Cordell 1

Memories of dusty-basement grandpa-treasure come to him. Grandpa Joe (Franklin) gave up a brittle-box Meccano set to Fourteen-at-seven on a sleepover. Flat metal surfaces, tiny nuts and bolts to tie it all together into boxy shapes. The Bollinger-B1-SUT-interior looks like that. Malcolm King’s electric ride reminds the boy of the army-surplus-whim Levi rented at Bull Shoals (then left abandoned). The black slab-dashboard is riveting-simple. Five round dials seem like some ancient sci-fi movie rocket ship. A toolbox is welded tight between them. Later, Fourteen understands why.

Levi Fisher claims Malcolm King (and aging company) is Boston-fled in a Hippy-after. He is starting early on the Karma-balancing of his before cannibal-consumerism. The others have different stories, but they are all Baby-Boomers,recovering materialistic addicts, self-criticizing themselves with a communal-off-grid-cleansing. Sort of, because this polygonal Bollinger taking Fourteen to the back end of nowhere blew somebody’s budget.

They start off smooth. So smooth, Fourteen does not get the Luxor Winnebago problem. They could drive this narrow highway. His gut tells him he has been Levi-ditched. Fourteen twists back, peers over stacks of this-and-that, seeking sight of the truck carrying Levi. He spends so much time angling out the rear view mirror through the dusty window, Malcolm has to comment. “Roman and your grand uncle are somewhere back there. Don’t worry about them. Inez, that’s Roman’s daughter, she wants her own place. Some things have to be bought. You will like Inez.” Malcolm adds with an appraisal of the essential horneyness of all boys fourteen.

“This is a good road.” Fourteen accuses.

As if to answer, Malcolm seems to leave the blacktop safety. They start to rollercoaster the gentle swells of the laterite way. Still a road perhaps, Fourteen can see the way ahead to purple mountains majesty. Arizona box canyons promising some relief from the days of highway annui. Okay, this would shake Levi’s rig to pieces, the boy concedes. A knot unties in his stomach.

“We try not to buy anything, find a use for everything. It doesn’t always work.” Malcolm admits. “Our consumer culture is like a cancer. Like your grand uncle Levi’s brain tumour. You try to cut it out, but the garbage is in your DNA. We are all junkies poisoning our Mother Earth. American culture is toxic, kid.” Another appraisal of this problematic, teenage, angel of mercy, love-blocking his old friend’s personal health directive plan to die in Vietnam. “Really toxic if you are a person of colour.” the old man has to add. Malcolm dismisses the too-white-bread boy trampolining on the bucket seat beside him. Malcolm figures the sheltered little suburban WASP cannot relate to systemic exploitation from the narrow confines of his Charter School upbringing..

“So you like, 5-R everything?” The furrowed-brow, mouth-twitch sexiness of Fourteen’s tangerine face has no impact on Malcolm King. There was a young earnestness in Levi Fisher, back in the bewildering now of Vietnam. That DMZ world is half a hard-lived-century behind Malcolm. Still, the old man imagines he catches a glimpse of young Levi’s DNA there in the boy’s face. You’ll be okay, Preacher. The leg will be okay, just hang in there. Bookish Levi was the Doc. He was always where you needed him to be. He had the touch. The leg was lost, but Levi saved the rest.

“The Jesuits had this saying, they say, ‘Start a youth out on his way; even when he grows old he will not depart from it… Teach children how they should live, and they will remember it all their lives.” Malcolm is thinking of grandsons Keon and Vondell, thinking of their lost father. He knows nothing of this Kale Euller. He knows Levi Fisher, though, so he will lie to the boy, help the man who helped him twice.

They lapse into long silence. The trail is back-of-your hand familiar after seventeen years. Malcolm is past breaking axles on the desert thrills and chills roller coaster ride out to The Pueblo. Everyone has their own name for it, that is Malcolm's.

Kale seems Levi-smart to Malcolm. Fourteen keeps half an eye out the back window, looking for the trailing dust cloud. Malcolm wonders if this boy knows he has been played. The boy’s other half-an-eye is on the road-goat track. Malcolm knows when to slow down, when to pick it up. He shakes his head at the reckless off-road tourists with their throw-away 4by4s attitudes. Malcolm is careful with the new Bollinger. The road has been hard work. Seventeen years of stone picking this path. The boy does not see that.

