Desert Boys (9 page)

*   *   *

Not often, my uncle said, but sometimes, a person would ask Phil what it was that he did. And by that they usually meant, how do you make your money, how is it that you
earn a living.
His response wouldn't exactly fill him with pride: hired help, here and there, painting houses or else moving lumber with Jim, most of the time out of work. “You're only twenty-one,” Jim reminded him. In fact, Jim had been reminding Phil of his age with the word “only” in front of it for years—only seventeen, only eighteen, and so on. Phil wondered how much longer the word “only” would apply. But for now, he supposed it was true. He was only twenty-one. So despite the fact he hadn't offered as
meaningful
an answer as he'd have liked, the question—what do you do?—didn't tug at him too bad.

What helped was that he had something in the works—a project, a big one. He was collecting old VW buses. So far he had six, all of them incapable of running, all of them rotting with thirty years' worth of rust and dust and backseat lust. That line—that was Jim's.

Phil found the first bus abandoned in the desert, out on the northeast edge of the Antelope Valley. From time to time, Jim took him out there, far enough from law enforcement to shoot the rifles and pistols he collected. Jim Durant, a hardworking but carefree man double the twenty-one-year-old's size, was someone Phil felt lucky to have on his side. It was Jim who'd let Phil tag along on jobs, and it was Jim, too, who had talked the trailer park manager—Uncle Gaspar—into letting Phil shack up there when he needed the help. Jim might have been “only” a decade older than Phil, but these acts of kindness and the faint, final wisps of hair that clung to the top of the big man's scalp seemed to give him a type of paternal authority Phil hadn't sensed from anyone. Sometimes Phil saw him like an old Southern politician, wagging a finger at bureaucracy, making sure of certain things, like, no one takes care of your business but you. Like, being given a hand up from a friend is different than getting a handout from a program.

So they'd go out to the nearby desert and shoot together. But this one time, Jim loaded his favorite rifle, a .44 magnum Marlin 1894SS, into the covered bed of his Chevy pickup. The gun shot at about 165 decibels—too loud even for their regular shooting grounds. So they went out farther into the desert. Jim drove—careful, once they'd left the road, to avoid the softer sand that collected in patches around that time of year, in May.

And the long and short of it is, there was this old VW bus, dull green, fossilizing out there beneath a Joshua tree, as if someone had searched long and hard for a parking spot with shade. The two men got out of the truck. They considered the bus. Phil said, “Hey, someone might be living out of this thing.” Jim unlocked the hatch on his pickup and found a handgun. He checked the magazine to make sure it was loaded, and told Phil to stay put. Then he traveled the fifty feet or so till he reached the bus.

The way he held the gun up near his chest, the way he put his back against the bus before peeking over his shoulder into its window—it all seemed, to Phil, so
televised.
Still, he watched his old friend and mentor pull the VW's door handle and climb into the thing with a level of anxiety he hadn't felt in some time, as if this were the first moment in a long while that felt even a little monumental.

Not much time passed before Jim returned, rattling a set of keys attached to a blue tether. “Looks like the sons of bitches left it for us,” he said.

“Engine work?”

“Don't look like it.”

Then they talked about how to rig up the bus to the back of the Chevy, how to tow the big green monster back through the desert. Wasn't too tough, really, once they got the momentum.

*   *   *

That was the first one. The other buses, the newer five, didn't have the same accidental backstories. These were simply purchased here and there through classified ads Phil and Jim started keeping their eyes on. Always fixer-projects, never running. Dirt-cheap, each of them. In fact, one of the orange ones was given away for free. All the buses, one after the other, towed into the unused gravel lot adjacent to one of the trailer parks over on Avenue I, where they both lived rent-free. Jim had convinced my uncle to shave off the rent and fence in the lot, all in exchange for working odd jobs around the place, including their big-duty, park security during the nights: Jim on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays; Phil on the in-betweens.

