by Heather Abel
“Not a joke. Apparently, he grew tired of being a liar and a thief.” If Donnie’s mom was part-Indian, this made him part-part-Indian, and he war-cried and whooped until everyone in the room was looking at him. “Sayonara, asshole.”
“What’s he saying?” Sue Lebs asked from a chair in the corner.
“Caleb. Up on Aemon’s place,” Gene Lebs called. “Giving it to Donnie.”
“He didn’t mention this to me,” Press said, turning to Don, who sat beside him on the couch. “He tell you?”
Don was staring at Donnie. They hadn’t had time to confer. His dad had been gone all day, driving kids from church camp in Naturita. “He’s giving it you?” Don said. “When did this happen?”
“Selling it.”
Don set his plate on the coffee table and walked out of the room, just as some Sorger girl entered from the kitchen, saying, “Did I hear right? My job’s gone?”
“You gonna hire us now, Donnie?” asked one of Charlene’s daughters.
Gene Lebs said, “Well, good for you, Donnie. Good for you.” Finally, the mood turned the way it should. Everyone started saying how glad they’d be to have Donnie back, and when would they meet the famous Marci, and wasn’t it great he’d earned enough money to buy his ranch back, wasn’t he responsible, and the Sorger girl, who was worried about her laundry job, told her daughter to get Donnie a beer.
After which, Donnie went to the bathroom, saying hello to his mom, whom he found in a photo in the hallway, a bridesmaid at one of Charlene’s daughter’s weddings, in a lavender floor-length dress with ruffles and high collar, her hair in two wings. She was captured midsentence, but what was she saying?
On his way back to the living room, he saw that the door to Charlene and Hein’s bedroom was flung open. He looked inside, and there was his daughter. Don had removed his boots and was on the bed with his legs stretched out; little Kayla, part-part-part-Indian, a papoose on his chest, her dreams, whatever they were, caught by the circles of webbed string and beads above the bed.
“Where you getting the money?” Don whispered, patting Kayla’s back.
“I’ll get it. Everyone has money. Money’s not the problem.”
Later, sticking around after everyone else had left, even Don and Kayla, Donnie asked Charlene if she could give him a loan. She was at the sink, hands gloved in bubbles, and she turned to him.
“Oh, Donnie. I loved your mom, and I love you. But I got nothing.” Donnie looked through the living room to where Hein was watching an enormous TV. Charlene was lying. “I got two of my daughters working the kitchen with me. That’s our income. What we make in the summer from Caleb takes us through the year. I’m happy for you, Donnie, but I don’t know what we’ll do.”
The next day, Donnie found Logan Sorger in his upper corral and asked him. Logan took off his hat, wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He was two years older than Donnie; they used to get drunk and push each other into the ditch. “Don’t you get it? There isn’t a single person we don’t owe money to.”
He went to talk to Glen Lebs and heard the same shit. The Lebses were drowning, their orchard insolvent. He drove over to Frank’s Farm and Feed, and Kevin Kinney told him that they were going through a temporary hard patch. He even asked Craig, who worked at the coal mine and whose dad worked at the coal mine, and both of them made less than Donnie made at AmMiCo.
That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, he called human resources at AmMiCo and said he was quitting. Then he called Marci and told her to come to Colorado. She said, “With what car? You took it.” When he asked if her dad could give them a loan, she said, “I knew it! I knew it!” And then she grew hysterical and screamed that he needed to bring Kayla back right away. Still, it didn’t seem like it should be hard to get the money. There was money all around.
The woman who led him into her cubicle at the bank was plump and pretty and smelled of floral shampoo, but soon it became clear she pitied him. His credit rating wouldn’t allow her to approve a mortgage of that size. No, not even a mortgage half that size. But she did know a real estate agent who specialized in starter homes and trailers he could talk to.
All week, he could hear the counselors shouting to each other, playing their music. From the trailer, he couldn’t see their ratty ways, except when two of them lay on the top of the picnic tables like they were lawn chairs. He didn’t walk by the house, didn’t speak to them. Not once, not even when the Jewess with the sharp face and the tufts of hair in her underarms came right up to him when he was sitting with Kayla outside the trailer.
