Desert Boys

by Chris McCormick

  “What’s that?”

  “Invest in a swimming pool.”

  * * *

  During the years Reggie and Allison lived on the farm, Keith asked on a number of occasions if his daughter could visit. Allison never said yes.

  “Why should I?” she’d ask Reggie in bed at night. “Keith was the one willing to give this place up, and now he wants to use it as a day-care service?”

  One night, Reggie decided to risk an argument. He said, “Forget about Keith for a minute. Think of the girl. She’d love it out here. She’d love Genie. You could show her how to ride.”

  “That’s just what he wants,” Allison said. “He’d train her to fall off the horse. Get hurt on purpose so he can sue us for the money he’s wanted from the start.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “You don’t know him like I do, Reggie.” She felt the need to provide an example. “Growing up,” she said, “he used to call me Frecklestein. Like Frankenstein, only uglier.”

  Reggie waited for a there’s more that never came. “That’s it?”

  Allison remembered the farmer next door—long dead now, house demolished, land for sale—how he’d asked her over the fence line to tighten a small screw in one of his sprinkler heads. He needed her tiny fingers for the job. While she worked at the screw, he slipped his hand up her shorts. His fingers were as cold and wet from the sprinklers as a slice of bologna. There was her brother, eleven or twelve years old, watching from the safety of the alfalfa field. Why hadn’t Keith helped? Well, he was a child, she supposed. Still, she never trusted her brother after that—maybe she never loved him after that, either—and she’d never told her husband, or anyone else, the reason why.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s it. You calling me petty?”

  “Forget the horse ride,” Reggie said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a young person out here for a change? Someone seeing the place for the first time?”

  “Everything children see, they see for the first time.”

  “But we’re talking about family,” said Reggie.

  “You’re my family,” she said, and kissed him on the forehead. “You, and no one else.”

  * * *

  In the second week of her stay at the farm, Charitye drove her uncle’s truck into a ditch. She’d asked for a driving lesson—her dad had only taught her on an automatic—so Reggie took her out in the red Ford to an unpaved but leveled section of the desert, where he’d seen kids with dirt bikes and paintball guns spend their weekends. This early in the morning, no one was around except for the wind, which, despite the time of day, was already going strong. Still, the sand under the tires was packed tight enough so that, if she timed the clutch right, they wouldn’t go skidding into a sandbank. Unfortunately, her timing was off.

  She’d left the engine running and was standing in her straw hat—Allison’s—over Reggie at the front of the truck, where he’d kneeled to inspect the buried front wheels. “God, I’m really sorry,” she said, genuinely embarrassed.

  “Hand me a plank out of the bed,” he said, reaching out for it prematurely, the way Charitye had seen doctors do in hospital dramas.

  After she’d handed him the plank, Reggie wedged it behind the front right tire—the one more deeply embedded—and told her to stand clear as he backed the truck out.

  “Wait,” she said. “I got it stuck, so let me back it out. Please?”

  A gust of wind nearly knocked Reggie off-balance. The straw hat on Charitye’s head went tumbling into the bank. She chased the hat down and, when she caught it, pressed it to her head. Sheets of sand slapped their faces. Reggie tongued granule after granule in his teeth. “Okay,” he said. “Give it a try.”

  Charitye looped around the truck and stepped in behind the wheel.

  When she’d backed the truck out far enough, Reggie heard her crank the gear into neutral, as he’d shown her. She leaned over the seat to punch open the passenger-side door.

  Tipping her hat, she said something Reggie couldn’t make out over the noise of the wind and the engine.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said,” she said, “Need a lift, cowboy?”

  * * *

  In the afternoon, Keith called.

  “Yeah,” Charitye said into the phone. She spun in place, wrapping herself with the helix of the cord, and then spun the other way to unleash herself. “It’s fun,” she said. “We’re having fun. I’m getting a lot done. I’ve learned a lot.”