In this way, the two men started working every day, as much as they could, on the VW buses, gutting them and sweating over their motors, eventually looking to give them all new paint jobs, trying to hawk them to young kids who seemed to find the old things hip. That was the plan. That's what Phil had in mind.

*   *   *

The girls came to the fence on a Saturday afternoon sometime in November. Despite what the calendar said, the summer hadn't really ended, not in the daytime anyway, and the girls wore outfits to prove it. There were two of them, a brown-haired white girl and a light-skinned black girl, both of them in short cutoff jeans, both of them in tank tops and flip-flops. They each looked around the same age, maybe fourteen or fifteen. They were just walking along the fence, on their way to wherever they were headed, when Jim mentioned them to Phil, who happened to have his head under the hood of the green bus, the first one.

“Look at these,” said Jim.

Phil turned to see what it was he'd pointed out. “Not bad, not bad,” Phil said. “At all,” he added, and went back to work.

Jim was the first to speak to the girls. Phil didn't hear what it was but looked back to see their reaction. They giggled, and the white girl said something in the ear of the black girl. They kept walking, only now they were checking out the buses.

“They aren't pieces of meat,” Jim said to the girls, motioning to the cars. “You can't just stare at them without introducing yourselves.”

Now the girls stopped at the fence and leaned into it, hanging their fingers onto the chain-link holes there.

“The gate's unlocked,” Jim said, pointing to the girls' left. “Enter, if you dare.”

At this point, Phil said, “You're going to get me into trouble, Durant.”

The white girl said, and you could hear the laughter in her voice when she said it, “Why don't you come over here?” Then she turned to the other girl, who, once she caught her breath from laughing, called out to Jim, “And bring your friend!”

“You hear that?” Jim asked Phil. Then, to the girls: “We don't have egos, girls. We don't mind heading over to you. We don't … play games.”

He took his time on his way to the fence. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and beat his left palm with the pack as he moved. Phil walked a step behind.

“Where you girls off to?” Jim asked once he got close enough. The girls, still on the other side of the fence, never stopped smiling.

“The movies,” the white girl said.

“The movies? How about that! My buddy Phil here, he was just talking about heading to the movies.”

Phil laughed a little and crossed his arms, unsure what to do with them.

Jim slipped a cigarette between his lips and put the pack away. “Oh,” he said, retrieving the pack from behind his back. “How rude of me. Didn't even offer. You girls want one?”

They both said no. They said thank you. They were very polite.

“Smart girls,” said Jim. “Bad habit. What movie you girls going to? Maybe we're heading to the same one.”

The white girl began to say the name of the movie, but her friend interrupted her. “You first,” the black girl asked.

“You know, we're torn,” said Jim. “Torn between that new action movie with the different cities getting blown up, and that romance with the young girl and the older guy falling in love.” He paused. “You girls know about love?”

The girls, still seemingly enjoying the flirtation, let go of the fence. They started walking again, not in a rush, and the white girl looked over her shoulder at the men. “We're fast learners,” she said. “Maybe next time you could teach us.”

Jim loved it. He said, “Next time it is,” and then asked for their names.

“Allie,” the white girl said after a laugh, clearly lying. “I'm Allie, and this is Caitlyn.” And when they were gone, Jim looked as though they hadn't left at all. He said, “Are you kidding me?” over and over, socking Phil's arm. He said, “Which one you like best? I don't discriminate.” They worked on the buses some more that day, with Jim talking about the girls and Phil talking about the girls, too, both of them wondering aloud what it was they'd do the next time those girls walked along that fence.

*   *   *

That night was Phil's turn to patrol the park. He was alone, and the heat of the day had become a frigid, windless cold. He was supposed to walk the paved paths between the trailers from ten o'clock till sunrise. For the job, my uncle had provided Phil and Jim each a flashlight and a two-way radio (one to share between the two of them; the other stayed with Gaspar). Phil knew that Jim, on his nights, would bring along some extra equipment—a gun, namely—but Phil carried only what he'd been given. He knew that most of the criminals in the Antelope Valley were kids, as he'd been, scared off easily enough by a bright light and a holler.

