Desert Boys (22 page)

She exhaled into her own mouth, making little zeppelins of her lips. “I'd rather you just read one and decide for yourself. At the end of my time here, I'll leave a poem on your kitchen table. How's that?”

“Poetic,” Reggie said. “I'll look forward to it. In the meantime, why don't you follow me to the chickens. They sound hungry.”

“A few more minutes.”

“I think you'd be remiss not to come along now.”

Charitye laughed, irritated. “Those chickens can wait a few more minutes, can't they?”

“I'm sure they can,” Reggie said. “But you'll want to cover your notepad, at least.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—”

The sprinklers sputtered to life. Charitye, shrieking, slid her notepad under her shirt and hopscotched her way out of the alfalfa.

She tilted her head to twist water out of her hair, a deeper red now that it was wet. “Well played,” she said, fighting back a smile. “Well played.”

*   *   *

Reggie had to drive Charitye to class and back four times before the school year officially ended, at which point, he taught Charitye how to bale hay. “Might as well learn something while you're out here,” he said, helping her into the tractor.

“With alfalfa,” he explained, “it's all about the leaves. Two-thirds of the plant's protein and three-quarters of its digestible nutrients are in the leaves, and when you're selling alfalfa hay to feedstores, that's what they're paying for. No leaves, no cash. Not even for a pretty, teenaged, redheaded poet, okay?”

He showed her where he parked the equipment: mower, tractor, swather, baler. “Once the plant's mowed, you attach the swather to the tractor, which you drive—carefully, carefully—dragging the swather behind, until half the cut alfalfa is arranged in neat windrows.”

“Halfalfa,” she said when they got back on solid ground.

“What?”

“Half the alfalfa, halfalfa, is arranged in cornrows.”

“Whatever helps you remember it,” said Reggie. “But it's
wind
rows, not
corn
rows. Like ‘windows,' but with an
r.
”

“We ready to bale, or what?” she asked. “Should I attach the baler?”

“Not yet. You bale the day
after
you windrow.”

The next day, they dragged the baler by the tractor, producing small rectangular cubes of hay. The heat that afternoon must have been in the three digits. Sweating and desperate for shade, they stacked the bales near the stable.

“Keep enough here for Genie,” Reggie instructed. “The rest will go to the feedstore.”

Charitye asked how much a bale of hay gets you nowadays.

“About six dollars apiece.”

She wiped at her forehead, burnt pink and shining in sweat and sunlight.

“Allison's got some old hats in the house,” Reggie said. He suggested she wear one with a large brim, like his. For the sun.

“Thanks,” Charitye said, “will do.” But first she loaded the last of the bales onto its stack with a grunt and offered her own advice: “You know what you ought to do?”

“What's that?”

“Invest in a swimming pool.”

*   *   *

During the years Reggie and Allison lived on the farm, Keith asked on a number of occasions if his daughter could visit. Allison never said yes.

“Why should I?” she'd ask Reggie in bed at night. “Keith was the one willing to give this place up, and now he wants to use it as a day-care service?”

One night, Reggie decided to risk an argument. He said, “Forget about Keith for a minute. Think of the girl. She'd love it out here. She'd love Genie. You could show her how to ride.”

“That's just what he wants,” Allison said. “He'd train her to fall off the horse. Get hurt on purpose so he can sue us for the money he's wanted from the start.”

“You really believe that?”

“You don't know him like I do, Reggie.” She felt the need to provide an example. “Growing up,” she said, “he used to call me Frecklestein. Like Frankenstein, only uglier.”

Reggie waited for a
there's more
that never came. “That's it?”

Allison remembered the farmer next door—long dead now, house demolished, land for sale—how he'd asked her over the fence line to tighten a small screw in one of his sprinkler heads. He needed her tiny fingers for the job. While she worked at the screw, he slipped his hand up her shorts. His fingers were as cold and wet from the sprinklers as a slice of bologna. There was her brother, eleven or twelve years old, watching from the safety of the alfalfa field. Why hadn't Keith helped? Well, he was a child, she supposed. Still, she never trusted her brother after that—maybe she never loved him after that, either—and she'd never told her husband, or anyone else, the reason why.

