Desert Boys (25 page)

And know that clichés in English weren't clichés to her. Know she would've been able to do gracefully what you're working so hard to do now: love.

Realize you're not capable. You may have been able to love Lloyd in San Francisco, but you can't love him here. You can love only one man in the Antelope Valley, and Robert Karinger is gone. He always treated you like a little brother—someone to mock, someone to protect, someone to instruct. Bringing Lloyd home has helped you see that you've been using him to fill that role. Decide to break the pattern. Decide you don't need an instructor. In fact, start instructing yourself, Daley. Instruct yourself.

Get Lloyd alone, away from your father and the script. Tell him the truth: you need to stay home for a while. When he says he doesn't understand, say nothing. Grief transcends language, too.

When your father comes into the living room to find you and Lloyd crying quietly on the couch, let him do the talking. He's put aside his discomfort and has treated Lloyd like a son. He's earned this monologue.

“When Gaspar sent me that case of arak after your mom passed, he attached a note. He said he'd been lying to me all these years. Apparently, when I'd given that answer of mine about my father and my vow never to drink, Gaspar knew I'd be doomed. How could I handle a wife if I couldn't handle a single drink? So he improvised. He told his father and the rest of the men that I'd given a speech about courage. About how I was already a brave man, and that my children—his grandchildren—would grow to be the smartest and strongest and bravest Armenians in the world, raised not on lion's milk but on Lena's milk.”

He lets out a single laugh of nostalgia that moves all the air in your lungs up to your throat. This is the most your father has ever said to you without asking a question. Now that your mother is gone, he has become the verbose, explicit man you'd wanted so badly as a boy. Now you have taken on the role he'd played, the man who asks questions, the man whose job it is to listen.

“Your uncle Gaspar lied,” he continues, “and that's the only reason I was allowed to marry your mother. You owe your entire life, son, to the greatest lie ever told. And I guess that's what my old play, or Lloyd's novel, or any kind of fiction is trying to be—a lie that lets love exist. But I was a kid when I wrote that damn thing, and as much fun as I've had revisiting it, the kind of love between your mom and me was beyond what a kid—even a sensitive, tuned-in kid like me, like you two—could've got down on paper. A lie might allow love, but it can't create it.”

After a moment, Lloyd wipes his eyes with his terrier scarf and asks, half crying and half laughing, if he can take the case of arak back with him to San Francisco. Laugh-cry along with him. When you help him load his suitcase and the box of liquor into the rental, arrange to meet in a few days or a week. Once back together in the city, you will get to the work of love. For now, tell him you need some time at home with your dad, who shakes Lloyd's hand and tells him to drive safe in the same way he used to tell you: Stay above your tires.

At night, after Lloyd's gone, your father falls asleep in his favorite recliner. Remember the reason—the false one—you are here. You almost forgot, didn't you? Find your mother's old car keys hanging by a pink plastic lanyard by the door, and take them into your bedroom. Take care to be quiet. Slowly, slide open the bedroom window and, as you did a million years ago, heave yourself through.

Feel the warm night cup your elbows and pad the back of your neck. Get into your mother's old Corolla, and count it as a blessing to hear the engine start on the first try. Before you know if your father's heard you, take off.

By the time you make it to the play, they're in the third act. Ramón and Julio have just awoken. They argue about what type of bird is outside their window. Be sure to look around to count a surprising number of people. Many seats are still open, but many—more than you'd have guessed—are filled. Understand maybe a quarter of what is said onstage, and piece together the rest. Most of the play you remember from high school, when star-crossed love felt not only real but inevitable, too. Stop thinking so much and listen to the actor playing Ramón as he says something about wanting to stay in bed with Julio. He doesn't care if the guards barge in.
“Ven, muerte, y bienvenido,”
he says, preferring death to leaving. Fool, you think. You will leave
and
you will die. There is no choice to be made.

