by Heather Abel
Donnie
Walking into the Motherlode, Nat and Saskia gripped Rebecca’s arms as they cooed over the ducks in gingham dresses and Murphy’s Law carved into wood, hung on the orange-and-brown wallpaper. Two waitresses with bouffants frozen in both time and space watched as the group took over three tables near the jukebox and pool table.
Rebecca had been told that on this day wonders would occur: censorious Mikala would happily buy the underagers beer; puritan Scott, who shook nutritional yeast on all his meals, would lead the candy run to Ute’s Market. And indeed, soon Mikala was pouring Rebecca a beer from the pitcher she’d bought while Scott was spilling out the contents of three plastic bags.
Rebecca found herself seated beside Jeremy, listening to Jeremy, which is what one did with Jeremy. He was overly tall and prematurely balding—he shaved what was left—and he seemed to misread these genetic accidents as proof that he was a divine translator of life’s complexities.
He sat with his legs wide and angled toward her, saying in his stentorian manner, “First word that comes to your head when you think of this town? Drowsy, right? Dead. Deceased. Over. Done.”
Rebecca had to nod yes, although she wasn’t thinking of the boarded-up storefronts or of the broken windows held together with duct tape.
“And yet,” Jeremy said, “I have this theory that, hard to believe, this town is headed for major change. Major change-o. Wanna hear it?”
Rebecca was thinking of the penis. What was the right word? Cock? Dick? Phallus? Thanks to one year at college, she could spot phallic representations in paintings, literature, rock formations, and wallpaper, but despite one year at college, she’d never been so close to an actual one.
Jeremy flicked the back of her hand in a plea for attention that seemed more aggressive than was called for, as if he could view the salacious competition of her wandering thoughts.
“No, yeah. Tell me.”
“Okay, here’s the thing. Escadom’s on the cusp. This is big. There aren’t many cusp moments for a town. The first one was in 1852. When white people came. You’re looking at me like, whoa, how’s he have all the dates memorized, but I actually wrote a whole paper on it. My senior thesis last year was on Escadom and Caleb. I gave Caleb a copy at the beginning of the summer. He seemed way pleased.”
For a moment, Jeremy looked distracted, and Rebecca thought she’d be spared his theory, but he regained himself, resting giant elbows on giant knees, cantilevering ominously toward her. “So remember? 1852. Three men on a scouting expedition. Looking for a way through the Rockies for the topographical engineers. These are tough men. Men who could maneuver through avalanches, fight off Indians.” Jeremy maneuvered through the English language like a cautious explorer, pausing to rest after each phrase. “They saw the river. And boom! They knew it. This was a fertile valley. Fertile. Soon as they’re done with the expedition, they come back. Kick out the Indians. Name the town. Escadom. It’s theirs.”
As he talked, Jeremy was scraping the remains of a Now and Later off an incisor with his thumb’s ragged, tormented fingernail, his cheeks reddening from his excitement at being the bearer of both history and prediction. What had David done once Rebecca left the barn? Had he waited, watching it (penis, cock, dick) droop, deflate? Had he jacked off alone? And how would he do that anyway? She pictured him humping the ground, tapping against the straw.
“From then on, Escadom was all about what you could get from the land. To sell. Coal. Shale. Crops. Fruit. Cows. See a pattern? Nothing produced for people’s souls. Or minds. Nada. Until now. Until right now.”
She’d seen the hand motion for jacking off, of course. Once, in high school, she’d made the mistake of miming carrying a sign at a rally, up and down, and set off hoots. That was the same, apparently. Subsequently, she’d thought a lot about the phrase. Jacking off. To jack off. Something sly about it. When what she did was simply, clinically, called masturbation.
“Enter Caleb, stage left. His arrival is as monumental as those dudes on horseback a hundred years ago seeing the potential for a mining town in an Indian village. That profound. This was the crux of my paper. See, Caleb comes in, sees this valley, not for what it can produce, but for what it does to people’s souls.” Jeremy pointed to his own heart, location presumably of his soul. “That’s the future. And Caleb? He’s the forerunner. I got an A, by the way, from this prof who never, I mean never, gives A’s. What this town’s gonna sell is nothing less than the intangible. Beauty. Think Taos. Small-town vibe, big-city amenities. People looking for self-actualization. Who appreciate this as the spiritual place it is. What Caleb saw in it. There’s money in that. This bar? Enjoy the last of it. In five years it’ll be one of those little places, those breweries, making their own delicious beers instead of selling us this piss.”
