Burning (30 page)

Judy placed the lamp carefully in the center of the truck’s cab before climbing in. Russell slid behind the wheel and they drove away.

Hog Boy spun the key chain around his finger. “Time to go,” he said.

“I’ll see you at Christmas, all right? I can’t come back for Thanksgiving, but I’ll check out your new place in December.”

Hog Boy looked as though he might say something hurtful to Ben and I felt myself bracing against it. But then his face softened.

“Okay, man. Hey—Knock, knock.”

Ben rolled his eyes, but he answered. “Who’s there?”

“Boo.”

“Boo who?”

“Stop crying, you pussy. It’s not the end of the world.”

Ben laughed. So did Hog Boy. They laughed and laughed, and there was nothing but their laughter and their friendship. All their problems, all their differences fell away, and I saw the little boy in each of them.

“Get out of here, then, and go show your Gypsy girl a good time,” said Hog Boy. They shook hands, and then embraced.

Hog Boy climbed into his family’s car, a tired-looking brown sedan, and we watched as he drove away, his hand stretched out the window to wave goodbye.

Ben put his arm across my shoulders and I leaned my head against him. So many goodbyes. And more still to come. I remembered it—our last card. The pierced heart, the driving rain.

It was in my future. Ben’s, too. Yet it was not necessary to rush to greet it. We could tarry first. There was time still for us, and I intended to enjoy it.

Korkoro
.

The salt flats of the playa are an ideal place to do things you can’t get away with doing practically anywhere else. The long, flat expanses make it perfect for going really, really fast—the land speed record has been set, broken, and set again in Black Rock Desert. And unlike a highway, it’s not just a long, straight strip; you can go in any direction. But also unlike a highway, the surface isn’t grippy, so your tires can slip out all haywire without any notice. More than a few amateur speed freaks have rolled their cars out here by turning too sharp.

You can burn things out here, too. With no vegetation to worry about, pyromaniacs have a monster hard-on for the place. That’s half the reason some of these pyros travel all the way out to the playa for what they call Burning Man—for the pleasure of the burn. They burn a lot more than just the effigy on Saturday night; all week long the partiers light bonfires, send up rockets and flares, explode shit just for the hell of it.

Lala wanted to see Burning Man, and I wasn’t about to
let her go to that freak show alone. It was true that I’d never been inside, but I’d seen some of the characters who pass through town for supplies. Wild eyed, half the time done up in some crazy costume or another, usually stoned or baked or drunk.

If Lala wanted to go, I’d take her there. But I had made a decision, during the quiet hours that she’d slept in my arms. If her family wasn’t going to protect her anymore, if they’d really thrown her out for good—then I would take care of her.

I hadn’t told Lala yet how I felt, but that didn’t make it any less real. I knew what I felt. It was love.

Pete drove us out to Burning Man. I sat in the middle so that Lala wouldn’t have to be jammed up against him. Lala kept her window down and watched the desert.

Pete had the music turned way up and was beating his thumbs against the steering wheel. He sang along with the song every few words, but he didn’t really know the lyrics, so half the time he just sort of hummed the tune. I’d thrown my backpack into the bed of the truck, but Lala kept hers tucked down by her feet.

I felt myself tensing as we neared the place on the highway where Lala’s family had camped, but I don’t know which was worse—the anticipation of seeing their motor home and tent or the shock of realizing they weren’t there anymore.

“Stop here, please,” said Lala.

Pete didn’t seem to hear her, so I shoved him in the ribs. “Hey, pull over.”

“Huh? Here?”

He parked, and Lala climbed down out of the truck. There was nothing much to see—her family had cleared out pretty thoroughly. I couldn’t really remember where exactly the motor home had been parked, where the trailer and tent had been. There was sort of a circle of rocks that had been their fire pit, but it was all kicked around like someone had wanted to mess it up but hadn’t taken the time to do it right.

This was where Lala went. She knelt down at the edge of the circle. Her skirt trailed into the ashes. Pete and I sat in the truck, watching her. I wanted to go out to her because she looked really sad, totally alone, but I thought maybe she needed a little time to herself. I felt myself getting really mad at her family. Who the fuck were they to leave her here like this, in a strange town, even worse, a town that wouldn’t even
be
a town in a couple of days? Abandoning her in the middle of the desert … bizarre.

“What do you think she’s doing?” Pete asked. “Some sort of weird Gypsy ritual?”

Her back was to us, but I could see it moving a little, like she was shaking. “I think she’s crying,” I said.

I left Pete in the truck and walked up behind her. She’d sat herself all the way down at the edge of the fire pit, and she had a rock in her lap. As far as I could tell it didn’t look any different from any of the other rocks.

I knelt down next to her. She was crying, all right, but she
didn’t make any sound, which in some way was even worse. Tears poured down her cheeks and her shoulders moved up and down like she was trying real hard to hold it together but she couldn’t quite do it.

I didn’t know what to say. What
could
I say? But I felt like I needed to say something—I mean, here was this girl—a girl I
loved
—who was crying like her heart had broken.

I wished her dad was there so I could punch him in the face. And Romeo, too, and his brother. Some of these rocks that made up the fire pit were just the right size to fill a fist, perfect for a good face pounding.

But there was no one to hit. There was just Lala and me, and Pete waiting for her to pull it together.

There was no way
I
was going to leave her, too. That was what I had been mulling over the night before—how could I possibly walk away from Lala, after what we’d shared, after what she had given me? That would make me just as bad as her family—maybe worse. Where would she go without me? What would she do?

It didn’t matter, because it wasn’t going to happen. I was with Lala, and I wasn’t going anywhere. Not without her.

When I put my arm around her shoulder Lala seemed grateful for it. She turned her face into my shirt and cried a little more, but I could tell the worst was already past. After a minute she dried her eyes.