 

SHELTER

We each carried a plastic grocery bag and a club. Karinger's was an old 3-wood—so old, it was actually made out of wood, except for a little metal plate across the top of the head that had the number
3
painted on it in red. Mine was an impossibly long 2-iron that had a face as flat as a ruler. Karinger said even pros couldn't use it right. Sometimes when the wind was low and if I got a ball that wasn't cracked or yellowed, I could hit it pretty well. Problem was, the only golf balls we found in the desert by the old course had been lost there for a while. Some looked so old, they seemed just as natural as the California junipers. Good white golf balls were so rare, Karinger made me feel bad for using them. “We can sell them,” he'd say, but we never did.

We'd been ball-hunting out there for ten days straight. Karinger said he hadn't seen anyone on the old golf course in a year. He had the idea to collect balls and take them to the new golf course on the other side of town, where crowds swarmed and the grass was kept nice. With the balls we collected in the desert and the clubs Karinger's dad left behind, we could hit on the range there for free. It was something to do. The walk was a slog, though, and sometimes I'd pretend I didn't see balls in the tumbleweeds that I normally would've gone for, just because my bag had already gotten so heavy. “I'll get them tomorrow,” I'd tell myself, but it was always harder to find a ball I'd already found and let go.

One time, Karinger reached into a dry bush for a ball that was lodged in there. From about a hundred yards away I heard him scream, so I ran over. I was going to ask what happened, but I saw it myself. Craning over a sharp yellow bush, a rattlesnake sat up like they do in movies. Karinger said in a whisper he didn't get bit, but it was close. We got out of the way, just in case. Karinger took his 3-wood and nudged the snake until it hissed. “Let's leave it,” I said, but Karinger didn't listen to me. He took a huge backswing and almost hit me in the face with his club. Next thing I knew, he was drumming the snake's head and body into the hard white dirt. I felt bad for the snake, but I hit it, too, once it stopped moving.

On the way home, Karinger straddled the yellow dashes of the empty highway. I walked in the dirt on the side of the road, using my club as a walking stick. Lizards raced before my feet, and once in a while I crushed a Pepsi can with my shoe or else knocked a plastic water bottle into the tumbleweeds with my 2-iron. The plastic bags, filled with old golf balls, hung from our wrists.

At one point, Karinger said, “You know we did more than kill a snake, right?” He kept moving forward, but now he looked right at me. “We'll never get credit for it. But in the future, we just saved somebody's life.”

*   *   *

Before I met him, Karinger walked five miles home from school. Mom would pick me up, and every day on the drive back we'd see this chubby blond kid walking in the desert with a big backpack and a huge T-shirt darkened with sweat around its collar. One day after school, Mom drove me to a clothing store on another side of town. There he was, still walking, slower now, an hour and a half after school got out. Mom pulled the car over and told him we would give him a ride. From then on, we drove him home after school.

Of course I knew who he was: we were in seventh grade together. He wore old oversized T-shirts every day. From his face grew the ugly blond beginnings of a beard, a feat at school accomplished only by a Filipino eighth-grader. Karinger never talked in class, and I'd never seen him talk to anyone outside of class either. He was always alone. I usually spent my time at school alone, too, but at least people knew I could speak because I raised my hand a lot in class and answered questions.

In fact, in the beginning I heard him talk only when my mom asked him questions in the car. Once she asked him why he walked home in the heat. Karinger didn't tell her it was because his mom worked all day and his dad was gone. He told her he liked finding things in the desert.

He started to come over to my house to play video games. We jumped on the trampoline in my backyard, jumped from the trampoline into the pool and swam all day. One time we'd been floating out there for a long while without saying anything to each other. I surprised myself by asking if he was jealous of my house. My parents both worked full-time; we weren't well-off. But I knew he lived in a trailer.

“Jealous?” he said. “No way.”

“But you live in a—”

“Yeah,” he said. “So?”

“So, don't you get bored?”

He dipped himself low into the pool so that the water came up to his nose. Without his oversized shirt on, he didn't look so chubby. When he came back up, he asked me, “Have you ever hunted lizards?”

“No,” I said.

“You ever drink the water from a cactus?”

I hadn't.