Easy to forget the worry, Fourteen has a Jeremy Gates moment where he would kill to have Shane (or strangers-in-the-night Cameron) squeezed into the seat beside him. This drive is intense. It ought to be shared with someone he can laugh with. It is a dusty gravel-rock road with few tire tracks. Fourteen tries absorb everything. In this bush-boulder-ledge tangle he cannot not tell what lies ahead. Pale Red tumbledown rock cliffs, bramble bushes shading snow, hugging their lips, catch his eye. Unexpectedly, they dip into silent pools reflecting the gray sky and the cliffs beyond. Fourteen gets a SnapChat of straw pale grass lining the shore. Marvin shifts into four-wheel drive. Water foams up across the front of the vehicle. Waterfall sounds against the wheels. A windy wet sand sound against the tires.

“It hardly looks like it rains enough for that.” Fourteen chirps as the Bollinger claws its way up the other side.

“Flash floods, winter snow, this isn’t Death Valley, Kale.”

“Just call me Fourteen. Kale is a salad.” Kale is an unappetizing boy in New England. Fourteen does not like being Kale. Levi Fisher’s family ambivalence rubbed off on him. Besides, Kale Euller is a tired story Fourteen is glad to be free of. An After-March, before March, Levi promised, comforting thoughts. Fourteen rides the Bollinger-bronco hands free, legs braced. “This is trippy!” He adds.

The Bollinger shakes a little as it rocks across the road like a boat riding the waves. Somebody’s rock-strewn path, it is hardly a road anymore. Moment by moment it seems as if the tires will scrape against the jagged rocks lining the side. Fourteen guesses that if they met a vehicle there would be no room to pass. "It's going to get rocky, very rocky." Malcolm warns.

Rockier than this? The old Luxor Winnebago would be so much green scrap long ago. Bluffs of low-lying fan-shaped cactus congregate. Despite the sharp twists and turns, they are still driving towards the folded hills devoid of habitation. They climb up at crazy angles, threatening to flip the electric on its side. Fourteen hangs on. Round boulders the size of houses stand piled-precarious beside the road. Dark clefts at their bases threaten to start a tumble. Sage green mixes with light hues of tiny green leaves. Water is scarce and yet the cliffs seem washed away by torrents. This is not Ohio or the verdant hollows of the deep-shadow, Boone-forest-deep Appalachian Parks the Gates family visits. This is Westworld.

“Take a piss.” An old man, Levi moment, actually. Even so, Fourteen steps away from the silent electric to open himself to the parched earth. It is wind-rustle quiet. It is everything not a Walmart parking lot, KOA iteration. Exposed roots of pines and gnarled cottonwoods cling to nearby rocks. Dark branches form a sun-drawn lattice onto the dessicated ground mingling with the exposed roots. Fourteen feels sun, feels utterly lost, utterly centred.

At one point, they stop and the road seems to end. Malcolm backs and turns up on to a pan of stone that seems to hump over. Fourteen realizes the road is washed out and they have made a detour. It's like that all along the way. Long stretches of round cobblestone plaza to cross.  The road braids like some slow river meandering its way across the landscape. And always, the rocking of the car, back and forth, jarring up and down.

“How far have we come?” Fourteen glances at the iWatchdog on his wrist. “Is there cell service?” The silver Vietnamese necklace-deadman’s-switch seems to vibrate menacingly about his neck. Four months, this necklace-promise is the there-not-there now of Fourteen’s day. The death-threat is simply gravity. It just is. So, Fourteen orbits Levi, done deal. He has stopped looking for the missing truck. This rocky world is a place unto itself, swallowing up footsteps, swallowing up Fourteen. Fourteen imagines the gunshot-crack of the tiny charge exploding against the soft hollow of his neck. Malcolm grunts an unhelpful answer to Fourteen’s cell phone question.

The cell phone question seems to answer itself when a box Canyon closes in so tightly that if you put your arm out your fingertips could brush against the rock. Can you hear me now? Tar stains paint the rocks in high gloss and flat black. A single round rock the size of the Bollinger rises out of the road. Malcolm slows to a stop, then they lift cautiously over, dropping down on the ready springs.

