by Heather Abel
The living room looked undressed without the Talcs’ plaid curtains, without their couch, their secretary, their commemorative plates, but Caleb had to admit that the kitchen had improved without the camp’s oversized appliances. What remained of the Talcs’ wallpaper was mostly obscured by photos of Lacey and Anders in Costa Rica, in Patagonia, in winter, in summer, always outdoors. A framed Ansel Adams photo of a pueblo in moonlight, a poster of the taxonomy of chilies, actual dried chilies tied to cupboards painted Ed Abbey peach.
When Anders DeWitt had heard from Suze, who’d heard from Mikala, that Llamalo was for sale, he drove there right away from Aspen. Caleb barely recognized him from the camp’s first summer. He still wore wire glasses on his unruffled face, river sandals on his skeletal feet, but he’d gained an air of astounding confidence, a smug joviality. The secret to happiness, he told Caleb, was simply prioritizing happiness. He was only twenty-nine, but he had an MBA from Wharton, a trust fund from his maternal grandfather, and a commitment, he said, to conscious investing. “That one summer I spent up here”—he waved one arm around the thorny, seductive grounds of Llamalo—“changed my entire outlook. Reset my life course.”
He’d bought Llamalo for four times what Caleb had offered it to Donnie for, and then doubled its size when he bought the Sorger ranch as well. And then he approached the owners of the Motherlode.
For months, the town’s single restaurant was dark, a note scotch-taped to the window. thank you to all our patrons. and especially the coal minors we are so proud of. we are sad that we must say goodbye. But it opened under the name Coyote Junction Restaurant and Microbrew just in time for Christmas Eve.
“Caleb!” Anders boomed into the room. “Don’t tell me Lace left you empty-handed.” He wore a T-shirt with a cartoon drawing of a triangle for a mountain traversed by a man on stick skis—a cuneiform of joy—with three words, it’s all good. He fetched two unmarked brown bottles from the fridge, and they sat.
Anders jiggled his knee beneath the circular table, tapped his turquoise ring upon it. “Are you cold? Lace says she’s freezing. I can’t get the fucking coal furnace to work right.”
“I’ll take a look at it.”
“Well”—Anders smiled, either embarrassed or relieved; it was hard to tell—“thanks. That’d be great.” He looked uncertainly around as if for a clue as to how to continue the conversation and then brightened. “So, there’s awesome news about some prospective buyers.”
A New Year’s article in the Grand Junction Tribune had gloated, Welcome to 1991. Nearly a decade after the collapse of oil shale, could Escadom be headed for financial recovery? It quoted real estate maverick and restaurateur Anders DeWitt: “I think we can safely say that the cycles of boom and bust are over. Unlike the extractive industries, real estate and tourism, if managed thoughtfully, are economically stable.”
Anders smudged one finger across a wet circle on the table as he described a couple from the Front Range who, because of something called telecommuting, could work in Boulder but live in Coyote Junction Ranch, during which monologue Caleb listed for himself the plants that would sprout along the ditch when the snow melted. Twistflower. Tumble mustard.
Lacey entered, wearing jeans and a red sweater, followed by the dog, Arapahoe.
Prince’s plume. Asparagus. Devil’s beggartick. Caleb remembered a time, so recently, when he’d pointed out Gardner’s saltbush to a crowd of kids walking behind him.
Anders said he was super-excited about the entrepreneurial synergy between the new residents.
Shad scale, hedgehog cactus, spindle bluebell. There was the mitzvah of knowing the names of the plants.
Lacey, opening the fridge, asked Anders why he’d bought mild salsa when she’d told him to get picante.
In a few months, before the snow melted and the high mountain streams poured into the reservoir, Caleb would walk the length of the ditch, setting fire to it, part of his job now.
Turning to Caleb, Lacey said that she totally got why Anders wanted to move here—“He’s an idealist, you know”—but the skiing sucked, and it was such a haul to get to Crested Butte or Snowmass.
Was the feeling of standing on Aemon’s Mesa a holy feeling if Caleb was standing there with synergistic entrepreneurs? Was there a mitzvah of modular modernism with a Western flair?
