closer to fine

by Gina Calderone

I WAS ON MY WAY to meet James when I accidentally met James. He was barreling down a rain-rutted dirt road in a manly Ford pickup and was forced to stop short of my Chevy Silverado (fondly named Grandpa) spinning out in the mud. James threw open his door and slid out of the cab. He fit the description volunteered by the town postal clerk: “heavyset middle-aged Jewish man from Brooklyn.” The clerk might have added: aspirationally Mexican. James had a furry face and was wearing Wranglers, cowboy boots, a sombrero and sarape. He was chewing on the end of a toothpick. He surveyed the tire-to-mud ratio, grunted, and declared that I was stuck.

Indeed I was. I might have cried, or even cared, except I was as dead as a stone inside. My prefrontal cortex took over, scanning the landscape, endeavoring a solution. Heavy clouds still hung low over the Santa Catalina Mountains, but here in their northernmost foothills, the sky had broken open. Tiny droplets, carried on a light wind for miles, brought a faint whiff of wet pine. Everything glistened in the cold sunshine. Vapors wafted from the craggy surfaces of a rock outcropping on a nearby hill and disappeared into blue. A meager desert shrub was either growing from a crack in the rocks or dying there. A lone raptor was catching thermals and then dive-bombing into tight spins before banking and ascending again. It was hard to read these tea leaves. I pushed the gas again. Grandpa’s rear-end slid side to side, spewing brown slurry, but we went nowhere.

The colorful poncho rushed past me. It disappeared momentarily, then reappeared in my rearview mirror. A scene flickered alive like a tiny television broadcasting a low-budget Western: James ditched the sombrero, waded through the sludge, and rummaged in the bushes at its edge. A covey of quail squawked and fled its creosote cover, birds zigzagging up the road like a bunch of tots let loose on a playground after naptime. Just up the wash—the one that had, in a torrent, grooved out the low spot that snared me—broken branches had piled up against mesquites and scrub oaks growing thick on the side of the road. James gathered a bunch, and I watched his figure grow in the mirror, the stash of sticks plastered to his chest. He dipped out of view again, pushed the branches into the ground against my sunken wheels, and reemerged at the front of Grandpa, arms raised from the elbows like an airplane marshaller. “Slow,” he said, waving me toward him with both hands.

And so it went: two-ton truck grasps onto twigs and inches its way out.

Three weeks earlier, some hundred or so miles northwest as the crow flies, I was reckoning with an unhappy truth: another relationship gone south. I was in Phoenix, thirty-five, careening toward irrelevance and invisibility, jobless, and living in the home of my soon-to-be-ex. The fake flocked Christmas tree was still up, well into January, adorned with all the Mickey Mouses and other trinkets she had collected. It was a haphazard and crowded display, tinkling the story of her life: crammed with junk left behind in the wake of a twister, scraps of passions and people spun out from the passing all-consuming vortex of her attention. My turn as the life-size plastic figurine in the 1100-square-foot snow globe had ceased to amuse.

I pulled an old map of Arizona from a collection of travel books on a shelf and unfolded it. The creases were white from wear, and someone had highlighted many of the minor highways and drawn hearts on some of the mountain towns dotting those roads: Strawberry, Heber, Pinetop. I recognized the ritual, but this was not “our” map. Ours had been an Atlas. We’d had big plans that fizzled out fast, the way a campfire does when it’s all starter fluid and pine needles.

The old map indicated failure, too, but somehow it seemed like a more successful failure. They certainly traversed more roads together, probably spent more time sleeping under the stars, likely shivered through more dawns next to a sputtering camp stove waiting for coffee to percolate. I wondered how they kept going, through all the red flags.

Our first road trip was—or should have been—illuminating, if only I could have seen the light through the limerence. We were flying down some backroad in her souped-up Honda Accord, trunk packed full of camping gear accumulated with the previous “meant-to-be,” when her fuzz-buster started beeping. Too late. A highway patrol vehicle peeled out from its cover and was closing in, siren blaring.

“G,” she said. “I can’t get another ticket. Can you trade places with me? I’ll pay the fine.”

I hopped into the driver’s seat and got the ticket. We both, in our ways, paid the fine. Less than a year later, I was holding the old Arizona map, spreading it out on the floor, running my hand over its cool surface, everything represented there levitating like a hologram in a moment of utter clarity. It was mine now, this remnant of a past that had belonged to someone else. I imagined my replacement already at REI looking at travel guides.

Nothing left to do but leave. Where does a person go when they have nowhere to go? My eyes flitted over the old map, corner to corner, Kayenta to Arivaca, the Grand Canyon to the Chiricahuas, pausing on those hearts. Where had they not gone? I had always been drawn to the parts of maps that were green, thinking that those parts of the world were, well, green. As in forested. Lightly peopled. I searched the green parts for a road they didn’t take, a town they didn’t “heart.” And there it was, like a beacon, like destiny: Oracle. I would go there.

