by Heather Abel
But did Donnie know that the song wasn’t actually Willie’s? Caleb did. It was by Cole Porter, although even that wasn’t entirely true. Tasked with writing a cowboy song for a soundtrack, Porter had borrowed a poem by a highway engineer in Helena. It was a Hollywood song, inauthentically Western, plagiaristic. Did Donnie know any of this?
When he finished singing, Donnie, as if emboldened by the performance, stepped forward and grabbed a hank of Suze’s hair. “You could do the pigtails. We’ll call you Wilhelmina.
He pointed at the mural. “What’s that supposed to be—an albino space alien?”
“Fuck. Tell me you know it’s a sheep.”
He released her hair. “You ever see any real live sheep, Wilhelmina?”
“They’re the pink ones with snouts, right?” With a finger, she snouted her own nostrils.
“Nice look on you. Stick with me and we’ll get your farm animals sorted out.” Donnie tipped his hat and headed back to the alfalfa field, passing Caleb without looking at him.
Caleb allowed himself to think, I went to a college so small and important you’ve never heard of it.
Donnie parked his Trans Am beside the house on Wednesday morning and stuck his head out the window. “Wanna help us with the fences, Wilhelmina? I don’t think your artistic endeavors will be missed.”
Suze was sitting beside Caleb on the porch stairs, mug of coffee in both hands. “That’s cool, right?”
Sharp sun on the irrigation ditch water, the chattering of birds. “Well, it’s . . .” Caleb raised his left hand to signify that it was conceptually a fine idea, commensurate with his plans for Llamalo, but practically speaking it was maddening and unnecessary. “If you wanted to finish the painting later, then . . .”
“Hop in,” Donnie called. Suze left her coffee cup on the steps.
The Trans Am returned in the heat of the afternoon. The three other counselors were napping inside the living room. Caleb remained in the would-be garden, culling rocks from dirt, a headache behind his eyes from the sun. He’d moved Scott’s vehicle and his own from their usual spot at the side of the house, parking them four hundred feet to the south. He watched the Talcs get out of the Trans Am and then Suze appear from the back seat, her arms and legs muralled with dirt, the hem of her skirt tucked into her waistband. Don went straightaway to the Russian olive by the side of the ditch where they kept their lunch boxes, but Donnie detained Suze. As they talked, she touched his arm twice. Finally, with a wave to Caleb, she climbed the stairs and entered the house.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it, boss,” Donnie called out to Caleb.
“Not bad,” Caleb said, walking over to him.
“There something you want to tell me?”
“It’s about your car. You can’t park here anymore.”
Donnie looked at his car. “Isn’t this where we park?”
“See, we realized this . . .” Caleb gestured toward the wooden archway that said double l and beyond that to where the plateau ended and you could see the far mesa, a horizon line of dark green. “Where you were parking your cars, that’s the best place to sit and watch the sunset. Totally on fire. We’re calling it the . . .” He hadn’t yet named this area, and what came forth from his imagination was “the Great Overlook.”
Great Overlord connotations came too late; he was stuck with it.
“The Great Overlook?” Donnie frowned. And who could blame him? This area was only slightly higher than the plateau to the south, the same elevation as the western expanse. It hardly looked over anything.
“There.” Caleb pointed at his car and Scott’s bus, which, now that he realized it, kind of ruined the view of the Dobies from here. “That’s the official parking lot.”
Donnie stepped into his car, revved, and drove toward town, leaving his dad beneath the Russian olive, peeling a hard-boiled egg. He came back fifteen minutes later, though, parking behind Caleb’s Honda in the official parking lot.
At dusk, two days before Llamalo’s first campers arrived, Caleb was washing dishes in a bucket when Suze ran over with delight on her face, skirt flapping. He stood to meet her. The attention she gave Caleb had lost focus, from spotlight to fog light, but now it seemed like she might run straight into his arms, and he couldn’t help but open them, bubbles dripping off his fingers. She stopped short, out of breath.
“So Donnie invited all of us to the Motherlode tonight. You should come. Friday night in exciting Escadom!”
“I don’t know, Suze. There’s still so much to do.” He felt rage like eggshells between his teeth.
