Desert Boys by Chris McCormick

players to assemble at the altar—mother, godfather, baby, priest. I’d recognize the bald priest, who would joke with the baby: Come on in, the water’s fine. The churchgoers, perpetually reminded of the unspoken sadness of the day, would appreciate the humor. Our laughter would complement the crying of the baby, who’d be lifted and dipped, lifted and dipped, lifted and dipped until every last prayer was heard.
    But I was sitting at an outdoor café in a city on the rise with a man I was beginning to love. I wasn’t about to go back.

 
    THE TALLEST TREES IN THE ANTELOPE VALLEY
    I. BRIEF OVERVIEW OF AN EVOLVING CULTURE
    The town became a city, and so on, but in the transition, there were elements of both, and I happened to be raised there during that period. In fact, depending on who’s telling the story, that transition still defines the place.
    I’ll give you an example of each. On the city end of things, you started seeing department stores, courthouses, various public schools—in short, buildings with elevators and escalators. Our town was literally moving up. Bridges linked stretches of new highway over the anachronistic caterwauls of the railroad. And people were moving in, people from Los Angeles and its boroughs, people who’d been drawn to the cheap, carry-only-what-you-need, fresh-start sort of living the desert represented. People who’d been renting a one-bedroom apartment for the entirety of their financial lives woke up one morning and read the signs that the same amount of dollars and cents got you a modest, one-story home up north. Sure, the desert wasn’t L.A. But for the people who headed into my town—and they came then by the thousands—maybe not being L.A. was the most appealing thing about it.
    Still, the place remained, and remains, a town in certain, immutable ways. To this day, alfalfa plants are farmed on the eastern fringe for cattle to eat, and their shoots come up in local markets for salad ingredients or else midday snacks for children. You’d make a friend in kindergarten and shake his hand at your high school graduation. You felt confident in the possibility that one day his son and your son together would hunt lizards in the heat. In school, they would be, like their fathers were, guided to the military, the police department, the fire department, or the farm. Most girls, as far as you could tell, longed for marriage and motherhood from the start. They taught children or else studied nursing while they waited for the inevitable shift in priority. Of course, these were suggestions, and suggestions only. If you didn’t follow the suggestions, there was still a place for you. It just seemed a lot lonelier a place.
    Maybe the biggest indicator of its town-ness was the attitude of its citizens. The townspeople looked at the incoming flux of city folk—many of whom happened to be brown—with a slant and baleful eye. They worried about the future of the town, which, as all townspeople understand, depends on the character of its community. They didn’t trust people who seemed, in ways both obvious and imaginary, so different. It’s true that these townspeople were what some might call bigots, or at least a group of people who didn’t like seeing things change. But they were also no monolith. Some might say they were persons, not a people.
    That’s why stories happen. That’s why this story happened.
    II. ONE WAY TO GET A JOB AT TWELVE
    The father of a kid I knew at school: His last name was Reuter—pronounced like the word “writer.” On account of divorce, his son didn’t share the name, and saw his dad only on occasions like birthdays and lazy weeks during the summer. I saw Mr. Reuter more often. He happened to be my neighbor.
    We lived on a block of tract homes. On each block stood an assortment of ten or twelve homes from two or three types. The blueprints had been flipped here and there,