The Optimistic Decade

by Heather Abel

  “Hello?”

  “Just me. David.” The light swooped onto the ground, so he entered and left its spotlight as he walked toward her.

  “Fuck. I thought maybe . . . like a mountain lion. Your eyes looked red.”

  “Yeah, when you shine directly on them. Here can I see that?”

  “Why?” But she handed him the plastic flashlight.

  With his thumb, he flicked it off. They both disappeared, but the stars came back. “You’ll actually see better without it.”

  He had no saliva. Could he even kiss with no saliva? He wasn’t usually this nervous to initiate, at least not here, the only place where he’d ever initiated. Of all the people in the world to kiss, though. Rebecca? He hadn’t thought of her in years, except as someone his parents wished him to emulate. But here she was, with all the force she’d had as a girl. He wanted to be next to that again.

  She sighed. “That’s exactly the kind of counterintuitive thing everyone says here. But you know what’s great for seeing? Electricity. Edison’s finest. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

  She was the one who was always watching him. So why didn’t she, with all her collegiate wisdom, make the first move? Here I am, Rebecca.

  “Well?” she said. “What?”

  Almost like an invitation.

  With his free hand, he reached for her arm. Found a hank of sweatshirt and held on to it. He banged his lips on the top of her head. Then his cheek brushed against her nose. Finally, his mouth on hers. He’d expected her to do something, but all he could feel was the air from her surprised exhalation moving into his mouth.

  She pulled away. “I have to go.” She turned on her light, sprinted down the road.

  So he’d misread the situation. Who cared. Who gave a flying fuck. There was Tanaya; there was every other girl here.

  But he felt surprisingly crushed. Only Rebecca, after all, had hair the color Rebecca.

  There were bongos in her dream of David.

  Rebecca woke, but unfortunately the bongos remained. She felt the embarrassment she always felt upon hearing bongos. A beat trying too earnestly to be liked. Sitting up, she pulled her sleeping bag to her shoulders. It was a murky light, not black, not yet dawn. The cold air smelled of smoke and dust. The only movements, human or animal, were Caleb crouching before last night’s fire and Scott whacking on a duo of drums, head bowed and bobbing, as seemed required of bongo players. Boom boom. Look at. Me now. So cool.

  Around her were chrysalises. Red, yellow, pink, and Power Ranger – print cocoons. She watched as the bongos insisted their way into everyone’s dreams, and the cocoons began twitching to life beneath the sky, which was now thick and gray, like cat fur. Shadow shapes of sagebrush thrashed about.

  And then she remembered. It had taken place in the dark, which made it feel like it had never happened. But she had a tactile memory: his lips dry as paper. Rebecca had gone from being someone who had never kissed, could never kiss, to someone who had. Earth was a malleable, windy place.

  For the first time here, she liked everything she saw. A scrim had been lifted from her eyes, except she was still Rebecca, so what she liked wasn’t the beauty. Liking the ugliness involved a type of morality that she was very familiar with, and so she noticed happily how weird and stark Llamalo was, an ugly dreamscape. She suddenly wanted it even more isolated, more benighted, but she felt satisfied that it was, as is, quite isolated, quite ugly.

  The way the camp awoke was dreamlike, too. All these kids, and nobody fucked up by talking. They were whispering, sure, and reminding each other with animated gestures that they weren’t allowed to talk, but they all followed the instruction given the night before, which was to put on their shoes and walk silently to Caleb.

  She joined the crowd around the reignited fire, scanning for David, and when she saw the back of him, those whorls of bedhead, she willed him to turn around and look at her. She could nearly feel the jolt that would bring. Scott finished in a rapid crescendo and then sprung his palms from the drumheads. Caleb stood, his face crinkling handsomely into a smile. “I’m going to tell you about the first time I came here. How I discovered Llamalo. How I found the Double L and turned it into Llamalo. In the beginning . . .”

  He paused, and everyone laughed.

  “In the beginning,” he began again, theatrically. More laughter. “In the beginning,” he said once more, “there was just me. And my truck. You know my truck, don’t you? She’s old now, so try to imagine her younger, spry.”