  Reggie tried not to eavesdrop. He sat down at the table near the window and looked out at the sun damage growing white across his truck’s red paint like a beard. I’ll have to get a new truck soon, he figured to himself, if I plan to drive into town for groceries or to lecture the Future Farmers at the high school for much longer. The truth was he didn’t want to leave the farm ever again, for any reason. He could get some livestock, he thought, plant new crops for food—he could learn how to self-sustain. The Future Farmers could meet here if they really wanted to learn about farming, which he doubted more and more every session. If he stayed put at the farm, he could give his truck to Charitye. He enjoyed the pun, inscribing it to his memory for when he’d make a speech at her next birthday party or at her graduation ceremony. He’d be welcomed into the family’s celebration, having wrapped one of those giant bows around the truck. Someone might click a knife against a glass: Uncle Reggie wants to say something! Then he’d stand up and tell the story of how he first came up with the idea: You know, originally, I planned on giving this truck over to charity.…

  The sound of the phone meeting its cradle broke his line of thinking.

  “How’re your parents?” he asked from the window.

  “Sounds doomed,” Charitye said. “I think they’re getting divorced.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Maybe it’s the best thing for my poems,” she said, joining him at the table.

  “That’s one way to think about it.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m trying too hard to seem like a poet to actually be a poet.”

  “Sometimes,” Reggie said, “you’ve got to act the role before you can reach the goal.”

  “I’ve been doing that with swimming,” she said. “Getting pretty good, too. My mom’s been making fun of me, though, so we’ll see if I stick with it.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “Said, ‘Sweetheart, you’ll never grow breasts.’” She impersonated her mother in a vaguely European voice, laughing in a way, and then: “I’ve been meaning to ask you, Reggie. How come you never had kids?”

  “Oh,” Reggie said, drawing it out like a sigh. “The short version of that story is your aunt didn’t want them. And I hope I’m not spoiling the surprise by telling you it takes two.”

  “What about adopting? I mean, now? I mean, after she passed?”

  “They don’t look at farmers as foster parents so much as employers.”

  “That’s sad,” Charitye said. “You’re acting the role well. Of a dad, I mean.”

  For a moment, Reggie let himself feel pride, the steam of it, before cooling. “You know, I’ve got the kids at your high school. I get it out of my system with them.”

  “You deserve better.”

  He let out a little laugh. “They do act up a bit, don’t they? Especially when I mention the aqueduct. What’s so funny about the aqueduct?”

  “Well,” Charitye said, “for one thing, it’s the closest thing we’ve got to an adventure out here. The river’s man-made, obviously, but there’s fish, so there’s fishing. People spread out on the cement slopes so they can tan. A lot of couples go out there to do, as you’ve said, whatever they can with each other that they can’t do by themselves. And then, there are the swimmers.”

  “That current’s pretty strong, though.”

  “That’s the point. It’s a dare. If you can swim from one side to the other without getting dragged to Long Beach, you win.”

  “What do you win?”<
br />
  “The prize of not dying.”

  “See,” Reggie said, “a benefit of not being a parent: I never have to worry about my kid doing something so stupid.”

  “I’ve always wanted to try it.”

  “Don’t, please.”

  “I bet I could,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ve mentioned how I am a prih-tee good swimmer.”

  Again the phone rang.

  “Hold that stupid thought,” Reggie told her, leaving to answer the phone. For the second time that afternoon, it was Keith.

  Charitye took the phone. After a minute, she put her hand against the receiver so her dad couldn’t hear her. “Apparently, he’s coming to pick me up now,” she told Reggie.

  Reggie felt a brief but unshareable disappointment, like being alone the one time you see a UFO zigzag between the clouds. Before Charitye arrived, he’d just gotten used to living alone, and now he was just getting used to having someone else around. For how many people, he wondered, was life only a succession of moments you were just getting used to?

  “Keith,” he said, having taken the phone from Charitye.

  “Sorry,” Keith said, “for the sudden change of plans. Lucy’s decided to leave for a few weeks in the morning. She’s come around to the popular opinion of women everywhere of hating me. She wants Charitye home tonight so they can leave together first thing.”

