Through Campland’s crackly speakers Stevie Nicks warbles Gypsy, casting a spell over the store. Behind the climbing counter in the back corner, seemingly immune to any enchantment, Jon lectures Abel. “I’m not trying to knock your lifestyle, Abel. Urban Camping could be fun. Romantic.”
“Romantic?” Abel says, thinking not so much of rom-coms and roses but of moody poets dying young.
“In the right place, that is. Not in strip mall parking lots in New Jersey,” Jon says, swinging an ice ax in front of him like a scythe, his movements fluid, bewitching.
“The right place. Where’s that?” Abel’s been urban camping for four years. It sounds better than homeless. Like Shelley’s bloated corpse washing ashore, Abel’s life has deposited him at Campland. Life, anyway. He isn’t sure if it’s his, if he must own it. He’s forty. Broke. Lives in his car. Who’d want to own that? Who’s culpable? Has his whole life, every choice and circumstance, been wrong? The wrong place. The left place. Its current name? Campland.
Jon tests the ax on the slatwall behind the climbing counter. Embeds it in the particle board. “A fine lifestyle,” he says. “Really and truly. Summers in Wyoming. Winters in Playa Del Carmen. A migratory hobo. You just need to find greener pastures.”
“I’m not a cow.”
“Cozier parking lots, then.”
“How do I get there? These pastures of green?”
Jon struggles to remove the ax from the wall before management notices. “You live in a van, man. Drive.”
“With what money? I can barely afford to fill the tank let alone replace the brake pads.”
“Think outside the box,” Jon says, leaving the ax in the wall to mime his way out of an invisible box.
Stevie sings about lightning striking and Abel thinks about money and value and his various jobs. Forty hours a week at Campland, North Jersey’s premier destination for discount camping gear. Another fifteen hours manning the cash register at the Barnes and Nobles across the highway, scanning glossy coffee table books as they start their journey to a landfill. Bartending two nights a week at the Orange Lantern, receiving a buck tip for every pitcher of beer he pours.
What if the box is really a coffin? How are you supposed to think outside it? How are you supposed to think at all?
“There is dough all around you,” Jon says.
Abel surveys the store and sees nothing but gear he can’t afford to access places he’ll never see, apparel to outfit a person he’ll never be.
Jon finally liberates the ax from the wall and pieces of particle board fall to the carpet like ash. Holding the ax by the adze, he points with the spike to the gear hanging on metal pegs behind them. “What do you see?”
“Expensive toys for rich people to make the world their playground.”
“Yes, and?”
“A lot of crap I have to inventory.” Enough to love, Stevie sings.
“And very expensive, very small gear. Headlamps. Avalanche beacons. Pocket-sized gear. Gear that’s marked up a lot,” Jon says.
“So?”
“You’re hopeless. Follow me.” Jon leads him into the stockroom behind the counter.
Abel shuffles after him, tripping on the warped threshold plate. The shush of their feet along the carpet sounds like a muffled threat. “What are we doing?”
Jon grabs a boxed headlamp. “How much is this one? A hundred, right?”
“Yeah. That’s the Bear Blinder, the brightest headlamp on the market.”
“Perfect.” Jon opens it, stands on his toes and dumps the packaging in a gap between the slatwall separating the stockroom from the rest of the store. He pockets the Bear Blinder and winks at Abel.
“You need a new headlamp?”
“No. But some schmuck on eBay does. And will pay for it.” Jon’s pocket bulges like it’s housing an extra scrotum.
“So, you’re a thief?”
“I’m a teacher,” Jon says.
“What’s the lesson?”
“On the topic of fairness.”
“Is stealing fair?” The only thing Abel’s ever stolen was a plastic pumpkin full of candy off his neighbor’s porch on Halloween when he was ten. It was just after his mother’s diagnosis and at the start of a year of doctors and hospitals and loss and fear. The pumpkin had a little post-it note that said “Take One” but there was no one around, the windows were dark, the street empty, so he dumped the whole pumpkin into his pillowcase. Later, sitting on his bedroom floor and surveying his spoils, he felt nauseous thinking about what he’d done. He confessed his crime to his mother and though she made him apologize and return the pumpkin and its candy to their neighbors the next day, she didn’t make him go alone. But that was a ten-year-old Abel, a different person altogether, with his life an open road, two decades before he’d turned into the dead-end street that is Campland.