The Poe line, memorized along with the first stanza in Mr. Bream’s AP English class, flashed to her now: Suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door.” Thinking of her own chamber door—her vulva, as Georgia had insisted on calling what all Rebecca’s friends dubbed “down there” or, worse, “privates,” like some military officials keeping post—Rebecca smiled, an inward grin that Jeremy misread as outward admiration.
He rubbed his hands together in a washing-up motion. “See, this is great. I’ve actually been wanting to talk to you more. You’re the kind of girl who might want to talk about things, pursue intellectual avenues. My only problem with Caleb, the only one, is that he’s not intellectual per se, although he’s weighty, but not, I mean, he’s had my paper four weeks and still hasn’t read it. He’s not”—Jeremy prodded the table as if trepanning a brain to excavate the correct word—“investigative. Like me. Like us.”
Was this a come-on? Would this happen now? She’d been tap-tap-tapped near her chamber door, and now other men could see? Unwittingly she looked at Jeremy’s crotch, the straining khaki fabric, the thick thighs, the blond commas of hair. Where was his penis sleeping? When she glanced up again at his face, she felt strangely unaware of how long she’d been staring downward. What if too long? She jumped up. “Just a . . .”
She stumbled over to Saskia and Nat, who were standing by the blinking jukebox.
“Rebecca you’ll love this.” Nat squeezed Rebecca’s arm too tightly. “Like it’s 1975. Every song. It’s so cute.”
She could hear Jeremy, adrift without an audience, calling to Mikala at the next table. “Wanna guess what this bar’ll look like in, say, five years?”
Even alcohol didn’t wash away Mikala’s perpetually smug look. “Well, this is my eighth summer coming to the Motherlode, Jeremy, and I’d say that not even a lightbulb has changed in that time, so we know what it’ll look like in eight more years. You’re looking at it.”
“Eight summers?” Rebecca whispered to Nat. “How old is she?”
“Old. Twenty-nine.”
“She doesn’t have a real job?”
“She became a teacher, so she can come back every summer. Scott, too. Maybe he’s a sub.”
Jeremy was saying, “Wrong-o. Yo, Scott. Your turn.”
“Elvis will be here. Alive and living in the apartment upstairs. With Marilyn.” Scott’s jaws were busy with mastication, his normally sleepy eyes ablaze with candy bliss.
Jeremy voiced a buzzer blast and said in robot-voice, “That. Is. In. Correct.” He threw a mini pack of Mike and Ikes at the next table, hitting the smooth, bare shoulder of Jamal, who was hunched toward Kai. “Jamal, one guess what this bar’ll look like in five years.”
Jamal twisted. “Dude, what?”
“Forget it. Let me lay it out. I fucking wrote my thesis on this.” Jeremy further amplified his voice out of generosity toward everyone’s ignorance. “Here’s the Motherlode in five years. Over there, every kind of microbrew on tap. Maybe a little juice-bar kind of thing. Mountain bikers enjoying a brewski at the end of a long ride. Climbers coming
in to fuel up. People who actually appreciate the nature here, who get it, not just freaking rape it. This town is headed for a big disruption. Big disruption.”
“Um, Jeremy, not now,” Mikala said. Because the bartender and both waitresses and the seventeen postshift coal miners on barstools and the family with the oatmeal-skinned children, all of them turned to see the source of that booming voice, the voice of intellectual investigation, ringing out louder than the song Saskia had picked ironically and forced the jukebox to play.
But Jeremy didn’t hear or heed Mikala. He just swigged beer and continued. “Don, people like Don Talc. Sweet guy, but that’s the past. Redneck culture is finished here. Caleb’s showing us the future.”
The song ended just as Jeremy paused to let his edification sink in, like rain on the arid mesas of their brains. A vehicle hit something outside, metal on metal. The swamp cooler whirred. “This is awkward,” Kai said in her dulcet singsong.