  “Hate to hear you couldn’t work it out.”

  “Tell him I still have work to do here,” Charitye said from her tiptoes, loud enough for her dad to hear.

  “Look,” said Reggie, “the girl wants to stick around for a bit longer. She’s getting some poetry written out here, is the thing.”

  “I respect the arts, Reggie, I do. But she can jot down her feelings anywhere, so poetry’s not the best excuse you could’ve come up with. Anyway, Lucy’s got this plan—”

  “What about one more night?” Reggie said. “Her mother can pick her up first thing in the morning, no hitch in the plan.”

  Charitye nodded approvingly.

  From Keith: “Hold.”

  “Reggie?” A woman’s vaguely European voice.

  “Hi, Lucy.”

  “She can spend the night so long as you promise me she’ll be packed and waiting for me outside at seven in the morning. If I have to so much as honk, I’ll crash my car into your house and drag her out of the wreckage.”

  “Okay, Lucy, thank you.”

  “Oh, and Reggie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do I have to tell you again to keep her away from that horse?”

  * * *

  Reggie lived far enough from what we call society to feel sorry for himself with neither shame nor showmanship. His thoughts on the matter were: If the only person you love gets a fatal kick in the head from a horse, you’ve got that right. Feeling sorry for yourself is a problem only if you do it around other people who don’t feel sorry for you (as you intended), but start feeling sorry for themselves. It turns out self-pity is contagious, but not in the way you want it to be.

  For this reason, Reggie preferred to feel sorry for himself in the privacy of his own bedroom. On Charitye’s last night, he stayed awake in bed, staring up at the stray hairs in his eyebrows, remembering Allison. This was an insomniac pastime he’d grown to resent and rely on.

  One thing he resented: the beginning, the time spent waiting behind her in the small (God, how short the lines used to be in the Antelope Valley!) registrar’s line at the community college. Allison kept turning around, this sunburned and goofy farm-girl-turned-student. Certain freckles on her face were illuminated by the holes in her straw hat. Nineteen eighty, and he was wearing a Reagan button on his denim jacket. Allison said, “Reagan, huh? Plays a cowboy on TV, but he’s too goddamn slick to be good for farmers.” She reached out and unfolded the list Reggie had been carrying at his chest so she could see which classes he was signing up for. Skeptically, she said, “Beginning Poetry. Next semester you’ll take the course on finishing a poem, that how it works?” Reggie started to correct her, but Allison interrupted. “A joke,” she said. “I know you Republicans ain’t heard many, but they’re called jokes.” Later, over coffee, she described her father’s farm, and Reggie asked her to repeat the word “weevils” a hundred times—“Way-vulls, way-vulls, what’s so funny about way-vulls?”

  He was resentful, too, of the end. He’d found her in the stable, her eyes open and crossed like a child’s funny-face. A surprising lack of blood (flooding, as it did, to the inside of her skull). The seat of her pants was covered in shit—he’d figured, wrongly, that she fell in horse dung. She’d gone to the hospital then, alive in no way but a technicality, until her body made the decision for everyone and just quit. When he returned home, Reggie thought of nothing so much as beating Genie to death with a shovel. He must have held the spade so tight, it bruised the back of his hands. How long did he look that animal square in its enormous, intelligent eyes before telling it—out loud, like he’d just realized—“You’re a fucking horse.” He resented the end because Allison’s death brought with it a severe loneliness, a reminder of his own impending death, of not having children in the world to sweeten the tasteless batter of mortality.

  It occurred to Reggie that every time he thought he was remembering Allison, he was actually remembering the way she’d made him feel at different points in their entangled lives—that anytime we try to remember anyone we’ve loved, what we’re really remembering is ourselves.

  Of course, a man can think in this way for only so long before it becomes tedious. So Reggie willed himself out of bed. The sun wouldn’t be up for another three hours or so. He felt his way along the dark hallway into the kitchen, where he opened the fridge, searching for juice. The light from inside the refrigerator hurt his eyes. To let them adjust, he turned away. That’s when he saw the sheet of paper—frills along the left edge where it had been torn from the spiral notebook—on the kitchen table:

  Uncle Reggie,

  Here’s that poem I promised. It’s called “The Costs and Benefits of Desert Agriculture,” and it’s a draft so don’t judge it too harshly.

