Desert Boys (21 page)

All we could do was return to our lives. Only then, from the distant
Oakland Tribune
offices, could I go through with my plan. I wrote an email to Roxanne Karinger explaining how Watts had taken the blame when in fact the deportation was my fault. I'd been doing research for an article, I lied, calling out small-business owners exploiting illegal labor. I'd been the one who discovered the undocumented status of the worker, and Seth Watts deported him on my notice. Why Watts would cover for me, I wrote, I couldn't say. Why do friends do anything for each other?

Roxanne never replied to my email, but the plan worked. Watts, grateful, kept me informed. Roxanne thought what I had done was disgusting and inhumane. Journalism, she concluded, was nothing but self-promotion. At last she understood why her brother stopped talking to me, and would never take my side again. Still, she could see why Watts would stay in touch with me after all these years—she admired his loyalty. Anyway, the truth was she hadn't been that upset about the deportation in the first place. She could see now that she'd used the opportunity to take a “much-needed break” at a “difficult time” in her life. Later, with her brother visiting between deployments, and with the inception of her new, adult life fast approaching, she felt ready to stop keeping her love for Watts a secret, which was the true issue at the heart of their struggle. Watts agreed. And the nameless worker who'd been arrested and deported soon became simply another part of their story, important only in the most fleeting way: that he had been there, and then one day, he wasn't.

 

THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF DESERT AGRICULTURE

For a brief but memorable time I belonged to an organization at my high school called, ridiculously, the Future Farmers of the Antelope Valley. Ridiculous, because I believed at the time that neither farmers nor the Antelope Valley had much in terms of a present tense, let alone a future. But I needed a noncompetitive extracurricular for college applications. So, twice weekly after school, I met with the group, led by an actual, visiting farmer, boots and hat and all, named Reggie Nelms.

Reggie spoke to us about farming in general, but desert agriculture in particular. You'd be amazed at how many of the kids appeared legitimately shocked when he informed us that water was hard to come by in the Mojave Desert. We were the product of the population boom of the late '80s and early '90s; our neighborhoods were so paved over with shopping centers and tract homes, we sometimes forgot about the biblical ecosystem lying beneath all that concrete. Reggie said, “When you shower or flush, do you think for even a minute about the finite source of that water?” We didn't. He accused us of not seeing value in anything we couldn't scan under a price-checker. Then he handed out black permanent markers and told us to draw bar codes on our faucets at home.

I immediately trusted Reggie, who looked like a baseball manager in the wrong costume, eyebrows all bristled like misplaced mustaches. He was a workingman in his late fifties, which meant people had begun to feel for him again after a long drought of sympathy, and since no one else on that first day seemed interested in asking him a question, I threw him a softball.

“Where does all our water come from, Mr.—?”

“Just Reggie,” he said. Then: “Aside from the all-too-occasional rain, my alfalfa farm is run on a combination of what are known as aquifers—pumped underground—and imported water via the aqueduct.”

A number of us recognized the man-made river in the hills above town not as a source of water, but as a destination, grinning at one another as if to say,
Remember that time at the aqueduct
.…

Eventually, in the most casual of tones, as if he had no idea how mystifying all of this was to a group of suburban desert kids, Reggie arrived at some general dos and don'ts about farming alfalfa. Starting out, for instance, make sure your pH is over six and a half. Keep an eye out for armyworms and weevils and—if you've got horses—blister beetles. They'll come for the alfalfa and stay for the hay.

The other bit of advice he offered at the end of every meeting: Cultivate a large family. I always thought he was talking shop here, too: children as indentured workers. But he meant otherwise. I learned later that he and his wife, Allison, never had children, and he didn't realize until she'd passed what a mistake that was.

*   *   *

In May, Reggie told the administrators he could no longer make the trip to the school. Instead, he asked that they send the students to his farm. He blamed his health, though my guess is he just didn't want to drive across town anymore, having reached the time in his life when he relied on a consistency in scenery.