Feeling proud for single-handedly settling all the kids in bed, Caleb decided to reward himself with canned peaches in syrup. It didn’t register that the kitchen lights were on until he opened the door. Three of the dinner ladies hadn’t yet left, and they were gathered around the counter with Don and Denise. Nobody noticed him.
“Precious.”
“Those lips? She’ll be trouble.”
“You gonna see her again soon?”
“Hard to get away in the summertime.”
“Then they should bring her here.”
“Aw, we’d love to see her. Little princess. And we’d all like to see Donnie, too—you know we would. It’s been too long.”
Caleb had sat with these ladies at the Motherlode alongside Don, asking about grandkids, bow hunting, Ski-Doos, rockhounding. He’d lived in this town for nearly a decade, had more than earned his entry to this conversation. But now he was nervous.
First, you shut down the oil shale plant. What a bizarre conspiracy Donnie had latched on to.
Then, you come and pretend you don’t even know anything about Escadom. Did Don also believe that Caleb had somehow derailed the world’s largest oil company in a scheme to devalue the Talcs’ land? Caleb heard him cluck proudly. “She’s a beauty alright. Takes after her mom, of course.”
Caleb turned to sneak out. But too late. “You want your kitchen back?” Denise called. “All of us just gabbing.” Everyone looked at him.
“No, not at all. Gab away!” He strode toward them and stood behind Charlene, the shortest kitchen lady, peering over her.
“Wow, is that Kiva?” Caleb reached for the photo, a bald infant with a concerned face. Donnie’s baby. Someone had written in ballpoint: Little Cowgirl. Even as he said it, Kiva sounded wrong. He started to say Keira, but that seemed off, too, and he swallowed the second syllable, so that he just said Keer, and then repeated himself emphatically—“Keer!”—to make it sound intentional, cutified, a nickname. He held the photo beside Don’s face. “She look like her grandpa? What do you think? Same eyes?”
Don took the photo from him. “Kayla. Name’s Kayla.”
“Right. Kayla. Sweet name.” To make up for his blunder, Caleb filched the photo from Don’s hand, went to the fridge, and clamped the baby under a horseshoe magnet, atop a yellowing Xerox copy of American Camping Association food regulations.
Don walked over and unfastened the magnet. The Xerox slipped down the length of the fridge and then skidded along the linoleum. “We’ll want to put her up in the trailer.”
It turned out there were to be more firsts for Rebecca this night. Thanks to Mikala’s largesse, Rebecca was drunk. To be precise, it was her third time inebriated, but the first time she was enjoying this state without associative anxiety, without worrying that she was letting down her parents, who themselves drank, but in an adult way, which meant unhappily.
Time folded up like a paper fan. One minute she was on the toilet in the stall beside Saskia; the next, she found herself standing at a table, wagging the newspaper she’d pulled from her backpack, claiming everyone’s attention. “Actually, it’s the most important paper of its kind. One of the only real correctives to both the mainstream and conservative media.” The newspaper was, she continued—landing upon a new, brilliant analogy—a rope with twenty thousand ends, and at each one, another activist with a tin can pressed to his or her ear, listening to Ira’s voice.
This was somewhat unnecessary. Over the past weeks, she’d told them as much. They knew about Angela Davis. They knew about Jane Fonda. But she hadn’t shown them the physical paper and these twenty-five pages of four-color newsprint with the in-house cartoon would either expand or deflate their perception.
“Oh, that. Wow. Yeah, everyone knows that,” said Mikala.
Scott and Jeremy concurred that the paper was “everywhere,” and Kai added, “I read something from it in poli-sci last year. The prof was like, ‘This is the shit.’ ”
Rebecca found this tenderly gratifying. Her parents. The shit.
