Desert Boys Read online

  “It’s not right,” Phil said. “What he’s done isn’t right, and for that I’m sorry.”

  “You know I’m a good man,” Gaspar said. “I don’t give people shit for things. I let people be happy so long they’re not making me, my family, unhappy. Sometimes I have too much to drink, and for that I’m working on it. But I’m a fair, good man. I know that about myself, so I can get pissed off once in a while.”

  “No, you are, I agree. Let me cover his shift tonight and we’ll figure out why he dropped the ball tomorrow morning. How about that?”

  My uncle considered it. He removed the big white jacket and placed it on some newspapers spread over the kitchen table. “Wear it when you go out,” he said, heading to the door. “I saw you on patrol last night, no jacket. You’ll get sick.”

  * * *

  Secretly Phil had a better answer to the question, What is it that you do? He imagined telling it to people who had asked him before, and hoped to tell a person who’d ask him in the future. He’d say: I do what we all do, which is we gain or we lose momentum. He’d say, We’ve only got the verb “to do” because we’ve got the verb “to become.” The question, What do you do? inherently looked to the future: What will you become? What will become of you? As soon as the question was asked in the past tense, however, the meaning became, suddenly, an accusation: What did you do? What have you done?

  A lot of what Phil had done in his life he did without knowing why, or caring, until after. Sometimes the answer was simple and easier to know beforehand. For instance: why Phil took the camera with him when he left the trailer was an easy one to understand, if not an easy one to explain later. It was as simple as this: He wanted to get rid of the camera. Holding a child’s camera made him sick. Before leaving, he deleted the picture he’d taken of himself, wishing he could erase more than just a photograph.

  Aside from his clothes, all Phil took with him were the camera and the flashlight. And he wore Gaspar’s puffy white jacket. Didn’t even bother to lock his trailer or bring the key. That’s all he had on him: the camera, the light, and the jacket. None of them actually his, a thought that did more than cross his mind.

  Nothing moved, nothing sounded. Phil passed the cars lining the pathways of the trailer park. Fog, inside, and frost on the outside clouded their windows. He half expected a kid to finger-draw a happy face in the fog from inside one of the cars. In front of Jim’s place, an empty space where his Chevy should have been. Phil skipped the layers he usually worked through to get to the park’s perimeter and headed straight to the gravel lot, figuring that Jim would be there, and the girls, too, if they’d made it out that night.

  But when Phil arrived, he didn’t see anybody. The six buses glowed in that orange light, and that was about all there was to find. Jim kept the keys to the gate on his patrol nights, so Phil could only peer at the buses through the locked fence. He stood on the sidewalk along Avenue I, just before Twentieth Street East, exactly where the girls had stopped that first time. He took out the red camera and placed it in the gutter along the curb there. He debated leaving it. Maybe he’d keep it until the next time the girls stopped by. Maybe he could keep it for himself, but what pictures did he have to take, and what good is a digital camera without a computer? The thought of selling it crossed his mind, but not seriously. The truth was that it didn’t matter what he did with the camera, because before he could make up his mind, a gunshot went off somewhere to the east, away from town, out in the desert. And another.

  Phil didn’t run away. Later he explained that he felt as though he were literally stuck in place. All he could do was remove the flashlight from his pocket, let it hang at his side toward the gutter, and flip the switch. On and off, on and off. A spot of light on the cement, unsteady, and then gone, and then there again. He had on his mind at that moment two things: first, a number, and then a name. The number 165—decibels—occurred and reoccured to him. Then came the name: “dolma”—he’d remembered the name of the food Gaspar’s sister made for him when he’d first moved into the park as a teenager, alone at seventeen. She removed the stems from grape leaves, and then boiled the leaves and rice separately. In a large bowl, she used her hands to mix the rice and the tomatoes and the lemon juice she squeezed in there, careful to pluck out any seeds that might have crept in. She said that in Armenia, she had her own grapevines and her own lemon tree, and the taste—you couldn’t imagine the taste of a real grape leaf, the strange sweetness of an Armenian lemon. Then she filled the grape leaves, spread across a cutting board now, with the stuffing she’d created in the bowl—you can use meat, she said while she did it, you can use lamb or you can use beef, but why not spare a life? She poured salt into the center of her palm and spread it over the rice on the leaves just before rolling them perfectly into little green tubes. You could see her fingers shine there with the juices and the oils of the dolmas, but it didn’t seem to bother her. She was a beautiful woman. Once, she’d been—plucking lemons from a branch—a beautiful girl, and Phil felt for her and for all of them.

