Burning (5 page)

The smell of bacon got me moving. My stomach rumbled and I shoved my legs into my running shorts and pulled on a gray T-shirt from my side of the closet. I ran my hands through my hair, wondering if it was worth the trouble to get it wet, and decided it probably wasn’t.

I picked up my wallet from the desk and looked inside, as if the tooth fairy might have decided to make a midnight visit and shove a few extra bills into it, just for old times’ sake. It was as empty as it had been the night before—just my ID and a couple of condoms Mom had given me a few months ago, her eyes appraising me as she said, “Just in case.”

I
did
have some money, though; I’d saved every penny I could from my last couple of summers working at the quarry with Pops. It was deposited in the Reno branch of the bank; I didn’t make a habit of carrying around any cash. If I did, no doubt Hog Boy would come up with some pretty strong arguments about how we should spend it.

Mom was transferring the bacon from the frying pan to a plate lined with paper towels. There were scrambled eggs, too, and James was buttering bread as it popped out of the toaster. His hair, sandy blond like mine, was neatly combed and parted, freshly trimmed around his ears. I ran my hand again through my own unruly mop and shook my head.

Pops looked up from the newspaper he had spread out on the table, opened to the Help Wanted section. I don’t know
why, but I looked away kind of fast, like I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to see.

“Hey there, Pops,” I said, but my voice sounded overly cheerful, like I was faking it. That’s how I felt—like a fake.

“You slept late,” he said with a grin. “Getting ready to grow again?”

I shrugged. At six foot one, I was already a couple of inches taller than my dad, so I figured I’d pretty much reached my max, even though some guys grow until they’re twenty or something. “Just tired, I guess.”

“Maybe you’ll have enough energy to help me tear down the old fort before it gets too hot?”

Oh, come on. Was he for real? “Jesus, Pops, are you serious? No one cares if we leave the fort.”

I could tell from his expression that he wasn’t budging on this one. “It doesn’t matter if anyone
else
cares,” he said. “The agreement with the mine was that we would leave this property in the same condition it was leased to us in. When we rented the house, there was no fort in the yard. So when we leave next Monday, there will be no fort in the yard.”

I sighed and pulled out the chair across from him. James brought the toast to the table. “I’ll help you tear it down,” he offered, and he sat down, too.

Pops smiled and ruffled James’s hair. He didn’t seem to notice when James yanked his head away and smoothed his hair back into place. “Atta boy,” Pops said. “Way to pitch in.”

I poured myself some juice. “All right,” I said. “After breakfast.”

Mom’s bacon and eggs considerably improved my mood.
I slathered three pieces of toast with apple butter and polished them off, too.

“Pops,” I said, “you know there are better ways to look for work than the newspaper classifieds.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But I found my last job in the classifieds, so maybe it’s lucky for me.”

“How long ago was that?”

He laughed. “Before your time, big man.”

“I could help you out,” I offered. “You know, post your resume in a few places online, set you up a profile on LinkedIn, stuff like that.”

He finished his last piece of bacon and stood up. “You just worry about getting packed for college and shaving a few more seconds off your times,” he said. “Your old man can find himself a job.”

I’m no actor. The doubt I felt must have shown on my face, because Pops looked pretty irritated as he headed out the door and back to his garage. “Thanks for breakfast, hon,” he called back behind him.

Mom hadn’t said more than two words all through breakfast. Now I noticed that she’d barely eaten.

“You okay, Mom?” I asked.

Her lips were pinched together in a tight line, but she nodded and faked a smile. “No problem,” she said.

At least Mom had a job lined up. She’d been the school nurse up until our school closed in June. That’s why they were heading to Reno: a grammar school there had hired her. I think the principal at Gypsum was buddy-buddy with the principal there and had pulled a few strings.

Between her salary and Dad’s unemployment checks, they would probably be all right even if it took Pops a while to find a job. But he was the kind of guy who never took a sick day unless he was coughing up a lung, and I couldn’t picture him pushing the vacuum and folding laundry while Mom brought home the paycheck.

I was about to offer to do the dishes before tearing down the fort—I guess the bacon had made me feel generous—when I heard Pete’s truck rattle up the street and stop in front of the house.

A minute later he and Hog Boy crashed through the door and into the kitchen.

“Hey there, Mrs. S.,” said Pete. “It smells good in here. Got any more bacon?”

“Sorry, Pete. It’s all gone. Hello, Randall.”

“Hi, Mrs. S.,” said Hog Boy.

Even most of our teachers had long since forgotten that Hog Boy’s real name was Randall. But my mom refused to call him that. She thought it might hurt his feelings. I had tried to explain that to
hurt
Hog Boy’s feelings, he’d need to
have
feelings.

“Dude,” said Hog Boy, his grin splitting his face, “you’ve
got
to see this. Out on 447, a couple of miles before the entrance to Burning Man—”

“Randall,” interrupted my mom, “I hope you boys aren’t spending time out there. All the drugs and alcohol—”

“No, Mrs. S.!” Hog Boy was all wide-eyed innocence now. “I’d never go to Burning Man. It wouldn’t, you know, mesh with how my family raised me.”

My mom narrowed her eyes. I could tell she wasn’t swallowing Hog Boy’s bullshit.

I guess he could tell too, because he tacked on, “Besides, we can’t afford the tickets.”

She nodded, satisfied, and began to clear the table.

“We were out there this morning,” Pete said. “You know, just taking a peek to see how the playa looks this year. They say it’s the biggest crowd ever. But before we made it out there all the way, we saw this RV pulled over on the side of the road.” He lowered his voice as if he didn’t want my mom to hear him. “Dude,” he said. “There was this chick.”

“Oh, yeah?” I laughed. “Was she covered in pink paint Hog Boy?”