And what if, after the snowmelt poured into the ditch, the ranch manager of Coyote Junction Ranch (which—someone should tell Anders—was no longer a ranch and had never seen a coyote), wedged a fridge door in a divider and flooded the road? Nobody could leave. All of them stuck here, staring at their computers. Would they even notice?
Caleb set down his beer and stood. “I have to go.”
“Whoa, man. What happened?” Anders jumped up. “You came for dinner. Lace makes a mean enchilada.”
Caleb reached out his hand to shake Anders’s, but Anders was placing something in it. “Just try this bottle—hints of pumpkin! Come on, man, don’t go. You know, it’s strange to admit it, but I get kind of lonely out here. We should hang out, man. We should do stuff.”
Lacey said, “Anders, if he needs to leave . . .”
There was the mitzvah of needing to leave. Caleb set the pumpkin beer on the table. “You have snowshoes? To walk in the snow. You have a pair I could take home?”
One day before the war began, Rebecca woke when the bare bulb switched on in the garage. “Hon?” The muffled maternal call came through stacks of paper. “Can I come in?” Georgia asked after the fact. Through the open door, the oceanic smell of fog hurried in.
Rebecca reached out from her bedroll to turn on the battery radio, expecting Daniel Schorr and the coming war, but finding herself deep into local food programming. Apparently, she’d slept through the day’s promising beginning. The room was dark; bamboo had grown over the garage’s windows. All night, she’d heard the leaves rustle like newspaper against the glass.
She’d arrived home by Greyhound two weeks earlier, in time for the annual Our Side Now after-Christmas potluck not to happen for the first time in her life. Nobody found the shoe boxes of political buttons in the linen closet. Nobody brought the potted pine in from the front yard. Nobody pinned the political buttons to its boughs and then draped on silver tinsel. Nobody stood on a chair to affix, at the very apex of the tree, in lieu of a star, Georgia’s prized possession: a green button with yellow writing that said wearing buttons is not enough.
The production assistant wasn’t drunk in the bathroom. The paralegals from Joe’s office weren’t huddled by the oleander talking shop. People who, due to political rifts, hadn’t spoken to each other in twenty years, weren’t not speaking to each other. The UCLA professors and the renters’ rights organizers and the good city councilors and school board members and Rose from Bread and Roses in Venice weren’t refilling their cups with cheap wine in the garage. David wasn’t sitting on the couch with his headphones on. There was no discussion of whether it was Joe or Judy’s year to come. (It was Joe’s.) There was no debate over when the contingent of United Farm Workers folks would arrive or whether Chavez or Dolores would be among them. There wasn’t a single member of the Chicago Eight, not even Tom Hayden. The movie star Ramón Estevez and his friends, the former nun and priest with whom he got arrested each Wednesday morning at the Federal Building to protest nukes, hadn’t brought their black bean dip. Only Jerry came—Jerry, who sold bumper stickers on the Venice boardwalk in his Speedo—but Georgia sent him away.
Since Rebecca’s bedroom was being used to store file cabinets and IBMs from the newspaper office, she was sleeping in the garage for the duration of her visit. Back when Rebecca was thirteen, the OSN office had moved from their garage to a storefront on Pico, and the garage had turned into the newspaper’s morgue, shelves stacked with papers in chronological order.
Now Georgia maneuvered around these shelves with her worried look and a plate of buttered toast. She sat on the edge of Rebecca’s mattress. “Can I sit?”
“Did a
nyone call?” Rebecca asked, reaching for the toast.
“You keep asking us this. Who’re you hoping for?”
“Nobody, Mom. It’s nothing.”
“Is it Luke? Is everything okay with Luke? He was very sweet when I spoke to him yesterday. Were you hoping he’d call again? It hasn’t been twenty-four hours. You really like him, huh?”
“It’s not Luke.”
“Is it someone from Samohi? Is it Mihui? Didn’t you go to the pier with Mihui a couple days ago?”
“It’s not Mihui. It’s nobody. Forget I asked.” She willed her mom to guess, to say, “Is it David? As a matter of fact, David did ask about you. David did call.” At the very least to say his name. David.
Instead, Georgia sighed. “Fine. I have to go to work. How about you get dressed and come with me this time? Aren’t you tired of moping around here with Dad? We could always use another canvasser.”
