The early summer day was both quiet and loud as Liam and I walked downtown toward the Shady Bean. The trees were frozen in place without a breath of wind as tourists sagged into the space left by the fleeing college students, swinging their shopping bags and gathering in loose pods at each corner crosswalk, voices tittering like the birds in the ficus branches above. Liam was telling me about his dream from the night before. I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about Cammy and how last night had left me feeling broken.
We’d gone to bed angry for the first time. I was buzzing about Utah, about how I wanted to pack up my climbing gear and head to the tall quiet of the desert. There were cracks like arteries running up the rusty sandstone, long walks through talus cleaved from the cliffs above. I’d find someone who wanted to trade belays. Cammy’s head bounced in the crook of my arm as I mimicked climbing hand over hand up the cracks, practicing with my thumbs pointing up, not down. I could sense her question forming.
“I need to go alone,” I said. She bristled against me.
“What is this?” she said.
Her room was sparse. I focused on the neat stack of books next to the closet. She loved Jeanette Winterson. Sometimes I’d read pages of Art & Lies aloud while she painted. The light struck off the welder’s metal boots in glowing chips. He wore his halo round his feet. I’d read slowly, trying not to make any mistakes.
“It’s not that I don’t want you to come,” I said.
“But what is this?”
“It’s where we are now. I’m not sure what else it is, but I like being here.”
“I’m here with no clothes on,” she said, sitting up, “and you’re thinking about being somewhere else.”
“Not anymore,” I said. She didn’t smile. She climbed out of bed, dragging a brown blanket with her. I reached to the nightstand and grabbed the remains of the joint we’d smoked earlier. “Can you hand me that lighter?”
She tossed it deliberately off target. It landed in the soft folds of her comforter. I lit the joint and drew deeply. “If I say thank you right now, it’ll sound patronizing. And that’s not how I want it to sound.”
“You’re welcome,” she said.
“It’s a pilgrimage,” I said. “You go it alone. You come out better for it.”
“Yeah,” she said, “Just you and the highway and your fucked-up Toyota. Go in search of the other pious souls. You can each find your own Mecca. None of you will remember which direction to pray.”
“Maybe.” I held out the joint.
“No, you finish it,” she said. “You need to be good and stoned to think about your pilgrimage of personal development.”
“It’s some really heavy shit,” I said, smiling.
She shook her head. “The heavy shit is going to be you lying next to me looking like this”—she lowered the blanket and spun around slowly, and I was very stoned— “and you not touching me the entire night. That’s some heavy shit.”
She climbed into bed and turned her back, pulling the covers around her neck. This was new territory, and it made whatever we had more real. She was asking me to name this thing. It deserved a name. That name had to describe the surf missions up the coast, the late nights swiveling into pale blue mornings, not seeing each other for days and being okay, sharing joints in the back of the movie theater, and my longing to drive to the outskirts of Indian Creek and camp alone for days or weeks or maybe months. We were more than the things we had done. We were also the things we wanted to do but hadn’t done yet.
Smoke hovered in the air above her bed. I turned off the lamp. “Good night,” I said. I knew she wouldn’t answer, but the silence still stung. “Sometimes you’re high,” I said, “and sometimes you’re sad.”
“Jesus,” she said. “Quoting Ryan Adams makes you sound desperate.”
❦
I was thinking about what she meant as Liam rattled on, his hands moving like punctuation. “Have you ever felt like that when you wake up?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said, but he was no longer listening. He walked up to the rear of a terracotta-colored Vanagon with a pleated denim curtain sagging across the rear hatch, a rust bubble shrugging the window seal out of place.
“Look at this thing.” His fingers rested lightly on the rear quarter panel, thrumming out a quiet rhythm. “We have to find out who owns it.”
A voice rattled from inside the van, ashtray-raspy. “You found him.” The curtain parted, and a thin, gaunt face stared out from behind the dirty window, one eye dark brown, the other a dull, unmoving blue. “Who wants to know?”
The sliding door opened with a metallic groan, and the old man emerged. His two-day beard was white stubble. His lips turned in toward the places where teeth were missing, and his brow was lumpy, eyebrows unkempt. He wore a black knit hat that had climbed above his ears. His dark jeans were patched.
“What do you boys want?” he said.
“My buddy loves your van,” said Liam. I glanced at him sideways. “His dad drove a ’71 Squareback before the train accident”—sometimes it was like standing outside my body watching Liam talk, figuring out which part of the story was mine and which part was his—“and he’s been talking about getting a van like this for the last few months.”
The man’s good eye softened for a moment, and then he stepped toward Liam slowly, moving in increments until their noses were almost touching. “That,” he said, “is the biggest pile of rahat I’ve ever heard.” Liam didn’t flinch, and I had an odd memory of a staredown between Liam and Jenny Walsh in fifth grade, one in which the victor—Jenny Walsh—won the right to choose between truth or dare for Liam. She’d chosen dare, of course, not knowing that Liam would have chosen dare over truth every single time.