Despite knowing that most of the Future Farmers had chosen not to take part in the field trip, Reggie might have imagined a cavalcade of school buses wobbling in the heat off the paved road from town. As soon as he saw the lone purple minivan heading his way, however, he set aside his fantasy. He waved his cowboy hat to let us know we'd come to the right place, even though he knew the driver didn't need any help.

I was one of five students—three boys and two girls—to scoot out the back of the van, followed by the driver, a bald man with a neatly trimmed red mustache. Reggie recognized him not only as Mr. Peterson, the parental advisor of our club, but also as his brother-in-law, Keith.

By now, Reggie had put back on his hat, which he tipped, and said, “Welcome, boys, girls. Keith.”

“Hey there, Reggie.” Mr. Peterson—Keith—reached out and pumped his hand.

After a moment, Reggie wiped his palms against his sandblasted jeans and said, “All right, then. Let's start the tour.”

*   *   *

He lived in a two-bedroom house on a small alfalfa farm east of town, not far from the golf course I used to sneak onto a few years earlier. We all expected cows and pigs, but all he had were three acres of alfalfa, a horse, and six chickens in a coop along the northern edge. The farm was more for personal use than business, although he did make some money off the hay and never had to pay for eggs. The horse, Genie, had been his wife's. Reggie, he told us plainly, had never learned to ride.

Throughout the tour, the other two boys kept clearing their throats intermittently, trading secret, profane messages in their coughs. I tried to make severe eye contact with Reggie, nodding up a sweat, in order to make amends for their attitude. One of the girls ended up doing what I didn't have the courage to do myself: She confronted them. In her blond hair she wore a red headband, which brought out the pimple on her chin. I'd seen her on campus before—her name was Jackie Connolly, and her family ran a farm themselves on the other side of town—but I had never heard her speak until now.

“This trip is voluntary,” Jackie Connolly said. “No one forced you to be here.”

Although I appreciated her for scolding the boys, I found myself resenting her strict advocacy of the rules as if I were among the scolded. I understood her eagerness for the opportunity to reprimand the boys as a kind of disrespect toward the farm itself; only someone absolutely bored with an experience would use that fleeting time making sure others weren't squandering it. I trusted Reggie felt the same.

The other girl in the group was Mr. Peterson's—Keith's—daughter, Charitye. It took me a moment to do the familial math and realize Charitye Peterson was Reggie's niece. Through this new lens I watched her on the farm. At school, in her stylishly unstylish denim jackets and bloodred lipstick, she'd always seemed out of place—tall and stoic and urban like a beautiful door at the top of a New York City stoop. Everywhere she went, she carried a green spiral notepad, which complemented her long orange hair. She was a year ahead of me, a junior, but she still had the two-dimensional body of a boy—a fact that reminded me she was a swimmer. I watched Reggie ignore the bickering boys and the pimpled Jackie Connolly, studying Charitye, some distance from the rest of us, kneeling at the alfalfa. She wedged her pen between her thumb and palm so she could feel the leaves with her fingertips. Then she wrote in her notepad and stood, skinny and nearly as tall as Reggie in his boots, and faced the San Gabriel Mountains to the south like a statue engraved,
WOMANHOOD.

Reggie returned to the finer points of fertilization, though I suspected his mind was elsewhere. Later I found out—though I might've known by the awkward handshake earlier and the way Reggie seemed unwilling to let Mr. Peterson out of his sight—that he was remembering the vague plan his brother-in-law had relayed to him over the phone earlier that day:
The wife and I could use some time alone.
Mr. Peterson had asked Reggie if it would be all right for Charitye to spend some time—a few days, maybe—at the farm.

Reggie's wife, Allison, had died two years earlier—and so for two years, Reggie had been listening at night for the wind rattling the chains of the realty signs flanking his property. Sure, he told his brother-in-law. He could use an extra pair of hands.

