by Heather Abel
She described how Joe had fought farmers for years to get them to stop forcing laborers to use the short-handled hoe, “El Cortito.” She described how he could team up with his friend Ralph Nader to bring national attention to safety at summer camps, using Llamalo as a case study, how friends at Mother Jones would write the article, how Ira, perhaps the best investigative reporter alive, outside of, say, Sy Hersh, could find the names of any camp parents, current or prospective. When she finished speaking, the only noise was the whoosh of cars passing in the fast lane.
Caleb didn’t speak again for half an hour, at which time he hit the steering wheel with both hands. “I’m fucked! I’m fucked!”
Caleb was indeed fucked. But what about her? The only boy she’d ever loved didn’t want to see her again. The only place this boy cared about was gone. Which was on her. All her fault. And the center had fallen from her life. Nothing mattered. El pueblo unido would be defeated. The schools would never have all the money they needed; the military would not be holding a bake sale; it would never be a great day. Wasn’t she fucked, too?
Caleb exited the highway at a town called Frisco. He parked in the empty lot of an office complex, all the windows dark, although spotlights on the façade illuminated white letters that spelled grochemco: growing a chemical colorado.
“So, I’ll rejigger,” he said, still looking straight ahead, hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, as if maneuvering traffic. “No kids. I’ll invite adults to live up on the land with me. A year-round thing. Better than a two-month camp. We don’t need campers. We don’t need tuition. Everyone participates for their keep, maybe pays some room and board. We could break even.” A moment later, he breathed out heavily. “But fuck. The lawsuits and the fucking insurance. How do I pay for that?”
“Can’t you grow something on the land? Wasn’t it a ranch?”
“Costs way more to ranch the land than to let it sit there.” He slammed his hands against the steering wheel. “Fuck!”
He drove back to the highway on-ramp, and Rebecca imagined coming back here in two years and finding that GroChemCo had taken over the entire town. And in five years, the company would own the state of Colorado. And in ten years, GroChemCo would be her entire country, and nothing she or anyone did would stop it.
At 12:17, Caleb again exited the highway, this time parking at a Taco Bell in Glenwood Springs. “I figured it out.”
“What out?”
“Are you hungry? I’m hungry. Let me buy you dinner.”
In an otherwise-empty restaurant, over seven-layer burritos and Sprite, he described a plan so fully formed that it seemed he’d spent months devising it, taking notes, weighing philosophical and practical concerns. He would sell the ranch, set aside a portion of the money for lawsuits, and with the rest, he’d buy cheaper land—perhaps in Colorado, but he’d consider Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, anywhere with a similar relation to mountains and the horizontal axis. He’d invite counselors and, when they turned eighteen, former campers. David, of course. Word would spread, and soon he’d be attracting other young people as well. College students on a semester off or in their aimless years after graduating, when life’s purpose glowed brightly but held no shape. Before they hardened. Before they were distracted by babies and debt, before they’d relinquished their plans of living a life of wonder.
It had been a mere four hours since he’d learned that Joe would destroy his camp. Already rising from the ashes? He was taut with confidence and optimism, radiant in the ugly fluorescent light.
He asked her if she knew the word “mitzvah.”
“Is that a Hebrew word? I’m not really Jewish, not in any synagogue-entering way. Is your mom?” She already knew of the atheism coupled with disdain for all religion—especially their own—on their shared paternal side, the way Ira could not even sit through a revised feminist Seder, where all mentions of Pharaoh were replaced with Reagan, and the hope for next year was never to be in Jerusalem.
“No. But it’s a useful word. I’ve been thinking about it. So, Christians have to believe in God, right? That’s what gets them saved—I take Jesus into my heart, that sort of thing. But Jews, those skeptical people, don’t expect anyone would simply believe in the intangible. So they set up certain actions—or mitzvahs—and by doing them, again and again, you might start to believe. One way to think about Llamalo is that it’s not a place, but a series of actions we do.”
“I don’t get it. You never mentioned God before.”
