by Heather Abel
“Ira, don’t.”
She was still mad. He walked into the kitchen with a finality Georgia chose to ignore by following him.
“I hope you didn’t say ‘we.’ I hope you didn’t say, ‘Mom and I want you to go to Colorado.’ ”
He peered into the fridge, at all the usual uninspiring bowls covered gently with waxed paper. “Look, you wanted me to figure something out, and I did. She’ll have a blast there. Or she won’t. But either way, she won’t be here.”
He closed the fridge, then walked into the bathroom but left the door open, because Georgia, he knew, wasn’t done. As he was zipping up, she appeared in the doorway.
“I just feel uneasy. She’ll think we’re sending her away.”
He turned on the water and looked at his wife in the mirror. “The hounds’ll be all over me. It’ll tear her up. You think I could stand seeing her like that? My own daughter? No, I can’t. I can’t. I could barely stand to see her today. Do you know how she looked when she said she’d go? All that false happiness for my sake.”
“Then don’t do it,” Georgia whispered, enunciating harshly, as if a change in tone might change his mind. “Keep the fucking paper. It’s my life, too.”
He leaned his forehead against the cool mirror. “Goddamn it, George. I don’t have a choice. Don’t you ever listen to me? I don’t have a choice anymore.”
two
Yama Low
During the school year, when Llamalo was a world in his head like the Forgotten Realms or Middle-Earth, David drew it over and over during class. Today, he began with the mountain in the center of the page and a wizard (Caleb) in the upper left-hand corner. Along the bottom of the page, he drew the river, shading it with cottonwoods and tamarisks, adding some towering boulders that looked a little lame, but the gnawed metal end of his pencil had lost its eraser. He found the pencil sharpener from his backpack and twirled until the lead was needle-sharp and able to represent in miniature the exact twists of the path up from the river—here’s where it’s so steep that you feel like puking; here’s where that kid once threw a rock and screamed, “Landslide,” hitting a counselor in the shoulder. When he finished the path, he saw that he’d drawn it too far up the mountain, so that the plateau at the base of the mountain on which camp was built had to instead jut out from the side of the mountain like Jupiter’s ring. What this lacked in realism, it definitely made up for in magnificence. On this ring, he penciled the barn, the ranch house, the garden, Don Talc’s trailer, a cluster of tiny people standing with hands raised in awe on the Great Overlook.
From a tape recorder on Señor Thacker’s desk at the side of the room came the interminable saga of José and María, who had been trying for the five years that David had been taking Spanish to get to the beach. “¿Vamos a la playa?” María asked in a voice that seemed to David increasingly desperate, with the breathy, high pitch of false optimism.
“Sí, sí,” José said, but there was this hesitation. You could hear it coming. A pause and then: “Pero . . .”
“¿Pero qué?”
Dramatic pause. David looked up as if he might see them: Anxious María, whom he pictured like the girls in this class, in skintight pants, pumps, winged eyeliner, and black bangs lacquered into a never-crashing wave above her face. José would be schlumpier, his clothes ill-fitting, undeserving of her endless attention, the two of them standing where nobody else stood—in front of the class, the direction the chairs faced, beneath the ticking clock.
“Pero . . . necesito un traje de baño.”
Who the fuck didn’t have a traje de baño? José—that’s who.
While, at the beach, waves crashed endlessly and the churro vendors sold churros to nobody, María and José were stuck inland, boarding an autobús for a tienda with bathing suits. David drew the arts-and-crafts shacks. Caleb’s yurt. Eight sleeping platforms. He made rays of sun emit from the wizard Caleb’s hands and land upon these platforms. Every picture, his mom had explained once, had to have a source of light. And then, since this class would never end, he added, in the voluptuous style of R. Crumb, a blonde maiden above the river: Suze.
“Righteous,” Yuji said, looking up from his own drawing just as David penciled the exaggerated ellipses of Suze’s breasts emerging from overalls.
