by Heather Abel
Rebecca wanted to put the plate on the coffee table and flee, but it was cluttered with back issues, a bulk-bin bag of walnuts split down the side and spilling, an empty bottle of scotch, a sweating metal bowl of melting ice cubes. Georgia was doodling curlicues over last week’s masthead. Ira, regal in the rocking chair, pushed himself forward and back with his bare toes while talking, ignoring Judy. This way. They’d do it this way.
When he finished, Georgia pointed at Rebecca, still standing with the plate. “What’s all over the cookies?”
“Cinnamon, duh,” Rebecca said. “A brown powder we use on desserts. Ever heard of it?”
“What for?” Judy asked.
“For congratulations.”
Ira beckoned. “Let me have one.”
She leaned against the wooden chair as her father examined, chose, and bit, puffing a cloud of cinnamon. Crumbs rested in the nest of his beard.
For once, it was like she’d imagined it would be. The others cooed: “For congratulations.” “That’s very pretty, Rebecca,” Georgia said. “Bring me one, sweetie.” “Perfect,” Ira said, finishing his and looking at her in such a way that Rebecca knew she was forgiven. “That was simply perfect.” And it was.
Until Ira broke the mood, saying to all those chewing, “You know, we’re only happy because we’re right. We have to admit we didn’t make it any better for anyone. We didn’t warn anyone.” His rocking resumed. “All those without a job are just as screwed as they’d have been if we didn’t write a fucking sentence. Okay, take the cookies away, we can stop patting ourselves on the back now.” He was right, of course. This was no cause for celebration.
Returning ashamedly to the kitchen, she beheld a miracle out the sliding glass door: smoke rising from the pink bugle of a hibiscus flower. She yanked the door in a hurry to investigate, imagining herself, as she so often did even under less exigent circumstances, dousing a fire that was already consuming the walls of the garage, saving the Silvers’ most precious possession. Oh, Rebecca. Thank you, Rebecca. Did you hear what Rebecca . . . ? But once on the porch, she saw that, as with most miracles, there was a prosaic explanation. One of the Silvers’ coffee mugs had been left behind in the planter, two lit cigarettes inside.
Pausing in disappointment, she heard a bird call. Like a mourning dove but more guttural. A cat in pain—its foot trapped? She followed the sound and saw, on the parched grass between the plum tree and the line of bamboo, Joe. David’s father, lying down. Such a nice man; he’d taught them gin rummy, which had proved a very useful skill, and bought her hot chocolate from a vending machine at the air traffic controllers’ picket line. And yet he was squirming atop an intern.
Later that night, when she closed her eyes and imagined David taking her to Mississippi, he pinned her down right on the dirt. She could barely breathe with him falling on her like that.
He came to her like that night after night for the rest of the year. Even when she started junior high, with all of its wartime distractions, he came to her. Even though he stopped tagging along to her house, because he was old enough to stay home alone, he came to her. Even when his mom sat at their kitchen table and cried, he came to her. Even when Rebecca began eighth grade, with its concomitant requirement to repeatedly announce one’s object of attraction, he came to her. His name was the name she offered, the name she wrote on her notebook. David Cohen. Who? Goes to John Muir. Oh, Muir—cool.
The crush was fed by nothing; it was a desert plant in the rainless West. Because they never played together after the day at Will Rogers, the day she’d pulled him down the boulder. Or, if it could be called playing, after the evening he’d removed her rubber bands, one by one. And the night of the meeting—the victory party that wasn’t victorious—was one of the last times they’d even talked. Iron Man? he’d said.
Then, one blue-sky Saturday when she was fourteen, she was walking on the wooden planks of the Santa Monica Pier, and she spotted him inside the dim, thrumming arcade. She hadn’t seen him in ages, but she was sure it was him in the blue sweatshirt and blue Vans. She dragged her two friends with her, their frozen yogurts dripping. “David. David,” she called. When they reached him, in front of the Skee-Ball machines’ flashing lights, he didn’t seem to recognize her. He squinted, extended one hand slowly to touch the wooden paddle in her yogurt, and ran off without saying anything. Her friends, conscientious girls, giggled nervously. That’s David? Like, who you always talk about? That’s seriously your crush?