“Yeah,” she said. “That's it. You calling me petty?”

“Forget the horse ride,” Reggie said. “Wouldn't it be nice to have a young person out here for a change? Someone seeing the place for the first time?”

“Everything children see, they see for the first time.”

“But we're talking about family,” said Reggie.

“You're my family,” she said, and kissed him on the forehead. “You, and no one else.”

*   *   *

In the second week of her stay at the farm, Charitye drove her uncle's truck into a ditch. She'd asked for a driving lesson—her dad had only taught her on an automatic—so Reggie took her out in the red Ford to an unpaved but leveled section of the desert, where he'd seen kids with dirt bikes and paintball guns spend their weekends. This early in the morning, no one was around except for the wind, which, despite the time of day, was already going strong. Still, the sand under the tires was packed tight enough so that, if she timed the clutch right, they wouldn't go skidding into a sandbank. Unfortunately, her timing was off.

She'd left the engine running and was standing in her straw hat—Allison's—over Reggie at the front of the truck, where he'd kneeled to inspect the buried front wheels. “God, I'm really sorry,” she said, genuinely embarrassed.

“Hand me a plank out of the bed,” he said, reaching out for it prematurely, the way Charitye had seen doctors do in hospital dramas.

After she'd handed him the plank, Reggie wedged it behind the front right tire—the one more deeply embedded—and told her to stand clear as he backed the truck out.

“Wait,” she said. “I got it stuck, so let me back it out. Please?”

A gust of wind nearly knocked Reggie off-balance. The straw hat on Charitye's head went tumbling into the bank. She chased the hat down and, when she caught it, pressed it to her head. Sheets of sand slapped their faces. Reggie tongued granule after granule in his teeth. “Okay,” he said. “Give it a try.”

Charitye looped around the truck and stepped in behind the wheel.

When she'd backed the truck out far enough, Reggie heard her crank the gear into neutral, as he'd shown her. She leaned over the seat to punch open the passenger-side door.

Tipping her hat, she said something Reggie couldn't make out over the noise of the wind and the engine.

“What's that?”

“I
said,
” she said, “Need a lift, cowboy?”

*   *   *

In the afternoon, Keith called.

“Yeah,” Charitye said into the phone. She spun in place, wrapping herself with the helix of the cord, and then spun the other way to unleash herself. “It's fun,” she said. “We're having fun. I'm getting a lot done. I've learned a lot.”

Reggie tried not to eavesdrop. He sat down at the table near the window and looked out at the sun damage growing white across his truck's red paint like a beard. I'll have to get a new truck soon, he figured to himself, if I plan to drive into town for groceries or to lecture the Future Farmers at the high school for much longer. The truth was he didn't want to leave the farm ever again, for any reason. He could get some livestock, he thought, plant new crops for food—he could learn how to self-sustain. The Future Farmers could meet here if they really wanted to learn about farming, which he doubted more and more every session. If he stayed put at the farm, he could give his truck to Charitye. He enjoyed the pun, inscribing it to his memory for when he'd make a speech at her next birthday party or at her graduation ceremony. He'd be welcomed into the family's celebration, having wrapped one of those giant bows around the truck. Someone might click a knife against a glass: Uncle Reggie wants to say something! Then he'd stand up and tell the story of how he first came up with the idea:
You know, originally, I planned on giving this truck over to charity.…

The sound of the phone meeting its cradle broke his line of thinking.

“How're your parents?” he asked from the window.

“Sounds doomed,” Charitye said. “I think they're getting divorced.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Maybe it's the best thing for my poems,” she said, joining him at the table.

“That's one way to think about it.”

“I know,” she said. “I'm trying too hard to
seem
like a poet to actually
be
a poet.”

“Sometimes,” Reggie said, “you've got to act the role before you can reach the goal.”