  And then he stopped. He was looking at something beyond them, and Rebecca turned to see a man approaching.

  Don stopped just outside of the group, like Caleb’s shadow. The two of them, dressed so alike, were the only ones standing. Don removed his hat as if this were a church, and held it with both hands in front of him, elevating the event’s solemnity.

  Caleb pulled down the brim of his own hat and began again. “You know my truck.” Now unsmiling, he looked nearly put-upon, as if they’d dragged him out of bed before dawn and forced him to speak to them.

  “Well, I’d been driving around by myself for a while, just exploring, and I turned down that road.” He pointed and seemed to regain some enthusiasm. “I saw the mountain, this mountain, and this stretch of land, and boom!” He clapped his hands, and Rebecca startled. “It was that sudden. I felt a pulse. I knew I couldn’t leave. It was like I’d been led here, like I was supposed to find this land. I knew that I could never go back to San Francisco, where I’d been living after college. My life there . . . Well, all at once, it didn’t mean anything to me. I parked right here, exactly where we’re sitting.”

  He paused again for a long time, and Rebecca worried that he’d forgotten what happened next in his story.

  Mikala called out, “So what I did was, I tracked down the owner . . .”

  Caleb glanced down, seeming to notice them again. It was a relief when he resumed talking. “Right. So what I did was, I tracked down the owner, one of the two owners. I started talking to him—his name’s Donnie. Our friend Don’s son. And I found out that he was in trouble, serious trouble. The family was in trouble. See, a developer wanted to buy this place, chopping up everything you see here and paving it over for a condo development. Can you imagine? Well, the Talcs couldn’t afford to stay, but naturally they couldn’t bear to see this land destroyed. And they were devastated at the prospect of moving away from the land they’d grown up on. I knew right then that I had to help them.”

  Rebecca looked over at Don. Her familial education had been in discernment. She knew which stories were worthy of emotional attention and which weren’t. She knew to be moved by narratives about the poorest, the neglected, victims of systemic prejudice. How many times had she read about Sadako, the girl who died of leukemia after Hiroshima? That book about Manzanar? Chavez’s biography? She knew to be skeptical of self-satisfaction, the smug charity of the privileged. There was only one bumper sticker Georgia had ever approved of, all others dismissed as trite, simplistic, dim-witted: if you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention. Rebecca and her parents were always paying attention.

  Although now she wasn’t, actually. Thoughts of her parents had aroused a distracting guilt. They’d considerately sent her the most recent OSN, which had arrived like their miniature selves in her mailbox three days ago, and while she had meant to read it each rest hour, she hadn’t even unfolded it. Caleb had told her that her mother had called twice, but Rebecca couldn’t call back until she’d at least skimmed the cover story and found something to say about it.

  When she returned her attention to Caleb, he was saying, “And then Donnie said to me, ‘Caleb, all my dad and I want is for our land to be saved. We don’t need to ranch here anymore, but we want the land to remain. For nothing to be built on it. No asphalt. No condos. Just as my great-grandpa Aemon found it. I’d be thrilled if you could help us out. I’d be thrilled if you took care of this land next, but it’s a lot of work. It’s difficult land, dry land.’ I tol
d him I could do it, but I knew I needed help. So I invited you. I planned a summer camp, and I sent out the letters. It was that urgent. And amazingly, you responded. Year after year, you’ve responded. This is why you’re here. To help me save this land. To save Llamalo.”

  Rebecca turned again to look at Don. His expression was as serious as always, but clearly, she thought, he must be pleased: his land saved. She wanted Georgia and Ira to hear this, to ask them, don’t you feel moved by this small unsystemic act? In first grade, she’d come home singing “America the Beautiful” and Ira had raged—genocide, whitewashing, separation of church and state—but Georgia had said, “Still, it is a beautiful song,” and she’d sat with Rebecca at the kitchen table and sang it through, even the tricky second verse. America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw.

  “Why’s it called Llamalo?” David shouted this out, and she bit her lip to keep from smiling at the sound of his voice.

  “Llamalo?” Caleb answered.

  “No, really, why?”

  “Llamalo.”

