by Heather Abel
“Really? God, I’m sorry,” Caleb said.
“Nah, nah, that’s not the real point,” Donnie said, with thin bravado. It took him half an hour to get to the real point, during which time Caleb’s eyes adjusted and he could see the white wicker shoe holding plastic daisies on the windowsill and the smug crowned Jesus in a shiny frame, and he’d never been in a house like this.
He was wondering how to let on that he wasn’t actually a journalist—or whether he should just leave without telling Donnie—but he followed this much of what Donnie said: In the years after his mom died, the Double L gradually sank into debt. Then, Exxon came to town, and the Talcs couldn’t even find anyone to work for them, because you could get fifty dollars an hour constructing the oil shale plant. Donnie convinced his dad that the only thing to do was sell the herd, pay their debts, and take jobs in oil shale.
“I told him we’d be millionaires in five years—six, tops—and then we could buy more cows. And my dad said no, we work this land. That’s our job. And I just started railing on him, telling him that this is our chance, until finally he agreed. And it was a good year . . .” Donnie raised his eyebrows. “A damned good year. I mean, it was like the center of the world here. A new bar opening every day. Whores coming in on a bus. Every night, my friends and I were partying down at the river. I mean, hundreds of people camped along the river. Some of the old people hated it. All these families just shitting in the river. Never seen anything like it in my life. Every morning at six, my dad and I would drive to Exxon’s shuttle bus, and the street was lined up with new people looking for work.” Donnie was grinning at the memory of it.
Lowering his voice to a whisper, he said, “I don’t know if you can write this in your paper, but there were drugs everywhere. You go to the bar, no one’s carding, and people just leaving lines of cocaine for tips.” He shook his head. “Then just one year in, Exxon says it doesn’t actually know how to make oil from shale. See you later, Exxon.”
Now their land was useless again, he said, a dried-out piece of shit. Any day, the bank would pounce upon their ranch, send them into foreclosure. They were broke, but they were Talcs. This was their ranch. “The thing is, Exxon lied to us. They lied.” Donnie pushed his hands into his pockets and gave Caleb a look that was both furious and imperious. “That’s a story, right?”
Well, Caleb thought, staring at the floral wallpaper to avoid Donnie, it was a story, yes, but did Donnie honestly believe that his situation would improve if the world read about it over Pop-Tarts, over coffee, on the subway, on the toilet?
He glanced back at Donnie and was startled to see his mouth contorted in what looked like disgust. He realized that the boy was attempting to hide the childish signs of sorrow—pouting lip, swimming eyes. “Fuck,” Donnie muttered.
Sympathy swelled in Caleb. Here he was, at last, a guest of a real cowboy, and he was worrying about the cowboy’s level of gullibility? He was thinking like his mom, like his stepdad, Aaron, their nightly outrage at everyone’s stupidity. He’d inherited his mom’s exasperation, the way she’d mutter, Oh, come on, lady, when someone ahead of her in line at the post office couldn’t find her wallet. The whole point of being here was to become a different kind of a person, to act like his dad had acted in the world, slipping into different spaces, slipping away and fitting in, and so he looked at Donnie’s anguished face as his dad would have. “It’s a story alright. A doozy of a story.”
Donnie stared for a moment, and then his face relaxed. “I knew you’d see that.”
When Donnie’s father returned home from the auction and learned a journalist was visiting, he invited Caleb to stay for dinner. It seemed innocuous enough for Caleb to ask to sleep out on the ranch—just for the night. He’d leave early, before they woke, and absolve himself of the lie by driving off.
“In the alfalfa field?” Don Sr. asked.
“Sure, if that’s the best place.”
The Talcs couldn’t answer; they were laughing too hard. “He wants to sleep in the field!” Don was smaller than his son, sinewy instead of fleshy, and, with his homely, washed-out features, he seemed an unlikely progenitor of Donnie’s dark handsomeness. But they laughed alike, hunched and shaking, silent except for an occasional breathy bleating. Then Don began coughing, unable to catch his breath. He rested a hand on Donnie’s back, and Donnie reached over for the cigarettes, handed him one. Don put it in his mouth, still coughing. Donnie lit it for him as Don inhaled, his cough subsiding. It was this silent conversation between father and son that kept Caleb up at night in the field, tossing on the hard pea of envy while clouds rushed the moon and swallowed it whole.