“I've been doing that with swimming,” she said. “Getting pretty good, too. My mom's been making fun of me, though, so we'll see if I stick with it.”

“What'd she say?”

“Said, ‘
Sweetheart,
you'll
never
grow breasts.'” She impersonated her mother in a vaguely European voice, laughing in a way, and then: “I've been meaning to ask you, Reggie. How come you never had kids?”

“Oh,” Reggie said, drawing it out like a sigh. “The short version of that story is your aunt didn't want them. And I hope I'm not spoiling the surprise by telling you it takes two.”

“What about adopting? I mean, now? I mean, after she passed?”

“They don't look at farmers as foster parents so much as employers.”

“That's sad,” Charitye said. “You're acting the role well. Of a dad, I mean.”

For a moment, Reggie let himself feel pride, the steam of it, before cooling. “You know, I've got the kids at your high school. I get it out of my system with them.”

“You deserve better.”

He let out a little laugh. “They do act up a bit, don't they? Especially when I mention the aqueduct. What's so funny about the aqueduct?”

“Well,” Charitye said, “for one thing, it's the closest thing we've got to an adventure out here. The river's man-made, obviously, but there's fish, so there's fishing. People spread out on the cement slopes so they can tan. A lot of couples go out there to do, as you've said, whatever they can with each other that they can't do by themselves. And then, there are the swimmers.”

“That current's pretty strong, though.”

“That's the point. It's a dare. If you can swim from one side to the other without getting dragged to Long Beach, you win.”

“What do you win?”

“The prize of not dying.”

“See,” Reggie said, “a benefit of not being a parent: I never have to worry about my kid doing something so stupid.”

“I've always wanted to try it.”

“Don't, please.”

“I bet I could,” she said. “I don't know if I've mentioned how I am a prih-tee good swimmer.”

Again the phone rang.

“Hold that stupid thought,” Reggie told her, leaving to answer the phone. For the second time that afternoon, it was Keith.

Charitye took the phone. After a minute, she put her hand against the receiver so her dad couldn't hear her. “Apparently, he's coming to pick me up now,” she told Reggie.

Reggie felt a brief but unshareable disappointment, like being alone the one time you see a UFO zigzag between the clouds. Before Charitye arrived, he'd just gotten used to living alone, and now he was just getting used to having someone else around. For how many people, he wondered, was life only a succession of moments you were just getting used to?

“Keith,” he said, having taken the phone from Charitye.

“Sorry,” Keith said, “for the sudden change of plans. Lucy's decided to leave for a few weeks in the morning. She's come around to the popular opinion of women everywhere of hating me. She wants Charitye home tonight so they can leave together first thing.”

“Hate to hear you couldn't work it out.”

“Tell him I still have work to do here,” Charitye said from her tiptoes, loud enough for her dad to hear.

“Look,” said Reggie, “the girl wants to stick around for a bit longer. She's getting some poetry written out here, is the thing.”

“I respect the arts, Reggie, I do. But she can jot down her feelings anywhere, so poetry's not the best excuse you could've come up with. Anyway, Lucy's got this plan—”

“What about one more night?” Reggie said. “Her mother can pick her up first thing in the morning, no hitch in the plan.”

Charitye nodded approvingly.

From Keith: “Hold.”

“Reggie?” A woman's vaguely European voice.

“Hi, Lucy.”

“She can spend the night so long as you promise me she'll be packed and waiting for me outside at seven in the morning. If I have to so much as honk, I'll crash my car into your house and drag her out of the wreckage.”

“Okay, Lucy, thank you.”

“Oh, and Reggie?”

“Yeah?”

“Do I have to tell you again to keep her away from that horse?”

*   *   *

Reggie lived far enough from what we call society to feel sorry for himself with neither shame nor showmanship. His thoughts on the matter were: If the only person you love gets a fatal kick in the head from a horse, you've got that right. Feeling sorry for yourself is a problem only if you do it around other people who don't feel sorry for
you
(as you intended), but start feeling sorry
for themselves.
It turns out self-pity
is
contagious, but not in the way you want it to be.