“Why the hell do you live way out here? Are you hiding from the police?” Levi and he are visiting the Hole in the Wall Gang. Alaska, maybe Alaska is more off the grid. Jeremy Gate’s mom talks about Appalachia Hillbillies. This is that.

“It is cleaner here.” The old man replies. Old man with a 21st Century pegleg sticking out of his shorts. Fourteen thinks of R.L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island on his bedroom shelf. This location is wrong. That treasure-horde of doubloons lies sparkling in a Caribbean-tropical after. Fourteen’s now is the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He has not seen that old movie, might worry about the ending.

Trees reach down to brush the roof, tapping memories of Levi's Luxor Winnebago when it left the State Park. They are getting somewhere. The canyon opens up to glaring light that makes the eyes water. An oasis of shallow, ice rimmed water stretches away, shadowed against the wind worn sandstone. Still water mirrors rock and sky. Fourteen absorbs pale blue, whites, yellows, shadow lines water-wind etched deep. Suntan sandbars invite summer-lizard rest. Wind ripples broadcast out, beside it. They reach The Pueblo.

Keon, Vondell, Ruby-Leigh, the names slip in and out of Fourteen’s RAM. He will buffer the information, along with the other domestic factoids Malcolm King throws his way. The architecture-ethos of this small community does not matter to him. All that matters is a Ford carrying Levi and a load of building supplies for some girl named Inez. He lets Keon’s piping voice wash over him for a while, and then checks the flow. “I saw the satellite dish. Do you have the internet?”

“Nope, just TV,” Vondell shakes his head.

Keon’s turn. “Just a distraction, Grandpa says. Mom says only an hour.”

“Cell service?” Fourteen has checked his wristwatch, knows the answer, cannot believe it till he hears the words spelled out.

“Too far out. “Well, grandpa or Mr Montreal take mom’s phone with them just to get the updates. She says it sucks. No computer, no nothing out here.”

The silver band is dead weight around Fourteen’s neck. This is the forgotten August panic attack all over again. Fourteen is back in the Bronco screaming, Let me out, I want to get out! Only, there is more than a rusty door between him and freedom. The watch says he has hours before he needs to be afraid. He starts early anyway. “Where is the truck?” The boys shrug.

Fourteen drops his bag on a bunk. The bare plaster walls fail to register with him. Let the brothers walk him through the house, back out and through the gate. More buildings made of dirt. A fenced garden lost to the season. More names to forget while he waits for Levi. Fourteen realizes that this is just another KOA. Mud brick RV’s full of passing strangers. He walks away from Keon and Vondell’s excited chatter.

Fourteen follows the Bollinger’s tracks back to the road and Levi. He sits on a bolder shaded by a palo verde. After a while, he tires of sitting. It is easier to lie back, look through the branches to the indifferent sky.

“The boys said you were out here.”

Fourteen blinks into the darkening sky. He realizes he has fallen asleep on the rock. Even though the answer seems pointless-obvious, he asks, “Did Levi and the truck get here?”

“No, Roman isn’t back yet, son.” Malcolm settles awkwardly on the rock next to the supine boy. “We should be able to hear the truck pretty soon, though. Night is falling. Roman would hate to be driving that road in the dark. You wouldn’t think to look at it, but we put a lot of work into clearing that road. Even so, it is a rough go at night.”

Fourteen listens to the desert noises when Malcolm’s friendly voice drops off. In the barn, fresh-fucked by the men, he stood waiting for John and his Saturday-night-special, death card. It will never leave his memory. Open doors to either side, but dead certain there was no escape. Fourteen remembers the vomit-relief when John offered him life. He remembers the Gifford Pinchot State Park abandonment-betrayal.

“Your uncle loves you. He was worried for you.”

Levi offered him the Beretta Nano twice. “You’re safe,” the old man wanted him to think. The gun is in his bag now, back in the brother’s room. Safe, only that is a lie. The dead-goat truth is Levi likes him just well enough to choose to be somewhere else when the antique silver ring rips his parched throat out. Fourteen does not have to check the heavy watch on his wrist to know the WARNING is on its way.

“Let him go.” This other old man urges him.

“He only cares about himself. Nobody cares about me. If he cared about me,” Fourteen cannot finish the thought. If they all cared about me, they wouldn’t leave me. Fourteen sits up, resting his arms on his knees. “Leave me alone.”