He fell asleep near dawn and thus failed to make an early exit, waking to find Donnie over him, asking, “Are you ready? I’m gonna give you the grand tour.” What could Caleb do?
As they walked alongside the irrigation ditch, Caleb wrote the names of the plants on a folded piece of paper he pressed against the palm of his left hand, as a reporter might—wild roses clinging to the bank of the trough, willows leaning over the water, oyster plants with yellow flowers, bindweed with white flowers, marsh marigold with orange flowers, spindly asparagus, while elsewhere grew only sage and grasses, the fecund so near the cracked, the lush opposite the prickly, water, no water—as they passed through all of this, Caleb thought, Holy shit. This is it. This is the place.
And so he stayed for eight days, during which the autumn colors emerged, the mountainside turning dandelion yellow, and the lie was like a toothache, a dull pain suggestive of rot. There were times he nearly believed it; he’d followed it so far. He found himself thinking about the article as if it existed, about Donnie as a character, how effortlessly sympathetic he’d be in the story, both furious and earnest. They got along surprisingly well—better, in fact, than Caleb did with most guys. Donnie was a gallant tour guide, a quick friend. He took Caleb to see the detritus of the bust, the abandoned “man camps” by the river, the school buses with blackened windows, where the hookers had worked, Escadom’s half-built hotels and restaurants. U-Hauls passed by as they walked through town, and Donnie’s hand raised in salute.
In the late afternoons, they walked along the ditch, and Donnie, never at a loss, told Caleb about a rancher who’d had a heart attack there, about the boy in his class who fell into the ditch. He said that since first grade, he’d walked the length of this ditch before school, looking for dead sheep or refrigerator doors wedged into a divider to divert water to another ranch. These diversions could choke a ditch and flood the road, and they’d all be trapped up here.
His favorite job, he said, was to burn the brush in the ditch, to clear it out in springtime before the water flowed again. He’d blast it with a blowtorch, all destruction behind him, like a movie. Once the brush burned, he’d run along stomping out sparks, pretending they were villages on fire, like fucking saving the day.
At dawn each day, Caleb would walk into the house, unhook a brown mug with a yellow sunflower from below the cabinet, and fill it with weak coffee. Don and Donnie would be waiting for him. Don would wipe a dishrag over the coffee Caleb dribbled onto the counter, and say, “Explain again why he won’t sleep in the house if he comes in every morning to eat our food?”
“It’s his wilderness experience, Dad. Just pretend you’re not here. Or you’re a mountain lion or something.”
There was no purpose to the Talcs’ early rising—no more ravenous cows, no more thirsty crops, no bus to take them to the shale plant while the stars still shone—and yet here they were, awake out of habit, their work boots tied. As they walked with their one-eyed eggs out to the porch, each grabbed a cowboy hat from the coatrack in the front hallway, as if setting off to work in the sun. Caleb followed in his sweatshirt.
On his fourth evening, they were again on the porch when Donnie bolted, just took off into the field, all those useless yellow and purple alfalfa flowers crowded out by weeds. He screamed, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” as he disappeared behind the b
arn.
Without taking his eyes from the darkening hump of the mountain, Don said, “You do understand what my son is expecting.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“You’re not?” Don’s eyebrows were the yellow of a nicotine-stained mustache, and he raised them. “He’s expecting you to write an article that will encourage people to feel sympathy for us, for what happened to us, when it was no different than what happened to everybody else. He thinks someone will read your article and ring our doorbell and offer us the money to keep our ranch, get it running again.” He turned to Caleb. “You know why he thinks this?”
Donnie reappeared atop his teal ATV, zigzagging across the dimming field. Caleb shook his head.
“He’s not stupid, you understand. But it was him who bugged me to leave ranching. There’s the shame of that, along with our lost livelihood.” Don half stood to untuck a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket, extracting matches from the cellophane. He lit his cigarette and crossed his thin legs, his manner tidy and feminine. “He’s always promising that he’s going to make the money himself, but ARCO’s not hiring, nobody’s hiring. For hundreds of miles, nobody’s hiring, and the bank could give a shit.”
