Chapter 1
The irrigation canals of Passport were the very veins of the land, carrying water, the lifeblood of the earth, through three hundred miles of dust and dreams. Just where the town’s edge frayed into the wild green of the farms, there stood a sanctuary. An old house, weary and silvered by time, leaned against two great fruit trees that cast a long, cooling shadow over the water.
There, under the leafy canopy and the warm summer sun, my friends and I spoke out truths into the damp air, safe from sharpened tongues of the townfolk. The fig trees, I suspect, caught our secrets and whispered them to the evening breeze, but they were kinder than humans; they never told a soul.
I remember those summer days as a slow honey-drip of time. The sun pressed its warmth against my skin while the bees hummed a steady tune, and the sound of water soothed our souls. Nature’s Symphony was the soundtrack of my youth. Even now, years later, when things get to be too much, I close my eyes and am instantly transported back to those happy times.
The summer between my sophomore and junior years, our sanctuary became my refuge from my family’s fighting. Months before, my sister, Nancy, had been caught testing the sweetness of forbidden fruit in the form of a Latino farmhand named Enrique while at the drive-ins. In a small town like Passport, gossip is a wildfire that feeds on the reputations of the innocent and the guilty alike, and it wasn’t long before the smoke reached my parents’ door, threatening the very foundation of their lives.
My mother, Barbara, was a conjurer of silk and soul. She worked her bolts of cloth with the reverence of a sculptor, her needle dancing until a gown emerged that looked as though it had been spun from moonlight and fairy tales. My father, Henry, boasted with a quiet pride that every girl in the valley walking towards the altar dreamed of being draped in a “Barbara Odom Original.”
Henry himself was a man of celestial brilliance trapped in a world of dirt and grease. He was a handyman by trade, but a navigator of the stars by heart. He had come of age when the world was looking toward the moon, but his own teachers, blinded by the narrow lens of his dyslexia, had clipped his wings before he could fly to college. So, he started devouring every book he could find until he knew the constellations as well as he knew the back of his own calloused hands.
Because my parents lived by the grace of the town’s vanity and its broken hinges, they knew the weight of a good name. “Keep your nose clean,” was the litany we lived by. But when the bigots began to sharpen their teeth, my parents’ fear turned them into people they weren’t deep down, and they forbade Nancy from seeing Enrique, and the peace of our home was shattered like cheap glass on a stone floor.
That first morning of my summer vacation, my father was excited about a ghost in the form of a 1600,000-year-old supernova that light had finally arrived, the likes of which had not been seen since the days of Kepler.
“My friend on the Ham radio says that light traveled across the ages,” he said, his eyes fixed on something far beyond the kitchen table. “Humans were still huddling in caves.”
Nancy, her heart bitter as gall, didn’t miss a beat. “And yet, some men still think like Neanderthals,” she snapped. “So much for evolution.”
The town’s venom wasn’t just about the shade of Enrique’s skin, though that was poison enough. It was his ambition. In the city, you climb the social ladder by the amount of money, but in the country, you do so by the amount of land or water you control. Enrique, months before, had managed to purchase a plot of land that many had been trying to get for years. To the town, he wasn’t just a man in love; he was a field hand trying to steal a seat at the table and using my sister to whitewash himself.
“You remember Mabel,” my mother said in a low, harsh tone. “She didn’t leave because she was guilty. She left because of the talk.”
We all knew the tragedy of Mabel Tidwell and her husband, Tommy, who was the mayor. Mabel, in an effort to save her father’s liver from an overindulgence of spirits, had used her position in the town as the mayor’s wife to get Mr. Nichols to stop deliveries from his liquor store and destroyed what her father had in his house. For this act of love, her father beat her black and blue. Fearing that Tommy would kill her father if he saw her, she said she had to go out of town to help a sick friend. She only went to stay in a hotel in the next town over, and soon the town heard about this, they whispered“abominations, and whore,.” Which Mable heard about and returned to tell the town what really happened. The townspeople, forgetting their Christian upbringing, doubled down and said that Tommy had to beat her to keep the whore in line. Mable and Tommy had no choice but to move away. Three months later, her father, with a blood alcohol level of 1.5 at seven AM, hit a school bus killing three children, and even then, the gossip blamed it on Mable.
