The Optimistic Decade

by Heather Abel

  Which hadn’t exactly happened yet.

  Still, as he walked northward, he began to imagine that Donnie was beside him in the ditch, holding the propane tank and blasting the brush behind them in order to char it into oblivion. He imagined himself saying, “Hey, can I have a turn?”

  And Donnie would look up, wary at first, but then relieved. “Sure. If you want. Come on in.”

  They’d walk together, devastation behind them.

  Caleb glanced at his watch and knew that they’d be arriving soon and that he should turn around, this doubling back always accompanied by a slight sadness, the walk no longer full of possibility, the immeasurability of scale out here suddenly measurable simply by the distance he’d traveled. As he turned around, he imagined saying to Donnie, “We just leave it like this?” This would allow Donnie to resume his proud didacticism of last fall. “Shit, we got a lot to teach you. We gotta make sure the fire’s out.” And then the two of them would begin stomping on the little licks of flames.

  Once he passed the Sorgers’ land and could see the ranch house, Caleb pursued a few more plot points of the fantasy, but it was too late; the dream was dissolving. Even so, the aura of resumed friendship remained. He understood this wouldn’t happen immediately, but surely over time.

  When the Talcs drove up, the car coming to a stop beside the house, Caleb had already leapt forward months to a time of forgiveness. He pulled a folded yellow sheet from his pocket, pretended to peruse a list. “So, where to start today? I was thinking maybe burn the ditch?”

  “Tryna kill us,” Donnie said to his dad. “Tryna scorch the mesa.”

  Don jutted his chin in the direction of the mountain. “Windy as fuck.” He took the list from Caleb. “Okay, so for the lumber for the platforms, you thinking pressure-treated?”

  “Can you lay out the pros and cons?” With embarrassment, Caleb noticed the wind he’d somehow missed before, dirt swirling in furious little ellipses, grit crunching in his teeth.

  Donnie assessed him flatly. “Your decision, not ours.”

  It was a few days later when, returning from town, Caleb drove onto the plateau and saw a length of the ditch smoldering, a freight train of smoke, steel gray and moving. Donnie had set fire to it without him.

  Over the next few weeks, the Double L became Llamalo, wooden platforms and the shower house rising up on the dead field as spring unfurled around them. Because the buildings were deliberately rudimentary and unfinished—Caleb specified that the least amount of material should intrude on the kids’ experience of nature—they looked like ruins. They looked, more specifically, like the riverside camps set up during the oil shale boom and abandoned after the bust. Caleb loved it. He hiked the back route on Escadom Mountain to see the newborn green of aspen daggers, snapping stalks of wild asparagus along the ditch and leaving them as offerings on Donnie’s Trans Am.

  There was no dampening his optimism until one afternoon when he was on the porch and Donnie appeared, cradling his right hand, a seam of blood across his palm. Neither of the Talcs had entered the house since the land sale, but without looking at Caleb, he pushed the door with his left hand. Caleb followed Donnie into the house after a few minutes, and Donnie’s presence made Caleb feel like a guest, like he was seeing it for the first time. He noticed the wood paneling again, the plaid curtains, the smell of bacon grease and generations of cigarettes. There was a dot-to-dot of blood along the living room carpet, up the carpeted stairs.

  Near the top of the stairs, Caleb could see Donnie in the upstairs hallway. He’d wrapped his palm with gauze and was looking in the open door of his old bedroom. Caleb had been using it as a closet, a dumping ground. There was a river of tangled shirts, jeans, boxers. There were balled-up yellow papers, cassettes, apple cores, a boom box with an open mouth, a tent city of overturned books: A Sand County Almanac, Desert Solitaire, The Man Who Walked Through Time.