He never came to her again. Without its defenders, Unionionion fell, becoming a town like all others, scabs slobbering for jobs.
seven
In the Beginning, There Was the Myth
Standing in the Dobies, watching his campers hike past, Caleb wanted to stop time, to make every day of the year this day, this moment, this long twilight in the midpoint of the summer.
Toward the front of the procession, a group of girls were looking for a hard-headed woman.
Farther back, morning had broken, like the first morning.
Then, a patch of little girls not singing. Because what if you could put one of those moving sidewalks that you have in an airport and you’d never have to hike again. Or a ski-lift type thing.
Somewhere near the middle of the procession, ten-year-olds of both genders were being followed by a moonshadow.
A long stretch of nobody, and then the voices of the oldest boys, followed by the boys themselves, David and friends in high spirits, screaming rather than singing, “How can I try to explain, when I do he turns away again.” They waved at Caleb without breaking stride.
It was 1982 Night, a celebration he’d created in 1985. At the time, three years had seemed a long enough stretch. Llamalo’s founding was ripe for commemoration. The way Caleb decided to celebrate then had become, in the way of all rituals, how they’d celebrated since. The first 1982 Night had been on the twenty-third day of camp. And while this date was chosen for no meaningful reason, now they always observed 1982 Night on the twenty-third day of camp. That first 1982 Night, they’d eaten a bagged dinner out in the Dobies, so now they always ate a bagged dinner in the Dobies, where it was so stark and hot and the high desert so unending that some teenager would always try out a newly learned word: “postapocalyptic.” That first year, Caleb planned for the entire camp to sleep in the Dobies, but one girl forgot to bring her sleeping bag, and Caleb had decided that they would all return to Llamalo and sleep on the Great Overlook instead. Now, of course, they always slept on the Great Overlook. That first year, Caleb woke at dawn, unable to fall back asleep, and he decided to wake the whole camp. In the dim, he told the story of how he found Llamalo. Or not the story exactly, but the story he’d created on the spot.
Tonight was the sixth 1982 Night. Dinner was done. Its refuse was packed in Caleb’s backpack. He was standing to the side of the trail that a group of campers had constructed over the previous days, marking its circuitous route with cairns. He would bring up the rear to make sure nobody became lost out here.
Most kids and counselors waved to him and kept going, but when Scott saw Caleb, he stopped close, his own need for personal space nonexistent. “I totally forgot. Don was looking for you earlier today. Gave me this for you.” From the grungy pocket of Scott’s famously unwashed jeans came a folded but pristine white envelope.
Caleb held one edge of the envelope, the paper flopping down like a shot bird. No return address, but the same postmark as the letter he’d received three weeks earlier, the letter he’d thrown away and, until this moment, forgotten: Quartzite, NM. Of all the nights, really, for this to arrive. Even if it had come in the mail today, Don should have had the decency to hold on to it until tomorrow. Caleb tore the paper just as a trio of older girls approached behind him.
“Ca-leb.” The half-whine, half-flirt mew of a fourteen-year-old. “We need to talk to you.”
His finger still in the envelope. “Great. I’d love to. But it’s 1982 Night. Everyone’s on the way to the Overlook.
Why don’t you catch up?”
“It’ll be so quick.” Tanaya nudged Nicole with her hip. “Tell him.”
“We have this thing. Okay, it’s not a thing.” Nicole giggled. “It’s a performance thing we do?”
“A lot.” Shauna shook her head wearily.
He slipped the envelope into his pocket. He was surprised at how much the three girls annoyed him. He could love all the kids—the farters, the bullies, the whiners, the hitters—but he found it impossible to love girls most similar to those who’d ignored him in his own high school.
“A ton of times. First at the youth group, then at the regional, then at—”
“Temple Beth El Home for the Elderly,” Shauna said.