Don stood and walked to his truck, his cigarette a red star. He climbed in and drove away.
Caleb sat alone. Don had barely spoken to him before this outpouring, and he felt humbled by his confidence. They’d welcomed him into their family, these people who didn’t hold studious silence as their highest goal, who understood that the only important thing was to live here. There were no books in the house. They didn’t read, which meant, according to Caleb’s mom and stepdad, they didn’t care about what it meant to be human. Oh well.
Soon the mountain was just an outline, a darker dark, and stars began to clog the sky. Donnie drove the ATV back to the barn and appeared on the porch. Don came back with two six-packs of Coors. Every time Don and Donnie drained a can, they chucked it into the darkness, and finally Caleb, who’d been lining up his empties beside his chair, walked to the edge of the porch and did the same. Like pitching himself into the blackness.
The next day, Donnie took him to Frank’s Farm and Feed, on the mesa outside Hotchkiss, and pointed to the circular display of cowboy hats. “You should get one. Go back to work in style. Show them you’ve been to the Wild West.”
Caleb took the hat Donnie was offering. “Definitely white,” Donnie said. “No other color should be considered.”
There was a feed smell, posters of men in Carhartts and Dickies, a linoleum floor punished by boot after boot. Caleb wanted the hat to make him look like he customarily shopped here. He appraised himself in the thin wall mirror with hope and then disappointment. “Doesn’t it look like the hat’s trying to eat my face?”
Donnie paunched out his lips, considering. “Nah. No, no.” Clearly lying.
Caleb set down the white hat and reached for a brown one with a braided rope around the perimeter. It was the color of a chestnut mare. It was exactly the same hat Donnie wore.
In the mirror, he saw his hair sticking up, bushily, statically, as if its very DNA was ashamed and also titillated by the prospect of wearing a cowboy hat. He pressed the brown hat onto his head, and there he was, looking exactly how he’d always wanted to. John Muir and Ed Abbey and Caleb Silver.
“You’ll look sharp going back to work in a Stetson,” Donnie said. “ ‘Holy wow,’ they’ll say.”
“Holy wow? Is that even something people say?” he asked, trying to hide his pride.
Donnie grinned. “Yup. Holy wow.”
They drove to the post office in Escadom. Donnie parked in front and went inside to check his mailbox, and Caleb walked down Founders Avenue, which already seemed more boarded-up than it had been when he’d arrived. Someone had written on the door of a flower shop: happiness is escadom in your rear window. And on the hardware store, more to the point: fuck exxon.
The receiver dangled from the pay phone. Caleb depressed the tongue and found a dial tone. He asked the operator to make a collect call, pulling from his pocket Our Side Now’s masthead, torn from the paper and folded small. He read out the number.
When his uncle came on the line, Caleb described the ranchers he’d been living with, their generosity, their land—the perfect land. From the back of a parked pickup, a dog barked without ceasing.
“What’s the problem?” Ira asked. “They can’t afford it anymore but don’t want to sell. And regardless of their preference, nobody else’ll buy it. Within our current and deeply flawed system of supply and demand, you’re a perfect match. So, what, are you calling me because of some class guilt? Sure! Feel guilty! Were they played by Exxon? Definitely. But I can’t figure how you’d be challenging corporate-federal collusion if you walk away from this. This isn’t exactly a boycottable situation. I mean, don’t get me wrong—they’re going to hate you. Don’t expect them to thank you for moving them off their land, no matter how much cash you offer them. They’ll fucking hate you. Class rage is real. But is that a problem you’re going to fix?”
Caleb hung up and saw Donnie beneath the flag outside the post office, grinning and pointing. “Nice hat,” Donnie bellowed down the street, his hands cupped around his mouth. He was eighteen years old and large, with shoulders the size of oar blades. Caleb had never had a friend like this. Donnie waved his hat. Caleb wildly waved his back. Donnie shouted, “Is that or is that not the most stylish journalist in the West?” Passersby turned to stare just as Caleb achieved a somewhat effortless step-jump into Donnie’s truck. “Come on,” Donnie said. “Let’s get home.”