  * * *

  Since that first time I heard the story, I knew what my curious but informal research would later prove to be true, which was that the gunshots meant the end of the two girls. For months afterwards, however, when I retold the story to people I wanted to count as friends, people I thought I could impress with a certain proximity to tragedy (here I’m not proud of myself), I was shocked to find that most felt unsatisfied by story’s end. The sound of two gunshots, apparently, couldn’t convince anyone that the two girls were killed. People wanted a clearer picture of the scene. They wanted to see the girls struggling to survive, fighting over the Marlin rifle in the cramped cab of the truck, which must have felt—someone once told me in a kind of prodding voice—“like a kind of coffin, no?” People expressed cautious, politically ambiguous doubt regarding two girls willing to leave home at midnight to meet a strange man. They would never blame the victims, they were quick to point out, but wouldn’t it also be likely that girls like these seemed willing—eager, even—to have sex? What else had they gone that night to find? Which precise sequence of events, these people wanted to know, had the power to transform Jim Durant—a creep, to be sure—into a killer?

  These cravings for gruesome variations on a story surprised and saddened me, and then stopped surprising me and only saddened me, at which point, I stopped telling the story altogether.

  The truth was I, too, felt unsatisfied—a horribly callous word to use in situations like these—but not because I missed out on the full experience regarding the rifle, or the imprisoned fate of the murderer. I wish I could say my lingering curiosity had to do with the two victims, whose real names were Sabrina Muller (Allie) and Ashley Simms (Caitlyn). They were only thirteen, and deserve to be understood in more context than the roles they played in this particular story. But this particular story, being the story I was trying to understand, had me returning again and again to the question of Phil.

  After a confession from Jim Durant and a testimony from my uncle, Phil was not indicted. He was free to go. But until I did the math, I didn’t know where, exactly, he went. I looked at the date of the crime, November 1999, and realized that Phil’s visits to my house came after, not before, the events of the story. My mother and uncle had put me in harm’s way. When it came to the matter of Phil’s innocence, I did not agree with the law. Toward my family I felt a kind of retroactive indignation. “You did what?” I shouted at my mother. “You invited a man like Phil into your home when your children were roughly the same age as his victims?”

  “You’re just like your father,” she said, waving me away. “He always took Jean out of the house when we had that poor boy over, as if Phil were a hungry wolf. I love your father, but he’s a real American, isn’t he? They love to talk about second chances, but only Armenians—the first Christians—understand that the only way you can change people is through forgiveness. Not prison bars, not shunning.”

  I asked what it wa
s, exactly, she’d been trying to change about our man Phil. “His stupidity, or his indifference?”

  “He was a young man with nothing,” she said. “He had no family. No home. No place he wanted to be. This can fill a person with shame. He was choosing, God bless him, whether or not to die. My brother? Me? All we were doing was trying to convince him to live.”

  That’s when I asked if they’d been successful.

  Under her breath, my mom cursed her brother for getting me involved. Then she said, “I want to tell you a story, too, one where he fixes one of his Volkswagens and drives to a place where he can feel at home, where he can live.”

  “But?”

  “For some, there is no such place. Not in this world, anyway.”