“And that other old people’s home? The one with the soft-serve?” Tanaya said.
“I’m getting to that.” Nicole was self-assured in a way she hadn’t been last year. Like her friends, she parted her long dark hair far to one side, her head perpetually tilted as if from the asymmetrical weight. “Basically, we performed it everywhere in Saint Paul and some other cities, too. So, we want to perform it here?”
Caleb realized this was a question. Everything she said had a teenage interrogative inflection, but this was an actual question. “But what is it?”
“Tell him.” Tanaya shoved Nicole again. They were all of them so twitchy, thrusting out their chests, jiggling their legs, pushing up on tiptoe.
“Okay, so, it’s this man who wants everything to be the old way, and his daughters don’t. He has three daughters, see, just like us. Three. And their names are—”
“I’m Tzeitel. Oldest and wisest,” said Shauna.
Nicole spread her arms, blocking Shauna. “And then there’s the middle daughter, and her name is Hodel, and that’s me, and then there’s—”
“Chava.” Tanaya spun around. “I’m the youngest and most beautiful. Duh.” Already at fourteen, she had the sorrowful, agitated look of women who choose not to eat.
“You want to perform Fiddler on the Roof? Here?”
Shauna blinked at him. “Not the whole show. It’s like a medley. Like, we’ll make a set. And get this, we brought our costumes. I mean, you’re Jewish, right?”
“That’s not even . . .” So tenuous was his relationship to his inherited religion that he couldn’t finish the sentence.
Tanaya grabbed his arm. “We’ll do it at the talent show. Please, Caleb, please?”
“There’s no talent show here,” Nicole confessed to the ground.
“God, what camp doesn’t have a talent show? I’m beginning to think we walked into a freak camp,” said Tanaya, releasing Caleb. Nicole scratched her shin guiltily.
He looked down at their small, sarcastic faces. He knew what to do. He needed to soften toward them, to detect the wanting beneath all that twitching, to love. First he should crouch, because kids act differently if they’re not looking up at you. Then he should say, “So, Fiddler. It’s a good story, a timeless story. Tell me what you like about it.”
But instead: “Are you out of your minds? You heard Nicole. We don’t have performances here. Not what we do. What we do is this.” He pointed. “See them hiking—that’s what we do. That’s what kind of a camp you ended up at. Come on, you’ve fallen behind.”
They followed along the trail, chastened into silence. He blamed them for making him act like an asshole, even as he knew it wasn’t their fault but the fault of the envelope in his pocket, that crinkle of paper beneath denim, the fault of Don, who was too cowardly to bring the letter to Caleb himself, the fault of Donnie and whatever idea had lodged in his head.
By the time they reached the Great Overlook, it was dusk, and then, after they laid out the foam pads and sleeping bags, dark. He couldn’t read the letter now. It was his own rule that nobody could use flashlights on 1982 Night. Scott lit the fire as Mikala distributed graham crackers in waxed sleeves and counselors led kids away to pee.
Once the fire was underway, Caleb took a few steps from the campout, and then he stopped. He had to be careful. Anything added to this night could become ritual. Scott’s fucking bongos, for example. But what was he thinking? That he’d be stuck, year after year, sneaking off to read yet another letter from Donnie?
He made his way to the house, which was darker than the sky, reaching for the banister to the porch steps. The windows of his office faced the barn, not the Overlook, and so on this night of no lights, he could switch on the overhead without being found out. He tugged the paper from its sheath. This letter was shorter than the last. No salutation, just:
I know what you did 8 years ago. I have proof now.
If you do not give me back my land I will find a way to get it.
This is happening all over The West. Look at Elko. Read from
Take Back Our Land by Lawyer Hobart R Billings Esquire.
The Sagebrush Rebellion Lives On. The West Is not For Tourism and Enviro-Nazis. The West is for the Working people who understand it and who made it what it is. It’s NOT your playground.
Oh, come on. What had he done? He’d been lucky, sure, but that’s all. He’d done nothing illegal. He drummed his fingers against the metal desk then balled up letter and envelope and tossed both in the trash can underneath the desk, the paper falling with a puff.