“So what’s your baby’s name? She’s so cute. Are you Don’s son?” She was polite and serious, and it would be fun to flirt, to make her blush. It would be fun to tell her the truth about Caleb and watch her react.
“I’m not allowed to talk to you,” Donnie said finally. He did what he was told. Walked inside the trailer, where it was so hot Kayla’s skin pimpled.
“Sorry, sorry,” Rebecca said, backing up, apologizing instinctually, even though she hadn’t done anything wrong. She’d only tried to be nice. The man was always alone, sitting outside his dad’s trailer in his USA shirt with his baby on a towel beside him. He was the man who’d tried to talk to them on the last day of camp and who’d been too shy and flustered to get his words out. She hadn’t wanted to bother him. She’d only wanted to tear down hierarchies! Wasn’t that a noble impulse? It wasn’t right, the way the counselors hung out day and night, like at a movable party, and he sat alone, a single dad, hardly older than she was.
She’d simply wanted to extend friendship across class lines. It seemed bizarre that he wouldn’t let her. He wasn’t allowed? By what religion, what law?
In the grip of embarrassment, she marched toward the house and entered the little upstairs office with the darling wallpaper. She hated this room now. She came here every day, ignoring messages littered across the desk—Rebecca, your mom called; Rebecca, call your mom—instead, calling David at the hospital. “Oh, Rebecca, hon,” Judy had said on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. “He’s busy now. I’ll tell him you called.”
Today was Thursday. The counselors were at the river, but she’d stayed back to use the phone, to finally tell Georgia that she’d be leaving school to help Caleb.
“After what he did to David?” Georgia said. “Judy said that Caleb acted unconscionably, that he was dangerously negligent. I only reached her once, the day after it happened. Joe won’t speak to us at all. Like everyone else, they’re furious about OSN. You don’t know this, because you won’t return my calls, but all our friends are absolutely enraged at Dad. I get blamed, too, you know.”
Rebecca patiently explained that Caleb didn’t do anything. David had done it himself, run away, attempted to descend a cliff in the dark, all because—here she became a little flustered, since she still didn’t know why he’d left that night. Was it because she’d bad-mouthed Caleb? Was it because David and Caleb had fought? When she’d asked Caleb what they’d fought about, he’d brushed it off, saying, Just a little thing.
“All because he loves it here!” she said finally, in an adamant tone that made up for the gaps in logic. He loved this place Joe was destroying, this place Rebecca would now save. Or, if not the place, exactly, then the spirit of it, the ethos, the way.
“Well, Joe’ll never forgive Caleb,” her mom said. “You know that. But what I’m hearing is that you’re reacting to what’s happening here. You’re having a reaction, which is understandable.”
“It’s not about there. I love it here. I love Caleb’s vision,” she said, realizing too late that this was not the way people in her family spoke. They didn’t care about “visions.” They just did their work. Until they didn’t.
“We need to talk about what Dad did,” Georgia said. “I need to know how you’re feeling. How is this for you?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve had the paper for a month without calling us. We gave you space, but you have to talk to me now. It’s a big ch
ange. I can admit, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, that it wasn’t my plan. It was all Dad. I hope you don’t mind me telling you that I’m furious, too. Like you, I’m completely enraged.”
The feelings Georgia apparently wanted to talk about were her own. “Everyone asks me why Ira thinks he was the only one who could do it. His voice is all that matters? Someone could’ve taken over as publisher. What about all the work everyone else did? What about the subscriber base? Everyone’s asking if I wanted the job, but you know he couldn’t have watched me, just sit by like that and watched.”
“So, I’ll call Berkeley and take a leave of absence.”
“Don’t be ridiculous—you can’t stay there. You’ll be so relieved to go back to school. I only wish I had that kind of distraction.”
Ira must have walked into the room, because Georgia began screaming. “Don’t put it there. Ira, Ira. Ira, stop. I’ll do it. Here, you talk to Rebecca. She says she’s leaving school. Because of what you did. She’s upset, like I told you.”