“My dad really did have a Squareback,” I said. “He lives in Oxnard.”
The old man’s eyes creased at the edges, his smile mostly toothless. “Marko and I bought this van new in Bucharest.” He stepped back and gazed at the vehicle. “Every time it broke, silence for three days. Not a fart or a sigh in my direction. By the time we reached Prague, I wished it would break down more so I could enjoy the silence.” He looked up at the sky. “You have to figure out how to live with both of your voices.”
A young couple pushing a stroller had stopped to listen to the old man. He turned to them and barked, “La ce te uiti?” They recoiled and flapped their hands like birds, pushing the stroller away with renewed purpose.
Liam shot me a glance, and I was planning an exit strategy when the old man said quietly, “He died last year. Marko. I’ve been driving since he’s been gone, and I’m too old to drive anymore.”
He dug into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a single key, then reached toward Liam’s hand. Liam pulled away instinctively, as if he wasn’t ready to meet the weight of the moment. The man turned toward me and I nodded.
“Do things to remember,” he said, gripping my hand. He turned my palm skyward and pressed the key there, closing my fingers over the black plastic fob. “And if you can’t get lucky in this thing,” he said, and he emphasized the word lucky as he turned toward Liam, his bushy eyebrows lifting, “there’s no hope for you in this world.” He threw his head back and cackled. Then he reached in through the open passenger window, yanked out an old canvas pack, and trod toward the creek bridge, knees knuckling out with every step.
“Holy shit,” Liam said.
“Hey,” I called after him. The old man held up his middle finger without looking back, and then it morphed into a peace sign, and soon enough he was another body moving through the world.
“Did that really happen?”
“Pretty sure,” I said.
“Looks like we’ve got a gentleman’s bet about who gets laid in this thing first.” He looked at me, his smile sideways as it was when he was happy.
“I guess we’d better go pick up the ladies and tell them about this wager.”
We both started toward the driver’s side, nearly running into each other. “You mind if I drive?” Liam asked. We hopped in and Liam stared at the shift lever for a moment. Then he put the key in the ignition and whispered, “Go.” And just like that, it went.
Liam piloted the van downtown while I texted Cammy about what had just happened. A breeze had crept up, the window seals whining even at our pedestrian speed. There were thin oval clouds in the sky, the kind that made me feel calm, as though things were going to be fine. Cammy and Leann pushed through the front door of the Shady Bean right as Liam pulled up.
“Come join us for the maiden voyage,” Liam said out the window.
Cammy wrestled with the sliding door handle for a few moments, and I jumped out to help coax the door open, then hopped back into the front seat next to Liam. “We haven’t settled on a name yet,” I said. “You want your voices heard?”
Leann slammed the slider shut and settled onto the rear bench seat next to Cammy. “I think we should name it Trouble.”
“Like we don’t have enough of that already,” Liam said. “Okay, Trouble it is. Unless there are any objections.” The engine sputtered and Liam feathered the accelerator pedal lightly as he pulled away from the curb, saying over his shoulder, “Speaking of trouble, the old man who gave it to us inspired a wager about who would christen the rig first. I’m not a gambling man, but I’d put money on myself.”
“That’s a safe bet,” Leann said. Cammy looked out the window and I saw the color rise in her cheeks. “Come on,” Leann said, “Don’t go all British prude on me.”
“Let’s figure out where to go,” I said, “and then we’ll worry about giving you some alone time with Trouble.”
“I’m pointing her west, and I’m not stopping until we’re cracking beers at the beach,” Liam said.
The van sputtered, hesitated, but it kept motoring along. I rolled down my window. The curtains snapped in the wind. When I lowered the visor, I could see Cammy in the small vanity mirror, her face moving in and out of sight as the fabric whipped around her. She stared out the window and didn’t meet my gaze the whole ride to the ocean.
❦
The pier was a frenzied scene, sand pocked with colorful beach blankets and plastic cups. Liam circled the parking lot a couple times before giving up.
“Let’s go out to the reservoir,” he said. “These assholes can have the beach.”
Cammy was still avoiding my eyes in the tiny rectangle of the visor mirror.
“Let me drive, will ya?” I said.
Liam stopped in the middle of the street, shifted into neutral, and ratcheted up the parking brake. He hopped out and walked around to my side, then stood there waiting.
“Slide over, dummy,” he said.
We drove in silence for a while. I listened to the road, the sound of the tires. I listened to the engine, to what it sounded like at the top end of third gear, the low end of fourth. We went east on the main road, and not many people traveled on the main road. A couple of early-’70s bikes roared past us just before the big avocado farms, but that was it.