On David’s other side sat Toast, who before falling asleep on his desk had given David a stoned smile of complicity. But David was sober this late April morning. He’d been sober for twenty-eight days now, sober since the Saturday afternoon he’d called Caleb, so freaked when he’d dialed that he’d messed up a digit and reached the Escadom post office, which itself seemed a minor miracle, the simple fact that the two-block town of Escadom existed while he was in an apartment in the swarm of Los Angeles, more people living on his block than in all of Escadom and the outlying rurality. He’d shaken out his hand, dialed again, and there was Caleb’s voice. “Hello? Llamalo.”
David had planned out what to say, but he’d mangled it and he had to try twice before Caleb understood just what David was asking for: permission to move to Llamalo when he turned eighteen next September. Move there, like, permanently. Without graduating from high school.
“Whoa . . . Huh.” That had been Caleb’s initial reaction. David held his breath, tried to hear Llamalo through the phone line, some proof of its existence—crickets in the peppergrass, the shrill of a hawk—but he heard only a song from the TV show Barney coming from the apartment above. Finally, Caleb continued. “And your parents? How do they feel about this? Their kid moving to Colorado, ditching high school. They’re on board?”
If he weren’t so nervous, David might have laughed, imagining his dad, Joe Cohen—Harvard grad; Columbia Law Review; beloved, if barely paid, lawyer to the farmworkers; recipient of the presidential award for something or other from Jimmy Carter; cofounder of Our Side Now; stern and self-disciplined—being “on board” with his son leaving high school. What could David do but wiggle around the facts? “They get it. They know what it means to me.”
“I’m impressed. That’s some open-minded parenting.”
“And besides”—David had rushed on, lest they dwell on his parents—“I’ll be legal. Full of sound mind and I don’t know, courage, and, Caleb, seriously, my school’s bullshit. I’m learning less than nothing. I’m getting the knowledge actively drained from me. I learn more in a single day at Llamalo than in a year here. I can help you with everything. Fix things, build things, clear the ditch for you. I need to be there.”
Another pause, then Caleb said, “You know, David, I have to tell you, I’ve thought a lot about something like this. Getting people up here year-round. And now you’re . . . Wow.”
“So, I can?”
There’d been a painful pause. Pause without end. José would crumple; he could never achieve such pause. David had opened the fridge, closed it, opened it again, lined up his mom’s Yoplait in color order on the top shelf, stared out the kitchenette window at the courtyard shared by the four six-apartment units. There was a small pool, painted teal but empty of water, full of brown palm fronds and diapers and the cardboard from a Coors twelve-pack. What’s the worst? he’d asked himself. What’s the worst, the very worst that could happen? Caleb could say no, and you’ll survive. No, I won’t, no, I won’t, he responded to himself. He’d been living on hope for months now, ever since he came up with this plan; he couldn’t live without it.
His mouth dry, his right palm clammy as it gripped the receiver, David considered blurting out into the pause all the ways he loved Llamalo, but you didn’t want to interrupt Caleb when he was thinking. Finally, Caleb said, “Sorry. I’m on the cordless and I saw fox prints, had to follow them awhile. So I should go check on our friends the chickens. See who survived the night. Well, look, David, it’s really great to hear how much you want to be here. That might really work for me. It really might. Of course, there’s more to think about and now’s really not the time for that. How about this? We’ll see how the summer goes. Check
back in at the end of it.”
After David hung up, he shoved into his Vans, flew down the outside staircase, sprinted around his city block without feeling a muscle. Caleb hadn’t said no. He’d said, We’ll see. They would see! They would see! Like blind men granted vision.
Later, in his room, David had more carefully analyzed the words. We’ll see how the summer goes. Check back. See how. It was, he’d concluded, a sort of test. Caleb wanted David to prove his dedication to Llamalo this summer, and David could do that. No problem. No problemo at all.
Right away, although Caleb couldn’t see him, David had begun. While there were limited opportunities for high mesa chores in an apartment complex in Culver City, he kept to the routine of Llamalo as best he could—showers on Tuesdays, eggs for Thursday dinner, washing the dishes in a bucket—although his mom complained and ran them through the dishwasher as if LA were not its own desert and water not scarce.
