The Optimistic Decade

by Heather Abel

  Then, as now, Rebecca comforted herself with the thought that sex was for frivolous people who had time for sex.

  All around them, children sang of a sad train commuter who, lacking appropriate fare, was never allowed to disembark. Why didn’t his wife slip a nickel into the sandwiches she dutifully brought him each day? Rebecca had wondered this as a child, truly distraught at the lack of realism or strategy.

  Bothered, she stopped singing. “You should see him at home,” she whispered. What detail could she provide that might dissuade? How he’d long ago stopped coming to rallies and potlucks? How he was satisfied to languish at the bottom of the academic heap with the druggies and non – native English speakers? Who at Llamalo would even care? “He’s a loner,” she said with pity. “Really different than he is here.”

  Nat hit Rebecca’s arm. “Those are the ones who’re the most interesting, right? Not some blind follower. I mean, I get that he’s odd. That embellished way of talking—I’m sure his high school friends can’t appreciate it. He should be done with that bullshit. He’s clearly smart enough. God, too bad he’s not older. Caleb would kill me if I fucked a camper.”

  Rebecca watched that unvirginal hand. That copulated hand. Those fingering fingers. When David removed his arm and shifted a few inches away from Tanaya, Rebecca found herself pleased beyond appropriate measure, as if she’d succeeded at something.

  David pressed his palms against the pebbled dirt in order to stop himself from standing up and grabbing Jeremy’s guitar to show Caleb what he could do.

  In the four days since David had arrived, Caleb had made no mention of their phone conversation, and the one time David had alluded to it, Caleb seemed not to understand. This freaked David out until he realized that Caleb wanted to keep their agreement a secret to avoid jealousy or confusion over David’s role here. David could get behind that; he’d tell nobody that Caleb was testing him, that he was assessing David’s dedication to Llamalo, and that, in all likelihood, David would move here in the fall. David wasn’t entirely sure how to prove his dedication. He already enthusiastically participated. He already knew more about this place than all the other campers and most counselors. Still, every day he tried to do a little extra.

  Right now, for example, it would be awesome to show Caleb that he knew the chord progressions for every song at the campfire. Over the last year, he’d borrowed Georgia’s guitar and taught himself to play, sitting on his bed for hours each day. Although he couldn’t do anything fancy yet, he was definitely proficient enough to stand up there, if only he had a guitar.

  David watched as Scott crouched to toss on a log, and sparks leapt upward and the fire made the sound of someone falling and falling. With a shrug, Jeremy asked Caleb “Is it time?”

  Caleb pressed a button on his watch, emitting into the dusk a small green glow, and nodded “Yes, it’s time.” David noticed all of this, and he was the first one standing. He reached for Tanaya’s hand, pulled her up.

  At the first campfire, that first summer at Llamalo, Caleb and Mikala had taught them hippie songs: “Teach Your Children,” “For What It’s Worth,” “Will The Circle Be Unbroken,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Songs with repetitive choruses so everyone could join in. The last song that night was “Rocky Mountain High.” David had been sitting between Suze and Caleb. There’d only been thirteen kids that first summer. “This is ironic, right?” Suze had asked Caleb. And yes, it had started out with irony. They’d sung it the way Ira and Joe sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” when the police had come to arrest them. Too loudly, tongue in cheek. I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky. But in just a few nights, it was sung differently. With the sweet sincerity of believers. They sang it every night at every campfire that summer, and still they sang it, always the last song of the evening, standing and holding hands in an amoebic ring. It was how they said goodbye to the day.

  This was one of Llamalo’s rules, although “rule,” David thought while singing along, wasn’t exactly the right word. More like a ritual, although that wasn’t right either. David had a memory of sitting on the floor with Zacky Reznick, one of the mornings he’d been allowed to tag along to the classroom of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. The rabbi, in surf shorts and a crocheted yarmulke had perched on the desk and talked about the difficulty of belief, about actions that help you, that bring you closer to God. That was the word he was looking for. Mizzo? Metzi? Something like “matzoh,” but not that.

  “Act well, and belief will follow,” the rabbi had said, smiling at the wonder of it all.

