The Optimistic Decade

by Heather Abel

  He’d gone too far. Clatter stilled. Hips shifted; heads turned. He patted the counter and attempted a smile. “Well, smells good in here. Smells delicious.”

  At announcements, his plan was met with wails of complaint. This was the last Thursday! Could the building crew stay back to finish work on one of the platforms? What about the cast of Fiddler on the Roof? Lines were unmemorized, sets unpainted.

  He raised his hand to quiet them. “Hot, isn’t it? At six this morning, I looked at the thermometer and it was nearly ninety. Six o’clock in the morning. I can’t think of a better way to spend our last Thursday.”

  It seemed to take forever for the kids to gather swimsuits, water, lunches. The relief he felt once they disappeared from sight dissipated as soon as he found a note from Don thumbtacked to the porch in the usual spot. Not feeling well—Home today. In eight years, Caleb hadn’t known Don to take a sick day. He’d been fine yesterday.

  Caleb waited on the eating platform, which afforded him a view of the road. He tensed when he heard the drone of an airplane and when a kitchen lady slammed the basement door on the way to the walk-in freezer. Then the kitchen ladies and the laundry ladies drove away, leaving him alone. Silence like the day Aemon had arrived on horseback.

  By 5 p.m., when kids and counselors had returned, Caleb realized he’d overreacted. Donnie was all bluster. Posturing, like a teenage boy in the hallway, stepping toward you, making you flinch. Caleb had been foolish to send them away, to give up a day with his camp. This had been the last Thursday until next year, and he’d given it up for fear.

  All day, while Marci worked, Donnie thought about escape. He thought about leaving Kayla with a stack of pink- and white-frosted animal cookies in her crib and driving alone with the window open. It was too hot, a cocksucker of a summer. Donnie and Kayla spent the whole day in the apartment, except for when he wheeled her to Walgreens for talcum powder, because she had a heat rash between her chin folds and under her diaper.

  Near dinnertime, the phone rang. Kayla was on the floor with the cereal box and her yellow chicken, and the TV was on, muted. Donnie was lying on the couch in a mellow state, neither awake nor asleep. He was aware of Kayla’s movements and chatter, and of the sweat on his back, and also of a staircase with gold balustrades that he knew didn’t exist and yet was ascending nonetheless, with a real excitement about what he’d find at the top.

  He was halfway across the room to answer the phone, pulling his damp shirt off his back, when he realized with grief that the staircase had disappeared, like a bubble pricked, and with it, whatever had been waiting for him. “What?” he said to Kayla, who was watching his travels into the kitchen area with delighted fascination.

  “What?” he said into the phone. The man who answered wasn’t Caleb. He wasn’t Hobart R. Billings, Esq., although Donnie had called the Cheyenne number in the back of the book and had been waiting for a response.

  “It’s me.” Don again. They’d talked this morning already.

  Donnie leaned onto the kitchen counter and picked up the bag of frosted animal cookies, pink and white, with multicolored sprinkles that stained Kayla’s lips when she gummed them, and he remembered his plan to put them in her crib, but what if she choked? He couldn’t leave in the evening, after Marci came home, because Marci would say, “Don’t go out, don’t even go to the store, I just got here. I’m so tired, and the heat of the dryers, you wouldn’t believe, it’s destroying my skin, look at my hands, no, touch them.”

  “So you listened to me for once,” Don said. “The kids’ll be gone Sunday. You come any day next week and sit down and talk with him. Or just call him on the telephone.”

  Donnie reminded his dad about the lawyer’s questions. How did Caleb buy the ranch? Who’s funding him, and why? He reminded his dad what Caleb had said in the Motherlode. “You’re not being respected,” Donnie said, and he pushed Marci’s Minnie Mouse collector cup into the sink. It was plastic and couldn’t break, but still he heard Kayla, just a piece of fluff, crying like she understood sorrow.

  “I have a job here,” his dad said.

  “A shit job.”

  “Caleb tries to be decent.”

  What could Donnie say to a man like that? A man who didn’t stand up for himself, even with all the evidence Donnie had presented, who’d lived out his days since his wife died without even fucking another woman, living alone up there with Caleb so as to stay in the exact spot where he was raised up, like a dying tree.