  Donnie’s face in profile looked blasted, like an accident victim on the side of the highway as the semis barrel past. Caleb nearly climbed the remaining steps to him, but for what reason? To hold him? He reminded himself that he was helping out. He’d employed them, allowing them to stay in Escadom these months, and he would do more. He’d invite them to work on the ranch all summer, even the fall, the winter, although he wasn’t sure yet what they’d do. Caleb noticed now that Donnie’s blue snap shirt was the same one he wore. He wore the same Carhartt jacket as Donnie, the cowboy boots, the brown hat, of course. Like a mirror, but not at all like a mirror. There was the jolt of Donnie’s beauty, the pronounced ridge of eyebrows over dark eyes.

  “Is it okay?” Caleb called, meaning the hand.

  Donnie turned and saw Caleb, and his face registered an intensity of hatred that Caleb had never seen. “Clean it up in there,” Donnie said.

  Just then, Don called from the bottom of the stairs. “Is Donnie there? Donnie? You okay, Donnie? I saw blood on the post.”

  Donnie started down the stairs to his concerned father, and Caleb leaned against the wall to allow Donnie to pass by. How could he be jealous of someone who’d lost everything?

  eight

  Rumspringa

  Rebecca whispered, “Hey, you here?”

  “Nope,” David answered. “Not here.”

  “Shh. Quieter.”

  “Nobody can hear us, Zoomy. You can’t even see me. Find me.”

  There was the mitzvah of hiding in the barn after swimming, alone with the creep of black widows in the woodpile, until Rebecca arrived and they ate each other’s mouths. The hiding could take ten, twenty minutes, the eating only a few seconds. He would hold her hand or touch her shoulder blades through her shirt, and she would kiss in that insistent pecking way. And then, before he could move his hand, she would rush off.

  David was crouched in a rear stall, his back pressed against the wooden divider, plucking strands from the hillscape of straw, releasing the gaminess of manure even though livestock hadn’t been in here for a decade or more—long dead, eaten and transformed into people cells, and some of those people had also died.

  “But not eaten. Presumably,” he said aloud.

  “What are you even talking about?” Rebecca said. “Can you just be quiet? I can’t find you.” He heard footsteps pattering nearer, and that was enough to make him half-hard.

  “I’m in cow apartment 2A. Cowpartment. Cowndominium.”

  Her head appeared around the wooden barrier. “God, there you are. What’re you even doing?”

  “Cownhouse.”

  Sigh of annoyance.

  She always acted like this at first. What was he even doing? Well, he was waiting for her, as she knew. As he’d done every Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday for the past three weeks. (On the other days, she’d determined, there was no safe time to meet.) Hiding as she’d asked him to do. Discreet, discreet. Now the rest of her emerged, her hips in a crumpled flowered skirt he’d never seen. From his delightfully low vantage point among the ghosts of bovine shit, he could see a slab of stomach and the up-down of her breasts, the movement of which he’d been studying even on Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

  “Look at you. All ready for your big night out.” He was still in his swim trunks, increasingly uncomfortable.

  She smoothed her hair, and it fuzzed back up. “Should be fun. It’s cool of Caleb to allow it. Like a tension release. Apparently, it gets kinda wild.”

  “Yeah. I’ve heard stories. Almost asked Caleb if I could go, but I figure he’ll need help around here.”

  “Need a hair tie.” She took off her backpack and, holding it with her chin, started rummaging through.

  “He’d’ve let me, though.” David couldn’t help but drop hints. Summer was nearly over, and it had gone very well. Caleb always seemed pleased with him, resting his hand on David’s shoulder, talking seriously with him. It was so hard not to tell Rebecca that he’d move here in September, that she should plan to visit him on breaks from college, the two of them sharing a tent.

/>   “You think?”

  The day after their second kiss, the one by the ditch, she’d said she couldn’t do that again, quoting Caleb’s admonition during the week of counselor training. “Any counselor suspected of sexual advances”—she’d hesitated but carried on—“defined as widely as possible, will be asked to leave immediately. Will you need to walk to town if you don’t have a car? Yes. Yes, you will.”

  David had explained as vaguely as he could that Caleb didn’t think of him as a camper, not at all, that he was exempt from such rules, more a counselor than some of the counselors. Anyway, although Caleb himself never had a girlfriend, never replaced Suze, because only she was worthy of him, David couldn’t imagine Caleb getting worked up about this, about a little kissing, and, hopefully soon, some more involved making out.