  Men built a river so that desert girls can finger

  the nutrient-heavy leaves of alfalfa

  in the summertime. Chickens clamor

  while horses eat six-dollar bales

  of hay. If men built the river so that water

  flows west, can the water change its mind

  and flow east? Can the desert girls swim

  against the current with nothing on

  but the lights of a carjacked pickup?

  Can the horse tiptoe into the widower’s

  bedroom & whisper apologies before daylight?

  I know, I know. Ending a poem on a question. I had a bunch of lines about wearing Aunt Allison’s hat at the end, but that seemed less poetic and more trying-to-be-poetic, you know? Thanks for letting me stay here, and for everything you’ve taught me. By the way, I’m borrowing your truck for a trip. It’s time I took that dare. Love, your niece, and forever

  Yours,

  Charitye Peterson

  Reggie ran to the spare bedroom to check if she was pulling a prank. She wasn’t. He ran outside, and, sure enough, his truck was missing. Considering his options, he found a flashlight and made his way to the stable, out of breath. He mustered a hello to Genie. Careful not to stand behind her, he lugged Allison’s old saddle over Genie’s back and whispered into her ear: “I’m going to learn how to ride you tonight, okay?”

  Atop the horse in his boots and hat, Reggie looked the part. But no matter how high he lifted his chin, the rest of his body’s posture—crouched low to Genie, one shoulder higher than the other for some twisted sense of balance—proved how ridiculous a man he’d become. For miles and miles he rode, speaking in a low, cinematic voice into Genie’s ear: “In the middle of the night, a man and his horse ride out of the farmland and into the suburbs, past the fast-food chains and used-car lots and community college,
into the foothills above Avenue N, upward, upward to the aqueduct where he suspects to find and rescue his runaway niece.” He laughed at himself. He said, “Genie, babe, we’re almost there.” Genie, out of shape from years of disuse, spat her breaths. They’d been riding for an hour, maybe more; the sun was getting ready to rise. Charitye’s poem was the poem of a teenager, Reggie thought, but he knew it was better than anything he’d ever written. He especially enjoyed those last lines: “Can the horse tiptoe into the widower’s / bedroom & whisper apologies before daylight?” He enjoyed imagining what else Genie might whisper to him in the nighttime. Maybe she’d have a toothpick-in-the-mouth drawl, and whisper: “Let’s go someplace new, cowboy. That girl ain’t gonna be up there at that old waterin’ hole. I reckon she’s long gone by now, way out past these parts. It’ll just be you and me and the aqueduct. What are you planning, Reggie? You aim to kill us tonight? Walk me right into the river? You know the sayin’ about leadin’ a horse to water. Hey, why don’t we drop this nonsense and go someplace new? Because all I know is, that young girl’s mother’s gonna be knockin’ at your door pretty soon here, Reggie. How ’bout let’s not be there when she gets there. How about it, huh? Promise me. Let’s be anywhere but there.”

  * * *

  Wherever Reggie went, I never saw him again. Charitye I sought out recently. She’s a server at the Bunker Burger off Knickerbocker’s golf course, and during her break, we spoke for a little while. About five years ago, she said, they expanded their driving range. Lushest Bermuda grass in town.

  HOW TO REVISE A PLAY

  First, attend one. After all, if you’re not willing to spend the sixteen dollars to see, for example, a modern, gay, Spanish adaptation of Romeo and Juliet titled Ramón y Julio, how can you expect anyone to see yours? If the production you’ve chosen to attend is in, say, your hometown, some 350 miles south of your San Francisco apartment, rent a car. Take the weekend. Remind yourself that this is why, as a blogger, you’ve sacrificed workplace companionship and a consistent reason to dress yourself in the morning—this mobility.