  Caleb raised his arms and widened his eyes with exaggerated ingenuousness. Everyone laughed, and Rebecca realized that the whole exchange was performance, ritual, because they all knew that llamalo was Hebrew, and it meant “why not.”

  Caleb pulled a folder full of loose yellow papers from his backpack and called out each camper’s name in turn. The papers had a sentence or two of commendation and then an assignment: i know that you’re ready to take care of _________.

  Morning slop bucket to the pigs or weeding the sugar snaps—something a kid could do without adult supervision from this day until the end of camp. As the campers stepped forward, the sun pushed its way over Escadom Mountain, and Rebecca’s sweatshirt was suddenly too heavy. Birds swooped in, small and black, shouting Will you? Willyou willyou? as if surprised anew that the sun, the glorious sun, was returning again. She watched the birds skim over the sleeping bags on their way to the irrigation ditch, because they could, because the ranch remained. No asphalt, no condos.

  Once all the letters were distributed, everyone was free to speak and head to the eating platform, where the kitchen ladies, who had arrived two hours earlier and parked on the road near Don’s trailer so as not to disturb the ritual, were working in dimmed lights. But the campers didn’t talk, not much, just smiled at each other and clutched their letters, and she understood the desire to hold on to the heady feeling.

  David walked by without a glance in her direction. She took her time stuffing her sleeping bag, even though all the others were left curled like spent firework casings. She was thinking about a story. Two childhood companions who knew each other best. A separation and then, amazingly, a coming back together. She’d tell her friends, “It was as if fated.”

  When she arrived at breakfast, though, David stood talking to Tanaya. She called his name. As if he didn’t hear, he turned his back to her and took his assigned seat.

  Rebecca sat before a spread of oatmeal steaming in aluminum pots, boxes of Barbara’s Corn Flakes, milk in enamel pitchers, yellow jackets plunging into bowls of canned peaches in syrup. Next to her, thirteen-year-old Patrick said, “This morning was totally awesome, wasn’t it?”

  But the day had lost its dazzle. She shrugged. “Bongos? I hate them. Everywhere I go, I hear them. Every single rally has these dumb drum circles, and then outside my dorm window. It’s hard to take anything seriously that has bongos.”

  Patrick looked down at the yellow paper in his hand. He folded the paper again and again until it was hard and small. “Oh, well, I kind of liked it.”

  “Hey! So you joined us this morning. Nice! Total surprise, though,” Caleb said. On his way to the house to look for the gold-panning sifters, he’d stopped short when he’d seen Don moving irrigation pipe on the Meadow.

  A muscle in Don’s cheek twitched. “I’d been hearing about it for so long, thought I’d see.”

  “It’s just a . . .” Caleb grinned and raised his hands in mock surrender. “Oh, you know. It gets them going. Makes them feel committed.”

  Don nodded. “Is that so? A story like that?”

  “The letters, though. Donnie’s letters . . .” Caleb trailed off with a shrug of false cheeriness, as if talking about a shared annoyance: heat, drought. His heart was thumping with the mad hope that Don might trivialize his own son’s ranting.

  “Well, I guess . . .” Don looked around. “I guess you’re Caleb. You figure everything out. So you’ll figure this one out.”

  Caleb climbed the porch stairs with an enraged vigor. Sure, he hadn’t told the truth this morning, but the myth stood in for the truth, which was all anyone wanted anyway. He knew that Don didn’t traffic in myths, but clearly he might see their utility over the muddy truth. How much imagination did that take?

  Half of what Caleb did as a director was incantation, recitation. Half of what he did was ritual: Platform Night, River Night, Taco Night, 1982 Night. This is how you make a trail. You walk the same path over and over. They were stacking cairns, walking a path again and again until it seemed like it had always existed.

  Caleb burst in on his office, forgetting that he’d asked the girl from town, a Jehovah’s Witness with a sneaker-length skirt, to do the billing. She sat at the desk surrounded by soft piles of invoices. Startled, she began neatening the pages.

  He found the sifters in a box labeled tuna salad, but he didn’t leave. “Can you just give me a minute?” he asked, annoyed at her presence, although he had no real purpose in the office.

  “Should I wait downstairs?” She stood, taking a few steps toward the door.

