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Come Down Somewhere

By Jennifer L. Wright

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CHAPTER ONE
October 1944
The army moved in on a Sunday.
Moved in. That’s what Uncle Hershel called it. Like they’d been a happy family out house-hunting and found the perfect little bungalow. Like they hadn’t just walked in and taken what was ours, claiming the government needed it for the war effort. Uncle Hershel could call it anything he pleased. I called it stealing.
I was in the hay loft when they arrived. Pushing things to the side, sweeping away years of dust and bird droppings, making space for boxes of things we were no longer allowed to keep in our house. Because our house, and over seventy-five percent of our land, was no longer ours. It was now property of the U.S. Government.
“Olive!” Ma’s voice came from outside, just below the window.
I didn’t answer. Instead, I jumped over a hole in the loft floor—one more thing we didn’t have the time or money to fix—and tossed a bag of old grain over to the corner with a bang. Dust floated up from the impact, shimmering in the afternoon sun.
“Olive, come on down. Your brother can finish up there. I need you to help me move the last of this stuff into the casita.”
I stuck my head out of the narrow opening. “Make Avery do it. I’m already up here.”
Ma shielded her eyes as she looked up at me. “Avery is stronger than you. It will be easier for him to carry the boxes up the ladder. Besides—”
Her sentence was interrupted by a distant rumble. She and I turned at the same moment, searching for the source of the commotion. From my vantage point in the loft, the land spread out beneath me, shades of brown and green. Dirt and shrubs, rock and hills, miles of withered land fading in a pale sky. Ugly. Barren. Home. But now, in the distance, on the last hill before our house, the one with the Arizona sycamore, my initials carved in the trunk, bark worn smooth from climbing and that one branch perfect for reading—beside that hill, my hill, a large truck rolled to a stop, the words “U.S. Army” stamped on the sides.
“They’re here,” Ma said, unnecessarily. “Avery! Hershel! They’re here.”
I pulled myself back from the loft window as another truck reached the barn. Tires on gravel, engines cut and, in their absence, a stifling silence. I pressed myself against the wall, unable to breath, unwilling to move. A slamming door, muffled voices. A man. And then my mother. Laughing.
I dug my fingernails into my arm and stared at my boots, breathing in the smell of manure and hay and memories of a place that was fading before my eyes.
And my mother was laughing.
The squeak of the barn door being shoved aside, the rush of sunlight across gray, weathered beams. “Olive?”
Uncle Hershel’s gruff voice. I pushed myself further against the wall.
“I know you’re up there,” he hissed. “Get down here. Now.” The last word cut through my resolve the way only Uncle Hershel could.
The ladder creaked as I swung my feet over the side, shuddering beneath my hands as if it too felt my apprehension. I jumped off the last rung, a small cloud of dust billowing out from my boots. I straightened my back, jutting my chin against Uncle Hershel’s harsh gaze.
The buttons of his flannel shirt strained over his barrel chest as he wiped the sweat from his thinning black hair. He sneered as he placed a battered cowboy hat back atop his head. “Get out here and say hello like is proper. Ain’t gonna have these men thinking we’ve raised a bunch of savages.”
“So today we care what the Army thinks, huh? Just a few weeks ago we hated Roosevelt and the war, then your CPUSA buddies tell you that they’ve changed their mind, so now we do support the war. I can’t keep—”
“Shut your mouth, Olive.”
Hershel raised his hand, prepared to strike, but I ducked out of his way. He would always be bigger than me but now I was faster.
He scowled. “When are you going to grow up and think about someone other than yourself? This country has made you soft and stupid, girl. When I was your age—”
But I strode from the barn before he could finish. I did not care what Hershel was like when he was my age. My bet was brooding and Russian—just like he was now.
The October sun was harsh and bright, summer refusing to give in to fall, as was often the case in this part of New Mexico. I walked with my head hung low, staring at the ground, avoiding the reality of what I knew I’d have to see eventually.
“Olive? Olive, this is Sergeant Hawthorne.” My mother’s tone was light, fake, grating.
“Olive, so nice to meet you.”
Sergeant Hawthorne had dark hair, slick with pomade, and eyes as green as the Rio Grande valley in spring. He was tall—over six feet if I had to guess—and muscular, evident even under the drab brown of his uniform. He stared down at me with a smile that dimpled his cheeks. On a normal person, I would have found all of these traits appealing. Downright handsome.
