Desert Boys (17 page)

And so Jean took two days off from work, bought a plane ticket, and stayed with our parents the night before she planned to meet up with Emily.

The next afternoon, Emily came by to pick her up. My parents hadn't seen Emily in years, and Mom tried her best to bridge the awkward gaps in her knowledge of Emily's new life. Eventually Mom—she was feeling pretty good that day, Jean thought—resorted to the past. They spoke of sleepovers and grade school teachers and the time Jean, chasing an eight-year-old me through the house, cut open her head against the corner of our kitchen cabinet. Before taking Jean in for stitches, Mom had come home from work to find Emily rinsing Jean's scalp with the garden hose out front.

Even after they said good-bye to my parents and left for Emily's house, in the car on the ride over, Jean and Emily slid back into their old roles with one another—Emily the star and the storyteller, Jean the supportive listener—using a kind of muscle memory learned only in friendships developed before puberty. In fact, in those fifteen minutes before they pulled into the four-car-wide driveway of
chez Gunnar,
Jean laughed at a joke Emily made, looked out at the blue mountains surrounding the desert, and felt, for the first time since she'd left for college, happy to be home.

The house, though, was an underfurnished monster. Everywhere Jean looked, she saw spiral banisters, hardwood floors, and mirrors. Dozens of mirrors, not a single wall spared. A couch sat in the middle of one room, facing an enormous flat-screen TV. As far as home furnishings went, that was all Jean could find.

Unless you count Gunnar, which Jean was prepared to do, just from what she knew of him already: right-wing, war-profiting, typical AV white guy that he was. But when he shook her hand—“The famous Jean!”—and pulled her in for an impromptu hug, she had to admit she liked him. He was long-haired and handsome, wearing a sports coat and brown saddleback shoes—she'd imagined him in fatigues, for some reason. He smelled like a green tea latte. He feigned embarrassment about the size of his house and the proposal on his ATV, mocking himself, calling the four-wheeler “the adult skateboard.” This, of course, reminded Jean of their predilection as kids for boys on skateboards, a reminder she found sort of endearing. Not to mention he was kind to her, and curious about her work, and asked follow-up questions even Emily had neglected to ask. If he thought something wicked about Jean helping undocumented LGBT immigrants seek asylum in the United States, he didn't let on. They all three stood in the kitchen around a rectangular marble-topped island, drinking red wine. At one point, Emily said, “Isn't my life pretty great?” And Jean said—without having to lie even a little—that, yes, it was.

Then Emily went to the fridge and pulled out a large dish covered with aluminum foil. When Emily uncovered the dish, Jean saw eight bloody strips of steak. “Marinated London broil,” said Gunnar, “once I get it marinated, broiled, and London-fied.”

Emily knew Jean had been a vegetarian since high school. She knew because she'd been the one to convince her, way back in her animal rights days. Apparently, Emily had given up vegetarianism herself in the years since, but Jean couldn't figure out why Emily would invite her over for lunch without having anything she could eat. Jean took it personally, as if Emily were making a point. On what, she couldn't say. She just knew that the point felt directed at her—chicken in the salad, bacon in the macaroni and cheese—and she considered faking a stomachache and calling home.

Instead, Jean said she wasn't hungry—large breakfast, you know—but they should go on and cook, obviously, and she'll fill up on wine, ha, ha.

This last joke turned out to be truer than she'd meant. Every time the three of them finished a bottle, Emily found another to open. Jean became drunk—so drunk, she couldn't tell if Emily was even drinking with her any longer or just pouring. Soon the meat was done, sizzling on a porcelain platter on the kitchen island between them, and Gunnar and Emily were digging in—except for the occasional swipe of a lemon-scented wet wipe—like hyenas.

Which is when Jean saw, in one of the kitchen mirrors, the old terrarium, iguana and all. She went over to look, drunk enough to confuse mirrors with hallways. When she found the terrarium, she reached into the tank and stroked the iguana's back. Gently she pinched the tail and turned the loose skin this way and that around the solid flesh, as if twirling a flower by its stem. The feel of the tail between her thumb and fingers made her laugh, and she leaned against the wall until Emily came over to insist she eat something.