“Not that much. You don’t mind if we go, right?”
The counselors piled into Scott’s VW and left Caleb alone again on the mesa. He made notes for the first day, rechecked supplies, and lay atop his sleeping bag—in the alfalfa field, where they all slept—listening for them. It was thick night when he heard a motor approach, shut off. He stumbled into his boots and walked with his flashlight past the barn to welcome everyone back. But when he rounded the house, he understood that it hadn’t been Scott’s bus he’d heard.
The Trans Am was parked on the Great Overlook. Caleb flicked off his light.
He heard two doors shut. Donnie’s voice said, “No, not that way. You may be a good singer, Wilhelmina, but you’ve a shit sense of direction.” Suze giggling. Donnie again: “Believe me, I know where to go for privacy around here. Hold my hand. We don’t want you falling in the water.” For a few minutes, during which they must have been crossing the single board he’d laid over the ditch, he heard only Donnie—“That’s it, careful now”—and then the faint sift of displaced stones.
He feigned sleep when the others returned. He heard them whisper drunkenly about not waking him, then brushing teeth, pissing, the rustle of nylon sleeping bags, snoring. His stomach clenched; his jaw ached. The constellations blinked back at him, the Milky Way drifted across the sky. He couldn’t get the fucking song out of his head. The tune of “Don’t Fence Me In,” but with Suze’s rewrite, which cut to the chase: I want your land, landy land, landy landy landy land. Over and over, until he felt frantic that he’d never stop hearing it. He was sure he wouldn’t sleep, but then he opened his eyes to find that the sky was mauve. There was a tumble of yellow hair out of Suze’s sleeping bag, and when he ran barefoot toward the Overlook, he saw that the Trans Am was gone.
A day that Caleb had been looking forward to had been stripped of every joy. The plan was to drive most of the way to Denver, camp in Rocky Mountain National Park, and pick up the thirteen campers at the airport on Sunday midday. The evening dragged on. Suze displayed an exaggerated joviality, but the others seemed to be waiting for him to speak, to set an edict—no fucking the locals, perhaps?
At the airport, he met and then dismissed the parent chaperones and hurried his thirteen campers into Scott’s van, which Caleb drove, and Caleb’s Honda, which Scott drove. The campers were aged nine to fourteen. Six were related in some manner to the counselors. The other seven —spawn of hippies, he assumed—had responded to the ad he’d placed in his uncle’s newspaper. Caleb had spoken reassuringly to each of their parents.
Small aesthetic variations aside, they all looked alike in the way of suburban white kids. Girls wore shorts with tucked-in shirts announcing school plays, winter choral jubilees, aquariums. Boys wore the same, untucked. They had knee socks with a yellow stripe at the top or ankle socks with pink pom-poms. They looked entirely unprepared for eight weeks in the high desert. How could he love them?
Five hours later, when they finally crested the rim of the plateau, carsick and hungry, spilled apple juice dribbled down their shirts, the van decided to slow, then stop. Caleb revved for a while, in an aggressive attempt at onwardness. But soon, he had to admit that although the wheels were moving, the van wasn’t.
He hopped out and landed softly.
Sixty years earlier, Eustace Sorger had paid for a road to be carved and paved into the cliff from the river valley to the plateau, so it headed strai
ght to his house, which was upriver from Aemon’s. To get to Llamalo from the rim, you turned right onto an unnamed dirt road and headed south along the cliff on a slight downhill slope. There was a spot where the ditch, which was a good distance from the road at Llamalo, sidled up right next to it on its way from the Sorgers’. And it was this spot where the road had melted into mud. Grayish mud with strips of red clay.
Two feet ahead of Caleb, there was a desert anomaly: water streaming across the road and pouring down a cliffside.
He stood staring as the Honda stopped behind the van. A door slammed, and Scott came and stood beside him.
“This is unexpected.”
By unexpected, Caleb meant “a horror.” By unexpected, he meant everything was ruined. By unexpected, he meant Donnie was a fucking asshole, a vindictive fuck. But he was trying hard not to show the depths of his alarm.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Scott whined.
