Desert Boys (10 page)

“Sorry,” Caitlyn said genuinely, as if she'd forgotten Jim's birthday. As if she'd broken his heart.

And with that one word—“sorry”—the fourteen or fifteen years Phil had pegged for the girl suddenly seemed exceedingly generous. Now that he looked at their faces in the enormousness of the windshield, now that he focused on Allie's miniature fingers tapping against the side paneling, he was struck by the fact that these girls were children.

Jim didn't seem to share the epiphany. “Tell you what,” he said. “What are you ladies up to later tonight?”

They drew up a plan for the girls to sneak out of their homes after midnight and come back to the trailer park, where Jim would be the only security guard on duty. Phil said, yeah, maybe he'd show up, that his being there that night was a possibility. In all likelihood, Jim knew Phil wouldn't join in on the fun, but that didn't seem to bother him too much. He might've looked forward to the time alone with, what were their names? Allie, yeah, and Caitlyn.

*   *   *

The first thing Phil did when he got home that night was he poured himself a glass of water from the tap. From the freezer he grabbed the only ice tray he owned, which he discovered hadn't been refilled before being put away. He spilled the water from his glass into the slots of the ice tray and placed that in the freezer. Then he refilled his glass and swallowed the water warm.

What he did next was he ate in front of the small, wood-paneled TV, getting up once in a while to tinker with the antenna. He focused on nothing for too long, though he did pay some attention to a show about saving money at the grocery store. Their big idea was websites with printable coupons, but Phil didn't have a computer or a printer, let alone access to the web. What good was saving money, Phil thought, when you didn't have any money in the first place?

While undressing, he realized he still had the girl's camera. He removed it from the pocket of his shirt, turning the thing in his hands like a puzzle cube. He pressed the power button at its top and switched a small dial from the icon of a camera to the icon of a Play button, the way Caitlyn had shown him, so he could look through the pictures the girls had taken earlier and the ones he had taken, as well. He searched through them backwards, clicking the left arrow button. There they were, the girls, smiling from the yellow van, making faces, alternately flipping the camera the bird or the peace sign. Then, further back in the camera's history, he found the photos Caitlyn had taken of Allie alone up there, pretending to look out onto an open highway. At the edge of the picture Phil noticed himself and Jim. Just standing there, squinting in the harsh light of the sun. Phil's arms crossed and Jim's akimbo, hands at his hips, both men looking in Allie's direction, mouths open as if they were laughing. Phil thumbed the circular button with the icon of a trash bin, and the image was gone.

But he kept going. The photographs were innocuous, childish things, pictures of four pairs of feet in a circle, toe to toe, or else the bottom-up image of a Joshua tree against the clouds. Phil didn't know what he was looking for—naked pictures, or what?—but he didn't find it. He guessed he just wanted to be surprised. Find something in there he wasn't expecting. So, to give the girls what he'd been hoping for himself, he flipped the dial back to the camera icon, aimed the lens at his face, and pressed the shutter.

*   *   *

He'd been in bed for an hour when the knock came at the door.

“Phil,” a voice said from outside. “It's me.”

Phil caught the accent. He opened the door to let Gaspar inside.

“Where is he?” my uncle wanted to know.

He asked as though a reward had been posted for Jim's scalp, a tone that made Phil question if this was the same Gaspar Lusparyan he'd come to know. On the weekends he was around, Gaspar had always treated Phil with dignity, is all, and Phil had never pictured him as a man with a temper. He'd even asked Phil over for dinner from time to time, citing his sister's culinary skills. And that part turned out true enough—my mother would serve Phil whatever it was she'd cooked, exotic foods with names Phil couldn't pronounce at the time or remember later, always at the tip of his tongue. All of it Phil had never seen before, most of it some of the best food he'd ever tasted. Now Gaspar, larger than usual in an oversized white jacket, puffy in the chest and arms, seemed more like an enraged father than a dinner host.

“Jim, I think, is patrolling,” said Phil.