“Thank you, Ben Stanley,” she said.

“No problem.” I stood up and gave her my hand. “Are you sure you want to go to Burning Man? We don’t have to. And I really don’t think it’s gonna be your scene.”

“That is exactly why I want to go.” She was holding one of the rocks from the fire pit. It was just a rock, but she looked down on it as if she saw something I didn’t see.

And when we climbed into the truck, when we pulled back onto the highway, she didn’t look back. Not one time.

I’d been out to the entrance to Burning Man a few times over the years. I didn’t have Hog Boy’s voyeuristic obsession with the place, but he’d managed to drag me out to see the sights at least once a year all through high school. So I knew what to expect when we drove up: We crested a little rise in the road and then, all of a sudden, instead of blank desert there was a city in the middle of nowhere.

A strange sort of city—ringed by a fence of four-foot-tall orange plastic netting, the city was formed of tents, lean-tos, RVs, and tent trailers. From the road you couldn’t see the details, but I knew that when we got up close Lala would be getting an eyeful.

That orange plastic fence seemed like a little glimpse into the future; in just a couple of days a fence would go up around our town, too. But there wouldn’t be anyone inside, and the fence the mining company was erecting would be topped with barbed wire.

This fence was designed to go up fast and come down fast later, when the week was over. The one around Gypsum—who knew how long it would stand? Probably until the elements eroded it, along with everything else.

Pete pulled his truck up toward the main entrance. I knew
that on the first couple of days, cars and trucks formed a long, winding line as greeters checked tickets and inspected vehicles to make sure no one was hiding in the trunks of the cars and in the showers of the motor homes, trying to avoid the steep price of entrance.

But this was Saturday; everyone coming to Burning Man was already here. We were the only car driving up to the entrance, and unlike the other times I’d been out here, always toward the beginning of the week, there wasn’t a big group of greeters gathered around the entrance gate. Actually, it looked pretty deserted.

It was early in the afternoon and really, really hot; probably anyone with any sense was inside a tent or an RV trying to avoid the sun.

“How are you guys gonna get in?”

I shrugged. “Lala says she’s going to buy the tickets.”

Pete whistled, impressed by the idea of so much money being shelled out for a single day. “I could try to drive around the perimeter,” he suggested. “We could see if there’s a place where you could climb in without anyone really seeing.”

Lala shook her head. “We will go in the main entrance.”

I shrugged at Pete. He was smart enough not to argue with her; Lala had a way of talking that pretty much let you know she wasn’t opening up a discussion.

“You want me to wait to make sure you get in?”

This didn’t sound like a bad idea to me, but Lala refused. “We will be fine, thank you. If you would just drive us to the front.”

“Well, I’ve got my phone if you need anything,” said Pete as we got out of the truck.

“Thanks, man. I’ll give you a call when we’re ready to head out.”

“Thank you, Pete,” said Lala. “I appreciate your kindness.”

“No problem,” said Pete. He looked a little embarrassed. “I’ll see you guys later. Have fun.”

Every year Burning Man had a theme that sort of guided the art projects people brought and also created kind of a vibe. In the past the theme had been all kinds of things—Rites of Passage, the American Dream, and Evolution are a few I remembered. This year I guess it was New Horizons. There was a big banner across the entrance, a picture of a desert landscape with a rising sun exploding into fire,
NEW HORIZONS
printed in big, bold letters.

Hog Boy had told me about the time he’d gone to Burning Man, all the half-naked chicks and guys in skirts and costumes lined up to tear tickets. But today there was just one guy in the front, sitting on a folding lawn chair with an umbrella stuck into the back. Not far away were a couple of ladies, probably in their fifties, each with the leathery skin of a lifelong tanner. They were stretched out in a patch of shade and looked to be asleep. Either that or dead.

The guy was wearing a big, broad-rimmed straw hat and some khaki shorts and a tank top. Nothing like the people Hog Boy had described. Behind him I could see the layout of what they call Black Rock City, a big, horseshoe-shaped
curve of campsites and art displays. Straight ahead was the Man himself—a giant wooden effigy, maybe eighty feet tall, that would burn later that night after being stuffed with fuel.

One year some guy managed to set the thing on fire like four days early. Hog Boy said he wished
he
would have thought of that, but it seemed to me a pretty lame thing to go to jail for.

Pete drove away as we walked up to the guy in the lawn chair. For a second I thought maybe he was just going to watch us walk on in. But then he said, “You guys miss the bus back or something?”

Every day of the Burning Man week, a bus carried loads of people into and out of our town, keeping Melissa pretty busy down at the Gypsum Store. This guy must have thought we’d gone into town on that bus and hadn’t made it back on board.

“We did not miss the bus,” said Lala. “We have just arrived.”

“Just arrived?” He sat up straighter now, looking us up and down. “You virgins?”

I felt Lala next to me take a sharp breath. “What did you say?”

He smiled at me like an idiot. “You virgins?” he said again. Luckily, he added before I punched him in the nose, “This your first time here?”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Well, welcome to Burning Man,” he said. “You got money?”

Now I felt like a piece of shit as Lala nodded yes. I’d only been on a few dates, but I’d always paid.

“I could pay you the entrance fee,” Lala said, “but perhaps I could offer you something of more value instead.”

“Hey, I’m all for barter,” said the man, “but they’re pretty strict about the entrance fee. No exceptions.”

“Tonight the Man burns, does it not?”

“That’s right.”

“And for you especially that ritual must hold special meaning.”

“What do you mean, for me especially?”

“You find yourself here, outside your element, yearning for something you think you have not yet found. Perhaps you came here looking for answers … but you have not been successful in finding them.”