My mother looked at Nancy, her eyes pleading, “Undesirable poor white trash,” the words stinging my sister. “Is that the coat you want this family to wear?”
Nancy’s frustration broke the morning air like a hot knife through butter, a sound that finally wore thin the weary threads of my father’s patience.
“Two more weeks,” he barked, his voice hard as the sun-baked earth. My mother moved to the kitchen calendar. She flipped the heavy pages, her pen scratching out my sister’s new sentence. By my reckoning, Nancy would be a prisoner in her own home for the next six months, a punishment that stretched out like a long dusty road. The main issue I saw with this is that my sister would be eighteen in a couple of days, a grown woman in the eyes of the law, and I wondered how my parents expected to keep her in the cage once the door was unlocked.
“At least in the old days,” Nancy shot back, with the bitter honey of sarcasm, “Enrique could’ve just clubbed me and dragged me to his cave.”
When my father lowered his astronomy magazine, I could feel the atmosphere turn electric, which was my cue to vanish. “Your mother and I didn’t labor to see you throw your future away on a childish crush while dragging our name through the mud.”
I slapped together a pancake sandwich and slipped out the back door, as Nancy’s high-pitched scream of “Crush!” rang behind me like a whistle that could only be heard by dogs.
Now, while some folks found their North Star in the teachings of Jesus or Buddha, I found my gospel in a boy named Ferris Bueller. In his immortal words, “life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”This was the mantra of my youth, and once I arrived at our spot, I slipped off my shoes and donned my beret and dark sunglasses-my armor against the drama going on at my house- and let the cool irrigation water take the sting out of the morning.
It wasn’t long before Jen Winterbottom appeared, her thin frame casting a long shadow over me. She dropped a bag of candy like an offering and rolled her eyes. “Lord, Bobby,” she sighed, “tell me we aren’t headed for another one of your adventures.”
Jen had been my anchor since the carefree days of the sandbox. Her life was not an easy one, with a mother whose heart had too many doors and no locks. Jen wasn’t even sure who her father was. “The seventies were a sexually freeing time for women,” was the reason she had given to Jen. My mother called it a poor excuse to be a whore. Even so, Jen managed to carry it with the grace that shamed the gossipers.
“No adventure today,” I said.
She offered me a piece of candy to mask the bitterness of the news she was about to give me. “I heard my mama clucking about Nancy last night on the phone. “It sounds like they think your sister is no longer a virgin.”
“Fuck.”
“She said she thought that your sister was just sowing wild oats before she went away to college in the spring.”
“Shit. They fight most days as it is, but if my mother hears that, there will be no peace at all.”
“No peace with who?” a voice asked from behind me.
The voice belonged to Mark Thomson, the Methodist minister’s son. He was tall like a stalk of corn in October with his curls as dark as midnight sky, and a spirit that seemed to pull the very air out of my lungs. My mother loved him because he was a ‘good influence’ on me, but I loved him for a different reason. From the first day I saw him, I felt a fire that terrified me because you aren’t supposed to yearn for another man’s presence with the ache of a starving heart. I lived in a constant tremor of fear, certain that one day my eyes would betray me, and the life I knew would end in a storm of stones and judgment.
My fear had such a grip on me that I didn’t even tell Jen, until one day last year, Mark couldn’t make it to the spot. My disappointment must have been written in the very way I breathed.
“Why are you keeping secrets from me?” she asked, her eyes seeing right through my mask.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, my stomach turning like a leaf in a gale.
“Bobby, I trust you with the dark parts of me,” she said, leaning in her voice soft. “I’d forgive you if you killed someone. So, falling in love with the minister’s son isn’t nearly that bad,” she said, winking at me, and the dam I had built around my heart simply gave way. I wept then, the hot tears washing away the lonely salt of my silence.
“Sorry,” I finally managed to choke out.
“I think he feels the same way. You should tell him,” she whispered, whipping a tear off my cheek.
Now, a year later, I still have not found the courage of my convictions.
“If she loves him that much,” Mark said, looking at the water, “why doesn’t she just run away with him. I mean, why fight the world?”
“Because,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt, “when you find a love like that, you want to shout it from the rooftops and not hide in the shadows.”
“You watch too many movies,” Mark said, taking off his shirt and sliding into the water.
I turned my gaze away from him, afraid my body’s reaction would give me away, and wondered how I would ever tell him how I felt.