“No, Rebecca. Not the biblical God, but a feeling, a holy feeling. You know it. The feeling of standing on Aemon’s Mesa. That’s what I’ve wanted to share with kids. That’s what can change them forever. But they can’t access that feeling simply by showing up and standing there. I mean, take yourself. Did you feel anything when you first came to Llamalo?”
She shrugged, rightly accused.
“See, it’s the actions we do, the rituals, the mitzvahs—repetitive, mundane collective acts—that grant us that feeling. We can take these actions anywhere. They’re Llamalo. And the first mitzvah we’ll do, the very first, will be to walk to this new Llamalo all together.”
As he spoke, not in the casual way he’d talked all day, but as a camp counselor, as if there were hundreds listening, she thought him brilliant. What an agile, fascinating way to consider Llamalo. And didn’t it have echoes of what David had said to her? Was it just yesterday? Caleb has this way, this system.
Then his tone switched. “I have five fucking days to figure this out.”
“Why five?”
“What do you think?” He spoke sharply, as if annoyed by the slowness of her mind. “Then they leave. The counselors leave. I can’t walk alone. I can’t do rituals alone. It doesn’t work that way.” He pulled the straw from his drink, twisted it tightly around one finger. “Some of them have to come with me. Jeremy? Mikala? They might. Saskia, sure. Maybe Kai. Scott? But I need to convince them. Now. Before school starts and they get distracted and then I’m alone.”
He released the straw, and it sprang onto the table. “What about you, Rebecca?” Now his voice was intimate and cautious.
“Me?”
He reached over their trays of food to touch the tips of two of her fingers. “Want to help me save Llamalo? I’ve seen you here this summer. I’ve seen how much you changed.”
It was true, she realized with a thrill. She wasn’t at all the same person. That sexless girl? That prude? Here, she was turned on by the very earth. “Yeah,” she would say to her friends back at Berkeley. “I took a semester off to help my cousin start a community. A commune-type . . . A way of living.” She’d have to work on the precise vocabulary. “I’ll be headed back there in May when classes are out. My boyfriend lives there. David. You should come sometime.”
“I think you have an understanding I need,” Caleb continued.
She saw herself visiting David tomorrow in the hospital she was currently driving away from. Don’t worry, I’m saving Llamalo for you. As the rest of Colorado became subsumed by GroChemCo, only Llamalo remained, a light of resistance. Not systemic? Well, what was? My friends, we have done something wrong.
“So what do you think?”
Dive in, she heard him say. Dive in and ride this wave with me. She turned to the window, which, in the darkness, had become a mirror. She saw them both leaning forward, looking so much alike, and who could tell whether it was familial resemblance or the Jewish thing or the determination of a diver. “I could take a semester off. Maybe longer.”
sixteen
Metamorphoses
A small glitch: Donnie’s car was still parked at the trailer.
Caleb had seen it in his headlights when he and Rebecca returned to camp at two thirty in the morning, and now he was lying in his yurt wondering what to do. His only goal over the next few days was to convince the counselors to leave with him for the new Llamalo. But who would do this if Donnie, inarticulate as he might be, found a way to share his rumors and rageful fantasies
? Donnie wanted nothing more than to sow chaos. His only goal was to fuck things up for Caleb.
He imagined calling Donnie in the morning from the ranch house.
“Hello, Donnie. It’s Caleb. Please leave my property immediately.”
“Hello, Donnie. Guess what? You’re not allowed to visit your dad anymore.”
“Hello, Donnie. It’s Caleb. You can stay, but I forbid you to talk to the counselors.”
When had Donnie ever done what Caleb wanted him to do?
Well, once he had.
At this thought, Caleb threw off his blanket and walked out of his yurt, its canvas walls too confining for his excitement. Barefoot on the wooden platform, he tilted back his head to breathe in the stars. All that mattered, he reminded himself, was the invitation.
Over the years, Caleb had learned that if you invited them the right way, people generally acted how you wanted them to act. If you made sure to invite them into something grand and purposeful. If you told a compelling and urgent story into which they could enter. If you gave them a role, a small but crucial part.
