Burning (11 page)

I considered saying yes. Not because I wanted to—an evening with Cheyenne, after the way things had gone down, sounded like torture—but because it would make Pete happy. It was something I could do for him, like a gift. Didn’t I owe him that—a gift? It was something he wanted, something I had the power to give to him.

But then some inner part of me remembered the way Lala smelled—like cinnamon and ripe oranges—and I shook my head.

“Nah, man.”

Pete looked disappointed, but he didn’t put up a fight. He just nodded and kicked at the dust on the sidewalk.

I felt like I should explain. “Listen,” I said. “You know how it is—with you and Melissa?”

He nodded. We all knew how crazy Pete was for her.

“Well, I don’t know why, but it’s like that. There’s something … I don’t know, something
great
about that girl. I want to find out what it is.”

Pete laughed a little, but not in a mean way. He patted me on the back, friendly-like. “You’ve got it bad,” he said again.

I stuck around just long enough to make sure that Melissa wasn’t going to carve Pete a new one over the twenty-two dollars. Pete made it sound like a joke—getting my fortune read—and when Melissa asked what the fortune-teller looked like, Pete lied his ass off. I was a good enough friend not to bust him on it.

Then I wandered home, taking the long way around the town’s perimeter, jogging real slow, barely faster than a walk, just to burn off some steam.

Lala, Lala, Lala. Each pace I took fell into the rhythm of her name.

Okay, sure, part of the attraction was the way she looked. Her eyes, edged with those thick black lashes, looking up at me like there was something more she wanted to say. Pete thought she had been eyeing me. I wondered what she saw when she looked at me.

I glanced down at the clothes I was wearing. A stupid Gypsum High T—that would mark me as a small-towner, nothing real sexy about that. And my running shorts. Great. Just what girls like.

But for a minute I indulged my fantasy. What if she
did
like the way I looked? Most girls did—that had never been my problem. But then why had she turned me down? Maybe I wasn’t her type.

She wasn’t
my
type, that was for sure. I guess I’d always liked the look of real athletic girls, tall ones with long, lean legs and small, tight breasts. The girls who caught my eye when we cruised the mall in Reno pulled their hair up in high ponytails and wore skinny little jeans and tank tops. They painted their nails the color of cotton candy, and their mouths, too.

Lala wasn’t like any girl I’d ever met before. She was almost like a mirage, it was so clear that she didn’t belong out here in the desert. I wondered where she was from. She didn’t speak with an accent, but she seemed foreign somehow. And
she was all curves and softness—her hair, the thick, dark ringlets of it, her breasts cresting out of that white lace bra, her little waist and then her hips, like a curvy vase.

But that wasn’t all of it, the way she looked wasn’t the whole attraction. It was some of it, undoubtedly, but it wasn’t just that, how she looked, the way she smelled.

Her eyes—they weren’t soft. Not even a little. They were hard, shiny onyx. They saw everything but showed nothing. Even though she looked about my age, she acted way older, and like she knew everything there was to know—about me, about everything. I wanted to know everything too, everything about
her
. I wanted to hear her story, and I wanted to be the guy to soften that steely gaze.

I was running hard now, even though I hadn’t intended to. My arms were tight at my sides, slicing through the air, and I sprinted right past my house. I felt the familiar burning in my lungs and down the backs of my thighs as I pushed myself even faster, going an extra block and trying to forget about Lala for a minute, pouring everything into my running.

It worked—for half a block my mind was clear at last as I forced myself to go even faster. All my focus went to my feet hitting the ground, my breaths in and out. And then I crossed the imaginary finish line I’d set for myself, and I slowed back to a jog, then, at last, to a walk.

I felt good. Emptied out. Clear. Running did that for me.

It was the counselor, Mrs. Howell, who’d suggested it—channeling my anger into my running. During freshman year, after I’d sat with an ice pack against my swollen eye
from a fight with Chad Harrison, a senior. I’d had my ass handed to me, but I did get in a couple of good hits.