“Pumpkin. I appreciate you calling finally.” Her father’s voice shocked her. That he still existed! That he had not, with the letter, somehow offed himself. “I know how mad you must be at me.”
“I’m not mad.”
“It’s natural for you to be furious. It’s not how you would want things to go. But school is exactly what you need. The sadness you’re feeling, the sadness we’re all feeling, will be mitigated by school. You’ll have your clubs. Your classes. Your friends.”
“Are you listening to me? I’m not sad.”
And she wasn’t. She’d spent the past few days floating on an eddy of happiness. Or if not happiness, then a wondrous type of energy. She enjoyed watching and talking to Caleb, who had several times taken her aside to seek her insight about the counselors and their possible commitments. Caleb was brilliant and decisive. He didn’t quit or fail. He cared so deeply about giving everyone the feeling of standing with so much space all around. David had been right about him, after all. And David, whom Llamalo had transformed so thoroughly, who was so entirely different here than at home, David would be thrilled when he finally learned what she was doing.
Often, when Rebecca walked about camp, she felt outside of herself, as if she were watching a movie about a woman who had come to save a dying town. And the woman in this movie was beautiful and sexy and also somehow her. Because she had transformed as well. How had she ever thought she could go back to Berkeley, to the loneliness of that neutered existence? Here, Scott smiled at her, Jamal gave her a back rub, Jeremy put his hand on her thigh and asked if she wanted to go look at the stars with him. They were on the Meadow at the time, the stars abundant above them, so she said no, she had a boyfriend, didn’t he know?
She listened as Ira screamed at Georgia. “Put the phones in the closet. No, not in there. I told you to give them away. I told you.” To her, he said, “It’s a mess here, pumpkin. We have to clear out the office before the first of the month. So tell me, is this an emergency? Are you actually serious about leaving school? Because I’ll drive there. I’ll come, and we can talk this through. Is that what you need? You need me to come there?”
“No. I don’t.”
He went through his schedule aloud anyway. He had a lunch interview that afternoon and a radio appearance the next day. He told her he was always giving interviews now. The Nation, NPR, the San Francisco Bay Guardian. They all wanted to know why he stopped the paper and what his thoughts were about the invasion. “You know about that, right? Iraq invaded Kuwait— done deal, now it’s really happening. I’m sure you’ve been reading all about it. I can leave Saturday. We’ll talk it through. Actually, Saturday’s tough. I’m sorry, pumpkin,” he said regretfully, as if unable to accept an invitation she’d extended.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Just get yourself back to Berkeley and we’ll come see you there. I’ll come next week. We’ll go out to lunch and talk about everything.”
She could hear Georgia’s voice in the background.
“George, I get it,” Ira said. “So, Mom says to remember, it’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be sad.”
“I’m happy,” Rebecca screamed, hitting her hand on the desk. “I am very, very happy.”
The Carter Years: October 1977
In the beginning, of course, there was no myth, just a younger Caleb, a skinny, nervous Caleb, standing beside his car’s open trunk at the end of a dirt road.
He knew how the story should go: A young man walks into the wilderness, unheeded and alone, and he finds purpose, strength, surety. Caleb knew the words “Rocky” and “Mountain.” Put together, they erupted into snowy peaks passable only by mountain goats, wolves, bear, and himself.
Perched on the ground beside him was a backpack with a metal frame like a railing for the disabled. Into the pack, he pitched a silver can opener still clinging to its cardboard backing, a can of refried beans, a fork. He looked for the mountain but could see only foothills furry with low brush. He hoped the mountain wasn’t too high. He shoved batteries into a flashlight’s plastic canister and dropped that into the backpack as well. On the other hand, if the mountain were too short, would it really count?
He’d left DC nearly two weeks earlier with a simple, glorious plan, which was to climb the mountains of the West and learn the secrets of people who did such things. People such as his father, dead now six years. Caleb was taking a semester off from college; there was no better time to uncover these secrets. “It was gnarly,” he would say when he returned to his job at Kinko’s. “It was insane,” he’d say.