  Well, Donnie could say, “And you’re his bitch.” But wasn’t Donnie becoming Caleb’s bitch, too? Waiting all day for a polite phone call. Waiting for the kids to leave. What could Donnie do to Caleb once the kids left? Wasn’t he falling inward, falling into the small shape of his father?

  Early the next morning, he drove north toward the New Mexico border, toward Four Corners, where his mom once took a picture of him in a cowboy hat, sitting in four states at once, as all around him, at each point on a compass, Indians on blankets sold tin rings. He wasn’t alone, but the windows were open, so he could barely hear Kayla cry, and when he did, he handed to the back seat a frosted cookie in the shape of a bloated mammal, a dead sheep in the ditch, and told her sweetly to shut up because he was bringing her home.

  The Reagan Years: Early October 1982

  A sign ahead: escadom. elevation: 5,798. population: 702.

  Caleb took the turnoff, driving across a river and into a wide valley like a salad bowl. He was twenty-four, with a stack of traveler’s checks, thanks to Peter Finkel, and he’d been driving the small highways for three weeks, surveying the most remote towns of Wyoming, Utah, and the Front Range, but nothing he’d seen was right for his camp.

  The road into Escadom hardly seemed to be heading into a town at all. Caleb passed arrow rows of arthritic fruit trees, two gray spotted horses in a field. A single-story school boasted a towering marquee that said arco coal proudly supports the escadom high conquistadors. It was a Friday afternoon in early fall, but there were no students milling. Beyond the school was another field and then a Mormon church and, finally, two blocks of narrow houses, but still no people, no toddlers in the small yards, no old men in lawn chairs.

  As he crossed into a two-block downtown, he heard the screech of a megaphone and saw a rivulet of people heading the same direction along the sidewalk. The street was lined with pickups and horse trailers, improbably crowded after so much emptiness. Nowhere to park. He circled back to the residential block and stopped under a globe willow. From here, he could see all of the commercial strip—a row of short buildings on either side of the wide street, cut off by a cliff, from which a white cross loomed benevolently.

  Caleb ran to catch up with everyone, feeling charged, expectant, like a child heading to a fair. He followed a couple who held hands but didn’t speak to each other. The man wore a flannel shirt tight over his potbelly, and the woman sported a shellacked fountain of hair and magnificently long pink nails, and still Caleb couldn’t help but see them—see everyone here—as sharing his passion for the wilderness. Despite the bumper stickers on their pickups saying please give me another oil shale boom and i promise not to piss it away this time! and i love spotted owls . . . fried and on the 8th day god made ranchers to care for his other creations. Despite his knowledge, hard-gained in lectures and discussion sections, that ranchers and miners debased the land.

  He walked behind the couple as they passed a stationer shop with a sign in its window—CLOSED indefinitely. thanks EXXON!—a post office, a restaurant optimistically called the Motherlode, a taxidermist. And then town ended, and he followed them across the train tracks, which the couple navigated in perfect synchronicity. Here, they came to a fenced-in area abutting the cliff. It had floodlights on poles at each corner, like a prison yard, although there was a sign insisting it was, instead, the Escadom Rodeo Grounds. The crowd funneled single file through chicken-wire gates, and Caleb trailed after.

  He heard the yowl of a PA system and a voice, the words
running forward: “Welcometothefirsteverbustedrustedtowndestroyed auction, everythingforsale. Howitworksis Isayaprice, youholdupyourcard. Simpleasthat.”

  Finally, Caleb understood. Over the past few weeks, he’d seen the breathless front-page headlines in the Idaho Statesman and the Denver Post: we woke to a nightmare and rocky mountain hell. The story, as he’d pieced it together, was that mighty Exxon had vowed to wring oil from the black shale beneath the western spread of the Rockies. And for two years, thousands came seeking jobs, creating commerce where there’d been nothing—hotels and bars and restaurants blooming like rare desert flowers, men camping in swarms along riverbanks, families living out of cars. Old people were kicked out of their trailer parks to make room for a shining new city to be built. Money, always so elusive, became comical in its near plenitude. Why not accrue a little debt and buy and buy and buy? And then, a few weeks ago, Exxon had changed its mind with, as one journalist put it, “the abruptness of a teenage driver making a screeching U-turn.” Overnight, ten thousand became unemployed.

