Desert Boys Page 2

  And so they made plans to watch the special at Karinger’s place, a brand-new two-story tract home on the west side of town. His mother, Linda, had won the house in a lottery, one of a thousand she entered every year. She, along with Roxanne—Karinger’s twelve-year-old sister—joined Kush and Watts in front of the TV, between multiple roaming cats. The three boys sat on the center couch. Linda took the love seat, and Roxanne, stomach and elbows down, lay flat on the carpet in front of them, chin on her hands. She wore a pair of little denim shorts, fraying at the ends. More than once, Kush caught Watts following the thin white lines of her legs to their meeting place.

  The show started. Peter Thorpe spoke to the camera, live in-studio, against a green-screened photograph of three women in burqas. Kush looked to see that everyone’s attention was on the screen. When it was, he studied the bottoms of Roxanne’s big toes, which were only slightly larger than paintballs. His own sister, Jean, had just moved away for college, and he rarely saw her. He rarely saw any girls—definitely not the bottoms of their toes—so he studied Roxanne’s with the unsexed air of a paleontologist.

  The segment shifted to an exterior shot of the high school. A voice-over informed the viewers that he (Thorpe) had recently had the opportunity to speak directly with students. One after the other, kids began making their on-screen claims. (“I have Trigonometry with her, but she never really says anything”; “She seems nice enough, but you never know”; “I’m sure it’s hard for her to be the only one, but her being here is hard for everyone else, too, you know?”)

  Finally Karinger, with his white-blond buzz cut and matching, furrowed eyebrows, appeared on the screen, much to the elation of his mother, who placed her hands over her nose and mouth, speaking into them: “My man, my man!” Roxanne turned her neck to look at her brother on the couch above her, as if checking for similarities and differences between him and his on-screen counterpart.

  On-screen Karinger began:

  “At first I was kind of—” He looked to Peter Thorpe for approval. “—pissed.” He leaned into the microphone. “She definitely brings up a lot of stuff you don’t want to be reminded of.” Now he turned to look at the camera. Kush wondered how many times Karinger had practiced this before—he was a natural. “But that doesn’t mean she can’t wear whatever she wants to wear,” Karinger continued, “because that’s what my dad fought for.” The kids in the background thrashed each other for attention. Kush, meanwhile, looked at Roxanne. He didn’t feel what he thought he ought to feel; he found himself thinking of the shape of Karinger’s legs, trying to remember if they belled out in the calves the way Roxanne’s did. Then he turned to Watts, who looked up from Roxanne’s legs, too, and gave Kush this look, eyebrows-up, that said, I know, huh.

  Linda reached out to her son and put her hand on his knee, saying something about the future president. Everyone congratulated Karinger on his performance—even the cats, swarming, seemed pleased with him—because he really did represent how the community felt, disturbed but principled. A bit self-righteous, Kush might’ve added, but at least humane. On their bike ride home that night, Watts and Kush talked about how proud they were of Karinger, admitting surprise. Kush hoped Karinger’s speech would inspire the rest of the school to leave the Muslim girl alone.

  Unable to sleep that night, Kush got out of bed and found a pen and a sheet of paper with two lists he hadn’t updated since middle school: one list, “Foster,” for people he admired and another, “Pester,” for people he felt he could do without. On the “Foster” side of the paper, which he’d go on to fold and carry in his Velcro wallet for a number of years, he wrote beside Karinger’s name: As a kid, you like your friends because you have fun together. As you get older, though, you start rooting for them. You want to be proud of them.

  * * *

  Five days after Jackie (Connolly) Karinger’s invitation, Dan Watts called me.

  After high school, Watts was the only one of us to stay in the Antelope Valley. While Karinger joined the marines and I moved to Berkeley, Watts worked his way through an EMT program at the local community college, passed the National Registry examination, and now worked as a paramedic. We blamed his schedule for how rarely we spoke (a few times a year). His voice had a coarse, sleepy quality, which some of his recent acquaintances must have mistaken as a consequence of his rigorous job. The voice was, however, the voice he’d always had, and hearing it this day came as a warm comfort.