The official story of how James came to own the Double-D Ranch was that he stumbled across this ramshackle gem just outside the tiny, southern-Arizona town of Oracle on one of his quests to find the original campsite of the Lone Ranger and Tonto. He came to believe that the site was on this property and set about making it his own. But the passing of time gave rise to a conundrum: he had a decrepit ranch in the middle of nowhere and a vision of its restored splendor swelling in his brain like a tentacled parasite intent on taking over its host completely. James had money, but his parasite needed people with nothing better to do than help carry out the vision, and people were hard to come by. So James and his parasite took long naps on cowhide-covered mesquite patio furniture and waited for people with nothing better to do to appear. And they did. We did. I was the first.

James must have viewed my getting stuck on his road as a sign from the universe. He agreed to let me stay, temporarily, in exchange for a modest amount of rent plus “light” caretaking duties. I must have thought this was my lucky day, like when you think you’re lucky that at least you didn’t come home to all your stuff splayed in the yard and the locks changed.

There are worse places in the world to be stuck. The ranch had four functional buildings—a main house, a bunk house, and two casitas—on thirty acres of high desert chaparral abutting wilderness with trails that went on forever. If the Lone Ranger and Tonto didn’t camp here, there were a dozen boulder caves within twenty miles where they might have: spots perfect for respite from long, dusty rides searching for truth and justice and/or fighting for law and order (depending on the episode). My whole adult life, I had been drawn to boulder caves (and carelessly unlocked spaces in basements of decommissioned academic buildings in quiet corners of college campuses), always registering the existence and location of a suitable domicile should my little world per chance fall apart. Here, for a few glorious months, we had our own casita and a view of the Galiuro Mountains to the east, just me and the dog. The dog was supposed to be “ours” too, but we—the dog and I—decided very quickly that we were soulmates, two peas in a splendidly effortless and wordless pod.

Enough of words. Especially the sort that welled up from need or anger or jealousy and hung in the air like a mushroom cloud, poisoning everything. Here I could hold the trembling dog in a blackout and count the seconds between lightning and thunder as they dropped to zero. I could navigate scorpions in my bed and rattlesnakes at my door. I could muster the daring (or stupidity) to wander deep into mountain lion territory, where trails vanished into washes peppered with jumping cholla and paw prints bigger than my open hand. It was all sweet abeyance from the real danger of speaking my mind.

Not speaking was easy at the Double-D Ranch, at least until James woke up, needing, as one does in that state, a nearby human against which to bounce one’s dreams. And I was near enough. In a poetic moment in late March, James declared that spring had arrived: “People think spring is beautiful—blooming flowers, budding trees, a surge of birdsong, a million mingles of viridescence—but spring is painful. Everything’s hungry. Everything’s trying to have sex.” For once in my life, I wasn’t hungry or trying to have sex. It was truly a beautiful spring.

Not so for James. After weeks of hibernation, he was suddenly a whirlwind bent on making the place “something.” He converted one of the casitas into an office with a cot and spent his days and nights in there crunching numbers and yelling at people on the phone in Spanish. Trucks started showing up with concrete and giant Lincoln Logs. Other trucks were loaded with humans—mostly Mexican men “willing” to labor for cash that they would send back to their families south of the border. They spent long days pounding and digging, razing, and raising. Fixing. Sprucing up. By early summer we had a horse barn and low rock walls around patios, all skillfully made to appear “original.” A pool was in the works. Horseshoe pits. An outdoor pizza oven. Built-in barbeques. Chimineas. New mattresses arrived. A dream was taking shape in matter: a guest ranch was born.

The main problem with guest ranches is that they contain guests. And it is in the nature of guests to expect an invisible structure that exists solely for the purpose of making them comfortable. One thing that does not make guests comfortable is rattlesnakes. Maybe it was all the construction commotion, or the unusually wet spring, or merely a localized punishment from the gods for humankind’s hubris in battling entropy, but sightings of the Western Diamondback surged. Some were six feet long and as thick as my upper arm. They sunned themselves on porches, nestled into cool corners under baskets, slithered about looking for drinks and snacks. Like guests.

James became a ruthless murderer of these unwanted residents. I watched him bludgeon one to death with a brick as it tried to leave his office, which the two of them had apparently shared quite amicably for hours. In the heat of slaughter, James shouted at me to grab a rock, as if his own repeated blows to the creature’s head were insufficient. A bout of horror-paralysis prevented me from helping anyone, a state that probably benefitted James. In a slightly less gruesome encounter, James snuck up behind one dozing in the shade on the porch and cut it in half with a shovel. Both halves then tried to leave the porch. The next time I saw him, James was wearing a leather-sheathed machete like a purse, which paired nicely with the rest of his vaquero getup. But the carnage was for naught. Rodents had a hold there, too, and the snakes just kept coming.