“Oh,” Emily said, “I know what you can eat. It's not much, but…” Off to the fridge she went, and when she came back, she was holding a tiny circular cake. It might've been four inches in diameter and two inches tall, and was covered in a dark chocolate ganache topped with an elaborate series of miniature roses—red, yellow, and white. Jean knew right away that Emily's mother had made the cake, and for some reason—the wine, maybe—Jean started to cry.

The wine wasn't entirely to blame. Jean cried because she understood for the first time that everything she had accomplished, everything she had become, was what she'd once had in mind for Emily, and now, because Emily had a mother and Jean soon
wouldn't
have a mother, none of Jean's accomplishments—not one—mattered.

Emily went over to hug her, and she was crying, too, Jean realized, and soon they were both laughing, embarrassed. Gunnar fetched them two forks, and together, Emily and Jean ate the small cake. Gunnar threw his arms around them both and asked Jean, “Are you sure you don't want a bite of steak?”

And before Emily brought Jean home and said good-bye, before Jean kissed Mom on the way to the airport and told her how much better she was looking every day, Jean took Gunnar up on the offer. For one bite, she pretended to be someone else, someone who had stayed in that place and never wanted to leave. Her only bite of meat in over a decade—though it wasn't her bite, really, but someone else's—and the meat was
good.
A shred of the steak stuck between her teeth, and the person who was not Jean tongued at it all night, even in the morning. She never got sick, and she never felt guilty.

*   *   *

The rain had steadied, light enough now for some of Habibi's shelter seekers to pull their outer layers up over their heads and walk out into it. The line cooks seemed no less bored for having heard Jean's story, if they'd heard the story at all. Maybe, what with the steam in the windows, they'd kept their ears perked for a sexy moment that never came. One by one, they fell back into the kitchen. Simon lifted his hands to the chandeliers to inspect the towels. Still wet. By the time Jean and I finished eating, we were ready to brave the weather. Simon tossed us the wet towels, told us to keep them. He mimed the act of stretching one over his head in a storm. New customers came in, putting him to work. We gathered our belongings and tossed out our trash to the sound of the rain dulling itself against the windows. As we were about to leave, Jean turned to the counter and asked in our mother's language—which I understood but never learned to speak—for dessert.

 

THE IMMIGRANTS

“Danny Watts” always sounded to me more like the name of an old peasant song, belted out by Irish scallywags lining the fogged windows of a pub, than the name of the half-white, half-Mexican boy I'd later call my friend. But there he was, Dan Watts, unpacking his cafeteria-issued burrito with the air of an archeologist, complaining to his lunch partners about the inauthenticity of the tortilla.

“You can tell whether or not the dough was kneaded by hand,” he said. “My mom always does this thing where, after she rolls out the dough, she slaps it between her palms, back and forth, back and forth, for no reason at all other than to get her skin on it.”

“Gross,” I said, though my mother made her Armenian recipes the same way, and though having another son of an immigrant in the group seemed to me a perfectly symmetrical and therefore agreeable thing to have: Robert Karinger, so fully white that his buzz cut appeared gray under most light, flanked like a kind of chess piece by two loyal but divergent halfies. I'd spent every day of the summer with Karinger, hoarding the treasures we'd scraped from the desert in his bedroom, and I thought I knew him well enough—eighth-graders as we were—to anticipate his saying, starting in a mock-parental tone only to devolve into vulgarity, “Daley Kushner is not often right, but when he is, he's fucking
really
right. That skin-on-tortilla shit is
gross.
”

But he didn't. Instead, he pulled apart his own burrito, inspected it, and said, as if he'd just realized the all-too-simple purpose of an alien instrument, “Huh.”

Which is when I knew Dan Watts had officially joined the group.

As I said, I was happy to have Watts around to buttress the clear leader of our gang. On the other hand, I was also disinclined to share the only friend I'd ever been able to make, and feared constantly—at lunch and on the weekends, in class or in the desert, jumping tumbleweeds on our bikes—that the two of them would ditch me. A bigger fear than being left entirely alone was to be left and then watched, in my aloneness, by the two boys some short distance away, hidden in a trench in the dirt except for their heartbreaking and eerily natural laughter.

