Desert Boys (2 page)

Watts came over, yelling at Karinger. Kush tried, and failed, to hide his crying. After a while, Watts offered his hand to help him off the ground.

Karinger said, “Why the hell didn't you shoot me, Kush?”

Watts said he'd had enough for the day. He was going home, and Kush wanted to join him. But as Watts got on his bike to leave, Karinger told Kush to stay for one more game.

“You're going to win,” Kush said. “Why would I even play?”

“You've got to start thinking different,” Karinger said. He'd taken off his mask now and was jabbing his fingers into the side of his head. He had the bright blond hair of an albino, and he'd recently had it shaved to military length. Sometimes Kush imagined Karinger with blue eyes, but now that Karinger was staring directly at him, lecturing him, they were clearly hazel. “Stop saying everything that goes through your head, Kush. The first step in being tough is convincing people you're tough. Including yourself. You've got to pretend you're tougher than you are, keep some shit to yourself. This is what not being a pussy is all about.”

He went on to explain the rules of this new two-person game: essentially, chicken. They'd each get one shot at the other person from a certain distance before taking a long step closer. Then they'd shoot again, and step closer. And so on. The first person to quit the game lost.

“Thanks for the pep talk,” Kush said. “But I'm going to pass.”

“Fine,” Karinger said. “You can get two shots for every one of mine. You want to get me back, don't you?”

Gingerly, Kush rubbed the welt on his hand and thought of how gratified he'd feel to give a matching one to Karinger. So he walked to his spot in the desert, thirty feet from where Karinger stood. Then he hollered, “Are there any rules?”

“You shoot twice, I shoot once. No need for masks”—he tossed his aside—“because there's no face shots. And no ball shots. Cool?”

“I won't aim for your face, but you should probably wear your mask. I can't promise anything.”

“No masks,” Karinger called out. “It'll force you to focus your aim.”

Kush tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry. The heat had the back of his tongue scaly. He aimed his gun and shot, missing wide left. His second shot missed high.

Karinger's first shot hit Kush on the left wrist.

“Shit!” Kush said, grabbing the pain.

They stepped closer. This round, Kush's first shot missed again, but his second hit Karinger in the right shin.

“Good,” Karinger called out, shaking his leg.

By the time they were standing ten feet away from each other, Kush had stopped feeling the pain. He found himself laughing wildly every time he was hit, just as Karinger did. As they stepped closer together, Kush imagined their bodies merging. The silly idea had an odd heaviness in his mind, and allowed him to feel a tickling pinch where the pain ought to have been.

When they got within point-blank range, they aimed at each other's chests.

“It's a draw,” Karinger said, still laughing. “See, man? It's a draw.”

Their laughter quieted down. For three, four seconds, their eyes met. Then, at the same time, they pulled their triggers.

There it is, Kush thought, doubled over in the desert. There's the pain again.

They hadn't merged after all.

*   *   *

I still hadn't responded to Jackie (Connolly) Karinger. Her email stayed open on my computer—I must have read it thirty times. Looking around the room, I saw on the edge of the coffee table the three books I'd impulsively purchased from Lloyd Alcero. In an effort to buy more time, I went over to inspect them:
Understanding the War on Terror, After 9/11: America's Global War, The Muslim One: A Memoir.

I turned the third book over. The author's black-and-white photograph: a young woman wearing a hijab. Chin down, she looked up at the camera. Her thin eyebrows tensed, giving her face the severe expression of a distraught mother, but she couldn't have been much older than I was. Seeing her photograph reminded me of someone I'd known (“known” is a strong word) in high school. For all I knew, she could have been the same woman. Upon checking the bio, however, I learned that the author was raised not in California, but in Florida, where she'd foiled her uncle's plot to set off a car bomb at an amusement park. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling—due, I suspected, to the timing of it all—that this author happened to be someone whose life was perpendicular to mine, and that, if I were to read her book, I'd learn something about myself at that intersection.

She'd written the memoir, strangely, in the third person. It began: “For the first sixteen years of her life, Adila Atef spoke with a throaty, confident voice.” By the time I reached the epilogue, I'd forgotten the book was not, in fact, a novel. The veracity of the story was re-revealed to me in those final pages, where the author converted to the first person:

Contrary to the beliefs of many—friends included—I wrote this book in the third person not for its therapeutic or distancing effects, but because it represents more accurately the way in which I remember these events unfolding, more like a film than a diary. The
I
can't exist in more than one place at a time, and I am here, now. Who, then, was that other Adila?

Nowhere in her story was the experience of the girl I'd been aware of in high school. She and the author were not, I accepted, one and the same.

*   *   *

Of hundreds of girls at Antelope Valley High, only one wore a headscarf.

She was two years ahead of Karinger, Kush, and Watts, and so they rarely crossed paths. The only reason they knew of her was because, after the terrorist attacks, she'd been harassed in the main quad at lunch, and the local media came to produce a special report. Peter Thorpe, local newscaster, along with a microphone-tethered cameraman, interviewed students on campus. He asked questions some in the community later agreed were loaded, including whether or not this girl's wearing a headscarf to school was in any way disrespectful, “considering the circumstances.”

Kush and Watts—along with about fifty other kids—vied for a spot in the shot's background, making faces and flipping the camera the bird. By the time they realized Karinger was being interviewed, Kush and Watts had missed the entire conversation.

“He took my name, age, and class,” Karinger said when he rejoined his friends. “I'll be on TV at seven o'clock tomorrow night.”

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.