Chris McCormick: Desert Boys

I kept telling Lloyd the story: I drove in the direction of our old paintball field, far enough out of town to be left undeveloped for now. The dark was setting in, and no streetlamps lined the road. I was the only driver in sight, so I took my time. I flashed my high beams at the desert shrubs, searching for the old paint, which must have come off by now in the rain and wind. When I reached what I remembered to be the right place, I pulled the car to the side of the road and felt the sand settle underneath the tires. I left the engine going and kept the headlights on, but got out of the car. A realty sign I’d once shot at still hung there, though nothing had been purchased or built. That far out, the wind came at me in sprints. The chains of the realty sign clamored, and in the east, stars began to show themselves. Across my stomach, I held my arms to stay warm. A scratching noise came over the sound of the engine; a wide and squat tumbleweed had nested under the front fender. “Shit,” I said, getting low to clear it.

Lloyd, born and raised in San Francisco, couldn’t believe I came from a place with tumbleweeds. “In California?” he said. “The next thing you’ll tell me is you’ve got a cowboy hat in the closet.”

“No,” I said dramatically, “just skeletons.”

“Hey,” he said, “Wasn’t that the original title for Brokeback Mountain? Skeletons in Spurs: My Closeted Life on the Range. ”

We laughed. Somehow I was having fun talking to him about the same material I’d been agonizing over on my own. The bar lights weren’t dim, and I wasn’t very drunk. The difference had to be Lloyd. I found myself looking for details in his face and throat, the few curls of hair reaching out from the collar of his PUNS ARE FUNS shirt. He was a dork. I hated his green goatee. I liked him.

“I’ve had a crush on you for years,” Lloyd told me once we’d gone back to my apartment. He spoke a lot during sex. Once he’d fallen asleep, I made my way out of bed and to the computer, where I typed the following email:

Dear Jackie,

First: Sorry this has taken so long.

Second: Congratulations on your baby — Watts told me when you first got pregnant, but I haven’t had the chance to congratulate you directly. You always struck me as someone who would be a great mother. Maybe it was how I always imagined you taking care of those horses — I don’t know, I just felt that way.

Third: Last time I was home, I drove by Karinger’s place. This was the day after Christmas. I knew he wasn’t home. I just found myself sitting in my mom’s car out front, staring at his old Mustang in the driveway. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I guess it’s just to show that the timing of your email was uncanny. I’ve been thinking about the old days a lot lately — about the guys, about our last few days together. I always sort of hoped things would return to normal after we all grew up a bit.

That being said, I will try my best to make it. April 18 at Sacred Heart, 1:00, right? This is the church by the old library? Suddenly I’m really excited to see you again, and everyone. I can’t wait to be back home.

Daley (Kush) Kushner

* * *

Every morning when they were picked up for school, and every afternoon when they met in the parking lot to go home, Kush and Watts slid into the backseat of the Mustang. They didn’t do it to treat Karinger like a cabdriver; the passenger seat was already taken. Roxanne Karinger, suddenly thirteen and a high school student herself, sat quietly in the front, hugging the unmistakable freshman mark that is an overstuffed backpack. She rarely spoke, and when she did, she had a soft voice that was overwhelmed by the engine or else the tires and shocks doing their work. For this reason, Karinger, Kush, and Watts hardly noticed her.

Or, at least, that’s what Watts told Karinger. Watts told Kush the truth.

The truth: Watts looked forward every morning to that switch — the car pulling up outside his house, the perfect royal blue door opening, the girl stepping out to let him in. He’d sit directly behind her. Through the space between the headrest and the seat, he’d stare at her white-blond hair and watch the tiny, wild strands of it dance above her head. Later, when the weather turned warm, her sundresses and shorts and tank tops augmented the impact she had on him. But even in those cold mornings of the school year’s middle section, when she’d have on a baggy sweatshirt, maybe, and a pair of dark jeans tucked into boots, just the simple motions involved in her transition from a seated position to a standing one were enough. To young Watts, they seemed to be a characterization of sex itself.

“Plus,” he told Kush, “she’s got an ass almost as nice as Jackie’s, and Jackie’s ass has years on Roxanne’s.”

There were certain moments when Karinger seemed to notice Watts’s attention. Sometimes, while Roxanne worked the lever to unfold her seat, Kush caught Karinger staring at Watts from behind the wheel, as if daring him to leave his eyes in the wrong place for even a second.

Then there was the time The Police’s “Roxanne” came on the radio. Naturally, everyone looked to the girl in the passenger seat. When the chorus hit, the three boys sang along, laughing as they tried to reach that raspy high note. During the last chorus, Watts — caught up in the fun — put his hands on the shoulders in front of him, leaned in, and sang the girl’s name directly into her ear. They were stalled at a red light. Karinger turned and looked straight at Watts. Kush, meanwhile, homed in on the beautiful new dimple in Karinger’s locked jaw, which he’d never noticed before. For his part, Watts did the only three things he could: He removed his hands from the girl, leaned back in his seat, and looked to Kush for help. The light changed, but Karinger didn’t move. He just kept staring at Watts. In her softest voice, Roxanne told her brother to go. He didn’t move. A driver behind them honked his horn. It took another “go” from his sister before Karinger turned and put the accelerator, finally, to use.

Kush was still thinking of that dimple when he took a seat in his favorite class, Intro to Literary Criticism. Dealing with “advanced” students as she was, Ms. DeGroff felt free to curse in her lectures, speak openly about sexuality in the books she assigned, and grade essays with the bluntness of a loved one. In other words, she treated her students as if they were already in college. Although a few hypersensitive kids had filed complaints over the years, none of them dealt Ms. DeGroff a real consequence. Most students, she’d found, preferred being treated like adults.

So it was in this state of mind that Ms. DeGroff made what turned out to be — in Kush’s mind, at least — her famous remark. In the course of discussing “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” in response to a student who deemed the defiant Bartleby a “jerk,” Ms. DeGroff told the class that sometimes, the world could use more Bartlebys. “Soon,” she said, “some of you will be asked to fight this illegal war, for example.” And God, she went on, would she be proud of any of them who said to the administration, “I would prefer not to.”

The aside took fewer than twenty seconds of the class. But as soon as Ms. DeGroff said it, Kush and the other students looked around at each other with despair. Ms. DeGroff must have known the trouble she’d just put herself in, because immediately upon saying it, she cleared her throat and changed the topic.

One of the students must have passed the news on to his or her mother; a petition began. Facing the possibility of another visit from Peter Thorpe and his cameraman, the school’s principal suspended Ms. DeGroff.

But her removal couldn’t erase from Kush’s mind the perceived lesson, the idea that pride, in certain cases, wasn’t reserved for those who went along with the plan. Kush started checking out certain books at the library and reading political articles on the internet. He attended an empty Sunday morning screening of Fahrenheit 9/11. He read as much Orwell as he could get his hands on, searching always for contemporary analogies. He began scoffing internally at the yellow ribbon-shaped magnets adorning every fender in town. Seeing Berkeley come up in so many of the articles, he started to dream of going to school there. He felt as though he’d been born in the wrong era, that he should have been alive in the 1960s and ’70s, and listened to nothing but sad music from that time — Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, and Jackson Browne. For a kid who wanted to travel back in time, going to Berkeley for college seemed to be the best option. He had some time to apply. Until then, all he had were Karinger and Watts, so he expressed his opinions only in his personal journal, safe for the future, and kept his mouth shut around his friends.