More difficult by far were the abstentions. For twenty-eight days now—twenty of them at school—David had stopped doing anything disallowed at Llamalo, which meant he no longer drank beer with Yuji and his brother, didn’t buy pot from Toast or even smoke when Toast offered freely. He wanted to be clearheaded like Caleb, but this had, honestly, created problems with his friendships. At first, he tried to hang out without participating, but they didn’t get it. You have pneumonia or something? Why you acting this way?
Without Yuji and Toast, it turned out he was totally alone in this school of 3,100, in this city of three and a half million. He hadn’t anticipated the loneliness. Every day around this time—toward the end of fourth period, lunchtime looming—he considered that he might smoke a little, just this once, just to be able to stand with them in the parking lot during lunch. He’d started carrying an array of pens in the pocket of his sweatshirt, with which he wrote LL on his books and the back of his hand as reminders to himself, like the straight-edge kids wrote an X. Yesterday, he’d drawn LLAMALO with a black Sakura paint pen on his locker in the heavily serifed thick block letters like Chicanos used. It looked good and had satisfyingly filled a lunch period and would likely not draw ire from the administration, who turned over Chicano and black kids caught writing on school property to the LAPD gang specialists but generally had a hands-off policy when it came to white kids and graffiti.
But he couldn’t spend lunch doing that again. And so what would he do? David reached in his sweatshirt pocket for his Sharpie while a shopkeeper informed José that the store did not carry bathing suits in his size. Desafortunadamente, José was too grande.
There was nothing David would miss when he dropped out of school, but he did acknowledge that there was a friendliness to the Spanish-language experience. Other than David and Yuji, the class was entirely Chicano—kids who spoke Spanish at home and to each other with a rapidity and accent that Señor Thacker, an aged white man in a guayabera, could only yearn to achieve—but since they were tracked remedial, this was their class. Señor Thacker dealt with the potential for embarrassment by talking as little as possible. At the start of fourth period, he’d turn on the language tape, dim the lights, and lower the blinds, as a kindness for anyone who wanted to sleep.
Teacher and students alike took a break from 10:17 to 11:09, during which time Señor Thacker would sit by the window, listening to his transistor radio with headphones and trimming his bonsai with toenail clippers, as the breeze gently clicked the venetian blinds against the metal window frames.
David crossed his right ankle over his left knee and bent to write LL on the white band of his Vans, over and over, until the bell rang and Señor Thacker shut off the tape, calling out, “Adiós, amigos.”
“Adiós, Señor Thacker,” the class mumbled back, heading to the door in shared somnolence, squinting into the fluorescent vigor of the hallway of the languages building.
David took off before Toast or Yuji could cast a beckoning glance at him. He traversed solo past the parking lot, through the rear courtyard, around the math and sciences buildings, and up the stairs of the English building.
When he reached the top of the stairs, he saw that Chris, Ryan, and Todd, three blond, tousled surfers, princely boys of average intelligence who’d taunted him since kindergarten, were congregated in front of his locker.
Reluctantly, he walked up to them, expecting them to move aside. They knew his locker was below Ryan’s; they saw him here most days. But they didn’t move. They stared at him. “Um, so, I just have to get something. Right there’s my locker.”
“Du-uude,” Chris said, shaking his head with a faux-friendly expression of disappointment.
Fuck. David knew this look.
“Du-uude.” Chris swiveled so he was directly blocking David’s locker. “What’s up with you, Chewy? You write this?” Chris kicked the locker hard with his heel, the metal reverberating in the hallway.
It would be preferable to lie. Nah, wasn’t me. Someone else must’ve. But obviously, lying wasn’t allowed at Llamalo. Caleb never lied. If he was mad at you, he told you. If he was uncertain about something, he’d let on. “Yeah, so?”
“Yama Low? Come on. What’s that about, Chewy?”
