Chris McCormick - Desert Boys

“Danny Watts” always sounded to me more like the name of an old peasant song, belted out by Irish scallywags lining the fogged windows of a pub, than the name of the half-white, half-Mexican boy I’d later call my friend. But there he was, Dan Watts, unpacking his cafeteria-issued burrito with the air of an archeologist, complaining to his lunch partners about the inauthenticity of the tortilla.

“You can tell whether or not the dough was kneaded by hand,” he said. “My mom always does this thing where, after she rolls out the dough, she slaps it between her palms, back and forth, back and forth, for no reason at all other than to get her skin on it.”

“Gross,” I said, though my mother made her Armenian recipes the same way, and though having another son of an immigrant in the group seemed to me a perfectly symmetrical and therefore agreeable thing to have: Robert Karinger, so fully white that his buzz cut appeared gray under most light, flanked like a kind of chess piece by two loyal but divergent halfies. I’d spent every day of the summer with Karinger, hoarding the treasures we’d scraped from the desert in his bedroom, and I thought I knew him well enough — eighth-graders as we were — to anticipate his saying, starting in a mock-parental tone only to devolve into vulgarity, “Daley Kushner is not often right, but when he is, he’s fucking really right. That skin-on-tortilla shit is gross. ”

But he didn’t. Instead, he pulled apart his own burrito, inspected it, and said, as if he’d just realized the all-too-simple purpose of an alien instrument, “Huh.”

Which is when I knew Dan Watts had officially joined the group.

As I said, I was happy to have Watts around to buttress the clear leader of our gang. On the other hand, I was also disinclined to share the only friend I’d ever been able to make, and feared constantly — at lunch and on the weekends, in class or in the desert, jumping tumbleweeds on our bikes — that the two of them would ditch me. A bigger fear than being left entirely alone was to be left and then watched, in my aloneness, by the two boys some short distance away, hidden in a trench in the dirt except for their heartbreaking and eerily natural laughter.

Because of this conflicted take on the new kid, my kinship with Watts would for a long time be reliant on Karinger’s presence. Years would pass before Watts and I spent any significant time together, just the two of us, and even then our conversations inevitably returned to Karinger. In other words, our friendship was more of an alliance, and the fact that I now — as an adult — speak more to Watts than I did to Karinger before he left to fight in the war, is a surprise my younger self would never have believed.

* * *

In college I’d picked up an internship at the Oakland Tribune, where I spent most of my time fetching frozen yogurt for the perpetually shrinking paid staff and peering, a safe distance from the wall-to-wall windows on the twenty-first floor of the sky-rise, out onto Lake Merritt, waiting for the next bit of instruction from my boss. I’d told my parents the newspaper needed me back as soon as possible, and that my visit home that summer after my freshman year could only last a weekend. The truth was my boss had encouraged me to take the entire summer off, and even hinted that my return next fall was less than necessary. But I wanted to be back in the office as soon as I could. I craved the light-headed kind of vertigo brought on by standing near the windows, looking from a building literally ten times the height of any I’d grown up around, out onto the lake, which — even though it wasn’t a lake, but a tidal lagoon — made the desert back home feel lifeless and beige in comparison. So I booked the short flights to and from home — an hour each way — four days apart and packed a tiny gym bag that read, along one side, ESSENTIALS.

The cheapest tickets had me landing at LAX at two in the afternoon on a Thursday, when neither of my parents could leave work to pick me up. I looked through my phone for other options: My sister was a law student living in New York; Karinger was in the midst of his first tour of duty, and we hadn’t spoken in a year anyway. I resorted to calling Watts, whom I knew to be taking courses at the local community college, training to become a paramedic. Two days before the flight, I went to a poetry reading on Berkeley’s campus, not for the poetry — though Robert Hass read beautifully from work that would go on to win a Pulitzer — but to stock up on wine, which I couldn’t yet legally buy. I stole a bottle of red from Wheeler Hall and drank three-quarters of it in my off-campus bed before having the courage to call someone I’d known, more or less, for six years.

“Kush?” said Watts, sounding genuinely surprised to hear from me. After my fight with Karinger a year earlier, Watts and I had seen each other exactly once, at Christmas, and spoken over text only a handful of times. But when he answered the phone using my nickname, and when I responded with his last name, a kind of fold in the fabric of time occurred. Our conversation was as comfortable and easy as though Karinger, silently, were on a third line somewhere, and we were all fourteen again.

The drive from Los Angeles to the Antelope Valley normally took about as long as the flight in from Oakland, but the traffic, even after leaving the city, was denser than usual, so Watts and I had a couple of hours to catch up. He was driving what used to be his father’s pickup truck, and the confined space of the cab along with the fact that we’d shared this exact seat many times in the past, prompted me to think in terms of contrast. The truck hadn’t changed, as far as I could remember, except for the addition of a rosary hung from the rearview mirror. I’d always vaguely known Watts was Catholic, but the beads surprised me. Watts himself looked more or less like he always had, his signature brown curls coiling to his shoulders. Whereas I — fair and wispy — looked like a scrawny version of my dad, Watts had always been his mother’s son, dark skinned and a bit pudgy. He’d been training for the physical portion of his EMT courses, and he looked as fit as I’d ever seen him. His forearms — one of which flexed every time he adjusted the steering wheel — were full of thick, rootlike veins. During my fight with Karinger a year earlier, Watts discovered I was the kind of man who fell in love with other men. Looking at him so intently now, I didn’t want him to mistake my intentions. I started to explain.

“Kush,” he said on a particularly bogged-down stretch of the 14, “I get it. No need to explain anything to me.” And, as if to prove how seamlessly he’d reconciled the laws of his religion with his friend’s queerness, he asked in his most comfortably warm and scratchy voice if I’d met anyone, you know, special.

I said I hadn’t, not in that way, and turned the question on him. “Any women in the AV you want to tell me about?”

“Just the one,” he said.

I knew he meant Karinger’s younger sister, Roxanne, who was about to become a high school senior. She and Watts had been seeing each other, secretly, for a couple of years. The only reason I knew was because I’d once discovered them half-dressed in a bathroom, and had been asking for periodic updates from Watts in the time since. Last I’d heard, they were still sneaking around together, waiting until she graduated before coming clean. I asked how she was doing.

“That’s the thing,” he said. “I don’t know. We haven’t talked in a while.”

“What happened?”

Watts adjusted his rearview mirror, causing the rosary to sway even more violently than it had over the bumps in the freeway.