Caleb nodded. It made perfect sense. That was the problem.
“It didn’t even rain,” Scott continued. “How did this even happen?”
“Over there.” Caleb pointed to the irrigation canal. In it, wedged between the sod walls of the divider, loomed something white, plastic, unearthly.
“The fuck is that?”
“Refrigerator door.”
“A what?”
“Fridge door.”
“In the ditch?”
“In the ditch. Blocks the flow.”
“But why? Who would even do that?”
“No idea,” said Caleb, although he knew exactly who and precisely why.
“Shit. How do we drive past?”
“We don’t.”
“Okay, so what? We stay in a hotel ’til they fix it?”
Caleb explained that even if he could spin free of the mud, Rocky’s Mountain Motel had shut down last fall during the oil shale bust, as had the Sleep Tite. The nearest motel was in Grand Junction.
“Two hours away?”
Crouching by the gully, Caleb saw that it was flowing so quickly across the road it could easily drag a kid down the cliff. Without a clue as to how to proceed, he tapped on the van. “We’re here. Everyone out.”
Counselors and campers emerged, standing on the dry islands of the road, appraising the runnel before them. “Welcome to Llamalo.” Caleb forced a grin.
“Don’t tell me this is it.” The girl had a freckled pancake face. The others tittered.
“Yup. This is it.”
Another girl—the freckled girl’s sister—smacked her forehead dramatically. “Oh jeez.”
Scott said, “What’s wrong with a night in a motel? We’ll get the people out here to fix the road.”
“What people?” Caleb said.
“I’d rather a motel,” said a girl.
Caleb told them to empty the van of luggage. He’d be back in a few minutes.
A papery panic crumpling inside his chest, he ran northward for fifteen minutes until he came to one of the planks Press Sorger had laid across the canal. It was warped and splintered, maybe six inches across and nine feet long. He ran back with it under one arm and set it across the ditch, just before the washout. Crossed over and then back again, testing it, feeling the wood bow beneath him. Nearly lost his balance as everyone turned to watch.
Caleb considered that they could carry their luggage through the sagebrush to Llamalo, about three-quarters of a mile away. But the ground was uneven, fissured, with great opportunities for kids to break a leg. The road was direct and relatively smooth, even if this meant everyone crossing the ditch twice.
He told the kids to stay where they were while the counselors, with their adult agility, crossed the plank in a few steps, carrying suitcases and sleeping bags. Caleb followed, picking up the plank behind him and placing it across the ditch just after the washout. The counselors crossed to the road, set down the luggage, and went back for another load.
Once the bags were all safely on the dry road, Caleb set down the plank near the campers, calling to them. “Come on over!” The freckled girl approached sassily, ponytail swinging. She put one foot on the makeshift bridge and took it off again, eyeing the swift water. “No way.”
Caleb crouched, held out his arms. “Ever walked on a balance beam? Same thing. Fun, actually.”
Her round face had turned stony and determined. “I can’t do that.”
He cajoled for a while, but the girl shook her head. All the kids were watching from her side, the counselors from theirs. He wanted to scream, to force her across. It was her stubbornness that was ruining everything. Instead, he crossed the plank, placing a hand on her back and gesturing to everyone else. “Come here.” Only the curly-haired boy from LA held back.
“You,” Caleb said to him. “Stand right here.”
He looked around as if Caleb couldn’t mean him.
“David, right? Come next to me.”
Caleb felt cold energy flowing through him like a rivulet through mud. “All of you just flew a long distance. You drove the entire afternoon. Where are we? We’re nowhere. Nowhere like home. You’re about to be braver than you’ve ever needed to be. You’re about to cross an irrigation ditch. You’re not going to fall. I promise you.” He paused at the audacity of this vow that was not his to uphold. “But first, let’s say goodbye to all the things that you left, that you think you can’t live without. Say goodbye to your television and your telephone. Say goodbye to shopping malls. Say goodbye to clean clothes and dry feet. And sidewalks. This morning, you said goodbye to your mom and dad and pets, and that was sad. Now we have to say goodbye to the rest.”
The kids twitched and looked away.
“No, really. Say it.” Sweat tickled his back.