Malcolm knows boys. First his son Franklin, angry on the Boston streets, then grandsons Vondell and Keon, getting desert-tired. Keon has pubescent-dark-moods at this exile already. Keon is old enough to remember what he is missing. All those easy distractions that lure a boy onto the streets where he almost lost Franklin, almost lost himself until Vietnam and the G.I. Act came along. Old bachelor Levi Fisher is clueless, but Malcolm knows boys. Malcolm has learned patience, lost patience, found it again.

“Levi won’t make it on his own.” Fourteen breaks his silence. “I’ve been driving as much as he has, maybe more. It eats away at his mind, his strength. That’s what my mom said. She knows. She works with people like him. He needs me to take care of him.”

“You feel betrayed, that is easy to understand. You cared about him. He knows that, Kale.” Malcolm reaches out a hand to pat the teenager’s shoulder. They are strangers still. He pulls the hand back. Something he just said sparks exasperation in the boy. There is an eye roll exhalation. Malcolm forges on, feeling put out that Levi chose this way to clear his debt.

“He told me you would do anything to stop him. Your granduncle is dying, boy. You know that. He told me you ran away to be with him. You would not let go, so your parents let you have this last time with him. Be glad they did. Hold these last memories close.” Malcolm has to stop, remember Franklin. “A man has to come to his end his own way. Your granduncle picked his. Some would say he is wrong. There are worse ways to die.”

“You have no idea.”

The words are adolescent-selfish. Malcolm knows center-of-their-own-universe boys all too well. “Kale,” he begins.

“I fucking hate that name. Call me Fourteen, call me kid, whatever.”

“Okay, Fourteen.” Who understands why boyhood nicknames latch on? “Doc, that was Levi’s nickname because he was our medic. He settled on calling me Preacher, knew I hated MLK. Doc has an ugly end ahead. We are old men. Old enough, anyway. A man chooses his own way out. You don’t have a right to stop him. He knew you would try.”

“What about my way out? What about forcing me to end it out here?” Malcolm feels the fury-despair scorch the Arizona air. “Levi fucked me. Now he is fucking me again.” The boy is twisting the useless SmartWatch about his thin wrist. “Did he give you his phone?” Malcolm thinks this an odd question.

“Cell phones don’t work out here.” The boy’s head drops onto his arms. Malcolm thinks the kid is a Millennial tech-junkie, jonesing like Franklin did for the next fix. “We don’t need that Internet crap out here.”

“Nice for you.”

“Suck it up, boy.” Malcolm knows boys. The time comes when you just have to tell it like it is to them. Levi’s grandnephew is just seventeen (or something). Malcolm came out to the desert because he knew his son Franklin was going to die. He had to step away, keep distance, so when it happened, he could bear the hurt. So it happened. Franklin found the end he sought all his life. Malcolm was left with Franklin’s orphan boys. “The deal is, you are here till I get word from Levi that he is out of reach in Vietnam. Then, you are free to tell your folks all about it.”

Fourteen throws two arms up into the air. “But you have no fucking phone, there is no fucking signal, and what about tonight? What are you going to do about tonight?”

“Levi will send me another email. I will get it next trip out.”

There is a long silence. Fourteen seems to have a thousand mile gaze that reaches over mountains to some place West, Far East. Angry-selfish tears drip down his cheeks. “What about tonight?” Fourteen repeats softly.

“Oh, I admit we are a little tight. You can squish in with Keon and Vondell for the month. The boys could set up a tent for you, if you need some space. Pretty cold though. Nowhere else to put you, I’m afraid.” There is Cordell’s room, over at the Faulkners.

The sound of Roman’s old truck comes between them. Even though Fourteen understands now that Levi has John-Patricked him with this old man, he sits dog-faithful for a sign of the Ed Harris security, his familiar partner-lover. Malcolm King has struggled to his feet. They wait out the passing of the rusty truck. The industrial fumes make light of Malcolm’s prissy electric Bollinger. The passenger seat is empty: no Levi, no Cordell. There will be a bottle of Tres Agaves on the empty seat for Samuel Faulkner. Both spectators to the passing truck sigh.