“My backyard is the whole desert,” he said. He formed a cup with his hands and guided a dead yellow jacket along the edge of the water. “I've got this knife that used to be my dad's, from the army. You take it to the cactus at just the right angle, you can get this really sweet water out of it.”

He went on and on about the desert and all the equipment his dad had left behind. He told me about the golf clubs and the abandoned course. By the end of his speech, I was so excited, I asked my parents if I could go to Karinger's place after school. Later, his mom called mine and said, “You've got no idea how important your Daley is to my Robert.” Then it was summer, and I was at Karinger's all the time.

*   *   *

Karinger's mom, Linda, did two things: She worked fifty-five hours a week at Antelope Valley Animal Shelter, and she entered sweepstakes. Scattered all over the floor of the trailer were losing scratch-off tickets. Walking between them on the carpet, my feet picked up their shavings.

If Karinger had shaved and worn a long blond wig, he'd have looked just like Linda. She even wore baggy T-shirts, too. After working at the shelter all day, she'd come home to Karinger, his younger sister, Roxanne, me, and the three cats living in the trailer. I couldn't tell if the shaggy brown carpet smelled like the cats or if the cats smelled like the shaggy brown carpet. Either way, Linda had that smell, too.

One time, Karinger and I cleared a patch of that spotted carpet and sorted our golf balls. We put newer balls in one pile and scratched or warped ones in another.

That's when Karinger told me we should sell the good ones.

Linda was standing in the room, rocking a big brown cat named Potato in her arms. “Why don't you tell Daley your real plan,” she said. She had a smile on her face like a kidder.

“That
is
my plan,” Karinger said. “We can sell them and spend the profits on better clubs. Then we'll get really good at golf and be rich.”

His eleven-year-old sister—who, like my own sister, and therefore like
all
sisters, as far as I knew, had an amazing ability to disappear and reappear without my noticing—suddenly stood beside her mother. Roxanne Karinger said, “That's not a bad idea, but me and Mom like your other idea better.”

Karinger slapped his hands together and nearly shouted: “Good-bye, ladies.”

Potato leaped from Linda's arms and into our golf balls. She batted them between her paws and messed up the neat piles.

Karinger hissed at the cat. “Get out of here,” he said.

Roxanne stepped over and scooped Potato up from underneath. She flattened the cat's face with her open palm and made funny noises. “You're mashed, Potato,” she said. She giggled and squeezed the cat tight. I laughed, too.

Karinger rolled his eyes. He made a gun with his finger and thumb and pulled the trigger at the side of his head. “Boom,” he said, and flopped dead on the floor.

*   *   *

A few times a year, Linda brought kittens home from the shelter in groups of six or seven. They'd stay at the house until they no longer needed to be bottle-fed. Sometimes the batches overlapped. Sometimes there'd be thirteen or fourteen kittens living in the yellow bathtub. Once in a while, one of the kittens would die. When this happened, Linda wouldn't bury the kitten nearby, even though Karinger asked her to let us bury it in the desert out back. “I can make a cross out of some twigs and we can say something nice,” he'd say, but his mom wouldn't budge. She'd get rid of the dead kitten some other mysterious way.

She told us not to name the kittens. No use in getting attached, she'd say. Karinger did anyway and named them based on their colors. Black kittens were called Midnight or Oiler. He called orange ones Tangerine or Carrot. One time, Linda brought home a black and orange kitten and I suggested we call him Halloween, but Karinger said no. “That's too easy,” he said. I wanted to point out that calling a white cat Snow White wasn't exactly difficult, but I just shrugged. After a little while, Karinger said we could call the kitten Halloween, just until he thought of something better. He never did, and Halloween, like the rest of the kittens who survived, eventually went back to the shelter with Linda.

*   *   *

We carried our golf balls and clubs to the new course across town. We walked for an hour before we came to the place, a lush green oasis with a big parking lot full of cars. A large boulder sat at the gate between the parking lot and the driving range. The words
KNICKERBOCKER GOLF CLUB
were engraved on it and painted red. When we walked past the boulder, Karinger slapped it with his hand and said, “They use these fake rocks to cover up electric boxes and things like that.”