Too bad I’d already decided to hate him.
He extended his hand. I didn’t take it.
Beside me, my mother giggled and tugged at her dress. “Olive.”
But still I did not shake his hand. After a few moments, Sergeant Hawthorne pulled his arm back to his side but kept that stupidly handsome grin on his face. “It’s alright, Mrs. Alexander. I’ve got a daughter around her same age. I know all about teenage girls.”
The two of them laughed at his joke like it was funny, my mother’s giggles morphing into one of her coughing fits.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped, trying to steady her breathing. “This dust. You never really get used to it.” She cleared her throat and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye, gesturing toward my brother. “And this is Avery.”
Tall and wiry, with a mop of jet black hair that would never lay flat, my brother looked younger than his nineteen years, though lately he more than made up for it with his ridiculous manly posturing. He thrust his shoulders back, chin lifted, and shook Sergeant Hawthorne’s hand with enough force for the both of us.
Sergeant Hawthorne’s eyes widened as his arm jerked forward under the intensity of Avery’s grip. He stiffened, regaining his bearing, and letting out an amused laugh. “Quite a handshake there, son.”
Avery gave a curt nod, lips pressed in an absurd, overly serious non-smile.
“We could use a man like you in the ranks!”
“I actually leave in two days, sir.”
Sergeant Hawthorne dipped his head and grinned, completely oblivious to the effect Avery’s words had on my mother. The slight shift in her stance. The imperceptible intake of breath.
His initial application the year before had been rejected, though I knew nothing more about the story than Avery’s return from the enlistment office with fire in his eyes and whiskey on his breath, a string of curse words that made even Uncle Hershel’s mouth seem tame. Avery had never exactly been light, but his darkness had grown even heavier then. He spent less time in the house with us and more time in Hershel’s casita, his bad temper exacerbated our uncle’s own and fueled by a steady diet of Hershel’s never-ending rhetoric on this country and its problems.
Still, despite it all, I thought that was the end of it. The world would war but we would continue on, untouched. And we did…for awhile. Then the Army sent a letter. Next thing I knew, Hershel’s friends from California had shown up, their loud meetings in the casita—which now included Avery—grew louder and then markedly quieter, all manner of strange men coming and going from the ranch for days before the whole lot of them just up and disappeared. That’s when Avery announced the Army had changed its mind and he was leaving soon, too.
Since then, my brother had started smiling more, my mother less and less. I kept my head down, doing my chores and trying to pretend none of it was happening.
But now here we were.
Uncle Hershel brushed past me, knocking my arm a little harder than necessary. “Sergeant Hawthorne, Hershel Alexander.”
“Hershel, yes, yes of course. I can’t thank you enough for this.”
I glowered at the ground. As if we had a choice.
“It’s temporary, of course,” Sergeant Hawthorne was saying. “Just a billet for the men while construction is on-going. Your house will be yours again before you know it. But the land could take longer. It’s all a matter of…” He cleared his throat, swallowing whatever he was about to say. Awkwardness seeped into the air around us.
He couldn’t tell us when. He couldn’t tell us why. But he knew. He knew what all of this was for, what secrets the government was hiding beneath its “war effort” label. He knew…and he couldn’t tell. And that knowledge was a power over us no amount of smiles or small talk could ever erase.
“Let me show you around,” Uncle Hershel barked, breaking the tension. “We’re just about finished in the main house—a few odds and ends here and there—but let me go ahead and give you the lay of the land. Now, over here…” He put a hand at Sergeant Hawthorne’s elbow, leading him away.
My mother sighed as she watched their retreat. The smile, the joy, the façade faded as quickly as it had begun, her shoulders collapsing in on themselves. She pulled a cigarette from her dress pocket, lighting it with shaking hands. “Come on, Olive,” she said wearily after taking a drag. “We still have work to do.”
Inside the main house, Avery returned to stacking boxes in the hallway, Mama to loading dishes in the kitchen. I joined them, biting the inside of my cheek to stem tears as I folded blankets in the living room.