  David remembered that Zacky had been screwing off, whispering stupid knock-knocks to David. But David had only wanted to listen to the rabbi. Actions to bring you closer to God! How had his parents never mentioned that such a thing was possible? Why weren’t they doing these actions all the time? When he’d brought this up with Joe and Judy that evening, they gave each other a look of shared superiority. Smiling at his naïveté, they explained that Judaism was regressive and discriminatory. The rituals David had become so excited about, they said, were either superstitions left over from a time before scientific explanations for disease, or rules put in place to maintain hierarchies. Don’t eat shellfish. Wear a little hat. Women pray behind a curtain. That had been the abrupt end of his religious education, and now he couldn’t remember this word. Mezma?

  “What’s it called?” He nodded his head toward Tanaya, who was much shorter than he was. “That thing that Jews do? You know, actions, deeds?”

  “What?”

  “Like what Jews do to get with God, good deeds.” You weren’t supposed to talk during this song, but he needed to know.

  “Are you talking about mitzvot? And if so, why the fuck now?”

  “Mitts-vote? You do a mitts-vote?”

  “You do many mitzvot, plural. V-O-T. You do a mitzvah, singular. V-A-H. Come on—bar mitzvah, bat mitzvah? Don’t you remember anything from yours?”

  He raised the hand that was holding hers. “Look, nothing on my wrist. No Swatch for me. Wasn’t bar mitzvahed.”

  He resumed singing, looked up at the watchful mountain. Everywhere else, the country was going to shit. Cows lived their whole lives in cages the size of bathtubs. Humans slept on cardboard on the sidewalk until the cops beat them for fun. Toast’s brother had been convicted of “gang activity” and sent to an adult prison, where he was murdered. Bush followed Reagan. Surprise, surprise. There was no stopping this slide toward increased inhumanity. David’s parents hadn’t stopped it. Rebecca’s parents hadn’t stopped it. The only thing to do was to get the hell away. This was what Caleb taught them. Live out here, with kindness and love, without buying shit, without watching shit. Every night singing “Rocky Mountain High.” Doing the mitzvah of John Denver, getting a little closer to God.

  The darkness was all darkness, pricks of stars. Caleb, alone at the fire, poured water on it, stirred the burned wood and ash, poured more water, and stirred until the sizzling subsided and gray smoke rose and dissipated, and darkness settled again. During these early days, the campers needed to be on their sleeping platforms before dark to reduce risk of falling. “Until you get your sea legs,” he told them.

  By the time he reached his yurt, all the flashlights had been turned off in the boys’ and girls’ areas. He stood on the edge of his wooden platform, pissing into darkness. The patter of liquid on dry earth and then silence. He could hear a cough, sounding as close as if the cougher were just behind him. Noise traveled strangely on the plateau at night, sliding everywhere at once. When Kai came, he’d tell her, “Quiet. We need to be quiet,” and then quietly he’d push up her shirt, no bra, his thumb against her nipple. He was nothing but anticipation, his whole body anticipation.

  As he slipped between the yurt’s curtains, he could hear a crunch, a crackle, the weight of a foot or paw landing on the dried arrows of peppergrass, but there was no way to tell how far away it was. When he heard nothing else, he swept his hand over the surface of an upturned crate until
his fingers felt the worn cardboard of a matchbook. A flick of his hands and there was that primordial glow. He lit the lantern by his bed. Within milliseconds, the moths arrived, batting against the glass of the lantern, and other strange insects as well. Ungainly, triple-jointed. His yurt a jungle of wings. He reached into a milk crate, digging beneath books and T-shirts for the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He took a long sip and then another, moths head-butting the bottle; they too wanted that amber glow.

  When he lowered the bottle, he saw the moon-white envelope on his bed. Caleb ripped it open, unfolded the unlined paper within. Before he read, he was surprised by Donnie’s handwriting, the verticality of it, like insect legs. There was a moment when against all rationality, he felt the springiness of hope. Donnie had written to him! After eight years of silence, perhaps they’d be friends again, checking in on each other by mail, visiting even.

  Caleb,

  Do you know about the words Wise-Use?

  Do you know what this means Custom and Culture?