Because of this conflicted take on the new kid, my kinship with Watts would for a long time be reliant on Karinger's presence. Years would pass before Watts and I spent any significant time together, just the two of us, and even then our conversations inevitably returned to Karinger. In other words, our friendship was more of an alliance, and the fact that I now—as an adult—speak more to Watts than I did to Karinger before he left to fight in the war, is a surprise my younger self would never have believed.

*   *   *

In college I'd picked up an internship at the
Oakland Tribune,
where I spent most of my time fetching frozen yogurt for the perpetually shrinking paid staff and peering, a safe distance from the wall-to-wall windows on the twenty-first floor of the sky-rise, out onto Lake Merritt, waiting for the next bit of instruction from my boss. I'd told my parents the newspaper needed me back as soon as possible, and that my visit home that summer after my freshman year could only last a weekend. The truth was my boss had encouraged me to take the entire summer off, and even hinted that my return next fall was less than necessary. But I wanted to be back in the office as soon as I could. I craved the light-headed kind of vertigo brought on by standing near the windows, looking from a building literally ten times the height of any I'd grown up around, out onto the lake, which—even though it wasn't a lake, but a tidal lagoon—made the desert back home feel lifeless and beige in comparison. So I booked the short flights to and from home—an hour each way—four days apart and packed a tiny gym bag that read, along one side,
ESSENTIALS
.

The cheapest tickets had me landing at LAX at two in the afternoon on a Thursday, when neither of my parents could leave work to pick me up. I looked through my phone for other options: My sister was a law student living in New York; Karinger was in the midst of his first tour of duty, and we hadn't spoken in a year anyway. I resorted to calling Watts, whom I knew to be taking courses at the local community college, training to become a paramedic. Two days before the flight, I went to a poetry reading on Berkeley's campus, not for the poetry—though Robert Hass read beautifully from work that would go on to win a Pulitzer—but to stock up on wine, which I couldn't yet legally buy. I stole a bottle of red from Wheeler Hall and drank three-quarters of it in my off-campus bed before having the courage to call someone I'd known, more or less, for six years.

“Kush?” said Watts, sounding genuinely surprised to hear from me. After my fight with Karinger a year earlier, Watts and I had seen each other exactly once, at Christmas, and spoken over text only a handful of times. But when he answered the phone using my nickname, and when I responded with his last name, a kind of fold in the fabric of time occurred. Our conversation was as comfortable and easy as though Karinger, silently, were on a third line somewhere, and we were all fourteen again.

The drive from Los Angeles to the Antelope Valley normally took about as long as the flight in from Oakland, but the traffic, even after leaving the city, was denser than usual, so Watts and I had a couple of hours to catch up. He was driving what used to be his father's pickup truck, and the confined space of the cab along with the fact that we'd shared this exact seat many times in the past, prompted me to think in terms of contrast. The truck hadn't changed, as far as I could remember, except for the addition of a rosary hung from the rearview mirror. I'd always vaguely known Watts was Catholic, but the beads surprised me. Watts himself looked more or less like he always had, his signature brown curls coiling to his shoulders. Whereas I—fair and wispy—looked like a scrawny version of my dad, Watts had always been his mother's son, dark skinned and a bit pudgy. He'd been training for the physical portion of his EMT courses, and he looked as fit as I'd ever seen him. His forearms—one of which flexed every time he adjusted the steering wheel—were full of thick, rootlike veins. During my fight with Karinger a year earlier, Watts discovered I was the kind of man who fell in love with other men. Looking at him so intently now, I didn't want him to mistake my intentions. I started to explain.

“Kush,” he said on a particularly bogged-down stretch of the 14, “I get it. No need to explain anything to me.” And, as if to prove how seamlessly he'd reconciled the laws of his religion with his friend's queerness, he asked in his most comfortably warm and scratchy voice if I'd met anyone, you know,
special.