“Pink paint?” asked James.

“Never mind,” I said.

“Ben, this chick was hot. I mean
smokin’
. Not like a normal chick. You’ve gotta check her out.”

Honestly, I didn’t really feel like driving all the way out to the playa just to ogle some girl parked on the side of the road. “I can’t,” I said. “I’ve gotta pull down the fort out back. And I haven’t started packing or anything.”

“You’re tearing down the fort?” Pete sounded almost insulted. “
Our
fort?”

“It’s not like we’ve even used it in the last few years,” I said, “and we can’t pack it up and take it with us.” I didn’t say the other part of my thought—that we were heading in different directions, anyway.

And thinking about it—tearing the fort into pieces, heading off without Pete and Hog Boy—all of a sudden, maybe it
didn’t sound like such a terrible idea to drive out on 447 to check out the hot chick the guys were so stoked on.

“Mom,” I said, “you mind if I head out for a couple of hours?”

“What about the fort?” James’s voice sounded whiny, younger than it should, and inwardly I flinched at the sound of it.

“We’ll get to it later,” I said.

“We’re running out of ‘later,’ ” James called after me as Pete, Hog Boy, and I headed outside.

I felt it, the weight of his words, the pressure of time running out at my back as we climbed into the truck. And driving through town I saw that the exodus of the remaining town residents had kicked up a notch; the McDonalds, both in their sixties, our neighbors right up the street, their Ford F-150 packed to the gills and hitched to an overloaded trailer, were leaving.

Mr. McDonald sat behind the wheel and watched as his wife pulled shut the front door. She turned the key in the lock and then stood there for a minute on the stoop, staring down at the key in her hand as if she didn’t know what to do with it. Then she bent down and tucked it under the mat.

Pete idled at the curb as they pulled away. Mr. McDonald rolled down his window and stuck out his hand in a kind of salute. Then they pulled out onto the highway, and we sat for a minute watching their rig shrink into the distance.

I’d known the McDonalds all my life. Mrs. McDonald was the one who had watched me the weekend James was born.

They were heading up to Washington State to be close to their oldest daughter, who’d made them grandparents the year before. Most likely I would never see them again.

It was like a tree that was sick, diseased, and losing its leaves. Just a few at first, one at a time, but soon the disease would grow too strong and all the leaves would turn brown and fall to the ground.

And then the tree would die.

“Fuck it,” I said, louder than I meant to. Pete looked at me curiously. “Let’s go see your hot piece of tail,” I said, and when he pulled out onto the highway the roar of the road through the open windows was loud enough to keep me from thinking anymore.

So they say that Burning Man is a cultural experiment in radical self-expression. They say it functions as a gift economy, and that once you’re inside it’s not about money. No one is supposed to charge anyone else for anything, and you’re not even supposed to barter. You’re supposed to show up ready to give to others, just because, without expectations of getting paid back.

This is all bullshit, of course. Having grown up in the desert, I’m smart enough to understand that you don’t survive a week on the playa without some pretty serious supplies—water, food, and shelter, to start. Add the cost of all these supplies to the $360 ticket and you figure out pretty quick that Burning Man isn’t necessarily as inclusive as the people who run it would like the world to think it is. Not to
mention the cost of getting to the middle of our desert. It all adds up.

It’s sort of like the Weekend Warriors who spend Monday through Friday at their corporate white-collar jobs and then hop on their fifty-thousand-dollar Harleys to tool around in the foothills. Those guys aren’t bikers.

And the Burning Man crowd isn’t what they say they are, maybe even what they
think
they are. I’d like to see them survive for a year in Gypsum. Working in the mine, spending every waking moment with the same small group of people, putting up with the damning heat and the painful cold day after day, night after night—and dealing with the
boredom
, the never-ending
sameness
of the desert landscape, the small-town life, the inescapable insularity.

But I guess that wouldn’t make for much of a party.

So instead they show up, they have their life-changing festival in the middle of our desert, and then they kick some dirt into the dozens of holes they’ve dug all across the playa to shit in and go back home to blog about how amazing, how transformative it all is.

Life in the desert
is
transformative. My dad doesn’t look anything like the old pictures of him.

About a mile before the entrance to Burning Man, I saw an RV parked on the side of the highway along with a little tent and a big old canvas tent, too. A clothesline was strung up with a few cotton shirts hanging on it. A pretty strange place to set up camp, if you ask me.

Then I saw the sign, a plywood A-frame positioned so
you could read it coming to and going from Burning Man:
FORTUNE-TELLING
.

Pete slowed his truck and edged off the highway, his wheels sending up a dry cloud of dust.

And then the door of the RV opened, and a girl stepped out.

Pete was saying something, and Hog Boy was rapping his knuckles on the little glass window that separated the truck’s bed from the cab, but these sounds didn’t mean much to me. All I had room for in my head was the girl—the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

They came out of the dust of the desert, down the long, flat road that seemed to have no beginning and no end.

I was not watching for them, but their arrival did not surprise me. The three of them came out of the truck—rusted, old, but still straight—each in his own way.

First out was the fat one. He hopped down from his perch in the bed of the truck with a loud snort of a laugh. Later, when I heard the others call him Hog Boy, I wondered if perhaps they were more intuitive than they seemed.

Next came the driver of the truck. He was handsome, very much so … tall, with rather narrow shoulders and slim also through the hips. He wore his hair long around his ears and loose across his forehead, which gave him something to do with his hands—brush the hair back in a way that I suspected gathered quite a few female admirers.

His energy was different from that of the boy who rode like livestock in the back of the truck; his eyes held secrets, and pain. My first hope was that I would have the chance
to hold his hand palm up between mine and ferret out the secrets he hid within those eyes.