  In a way, David was older than Rebecca. He did the reassuring, the cajoling, made the moves. Each time, she acted like they wouldn’t kiss. Like now, pulling from her backpack a copy of her parents’ newspaper, which she began flapping around. “Look what I’ve been carrying around forever! They sent this to me when—two weeks ago? Three? And I haven’t even read it. Did you?” She dropped the backpack on the straw, but now his view of her was foiled by the newspaper.

  “Did I what? Read that one?” Any? Ever? Gee, no, he hadn’t had the chance.

  As he stood up, she glued her gaze on her beloved newspaper, determined, avoiding. She hadn’t even glanced down at him, at the comic tenting, the straining against nylon fabric. Just prattled on about Ira’s latest apocalyptic warnings. He couldn’t help thinking that more attention should be paid to his hard-on. Did she know about dicks and where they were? Wasn’t she just a little curious? He would be.

  But no. “See this article—‘What Threat Saddam?’—Ira was telling me about it when I was home. He’s talked to some people in the administration who think involvement can be avoided.”

  As if they’d simply met up in cloistered secrecy for a leftist study group. She had no moves. She was entirely moveless. Gave him the confidence to say “Come here.”

  “I mean, doesn’t everyone understand that a war would just be about oil?”

  Her brow furrowed from the force of the roiling white-capped rivers of concern for global stupidity and avarice that rushed through her day and night, while all his blood simply made its way downward. The way she’d said “in the administration” was precisely how Ira always said it, demonstrating that he had access while simultaneously disparaging those with access. She licked her finger to open the front page, and the newspaper flopped over as if exhausted by its own shrill voice. She was determined to be on the wrong path, the prudish path, the fogey path, and only one person could pull her back to the right one.

  “Zoomy. Come here.”

  A shoal of counselors was waiting for Rebecca. They were packed closely—the analogy to sardines had been made several times—in the tin can of Scott’s VW bus, ready to drive into town.

  As they waited, they said they would die if they didn’t get cheese fries soon. They said fuck the cheese fries; it was so hot they wanted a pitcher of beer all to themselves. They said that after two months up here, didn’t it always seem like magic when night came at the Motherlode and electric lights went on? They said that more than anything they just wanted the swamp cooler. They were going to stand under the blast of the swamp cooler until their skin turned blue.

  This was their Rumspringa. The last Tuesday of camp. The afternoon when counselors left en masse and emerged into the world as a team, comrades from the land of Caleb. The world they always chose to emerge into was the Motherlode, because the Motherlode, caught as it was in the past, was the best evidence that they weren’t in Portland anymore, that they weren’t in Ann Arbor or Austin or Providence, or even Phuket or Goa or Puerto Escondido—there was no Lonely Planet guide to what they were doing out here among the unexotic poor.

  They said that if they didn’t leave this minute, they might scream from heat exhaustion.

  But Rebecca, in the barn, was otherwise occupied. If this was a kiss, this thing that never ended, this Möbius route through dark woodland, then what exactly had she been doing before? She was somewhere she’d never been, led here by David, whose tongue tasted of tomato and probed everywhere, encouraging her to do the same, to keep her own mouth open, until all her little pecks and nervous licks ran together like a river, dense and insistent. With one thumb, he was stroking her cheek.

  Then there was the additional etymological question about what exactly was tap-tap-tapping against her hip, bringing to mind Poe’s raven. It was a very friendly tapping, she felt. The nosing of a badger or vole against a pine in the woodland.

  She wanted to stay here forever, and so, impulsively, she pulled her face away. Still at close range, David was a Cyclops blur, one-eyed, two-nosed. A spider’s thread of saliva linked them. “I just want to know something.”

  “Well, okay.” He was laughing at her.

  “That time I saw you at the pier?”

  Tapping ceased. She didn’t look down.

  “What time?”

  “Don’t you remember? Like five years ago? I was with my friends in the Skee-Ball place. The arcade. And you acted like you didn’t recognize me?”