A drink wasn’t possible tonight with all of them sleeping outside. But he couldn’t just sit here and he couldn’t go back yet. He yanked open the window so that the pane would stop reflecting the room. Through the screen was nothing, blackness, a plonk, a creak. He reached across the desk for the phone and picked up the receiver with a little shake of his head, as if admonishing someone else: Oh, Caleb, not again. His desperation was humiliating. He wouldn’t be doing this if he could fuck Kai tonight.
The female voice was bored and loud, from another world. “Operator. Can I help you?”
“Spokane,” he whispered, pressing the receiver against his shoulder.
“What?”
“Spokane.”
“Business or residence?”
“Residence. The name is Guenther. G as in ‘giraffe.’ U as in ‘unicorn.’ E like ‘ear’ . . .”
In years past, he’d tried Portland, Lander, Flagstaff, Denver, Taos, Missoula, etc.
“You have a first initial?”
For a while, after she’d left him for Steve in Crested Butte, some counselors still saw her and brought back pieces of information that Caleb ruminated on until they were wrung out and offered up no more fodder for supposition or fantasy: She’d left Steve for Greg. She’d left Greg. She’d left Crested Butte. But since then, everyone had lost touch with her. She’d always said she would grow old in a shack near the tallest mountain imaginable, owning nothing but a toothbrush. But he’d called every Western town and never found her.
“S.”
It wasn’t even just her anymore, but an entire orbit of associations, any of which triggered an almost enjoyable longing. Or not longing exactly. He felt instead like he was waiting. The amount of time he devoted to thinking of her seemed to mean something, as if he were doing the necessary and generative work of hurrying along her return. Campfire songs were about her. The lawn was for her. Not only was blonde hair Suze, but so was anything yellow. And the letter S. It had been five years. How could he tell anyone that? The letter S.
“Did you say F as in ‘Frank’?”
“No. S. S as in ‘Suze.’ ”
“Nobody here by that name.”
Back at the Overlook, no time seemed to have passed. When he returned to the encampment and found a seat by Kai, the kids were still eating graham crackers and singing either the same song they’d been singing when he left or one that sounded the same: too many verses, animals of various sorts acting violently, erratically, bumblebees eating other insects, a wedding gone horribly wrong and everyone dead in the end.
If you saw the Great Overlook in the middle of the night, David thought, it would resemble a battlefield in the gory after-hours. Seventy-one bodies scatte
rshot, this way and that, curled, stretched, stricken.
He’d woken to find that the fire, which had been burning when they all fell asleep, was now extinguished. Caleb, ever careful, must have soaked and stirred and soaked again. There was no moon. And so, as David lay on the ground, the stars were all around, doming down upon him, pulsing, and even though he was doing the watching, he felt himself beheld by them. Through their eyes, he was shape-shifting. One moment, he felt enormous and important, and the next, infinitesimal and anonymous—back and forth like this.
A light flashed on, a little bling, a mislaid star. It jiggled around, then lowered to the ground, where it illuminated its owner. Rebecca was shimmying out of her sleeping bag. Stepping into boots. Now the light wove between bodies to the road and bobbed slowly away.
All summer, communiqués had arrived: Tanaya liked him. But Tanaya was young, another camper. She wasn’t interesting. What was interesting was the way Rebecca looked at him, the way she watched him; she was always watching him. That was a surprise. Only Rebecca made him nervous. When he met her gaze, he was on the verge of remembering something. The only adjective he could think of for her was “Rebecca.” The color of her eyes was Rebecca.
The light stopped moving and flicked off. He knew she was crouching, panties pushed down. The splatter of pee on hard earth. It was enough to turn him on. When the light sparked on again and began bobbing back down the road, he climbed out of his own bag, stepped into his Vans. He didn’t bring his flashlight.
On the road, he felt light pierce his eyes. “Hello?” she whispered. “Hello?”
He shielded his eyes with one hand. “Jesus, can you—?”