I pulled off at the dirt road leading to the reservoir. Dust gathered around us as I slid to a stop. “This is important,” I said. “Does anyone have a joint?”
Liam laughed, and then Leann. Cammy was smiling, too. The way the light cut through the windows was mesmerizing. The dust motes swirled and danced with every word spoken, every chuckle moving air. Leann reached into the breast pocket of her blouse and produced a skinny spliff.
“One of the many reasons,” Liam said.
“Why you love me?” asked Leann.
Liam cocked his head to the side and smiled.
“Just hand me the goddamn thing,” I said. I lit it and took two light drags to make sure it wouldn’t run. I stretched out my arm toward Cammy, and she watched my hand for a moment. “Come on,” I said.
“I need to pee,” she said, and she pulled the sliding door open. She walked behind the tall manzanita, the lilac. I handed the joint to Leann and hopped out of the van, following the smooth footprints of her sandals. I saw her squatting, and I turned away toward the road and waited. I leaned down and ran my fingers over the sticky flowers of the hummingbird sage near my feet. There was a smooth round rock next to the sage. Written on it in white chalk: FIND ME. I picked it up and turned it over. GO, it said.
“Can’t you give a girl her privacy?” Cammy said.
“Look at this.”
“Fuck off.”
“No, really. Look.” She took the rock and ran her fingers over the chalk.
“We have to find it,” she said.
We walked into the chaparral. There was poison oak everywhere, choking the stunted oaks, crawling along the ground in shiny tendrils. Cammy was a strong hiker, and I worked to keep up with her, even on the steep downhills. She was sure-footed and graceful like water over stone.
We reached the edge of a eucalyptus copse just inside an oblong clearing. In the middle was a stump, maybe two centuries round, worn smooth by way of hundreds of asses resting there over time. A chunk of white candle jutted out from the middle, rivulets of wax bisecting the rings like a radar stroke. The wind had gutted the flame before the candle burned down much. There was a note tacked to the stump with a dark, thin nail. A green band of jade hung on the nail, and Cammy plucked it from the end of the nail and held it up to the sky.
“Hold this,” she said.
The ring was cold and smooth in the palm of my hand.
Cammy stared at the note, watching the edges move in the light breeze. “Should I read it?” she asked. I wasn’t sure what to say. I wasn’t sure what I would do. She ripped the note from the nail and unfolded it. Her face buckled.
“What is it?”
She looked up at me and shook her head. There were tears shivering in her eyes. “Let me have that ring,” she said. I held out my hand, and she took the ring and slid it onto each of her fingers in turn. It fit the ring finger of her right hand perfectly.
I imagined her saying, Aren’t you glad it’s not the other hand? But she would never say something like that. It’s something I would say, but that wasn’t her. I felt as though my head was glowing, and then I remembered the joint we’d smoked, and I felt a little bit better.
The sound of Cammy tearing the note in half was like a shivering beneath the trees. She coupled each half and continued tearing until the note was confetti.
“What did it say?”
“The saddest thing I’ve ever read,” she said.
She dug her toe into the soft loamy soil, then bent and sprinkled the pieces into the hole.
“I’m not walking any farther,” she said. “I want to go back to the van. I want to go home.” She covered up the tiny pieces, patting down and roughing the earth with her fingernails. The ground looked as if nothing had ever been buried there. She stood and walked back toward the van, and I sat on the edge of the stump, my hip next to the stub of candle. I knocked the candle loose with the heel of my hand, and the rivulets of wax pulled up from the wood in an unbroken web.
I dug a shallow hole next to the stump and buried the candle and its waxy web there. I pulled the black nail from the stump and added it to the grave, then covered it all up and smoothed the dirt beneath my hands. The place was back to what it was before the sadness, the most recent sadness, a shudder that might have been more or less than the sound and shape of the tree cracking loose from its mooring, falling into shadow, crashing down into the silence left behind.
When I got back to the van, Liam was sitting in the passenger seat smoking a joint. Cammy was sitting cross-legged on the bench seat in the back with Leann braiding her hair. She stared at me, unblinking.
“This is yours, champ,” Liam said, holding the key out the window. I took it, and he offered me the joint. I shook my head, and he lifted his sunglasses and looked into my eyes. “Come to think of it,” Liam said. “You should call me champ.”
“Yeah?”
“I won the bet,” he said.
I looked back at Leann, and she smiled and shrugged. “I hate losing at anything,” she said. “And Cammy—maybe we should trade spots.”
Cammy snort-laughed, and then Liam was doubled over with the kind of laughter that makes the muscles in the back of your head ache. The sun pushed columns of light across the hills. A red-winged blackbird on a sagging loop of barbed wire turned toward us, cocking its head at our sounds. I turned the key in the ignition, and the van responded with a hollow click. I pumped the gas pedal.
“Why are you doing that?” Liam said.
“Bad idea,” said Leann.