  NOTES FOR A SPOTLIGHT ON A FUTURE PRESIDENT

  THE INCIDENT

  The mascot—a cartoonlike Confederate soldier known affectionately on campus as Rebby the Blue—had been defiled. Unfortunately, the African American sophomore commissioned to wear the costume at the spring pep rally didn’t notice the freshly painted Hitler mustache until it was too late. Joshua Stilt fist-pumped his way onto the gymnasium floor, where he expected to be swathed in the intoxicating energy of school spirit. Instead, he was met with a wild mixture of laughter and hissing from the overwhelmingly white audience of five hundred. Afterwards, the local news sent a camera crew and a reporter to interview Joshua Stilt and the high school’s white principal about what was already being described in the Antelope Valley as the third or fourth greatest controversy of the year.

  “To equate a Rebel soldier with Nazis is ridiculous,” said the principal in his prerecorded interview. “Rebels fought for freedom, you see, and Hitler fought for power. Anyone who knows history understands states’ rights and dictatorships are like Chinese food and cheese—totally incompatible.”

  Peter Thorpe, the local reporter—having already heard the joke over Panda Express takeout at the principal’s house two nights earlier—decided against challenging his old friend’s logic. They had graduated as Rebels fewer than thirty years ago.

  Quickly the conversation turned to identifying the culprit. For his part, Joshua Stilt—whose last name provoked jokes about his five-foot-nothing frame—became the first suspect. “If I’d wanted to make a political statement,” he told the reporter when he began to feel accused, “I’d have come up with something more intelligent.”

  The story might have ended there had the local news segment not been seen by a famous film director, who happened to be this far north of Los Angeles to shoot an explosion scene in the desert. The director, a woman whose own fight for legitimacy in the male-dominated field of Hollywood action films had nurtured in her a sensitivity to the just indignations of others, sent a brief but excoriating email to the chiefs of major news organizations across California. Word spread. Soon, reporters at every major television network wanted a sit-down with Joshua Stilt. The local interest—who sullied Rebby the Blue?—was replaced by a national interest: What young black kid in twenty-first-century California would willingly don the uniform—cartoonlike or not—of a Confederate soldier?

  Interview after interview produced the same response from Joshua Stilt: “I really enjoyed being the mascot, and I couldn’t change what the mascot was.” But what Joshua Stilt felt he could not do, national media attention proved able to. Shortly after the story broke, petitions, rallies, and lawsuits were organized to replace Rebby the Blue with a less political mascot for Antelope Valley High. After consulting his conscience, his Bible, his school district, and an online national poll, the suddenly apologetic principal revealed the new mascot at an assembly on the football field. An actual desert tortoise had been borrowed for the event from the conservatory, and, released from its cage, began eating blades of grass that had been painted white with the high school’s logo, a Stars and Bars flag that had not yet been replaced.

  THE MEETING

  A decade later, I planned to meet Joshua Stilt at a Mission District café in San Francisco, but saw him almost an hour early, standing at the yellow edge of the Rockridge BART platform in Oakland. The weather—warm and overcast—lent a cinematic, quiet texture to the whole scene, as if we were waiting for a steam engine and not a commuter train. For a moment I considered avoiding him until our planned meeting. Checking the overhead electronic platform scrolls, however, I saw that our train had been delayed due to a post-Occupy, largely impromptu protest a station ahead. Fearing Joshua Stilt might catch me avoiding him in that time, I went over to introduce myself.

  He was donning those large white plastic headphones everyone our age seemed to be wearing in transit, and I had to reach out and touch him on the shoulder to get his attention. When he slid the headphones down around his neck, I said, “I’m Daley Kushner, the guy who’s writing about you.”

  He’d grown up to become a stylish, handsome young man. He’d sprouted a good eight inches not including his early-’90s-style flattop fade (an additional two inches), complete with lines shaved into the sides of his head that reminded me, for whatever reason, of the wingtips on classic American cars. He wore large-framed black glasses and, despite the warm weather, a slim-fitting suede blazer that, only when the clouds passed temporarily, proved to be navy blue. We talked about the chance of rain and the clearer skies we could already make out across the bay until our train arrived, at which point, we found two empty seats and began to talk more comfortably.

  “I won’t turn this on,” I said, showing him my digital recorder, “until we get to the café. Too much noise on these rails.”