When he woke, he was startled by a strange light. He’d never been in his yurt midmorning in the summer, and it was like being trapped within a glowing white orb, what a caterpillar might see midway to becoming a butterfly.
At the house, he found the counselors doing nothing, directionless, under the halcyon illusion that everything hadn’t just changed. They were squeezed around one table on the eating platform. Four played hearts; two, cribbage. On the table were boxes of cereal, bowls crusty with oatmeal. Caleb stood behind Kai, placing his hands on her shoulders, pressing his thumbs along the knobs of her spine to the velvety nape, and in that way, he apologized for his distance of the past few days. As he rubbed, he told everyone that David had been in a good mood, despite some injuries he’d sustained when he’d fallen while on an ill-conceived farewell walk yesterday morning. (Caleb had told Rebecca, and she’d agreed, that this was a simpler story to present.) Caleb then gave instructions for the work that the counselors needed to do that day, but he made sure to praise them, too, to tell them he trusted them to set whatever pace they needed, to take trips to the river, to have a good time.
“Wouldn’t it be so fun to bring the baby to the river?” Nat said. “She’s such a squish!”
“She’s like the cutest thing,” Kai said, leaning into Caleb’s hands. “Don was walking the ditch with her, and we all got to hold her.”
Caleb tried to keep his tone casual. “Was anyone else with them?”
They said no, they didn’t think so.
Caleb sat with them until he saw Don drive away. He told the counselors, in a demanding tone that negated his previous laissez-faire sentiment, that it was time for them to head over the ditch. Once alone, he walked across the alfalfa field to the trailer.
“My dad’s not around,” Donnie said, filling the doorway so Caleb couldn’t see inside, although he could hear a baby’s emphatic babbling.
“No, that’s fine. The thing is, Donnie, I was looking for you.” Standing at the threshold, Caleb was a step down from Donnie, a bothersome deficiency in height he wasn’t used to.
“Not exactly in the mood for a chat.” The door began to close.
“Wait up,” Caleb yelled. And since all that mattered was the invitation, he said into the diminishing space between door and jamb that Donnie had made some really great points when talking to the campers.
The door stopped moving a few centimeters from shut. “Really smart thinking. I listened to you, and I thought about it. This is your land, Donnie. When Exxon left, it was a terrible time for everyone here. I didn’t mean to take advantage after what Exxon did.”
The door opened. “Wasn’t Exxon.”
Caleb nodded several times, trying to agree with this irrationality without convicting himself. “After the . . . unfortunate circumstances. Look, Donnie, you belong on this land. You’re right about that. And I wish, man, I wish I could give it to you outright. I really do. Unfortunately, I’ve got debts, as you might imagine. But how about this? I’ll give it to you as cheap as I can.” Caleb named a price. It was slightly less than he’d paid eight years earlier but still significant, although, as he’d been telling himself all night, surely mining jobs paid quite well and Donnie’s expenses were minimal. Besides, wouldn’t Escadom Savings loan the Talcs whatever they needed? “How’s that sound? You think you could come up with that?”
Donnie turned away, retreating into the trailer. Caleb leaned in and saw Donnie, responding to a noise, crouched and tugging something from the baby’s mouth. “Drop it, Kay-Kay. I said drop it.” When he returned, he was holding the girl. She had a red shirt, diaper, yellow flyaway hair, a grave expression like her dad. Her starfished palm was hitting his chest.
“I mean, if you can’t get the money, I do understand,” Caleb said nonchalantly, his heart pounding as if a palm were slapping his own chest.
“You think I couldn’t? You really are an asshole.”
“Sorry, I didn’t want to assume. Well, I was hoping to get this going as soon as possible. How much time will it take to get it together?
“Like I said, no problem. Whenever you’re ready.”
Caleb shoved his hands into his pockets. “There are a couple additional things I’ll need you to do, though.”
“Things?”
“Just two.” Caleb paused. With an anxious little smile, he said, “Number one is, I need you not to speak to the counselors. You don’t tell them anything. I just want to be clear, and I wish I didn’t have to ask this, but if I find out you even come near them, I’ll have no choice but to sell to someone else.”