I closed my eyes and turned the key again. Click.
Knuckles rapped on the rear side window, and the whole van shook as we jumped collectively. It was a girl with thick fingers, long blond dreadlocks, eyes sunken and dark with pupil. Liam hopped out and opened the sliding door, then walked around the front of the van and watched the girl. She watched him back.
“Smells like weed,” she said. She sniffed the air dramatically.
“Must be the chaparral,” he said.
She shrugged off an olive-green backpack, army-issue straps jangling on the ground.
“Hand it over,” she said. She reached into the breast pocket of her white tee and pulled out a leather billfold. She flashed it open for a moment, enough time for us to see the badge, and then she tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans.
“You’re an agent,” Liam said. “Huh.” He smiled his crooked smile.
She returned a wan smirk. “Let’s get this thing started,” she said. “The rest of them will be here any minute.”
Liam looked at me through the windshield. There was a sun flare at the tip of his ear, his head lucent.
“Scooch on over,” he said to me. “This, um, special agent is going to help us bump-start your van so we’re ready to go when the others arrive.” He winked at me dramatically, not bothering to hide his face from the girl.
“You can’t be serious,” Cammy said.
The girl opened the driver’s door and glared at me until I looked away. I pushed myself up on the armrests and slid into the passenger seat. Cammy and Leann climbed reluctantly out of the van.
The girl slid into the driver’s seat and turned the key to the on position. She pushed in the clutch and moved the shifter into neutral, rocking it back and forth between gears. She shook her dreadlocks behind her shoulders and nodded her chin toward me.
“Wow,” she said. “Wouldn’t your mother be proud.”
She saw the genuine confusion on my face and softened her tone a bit.
“You seem like a douchebag sitting here while your friends are pushing the van.” Blood was hot in my cheeks. I hopped out and jogged to the back. We heaved and pressed our sandals into the dry earth, scrabbling on the grit.
“Make sure the parking brake is off,” Liam shouted. The van was groaning forward, and then it cut free, the brake released. The engine sputtered to life, chugging and bucking a bit, then rumbling smoothly.
We cheered, the four of us jumping into the air, and then we watched the van, waiting for brake lights, for that front end to swing around tight like a forklift, for the dreadlocked girl to come back and make us uncomfortable. The van disappeared around a hillside, then reappeared on the snaking road further downhill. I raised my arms. The vehicle ambled around a rocky bend and was gone, the echo of clattering valves bounding up the canyon.
“What the fuck,” Liam said.
“I was gonna take that van to Utah,” I said.
“You’re going to Utah?”
“He’s going on a pilgrimage,” Cammy said.
“When are you guys leaving?”
“Just him,” said Cammy. “He’s going it alone.”
We walked and Liam kicked a rock down the road for a while. We watched him keep the rock in play, getting bolder with his distance. When it skittered off the edge and ticked its way into the ravine below, he muttered rookie under his breath. Then he said, “That van was special. We have to find it.”
“You had just christened that thing, too,” said Cammy.
There followed a silence maybe a moment too long, and, though it was broken by a tide of laughter that swelled until tears dripped from noses and onto the steaming road beneath our sandals, the imprint of that silence felt like the moment immediately after the crisp snap of a twig underfoot, the snap of a wooden ruler bent beyond a bow. The feeling didn’t fade even as we walked along the winding road back to town, the oaks reaching down toward the earth, rounding toward the ground. We walked in and out of their shade, and eventually I reached for Cammy’s hand and found it waiting. We interlaced fingers, the skin over her knuckles taut. After a while her hand loosened, and she held my fingers just barely. Then she squeezed the tip of my forefinger, and her hand fell to her side.
In the space between us, I could feel the pull of Utah, the Wingate Sandstone jutting from the desert floor. There were people who looked up at those cracks, scientists and geologists and accountants and grocery baggers and dirtbags, and saw something more than broken. Look at that weakness, we’d say, but we meant possibility. I thought about asking Cammy to come with me, but there was her hand, swinging at her side. Her long fingers were out of reach.
“The saddest thing you’ve ever read, huh?” I said.
She took a deep breath, steadying. “You are too late.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s what it said.” She looked at the sky to stave off tears.
Liam and Leann were up ahead, hand in hand. Leann kept trying to lean her head against his arm, her skull bouncing around until she gave up for a few steps. Then she’d try it again. They were laughing as though we weren’t there at all.
“Don’t ask me to come with you,” Cammy said.
A blue pickup truck roared by, then lit up its brake lights and skidded onto the gravel shoulder thirty yards ahead. Liam and Leann started jogging toward the truck. Liam looked back at us and scooped his arm in a wide gesture. I thought about the van I hardly knew, about how it would look parked beneath those rust-colored cliffs, tone on tone. I ran toward the truck, faster than I’d run in a long time. It felt like there was hardly any time left to lose. ◆
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