  He leaned his head back, two-eyed again and frowning. “Nah. Couldn’t have been me. ’Cause I don’t remember that. I would remember, and I don’t.”

  “That’s so weird. All these years, I thought it was you and you were ignoring me. It looked like you. And when I said your name, you came over to me.”

  “My doppelganger, clearly,” he said, moving his hand along her back. “He’s been known to roam the streets of Santa Monica impersonating me. But seriously. I have no memory. Five years ago?”

  She frowned, unconvinced but distracted by the slow movement of his hand on her skin. She was feline, petted. Oh, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, she thought. “You go,” she said. “You go out first.”

  “No, Rebecca.”

  “It’s better that way.” He wasn’t careful enough. If she left first, he would come out seconds later, and call, with exaggerated, and thus obviously faked, surprise, Why, Rebecca, you’re here, too! What a coincidence! She, on the other hand, would wait cautiously, not emerging until five minutes had passed, and then, poker-faced.

  “But I can’t. Not yet.”

  “Just go.”

  “Uh, don’t you get it? I physically can’t go out there.” His face was animated by a pure form of pride, unmiserly, wanting to share his bounty.

  She couldn’t look down now, but she wished she’d looked before, because she wanted to understand how it worked. Was it horizontal or vertical? At a jaunty angle like a flagpole off a building or, more sinister, a “Heil Hitler” salute? So she’d actually felt one!

  Rebecca ran from the evening of the barn into the sunshine, Eve’s original knowledge now hers. She climbed into the bus amid cheers, dragging her backpack. All the seats were taken; she crawled past the hillock of Scott’s laundry and sat on the floor behind the last row of seats. The bus bucked down the dirt road, bashing her sacrum over and over against the metal floor, but Rebecca was smiling, immensely pleased by what she’d felt.

  “You want?” Over the seat, Jeremy was holding out a small wooden pipe.

  She refused; she’d done enough new things for one day.

  As the dirt stirred up by the VW resettled on the road, and the camp was left counselorless, Caleb paged warily through the letters, the bills, the rifle and seed catalogues in his mailbox on the outside wall of the barn. It had been twenty days since 1982 Night, when he’d last received a letter from Donnie. Although neither of the two letters had been addressed to Caleb directly and had gone instead to Don’s PO box, the daily task of checking his mail had begun to fill him with trepidation, and lately he found himself forgetting to do so altogether, allowing the mail to sit abandoned for a few days.

  At the moment of relief—nothing from Donnie—Caleb saw David sauntering
out the barn door in his swim trunks. It was so easy to love this boy who was always happy. Calling to him, Caleb said, “Scott’s gone. Would you mind ringing the dinner bell in his place?”

  David flushed, even happier. “I mean, that’d be great.”

  Together they walked to the house to retrieve the cowbell from its usual place on the bookshelf, where they found, anchored by the weight of the instrument, a white envelope addressed to Caleb, c/o Mr. Donald Talc, Sr., The Double L, Escadom, Colorado 81428.

  “You go ahead,” Caleb said, opening the door to allow David to step onto the porch and clang the bell the requisite seven times. Shutting the door behind him, Caleb ripped open the envelope.

  Howdy Caleb. My Dad told me about the lies your spreading up at your camp. How you tell everyone we were so happy when you came and saved our land from the developer who wanted to buy it. HA HA. You think we didn’t see through your plan but we did. I have proof now.

  It’s a proven and recorded fact that it was the enviro Nazis who came to Colorado to shut down Exxon and take away our Jobs. And then, when we had nothing, who showed up in Escadom looking for land? You did, Caleb. Coincidence???? Now I know. It was your plan all along. First, you shut down the oil shale plant. Then you come and pretend you don’t even know anything about Escadom. Well what made us foreclose?? You. I know from lawyer Hobart R Billings Esquire that is called an Illegal Taking. There are ways to settle this. The West is being taken back by the people who live here and belong here. You can wait until I come there or you can clear out Now.

  From,