“So, come back to the house, have some supper. The boys are eager to show you around tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Fourteen echoes bleakly. “You don’t have a clue. Just, just leave me alone.” He does not want to be forking burettoes around the table when his throat opens up.

“Suite yourself,” Malcolm concedes. The boy needs his space, time to let the rage cool. Malcolm surveys the gloom. The city boy will be safe enough. First crackles on the desert floor and he will scamper back to the puzzle-cluster of The Pueblo. He will get cold, too.

This is a desert night Fourteen can not appreciate. He shifts frost-numb on the rock, speaking out the flattest spot. He would have sought the warmth of the boy’s room hours past if not for the WARNING from Levi’s wristwatch. The familiar buzz against his pulse jolts him tonight like a defibrillator. I should start running. It is a consideration: release the tension with a bobcat lope, let loose the jackrabbit terror. There is no outrunning the looped bomb about his neck. Fourteen Aspen-leaf shivers in the final now.

“Damn you Levi, god damn you old man!”

Fourteen needs to believe Levi Fisher told the truth about the bomb. He needs to believe Dr. Evil Fisher is not a bullshit-liar. The Vietnamese token of Tuan has to be real, otherwise Fourteen has been a fool. Fourteen has been tranced by the weaving boy-snake-charm old Levi flutes on. He gaslighted you, his Chillicothi friends laugh somewhere in the Arizona dark. You’re smarter than this, Remy Gates reminds him. Keep your eye on the glittering ring, while I make my cock disappear up your ass, Levi Fisher whispers in his Ed-Haris-soft voice. It was a willing suspension of disbelief. It was a necessary narrative for Fourteen.

The Vietnamese token of Fourteen has to be not real, otherwise he is betrayed worse than Tuan betrayed Levi in Da Nang. Fourteen is bed and soon to be dead, here in the back end of nowhere. “It was all a fake.” He decides, wanting not to die. “It’s just fucked.” He sighs, summarizing his situation. Fourteen needs it both ways. He looks off into the shadows crowding the road back to Jeremy Gates. There is no clear path in this darkness.

Deconstructing Levi-Fourteen’s inter generational verbal jousting, and the dusk-to-dawn, lazy afternoon, man-tangles does not help to pass the count-down time. Four months he has dealt cards on his own fate. Wanting to believe he is safe, liking the choice he has made, wanting to believe he had no choice, excusing the choice he made. Fourteen cannot talk himself down-around, or tap the inner peace freedom Levi found facing his own end.

Arizona is really cold, Fourteen decides.

There is a crunching of light feet and some low, boy-murmurs coming from the light behind him. The welcome in his heart does not reach his set face. “Grandpa warned us to get out of your grill for a while. I thought you might need this.” Fourteen shifts his head and Keon flips his heavy hoodie over.

“Thanks,” Fourteen snuggles into the fleece gratefully. Vondell is three steps off Keon’s stern with a heavy blanket clutched to his small chest.

“Vondell has a blanket.” Keon adds to fill the silence.

“You gonna sit here all night?” Vondell speaks for himself. Fourteen gets the you’re crazy subtext. “What are you doing?”

Waiting, “I just needed to think.” It will be rude to spray his blood and trachea across the blanket. How do they do the laundry, pound it on the rocks? Fourteen gets an image of the boys massaging blood out of the blanket. Red hues and small particles of Jeremy Gates dispersing in the still water. On the other hand, his nuts are clawing their way into the warmer cavities of his body. “I’ll take the blanket, Vondell, thanks.”

“You want some company, Kale?”

There is a flashing memory-temptation of Barry Gordan’s twelve-year-old brother. Fourteen can imagine the now of Keon under the blanket beside him. No perv-grope the kid’s junk, no Cameron-soft first kiss, just the maleness comfort of together. Levi Fisher would totally get the charm of an innocent audience to his closing curtain. So what do you do around here for fun, Keon? Then abrupt crack-splat. Fourteens scrawny neck is a gaping hole. Maybe his  Not a good idea, Fourteen knows. “Maybe later,” he offers. “I need some time alone.” There should be a smile along with this, but Fourteen’s gaze has gone back West, Far East.

“Okay, cool.” Keon acknowledges. “Come on Von, Kale….”

“Fourteen is good.”