The farewell dinner began festively enough. Don, who’d removed his Carhartt bib overalls for the occasion and was wearing a white button-down, ordered a paternal round of beer. That morning, Donnie had said they’d seen all there was to see but that Caleb should feel free to stay on for as long as he needed for research. Caleb had asked to take them out to dinner to thank them for their hospitality. “What hospitality?” Don said, “You wouldn’t even sleep in our house.” But it was clear he was pleased by the gesture.
The waitress brought a wooden bowl of tortilla chips and a saucer of salsa, which sloshed onto the table when she set it down. Donnie, ever the tour guide, gave a history of the building they were in, now inhabited by The Casa, which had opened during the boom. “So before that, it was empty awhile, but it used to be a bar—the Ute’s Mirage—and before that, this was where Frank’s Farm and Feed was until they moved up on the mesa. And before that . . .”
Caleb only half listened. It struck him that maybe Ira’d been wrong. They might not hate him in the slightest. Why hadn’t he thought of this before? They were struggling, and he would help. They might, in fact, be grateful. The word “savior” bounded through his head. Embarrassed, he pushed it down, but it bobbed back up. The waitress returned with their food—platters of beans and rice, and something yellow.
Before Caleb had a chance to reconsider, he blurted, “So, I had an idea about your land.”
They turned to each other with amused looks. Donnie said, “An idea?” Don said, “Oh no, he had an idea.”
Caleb grinned along, but he could feel a nervous strain creep onto his face. He explained that he’d been planning for some time to start a summer camp and had been scoping out land. He paused to drink, heart pounding. “I know that you’re in a bit of a bind”—he cringed at the euphemism, the alliterative British-sounding phrase—“with your land, and I thought, hey, if I keep you from foreclosure, this could be mutually beneficial.”
Donnie’s tongue covered his upper lip and then retreated. “Wait, I don’t get it. Aren’t you a journalist? Aren’t you writing about us?”
Caleb didn’t answer.
“We need to get this straight,” Don said, carefully placing his utensils on the edge of his plate. “You’re asking to buy the Double L?”
The Christmas lights on the window winked with desperate cheer. The ceiling fan wobbled on its orbit,
hinting at decapitation. Oil pooled orange on their plates. Caleb offered a price per acre that he’d come up with by looking at the bank auction flyers around town.
“Are you or aren’t you a journalist?” Donnie demanded.
Caleb couldn’t bear to disappoint further. “I was. It’s true—I was. But I’m ready to get out. Leave the rat race.”
Donnie leaned forward. “And now you want our house? Where are we supposed to live?”
“Shut up, Donnie,” Don said. “I don’t think that’s his consideration.”
Of course, Ira had been right. The evening’s joy had been trampled upon, neatly killed. Don turned his attention to his food, methodically cutting his quesadilla, taking small bites, and when he had eaten exactly half, he set his fork down and wiped his mustache. He kept his gaze down.
Donnie, however, couldn’t stop staring at Caleb. Sauce dribbled from his fork. “You were lying?” he asked.
“Shut it,” his father warned.
The waitress had abandoned them. She’d lose her job by the end of the week, judging from the other tables, all the empty chairs showing their bones. Caleb couldn’t take it anymore. He set down a traveler’s check worth four times the cost of the meal, and although he knew this display of profligacy would make everything worse, he walked away without waiting for change.
“Sorry,” he said, although he didn’t know exactly which crime he was apologizing for, and anyway his voice was drowned out by bells disguised as chili peppers that jingled as he opened the door.
nine
Do You Love Me?
“So, do you love me?” David asked little albino Caitlin, who was kneeling to tie her laces. He stabbed at her sneakers with her broom. “Do you love me? Do you love me?” It was the morning after Rumspringa, and David was rehearsing on the patio near the Gathering. Shauna, Tanaya, and Nicole, and their admirers huddled to watch. David continued. “If I have to ask, I don’t want to know, right? Right?”