“CalPIRG? Door to door in Pacific Palisades?”
“I know, I know. What am I selling?” Georgia smoothed Rebecca’s hair from her forehead. “Let’s see. I’m selling a way for some housewives to stop feeling guilty. They don’t pay their maids a living wage, but they gave twenty dollars to save the sea lions! There. I beat you to it. Did I miss anything?”
“No, that’s basically it.”
This was her parents’ life, postnewspaper. Ira had his book deal. Georgia, unable to find other work, ended up with an organization she and Ira had always mocked for its Band-Aid solutions.
Rebecca switched off the radio. “The war’s about to start, you know.”
Georgia gave the automatic responses. “Terrifying, disgusting . . . That man.”
“Apparently, there’ve been protests at the Federal Building. There’s an encampment.”
“Are you going?”
Rebecca took a bite of toast, chewing as she said, “Me? To stop the war? Nineteen-year-old white girl sleeps in North Face tent on the well-watered lawn of the LA Federal Building. Bush reconsiders bombing Iraq. War in Middle East thwarted forever!”
Georgia picked up the plate and stood. When she reached the door, she turned around. “It wasn’t very nice of us, was it?”
“What wasn’t?”
“We made sure that from the earliest age you were outraged by injustice. And then we told you that there wasn’t anything you or anyone could do about it.”
Rebecca shrugged. “It’s not like you had a choice, right? The end of the optimistic decade and all.”
Georgia frowned, her hand on the light switch. It was automatic, muscle memory; when you leave the morgue, you shut the lights. “What’s that?”
Rebecca explained it the way Ira had. How everyone got just one, and hers was over.
Georgia tossed her head back. “That’s such bullshit! Such typical Ira bullshit, creating a universal theory out of his own personal malaise. One optimistic decade! Just because his ego wasn’t being rewarded sufficiently, despair’s on all of us now?”
Georgia flicked the light off—“Sorry”—and then on again. “Hon? You know why I was so furious when Dad stopped the newspaper? It wasn’t because I disagreed with him about its efficacy. I can’t argue—and I didn’t argue—that we were creating substantive change. No, I was mad because I loved it. God, Rebecca, I really did love it. I loved the weekly deadlines, all that anxiety. I loved the sense of being in it with everyone else, of being in the trenches, if I can, on this day, use a war cliché. Ira worried for years—‘Are we still relevant?’ And I would reply, ‘It feels good.’ ”
“You wanted to keep it going because it felt good?”
“It made me happy to do the work. Or, I guess more accurately, it made me happy to decide that the work mattered. Because it is a decision. You should know that, hon. So many things in life that you think are definitive are really just decisions. Does the work matter?” Georgia frowned and folded her arms, leaning against the doorway. “I made a decision, despite evidence to the contrary, to believe in . . . what? In the collective power of all of our seemingly insignificant steps? I guess that’s it. Your dad always likes to say ‘Maybe the arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend toward justice after all,’ and sure. It doesn’t. Not unless we pound on it. But that’s my decision, to believe in the pounding. That’s what makes me happy. This afternoon, I’m giving a presentation to the other canvassers about mollusks, our latest campaign. Mollusks! Did you know your mother cared about bivalves?”
“No, Mother. I didn’t.” Rebecca knew she sounded snide, and she felt bad about it. But deeper down, she felt the smallest rustle of hope, a palm frond moving in the windless sky.
“Do-nnie,” Denise called, later that morning in Colorado.
“Do-nnie,” Marci called.
Donnie tensed his leg muscles and then released them again to the soft embrace of the couch cushion. Don was sitting in his chair beside the couch. Kayla, her hair in two pigtails, busily crawling in and out, dropping plastic pop beads like prizes on Don’s lap, on Donnie’s belly. The TV panted, “Desert Storm!” There were yellow ribbons wrapped around the front doorknob and pinned in cheerful florets on Denise’s sweater. In September, Craig had flown for free to Kuwait, via Texas, after signing up with a recruiter at the Grand Junction mall.
“Donnie, we know you can hear us.”
“Get in here.”