The losing battle with nature proved a setback for James, so he took to napping again. I had come to view this state with suspicion. He seemed to put himself into some kind of torpor conducive to conjuring the support he needed to keep the dream alive. I used to dabble in the craft, too, derivatively, but I’d shed the last wisp of my faith in anything so grand in my last molt. I couldn’t make it fit anymore. “We were meant to be,” she’d said. “Everything happens for a reason.” We could lock a stare, slip past corneas and swim in the nether reaches of each other’s soul, see what no one else could see. She made me believe for a moment that I was the center of her universe, that anything was possible.

It was a special place to be, under her wing: “Use the light, G.” She could hold airplanes in the sky by imagining them surrounded with light. She could cure disease, heal wounds, find the best parking spots. She had broken the code. Found a way to feel worthy of her good fortune—perhaps, through a cozy relationship with a Higher Power, even in control of it. I guess I was more comfortable thinking that the universe could shit on anyone at any time.

James’s Higher Power might have doled out miracles, too, but not without a price. Intermittently he would wake up from his slumber and smash a kissing bug against his face or bare arm. It was a banner year for the large bloodsucking pests, and James was covered with welts that he mindlessly scratched to a bloody pulp. Nevertheless, before long, the guest ranch had a guest: an artist from Chicago looking for a place that was not Chicago. James evicted me and the dog from our casita, set us up in a spare-in-every-way expansion behind the office, and put me in charge of the invisible structure. For a time, I was the invisible structure.

Simone from Chicago moved in.

Then came a group of women on some kind of spiritual retreat necessarily coinciding with a full moon. They wore billowy gauze dresses and Tevas. They stayed up late beating bongos in a circle around an open fire over which roasted an animal, probably a chicken that they picked up from the Costco in Tucson. In the small hours, they retired to the refurbished bunkhouse, still a little cruder than a Motel 6 with its single beds, wool blankets, and original boot-scuffed pine floors. I was almost immediately alerted to an emergency: someone found a mouse turd under their pillow, and every bed had been torn apart in a frenzy looking for more of the same. I changed the bedding on twelve beds in the middle of the night while the seekers-of-oneness went through cupboards and drawers looking for the perpetrator of the crime, which they intended to pummel with a broom.

The reality of guests, and guest-related issues, seemed to merit a larger invisible presence. Daniel, a young and very recent immigrant from Mexico who spoke not a word of English, became our handyman, and—as decreed by our guru James—my roommate. As Daniel and I groped for the means to communicate without the usual scaffolding of a common language, I learned that he had a wife in Mexico and was also interested in sleeping with me. “Daniel, sweet Daniel, non mi piace, I mean, gusto, hombres. Comprende?” I don’t think he did.

Soon I would be fired anyway, but not before my replacement had been installed: this time in the form of a capable woman named Debra, who James knew from their intersecting pasts as students of the Human Potential Movement when both were paying large sums of money to be starved and sleep-deprived until they “got it.” Debra came with a sidekick whose name evaporated from my consciousness as soon as it landed. It simply refused to root. Maybe Ellie. Both were rather androgynous and though there was a conspicuous age gap between them, I wondered about the status of their relationship. My curiosity only grew with Debra’s frequent tales—related with convincing sincerity and great detail—about her ex-husband’s acuity in the sack. Ellie, as we shall call her, was a chain smoker with too much angst but otherwise could have run the ranch by herself. She followed Debra around like a puppy. Abruptly, James, Debra, and Ellie were the two-and-a-half Musketeers and I was looking through my unpacked boxes for that old map.

If it had to go down in flames, the timing was good. Winter was skulking and I felt a certain dread about it, triggered daily by the visible fog of my own—and Daniel’s—breath in the morning chill. James called a meeting. He was agitated, nervously biting his lower lip. Perhaps he was feeling the cold too, sensing imminent dormancy, the natural ebb of clamoring guests, certainly worthy of another poem. He seemed to be talking to himself while the rest of us glanced between the floor and each other, bewildered. The tension was high. Even the dog was stressed, growling at the door as he did when he wanted to be let out. James muttered something about Simone’s ongoing use of the private casita with that spectacular view, as if she were squatting there. I reminded James, audaciously, with words, that she was a paying guest. He told me to shut up, in those words. I told him to fuck off, in those words. Oh, words, with their power to lure a person to the gates of heaven, and also heave her through the mouth of hell.

Nothing left to do but leave. Yet, for the first time in a long while, I found myself something like jubilant: me, the dog, our trusty truck, Grandpa, barreling down that rutted road. Sun at that autumn angle, bathing boulders in orange, radiant warmth against a cloudless deep-blue sky. Dog pressed against my chest, his curly head insistently overhanging the open window, tongue and ears flapping in the draft. “Closer to Fine” in the CD player on repeat. It was enough. I was still stuck with nowhere to go, but it was a freer, lighter, kind of stuck.

About the author:

Gina Calderone lives in and wanders around Auburn, California.

Gina has previously published her work in sneaker wave magazine. Her story “Camp Whispering Pines” appeared on October 13, 2024.