by Heather Abel
Caleb could see the rest of his day stretch ahead. When he finished fucking up this interview, he’d eat dinner burritos with his roommates at El Farolito, followed by pub trivia at Flanahan’s. Half-drunk and not at all revived by the trivial victory, he’d retreat to a bedroom that used to be a fire escape, the walls gummed with Ansel Adams prints and that Thoreau quote: in wildness is the preservation of the world. He would read from the stack by his bed: The Call of the Wild, Gary Snyder’s The Back Country, Desert Solitaire, the books his dad had given him the last time Caleb saw him, all of which he’d already studied devoutly, highlighting and scribbling This is it! in the margins. He’d jack off. He’d sleep.
Panicked by the dour unspooling of his day, he found himself shouting, “I can save people, sir. I know it.”
Peter Finkel glanced up as if he’d just noticed that a visionary—or an idiot—was sitting across from him.
“What are you, twenty years younger than me?”
Caleb nodded. At least twenty.
“And you’re saying exactly what I said twenty years ago.”
“Seems unlikely.”
“Do you have any idea how depressing that is?”
“It can’t be exactly the same.”
“You can save people. Really?” Peter Finkel paused to slide his jaw back and forth in a way that made him look both enraged and uncomfortable. “Because I have no idea how to save anyone, least of all myself. And I kind of want to smash your head for the hubris you have.” Peter Finkel raised his fist toward Caleb’s head, and Caleb flinched.
Peter Finkel shook his own head slightly, eyes cast to the floor, as if to apologize to his peaceable self. “And then to think that in twenty years, you’re going to be like me, disappointed with everything you did, wishing more than anything you could get that feeling back, that confidence, that ballsiness, but knowing you never did save anyone. God, that’s depressing.”
Caleb knew that he would never be like Peter Finkel. Peter Finkel had scaly white islands on his bald tan head and small hairs protruding from his earlobes. Caleb’s body could climb mountains, could bike across the Golden Gate Bridge in the rain.
“When Ira called and told me about you, I thought, Okay, sure, my job now will be to nurture the young blood, to mentor, to help out, to pass the baton, so to speak. But then you come here with your suit, and Jesus Christ, you look just like I did, with your hair cut short and your ears sticking out. But that doesn’t matter, because everyone’s always told you that you’re smart, so you think you can save people.”
He bugged his eyes at Caleb. “And so I’m thinking, sure, I’ll teach you. Do you want to learn about disillusionment? You want to learn about a pervasive feeling of failure?”
Caleb tugged at his socks. “I understand your reluctance, sir, but isn’t it somewhat of an exaggeration to insist that failure and disappointment are inevitable? I mean, of course I’m not working at this scale, but consider—”
“Hold on. You’re not about to say Gandhi. You’re not going to say MLK.”
So Caleb, who had been about to say Gandhi and MLK, said, “Ira.”
“Ira?”
Caleb regarded Peter Finkel, the scorn scowling his face, his bare knees shining and broad as skulls, his fingers twitching at his toys. The person he used to be was dead. His days were spent mourning Peter Pan, mourning optimism. Caleb felt a sudden sharp love for him, for how old he was and all he’d lost. He stood up, relieved to be released from his blue egg, and began gliding around the room, the straw mats springy and smooth under his socks. “Think about it: Ira’s still doing what he set out to do. His paper arrives in my mailbox every Wednesday. He hasn’t lost his ideals. He hasn’t succumbed to disillusionment. You don’t have that, right? But what if that’s Llamalo in twenty, thirty, forty years? Forty years of kids being transformed. Going back into the world as these transformed people and then changing it. What if you made all that happen?”
“You’re a cocky motherfucker.”
Caleb stopped abruptly a foot away from Peter Finkel, forcing the man to look up. He put his hands in his pants pockets, hitching up the pants. “How about you give me the money, and then in forty years you come visit Llamalo and see what it’s become?”
Peter Finkel squinted at him. “And if Llamalo—which is a crazy name, by the way, you might want to think about changing the name—doesn’t exist anymore?”
“You can gloat. You can say you were right. But that’s not going to happen.”