Pa had died seven years ago, a farming accident with a wayward bull. His brother Hershel had returned from California and moved into the casita not long after, sulking but dutiful; his temper and bad mood a cloud the ranch had never quite been able to shake since. I couldn’t help thinking that if he were still alive, none of this would be happening. It wasn’t true, of course—my father’s presence couldn’t stop the war any more than his absence—but I clung to the fantasy anyway.
“Olive, you grab that pile there and take it to the casita. Avery, that stuff goes in the barn.”
Avery grunted as he lifted two boxes at once. “You sure they’re okay with us storing this stuff in the barn?”
My mother lit another cigarette, inhaling deeply before answering. “The barn is still ours. At least according the papers they gave us. ‘Eminent domain’ or not, we still have to make a living, and we need that barn to do it. Though heaven knows how we’re going to—”
“It’ll be fine, Ma.” A look passed between my mother and brother, fleeting, before Avery shifted the boxes in his arms and strode from the room.
My mother stared after him, the smoke from her cigarette curling around her gaze for several moments before she finally blinked and smiled weakly at me.
I punched at a pile of blankets, trying to force them into a ball small enough to carry in one trip, and stalked from the house. I didn’t want to look at her. Or Avery. And I sure as anything didn’t want to hear the word ‘eminent domain’ again. The government kept using that word over and over. As if naming a thing made it right.
I stomped over to the casita, ignoring Uncle Hershel and Sergeant Hawthorne who stood next to the Army truck, laughing and talking like old friends. I stuck my nose in the air, not caring as the blankets began to slip and drag in the dry New Mexico dirt. Let Mama sleep in dirty blankets tonight. At least she’d still be here at our ranch. Yes, the Army would be here. The land would be smaller, the big house no longer our own. But, even in the casita, she’d still fall asleep to the coyotes howling, to the smell of the sagebrush floating on the breeze. Tomorrow morning, she’d still wake up and watch the sun wash over the Jornada, the gray of night giving way to reds and browns and yellows, before stepping outside with Hershel, doing their work, playing their part, just as they’d always done.
And Avery? In a few days Avery would be shipping out, his duty finally realized, his restless anxiety now fused with purpose and a plan. With meaning.
But tomorrow morning, I’d be in Alamogordo, opening my eyes to the pale blue wallpaper at my grandmother’s house on Delaware Avenue. The one with the cracked chimney that made the whole house smell like smoke and the fenced in front yard that wasn’t even big enough to grow a row of corn. The one where the mountain view was obstructed by rows of other houses just like hers and where, instead of painted desert sunsets coloring the walls, there were portraits of Jesus in every room.
Sixty miles away but it may as well have been a million.
I should have been grateful. We all had a role to play in the war effort, all the posters said, and this was mine. We’d get our land back eventually, the Army had promised, when the war was over and the government was done. I should be proud to sacrifice in such a way.
And I was. But I didn’t understand why my sacrifice meant moving while they got to stay. Why my work at the ranch for the war effort wasn’t enough, why I was being pushed out instead, treated like an in-the-way toddler rather than the adult I practically was. Why the need for help was great…but not the kind I could offer.
I threw the blankets on the floor of the casita, not bothering to take them all the way to the back bedroom, and returned to the main house, my grief and anger rising with each step. The living room was empty, voices coming from the back part of the house.
No, not just the back part of the house. My part of the house. No. No no no.
I ran towards the sound, skidding to a halt in the doorway. Avery was pulling books off my shelf, tucking them into a box labeled “Alamogordo.”
My mother, perched on the corner of my bed, was the first to see me. “Now, Olive, it’s the last room. We’ve waited as long as we could—”
I didn’t bother to listen to the rest of her words. I flung myself across the room at Avery, something between a scream and a wail erupting from my throat. The book in his hands—Treasure Island, one of Pa’s favorites—landed with a thud on the floor as he raised his arms, shielding himself from my blows.
“Get out of my room!” I screamed. My nails dug into his flesh as I swung. “Get out! Get out!”
“Olive! Olive, stop that!” My mother’s voice was far away, muted inside my anger.
Blood sprouted across Avery’s arm. I kept swinging anyway. It was immature, childish, as if we were kids again and he’d broken my favorite toy. But I didn’t care. Surprise shone in his eyes as he wriggled and dodged, trying to both block me and escape. I moved to connect with his cheek and felt my arm jerked painfully back.