  “Great. That’s perfect.” Heading the other way around the desk, he dropped the sifters with a clatter and picked up the phone in a show of urgency.

  She hesitated. “In the living room?”

  The dial tone was loud in his ear. “Sure, or the kitchen. Wherever.”

  He depressed the zero button. Nothing, zip, help.

  Still she wouldn’t leave. From the doorway, she asked. “Do I take this off my time? You want me to stay later?”

  A pearly voice said, “Operator. Can I help you?”

  “Denver.” He palmed the receiver. “No need to stay late.”

  “What’s the name?”

  He waited to speak until the girl had finally left the room, as if she’d discern the foolishness in this attempt. “Guenther. Suze Guenther.” He tried Boise, then Bozeman.

  As the operator was searching her Montana database, Caleb heard the dolphin noises of kids out his open window and swiveled in his chair to watch. Nicole and Shauna were emerging from the barn, each holding one handle of a wheelbarrow. Behind them came Rebecca. To see better, Caleb pushed the daisy curtain aside. And it wasn’t Rebecca out there at all; it was his dad. Robbie. Dark eyes, strong eyebrows, that dissatisfied twist of mouth.

  He pressed his forehead against the screen. He’d seen the resemblance before, but never this strongly. Like his dad was here.

  “Sorry, no Guenther there. Anything else I can help you with?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe San Francisco?” He knew Suze would never live in a city, but he was rattled.

  He saw David crossing the footbridge, something flashing in his hand. Nicole and Shauna dropped the wheelbarrow, raked fingers through their hair. “Hey, Da-vid, whatcha doing?”

  David swerved around them with a smile and a wave, but he stopped right in front of Rebecca.

  “First initial S?”

  “Yeah.”

  It annoyed him afresh how sullen Rebecca was here. How she always looked blank or skeptical. Couldn’t she try to be happy here and show him Robbie like that?

  “Please hold for your number.”

  Caleb swung away from the window.

  “It’s mullein,” David said. He set the jar he was carrying on the ground and leaned forward to pick the leaf from Rebecca’s fingers. She liked the concavity of his chest, the way his shirt hung.

  “Alright.”

&nbs
p; “You can use it as teepee.”

  “Teepee?

  “To wipe your ass. It’s soft.”

  “Oh, TP. Well, we’re just collecting leaves for sachets.” What a ridiculous word to say out loud. She studied Spanish, not French, the language of the oppressed, not just the oppressors. It sounded wrong. Sashay, like the dance move? Shimmy-shimmy? How did one go from talking to kissing anyway? His mouth looked faraway and utilitarian. She couldn’t reach it.

  To make matters worse, he started to back away, rubbing a rash just above the neckline of his shirt. “Look, I didn’t mean anything last night. Shit, Rebecca, I’m really sorry.”

  “Sorry?” She had to go home. She’d give Caleb any excuse, although the emergency would need to be of a certain magnitude. She’d take the risk—or Georgia would—of cancer, breast, ovarian, lung.

  “It seemed like you, you know, weren’t that into it? You kind of, well, you ran away.”

  “It was the middle of the night! Anyone could have seen!” Although these statements contradicted each other, her chest tensed with outrage. She could remember bickering over the rules of Unionionion. The whole point of the game was the people united, but someone did have to be in charge.

  “You ran away because it was the middle of the night?”

  Well, no. She’d run because she needed to be alone in order to contemplate the implications of having kissed. And she’d run because, stricken with an admixture of embarrassment and elation, she hadn’t known what else one did next.

  “The whole camp was nearby. Anyone could’ve seen.” Her hands were on her hips; she was ready. She would argue until it was clear that only she should lead the leaderless collective.

  “So perhaps we’re in need of some clarification. Maybe come to some agreement of the basic principles?”

  “Principles?” Without a fight, she was at a loss.

  “Well, firstly, I was wanting to kiss you. And secondarily, you were also wanting to kiss me. All who agree say aye.”

  Admiring the arrow of his mouth, that borrowed adult nose, and the flush on his cheeks, she wanted to say aye, but, still pugnacious, she said, “Wait.”