by Heather Abel
Happy bar mitzvah to David. Mazel tov, David. Give the man a Swatch. A scotch. This hadn’t been his first time, not at all, but he hadn’t felt like this with Heather L., not with Aura, not with his own hand. He’d never told anyone that he loved them, because he’d never loved them. He waited the requisite five minutes and then walked out of the barn a man.
On the eating platform, he poured a mug of hot water from the thermos at the counselor’s coffee-and-tea station. He spooned in Folgers, stirred. Ostensibly, campers weren’t allowed to do this, but he’d found that nobody said anything when he did. It seemed like the appropriate action for a man, to bring a cup of coffee to the office and set it on the desk.
He was nervous when dialing, sure, but the doubts he harbored were overshadowed by the potential to please Caleb. A final gesture—and a grand one!—before camp ended and judgment was cast upon David.
Suze answered on the sixth ring, and he explained that he was David, from Llamalo. She might not remember him, he said, but he remembered her.
“Not remember you? David?”
“David Cohen,” he clarified, just in case she was remembering a different David. He didn’t recognize her voice.
“David Cohen then. Of course I remember. What a surprise. What a treat. Wait, are you okay? Is everything okay?”
“It’s all fine. It’s the last Wednesday of summer, though. You know how it goes. Final Friday is in two days. Then it’s done. We leave. It’s all over.”
“So sad. The weeping and hugging. I’m sad just thinking about it.”
The enthusiasm with which she spoke sounded like the Suze he remembered, but the voice over the line still hardly correlated with the woman he’d held in his mind all these years. He pressed on anyway. “So I wanted to officially invite you.”
“To what?”
“Final Friday. Come here and cheer us up.”
She laughed. “You sound different. How old are you now?”
“I’ll be eighteen next month.”
“A full-fledged adult. How are things at Llamalo? How’s Caleb?”
“It’s been a great summer. Maybe the best yet. Don’t you want to see it?”
“You’re so cute. Do you even know where I am?”
He blushed. “Actually, no.”
“San Francisco. You’re talking about a sixteen-hour drive.”
“To the greatest place on earth? That doesn’t seem like anything. I’d drive forty-eight hours to get here. Straight.” He took a sip of his coffee. He hated it, but he was interested in liking it, so he persevered. “Here’s what you do. Drive ten hours tomorrow. Camp by the side of the road. Do the last six on Friday. Get here by lunch.”
“I can’t even imagine seeing it again. What a trip that would be. We actually have friends in Crested Butte. I was telling Colin we should see them, and that way . . . God, it would be such a trip to come to Llamalo. Like, does it actually still exist? Sometimes I feel like it was all a figment of my . . . Friday? That’s the last day?”
“This Friday.”
“Honestly, I couldn’t bring Colin. No way in hell. He hates roughing it and ex-boyfriends.” She laughed and seemed to wait for him to laugh along, so he obliged. “But if I dropped him in the Butte and came for the day and then spent the weekend up in . . . Friday, right?”
Was she even listening? “Friday,” he said for the third time. Had the last day ever not been a Friday?
“Okay, so I have a question for you, David Cohen. Did Caleb ask you to call me?”
“No! I just . . .” He paused. What to say? “I saw your number, and . . . well, I just missed you, I guess.”
“You’re so sweet. What a trip it would be to be there. I’m such a flake about keeping in touch with everyone that sometimes I feel like the past disappears. And then, here you are, calling me. Okay, I’m not promising, but I’ll work on Colin. We’ll talk it over.”
Hanging up, he recognized that the pronoun she’d used was a problem. Perhaps a man would have asked her about it. Perhaps a man would demand, Who is this Colin of whom you speak? Perhaps a man might say, On second thought, if there’s a Colin involved, don’t bother coming. But he was just a junior man, a newborn man, and he decided that once she got here, once she stood on Aemon’s Mesa, the most incredible place to stand, she’d become singular when she’d been plural. Colin? she’d think. Did I even know someone with that name?