“Is fair working for eleven bucks an hour while your boss buys a third home in Cape May? Is shilling overpriced gear to help rich people spoil what’s left of the world’s wild places fair? The world’s not fair. This,” Jon says, patting his pocket, “this is fair. This is redistributive economics. This is one small installment of my long-overdue Christmas bonus.”
“Ok, ok. Lower your voice.”
Jon shrugs, says “you can lead a horse to water,” and leaves the stockroom, waddles through the bike department and exits the store with his Christmas bonus.
Abel faces the wall of gear before him and sees behind each product its miserable history. Copper mines. Sweatshops. Shipping containers. Plumes of pollutants. And yet he doesn’t feel nauseous. He is hungry. Starving. His mother may have taught him that stealing was wrong but she didn’t stay around long to ensure he fully learned his lesson. Stevie sings about your bright, bright eyes and her quavering voice transforms the wall from a forbidding mass of overpriced and toxically-produced toys into a hope, a chance, his future.
*
Soon, Abel’s thieving outstrips Jon’s. He’s a man on a mission: to steal and sell and save. The plastic pumpkin all over again except his mother isn’t here to make him return the goods. He’ll sell his van, jettison that version of himself, buy a pick-up and drive west. He’ll camp on Bureau of Land Management land, summer in the mountains of Washington and winter in the deserts of the southwest. No more strip malls. No more Jersey congestion. No more entitled customers demanding discounts. Just endless miles of open wilderness for Abel to explore.
Jon, admiring the scale of Abel’s thievery and applauding his ambition, sets him up with his fence, Casey. Casey works at the local climbing gym and is paying his way through an occupational therapy program by connecting outdoorsy people light on cash and scruples with stolen Campland goods.
They meet at a trailhead in Harriman State Park. An unseasonably warm early March night. Jon makes the introductions and Abel opens the back of his van to let Casey examine the gear.
Casey whistles. Headlamps, GPS watches, crampons, ergonomic ice axes. All of the overengineered trappings marketed as necessary to lead an adventurous life. “You weren’t kidding, Jon. This guy is serious. I’ll take it all. And whatever else you can get your hands on.” He picks up an ice ax, swings it over his head onto an imaginary glacier.
Abel grins, proud of his haul. He’s a capable climber, a decent skier, a competent kayaker, but he’s found his calling now: sneaking caches of gear out of Campland by throwing them in the dumpster and retrieving them at night once the parking lot is empty. He’s even figured out how to fudge the inventory in the computer system so by the time anyone notices, he’ll be free and clear and camping under western skies.
Casey gives him thirty-two hundred for ten grand worth of gear. At this rate, Abel will be able to buy a new truck and quit Campland within a year. He’ll even have a nest egg to live off a while. Through the haze of light pollution coming from New York City forty miles to the south, he can see the jagged grandeur of the North Cascades and can almost smell the fresh mountain air.
Jon and Abel watch Casey drive away then don their own packs and start their hike to a lean-to four miles into the woods. They’re celebrating. Though Abel’s pack is stuffed to the gills with meat to grill and an entire box of merlot, he flies up the trail, each step somehow landing in the right place, over rocks and roots and boot-sucking mud. His headlamp carves a bright path through the night.
“What did I tell you?” Jon yells after him, struggling to keep up.
“We’re outside the box now,” Abel says, digging his trekking poles into the rocks and scaling the moraine. He stays still a moment at the top, waiting for Jon to catch up, listening to the woods, and feeling like he is climbing outside it, climbing free of it. “Fuck the box,” he shouts.
“Fuck the box,” Jon echoes in the dark.
*
Kismet is a gently-used silver Toyota Tacoma shining in the summer sun on a pitted and packed used car lot on Route 46. Abel spies it from one of his usual urban camping spots, the Kmart across from it. He has to have it. In his bones and gut, he knows it is the vehicle for him. No, not just a vehicle, not an object, but an extension of him, its purchase a retrieval of a lost limb.