  Caleb felt solemn to be so near these people, to brush up against their disaster, to examine the tables with their mammy cookie jars, Mixmasters, towers of plates, a congregation of teacups, buckets of wrenches, earrings, scissors, Bible figurines, piles of faded linens. Larger objects waited together on the ground: blank-faced TVs, basins with bloody rust stains, crayon-colored farm equipment, everything tagged with a black number on a yellow circle. The bleachers at the end of the lot were full, families settling down on pillows, lunches emerging from tinfoil. Only a handful of arms—arms, he figured, that lived in wealthier towns, in the ski towns and Front Range cities unaffected by the bust—raised to bid, and they bid on everything.

  He found a place to stand beside the bleachers, with the eyelinered teenagers and the smell of cotton candy and beer. Next to him, a mother bounced a baby. A girl passed him a collection can covered in blue construction paper with Magic Markered writing. As he shoved twenty-seven dollars of Peter Finkel’s money inside to help the families with babies who have nowhere to go, he felt someone staring at him. He glanced over long enough to take in the angry stupor of three teenage boys against the fence, before returning his gaze to the auctioneer, a short man in a blue polo shirt tie-dyed with sweat.

  A few minutes later, he twisted his head, and, of course, they were still on him. He turned away. He turned back. The boy on the right had long blond hair and a shirt with cutoff sleeves that said i’m oilfield trash and goddamn proud of it. The boy on the left had sickly skin, a white tank top, and a dark mullet.

  But the one in the middle, the one who stared most deliberately and most furiously at Caleb, was dressed in full cowboy—low hat, jeans, boots, and a fuck-the-heat blue denim shirt—an outfit that was all cliché; Caleb knew this. He was simply the person Caleb had wanted to be for his whole life.

  Caleb turned away.

  He took inventory of himself as they saw him: his North Face Rockhopper shorts and World Wildlife Federation panda T-shirt. He felt an idiotic desire to explain that, despite his looks and ancestry, he wasn’t in the least bit Jewish.

  Caleb glanced nonchalantly while stretching his arms to the sky. The cowboy’s face was disgusted.

  Caleb had survived high school; he knew the treachery of teenage boys. He forced himself not to look anymore, although he could hear whispering. He considered leaving but imagined them following him through the unpopulated streets. The auctioneer was relentless in his enthusiasm—“Sevensetsofheirloomqualitycandlesticks! Perfectforyourmantelpiece!” There was straw on the ground, an undersmell of manure.

  Out of desperation, Caleb turned to face the teenagers. He gave a little wave and stepped toward them, saying, “Hey!” He told them his name, and then a lie just glided right out of him.

  “I’m a journalist,” he said, borrowing his uncle’s trade, in which privileged people could eavesdrop and snoop without recrimination. He smiled nervously at his audacity.

  The blond and the mulleted one began jabbing the cowboy, looking genuinely happy for him, as if he’d been chosen to step forward in a TV game show. “Told you.” “That’s what I said.” “No, Craig, I said.”

  “Donnie here’s been wanting to talk to a reporter.”

  “Who for?” asked the cowboy, jerking his chin with a practiced arrogance. Up close, he looked even more cinematically Western, with his heavily browed eyes, an angular, canine jaw, the squint of a telegenic young man looking out over the canyon. “Trib? Post?”

  “Our Side Now,” Caleb said, knowing they wouldn’t have heard of it.

  “Never heard of it.” The cowboy frowned, as if this proved it didn’t exist. And then he lit up. “You want a story? I got a story. Shit, I got a story that’ll blow your mind.”

  “A story?” Caleb said, relieved. “Yeah, I want a story.”

  Sure, he worried where they were headed as Donnie maneuvered him out of the auction with a hand around Caleb’s upper arm, but he was charged, too. He wanted to see whatever this boy would show him.

  “Where’s your ride?” Donnie said when they were standing on Founders Avenue, Escadom’s main street. “You need to follow me.”