“You’ve got a real talent, Ben, and a shot at something big,” she’d chastised me. “But you’re going to screw it all up if you can’t learn to control your anger.” I guess I sort of became her pet psychology project—not that I wasn’t grateful for it. Probably, without her help, my school record would have been too riddled with fights and suspensions resulting from fights for UCSD to give a rat’s ass about my running times.

When I rounded the corner back onto our block I heard James banging around back by the fort. It sounded like he was trying to take it apart single-handedly.

Guilt. I remembered that I’d promised to help him tear down the fort that afternoon. Now the sun was getting ready to set, and we hadn’t even started. I imagined how the day had probably gone—my little brother waiting patiently for me at the kitchen table, his hands folded in that peculiar way of his, with the thumbs crossed, too. How long would he have sat there before he figured out that I’d forgotten about him?

I peeked over the fence and watched him for a minute. He was in his own little world, methodically swinging Dad’s heaviest mallet again and again against the side of the fort. His swings weren’t hard; it was more like he was measuring time than really trying to do any serious demolition.

In the desert, wood dries out pretty quick. Really, it was
sort of a miracle that the fort hadn’t collapsed already, over the years.

James wasn’t dressed for manual labor. Was he ever? His shorts were plaid cotton, neatly pleated down the front. He wore a T-shirt like any other twelve-year-old, but somehow he managed to make it look formal. And his shoes were these ridiculous leather Jesus sandals he had
needed
to have. They were the dumbest-looking shoes I had ever seen in my life. He’d found them online somewhere and had bullied Mom for three straight weeks until she finally ordered them.

“I don’t know,” she kept saying. “They look like
girls
’ shoes.”

Each time James would sigh and shake his head. “They’re not
girls
’ shoes, Mom. Look at the model. He’s a
boy
.”

Mom hadn’t looked too convinced that the androgynous Asian kid in the pictures was really male, but at last she’d given in.

That was the problem. When I wasn’t around to talk James out of these ridiculous ideas—which I only had about a fifty percent success rate at, anyway—who would clean up the inevitable messes he created?

And it wasn’t like I hadn’t had a choice, if I wanted to be completely honest. I’d applied to Reno’s University of Nevada campus as a backup and I’d gotten in, of course. I could have enrolled there, stayed at home a couple more years, maybe transferred once James was out of junior high. But I couldn’t hold his hand forever. And UCSD was my
dream
school. I’d only had the nerve to apply there because I’d read
in one of those “How to Apply for College” books that you have to be rejected from at least one school or you’ll always wonder if you didn’t aim high enough. So UCSD was the school that was supposed to turn me down.

Only it didn’t. And once I got the acceptance letter—along with an offer for full financial support—how was I going to say no to that?

James was excited too, I told myself. Now he’d have someone to visit in California.

I was lying, though. How would my parents ever be able to send him out for a visit? They’d barely have enough to pay their bills now that the mine was closed, now that Pops was out of work. Even when they’d both been working there had never been any extra money. There wouldn’t be a travel fund set up anytime in the near future.

The way James swung the mallet made me laugh a little. It was the same as how he swung a bat, back when he used to play T-ball—terribly. He swung entirely from the arms. And he had pretty strong arms, but he didn’t get any rotation in the hips. He’d never get a solid hit like that. I’d tried to teach him, so had my dad, but James was not interested in taking instruction.

That was something else he and I didn’t have in common. I was perfectly happy learning from someone else’s mistakes. It only took me watching Hog Boy puke himself silly after drinking an eighth of Jägermeister for me to decide that I would
never
get that drunk. But James—he wanted to figure everything out for himself.

I watched him swing the mallet a few more times, until it
just got too painful to watch. Then I unlatched the gate and let myself into the yard. “Give me that thing,” I said.

James’s face lit up like Christmas when he saw me. “Ben! You’re home!”

This made me feel even more like shit. If someone had kept me waiting the whole afternoon, I wouldn’t be all that happy when he finally turned up. But James just seemed glad that I’d decided to put in an appearance.

He handed me the mallet. It was totally the wrong tool for the job. Dad had a sledgehammer out in the garage; I wondered for a minute why James hadn’t chosen it, but then I figured that it was probably too heavy for him.

“Watch and learn,” I said, and James took a couple of steps back.