  Do you know about the movement across the Western States to TAKE BACK OUR LAND?

  Do you know that land transfers sometimes are Illegal?

  Consider this -- The DOUBLE L is not yours

  You can make this easy or hard

  Some things to think about.

  Donnie

  Caleb heard a bright snap, a foot against a twig.

  “Caleb? Knock, knock!”

  Kai pushed aside the curtained door, peeked around. “Oh, hi.” As if surprised to find him there.

  Caleb shoved the letter under his pillow. “No, sure, come in.” Nothing in here but his mattress and the crate, but from the hole in the roof they could see stars. He picked up the bottle and held it out. “Want some?”

  Afterward, he took her outside to watch the moon rise over the final, most western of the Rocky Mountains. It shone a spotlight on Escadom’s snowy summit, slid light down the mountain’s royal alpine body, cast its white eye over the oceanic and unaccommodating desert, which began in the folds of the mountain’s kingly robes and spread out southward as far as they could see.

  He held her hand. Naked and content, he decided that he would forget about Donnie’s letter. His yurt was washed in moonlight, and the letter dissolved into the darkness from whence it came, and he howled into the night to make Kai laugh. The campers who woke to the howling thought, “Wolf,” and went back to sleep.

  The Reagan Years: June 1983

  Caleb was alone at the ranch when the camp’s very first counselors arrived from the humid east. It was a Saturday, so the Talcs weren’t working, and the only sounds were the scratching searches of insects and birds. A van pulled up beside the house, expelling the counselors, who blasted out with their road-trip peppiness, their in-jokes, their Big Gulps.

  He knew two of them—Scott and Mikala—from an outdoor adventure trip he’d led during their freshman orientation at college. They were four years younger, enamored with him, had eagerly agreed to work for free and to bring along two friends, Suze and Anders.

  The counselors oohed over his land in a way that made him feel they didn’t quite appreciate it. He’d planned a game that involved closing their eyes and listening, but instead he led them on a hike to the foothills of the mountain. It was midday, June, hot, and there was no trail. As they wove their way between sagebrush, he recognized that he was punishing them because the moment of their arrival hadn’t lived up to his expectations. He’d wanted to feel the flick of the ignition switch for Llamalo, the moan of the motor starting up. When he finally let them stop for water, three of them dropped onto the dirt, chugging, panting. Suze walked past them, climbing a nearby mound. She spun a slow 360, then walked down to him. “Do you ever want to let this place just annihilate your sense of self? Like just get rid of everything, absolutely everything you own, everything you need, and give yourself over to this? I mean, I just want to fucking eat this emptiness.”

  He looked down—she was short, even for a girl—and everything shifted, as if someone had taken a tangled sheet and, with a flick of the wrists, spread it smooth. “Well, guys,” he said, turning away from her. “She’s figured it out. The whole point of Llamalo.”

  They hiked back side by side, and he saw that she was more remarkable than he’d initially allowed. That hers wasn’t an obvious first-glance beauty provided him the additional pleasure of recognizing something subtle that others might not be able to. She had sunken eyes and pale lashes and a fierce nose, but somehow she was stunning, with a confidence that defied the Deadhead skirt, the multitude of bracelets. There was a corona of happiness around her, a glee, the ethereal manifestation of her hair, which was a yellow fishnet tangled up and set upon her.

  That night and the next, he found her often beside him. She asked questions about every detail of his plan for Llamalo. He liked her wrists. He liked her collarbone. He ridiculed his mother’s elitism, and she, her mother’s anxiety. They came up with a rating scale of all outdoor places—forest versus desert versus ocean versus little stream with a hammock next to it versus sweeping mown lawn versus lake—and agreed on all stages of the hierarchy. Of course, mountains were supreme, the higher the better, preferably above tree line, just rock. The gods on Mount Olympus were the most dangerous and the most sexy to be near. Sexy. Suze said that word.

