Her parents, Connie and Ralph, had come to the desert out of irritation. They seemed to have lost their tolerance for brushing against people, until their nerves were like old wiring with plastic insulation that had worn and cracked open. They spent their days behaving as though they still lived in Los Angeles, the mother taking Valerie to school and then coming home to water the flowers in the pots on the asphalt beside the trailer. Her husband drove fifty miles to Palm Springs every day to work fixing cars. He had been an engineer in Los Angeles, and the job was easy for him. He never had to talk to the customers directly. Valerie’s parents could act that way, living in an imaginary place, but their daughter was in the world outside their heads. She went to school with the other desert kids, and spent her spare time walking the vast empty places with Jared Hobart.
He stepped up to the trailer, grasped the window frame, pulled himself up and looked in the window. He could see two clean dishes on the table, two glasses, and a vase of flowers, the kind that her mother used to grow in pots.
He walked around the side of the trailer to the back end. There was a dim light in the small window above the bed. Hobart looked around, found a big empty pot, turned it upside down and stood on it. He could only see a bit of the bed, but it seemed to be made, and he was sure it wasn’t doing any moving. He heard a car coming, and then saw the headlights shining on the blacktop to his right. He stepped off the pot, spun it upright and set it on the pavement approximately where he had found it. He went around the left side of the trailer and waited near the door, one foot resting on the steps.
Valerie got out of her car, walked to the steps, put her arms around him and kissed him once quickly, then edged past him and unlocked the door. She pushed it open for him, said, “I’ll be there in a second,” and went into the dark.
After about a minute, she came back into the trailer and shut the door. “You feeling jealous, Hobart?”
“Why would you say that?”
“You moved my pot to look in my bedroom window.”
“If you were asleep, I wouldn’t want to wake you up.”
“Sure you wouldn’t.”
He met her gaze for a moment. “Where were you?”
“I went to a movie with Maria.”
Maria Sandoval was one of the people who had grown up with them in the desert. He looked out the window in the direction of the Sandoval trailer. When he looked back at Valerie, she was smiling. “There’s the phone. If you feel like it, you can call her.” She walked toward the back of the trailer.
“Where are you going?”
“To bed. I guess you don’t want to come.”
“Well, maybe I do. It’s been a hell of a long drive, and I’m pretty tired.”
“If you’re tired, then maybe you ought to call Maria instead.” She said it over her shoulder, but the head start she had wasn’t enough, because Hobart was quick. Before she could reach the tiny bedroom he was scooping her up into his arms. He ducked to bring her through the door, flopped onto the bed with her, and in a moment they were wrestling each other out of their clothes.
Later he lay in Valerie’s bed staring at the false ceiling. There was an inch-thin layer of old insulation above, but the roof was metal and he could hear when the desert wind blew the particles of sand and bits of dirt against the walls and made ticking sounds that usually soothed him and helped him sleep.
Tonight it wasn’t working.
Hobart was aware that he had wasted his life, but he seldom spent time regretting it anymore. He could have married Valerie when they were young. She had always wanted to get married in those days, and had stopped wanting to only when he went to prison.
Probably they would have had a few kids and built a place outside Palm Springs, far up in the hills. That was where the really rich people had built winter homes since then, so it was too late now. It was too late anyway. After Hobart got out of prison, five years had passed, and Valerie was different. When he said anything about marrying her, she just laughed and shook her head and changed the subject. If he would let her, she would say, “Why buy the bull when I get the bullshit for free?” or “I’m saving myself for Jesus,” or some other craziness to tell him the time had come and gone. His whole life was like thatburned up. He had no claim that anyone had done this to him. He had burned it up himself, for no particular reason except that he once thought he could get more of everything if he just took it.
Now, when he thought about the past, it was always the old days when he and Valerie had been kids. He would reach all the way back and try to get there and hold himself down, so the two of them would stay on the careful path. He would close his eyes and see her as a fifteen-year-old, walking with him in the desert after school. She was skinny and her long blond hair was sun-bleached, and her skin was always tanned like his. They would walk together but ten feet apart, because the land was empty and private for miles at a time.
The desert was almost silent because the wind needed something to blow against to make a noise, and there were no tree leaves or grass blades to swish and rustle. The only sound it could make was by blowing across the openings of their ears. Sometimes when Valerie talked, it was as though she were leaning her head against his shoulder-no, as though her thoughts found their way into his head. In those days children didn’t talk to adults much, not even their parents. There was too much about their lives that their parents would have stomped on.
There was a group of kids who lived in the trailers and shotgun shacks north of the interstate who met in the desert after schooclass="underline" Maria Sandoval and her brother Augustin, Nancy DuVal, Bill Skinner, Mike Zellner, Hobart and Valerie. Now and then other kids would come into the group for a time because they had fallen into temporary disfavor with their regular cliques, or because they had heard something special was going on. Once Augustin picked up some cherry bombs and M-80s on a trip to Guadalajara, and there was a temporary swell in the gathering. On another occasion Hobart stole a case of beer from a truck idling near a diner in Indio. But most of the time there were only four or five of them who met in the desert to be together and smoke cigarettes.
The talk was sparse and weighted, the words chosen with great premeditation to convey and dispel anxieties, or designed like bait to elicit revealing admissions or concessions from the opposite sex. The answers were big, too, sometimes discussed in whispers by the members of one sex before they decided what answer was best to give. The speakers were representatives and exemplars of one-half of humanity. As the afternoon waned, they left in ones or twos, until most days, only Jerry and Valerie would remain.
There was no way for Hobart’s mind to trace forward from that time to this, because the change, the damage, was so profound and the days in their thousands so full of other places and people that he forgot most of them. And during the intervening times he was often different kinds of men to different people, one no less real than any of the others. When he followed this thread-the boyfriend of Valerie Putnam-there were long gaps when that person had not existed. He had heard somebody say once that as long as a man’s hopes outnumbered his regrets, he was still alive. But by that measure, he had been dead for years.