Peter Finkel stared ahead. “That’s fantastic, but in forty years I’ll be dead.”
“In forty years, Ira will still be writing his outraged editorials—.”
“Hunched and arthritic,” Peter Finkel said.
“And I’ll be waiting for you at Llamalo.” Caleb opened his palms.
“You want me to give you money so that I won’t be outdone by Ira in my dotage?”
Caleb didn’t answer, and Peter Finkel didn’t say anything for a while, just tilted his head back, considering the ceiling. Then he stood. “Fine. You’re on. I’ll back you for one year—start-up costs not to exceed fifty thousand dollars. Because if I live, I want to be able to say, ‘I told you so.’ ” He was much shorter than Caleb, and he looked up as he spoke. “I’ll pay fifty grand for the privilege of saying it to you.”
Caleb reached to shake his hand. “You won’t be able to, sir.”
Peter Finkel bowed with his palms together, offering his eczematous baldness to Caleb. When he returned to vertical, he stared into Caleb’s eyes. “You don’t get it. I was you. I was a motherfucker like you. It doesn’t last. I wish it did. God, I wish it did.”
fourteen
Miss Clavel
Caleb clanged the cowbell on the porch. The hem of his jeans was wet from crossing the dewy meadow. Wind flattened his shirt against him. It was five thirty on Saturday morning, and there was darkness all around, stars above. He sounded the bell again and again, until everyone on the plateau would know: this was the last morning.
A baby cried. Donnie was still here.
Caleb entered the house, passed through the living room, and set a pot of water to boil. The kitchen held the fermented smell of a crate of apples rotting under the table. Today, the kitchen ladies wouldn’t come until dinner, when they would feed the counselors one last time. After that, he’d see them only in the bank and Ute’s Market and the Motherlode until next summer. Soon he’d be cooking for himself again, taking one plate from a shelf of ninety, or heading to the trailer to see what Denise had made. That is, if his friendship with Don hadn’t been soured by Donnie’s paranoia. And if it had been, then what? Entirely alone up here?
But first, he reminded himself, with a firm enjoinder to calm the fuck down, there would be Counselor Week, six days when the counselors helped Caleb clean and store supplies, remove tarps, and repair the structures. With skills honed in college, they’d prepare meals of overspiced slop, legumes softening in the cloying embrace of curry powder.
Our Week of Infantile Foods. That’s what Suze had dubbed Counselor Week. Remembering this, Caleb felt doused with a fire hose of embarrassment, and he turned away from the window, as if to avoid being seen thinking of her. Would he always feel this humiliation at memories of Suze? He could not bear it.
Knowledge, it turned out, was not preferable to ignorance. Send Caleb back to the garden, to his innocence and longing, to his belief, however false, in her inevitable return, anything but this finality. Better to never have seen her again.
Caleb poured the boiling water into two mugs, added Folgers to both, sugar and creamer to one, and was ready by the side of the road just as the headlights came toward him. When the bus heaved to a stop and Don stepped down, Caleb held out the sweetened coffee.
“You planning on taking time off next week? Just let me know—it’s no problem,” Caleb said nervously, as this was his oblique way of asking about Donnie’s visit.
Don sipped his coffee. “Might head to Junction. Let
me know what you want me to pick up. Been having these headaches. Denise wants me to see some Chinese healer she’s heard about. She says they know a lot, the Chinese. She says they have ancient wisdom.” Don laughed in his wheezy way that was indistinguishable from gasping for breath, then he added. “Donnie’ll leave today, I’m pretty sure. Or tomorrow. I apologize for any interruptions.”
I told you so, Caleb thought, being both subject and object of that sentence. Of course Don harbored no ill feelings toward him. Of course they were friends. For eight years now, they’d stood in the dark, drinking coffee.
“Ancient wisdom, huh?” Caleb said. “I’ll tell you what has ancient wisdom. Tylenol. You tried that? You tried a little something I learned from the native peoples called Advil?”
“How about you go round up your kids.”