“Knock it off!” The stink of sweat and tobacco pressed into me. Uncle Hershel pinned my wrist to my spine with one hand, the other digging into my bicep. “What in Sam Hill has gotten into you?”
My mother stood to one side, hands in front her mouth. Sergeant Hawthorne was in the door way, that stupid smile finally gone from his face, shiny black shoes covered in dust. At the sight of him—this stranger, this intruder, standing in my bedroom as if he owned it, because he did—the blood drained from my limbs. My body deflated.
Avery wiped at the scratches on his arms and puffed out his chest, snatching the book from the ground and shoving it unceremoniously into the box, ripping the cover. He sneered, daring me to say something, to come at him again.
But instead of inciting me, that rip—that small rip in the cover of a book I hadn’t read since childhood—broke me. I wrenched from Uncle Hershel’s grasp, barely registering the tears on my mother’s face through my own, and fled from the room. Momentarily blinded by the sun, I kept running, past the casita and the barn, past the corral, out into the open desert.
Ragged sobs choked me as the ground began to slope upwards, stealing my breath but not my grief. I dogged the yuccas and prickly pears easily despite my blurry vision. The path up the mesa was as familiar to me as my own hands. I didn’t stop until I came to the top, to the corner where the big boulder split, a cleft in its side shaped like lightning, opening into a secret space no one ever bothered to notice but us.
The burrow. My brother had called it that because we’d had to pretend to be small animals just to fit inside. Through the lightning-shaped crack, a hidden ledge jutted like a makeshift balcony in front of a shallow cave that was really nothing more than a crawl space. We’d outfitted it with a door made of rotted wood and stuffed the inside with old moth-eaten blankets and pillows, comic books and dime store novels scattered over the dirt floor.
It had been our spot, Avery and I’s. Back before Pa died and Hershel moved in. When we were still friends and life was still fun. But now it was my spot, my safe spot, a place to escape from Mama’s grief, Avery’s sullenness, and Uncle Hershel’s temper. A refuge and release. A remnant of childhood I refused to let go. Because up here, among the rocks and the shrubs, the bare earth and the cloudless New Mexico sky, I could still pretend life made sense.
From this spot, I was perfectly hidden, yet could still see our ranch hundreds of feet below, shimmering in the heat. In the distance rose the ragged top of Oscura Peak; across the drabness of the desert floor, the dark stain of the ancient lava field to the east and the faint glint of the gypsum dunes to the south. I slid to my knees as a fresh wave of sorrow washed over me.
The ranch had been in our family for over half a century, before New Mexico was even New Mexico. Since my grandparents had immigrated from the motherland with their two small boys in tow. Back then, no one wanted a piece of the Jornada del Muerto. And why would they? The “Route of the Dead Man” was nothing but a wasteland, a ninety-mile stretch of desert between Socorro and El Paso with no water, little vegetation, and summer temperatures hot enough to boil your blood.
But the land “called” to my grandparents, or so the story goes. Grandpa built the adobe walls with his bare hands, forming each brick with soil and straw gathered right here. The pitched roof, the chicken coop, the barn, the horse corral…everything here bore his mark. As a teenager, Hershel had fled, claiming he was going back home to fight in the revolution (Pa swore he never made it out of California, his mouth being bigger than his courage—a rumor I learned not to bring up in my uncle’s presence, lest I wanted to be on the wrong end of his violent rebuttal), but my father had stayed in his adopted homeland, his Russian blood thawing in the New Mexico sun. My grandfather added the casita, attached to the house by a courtyard wall a year after my parents’ wedding, he and my grandmother planning to finish out their days there while my parents started a family of their own in the main house.
And he did. He died in the casita’s back bedroom and is buried in the far corner lot.
My grandmother followed soon after, and Pa took over, making the ranch his own by adding a second bedroom onto the main house for his daughter. Me. Every memory I had—of him, of my family, of my life—centered around this ranch.
New Mexico. Our home. My home. Only it wasn’t mine anymore.
I wept for what seemed like hours, until my eyes burned and my cheeks cracked beneath dry tears. Until the sun lay only a finger length above the mountains and the shadows began to stretch, dappling the landscape with previews of the coming night. Until I heard the sound of crunching rocks and Avery’s face appeared through the crack in the boulder.
