting there in the sunset of a campfire. Everything was fine this fourth day, this fragile day. Jeremy and Mikala faced the crowd with their guitars. Caleb scanned the heads for Kai. She hadn’t come to his yurt the night before, and he’d wondered what that meant. Had she not understood him? Could she be uninterested?

  He squeezed in beside her. Kai turned and smiled wit
h half her mouth. “Yello,” she said. Her finger brushed the back of his hand. Apparently, she had understood him the day before. She leaned forward until he could feel her breast press against his right arm. Caleb began to sing in a way that, he’d been told, sounded nothing like singing. He couldn’t carry a tune, but who cared? He shouted out the words he loved.

  “I’d fuck him.”

  That was Nat, whispering in Rebecca’s ear just as the wind shifted and carried the campfire’s smoke to them.

  “Caleb?” Rebecca had been watching across the fire as Caleb wove through the crowd, his tall body settling down beside Kai, which made sense.

  Nat laughed, a harsh little huh. “I mean, who wouldn’t? But apparently, you’re tagged the first day if it’s you. I mean, he’s nice to me and all. He likes me. I love him. At least you don’t have to deal with the rejection. Better to have Caleb as a cousin and not have to feel sad that you’re just not pretty enough.”

  Rebecca knew that this was her cue to say “No, you’re so pretty.” She wasn’t, but she was buxom and game, with a Ren Faire obsession that fit her looks. One could easily imagine her in a dirndl, waving a stein of beer.

  “Thanks, but, I’m no Kai apparently. Look at them.”

  “Well, then who?”

  “Who what?”

  “Who would you . . . you know?”

  Nat pointed a few rows in front of them. Rebecca hadn’t noticed David there, his arm reaching around Tanaya, who leaned against him. His back, which was all she could see of him, wasn’t unattractive, objectively. But this was bizarre. “David?”

  “I mean, look at the way he . . .” Nat laughed again. “You can tell he’s not a virgin. That hand!”

  How could Nat tell? What cues was Rebecca missing again? It was like in eighth grade, when she’d gone trick-or-treating as a sheep and the other girls had turned into sexy devils, sexy nurses, sexy animals. Rebecca had worn wool upon wool (this was the joke in her costume, a sheep dressed in Georgia’s wool sweaters), scratchy and stifling when the hot Santa Ana winds rushed in that evening, inducing the sexy kittens to peel off their black tights.