  He asked whether or not I had plans on the eighteenth of April, the date of the baptism. When I told him about Jackie’s email, he sounded relieved: “I didn’t want to bring it up in case you weren’t invited.”

  “Wait,” I said. “What would you have done if I didn’t know about the baptism? What if I’d asked what was so important about April eighteenth?”

  “Huh. I didn’t think that far ahead.”

  I asked about him—was he going to be there?

  “Believe it or not,” he said, “I’m the godfather.”

  A strange, embarrassing jealousy came to me.

  “What about you?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I told him I changed my mind every hour. “I can’t get the thought out of my head that he wouldn’t have wanted me there.”

  Watts laughed. “Probably not. But isn’t that your cue?”

  “Do you remember that Muslim girl in high school?” I said. “The one they did the TV special on?”

  “Yeah, for sure. Did you guys meet up? Wait, are you with her now?”

  “No, no,” I said. “I’ve just been thinking of Karinger’s interview. Where he shocked us with his sheer humanity. Remember that?”

  “Yeah,” Watts said. “Too bad it didn’t make a difference.”

  I’d remembered Karinger’s self-righteous but heroic speech, but I’d forgotten the rest of the story. Less than a week after the televised special, the girl in the headscarf was enjoying the lunch her mother had packed for her that day (a peanut butter sandwich, of all things), when she was pinned down by a group of six female seniors, who proceeded to spray-paint her white scarf red and blue. She rolled up to avoid both the fumes and the beating she presumed (understandably but incorrectly) was coming. According to Peter Thorpe’s follow-up report, she elected to be homeschooled for the remainder of high school. The six girls, who’d each been handed a five-day suspension, were initially also banned from attending senior prom. After a community petition gathered enough signatures, this additional ruling was reversed.

  “I really believed Karinger’s speech was going to convince everyone on campus to leave her alone,” I said. “I went home that night and wrote this extremely sentimental note about growing up. About being proud of your friends, as opposed to just enjoying their company.”

  “Sounds like you,” Watts said. “You still carry that note around, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not that sentimental.”

  The truth was, of course, I’d been even more sentimental. Years after I’d written it, after what turned out to be our last conversation, I slipped the note into Karinger’s backpack. My hope was that he’d stumble upon it after I’d gone home, understand its significance, and return to me, his best friend, inspired to make me proud again.

  “I don’t know,” said Watts. “I bet you still have it.”

  “Tell me about the baby,” I said. “Tell me about your godson.”

  But then my phone pinged, and I saw the name—LLOYD BOOKSTORE—on the screen. I told Watts I’d call him back in a few minutes, but I ended up talking with Lloyd for a long time, an hour and a half, and meeting up with him that night at a bar, and by the time I got home, Watts may or may not have been at work or asleep, and I didn’t want to bother him either way, so I turned off my phone and went to bed.

  * * *

  For the boys, there had never been in their midst a girlfriend—a young woman with the power to transform the priorities of a young man fundamentally—until Jackie Connolly pressed her cornsilk
lips against the forehead and cheek and mouth of their friend Karinger. This was their junior year: the rattle of 2003, as Karinger would say, the fangs of 2004.

  That Karinger, the only one with a girlfriend, was also the only one of the three who had a car seemed to the others not to be a coincidence. Earlier that year, Linda Karinger had purchased for her son (and, she specified, for her daughter to inherit) a royal blue 1988 Ford Mustang. If it weren’t for the daily rides to and from school—not to mention the joyrides on the weekends—Kush and Watts might have resented Karinger for his “sick ride,” as they, without irony, called it. As it was, Karinger’s successes felt entirely like theirs to share.

  Until, of course, along came Jackie Connolly.

  She was beautiful in the way people call the desert beautiful, which is to say that although some people actually believed it, most of the time it was said in response to someone else’s denigration of it.