“That's where he should be,” my uncle said. “Isn't, though, as far as I can tell. Noise complaint from woman in number four-oh-three. Sarah. Says she thinks someone is messing around in the lot back there, with your buses. So I call Jim on the two-way, get nothing. Know what I do next?”

“No.”

“I get up. Out of bed. Tomorrow already, when I should be on my way home to Glendale, but how could anybody tell? Exactly why I let you keep buses out there, so I can sleep these hours and not be forced awake by noise in the lot. So I head out there to check it out, what do I see? Nothing. Nobody lurking—and no Jim Durant, that's for sure. So I'm thinking, where the fuck is this guy? I spend twenty, twenty-five minutes driving around the park to find this man, the one I am letting live here for free, keep shit here for free. For the work he is not doing.”

“It's not right,” Phil said. “What he's done isn't right, and for that I'm sorry.”

“You know I'm a good man,” Gaspar said. “I don't give people shit for things. I let people be happy so long they're not making me, my family, unhappy. Sometimes I have too much to drink, and for that I'm working on it. But I'm a fair, good man. I know that about myself, so I can get pissed off once in a while.”

“No, you are, I agree. Let me cover his shift tonight and we'll figure out why he dropped the ball tomorrow morning. How about that?”

My uncle considered it. He removed the big white jacket and placed it on some newspapers spread over the kitchen table. “Wear it when you go out,” he said, heading to the door. “I saw you on patrol last night, no jacket. You'll get sick.”

*   *   *

Secretly Phil had a better answer to the question, What is it that you do? He imagined telling it to people who had asked him before, and hoped to tell a person who'd ask him in the future. He'd say: I do what we all do, which is we gain or we lose momentum. He'd say, We've only got the verb “to do” because we've got the verb “to become.” The question, What do you do? inherently looked to the future: What will you become? What will become of you? As soon as the question was asked in the past tense, however, the meaning became, suddenly, an accusation: What did you do? What have you done?

A lot of what Phil had done in his life he did without knowing why, or caring, until after. Sometimes the answer was simple and easier to know beforehand. For instance: why Phil took the camera with him when he left the trailer was an easy one to understand, if not an easy one to explain later. It was as simple as this: He wanted to get rid of the camera. Holding a child's camera made him sick. Before leaving, he deleted the picture he'd taken of himself, wishing he could erase more than just a photograph.

Aside from his clothes, all Phil took with him were the camera and the flashlight. And he wore Gaspar's puffy white jacket. Didn't even bother to lock his trailer or bring the key. That's all he had on him: the camera, the light, and the jacket. None of them actually his, a thought that did more than cross his mind.

Nothing moved, nothing sounded. Phil passed the cars lining the pathways of the trailer park. Fog, inside, and frost on the outside clouded their windows. He half expected a kid to finger-draw a happy face in the fog from inside one of the cars. In front of Jim's place, an empty space where his Chevy should have been. Phil skipped the layers he usually worked through to get to the park's perimeter and headed straight to the gravel lot, figuring that Jim would be there, and the girls, too, if they'd made it out that night.

But when Phil arrived, he didn't see anybody. The six buses glowed in that orange light, and that was about all there was to find. Jim kept the keys to the gate on his patrol nights, so Phil could only peer at the buses through the locked fence. He stood on the sidewalk along Avenue I, just before Twentieth Street East, exactly where the girls had stopped that first time. He took out the red camera and placed it in the gutter along the curb there. He debated leaving it. Maybe he'd keep it until the next time the girls stopped by. Maybe he could keep it for himself, but what pictures did he have to take, and what good is a digital camera without a computer? The thought of selling it crossed his mind, but not seriously. The truth was that it didn't matter what he did with the camera, because before he could make up his mind, a gunshot went off somewhere to the east, away from town, out in the desert. And another.