Donnie groaned to rise, beads tumbling to the carpet. He didn’t work until 4 p.m. No need for verticality before then. In the kitchen, the two women seated at the table had the same disapproving expression on their dissimilar faces.
“Didn’t we ask you twice to check in on Caleb?”
“Twice.” Marci played the important role of echo.
“We need you to do it this morning.”
“This morning.”
Donnie stood above them. He was the man of the house now, but not the hero. Caleb was the hero, after all, the good son. He’d bought Don this two-bedroom in town, across from the park, where they could all live together. No vista, no mountain, but out the kitchen window, they could see the statue of the miner, snow landing on his helmet and streaking across the names of the dead.
“It’s been, what, three days?” Donnie said, still hopeful he could get out of this. “Probably on a trip. Skiing or whatever he does.” Until this hiatus, Caleb had been coming every afternoon to sit with Don for a stretch. He’d drag a kitchen chair into the living room, hold Don’s left hand, talk to him about god-knows-what.
“Well, we should know that,” Denise said.
“We asked you,” Marci said.
Getting out of the tasks the two women required of him was Donnie’s current fight against society, but he could tell he wouldn’t make headway today. In the silence of their insistent gaze, he heard Kayla in the other room talking like Don, to Don: Caw caw, da da. They were learning together.
He drove up onto the plateau before work, and there was Caleb’s truck in front of the trailer, snowbound. He’d let the women know they were worrying for nothing. Caleb had simply stopped his visits. Even good sons go bad sometimes.
But as Donnie turned onto the field, he spied some yellow paper nailed to the front door, fluttering slightly.
Dear you,
I’m sitting on what I used to call the Great Overlook, nothing to the south but the grays and whites and browns of winter. Escadom Mountain in its winter pelt keeps guard to the northeast. This is the view that I’ve seen every day for nearly a decade, and I love it.
If you found this note, you’ve seen it. You know how perfectly mind-stopping it is. You know how every morning it can shock you anew. I’ve spent these past years trying to understand why we crave so much open space and mountains. I can only figure that there’s something reassuring about grandeur. That it helps us believe that there could be eternity, there could be forever. There could, at the very least, be a very, very long time, long enough for us to finally tire of this world.
When I sold Llamalo, I was determined not to lose this, too. Th
e feeling of standing on Aemon’s Mesa. But I was holding on to something I didn’t need. This view is actually nothing special. There are lots of grand places, plenty of mind-stopping views. For a few days, I understood this. I thought I would make a new Llamalo. I thought we’d walk there together, find a new piece of land. But I see now, I got the order messed up. I’m the one who’s supposed to start Llamalo, to do Llamalo, to be Llamalo. Nobody will follow until I start. Well, here I go.
There’s nothing holy about this plateau. This is NOT Llamalo. I’m headed out to find it. You’re welcome to join along.
“Jesus, Caleb,” Donnie said out loud, slipping the note into his back pocket. “It’s the fucking middle of winter.”
At Coyote Junction Restaurant, where Donnie was a busboy and Marci a lordly waitress, he was distracted from the skilled labor of carrying water glasses, because Marci was flirting with Glen Lebs, who’d asked to be seated in her section. While they worked, Denise watched over Kayla and Don and the demon boy from across the street and Charlene’s grandbaby. “My daycare,” she called it. Honey Nut Cheerios for all.
Donnie stayed late to mop, returned home beat, eyeballs throbbing, spine twisted. And still, because he was the man of the house, he went into the basement to remove clinkers from the coal furnace before he dropped into bed between Kayla and Marci. Fell asleep on his back with a hand on each of them.
When he woke at noon, twelve hours before the war started, he passed the note on to Denise, who called Chase at Search and Rescue.
twenty
Llamalo
“Yeah, I knew all that,” David said with surprising matter-of-factness.
“All of it?”
Rebecca had just told him everything. She’d taken the bus to the address Judy had given her, knocked on his door, and said, from the hallway, “I know you don’t want to see me, but there’s some stuff you should know.” She didn’t omit anything: Joe’s threat; Caleb’s idea to remake Llamalo according to some Jewish idea—she couldn’t remember the word; Donnie. She told him that Llamalo had been sold to a former counselor, and Caleb was living in Don’s trailer.