Donnie stared at Caleb. It was a wolfish stare, both vulnerable and accusatory. “And two?”
Caleb laid out the second condition. He told him what time to come to the Overlook on Friday, what to wear, what to say. He said that if this went as planned—and he had every reason to believe it would—on Saturday morning the two of them would meet at Escadom Savings and begin the land transfer.
“You’re bribing me?”
“No, no. No. Not a bribe, Donnie. This is mutually beneficial. Come on—you can see that.”
There was a noise—a thunk and then a scratch, like a branch scraping glass—and a shuffle of blue-and-white feathers in Caleb’s peripheral vision. A bird flying across the alfalfa field had hit one of the trailer’s windows and dropped to the ground. They moved together from the doorway to see. A magpie lay still.
For a few seconds, nothing. Just Kayla pointing. Then it shook, and without discernible effort, it was aloft, showing off the oily black underside of its wings, their crisp white bands.
“Thank god,” Caleb said.
“Stupid bird,” Donnie said.
But the way they stood there and the sound of their voices made it seem, to Caleb at least, like they’d finally said the same thing.
At lunchtime, Caleb found the counselors on the porch. He crouched to get their full attention. On Friday, he said, after all their tasks were done, they were going to do something they’d never done before. They would have a kind of ceremony, during which he would give them news that, quite frankly, would change their lives forever.
“What?” Kai asked.
“Rebecca knows, but she’s not telling, are you Rebecca?” He caught his cousin’s eye, shared a smile.
Nat said, “This is so freaking mysterious.”
Scott said, “Whoa.”
Caleb grinned. “Good. Get excited. You should be.”
There were Indians everywhere on Charlene and Hein’s coffee table that evening. Seated warriors with ribboned headdresses. Bare-chested bucks on horseback. Men smoking the peace pipe inside a teepee. A whole clique of kneeling maidens, breasts just pouring out of leather dresses, one of whom Donnie had picked up and was examining. “Your mom loved Indians, just like me,” Charlene said, coming up beside him. “You remember that about her? How she used to say she must be part-Indian because she lov
ed the Indians so much?” Charlene was child-sized, had been old even when Donnie was a kid, and she had to reach onto her toes to pinch his upper arm when she said, “It’s good to see you back, Donnie.”
It was Sunday night, and she’d filled her house for him. Charlene and Hein’s daughters and their families, and Press and Amy-Lynne Sorger, and Glen Lebs, who’d been just a skinny, nervous fucker and was now the cop, and his parents, Eugene and Sue Lebs of Lebs’s Orchard. Also Craig and his parents and brothers and their families, and the Kinneys, who owned Frank’s Farm and Feed, and a whole flock of teenage girls in Escadom High shorts and ponytails, one of whom brought him a banana split in a red plastic bowl, blushing cutely. And whenever he was thirsty, some woman would say to some kid, “Go get Donnie a beer,” because he was the guest of honor, the king, the one they’d all come to see, after his years in banishment, and they didn’t even know it was over yet.
The teenage girls had set Kayla on the rug and brushed makeup on her cheeks, and last he saw, she was back in the kitchen, where some women were feeding her succotash from their fingers. Donnie discreetly felt up the Indian maiden. He’d never been an honored guest before, never even had a birthday party after his mom died, and here he was, basking in love coming at him from all directions.
He could kiss Charlene in gratitude, pick her up and spin her around. If Charlene hadn’t planned this party for him, he would’ve left yesterday. Instead, he’d called in sick and was around this morning for Caleb to tell him he could have his land back. He hadn’t thought he’d convinced Caleb, but apparently he had. He waited until there was a unified lull in the conversations, and then he set the maiden down, saying to no one in particular, “Well, it looks like I’ll be moving back here.”
The heads nearest turned to him.
Donnie nodded, as if in response to a question. “Yup. Caleb’s ashamed of how he acted. Moving on. Says it’s Talc land.”
Charlene sucked in air between her teeth. “Don’t joke, Donnie. That’s my job you’re talking about.”