But he’d driven to the Bitterroot Mountains and the Wind River Range and the Uintas and the La Sals, and he hadn’t climbed anything. Instead he ate at Denny’s and slept in hostels, including the hostel in Moab with a live alligator in the bathtub and the one in Lander with three girls lying shirtless on the roof. The other young men wore sunglasses on little leashes and read topo maps before setting out for the wilderness without inviting Caleb. They looked at him as if they knew he’d never slept outside except for that one night on the lawn between Temple Emanuel and the Dunkin’ Donuts to raise money for the cross-country team.
Caleb crouched to tie the laces of work boots as large as teakettles. He was due at Kinko’s in three days and should really be driving through Nebraska right now, but last night he found himself on a small highway somewhere past Montrose, Colorado. There were no billboards. No stores. No suburbs, no subdivisions, no woods, no apartment complexes, no intersections, no overpasses, no cemeteries. Nothing he was used to. When he saw a sign for Gunnison Mountain Road, he took it. Although he couldn’t actually see a mountain, he decided that this was the Rockies, and Gunnison would be the mountain he would climb before returning home. He slept in his car and woke at dawn, figuring he should be able to ascend and return by nightfall.
There was no marked trail, so Caleb headed off between huddled juniper trees. After fifteen minutes, he turned to look at his Honda, which was actually his stepdad’s Honda, orange and bereft, like a homebound pet. He waved, just a small lift of his hand, because he was embarrassed to be waving to a car, although no one could see him, not even the Honda.
Soon Caleb grew pleased with the sluggishness of his leg muscles and the blisters ballooning on his heels and toes. This pain meant that he wasn’t the same Caleb as he’d been in DC, when his body had felt nothing. Here, red crevices had been cut into the earth. Maybe he, too, was cut away, all that was distasteful about him, all he’d inherited from his mother—his worry, arrogance, pessimism, all eroded.
As he walked, he found himself keeping pace to the iambic first line of a Thoreau quote. The-West of-which I-speak. The-West of-which I-speak. And, unbidden, it came back to him: The first time his dad took him hiking, how he’d strained to keep up. He’d been nine, naïve, sycophantic. Even now, a decade later, he cringed with embarrassment, remembering how, at the dizzy peak, with patchwork Vermont spread below them, he’d tried to impress R
obbie by saying solemnly, “Now I understand wilderness.”
Robbie had laughed like a delighted baby. “This? This is sweet, but shit, it’s not wilderness. It’s not really even a mountain. What is it? Second-growth forest on a hill? A mound? A trumped-up anthill? You want real wilderness, you should come to Utah. Or Wyoming. Colorado—that’s wild.”
Robbie had then explained that the reason he didn’t visit Caleb more often—and he would like to, really he would—was that when he hung around humans after a stretch in his cabin in Utah, the anxiety that came off them was so heavy he could smell it. “Like burning rubber. I can literally see the fear of death on them. I just kind of sit back and watch them buzz around, rush and stress and freak out. Just so they can gorge themselves and buy crap and watch television and make lists. You see this, right? They’re trying to distract themselves. And the funny thing is, they don’t even have to feel that way!”
Later that day, Robbie had dropped him back at his mom’s, where, a week later, a letter arrived with no message, just the quote in his dad’s handwriting, the words crawling across the paper. “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. —Henry David”
The quote, he later learned, after checking out every book by Thoreau from his Jr. High library, came from an essay titled simply, “Walking.” And here he was at last, walking in the West, the Wild. “Colorado,” he said, and he liked the round sound of the word.
It was not yet noon when he finished his beans and realized his life’s purpose. He was meant to be a wilderness pioneer, a leader through the unknown, an interpreter of the desolate high-altitude expanses. His laces were stippled with burrs, like a feasting of aphids on stems, and although he didn’t know the name of the burrs, he wanted to teach the name to a group of people who walked behind him.
He wanted to say “butte,” “mesa,” “abutment,” and he wanted the people walking behind him to ask “Which is which, Caleb?”