The mitzvah of taking a shower, David wrote in his journal at rest time that day,
begins officially with the ditch water, which goes into the water storage tower on the alfalfa field and then gets piped into the shower house. The shower house, which I should describe, has a wood floor, a faucet on each of the walls, no roof. And a drain in the middle. On Mondays, we (the boys) stay at the river past dinner, eating sandwiches, and the girls go back to camp to shower and I have no idea what they do up there and I can’t think about it too long, because here’s what we boys do when we shower. We freak out. In a good way, a kind of Lord of the Flies way, but without the violence or conch shells. This is Tuesday, I forgot to say. We drop our swim trunks as soon as we cross the road and there’s this ritual of spinning them and letting them fly. So we’re waiting for our turns naked, except with our boots on, which we leave at the door of the shower, and we get back into them, the boots, as soon as we’re done. And right at first we’re freezing. The water heater is solar, that’s cool but it never really gets the water warm. But nobody towels off, we just run around and because it’s so hot, we’re dry in a few minutes and still we keep freaking out and running and screaming until someone yells GIRLS COMING. And then we race bare-assed across the ditch to our platforms to get dressed.
David shook out his hand, cramped from writing. He closed his notebook, lay down on his sleeping bag, closed his eyes, and then sat up again to add one sentence:
Important: Of course if there’s a thunderstorm, all showers are canceled.
ten
Across Disney World
Donnie sat by the kitchen window the night after he sent the fax, waiting for the phone to ring. He could hear the Mexicans revving their lowriders. Someone set off Roman candles, and down the block the chained-up dogs howled in lust for fire that could fly. The wind was as warm as breath, and the phone didn’t ring. He’d wait until midnight, and then, if Caleb didn’t call, he’d start driving. Or maybe he’d wait until one. He didn’t want to go. In his fax, Donnie had said, Call me right away to discuss this. He didn’t want to go, but he wasn’t being respected.
From the other side of the bedroom door, he could hear the bleating again, like the end of the world, like an accusation: What are you going to do about it?
Nothing. He was going to do nothing about it, because he was waiting for the phone. From the floor, one of Marci’s magazines stared up at him, asking are you on the journey to wealth? find out inside! Also on the floor were Marci’s underwear, a slump of towels, and two empty grocery bags with crumpled receipts. It all bothered him.
He picked up the magazine, flipped to the article: “Five Regular People Share Their Ordinary Journeys to Extraordinary Wealth.”
Donnie’s own journey to not-extraordinary wealth had started eight years ago, when he’d been one of six people living in two rooms in Montrose, picking corn while high. After a shitty winter cutting wood with the Mexicans near Olathe, Donnie had arrived in Telluride one March day, and, hallelujah, here was a town still alive, a town about money. He’d found a job fixing up Victorians, painting them lavender or teal or candy-cane stripes or camo green with yellow trim or maroon with gray—like team colors, all lined up on one block. He shared a rental on the wide mouth of the canyon with Ted and Shawn and Summer and Mark. It was a party condo, and he was a party guy, the one who placed the final can at the apex of the beer-can pyramid and then did a little Mexican hat dance. Da dá da dá da dá. His roommates adored their real rancher. All of them were from rainy places like Connecticut and Seattle, and they bought the pot and said, Te
ll us about rodeos. Tell us about how bad the cows are treated.
It was perfect until the October day he’d parked his truck outside the candy-cane house. The wind screamed of an approaching storm. Some hippies had just opened a shop that sold muffins, dense as boiled wool, and he’d bought one and was throwing bits of walnut and banana at the chipmunks. By the time his boss pulled up, the jays had become excited about the smorgasbord, and the sparrows, too, and Donnie was Francis of Assisi, feeding all the little animals.
But his boss had bad news. The Californian who’d thought he wanted to live in a revamped toolshed at nine thousand feet had decided he preferred the planed horizons of the desert. The project was over, and the building season, too, until April or May, depending on snowpack.
