Chris McCormick: Desert Boys

“What kind of name is Kallie?” Karinger said. He looked at the kitten while he asked his sister.

“It’s short for Kaleidoscope. She sort of looks like one.” She bent over to put her face near Kallie. “Don’t you?” she asked the kitten.

“That’s stupid,” Karinger said. He let the word hang there for a second, and then left the bathroom.

I stayed behind and played with Kallie. She made small squeaking noises by opening her mouth as wide as possible and shutting her eyes tight. Her head was too big for her body. She nibbled on my fingertips. I’d forgotten Roxanne was still there until she said, “Cute, right?”

“So cute,” I said.

“Guys?” Linda peeked around the door at us. “Where’s Robert?”

“Being a baby in his room,” said Roxanne.

“Go check up on him,” Linda told her daughter, who, groaning, obliged.

Linda and Roxanne traded places, and before I could feel the awkwardness of our standing in a small bathroom together, Linda began to talk.

“Robert can be sweet,” she said. “You should have heard his original plan for the nicer golf balls you guys have collected. He came into my bedroom one night with the saddest, reddest face, like he’d been crying for years on end. He’d be embarrassed if he knew I’d told you, you know. It’s just that he can be so sweet, is all. I told this story to your mother.”

I thumbed between the kitten’s eyes.

“He came in all sad and I asked him, ‘What’s the matter, baby?’ And he didn’t even get mad when I called him that. He just inched his way to my bed and flopped down into it with me. You have to understand how sweet this all was. When I told your mother, you should have heard her voice. ‘Really?’ she seemed like she was asking, and I said, Really. It was just so sweet.”

I was nervous that Karinger was going to come back into the bathroom and discover his mom telling me his secrets. I decided I could only stay another minute.

“So he’s in bed with me and he’s just so red — I’ve never seen anyone so red — and he asks me, so quietly, ‘Mom’ —and he said it just like that—‘ Mom? You think if I get enough of these nice golf balls—’”

She paused for a moment. When she continued, something in her voice had changed.

“He said, ‘You think if I get enough of these nice ones, Dad’ll come back and teach me how to play?’”

I kept on with the kitten, afraid to look Linda in the eyes. The year before, I’d been a businessman — a neighborhood landscaper. I’d negotiated wages, for God’s sake. Now I’d regressed to the point of looking to a kitten for strength. Karinger was to blame, but I wasn’t sure how.

“Sure,” Linda continued. “I told him, ‘Sure, your dad will come back. Of course he will.’ But Robert’s not a child anymore. He knows I can’t promise a thing like that. He could tell I wasn’t being honest, and he’s been upset ever since. You should have heard your mother when I told her this story. ‘How sweet,’ your mother said in that cute accent of hers. And it was. It was really, really sweet.”

* * *

That night, when Linda was asleep, I joined Karinger in his bedroom to play video games. They used to be mine. For my birthday that year, I’d been given new games on the condition that I hand my old ones over to Karinger. While we were playing I asked, “Why’d you freak out earlier?”

Karinger kept playing. His mouth was open and his eyes were watering. He hadn’t blinked in a while. I asked him again.

“I didn’t freak out,” he said. “Those old men are why people hate golf.”

“You were kind of stupid.”

“Look. Can we play this game or what?”

“Sure,” I said. “But can we go back and apologize tomorrow?”

“Wow,” Karinger said. “Are you serious?”

“You messed up their grass pretty bad. It’s not easy to grow grass out here, you know.”

That last part was true. In the desert, it takes a certain knowledge and work ethic to keep a lawn green. One skill my dad taught me was how to maintain a desert lawn, how to keep the mower’s blade high. Too short and you can burn the grass at the roots. I never told Karinger any of that. I felt guilty talking about my dad when I was with Karinger, so when I was, I pretended our dads abandoned the Antelope Valley together.

Karinger paused the game and looked at me. The random yellow hairs on his face had multiplied since the morning. “You’re going to leave, too,” he said. “I can see it in your face. One by one, I’m going to watch everyone leave this place, aren’t I?”

“You can leave, too,” I said. “Don’t you want to?”

And as soon as I asked, I knew the answer was no.

* * *

“Let’s go make that apology,” Karinger said. He stood over me, backlit by the lamp in the ceiling.

“What time is it?” I asked. Outside, the sky was still dark.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “There’s no wrong time for an apology.”

“Robert,” I started, but I didn’t really have anything to say. I didn’t want to walk over to the golf course in the middle of the night.

“The groundskeepers will be around,” he said. “They’re the ones who have to fix the holes in the grass we made, right? They’re there all night, and we’ll apologize to them directly.”

“Your mom—”

“Sleeps through everything. Besides, you were right last night.”

“I was?”

“Yeah. I feel really bad about the grass thing. I can’t sleep until we go out there and say sorry.”

I got up and put on a sweater. I was about to leave the room when I noticed Karinger had his 3-wood and his grocery bag in his hands. I asked him why he was bringing his equipment.

He said, “After we say sorry, we’ll be able to hit balls while no one else is out there. We’ll have the whole place to ourselves.”

I thought of Crocodile Dundee yelling at us for retrieving bad hits. I had to admit it would be fun to be out there alone, with an infinite number of chances to hit a good shot.

“Don’t forget your stuff,” he said, and I didn’t.

* * *

Under the stars, the gate looked like the entrance to an old zoo. It was locked. Karinger tapped his club between the gate’s metal bars. He was thinking. I suggested coming back in the morning. He wasn’t listening to me. He was listening to the rhythm he was making with his club against the gate. Finally he slid the 3-wood between the bars and did the same with his plastic grocery bag. “Here,” he told me, and he took my club and bag and put them through the gate, too. He went to the KNICKERBOCKER boulder. He knocked at the rock with his knuckles and listened to the sound. “Guess I was wrong,” he said. “It is real.” He pitched himself up onto it. The baggy shirt made his stealth a surprise, and I watched the secret muscles in his forearms press against his skin. Karinger latched on to the top of the gate and heaved himself up over it. He landed on the other side with a thud that sounded painful. Immediately, though, he said, “Your turn.”

“I can’t,” I said. What I had meant to say was: What’s the point? There was nobody there. No groundskeepers, no Crocodile Dundee.

“Your turn,” he repeated.

I climbed onto the rock and up to the top of the gate. Falling from there to the cement on the other side was the hardest part. Karinger reached up and I reached down. He helped pull me to the pavement. When I landed, I still held on to him. My feet rang like my hands sometimes did when I hit a ball in a weird place on the club’s face. It stung a bit. It didn’t hurt as bad as I thought it would.

Some of the smaller lights were still on, but the large stadium lights down the field were all shut off. Huge sprinklers showered the grass two hundred yards out.