  “Very strange to see another AV kid outside the desert,” he said. “I guess you and I are special.”

  “Ha,” I said—actually saying the word. I wondered (a) if he remembered me from high school (probably not) and (b) if I—far less stylish as an acne-scarred, uncombed, short-but-lanky white dude in a polo shirt—had made a good first impression. I resisted the urge to ask, and told him that once the recorder came on, the conversation would be about the ways he—and only he—was special. “Trust me,” I said. “My editor has no interest in getting to know me better.”

  “You’ll seep through anyway,” Joshua said, not unkindly. His music was still on, and I could make out the snare hits through the headphones around his neck. “As soon as you choose what to say or write,” he said, “you start seeping through. And it only gets messier the more you say.”

  THE ASSIGNMENT

  My class—Antelope Valley High, 2005—was the first to graduate not as Rebels, but as Desert Tortoises. Joshua’s was the next. After earning his bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Philosophy at Stanford, he became, at the age of twenty-three, the seventh-youngest city council member in Oakland’s history. Now, at twenty-five, he was mulling his first mayoral run. It was too early in the campaign for him to be followed around by reporters, but his name had been floated as a possible candidate, and early polls were lending credence to some—if not all—of his confidence. My assignment was to:

  1. Conduct, over lunch in San Francisco (where he’d scheduled a cross-Bay photo-op), an interview with Stilt.

  2. Return to Stilt’s Oakland apartment for a prearranged photo-shoot with his friend, a photographer named Jenna King.

  3. Attend, in the evening, a “green jobs” event at which Stilt was scheduled to speak.

  4. Write the spotlight, tentatively titled, “The President of the Future Presidents Club.”

  The publication for which I was writing—a Los Angeles–based, century-old magazine turned website—wasn’t the first to speculate on Joshua Stilt’s bright future in politics, but it was the first to acquire an exclusive feature with him (citing his L.A. County birthplace). Stilt and I had never been friends, but I’d been thinking a lot lately about what motivates a person from our hometown to leave, and whether there was some essential difference between people like us and those who chose to stay. In fact, that’s how I’d pitched the article in the first place—from the point of view of some
one who went to high school with Joshua Stilt—but my editor advised me to keep the focus on the subject at hand. “Do whatever you need to do,” she added at the end of our conversation, “as long as you don’t turn this into a story about you.”

  And so I’d kept certain facts of my life—some more important than others—from Joshua Stilt. I hadn’t told him, for instance, that for the previous two weeks I’d had a dull but constant headache, the result of getting so little sleep. I’d been living with my partner, Lloyd, for nearly a year in San Francisco, but a recent series of disagreements (he wanted to meet my mother) had me sleeping on the stiff corduroy couch of a friend on the south side of Berkeley.

  I’d stayed up the night before searching the internet for old interview clips with Joshua Stilt regarding the Hitler-mustache controversy. Some of the footage showed panning shots of the high school during lunch, and when I started looking for myself among the crowd—going so far as to pause the video—I knew it was time to shut off the laptop and try, again, to sleep.

  THE TRANSCRIPT, 1/3

  JS: You can probably tell your readers more about the Antelope Valley than I can, Daley. I’d rather talk about Oakland.

  DK: We’ll get there, but I’d like your thoughts on growing up in the AV. Like, how did growing up there affect your worldview, et cetera.

  JS: On the record or off? [Laughter.]

  DK: Whichever, just let me know which is which.

  JS: Okay. On the record: The AV’s an interesting place. Edge of the Mojave Desert, so, hot and isolated. Not a lot to do. I ended up spending a lot of time in my own head. I thought the Joshua trees were named after me, for example, and then I thought I was named after them. [Sounds from the espresso machine.] I couldn’t face the fact that we had absolutely nothing to do with one another, other than accidentally being in the same place. Mostly I thought about leaving, and what I was going to do after I left. I wanted to live in a place where I wasn’t the only one trying to change things, you know? When you’re basically the only one of your kind in a town, whether it’s an activist, or if it’s the only black kid in class, or the only gay kid, or both, like—