He’s unloaded five more caches on Casey since March and has enough saved to buy the truck. With the trade-in on his van, it’ll be his free and clear. And, with some additional thieving through the fall, he’ll have it fully outfitted. He’ll be able to bail on suburban New Jersey, on the whole claustrophobic world of Campland, by the new year, February at the latest. Greener pastures.
Once the deal is done and the title transferred, Abel names the truck Raquel after the poster of Raquel Welch that Andy Dufresne used to cover the hole he dug in his cell wall. Abel makes the truck homey. He uses the amateur woodshop in Jon’s uncle’s garage to build an elaborate platform out of pine plywood for the bed of the truck. He sands the wood soft with four different grits, brings out the material’s quirky knots and warmth, and coats it in protective stain. Covers it with a fluffy futon. Beneath it, he constructs a system of drawers to stow his gear. He even adds a small locked section to secure the twenty-two thousand in cash that he hasn’t deposited yet because he doesn’t want to raise suspicion or leave a trail for anyone to chase once he’s left Campland and inevitably some bookkeeper discovers the discrepancy.
In early October Jon and Abel take a long weekend trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire to backpack in the Presidential Range. If Abel leaves in the winter, it might be their last trip together.
Abel drives. Since his first theft at Campland he’s been on a Fleetwood Mac kick and puts their greatest hits on repeat on the drive north looking at the familiar terrain of the Appalachians through the eyes of someone about to leave it, perhaps never to return. Rest areas. Deciduous trees shedding their leaves. The Mac singing about sweet little lies and unbreakable chains. Raquel rolling up and down hills of greens, reds, browns, and golds.
“These mountains are all worn down. Old and worn. Like little nubs compared to the ranges out west,” Abel says as they leave the Berkshires and continue north to the Whites.
“Nubs?”
“Nubs, remnants, rubble, pitiful little hills. But the mountains out west are still rising. Still growing and dynamic. The crust still churns.” Gypsy comes on and Abel cranks the volume. “They are still rising,” he yells over Stevie, “rising and rising.”
*
Casey asked Abel to stock up for the holiday season. He promised extra eager buyers. Business is booming.
On Halloween, they meet in the parking lot of a derelict diner up Route 17, the northeast tip of New Jersey, derelict diner up Route 17, where a twenty-foot-tall inflated ghost haunts the parking lot of the bank opposite Abel is waiting with the largest haul to date. Casey pulls up in a new WRX, a purple turbo. Two additional bodies fill the car. A behemoth who looks like a nose tackle. The second is wiry like Casey. A climber, Abel guesses.
“Hey, Case. Who are your friends?”
“These two goofs? Moe and Curly. My climbing partners. They want to take a look at your tricked-out caravan.”
Abel is proud of Raquel, of his hard work. Casey and company crowd around. Abel pops the tailgate and gives them a mini-tour. Shows off the crepe curtains he’s sewn. The hand-made gear storage, the pine plywood platform, its multiple configurations.
“Amazing, Abel. Really. Right, guys?” Grunts of agreement. “Well, it is Halloween so let’s see the treats.”
Abel lifts the platform and reveals the compartments housing thousands of dollars’ worth of stolen climbing rope, knives, headlamps, and avalanche beacons. Enough to outfit a crew to summit Everest.
“A hell of a haul,” Casey says.
“Yeah. But I wanted to tell you this might be my last load.”
“No shit.” Casey looks it over again, smiling. “Why’s that?”
“I’m leaving soon. I’ve got all the gear I need and some money saved. I’ll be out of here in no time. Raquel and me.” Abel pats the tail light.
Casey turns to his friends who are watching the lot. “This guy is going to drive across the country in this beast. See all the sights, right?” More grunts. Casey leans into the truck. “And your own gear is in all these side pockets and storage areas?”
“I haven’t had a chance to use a lot of it yet but I will soon.” Go west, middle-aged man. Churning crusts. The Cascades, rising.
Casey says he is impressed. He rummages and comments on the gear, its newness, its cost. Abel helps them transfer the gear to Casey’s car. He puts out his hand.
