Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

Another boy comes down the road behind him, this one with an old leather-and-Cordura backpack molding apart, a huge blue tarp rolled up and bungee-corded to the side. This new boy says, “Dude! Dude! Check it out! A van!” He’s holding a spray can of Easy Cheese and piling it onto a Butterfinger. She places her front sight on the can. “Dude, Jacob!” he says to the black-haired boy. “Dude, Jacob! You want to sleep in that sick, righteous-looking van?” He stuffs the Butterfinger into his mouth and chews. His grin is so big that his jaw stands out and shows his chocolate-stained teeth. He’s having trouble eating the bar all at once and it slips partially out of his mouth, so he pushes it back in with a forefinger. Turtle could shoot the can right out of his hand.

Jacob smiles and squats down at the coals of Turtle’s fire, raking through it with a stick. She’s seen both boys before, last year when they were eighth graders and she was a seventh grader. The candy-eating boy is Brett. They must be high school freshmen now, and she doesn’t know how they’ve gotten here, but they must be a long ways lost. She wonders what the black-haired one is thinking. He is hurtful to look at, his face beautiful and unguarded. They must be on some kind of weekend adventure. Their parents dropped them off, they were going to spend one night out here and walk out the next day, something like that. Jacob sets his backpack down and eases a map from the mesh access pocket. He smooths it flat and says, “Well.”

“This cheese,” Brett says, holding up the cheese can, Turtle placing the front sight perfectly on it, “is sick . I mean, fucking dank , is all.” He props his backpack against one of the VW’s wheels and lies down, pillowing his head against it, jetting Easy Cheese into his open mouth from the can. “I know you don’t believe, but truth, I mean truth .”

Jacob, looking by turns at the map and at the valley, says, “Man, we suck at this.”

Brett says, “Just because it’s in a can doesn’t mean it’s not ‘real’ cheese, you know?”

“We are extremely, I mean extremely— I don’t want to say ‘lost,’ but I am not entirely sure of where we might actually be.”

“You’re cheese-prejudiced, is what you are.”

Jacob lies back on the rug that Turtle unrolled hours ago. He says, “Our powers of navigation astound .” He opens his backpack and pulls out a wedge of Jarlsberg and a loaf of focaccia still in its Tote Fête bakery bag. He and Brett pass these items back and forth, lying propped up on their packs, stretched at length on the Oriental rug with small powdery gray moths struggling up from the nap. They take bites directly from the wedge of cheese.

“Let’s camp here.”

“There’s no water.”

“I wish there was a girl here,” Brett says wonderingly, looking up at the sky. “We could woo her with our powers of navigation.”

“If she were blind and had no sense of direction.”

“That’s sick,” Brett says, “sick, deceiving a blind girl like that.”

“I’d date a blind girl,” Jacob says. “Though, not just because she was blind. What I mean is—I don’t think it’d matter.”

“I’d date her just for being blind,” Brett says.

“Really?”

“How’s it any different from objectifying her for her intelligence?”

“Her intelligence cannot be abstracted from her personality, whereas her blindness is incidental to who she is, and can be abstracted,” Jacob says. “I.e., she’s not a blind chick. She is a chick who is, incidentally, blind .”

“But,” Brett says, “but, dude! She is not, like, responsible for her intelligence in any meaningful way. That’s shallow , dude.”

“She isn’t responsible for her blindness, either,” Jacob says, disgusted.

“Unless she plucked out her eyes in a fit of rage.”

“You’d date a girl who plucked out her eyes in a fit of rage ?”

“You know she’s feisty. You just know it.”

“That feels like an understatement .”

“Dude, bring it. I’m all about it.”

“I bet she has a wicked temper.”

“Girls have to start spunky, Jacob, or ninth grade grinds it out of them.”

Turtle lies in the brush, the sight laid first on Brett’s forehead then on Jacob’s, and she thinks, what the fuck? What the fuck? They recline on their rug, ripping off strips of focaccia. Brett gestures to the view. “Gods,” he says, “but I wish we had some more Easy Cheese.”

When they are done, the boys help each other up and trudge bantering along the jeep track into the redwoods. Turtle rises and stands there for a moment and then slips into the trees after them. The road is hardly better than a streambed. Gangly brown roots stick out from the cut bank. They walk for hours and climb finally into a clearing with a cottage built from scrap lumber. It is unlit and the door stands open. Turtle squats behind a burned-out stump, coal-black, eaten by fire into a helix laddered by mushrooms with flat brown tops and bottoms like frogs’ throats. It is shading into early evening. Everything is painted in deep green and sumptuous purple. She watches the boys walk out into the clearing. The clouds look like candles that have burned down to tiered pools of blue wax.

Brett says, “Dude, dude , what if you go in there—and there’s just, like, one deformed blind albino child on a rocking chair with a banjo ?”

Jacob says, “And he takes us prisoner and makes us read Finnegans Wake to his peyote plants?”

Brett says, “You can’t tell anyone that my mom made us do that. You can’t.”

Jacob says, “Why Finnegans Wake , do you think? Why not Ulysses ? Actually, why not just read The Odyssey ? Or—or The Brothers Karamazov ?”

“Because, dude —you read fucked-up Russian bullshit to your peyote plants, you’re gonna have a bad time.”

“Okay, so: To the Lighthouse . Or—you know what?—people die in subordinate clauses in that book. Maybe D. H. Lawrence? For a passionate, make-love-to-the-gamekeeper kind of high.”

“Dude, with your voice you are like, ‘Look at all these books I’ve read,’ but with your eyes you are like, ‘Help me.’”

“You know what would be good, actually? Harry Potter.”

“Well, I guess we’ll never know what’s beyond that door,” Brett says.

“We already know, Brett.”

“We do?”

“Adventure,” Jacob says. “Behind every door lies adventure .”

“Only if by ‘every’ you mean ‘some’ and by ‘adventure’ you mean ‘sodomical hillbillies.’”

“Nah.”

“Dude. It could be dangerous. Actually and in reality dangerous.”

“It’s fine,” Jacob says, and goes up the steps and in through the door.

“Physically perilous, Jacob,” Brett calls after him, “in an entirely real, entirely not-hilarious way.”

“Come on!”

Turtle follows the edge of the forest around the back of the cottage, slipping through the brush. She thinks, stay calm, stay easy. She steps up onto the creaking back deck and stands looking out into the woods. There are big black coils of irrigation hoses and heaped fifty-pound bags of organic fertilizer at the foot of the deck. There are clipped hoses and coupling links lying beside an overturned bucket with a coffee-can ashtray. The deck has an outdoor bathroom with a toilet and shower, the drain cut crudely into the redwood boards with a PVC pipe running to a sump hole. There’s a PBR can beside the toilet and when Turtle picks it up she can hear the ticking of its carbonation. She sets down the beer and opens the door and steps into a bare kitchen. Now she is in the back of the house and the boys are in the front, separated from her by a dividing wall and a closed door. She can hear them.