California(41)

The Land. Appropriately vague, vaguely philosophical, a tinge poetic. Cultish, maybe. But, at least, if the place was named, it meant its citizens wanted to stay here, make it into something worthwhile.

The kiosk led to one long dusty road. It was a main street, the kind Cal saw in his mind’s eye when he imagined fledgling mining towns, new settlements of the Wild West. The world of children’s history books, adventure stories. This had once been the kind of place where men settled arguments with bullets, and the rare woman flashed a leg at the saloon; a town that had probably been forsaken in a day, and easily: all of its inhabitants leaving at once, driven away when the wells ran dry or when the gold ran out. Or after an earthquake had unbuckled its foundation, scaring the easterners silly.

“A ghost town?” Frida asked.

That same dopey grin spread across Sailor’s face. “The ghost of a ghost town.”

Cal raised an eyebrow.

“It was built in the 1800s and then reopened a few decades ago as a place to wear a cowboy hat and imagine the past. Closed down about twelve years ago, after it cost too much to keep it running. I guess people stopped driving out of their way to leer at a bunch of abandoned buildings—too costly, and the roads just got worse and worse. We still have some pamphlets, though, from when it was open as an attraction. I can show you later.”

“Sailor,” Peter said, and the kid stopped talking.

The road was lined with sagging wooden houses. There were two larger structures farther down. A few had plank walkways leading to their doorways—some of the doors had long blown off. One of these openings was covered by a large animal hide; it looked coarse and crusty, and it flapped in the breeze.

Near the kiosk stood a single brick wall, freestanding and crumbling, uneven. The other parts of the building must have collapsed and then dissolved. Or, more likely, been reused. The houses on either side of them were part ghostly and antiquated and part rehabbed. The two parts didn’t match. A few of these extensions looked like the house he and Frida lived in.

“The Miller Estate,” Cal whispered to Frida and gestured to the house to her left.

Peter looked like he was about to say something, explain, but Frida grabbed Cal’s hand and said, “Oh my God.” She was looking ahead, down the road.

People. There were people.

They were emerging from the houses and bigger buildings, one of which was a large church, with its steeple wrapped in barbed wire. One more Spike.

Cal pulled Frida to him and kissed her cheek, swept her knotted hair out of her eyes. She smelled of sweat, like the muskiness of the tea she used to like to drink in winter and the canvas of Bo’s rucksack. They would soon be carried away by this tide of strangers, and he didn’t want to lose her. Or was it her familiarity that he didn’t want to lose?

She smiled at him, but her gaze went right back to the people coming toward them. Cal couldn’t blame her; it was mesmerizing to see such a population. There must’ve been forty or so. All those faces and bodies. From afar, they looked like Peter, Dave, and Sailor. That is: human. Like Sailor, they had on normal street clothes, if a little torn up: Tshirts, jeans. Work boots or sandals, a few maybe barefoot. There were women, too, and some of them wore long dresses, the kind Sandy had been partial to. Thank goodness there weren’t only men, Cal thought. He didn’t want to enter a world like Plank. He didn’t want Frida to be the only woman.

As they got closer and the people’s faces began to differentiate themselves, in all their unique ways, Cal felt light-headed. It was the same feeling he’d experienced his second year at Plank, when he’d gone to a street fair three towns over and seen so many people he felt drugged by the newness.

He’d gone with Micah and a first-year they hardly knew. And that guy’s cousin—a real live girl. It was Micah’s Toni, though at the time, Cal had called her Antonia in his mind because her nickname sounded too much like a guy’s. She was three years older and lived in L.A.

No one was supposed to sleep on campus except for Plankers, but visitors came so rarely, and female ones never, that everyone let it go. Besides, she’d come with a trunk full of groceries for the students: Cheez-Its, celery, and apples from New Zealand, almost too expensive to eat. Her grandmother had money, though she claimed she never talked to her, that she’d run away years before. After one night on campus, Toni said even the quiet itself was boring, and so she’d driven her cousin, Micah, and Cal to the strange fair she’d seen signs for on the drive over. Cal wasn’t sure how he and Micah had smuggled themselves into that car; the other Plankers had been so envious.

The fair was in a suburb. An exurb, really. Wasn’t that the word? It had been so clean and antiseptic, Cal thought now. It was transformed into a Community soon after.

“How stimulating,” Micah had remarked as they passed beneath a banner painted with a garish rainbow, and Toni had laughed, thrown her head back as if she wanted him to slice open her neck. She’d been smitten with Micah immediately, the lucky bastard.

There were packs of people everywhere: watching juggling acts, eating corn on the cob, dancing to the music of a leather-vested fiddler. Cal wasn’t used to so much diversion, so much information. The colors, the noise, the sugar, and the salt. The fair left him giggling like a stupid drunk.

That’s what Cal wanted to do now. Giggle. He wasn’t happy, and this wasn’t funny; he was just overwhelmed. For months it had been just the two of them, Cal and Frida; even when the Millers were around, and even with August’s monthly visits, they negotiated a very limited universe. The same trees to count and admire, the same gardening routines. Suddenly everything and everyone were new. No wonder Frida didn’t want to look at him.