“... Fourteen, cool. Fourteen needs his space.” Keon steps away, count five. He turns back to the huddled boy. “So we will just be hanging out in our room when, whatever.” The dark mass of Fourteen waves a hand.

Fourteen listens to the Arizona night, feels the light-step of the brothers fade back to the hippy-dippy, militia-survivalist unknown of this wacky outpost. It is a sort of family, he supposes. Fourteen has no family, just the March-after promise or the predawn fireworks Dr. Evil planned. Fourteen practices flashing his life before his eyes.

He must have slept, slumped over his knees in a hoodie-blanket cocoon. Everything is greyed to frost-mist, sort of ghostly. Fourteen has a good head on his shoulders. Clearly, it is time to call bullshit on the Dr. Evil Fisher farce. Fourteen has been had (front, back, sideways, upside down… etc.). He checks the watch for clues. It’s expensive face radiates innocence back.

It just floods out of somewhere deep: the anger-hurt immensity of it all, the unfairness of it all. Fourteen mechanically strips the watch from his wrist. It lays on the rock beside him. He stares at it. The rock just seems to be in his hand. It comes down on the watch. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” His voice is angry-trembling, and it goes on and on as he grinds the fragments back into the earth. He hates the man. He hates himself for still wanting Levi, caring that the old man abandoned him this way.

There was nothing he could do about the useless necklace around his neck. Levi welded that on in some way. He let it lay where it is, a reminder of something. Fourteen feels drained, tired despite his fitful dozing through the night. Death Row is draining. “Fucking Levi!” He mutters without feeling. The old man did say he would be okay. Patience, he counsels himself. Malcolm King, Keon, Vondell, and all this nextness, it was just the beginning of the end for Fourteen.

Fourteen stands up, stretching old-man-Levi under the borrowed blanket. Jeremy Gates steps away from the road. Count five; he turns back feeling more Fourteen. The moments he lay comfortable under the sheets, late night, late morning, a gentle man beside him. Maybe propped up on one elbow so he can enjoy the curvaceous maleness of near-fifteen. Propped up on his elbow so he could let a soft hand trace Fourteen’s contours while they chat as easily as his mom might pass the preschool morning over Jeremy Gate’s eggs and toast. The old man’s voice as gentle-calm as Remy’s. The adult-adolescent ripposet as familiar as Greyson and Jeremy at the dinner table. Those companionable moments, those frustrations, generational misunderstandings, deceptions, they flash past better than Jeremy Gate’s short life. Mutual possession; Levi’s boy, Fourteen’s man.  

Staring West, Far East to where Mỹ Sơn Temple probably lies in ruins. Levi Fisher moves somewhere between these two points. Just off (or in) Havasupai Indian Reservation, Fourteen does not understand Levi. The resentment at being tricked, not trusted, will still gnaw at his guts.  “Thanks Levi, I appreciate not being blown up, I guess. I hope you make it back to that son of a bitch Tuan. You could have trusted me. I would have sat with you while you went to join him.” He adds wistfully. With that said, he turns back wearily to the dubious comfort of the brother’s room in the double Adobe shed. Still alive, the tangerine curiosity of it all takes hold.

Two dark heads snuggle into one bunk bed leaving the bottom bunk free for the angry stranger. His movement in the room disturbs the older Keon, who flips onto his back, mouth slightly parted. So young, and Fourteen feels as old as the whores on the city streets. He feels as old as John Canon. Best not to think that way, he cautions himself. It would have been better if Levi simply dropped him off in Phenix on his way to the airport. He should have trusted me. Keon opens his eyes as if he hears the comment.

It takes another raven-haired boy on a different morning to help Jeremy Gates understand. He had puzzled over abandonment and the mystery of Antigua for too long. “I think he was protecting you Jem. He didn’t want you to lie for him, have to live with that lie when you went home. Maybe you were not just a substitute for Tuan. He liked you for who you are, dear. Remember what Jody told you Fergus. The scorpion does what is in its nature. Only, Levi was not a scorpion. Not in Levi’s nature to sting you and let you sink beneath the waves.”

“Well, what about Fourteen Gates and the bank account in Antigua?” Fourteen asks Dil.

“Whores were in the old man’s nature. Antigua was money left on the table, sweetheart.”