At some time past midnight, he decided to head over to the lot to check up on the buses. Eventually, the space would be used for more trailers. But for now, the new fence was all that separated the place from the park on one side and the uncultivated desert on the other. It used to be that kids would set up a basketball hoop out there. Phil had known the family that owned the hoop, and they'd left a few years back, taking the thing with them. In the time between the basketball and the VWs, the only objects that ended up on the gravel were either dumped and abandoned, or led there by the wind. My uncle didn't tell Jim and Phil outright, but he was glad to have the VW buses; he liked the idea of the lot being put to some good use.

The buses, all six of them, were parked in a single row. From where he stood, Phil could see the front ends, those big, bubbled headlights, the VW insignias between them. To save the flashlight's battery, Phil kept the thing off unless he needed it, which meant that the only light on the gravel lot now came from the orange-bulbed arc lamps that lined Avenue I. In that strange, muted glow, the buses looked new. The spots where oxidation had done its job on the paint hid in it, reflecting and absorbing the hazy light just as the more polished areas did. The headlights, all twelve of them, crystallized the light back at Phil in a way that reminded him of the twinkling eyes of cartoon children.

He moved on, working the perimeter of the place, and then inward toward my uncle's office at the center, and then back outward again. In this way, in layers, he worked the remainder of his shift.

*   *   *

Sunday, at about the same time as the day before, the girls returned. Phil hadn't expected them to come back at all, and even Jim was surprised to see them again so soon. He thought, at the very earliest, they'd come back the next Saturday. He said to Phil, “How bad can a girl want it?”

This time, Allie asked the men if she and Caitlyn could get a closer look at what she called the “hippie cars.” Jim let them in through the gate, telling them they could sit behind the wheel of one, if that was something they'd like to try. It turned out that, yes, that's exactly what they had in mind.

So in went Allie, into the driver's seat of the yellow one. “Yellow's my favorite color,” she said more than once. Jim closed the door behind her, and she rolled down the window. With one hand gripping the top of the wheel, she waved her fingers down at Caitlyn, who stood flanked on either side by the owners of the bus. “How do I look?” Allie asked the three of them. Great, they said. They all agreed that the girl looked great.

“Take a picture of me,” Allie said, and Caitlyn slid from her back pocket a thin red camera. Allie posed in various ways. She made certain faces, many of which featured sticking out her tongue. From several angles, Caitlyn snapped pictures. Then she climbed up to the passenger seat and handed the camera, along with instructions, to Phil.

“You girls know how to drive one of these things?” asked Jim.

“Caitlyn can't drive a bicycle,” Allie said. Her friend disagreed, loudly. The girls found this funny. “But I,” Allie continued, “have my driver's license.”

“Driver's
permit,
” Caitlyn corrected.

“No difference there,” said Jim. “But do you know how to drive a manual transmission? A stick shift?”

“Not really,” Allie said. “Learned on the other kind.”

“Not surprising,” said Jim. He made a joke about putting the “man” in “manual.”

Allie pivoted her body in the driver's seat to face the men, letting both her arms fall from the open window. With her palms she drummed a soft beat against the door. Phil snapped a picture of her this way. “Teach us,” she said.

Phil slipped the camera into his shirt pocket for safekeeping. He said, “Don't you girls have fathers for that?”

“Quiet all along and the first thing he says is negative,” Jim said. “Don't mind him, girls. Of
course
we could show you what you need to know. Only problem is: None of these dinosaurs are in what we call ‘running condition.' Good news is, I've got a manual transmission in my own vehicle, a working truck, just over there.” He threw his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the trailer park. “What do you say?”

Allie looked to her friend. “Can't,” she said, turning back to Jim. “Caitlyn has to be home before her mom gets there.”

“And that's soon?”

“Real soon.”