Casey laughs. “Does this mean I’ll never see you again?”
“We might meet again on the road or along a ridgeline somewhere.”
Casey takes his hand, shakes it firmly once, then turns to leave.
“Aren’t you forgetting something,” Abel says.
“Am I?”
“The money.”
Casey sucks his teeth loudly, rubs the back of his neck. “No money this time, buddy. Sorry. Consider it my Halloween trick. After all, I’m losing my best supplier.”
Abel feels his chest hollow out, a void where his lungs should be. “Quit screwing around, Case. Fork it over.”
“Or what? You’ll call the police and tell them I stole your stolen goods? Don’t be an ass, Abel. Get in your truck and fuck right off.” Casey looks at Moe and Curly, points at Abel with his thumb, shakes his head.
Abel thinks about how his world was a box, a coffin in the shape of wasted years working retail and cold and lonely nights living in his van. But that was a different Abel, a dead-end Abel. This Abel, the one standing in a dark parking lot in New Jersey with his whole future before him, grabs an ice ax out of his truck and walks towards Casey holding it at his side. “Give me the money, Casey. Fair is fair.”
“If you don’t get in your truck and drive away, we’re going to fuck you up, get it? How’s that for fair?”
Abel considers cutting his losses but Casey’s smirk reminds him of all the customers over the years who’ve berated him, talking to him like he was a second-class citizen, reporting him to his manager, spitting on him, pitying him. Reminds him of the endless hours wasted peddling gear to rich people to explore places and spaces he never could. The additional hours—weeks, years—he’ll have to work to make up the loss. Lightning strikes maybe once, maybe twice. He presses his feet into the crumbly pavement, raises the ice ax and lunges at Casey. Casey retreats. Abel keeps swinging, advancing. There is no past. All is future. He’s outside the box now. There are no more walls. He’s demolished them.
Until a light explodes in the parking lot. Casey had palmed a Bear Blinder and cooks Abel’s corneas with its full wattage. Abel drops his ax and turns away from the light and right into Curly’s fist. Pain lights up his face, radiates down his neck and shoulders. Another fist connects with his stomach. Abel sinks to his knees clutching his bruised guts. He rests his head on the cold pavement. A foot connects with his shoulder, his ribs. More kicks follow.
Casey picks up the ax Abel dropped. He tests it out on Raquel. The truck cries under the assault. The brake lights explode. The rear window. Casey drags the ax along the side, gouging the paint. “Take it all,” he tells Moe and Curly. They ransack the truck.
Casey stands over Abel, holds the Bear Blinder over him like an interrogation lamp, and says, “you should have just gotten in your fucking truck and drove, man. Just fucking drove away.” He returns to the truck, crawls in, and uses the ax to pry open Abel’s locked compartment, whistling as he takes Abel’s savings. He exits the truck and waves the Ziploc of cash in front of Abel before kicking him once again, lightly, almost with affection. The three of them load Casey’s car with their spoils like kids gloating over an especially good Halloween haul. As they drive away, he calls out from the driver’s side window, “Happy Halloween.”
Abel lies on the cold pavement struggling to breathe. Cars rumble up the highway into New York State, towards New England and Canada. More rumble south, drawn into the morass of Manhattan. The inflated ghost in the opposite lot strains against the ropes tying it down. Ten minutes or an hour pass, he can’t tell. He is stupid, bleeding, aching. It is late. In a stumbling arc he makes his way to Raquel, finds his first-aid kit still there, shakes off the broken glass, fumbles with the kit, gets the zipper stuck, says “fuck it” to the empty lot, to his empty life, and crawls into the back of the truck.
*
Fall becomes winter. Abel spends the cold nights wrapped in his mummy bag, cinching the elastic cords threaded through the hood tight. The only part of him exposed is the tip of his nose. His ribs are slow to heal. Breathing hurts. He self-medicates with Ambien and expired Zoloft washed down with Captain Morgan. Alone and in the dark, Campland is a phantasm. A nightmare. A greasy chili dog repeating on him.