Even these boys knew the proper Spanish pronunciation of llama. In Thacker’s “average” class, they’d been hearing María’s plaintive cry “Me llamo María. ¿Como te llamas?”
Ryan took a step toward David. He was a head shorter than David, and he cast his blue eyes up at him. “What is with you, Chewy? We’re worried about you.”
“Very worried.”
“Deeply concerned.”
“You think you’re a cholo now, ’cause you’re friends with them?” Ryan said this. “Have you become sadly mistaken?”
Chris and Todd bent over, covering their mouths and muttering, “Oh man, oh shit,” a loss of control caused by the mere thought of David, with those skinny arms, in a gang.
“Have you become sadly mistaken?” Ryan repeated proudly, in the stupid the way boys do when they land on something that makes their friends laugh. “Is that it, Chewy? You thought you were in a gang?”
They’d called him Chewy ever since he’d brought his stuffed Chewbacca to the sixth-grade graduation sleepover in the elementary school gym, only to find that it was too late. Chris, it seemed, had finger-fucked Vanessa Slater the weekend before, and in a great unified purging, all sixth-grade boys—other than David and his best friend at the time, Zacky Reznick—had somehow known to leave behind the soft, plush comforts of childhood.
“Yama Low’s his gang name,” Chris said, turning to the small crowd of girls who’d gathered to watch. “He’s in the Yama Low gang,” he said, louder now, because someone was walking by with a boom box, playing It takes two to make a thing go ri-ight.
Giving up on access to his locker, David smiled foolishly at the girls, making his way through them. “Excuse me. Excuse me. Show’s over, folks.” He hurried down the hall, down the stairs, outside. What a coward he was.
When David realized he was walking to the parking lot, where Toast and Yuji would welcome him into an intimacy of hilarity, he made himself U-turn. Heading instead toward the admin building, he passed the colorful frippery of the Japanese party kids and the lonely dyad of black band kids, and the math nerds and the attractive soccer players of all races, like a fucking Benetton ad. And then, on the lawn, there was Zacky Reznick himself, holding up a sandwich to make Amy Diamond jump to take a bite from it.
Zacky had attained, if this could be said about a seventeen-year-old, a certain gravitas, immunity from public ridicule bought by wealth and GPA. David hurried past, looking away so that Zacky wouldn’t feel compelled to call to him—“Cohen in the houuuuse”—after which they’d have nothing to say, although they’d been inseparable all through elementary school and David still remembered each of Zacky’s Transformers and Micronauts, and the way Zacky’s mom would wake them up on Saturday mornings with trays of OJ and cinnamon toast and let David tag along to Zacky’s Hebrew school, something his own
parents would never send him to, religion being the opiate and, also, expensive.
The breach in their friendship resulted from a single standardized test in spring of sixth grade, one week after David’s parents announced their separation. The test sorted students into tracks on which they would travel for their junior high and high school journey. Other than David, all the Jews, along with most Asians and a few of the non-Jew whites, were slotted into the gifted-and-talented program, which was called GATE, a fitting acronym. David often imagined an ornate metal gate opening to let these fine students through and then slamming shut behind them. In junior high, they ate lunch and attended all their classes in two trailers across the basketball courts from the average and remedial students. It was the “and” that got to David. His former friends were not just gifted, not merely talented.
After an acrimonious year and a half of divorce negotiations, his parents had finally noticed his academic standing. But what could they do? Should they tell the administration that their darling white child didn’t belong in classes with the children of day laborers, domestic workers, and the very farmworkers Joe helped? They couldn’t do this. Nor could they afford private school. The only reason they sent David to Llamalo, after all, was because Caleb annually waived the fee in exchange for nine months of ads in Our Side Now. Free childcare. Finally, they decided to scrape the money together to hire David a tutor for a few months, a former OSN intern, who was the first to introduce David to pot, saying, “School is the prison from which your mind needs to break free to find its own sources of imagination.”
On the bench outside the admin building, David took out his notebook. Please excuse David Cohen from school today at 12:15 for a doctor’s appointment. He signed Joe’s name.