“We’ll be fine,” Caleb said, grinning over his coffee. Don believed flight times were merely suggestions. Every year, he’d worry that the planes would get spooked like horses and fly away before he could get the campers to the airport.
“There’s the coal train to think about.”
“It’s going to be fine.”
“I know you’ll insist on a breakfast stop. You want to ring that bell of yours again?”
Caleb let Don fret for a while as the sky lightened around them and objects took their usual shapes, and then he relented. “I’ll move them along.”
Walking toward the ditch, he could see campers laden with sleeping bags and backpacks; soon they called to him: Caleb! Help! You woke us up in the middle of the night. My bag is way heavy.
For the next half hour, Caleb and Jeremy and Jamal hefted suitcases from the platforms to Don, who loaded them in the bus’s storage. When they were finished, Caleb boarded the bus, standing with one hand on the driver’s seat. “Shit, they’re loud for six thirty in the a.m.,” he said to Don.
The lucky campers with window seats rested their cheeks on the glass. Nat and Saskia stood in the aisles to count kids. Kai, whom Caleb had turned away from his yurt the night before, climbed the stairs, slipping past Caleb without looking at him. Rebecca headed up the aisle to where Caleb stood. “Where’s David?”
Caleb shrugged, gestured his thumb out the door. “Ask Scott.”
He turned sideways to allow Rebecca to pass down the stairs. From the doorway, she called to Scott, who was approaching from the eating platform, bent over a mug. “Where’s David?”
“What?”
“Where. Is. David?”
Once aboard the bus, Scott looked down the aisle. “He’s not here,” Rebecca said, coming up behind him.
“Gotta be. He came down early this morning. Was gone when we woke up. Duffel bag by his bed, everything packed. Figured he had something to do with Caleb.”
“Me? Why would he?”
“He’s not here,” Rebecca repeated.
“We can’t wait around,” Don said.
Caleb calmed everyone down. “I’ll bring David myself. He must’ve decided to take a walk. Pretty irresponsible of him.” He gave Scott cash to buy the traditional breakfast donuts in Delta and patted Don on the shoulder, still relieved at the reassurance of their friendship. “See you at the airport.” He hopped off the bus, but Rebecca followed.
“I’m waiting with you,” she said, with a fierceness he didn’t have time to address.
Don honked the horn.
“Okay, okay,” Caleb said to Rebecca. To Don, he said, “Get out of here!”
The doors closed; the bus exhaled and left.
Caleb told Rebecca that he’d check David’s platform again. “You hang around here and give him hell when he returns.” He grabbed a box of O’s from the pantry, eating from it as he walked, impatiently awaiting the return of prodigal—and hopefully penitent—David.
The sky brightened. Nothing moved but the shaking heads of sage. Nor was David on his platform, where Caleb saw only Scott’s sleeping bag and eight stripped and stained mattresses. On the shelves, the usual left-behind debris. An uncapped bottle of Off. A pink bandana. One sock. A composition book, its black cardboard cover with a constellation of white spots.
He picked up the notebook, and it opened to the middle, where the pages were sewn together. On the lined paper, indented with ballpoint pen, he found a sort of family tree or genealogy chart. “Water” branching off to “shower” and “drinking” and “plant,” which was crossed off and “garden” written above it. “Singing” branched to “Meadow/informal” and “campfires.” “Walking,” its own category with three subcategories. And so on. The writing became miniscule toward the bottom and edges of the page. Dropped onto the edge of a cot, he turned the page and began reading. The mitzvah of the generator, which is similar to the mitzvah of sundown . . . He flipped forward a few pages: The mitzvah of looking at the silloehtte sillohette of the Dobies when you wake.
He read awhile; he couldn’t say how long—he was simply gone, fallen into this curious encyclopedia of sorts. The mitzvah of John Denver. The mitzvah of standing at the Gathering and feeling your vectors go shooting out. The mitzvah of guitar before eating. The grammar was juvenile, “your” and “you’re” methodically transposed. The handwriting was terrible, the “vah” of “mitzvah” barely legible, like the silhouette of the Dobies when you wake.
He turned back to the front page to look for a name or explanation and found a ripped-out sheet of paper, folded once, stuck between the front cover and first page.