Phil didn't run away. Later he explained that he felt as though he were literally stuck in place. All he could do was remove the flashlight from his pocket, let it hang at his side toward the gutter, and flip the switch. On and off, on and off. A spot of light on the cement, unsteady, and then gone, and then there again. He had on his mind at that moment two things: first, a number, and then a name. The number 165—decibels—occurred and reoccured to him. Then came the name: “dolma”—he'd remembered the name of the food Gaspar's sister made for him when he'd first moved into the park as a teenager, alone at seventeen. She removed the stems from grape leaves, and then boiled the leaves and rice separately. In a large bowl, she used her hands to mix the rice and the tomatoes and the lemon juice she squeezed in there, careful to pluck out any seeds that might have crept in. She said that in Armenia, she had her own grapevines and her own lemon tree, and the taste—you couldn't imagine the taste of a real grape leaf, the strange sweetness of an Armenian lemon. Then she filled the grape leaves, spread across a cutting board now, with the stuffing she'd created in the bowl—you can use meat, she said while she did it, you can use lamb or you can use beef, but why not spare a life? She poured salt into the center of her palm and spread it over the rice on the leaves just before rolling them perfectly into little green tubes. You could see her fingers shine there with the juices and the oils of the dolmas, but it didn't seem to bother her. She was a beautiful woman. Once, she'd been—plucking lemons from a branch—a beautiful girl, and Phil felt for her and for all of them.

*   *   *

Since that first time I heard the story, I knew what my curious but informal research would later prove to be true, which was that the gunshots meant the end of the two girls. For months afterwards, however, when I retold the story to people I wanted to count as friends, people I thought I could impress with a certain proximity to tragedy (here I'm not proud of myself), I was shocked to find that most felt unsatisfied by story's end. The sound of two gunshots, apparently, couldn't convince anyone that the two girls were killed. People wanted a clearer picture of the scene. They wanted to see the girls struggling to survive, fighting over the Marlin rifle in the cramped cab of the truck, which must have felt—someone once told me in a kind of prodding voice—“like a kind of coffin, no?” People expressed cautious, politically ambiguous doubt regarding two girls willing to leave home at midnight to meet a strange man. They would never blame the victims, they were quick to point out, but wouldn't it also be likely that girls like these seemed willing—eager, even—to have sex? What else had they gone that night to find? Which precise sequence of events, these people wanted to know, had the power to transform Jim Durant—a creep, to be sure—into a killer?

These cravings for gruesome variations on a story surprised and saddened me, and then stopped surprising me and only saddened me, at which point, I stopped telling the story altogether.

The truth was I, too, felt unsatisfied—a horribly callous word to use in situations like these—but not because I missed out on the full experience regarding the rifle, or the imprisoned fate of the murderer. I wish I could say my lingering curiosity had to do with the two victims, whose real names were Sabrina Muller (Allie) and Ashley Simms (Caitlyn). They were only thirteen, and deserve to be understood in more context than the roles they played in this particular story. But this particular story, being the story I was trying to understand, had me returning again and again to the question of Phil.

After a confession from Jim Durant and a testimony from my uncle, Phil was not indicted. He was free to go. But until I did the math, I didn't know where, exactly, he went. I looked at the date of the crime, November 1999, and realized that Phil's visits to my house came after, not before, the events of the story. My mother and uncle had put me in harm's way. When it came to the matter of Phil's innocence, I did not agree with the law. Toward my family I felt a kind of retroactive indignation. “You did
what
?” I shouted at my mother. “You invited a man like Phil into your home when your children were roughly the same age as his victims?”

“You're just like your father,” she said, waving me away. “He always took Jean out of the house when we had that poor boy over, as if Phil were a hungry wolf. I love your father, but he's a real American, isn't he? They love to talk about second chances, but only Armenians—the first Christians—understand that the only way you can change people is through forgiveness. Not prison bars, not shunning.”

I asked what it was, exactly, she'd been trying to change about our man Phil. “His stupidity, or his indifference?”

“He was a young man with nothing,” she said. “He had no family. No home. No place he wanted to be. This can fill a person with shame. He was choosing, God bless him, whether or not to die. My brother? Me? All we were doing was trying to convince him to live.”