But in the morning, driven from his bag by the pressure of a full bladder and the nagging sense that he has somewhere to be, Campland returns, its walls manifesting around him, cinderblock and slatwall following him wherever he goes, as if they mark the edges of his world, as if they’re the only reality he’s ever known.
*
Abel mopes through the holidays, the new year, through winter and into March. Jon tries to cheer him up with a weekend campout. A night in the woods, clear skies, fresh air, a campfire. They drive north together, forty miles to Bear Mountain. A night hike after their Saturday shift just like they used to. But, once on the trail, Abel is all aches. A half-mile into the woods, he gives up. The bright beam of his Bear Blinder lands on a rotten log down across the last flat stretch of trail before a short and steep ascent through a narrow gully to the camping spot Jon’s chosen. The peak is bare due to a forest fire a decade ago. Uninterrupted panoramic views atop except for the charred husks of dead but stubbornly standing oaks. Abel’s leg aches, his ankle, his ribs, and he couldn’t care less about panoramic views of suburban sprawl. The log is as good a resting place as any. He runs his fingers along its soggy bark.
“A minute or two to catch our breath,” Jon says, raising an eyebrow as Abel moans, slumped against the log, “then we push on to the campsite. There’s interesting geology right here in our backyard. It’s not the Cascades but it’s no less fascinating. Look over there. Up on the hill.” Jon turns his headlamp up a few lumens, focuses it on two large gray boulders. “I’ve been reading up on the local geology. They’re glacial erratics. Big boulders that rode the glacier and were dumped here when it receded ten or twenty thousand years ago. We passed one coming in too. There’s so much history here. Abel, are you listening to me?”
“Yes, yeah. History. Recession. Erratic dumps.”
“How’s about a beer now? To fortify you for the last leg of the hike.”
“You go on. I’m going to rest here for a minute.” Abel pats the rocky earth around him. “Take in the sights.” He turns off his headlamp. In the dark the sights are confined to the leafless branches of a nearby birch tree, papery bark peeling off like old scabs.
“It’s only a little bit farther. You can make it,” Jon says, the light of his headlamp displaying his indecision, alternately illuminating the next stretch of trail, Abel, the trail, Abel.
“Just a little rest.”
Jon turns his headlamp off and squats beside Abel. “Did I mention my uncle wants to rent out the apartment in his basement? It’s a decent space. He even expanded the window wells so it gets some natural light. I was thinking, if you’re tired of urban camping, we could rent it together. Split the bills. We could swing it. My uncle would give us a fair deal.”
“Rent a place? A basement? In New Jersey?”
“A basement is better than a truck, no?”
Abel wonders if maybe this is the right place after all. Would putting roots down be facing his fate, an act of acceptance and maturity? Or would admitting defeat be just resignation and cowardice? Maybe there is no right place? Like fairness, it could be a myth. “I’ll think on it. Really. I’m just tired. Let me rest a minute on my own, gather my thoughts.”
Jon turns his headlamp on again. “Fine. No pressure. Just think it over. We can talk more by the fire. Rest here, ten, twenty minutes, and by the time you get to our site, I’ll have a fire going. Meat grilling, beers open. Ok?”
“Sure. Ten, twenty minutes.”
“Right. Until then, old chum,” Jon says, saluting his prostrate friend.
Abel salutes Jon’s back. His body slackens against the log. He lies listening to the woods, the life in the dark. Trees creak. A coyote yips. Traffic drones along the Palisades Parkway. When the pain in his leg subsides, he decides to seek Raquel and hobbles back towards the trailhead, leaving the security of the log reluctantly, a friend at the departures gate. His pack is monstrously heavy, stuffed with recently stolen gear that he once thought so essential: wind-proof lighter, spare wool socks, collapsible camp chair, trekking poles, first-aid kit. He takes it off and starts rifling through it looking for his bottle of rum. He changes his mind, picks up his pack again and continues towards the road for a quarter mile, still buckling beneath the burden. At the lone glacial erratic looming over the trail, he stops again, rests for two minutes or two hours, his ass going numb in the cold mud, his back against the cold stone. He stands, sits, stands again. He rummages once more in his pack, extracts the keys to his truck and the rum, and leaves the pack beside the boulder. Jon will find it the next day and pick it up for him. Or not. He doesn’t care.