Hey Caleb. I think you should have this. I was keeping a sort of record of Llamalo—how it actually works. I don’t know if you know the word mitzvah. Actions to bring you close to god. Jewish people—actual Jewish people not like me—say you don’t need to believe in god, just do the actions and you get there. Whatever god is, right? Act this way and belief will follow! Anyway I was going to explain this all to you, the whole point of the book. But since we both know that my time here is over—that I won’t have anything more to do with Llamalo. Well, I guess I won’t get the chance. You could keep this if you want. Love, David
Book in hand, Caleb descended the platform steps and headed to the house. After a few minutes, he picked up his pace, just slightly. Was David running away? Caleb didn’t want to give in to panic. It was early still. The kid was surely nearby, could return. Caleb began walking faster. A disconcerting image from Madeline, which he’d read hundreds of times to his half sister, appeared. He had a sense of himself as the feminine and ineffectual teacher—or was she a nun?—speed-walking toward disaster at an impossible angle to the ground.
Ignoring Rebecca on the porch—“What’s wrong? What is it?”—he headed to the parking lot, tossed the composition book onto the floor of his truck, drove all the way to the Sorgers’ before he thought better of it. He skidded around and returned to Llamalo, parking beside the house. Ignoring Rebecca again, he ran up to his office and found the number in the phone book for Escadom Search and Rescue.
Chase from the Forest Service answered. “Caleb! Bright and early. Been meaning to ask you about your truck. Glen Lebs said you might be selling it. You called on the Search and Rescue line, not my home line, just FYI.”
“I’m missing a boy.”
“Seriously?”
“Seventeen-year-old kid. He left this morning, couldn’t have gone far. Maybe five eleven. Blondish hair. Can you start looking?”
“Hold up.” Chase began asking useless questions. Date of birth. Parents’ names and numbers.
“He could be at the river. Actually, I think probably that’s where he went. You know, I’ll hang up now, go down there myself and check.”
“Hold on. Wherever he is, he’ll probably come back on his own. That’s by far the most likely scenario. And now that you’ve initiated a search, I’ll need you by your phone. You’ll need to stick around to call us, so we’re not scrambling up your cliff all day when he’s back there eating marshmallows.”
“You know my trail to the river? I can show you,” Caleb said while searching for David�
�s file in the box of such.
“All your kids hoofing it every day when I’m trying to count birds? I think I’m familiar with it. Stick by the phone.”
Caleb found David’s registration and shoved the paper and cordless at Rebecca, who had appeared in the doorway. “Answer his questions. And stay in the house. The phone has a tiny range. Only goes as far as the barn.”
He pushed past her to descend the stairs and didn’t stop running until he reached the river, a shock of green willows by the blue water.
“David! David!”
A kingfisher flew by, three great blue herons. A bald eagle circled. Tamarisks swayed their lacy fronds. Had he drowned himself?
They would have to dredge the river. He would insist on it. Caleb ran back uphill to find Rebecca on the porch, to ask if Chase had called. But Chase hadn’t.
Caleb ran through camp, past the Gathering, climbing into the foothills, so that he could see farther. But he could see nothing. He saw the mountain rising to the east. He saw the Dobies to the south. He saw the green cut of the valley to the west and the mesa beyond, stretching nearly to Utah. He saw nothing. There was no emergency. If there were an emergency, wouldn’t he see it? Our eyes are useless tools. Our eyes could see a boy and mistake him for a Russian olive.
Returning to the house, he grew fatigued and unable to run. He jogged and then walked, bent over, a sharp pain between his ribs. He was passing the photography shack when he noticed a small figure moving near the ditch. “David?” he screamed in a high voice. “David?” He felt the wings of endorphins, and he ran effortlessly.
But it was only Rebecca, waiting on the bridge. “Chase called. He’s pretty banged-up— that’s all he said. Banged-up. They’re bringing him to a hospital in Delta.”
“Where was he? Where’d they find him?” Caleb grabbed the phone, as if it held the answers.
“I didn’t ask.”
“Did you talk to him?”