Lighting Out. Daniel Duane

Levis, clean white sneakers and baseball caps.”

      “Your choice, my snotty friend,” Nick said. He twisted my rearview mirror around to have a look at his freshly cut hair. “Right? You didn’t have to do it. Don’t pretend you had to do it. In fact, I bet you loved it.”

      “I asked one of my pledge bros why he rushed our frat,” I went on, ignoring Nick’s ridiculous insinuation, “and he said, ‘Hey, you wouldn’t call your country a cunt, now would you? So don’t call your fraternity a frat.’ ”

      A white gateway stood like a football goalpost over a road going nowhere: California prairie redefined as the Hacienda Business Park.

      “Wait,” Nick demanded, “aren’t you the guy who dated exclusively DeeGees all four years of college?”

      He had me. “Technically, that’s true. But most of them were Greek exiles like myself.”

      Nick exhaled heavily and nodded. “How Bohemian.”

      Santa Rita County Jail sprawled below curved folds and smooth rises of golden hillside. My mother once spent a weekend locked up there with six hundred other women for protesting nuclear weapons research at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. She didn’t like to talk about it much, but they’d kept the women together in a huge wooden gymnasium for three days. The guards brought in carts of paperback novels and four of the women got so pissed at the content, at the gendercasting and bullshit archetypes in that brainwashing crap they’d decided to burn the books in an act of protest, a localized tactic of resistance. Once the blaze was underway in a garbage can my mother risked social suicide by pointing out that all the doors of that sixty-year-old sun-baked tinderbox were chained and locked.

      “Let me tell you about the joys you’ve passed up,” I said, about to speak the unspeakable and break a solemn fraternity vow of silence. “The bros took all of us pledges out to a canvas tepee in the woods, dumped us with a keg, and said they’d come back in the morning and the keg better be empty. So we’re supposed to get tight with each other for the hell that lies ahead.”

      Nick hadn’t seen me in a while, and he took a long look at me. He remembered me mostly from high school water polo, for which he’d tried out, immediately made varsity, then quit because of the pressure to perform. His grandfather was a Freudian therapist in New York, his father an estranged Jungian in California. Nick had struggled as a business administration major and had hung out in Boston with the heirs of two New York department store families doing blow and eating sushi nightly on their parents’ Gold Cards. Even that memory embarrassed him now, as if he’d played a role in a bratpack film that flopped. He shifted his feet on the dashboard and put his calfskin wallet in the glove box.

      The only road sign more frequent than “Speed Limit 55” was “Available.” Housing tracts took names from whatever they’d bulldozed—Muir Field Estates, Meadow Glen Single Family Homes, Blossom Valley Luxury Single Family Homes, Quail Ridge.

      “So anyway, Red,” Nick said, “what happened with the keg?”

      “A keg for fourteen guys turns out to be about ten beers each,” I explained. “A bonfire’s raging in a pit outside the tepee. I’m now hammered and kind of sick, and me and this guy Marty from Michigan are doing bingers in the woods—low-profile because the bros are uptight about pot. Habitual sex offenders, stone alcoholics, but no pot smoking and church on Sundays.”

      Two hundred blackbirds wobbled about a fallow field in the old homestead wind shelter of six eucalyptus; the farmhouse had long since vanished—“For Sale, Planned Development. Inquiries from Principals Only.” Ahead the highway rose in a black line from the Livermore Valley to the dry coastal range. On either side of the road ahead something moved—the hills, then the entire crest of the range shimmered in black. Twenty minutes later groves of streamlined metal windmills with airline propellers for blades appeared on both sides of the highway. All of them spinning. Another five minutes and hundreds upon hundreds of fluttering towers infested the hills. Western rangeland, the last stretch of mountains before the great Pacific Ocean, reforested by tax accountants.

      Now over the coastal range and down into the flat humidity of the Central Valley, we passed through Tracy and Manteca, towns with slaughterhouses and feed-lots the size of army bases. The rank, mulchy stench of blood flooded in and lingered long after we’d closed the windows. On the straight-line highway past thousands of acres of square, easy-packing tomatoes, the Word of Truth Fellowship had let things fall apart; its orange stucco had faded. On the other side of the beautifully wooded Stanislaus River, across the street from the grain elevator, Oakdale, California, on a sign: Optimists, Rotarians, Lions, Jaycees, the Oakdale Garden Club, Veterans of Foreign Wars, PofH Grange, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Loyal Order of the Moose, Toastmasters International, Civitan, Kiwanis. After a bleak four-lane strip of franchises, Route 120 left the Central Valley and rose into the foothills—the gentle rise of the Sierra’s western slope.

      “So we’re all standing around the fire,” I said, “and guys are going around saying things about themselves. They’re really nervous about it because they barely know each other, but somehow they can believe that this matters. They’re talking about how ‘my mom and dad broke up last year, and like, it’s been really rough, but I’m all right. Yeah, I’m all right. I’m all right.’ And all the guys are getting choked up and going, ‘Dude, we’re really here for you. That’s great you can tell us.’ But all this out there in the woods at a tepee, right?”

      Nick looked deeply touched. He stuck a finger into his mouth to pull out a piece of tortilla chip, and said in garbled voice, “Robert Bly’s got nothing on the Psi Gams of Cornell, does he?”

      A red sun expanded into the dust of the valley behind us, melted and grew redder as we drove, blotted out the rearview mirror and highlighted Nick’s straight, shiny black hair. They say you used to be able to see across California, from Mount Diablo in the coastal range to Mount Ritter on the eastern crest of the Sierra and up north to Shasta, a volcanic cone at the southern end of the Cascade Range. Hundreds of miles. The Sierra were named “nevada”—snowy—by a Spaniard who stood atop a peak by the sea and beheld a snow-capped range of mountains in the distance. This view occurs perhaps once every few years now, after a long storm, after much wind. So clear were the nineteenth-century skies, so beautiful the play of the sun across the peaks, John Muir called the Sierra the “Range of Light.” Just as the new world was neither new nor China, just as the Indians were certainly not Hindus, snow does not, by any stretch, characterize that range of mountains whose banal Spanish descriptive has become an English proper noun.

      “When it got to my buddy Marty, he pauses, so everyone gets real quiet, and all you could hear was the fire crackling and guys burping a little from the beer, and Marty’s got this great Midwestern poker face and he goes, ‘Well, when I was only eight years old,’ and with a totally straight face, ‘I walked into the bathroom, and saw my father masturbating,’ and he looked everyone in their blown-away eyes for a minute, then said, ‘and ever since then I’ve been revolted by the sight of the human penis.’ And he just stopped. Dead serious. Making the whole thing up.”

      “You sure?” Nick demanded.

      “Of course! I mean, I think so, but anyway, these guys were appalled, but it was their game. None of them got the joke. They all came over and started putting their arms around him, saying, you know, ‘We’re really here for you, buddy,’ and feeling the depth of their magnanimity for a bro. I was off behind a tree trying to pull my face out of a stoned perma-smile.”

      Nick looked out the window. He laughed a little for my sake, but I could tell something about the story made him uncomfortable. A new sign had appeared among foothills ranch country: Hatler Industrial Park. A hillock was gone and a bulldozer sat idle in the sun. A trailer home rusted among bicycle frames; two rotting green pickups sat on cinder blocks. As we drove past, a big man with a garden hose stood out among open, prone refrigerators and watered his dog.

      “Sounds like a wild time,” Nick said, riding his hand out the window like a plane. At once vulnerable and viciously critical, he was a great athlete who never liked team sports, a photographer who shot only strangers