  In this way, the first days of Llamalo buzzed with an audible erotic charge, the sound of power lines across the Dobies. On Sunday afternoon, when they all stripped to swim in the river, piling their clothes on the white stones, he was aware of his body in a way he hadn’t been for some time. Not just aware, but pleased. He was pleased with the way he ran over the somewhat-painful rocks and dove under the frigid water. He was pleased, when he surfaced midriver, so cold in the snowmelt that he was almost burning, to see Suze floating naked. Treading water, he was pleased with the water lapping in circles on her breasts, her nipples like rocks, the meeting of her thighs. He was pleased when her eyes caught his, looking at him looking at her. The promise of pleasure was itself so pleasurable that he almost wanted to prolong this expectancy.

  The next day, Donnie’s Trans Am pulled up beside the house while Caleb and his crew were still eating oatmeal on the porch. “Check it out,” Scott was saying, letting the needle skid against a record. “This song? So cheesy.” He’d dragged a record player and its speakers to the porch, along with a stack of LPs that Caleb had bought at one of the auctions in town in the wake of Exxon’s oil shale bust. He’d bought their encyclopedia sets and board games and axes, their lamps, their pellet stoves, their storm windows, their mason jars, their twin mattresses. For costumes, he’d bought their clothes. For art projects, their dental tools, coin collections, vacation slide shows, Bible figurines.

  Donnie and Don stepped out of the car, squinting up at the porch. Caleb ran down the steps, saying loudly, over the oompah of the music, “Hey, guys! Hey, the counselors are here. Come up and meet them!”

  Don gave a militaristic salute and headed toward the ditch. Donnie stood still, blinking. The counselors emerged in a line at the porch railing, peering over, holding their bowls, steam rising over their faces. Suze had jumped in the ditch earlier that morning, and wetness from her hair seeped into her camisole. Mikala wore overalls over a leotard. Scott was in cutoffs and knee-highs, his stringy shoulder-length hair in his face. Anders wore the cap he’d bought at Ute’s Market: exxon—sign of the double cross.

  Looking up at them, Caleb felt sorry for Donnie. How disorienting it would be to meet people your age but with a style and worldview you couldn’t comprehend. He called up to the porch, “Come on down, guys! Come meet the Talcs.”

  The counselors gathered beside Caleb, and he put an arm casually around Suze. “Everyone, this is Donnie. Best thing about Escadom.”

  The counselors all began reaching their hands toward Donnie like he was a celebrity on one side of a red velvet rope. He shook each hand dutifully.

  Caleb kept his arm around Suze while she and Donnie met.
He noticed Donnie’s handsomeness; he always did. And he noticed Suze’s beauty, it was practically all he could think about during those days. But Caleb also noticed, with a small amount of pride, that these two people shaking hands belonged to different worlds, and only he belonged to both of them.

  Suze was painting the rear wall of the barn the next afternoon, rendering within view of the mountain a facsimile of the mountain. Caleb had chosen a task a few yards away. He was trying to convince a rectangle of ashen dirt between the barn and the ditch that it should resemble garden soil, and from here he witnessed Donnie banging his way into the house and then out again and coming to stand behind Suze.

  Caleb saw her turn to him. He saw Donnie pull his hat low. “You get to paint pictures like a kindergartner while I’m out there in the heat?”

  Suze paused a moment, looking Donnie over, and then set down her paintbrush on a piece of cardboard before saying, “So what exactly are you doing out there in the heat?”

  “Fences. Fixin’ em.”

  She started singing “Don’t Fence Me In” but seemed to have forgotten the words. “Give me some land, landy land, landy landy landy land.” A voice like the tumble of rocks in a riverbed. “Willie’s song. Don’t you love him?”

  Caleb loved Willie Nelson, and that song, that paean to the western breadth, to solitarily surveying the horizon line, well, that song was anthemic to him. He’d teach her the words.

  “Willie’s aright.” Donnie ladled on a drawl. “Willie’s my kind of man. Not sure about the pigtails though. Think they’d look good on me?”

  She cocked her head, considering. “Awful. Sometimes he has that one long braid. I could see you in that.” She sang again. “I want your land landy land under landy landy land. Isn’t that how it goes?” Caleb realized she was teasing Donnie, egging him to sing the correct words back to her. Caleb was sure Donnie wouldn’t know them, but then he began to sing the first few lines, slowly, in a surprisingly confident tenor, while staring at her.