  Caleb followed Donnie’s truck as it crawled out of town, winding along the river, the fading call of the auctioneer coming through the Honda’s open window. They passed a few farms or ranches, fences, horses, rows of crops, waving arcs of irrigation sprinklers. Caleb followed Donnie as he zagged upward into what seemed like a canyon, the elephant toes of the mesa. Finally, they crested the cliff, and here was another world, hidden from the valley below. Brown earth like he’d never seen before, cracked and lunar, stubbled with grasses and sagebrush. Beyond this, the mountain.

  They drove alongside a canal and underneath a wooden archway with a swinging sign—the double l—stopping beside a shy white house, its back to the road, its front door and porch facing the mountain. There was a barn, the wooden fence of a corral. Nothing else for miles. Caleb stepped out with a buoyant thrumming beneath his sternum. He walked toward Donnie, who was climbing the stairs to the house, and the tall, dried grasses stabbed his legs. It made him unable to swallow, how perfect it all was.

  He 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 . . .”

  eleven

  Heat Wave

  What was the mathematical term to describe the shape of Escadom Mountain viewed at dawn from Rebecca’s platform? Sine, cosine, one of those waves. Not tangent—she remembered that much. I remember it tangentially, she thought. It is tangential to my purpose here.

  And what was her purpose here? Last night, after her girls had fallen asleep, she’d made herself come twice, urgently, with her eyes closed. This morning, as the first light manifested a difference between sky and mountain, her hand slipped back in her underwear before she was fully awake. She began rubbing lazily, eyes focusing on the deep-blue outline of the mountain.

  Whatever the term, its shape was erotic, she thought, attempting use of a word that had always unnerved and embarrassed her, much like the word “occult.” Against her wishes, she thought of the inscrutable exterior of Erotic Books. She’d been sure to look assiduously away whenever her parents drove her down Pico, so she never saw the clientele, although she’d imagined them. Even a girl without a TV knew what the clientele of Erotic Books was supposed to look like, the facial hair indicating furtive and unsatisfied desires.

  Her parents visited bookstores that other parents didn’t. Georgia periodically brought Rebecca with her to Sisterhood Bookstore, and Ira to Midnight Special, and she would worry that someone from school might see her and assume these strange stores were a type of Erotic Books and her parents perverts, a worry that wasn’t assuaged with the paintings of vulvas in the feminist store, although the Marxist bookstore was reassuringly sexless.

  Returning her thoughts to the mountain, she considered that it was the shape of the swell sh
e was currently chasing. My purpose here: rise, apex, downward float. Maybe this was why everyone liked mountains so much. They were the physical manifestations of fucking. “Fucking,” as a verb, was another new word. Her parents used “fucking” exclusively as an adjective—the fucking president; the fucking idiots. Or, on further consideration, as a middle name—Jesus Fucking Christ!

  There was sweat on her forehead, thighs, belly, hand. For two days, a hot wind had been whipping across the plateau as if blown from a hair dryer. She’d never felt anything like this in sunny California, where the ocean tempered all temperatures, so that the prevailing element was always water. Here, it felt like the brittle ground was about to burst into flames. All her girls had slept atop their sleeping bags; but she’d fallen asleep inside hers, so that her hand wouldn’t be visible if anyone woke and looked over. Still, she couldn’t stop the rhythmic shh-shh-shh of down-filled polyester.

  She hadn’t been able to meet David in the barn since Wednesday morning, when they’d had the experience she was currently reenacting with her own hand. Wednesday afternoon, he was on dinner duty. Yesterday, because of the heat, Caleb had sent everyone to the river all day. As they hiked back to camp, Tanaya approached Rebecca with surprising urgency and shyness. Her period had come suddenly, staining her bathing suit; she didn’t want her friends to know. Rebecca snuck Tanaya inside the house, where they could wash her suit with forbidden running water in the upstairs bathroom. Leaving Tanaya hiding there, Rebecca rushed around to fetch a pad, clean clothes, Advil. It was pleasing to be needed in this way, especially by Tanaya, but it kept Rebecca busy until dinner. “I waited,” David had whispered in her hair when he passed her table. “Tomorrow,” she’d replied. Which would be today. Saturday, campers left early. Rebecca and the other counselors were expected to stick around for a week of cleanup, after which she’d take a bus from Grand Junction to Berkeley, where she’d sit behind a folding table in Sproul Plaza during orientation and invite the incoming class to join Students United for Justice.