At sunset, while we followed Mr. Peterson to the van at the edge of the road, Reggie pointed to the sky and told us the clouds at this time of day always reminded him of peeled tangerines. We boys and Jackie Connolly fought our way into the backseats of the van. Mr. Peterson unloaded a single large duffel and hugged Charitye, the only one of us to stay. Again the two men shook hands, and Mr. Peterson said to his brother-in-law: “I don't mean to repeat myself, but please make sure she's careful around that horse.” To which, Reggie smiled his cowboy's smile and said, “We'll be extra, extra careful.” Then we were off, and the dust behind the diminishing van rolled east with the light but influential wind. As Mr. Peterson's van carried us away, I watched Charitye shrink in my window, scribbling in her notepad, craning her neck to the page, straining her eyes against the twilight.

In the van, Mr. Peterson said, “Kind of a kook, huh?” And when the boys laughed and the pimple on Jackie Connolly seemingly doubled in size as she chided them, I felt a deep, strange respect for Reggie, and a longing to have known him better.

So although I couldn't see them any longer, couldn't even see the farm—we were well on our way back to town—I imagined Reggie, a man who had always respected a person's right to privacy, ask as gently as he could what Charitye was straining so hard to write in that notepad of hers.

“Lines,” she said, “for a poem.”

“Ah,” Reggie said, more a breath than language. “A poet. I once wanted to be a poet.”

“I figured,” she said, “what with the clouds and the tangerines.”

Reggie expected her to ask what had changed. He wanted, stupidly, to tell her that farming was a kind of poetry you got to do with your hands. He even had a little joke lined up about the two professions, how steeped they both were in anachronism. But by the time they made it back inside the house for dinner, the thread of the conversation had already been lost.

*   *   *

Since boyhood, Reggie had always appeared more confident than he actually was—lifting his chin when he spoke, projecting his voice, exerting little energy and displaying little patience with those who could not keep up—and for this reason, many of us Future Farmers believed he was born and raised on that little alfalfa farm of his. Sometimes, late at night, when he looked out at the silhouettes of Joshua trees dancing black against the deep blue between the stars, he bought into that story himself.

The truth was his father-in-law had owned the farm, and Reggie didn't move out there from town until he and Allison had been married for sixteen years, when her mother died and it became clear the old man was soon to follow. Allison and her kid brother, Keith, fought about selling the land to the proprietor of the nearby golf course, a man named Knickerbocker, who wanted to build a new driving range on the property. Keith argued for the money—at the time, his daughter, Charitye, was an infant, and the money wouldn't have been useless. Allison must have said something about keeping the farm
in the family,
because Keith, lifting his daughter in his arms as if she were a smoking gun, said, “I'm the only one
with
a family, Allie.”

Which is when Allison Nelms reportedly removed her wedding ring—she was a lefty—and punched her brother clear across the nose.

*   *   *

At dawn on Charitye's first morning at the farm, Reggie expected a fight to get her out of bed. He slipped into his jeans and boots, snapped the buttons on his shirt, and clacked along the hardwood hallway to the spare bedroom she'd sidled into after dinner the night before.

After four increasingly loud knocks, he let himself in. Both the twin-sized beds (as kids, Allison and Keith had shared the room) were made. The large black duffel—unpacked and deflated—lay folded in the corner, the only visible evidence that Charitye Peterson had visited at all.

Reggie left the house to find his niece knee-deep in the alfalfa field. Again she was scribbling in her notepad.

“Surprised you're up so early,” he said. “Took me a few months to get used to waking up with the sun.”

“Sleep's not my thing,” Charitye said, not looking up from the paper.

From the coop, the chickens clucked.

“I'm also surprised you're out here,” he said, “as opposed to feeding the horse. Your dad told me I'd have to work my ass off to keep you away from her.”

At this she looked up. “Same horse that killed her, isn't it?”

To that, Reggie didn't say a word, just hummed an affirming hum.

“I prefer plants anyway,” she said, returning to her notes. “Smell nicer.”

“That what your poems are about? Plants and flowers?”

“Poems aren't about anything,” she said. “They
are
things.”

“I see. What kind of
things,
then, do you write?”