It took me a minute before I swung the mallet. I took one last look at the fort—this was where Pete and I had smoked our first joint. My last joint, too, it turned out—one round of coughing and hacking was enough to convince me that the munchies weren’t fun enough to counterbalance the effect smoking would have on my running times.

This was where the three of us—Pete, Hog Boy, and I—used to sleep on the hottest nights of summer, shooting the shit until it was too black outside to even see each other’s faces.

This was where I’d come with Becca Wilson during sophomore year. She was my first girlfriend, and this was where I’d kissed her for the first time. I hadn’t admitted to Becca it was the first time I’d kissed a girl, but I’m pretty sure my nerves gave me away.

“Well?” asked James. “Aren’t you going to swing that thing?”

I nodded, sort of miserable. It seemed like I should say something, some kind of a eulogy to the end of an era, but I didn’t have the words. So I swung the mallet, pivoting on my hips, and I tore through the first wall.

I pulled the mallet free and backed up a couple of steps before having another whack at the fort. Most of my hits were solid, and pretty soon the fort was starting to tilt to one side. James stood back a little ways, watching.

But after seeing me get in a few more whacks, James stepped back up. “Hey,” he said, “let me have another try.”

I handed him the mallet and wiped the sweat from my forehead. “Give it a go.”

And I’ll be damned if my little brother didn’t swing that mallet like a motherfucker. My eyes just about came out of my head.

I thought maybe it was just a lucky hit, so I gestured to him to have another go. The second swing was as solid as the first and one of the boards cracked apart. The fort tilted a little more.

I was dumbfounded. “Holy shit, James, where’d you learn to swing like that?”

He shrugged and swung again, taking out a chunk of the back wall.

“Just a second,” I said, and I ran to the garage. I found Dad’s sledgehammer and took it out to James. “Try this one.”

He hefted the sledgehammer for a minute and looked at
me like I was crazy, but then he swung it up on his shoulder. It was hard for him, but he did it.

And then he slammed it into the wall, carried off balance by its swing, and the board he struck splintered into pieces.

His eyes got wide with surprise, and then he grinned. I grinned too.

The next twenty minutes were awesome. We took turns swinging the sledgehammer and the mallet, and between the two of us the fort was decimated pretty quick. Then we pulled the wood into a big pile, stacking it in the center of the yard.

The wood lit on the first try. A giant bonfire sprang up, crackling and sending up sparks as the flames devoured the wood.

The kid was practically hopping from foot to foot, he was so thrilled. I was happy, too. I felt great. I didn’t care anymore about the fort—so what if it had to come down, so what if our town was gasping its last breaths? Things were changing, sure, but maybe that was all right. Maybe they would change for the better.

Look at the kid—look at him! His hair was mussed, his preppy shorts were torn across one knee, and he didn’t even notice. I felt a giant upsurge of hope. Maybe things were going to be okay. Maybe everything was all right.

James hooted and hollered as the fire burned. Mom and Pops must have seen the flames from inside because they came running out. They stood there in the doorway, and their faces looked worried at first—“You’ll burn the whole
place down,” Mom said, but then she must have realized how little that would matter at this point, because she started to laugh.

It felt good like that, the whole family in the yard. I realized it had been a long time—it felt like years, but it couldn’t really have been that long—since the four of us had been like this. Close.

Pops leaned down and said something to Mom that I couldn’t hear and they turned together back into the house. A minute later Pops reemerged holding a fire extinguisher. “Just in case,” he said, handing it to James and ruffling his hair.

James didn’t even smooth it.

After a while the fire started to die down. Pops had gone back inside, so James and I had the yard to ourselves. We sat on the back porch.

It was hopeful. That’s what it was. And I remembered the reading Lala had done—I remembered the card, the Page of Cups. What was it she had said about James? That he was somehow coming into his self-realization. That he was creative, emotional, imaginative. Okay. All of those things were okay. Maybe James was a late bloomer. Maybe he was just now getting a sudden rush of testosterone. After all, look at the way he’d swung that sledgehammer—he was a solid hitter, it turned out, just as soon as he learned to really pivot, to throw his weight behind it.