  Her blond hair, invariably tied back with a red headband, was as thick as the tails of the horses she tended to on her parents’ farm in Quartz Hill. Regularly she came to school smelling like an old haystack. Although she was thin in the face, arms, legs, and chest, her hips spread against her like the San Gabriel Mountains. They’d had a class together here and there since freshman year, and Kush had met her during a brief stint with the Future Farmers club. But it wasn’t until Karinger, Jackie Connolly, and Watts all had junior English together that she became Karinger’s girlfriend and therefore part of the group. The schedule had it so the end of that particular class meant the beginning of lunch. Kush, enrolled separately in Intro to Literary Criticism, had to cross the width of campus to meet up with the other three, who, by the time he arrived, had invariably begun eating already.

  Maybe all young people in love think about their relationship in the future tense, but Karinger and Jackie Connolly vocalized their future. Earlier in the year, the launch of the new war in Iraq promised Karinger at least some action, and he and Jackie constantly hypothesized on their capacity to be a military couple, to have a military family. They even talked unabashedly about money. Getting married before shipping out meant higher pay for Karinger, and possible wedding arrangements were tossed around in the lighthearted, creepy tone of the clinically deranged. They were proud to kiss in public—never raunchily, mouths always closed—and held hands any time they were in reach of each other. Nobody but Kush seemed to mind.

  Because she shared the class with Karinger and Watts, Jackie Connolly seemed to think of Watts as Karinger’s best friend, not Kush. (In Kush’s mind, their friendship was an equilateral triangle—a generous thought, since Watts was the newer addition to the group.) Kush would watch Jackie laugh after Watts made a joke, and she’d go on and on until she snorted and—in some particularly egregious cases—cried. Meanwhile, after Kush told a joke of similar quality, she’d offer only a bit of flattery, this eyes-averted chuckle and smile. He found himself simultaneously jealous and contemptuous of this girl—this pallid, manure-shoveling girl.

  Once, on a violently windy Saturday afternoon in November, Karinger backed out of plans to head to the paintball field, citing Jackie as his reason. Instead of riding in the smooth royal blue Mustang the way they’d envisioned, Kush and Watts pedaled their bikes side by side like children, struggling to push forward into the gusts. At one point, Kush confided in Watts his secret hatred of Jackie Connolly.

  He said, with effort: “Don’t tell Karinger, but I want to rip that red headband out of her hair and throw it at her stupid face.”

  Watts, who was in better shape and full of breath, said, “Why would I tell Karinger that?”

  It occurred to Kush that maybe Watts was the better friend. They didn’t say another word on the subject until Watts brought it up again a few minutes later.

  “You got to admit, though,” he said. “She’s got an amazing ass.”

  They pedaled their undersize bikes like bears at the circus, and the wind carried their laughter.

  * * *

  Lloyd paid the eight dollars for the pitcher of beer between us, so I felt obligated to answer his question—“What’ve you been up to?”—honestly. I told him I’d done nothing for two days but read and think about an old friend named Karinger.

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “A last name,” I said.

  “What’s his first name?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It’ll bug me.”

  “It was Robert,” I said.

  “‘Was’?” Lloyd asked. When I didn’t say anything, he ordered a second pitcher.

  I told Lloyd about the invitation to the baptism and about the last time I was in the Antelope Valley—the previous Christmas. I’d taken my mother’s car to drive by Karinger’s house. He was a month dead, but I hadn’t heard.

  Even as the sun was setting, I could see Karinger’s house had been repainted a kind of pastel green. The small town I grew up in had become a relatively large suburban city—empty stretches of desert had mostly been replaced by fast-food restaurants and shopping centers. But it was the paint on Karinger’s house that seemed to me like the greatest change. Every other detail—the motion-sensor light fixture on the garage and the royal blue Mustang in the driveway—had remained the same. The perfect sameness of the house had been ruined by an ugly coat of pastel paint. Pulling up closer, I noticed another change: the Mustang’s license plate frame had been replaced with a pink camouflage one labeled USMC GIRL. Karinger’s mother had kept to the deal—this was Roxanne’s car now.

  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.