Donnie’s roommates were all buying ski passes for the price of three months’ rent, and they didn’t understand why their rancher was riding off into the Western sunset. Or, actually, to Phoenix, where you could get construction work through the winter. There, he painted orange on stucco walls and laid terra-cotta on roofs like Legos, but in a few years, the rents climbed roof-high and his new roommates said, No problem. Let’s travel around in our van with the money we made, and Donnie said, You’re crazy, and moved to Questa, New Mexico, where everyone mined molybdenum at AmMiCo.
At the mine’s cafeteria, he sat next to two brothers, who turned out to be members of a group called People for the West! (the exclamation point, he learned, was part of their name), and they taught him that everything was connected: the same enviros in Washington who had made it too expensive for the Talcs to grow beef were now making it too expensive for the mining companies to conduct their business. It was all connected, because the West wasn’t owned by the people who lived in it or the state governments that understood it, but by the federal government thousands of miles away, bureaucrats with no clue how to take care of it.
Donnie joined the AmMiCo chapter of People for the West! and the mining company paid for his entrance fee and hotel room at the Wise Use Leadership Conference in Reno. The keynote speaker shared a stage with an overlarge ficus and talked about the “end result.” Soon, there would be no way for honest people to make a living, and the entire West would be an amusement park, a sort of Disney World that people in Washington and Hollywood could visit to climb rocks or ski. The mines would move to South America, and our beef would come from Japan and our oil from Arabs, and the trees would be shipped from overseas as well. Our country would be the bitch of the rest of the world. The end result would be a land without its people, just tourists and animals frolicking around like Bambi.
He’d understood then what Caleb had done.
Donnie met Hobart R. Billings, Esq., at the conference, and he left with Billings’s book, as well as pamphlets that asked are you in CONTROL of your PROPERTY? and how can EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRY and WORKING PEOPLE join together to protect JOBS? The evening he returned to Quartzite, he finally had the swagger to talk to Marci, who worked at the El Monte Carlo, a bar near the laundromat.
Donnie said, “Do you know the phrase ‘custom and culture’?” She gave him a squinty, skeptical look.
She had obsidian-black hair, short as a boy’s, and small winking earrings, like extra eyes. He was at the bar, and she was behind the bar, adjusting the radio. She looked too young to be there.
“Think of these words. Custom.” He released his beer to raise his right hand. “Culture.” He raised his left. “What do those words mean? Custom: How we live on the land. What we know about our animals and our crops and our minerals. Culture: The community we make out here. The morals we follow.”
He repeated exactly what the keynote speaker had said, with the same rousing inflections.
She said, “Okay?”
Encouraged, he kept going, all the way to the amusement park. “We’ll be the endangered species then.”
He told her about his ranch, how he would be moving back there soon, taking control of his property. Maybe she’d want to visit sometime.
She said, “You’re funny.”
Marci stayed that night in his rented room, and for several nights afterward, until he felt certain they were dating. He told Marci how they were going to get married and work his ranch and have babies, by which he meant she should keep having sex with him and answering the phone when he called and resting her head right there on his arm. However Marci herself interpreted it, soon she was pregnant and then there was Kayla.
Kayla was tiny and terrifying. She was a spiderweb and a spider, all at once. She was a bouncy chair with a Winnie the Pooh pattern and a pink-roses diaper bag and a bottle sterilizer and a white crib and pink bibs and pink pajamas and little pink dishrags that were not to be used for dishes, and diapers and a camo-print stroller, and this took up all the space in their apartment and all his money.
For the first time since his mom died, he wasn’t lonely, and he never wanted to be lonely again. He would think, Stop bothering me. Who are you? And then he would ache for them: What if they left! He wanted to tuck them under his coat, hide them under his wings. During the days after Kayla was born—those early days before Marci started crying all the time—Marci would say, “Can’t we go now, live on your ranch, let Kayla ride a horse, our little cowgirl?”
He started writing the letters to Caleb when Marci started crying. He’d already been in correspondence with Hobart R. Billings, Esq., who believed that Donnie had a clear case. Follow the money! Hobart R. Billings, Esq., wrote, going on to say that Caleb was clearly funded by the enviro-Nazis; how else would a twenty-four-year-old kid be able to buy a ranch? He warned, however, that lawsuits took years and years. He said that there were quicker ways. Most recently he wrote, We must band together and take back our land from the Jews and the Washington elites. We are all supporting you in your fight!