She sat back down with the pleasurable feeling of receiving an award for which she’d worked hard. The notes that had been appearing in her mailbox—Your mom says please call home. Your mom called, says to call her. Call your dad—rose up in her mind, but she nudged them back into the murky subconscious. Looking woozily around the table, she realized she loved Mikala, who had her quite large head thrown back and was holding Scott’s hand. And she loved Scott, who with his free hand was making the salt and pepper shakers talk, making Mikala laugh so hard she became young. And she loved Kai, who, despite being beautiful seemed to be genuinely interested in everything Rebecca said tonight and was now turning her open, receptive face toward Jeremy. And she even loved Jeremy, who clearly only wanted to be loved. All those theories so that someone would love him. And she loved Saskia and Jamal and Nat, but they were playing pool, and with her back turned to the pool table, she couldn’t feel those particular rays of love, which, now that she thought about it, were probably all Caleb meant when he’d told them to hold their arms out at the Gathering and feel their vectors shooting away.
She loved David—of course she did. She always had.
When it was time to leave, she stumbled over a chair. Its occupant, a middle-aged miner with a walrus mustache, looked up at her in a way that she considered might be actually lecherous, because now she’d been tap-tap-tapped and also been happily drunk, and yet she remained Ira’s daughter, remained so interesting.
Nobody else was on the streets as they made their way to Town Park, where Scott’s bus waited to take them back to Llamalo. It was as if Jeremy’s predictions had come true, and the town was just theirs, just kids from Berkeley and Reed and UC Santa Cruz out on a stroll for beauty.
Scott reached the bus first. He coaxed the engine, shoved a tape in the deck, and twisted the volume. Then he jumped out. That’s great, it starts with an earthquake. Scott was first to start dancing, and the way Scott danced was like one of those wooden animals where you depress a button and the strings fall limp. Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn, world serves its own needs. Saskia was next, and the way Saskia danced was more like pogoing, and the way Kai danced was hips and tits, like she was listening to an entirely different song, and the way Jeremy danced was to hop from foot to foot and huff out the words. Team by team, reporters baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped, look at that low plane. Lights went on in the houses across from the park. The way Mikala danced was to grab hands with Scott and to swing their arms from side to side. You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched. The way they all danced was to shout as one, It’s the end of the world as we know it.
A truck drove slowly by. From a machine in its bed, it expelled a giant plume that rose into the blackness like a poltergeist, lit up red by the truck’s rear lights, the candy smell of poison everywhere. It was awesome and horrible.
“What’s that?” Rebecca asked, coughing. But all anyone said back to her was, And I feel fine. Jeremy grabbed her hand with his clammy one. And
I feel fine.
They danced around a statue of a miner with a pickax slung on his shoulder. He looked into the middle distance, as if hoping to bring some solemnity to their folly. She saw that the names carved in stone beneath him were of Escadom’s sons killed in its coal mine. Above him was the canopy of a large tree of a type Rebecca didn’t know—maple? oak?—maybe even planted by the town founders, those dudes on horseback, with impeccable forethought about the need for shade in the future. The leaves unmoving in the still night.
The Reagan Years: Early October 1982
Caleb trailed Donnie into the kitchen, where Donnie leaned against the sink and said, “I already have the beginning of your article. It goes like this . . .”
Caleb, who couldn’t see anything in the dimness after the undaunted sunshine of the outdoors, tried to make his body casual in a listening way, a strained hand-in-pocket, head-cocked journalistic pose. The lie was beginning to feel playful, like a costume or invisibility cloak, something he’d put on to allow himself to enter another world.
“Once upon a time,” Donnie began, “there was this ranch called the Double L. It was homesteaded by a real pioneer, you know, who rode here and found this dried-out piece-of-shit land, all the prime riverside plots already taken, but he turned it into something. I mean, he dug out the ditch with horses and hard work, and bam—he grew crops and cows. You can say all that exactly. You got to make them understand it’s a real American story. You’ll want to say that it was three generations of men taking care of it, passing it down, father to son, you know? That’s important. And one day, on this ranch, a baby was born, and they named him Donald, and that’s me.” Donnie snuck a little proud smile at the miracle of his own birth.
“And everything’s really perfect. The mom’s like this perfect mom, and the dad runs the ranch, just two-fifty cows. And the mom and the boy do the irrigating and shit, but also they play around a lot.” Donnie paused. “A lot. And then we go to when the boy is nine—you’ll have to figure out how to do that—and the mom dies, and nobody even told the kid that she was sick.”