THE MISSING ANTELOPE OF THE ANTELOPE VALLEY
Of course, they weren’t antelope at all, but pronghorns—pronghorns that looked, to the treasure-seeking settlers of the California high desert, like antelope. Upwards of eighty thousand pronghorns grazed the outer valley’s tussock grass before the completion of the Southern Pacific Railroad line in 1876. The pronghorns, which had coexisted with native human populations for eleven thousand years, refused to cross the railroad tracks. This confinement, along with a growing number of fur-hunters and, at the turn of the century, a series of bizarre weather patterns, all but killed off the valley’s misnomered namesake. The few that survived migrated inland and north, and nearly a hundred years passed before anyone in town saw an antelope — a pronghorn, that is — again. That person happened to be my sister.
* * *
We — Mom and Dad and I — called her Jean, as in denim, but she went around pronouncing her name as if it were the last syllable in “parmesan.” Everyone at her high school who’d seen a map of California was taking Spanish, but Jean found herself among the four seniors who’d kept with French, the other three being: Colette (Colleen Ditzhazy), Bertrand (Bert Strife), and Jean’s best friend, Amélie (Emily Goodson). Not until year two did Jean’s teacher mention that pronouncing her name “the French way” actually made it male, but by this time, Jean — as in parmesan—had already stuck.
* * *
Meanwhile, I was enjoying the eighth grade. My parents were so distracted by my sister’s college applications and general entanglement with what my mother called “womanhood” that I was left, by and large, to my own devices. Said devices were few but important, and consisted mainly of my best friend, Robert Karinger, and the expanse of uncultivated desert that stretched from the stone wall behind Karinger’s trailer park to the back loading zone of Albertsons, some three miles away. Outside my parents’ purview, we finished our homework and ran off into the wilderness. We hunted lizards. We studied the carcasses of feral cats. We searched the makeshift dumps for treasure. We slept, on warm nights, on his roof. We woke early and eavesdropped on Karinger’s mother and little sister through the EPDM rubber roofing. “Ethylene propylene diene monomer,” Karinger told me on our first night atop the trailer. He waved his open palm across the surface like a game show model. “All spread out over a layer of wood decking.” We pressed our ears against the bottoms of empty water glasses. All we could hear was the running shower and the occasional violence of the blow-dryer.
* * *
A decade after her husband left, Karinger’s mother, an avid lottery player, won a sweepstakes for a new tract home on the west side of town. Soon, Karinger would be living in a big house with stairs and a rec room, and I made him promise I could stay over as much as I wanted. “Sure,” he said, “but we’ll have to make a concentrated effort to continue spending time outdoors.”
“True,” I said. “When you’re right, you’re right.”
* * *
Jean was preparing to hear back from colleges just as Karinger’s mother made plans to move from the trailer park into the new house. While the movers did their business, Karinger spent nights at my place. “It’s decision week,” I warned him as he unfurled his sleeping bag on my bedroom floor.
The day Jean was accepted to UCLA, the college of her choice, the French Club had a study session at the house. Colette hugged her, thinking probably of her own mailbox at home. Bertrand, aware of my father’s presence in the room, offered a neutered high five. Amélie — Emily Goodson — who’d been coming over to the house since I was a baby, grabbed Jean by the wrists and jumped up and down with her, squealing, for a full minute and a half. She had enormous breasts, and Karinger nudged me to pay attention. I was paying attention to Amélie, but for different reasons. Of all the French Club, I knew her to be the only one staying in the Antelope Valley after high school. I studied her for any signs of envy or devastation, and, when I found none, returned to watching Karinger watch her bounce.
* * *
Then came summer. As far as I knew, Amélie and Jean were spending every day at the mall. That was true of most teenagers in the Antelope Valley. Karinger was proud to say we were the only ones wise enough to understand the desert. “You can find a mall anywhere, can’t you?” he said. So when, after a long day of digging trenches and bunkers between Joshua trees for a game of paintball, we spotted a parked car reflecting the orange sun next to our dismantled bicycles, we were — at least I was — afraid. But I vaguely recognized the car, and when the doors opened to reveal Jean and, on the driver’s side, Amélie, my fear was replaced by a kind of bitterness. The one unspoken rule between my sister and me — keep your worlds separate — had been violated, and I was ready to call foul. However, Robert—“Karinger,” he reminded me with an elbow to the side — was all charm and accommodation. “Ladies,” he said. “What can we do you for?”
* * *
To hear them say it, Amélie and Jean hadn’t seen an antelope but a ghost. Karinger kept asking for details.
“Where, exactly?”
“Way east, down by the 138.”
“When?”
“Just now — drove the twenty minutes over here right after spotting him.”
“Him—you sure it’s a male?”
“How do you tell?”
“Well, horns or no horns?”
“Horns, small ones.”
“How big?”
“I said small.”
“Not the horns, the animal.”
“Big, real big.”
I took a different line of questioning.
“What were you and Emily doing out in the desert in the first place?”
“It’s Amélie, and we were just going for a drive, that’s all.”
“How’d you know where to find me and Karinger?”
“Didn’t — just saw your bikes on the side of the road by accident.”
“So what’d you stop for — what is it you want from us?”
“I’m beginning to ask myself the same question, jerk.”
* * *
Karinger convinced Amélie and Jean to drive back to the place of the sighting, but couldn’t convince me to leave our bikes behind and join them. I rode home, maneuvering Karinger’s bike alongside mine. The next day, I asked Karinger how the search went, if they saw the antelope. “Negative,” he said. “Waste of time. Should’ve rode home with you.” And that was the last we said of the matter.
* * *
At the end of summer, Jean moved away to college, and Karinger and I started high school. Four years later, my sister had gone back to Jean, as in denim, and moved East for law school. Karinger and I celebrated our diplomas before he left for boot camp. Then we had our last conversation, and time passed indifferently.
* * *
The unspoken rule: Keep your worlds separate. But once Jean finished law school and decided to stay in New York, and once I moved to San Francisco after college, the rule became enforced not by us, but by the width of a continent. This — we preferred self-enacted divisions — we didn’t like. So as we got older, we grew closer. We called each other more often, and Mom got sick and passed away, and I went back to the Antelope Valley temporarily, and Dad was doing fine, selling more furniture than ever, he said, though we had a hard time believing him. He was sixty-two and still nowhere near retirement. He didn’t need me at the house, but I ended up moving home anyway to keep him company, and made some money writing for the internet, which almost anyone can do. Jean kept saying how she felt bad for us — bad for Dad, mostly, which I joked sounded like a gloomy book by Dr. Seuss. Jean didn’t laugh. She was the kind of person who cried in the parking lot if the cashier at Target was over the age of forty. So one day she called and told us to pack our bags. “Family vacation,” she said, and when I asked her where she was taking us, she just said to start calling her Jean again.