In singsong mockery, a girl said, “Goodbye, television. Goodbye, telephone.”
This was never going to work. Fuck you, Donnie.
“Not like that. Say it like you mean it. Let it be sad.”
He was looking at David while he spoke, and it was across David’s features that he first noticed the shift in expression. The boy’s face let go of its skepticism and then quite suddenly billowed with joy as he shouted, “Goodbye, Pac-Man! Goodbye, Defender!”
“What about junk food?” Caleb asked. “Think how you’ll miss that.”
“Goodbye, Funyuns,” David shouted, and now the others joined: “Goodbye, Oreos! Goodbye, Doritos!” They shoveled all their travel fatigue and dislocation and fear into shouting. “Goodbye, Barney Miller. Goodbye, Battlestar Galactica.” Caleb felt the relief of this cacophony filling so much silence, like a crayon scribbling across blank paper. And he felt the coasting thrill of being listened to, of being obeyed.
“Okay. Let’s try again.” His hand still on the girl’s back, he led her to the plank. She set one tentative foot on the plank, inched the other behind it. She undulated—shoulders this way, hips that way. He willed her not to fall. She shuffled her front foot forward, dragged along the rear foot. Caleb could barely watch; he was asking too much of them. But she crossed.
One by one they came, nervously, arms out for balance. Last was David, practically dancing across. Caleb picked up the plank, brought it past the washout, set it over the ditch, and willed them across once again.
Finally, the kids sat on their bags, looking ragged. Faces were slack and smeared with dirt. They licked their already-chapping lips. It had taken an hour to travel twenty feet. Still, Caleb guided them into a bucket brigade, each person two feet from the next along the road. “See that house?” He pointed at the white house nearly a mile away. “We’ll get everything there if you toss gently. Work at a rhythm, which I’ll set.”
“Just a minute.” Anders broke out of line. “The kids are beat. We could just carry everything. The counselors, I mean. What would it take? Half hour max?”
Caleb hadn’t considered that. He saw the sweat drip down Anders’s red forehead. Suze was standing next to Anders, and Caleb hadn’t been able to look at her all day. He said, “Don’t you understa
nd Llamalo?”
“Hold up.” David unzipped his duffel, pulled out a skateboard. “What about this?”
David held it steady as another camper balanced a suitcase on it, and then he released it. The road had just enough of a downhill slope to offer a slowly accelerating ride. When the board jumped a rock, the suitcase flipped, skidding. “Good try,” Caleb called. “Come on, take your places.”
But David was already running after the board, and the kids were clamoring—“Try my bag.” They decided that the law was that all the bags had to roll the entire distance to the house, no matter how many wipeouts occurred.
Caleb took position in the sagebrush, trying to block the board from bulleting off the road. Standing there, he watched the kids and counselors running back and forth, dirt in gray maps on their limbs, fallen luggage lying like casualties all along the road. He loved them all. He looked up at the sky, at the immeasurability of blue, and he could fucking eat the emptiness. He thanked the ditch for overflowing its banks. He thanked the road for washing out. He even thanked Donnie, because he was sure it was Donnie who’d shoved the fridge door in the ditch. It couldn’t have been anyone else.
They were fully cut off from the world now. Nobody could get here; nobody could leave.
Suze came running toward him, a girl’s hand in hers. She let go of the girl when she noticed him, came over to say “It’s so awesome how . . .” But he interrupted her. Caleb kissed her in full view of everyone. It was the first time, their first kiss. She kissed him right back, pressing her palm against his chest. And then he went diving for the board.
The next day was a Monday, and Don showed up to work without Donnie. He told Caleb that when he’d seen the washout, he’d parked at the Sorgers’ ranch and asked Press Sorger to come by later with a winch hooked up to his tractor to pull the VW from the mud.
Caleb asked about Donnie. “Is he feeling sick? Is he coming later?”
Looking away from Caleb, Don said that he’d woken up on Sunday morning to find his son gone. His Trans Am, his clothes, everything he owned, gone. He hadn’t even left a note. “Shame about your ditch,” Don said, still looking away. “Not likely we’ll ever know who did it.”