I swatted at my face, wiping away the grit of evaporated grief.
“You look awful,” he said, crawling through and dropping down beside me. His long legs stretched in front him, draping over the edge of the mesa.
I scooted away, scowling. “At least my clothes match.”
He let out a loud laugh, which echoed across the desert air, and glanced down at his outfit. “Mine don’t?”
A pair of jeans and a faded white shirt matched well enough, but Avery had been colorblind since birth; making fun of him for it was stupid but routine. A pathetic grasp at normal when the world was anything but.
“I’m sorry about your book. It was an accident.”
I scrunched my face. It was my turn to apologize; the welts on his arm looked painful, and I knew I’d landed at least one hard blow on his cheek. But I still couldn’t bring myself to do it.
After a few moments, he sighed. “You know, you can’t hide up here forever, Olive.”
“I wasn’t hiding. I just wanted to be alone,” I added pointedly.
He rubbed at his arms. I pretended not to notice the welts my nails had sprouted. “Ma’s worried about you.”
“Good.”
“Now, stop it. That ain’t no way to be.”
“Ain’t no way to be? You don’t have any right to tell me which way to be. You’re leaving.”
“Just because I’m leaving don’t mean I don’t care about what happens here.”
I stared at my boots. The laces were frayed, the toes scratched. Memories of a place that no longer existed. I pulled my elbows into my sides. “Why are they making me go?” I had thought my tears were spent but here they were, springing up once again. “It’s not fair. Especially with you gone. I can help! They can’t do this all on their own.”
“Olive…”
“Why don’t they want me here?”
Beside me, Avery shifted, his discomfort obvious. “Olive, there are some things in this world that are bigger than us. Bigger than our family, bigger than our home. I know you don’t understand that yet—”
“Oh, just shut up, will you?” That was another thing Avery had started doing. Only three years older than me, but acting like it was ten. Like he was so wise and worldly, when the farthest he’d ever been was Albuquerque. “I know there’s a war going on, same as you.”
“I ain’t talking about the war.”
I turned to look at him, but his face remained forward, staring out towards the rapidly setting sun. He rubbed his temple with one hand, pushing away the dark hair matted to his forehead.
“I mean, I am talking about the war. But there’s more to it than that. There are some things…” He stopped and sighed deeply, chewing a moment on his lip before continuing. “There are some things even bigger than the war, Olive. I…I can’t explain. But I hope one day you’ll understand.”
I scrunched my eyebrows, titling my head to one side. “What do you mean, Avery?”
He blinked several times and shook his head, pressing his lips into a small smile before glancing at me. “Nothing, Olive. It’s nothing. Just…just know that I do care, okay? No matter what you think, no matter what you see or hear. I do care. About you, about Ma, about this.” He took my hand, pressing one finger into the dirt. Up to a point, then down again. An upside down ‘V’. It was the same symbol carved into the rock behind us. The one we’d sign in the air when Hershel got ugly, write on papers slid under each other’s door when we’d been sent to our rooms, leave it written in the dirt when Mama’s incapacitating grief made the chore-load overwhelming.
The three points representing the only stable things in a world of instability: me, Avery, the mesa. Home.
We hadn’t used the symbol in over two years. But the weight of it now beneath our entwined fingers made the lapse evaporate, the world at large seeming to vanish at the power of our unity. I leaned against him, truly seeing my brother for the first time in months. He squeezed my shoulder and I felt his chest rise and fall in a weary sigh.
“That’s why I’m going, Olive. And that’s why you have to go, too.”
He left after that, words hanging in the air between us, disappearing back through the crack of the burrow with a sad, resigned smile. My shoulder was cold at the memory of his touch. Although I knew he was only going back to the ranch, it felt as if he were already a thousand miles away. Because he was; he had been for months. And no amount of childish reminiscing was going to change that.
Below me, clouds of dust rose from the desert floor as three more Army trucks made their way up our long drive. As I watched them, Avery’s words hung over me like a fog. I should have felt something like pride. Comradery. Duty. The honor of sacrifice, of being a part of something bigger.
And I tried. Because he was right—all of that stuff was meaningful, more important. All of that stuff mattered.
The only thing that didn’t matter was me.

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