In the distance, a dim light. The trees thin as he reaches the road. Through them he sees Raquel, the outline of his scarred truck on the gravel shoulder. Enough for me to love, Abel sings softly to himself, enough to love. He’s left the dome light on which casts a weak spotlight on the empty driver’s seat. He gets in his truck and hunkers behind the wheel, takes two painkillers from the glove compartment and swallows a slug of rum. It burns, vanilla vinegar.
He looks at himself in the rearview mirror. The man who looks back at him doesn’t sync up with the image he has built of himself in his head: a fit man forever frozen in his mid-twenties. Skin taut and suntanned. Muscles lean and strong. An adventurer. Now, his skin is sallow, sapped of life from so many hours under Campland’s fluorescent lights. His deep-set eyes shy from his reflection, burrow backwards into his sockets, afraid of the world. He rests his hot cheek on the cold steering wheel, puts his key in the ignition and listens to the clicking as his truck fails to start, the battery drained. He leaves the key in the ignition and imagines the truck rumbling downhill with the unstoppable force of an ice age glacier, all that weight and pressure. He holds the wheel lightly, humming Gypsy to himself and intuiting the route, every turn the right one. The tires beneath him eat up miles and miles of road, ascending, descending, but always advancing, carrying him west, away from Campland, New Jersey, his aches and pains, his age, carrying him away from this wreck of a life and towards his real one. The one waiting for him out there, unboxed, unfucked.
But the night is long and dark. New beginnings are best left for bright mornings. He’ll wake and wait for Jon, thank him but decline his offer. He’ll say a proper goodbye. Jon will help him jumpstart the truck and he’ll stop for coffee, a donut, a shit and he won’t stop again until he’s crossed the Allegheny Mountains. He won’t stop until the walls around him dissolve. Until he’s happy.
To celebrate the passing of his old, loathsome life, he takes the rest of the pills, a little handful, and finishes the rum. Together they turn into a tropical and bitter paste in his mouth. He burps once, twice, stands, exits the cab, stumbles towards the back of the truck. He struggles with the tailgate, kicks it twice, then crawls in. It’s cold yet homey, cozy even. The crepe curtains. The smooth pine plywood. Though his head is spinning from the pills and liquor, he feels right. No longer left. No longer wrong. The night has become what it ought to be—a restful interval between the bright realms of possibilities that should be, will be, his days. He is young enough to tackle a few more storied peaks, the Tetons, the Canadian Rockies, the Cascades. Maybe even get to the Himalayas. He could raise money to climb Everest. His mother had always talked about it. She’d been awed by the climbers’ endurance and skill up at the top of the world, touching the sky. He remembers the look of weary joy on her face on the final family road trip they’d taken to Mount St. Helens. Hours and hours of Fleetwood Mac, her favorite, as they left the east coast, cruised over the plains, and oohed and aahed over the Rockies. She was too sick to hike or climb so his father just wheeled her to the observation deck at the visitor’s center and they listened to a ranger talk about the eruption, the cloud of ash reaching fifteen miles into the sky. The crater it left behind. His mother’s thin arm dangling off the side of her wheelchair. She died in a hospital in Boise and he and his father drove back east in silence.
Everest, yes, he could do it—why not? He could talk to the Sherpas and learn how they haul so much, so high, again and again. He doubts there are any glacial erratics on Everest. He remembers his mother saying that the summit was comprised of marine limestone. It dwelled quietly beneath the sea for ages until rising when India slammed into Asia. The tracks of the subcontinent’s slow commute scar the ocean floor. But is it rising still? Or has the orogeny ceased? Which would mean nothing but erosion and decay for the entire range. Nothing but a grand nub succumbing to a gradual, inevitable diminishment.
Abel thinks he should know. Used to know. Perhaps it will come to him in the morning.
*
Kent Kosack is a writer, editor, and educator based in Pittsburgh, PA. His work has been published in Tin House (Flash Fidelity), the Cincinnati Review, the Normal School, 3:AM Magazine, and elsewhere. See more at: www.kentkosack.com.
New Critique 