Chris McCormick - Desert Boys

The buses, all six of them, were parked in a single row. From where he stood, Phil could see the front ends, those big, bubbled headlights, the VW insignias between them. To save the flashlight’s battery, Phil kept the thing off unless he needed it, which meant that the only light on the gravel lot now came from the orange-bulbed arc lamps that lined Avenue I. In that strange, muted glow, the buses looked new. The spots where oxidation had done its job on the paint hid in it, reflecting and absorbing the hazy light just as the more polished areas did. The headlights, all twelve of them, crystallized the light back at Phil in a way that reminded him of the twinkling eyes of cartoon children.

He moved on, working the perimeter of the place, and then inward toward my uncle’s office at the center, and then back outward again. In this way, in layers, he worked the remainder of his shift.

* * *

Sunday, at about the same time as the day before, the girls returned. Phil hadn’t expected them to come back at all, and even Jim was surprised to see them again so soon. He thought, at the very earliest, they’d come back the next Saturday. He said to Phil, “How bad can a girl want it?”

This time, Allie asked the men if she and Caitlyn could get a closer look at what she called the “hippie cars.” Jim let them in through the gate, telling them they could sit behind the wheel of one, if that was something they’d like to try. It turned out that, yes, that’s exactly what they had in mind.

So in went Allie, into the driver’s seat of the yellow one. “Yellow’s my favorite color,” she said more than once. Jim closed the door behind her, and she rolled down the window. With one hand gripping the top of the wheel, she waved her fingers down at Caitlyn, who stood flanked on either side by the owners of the bus. “How do I look?” Allie asked the three of them. Great, they said. They all agreed that the girl looked great.

“Take a picture of me,” Allie said, and Caitlyn slid from her back pocket a thin red camera. Allie posed in various ways. She made certain faces, many of which featured sticking out her tongue. From several angles, Caitlyn snapped pictures. Then she climbed up to the passenger seat and handed the camera, along with instructions, to Phil.

“You girls know how to drive one of these things?” asked Jim.

“Caitlyn can’t drive a bicycle,” Allie said. Her friend disagreed, loudly. The girls found this funny. “But I,” Allie continued, “have my driver’s license.”

“Driver’s permit, ” Caitlyn corrected.

“No difference there,” said Jim. “But do you know how to drive a manual transmission? A stick shift?”

“Not really,” Allie said. “Learned on the other kind.”

“Not surprising,” said Jim. He made a joke about putting the “man” in “manual.”

Allie pivoted her body in the driver’s seat to face the men, letting both her arms fall from the open window. With her palms she drummed a soft beat against the door. Phil snapped a picture of her this way. “Teach us,” she said.

Phil slipped the camera into his shirt pocket for safekeeping. He said, “Don’t you girls have fathers for that?”

“Quiet all along and the first thing he says is negative,” Jim said. “Don’t mind him, girls. Of course we could show you what you need to know. Only problem is: None of these dinosaurs are in what we call ‘running condition.’ Good news is, I’ve got a manual transmission in my own vehicle, a working truck, just over there.” He threw his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the trailer park. “What do you say?”

Allie looked to her friend. “Can’t,” she said, turning back to Jim. “Caitlyn has to be home before her mom gets there.”

“And that’s soon?”

“Real soon.”

“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.