Chris McCormick - Desert Boys

Which is when Allison Nelms reportedly removed her wedding ring — she was a lefty — and punched her brother clear across the nose.

* * *

At dawn on Charitye’s first morning at the farm, Reggie expected a fight to get her out of bed. He slipped into his jeans and boots, snapped the buttons on his shirt, and clacked along the hardwood hallway to the spare bedroom she’d sidled into after dinner the night before.

After four increasingly loud knocks, he let himself in. Both the twin-sized beds (as kids, Allison and Keith had shared the room) were made. The large black duffel — unpacked and deflated — lay folded in the corner, the only visible evidence that Charitye Peterson had visited at all.

Reggie left the house to find his niece knee-deep in the alfalfa field. Again she was scribbling in her notepad.

“Surprised you’re up so early,” he said. “Took me a few months to get used to waking up with the sun.”

“Sleep’s not my thing,” Charitye said, not looking up from the paper.

From the coop, the chickens clucked.

“I’m also surprised you’re out here,” he said, “as opposed to feeding the horse. Your dad told me I’d have to work my ass off to keep you away from her.”

At this she looked up. “Same horse that killed her, isn’t it?”

To that, Reggie didn’t say a word, just hummed an affirming hum.

“I prefer plants anyway,” she said, returning to her notes. “Smell nicer.”

“That what your poems are about? Plants and flowers?”

“Poems aren’t about anything,” she said. “They are things.”

“I see. What kind of things, then, do you write?”

She exhaled into her own mouth, making little zeppelins of her lips. “I’d rather you just read one and decide for yourself. At the end of my time here, I’ll leave a poem on your kitchen table. How’s that?”

“Poetic,” Reggie said. “I’ll look forward to it. In the meantime, why don’t you follow me to the chickens. They sound hungry.”

“A few more minutes.”

“I think you’d be remiss not to come along now.”

Charitye laughed, irritated. “Those chickens can wait a few more minutes, can’t they?”

“I’m sure they can,” Reggie said. “But you’ll want to cover your notepad, at least.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—”

The sprinklers sputtered to life. Charitye, shrieking, slid her notepad under her shirt and hopscotched her way out of the alfalfa.

She tilted her head to twist water out of her hair, a deeper red now that it was wet. “Well played,” she said, fighting back a smile. “Well played.”

* * *

Reggie had to drive Charitye to class and back four times before the school year officially ended, at which point, he taught Charitye how to bale hay. “Might as well learn something while you’re out here,” he said, helping her into the tractor.

“With alfalfa,” he explained, “it’s all about the leaves. Two-thirds of the plant’s protein and three-quarters of its digestible nutrients are in the leaves, and when you’re selling alfalfa hay to feedstores, that’s what they’re paying for. No leaves, no cash. Not even for a pretty, teenaged, redheaded poet, okay?”

He showed her where he parked the equipment: mower, tractor, swather, baler. “Once the plant’s mowed, you attach the swather to the tractor, which you drive — carefully, carefully — dragging the swather behind, until half the cut alfalfa is arranged in neat windrows.”

“Halfalfa,” she said when they got back on solid ground.

“What?”

“Half the alfalfa, halfalfa, is arranged in cornrows.”

“Whatever helps you remember it,” said Reggie. “But it’s wind rows, not corn rows. Like ‘windows,’ but with an r. ”

“We ready to bale, or what?” she asked. “Should I attach the baler?”

“Not yet. You bale the day after you windrow.”

The next day, they dragged the baler by the tractor, producing small rectangular cubes of hay. The heat that afternoon must have been in the three digits. Sweating and desperate for shade, they stacked the bales near the stable.

“Keep enough here for Genie,” Reggie instructed. “The rest will go to the feedstore.”

Charitye asked how much a bale of hay gets you nowadays.

“About six dollars apiece.”

She wiped at her forehead, burnt pink and shining in sweat and sunlight.

“Allison’s got some old hats in the house,” Reggie said. He suggested she wear one with a large brim, like his. For the sun.

“Thanks,” Charitye said, “will do.” But first she loaded the last of the bales onto its stack with a grunt and offered her own advice: “You know what you ought to do?”

“What’s that?”

“Invest in a swimming pool.”

* * *

During the years Reggie and Allison lived on the farm, Keith asked on a number of occasions if his daughter could visit. Allison never said yes.

“Why should I?” she’d ask Reggie in bed at night. “Keith was the one willing to give this place up, and now he wants to use it as a day-care service?”

One night, Reggie decided to risk an argument. He said, “Forget about Keith for a minute. Think of the girl. She’d love it out here. She’d love Genie. You could show her how to ride.”

“That’s just what he wants,” Allison said. “He’d train her to fall off the horse. Get hurt on purpose so he can sue us for the money he’s wanted from the start.”

“You really believe that?”

“You don’t know him like I do, Reggie.” She felt the need to provide an example. “Growing up,” she said, “he used to call me Frecklestein. Like Frankenstein, only uglier.”

Reggie waited for a there’s more that never came. “That’s it?”

Allison remembered the farmer next door — long dead now, house demolished, land for sale — how he’d asked her over the fence line to tighten a small screw in one of his sprinkler heads. He needed her tiny fingers for the job. While she worked at the screw, he slipped his hand up her shorts. His fingers were as cold and wet from the sprinklers as a slice of bologna. There was her brother, eleven or twelve years old, watching from the safety of the alfalfa field. Why hadn’t Keith helped? Well, he was a child, she supposed. Still, she never trusted her brother after that — maybe she never loved him after that, either — and she’d never told her husband, or anyone else, the reason why.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s it. You calling me petty?”

“Forget the horse ride,” Reggie said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a young person out here for a change? Someone seeing the place for the first time?”

“Everything children see, they see for the first time.”

“But we’re talking about family,” said Reggie.

“You’re my family,” she said, and kissed him on the forehead. “You, and no one else.”

* * *

In the second week of her stay at the farm, Charitye drove her uncle’s truck into a ditch. She’d asked for a driving lesson — her dad had only taught her on an automatic — so Reggie took her out in the red Ford to an unpaved but leveled section of the desert, where he’d seen kids with dirt bikes and paintball guns spend their weekends. This early in the morning, no one was around except for the wind, which, despite the time of day, was already going strong. Still, the sand under the tires was packed tight enough so that, if she timed the clutch right, they wouldn’t go skidding into a sandbank. Unfortunately, her timing was off.

She’d left the engine running and was standing in her straw hat — Allison’s — over Reggie at the front of the truck, where he’d kneeled to inspect the buried front wheels. “God, I’m really sorry,” she said, genuinely embarrassed.