It was with this encouragement in mind that Donnie sent the fax from the drugstore after talking to Craig, whose stepsister had been at the Motherlode last night. Donnie checked the messages when he came home from a half shift, but nothing. He had the next two days off, but Marci would be working at the laundry and Donnie was supposed to watch Kayla both days. He couldn’t really leave to go to Escadom. When Caleb called, they could talk it through and he wouldn’t need to go. If Caleb called by midnight. Or two. Or three.
He dropped the magazine. The telephone not ringing made Donnie want to crush things.
He waited until the bedroom was quiet, and then he went inside and shut off the TV. Marci had fallen asleep with her mouth open; she was so pretty. Kayla was just lying on the mattress, looking up at Donnie seriously: What are you going to do about it? He walked around to the far side of the mattress and sat down carefully. He held his breath to hear her breathe. She turned to him. Began kicking her legs. He picked her up, held her to him, smelled her scalp. Sometimes, to cheer up Marci, he flapped the baby’s arms around and pretended she was speaking: “Hi, Mommy. I wuv you.” Now he took her little fisted hand and put it in his mouth, closed his lips around it.
He wasn’t going to live in this apartment forever, waiting until AmMiCo moved to South Africa.
He would drive to Caleb right now if he knew where to put Kayla. Too near a pillow and she might suffocate and die. Too near the edge of the bed and she might fall. He poked Marci until her eyes shot open as if she’d never been asleep.
“Just take her, Donnie,” Marci said, rolling over and away from him. “I need an hour. Just an hour—that’s all.” But he waved Kayla’s arms around and said, “I need my Mommy. I wuv Mommy!” and pushed her toward Marci all the same.
Donnie slept on the couch so that he might hear the phone when Caleb called, but he woke at dawn, undisturbed.
Sometimes the saddest events are just a coincidence.
An enviro-Nazi is a fantasy, conjured up by corporate lobbyists.
A storm came and swept your life away, and I just happened to come by after.
Caleb was writing down things to tell Donnie. By storm, he meant global c
apitalism, the unstable price of oil.
It was two, then three, then five in the morning. Too hot to sleep, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was all he could imagine. For example, a gun. Small, the kind that fits a palm. He could hear the campers’ screams. He’d been stupid not to call the cops, but “the cops” was actually just one cop, Glen Lebs. Glen had gone to school with Donnie. His father was on the board of the ditch company, in charge of Caleb’s allocation of water. So maybe he hadn’t been stupid not to call Officer Lebs, but he’d been stupid not to send the campers home. Instead, he’d decided to ship everyone to the river for the day so that he could receive Donnie alone and calm him down before the campers returned for dinner, a plan that now, considering his ignorance of both Donnie’s arrival time and intentions once he got here, seemed half-assed at best.
But what more could he do? Caleb headed to the house before the wake-up bell to remind the breakfast ladies to set out supplies for bagged lunches. He’d left a note to this effect, but as he entered the kitchen amid the gassy fug of eggs, Charlene raised her eyebrows. “It’s far too late to make changes like that.” Despite her diminutive stature, she dominated the kitchen. In theory, the campers were responsible for cooking and cleaning, but this participation, minimal at best—baking the bread, setting the table, filling the condiments—was made possible by, and created extra work for, Charlene. She put her hands on her hips. “I set out the ground round to defrost last night. My menu says sloppy-joe lunch and burger dinner, and so that’s thirty-five pounds of meat gone to waste if you cut out lunch. And besides, my lunch girls are already here. You weren’t wanting me to send them home without pay, were you?”
Was Charlene in on it? Had Donnie called her and told her to keep the campers here? Caleb never argued with Charlene. “This is your kingdom,” he usually joked when she wanted to make a change to the menu. But now he said, “It’s just meat. Can we have some flexibility around here? You ladies want to take the day off and still get paid? Go for it. Live it up.”