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p. 4 of 8

          Now, though, Daniels and Dawkins and Fairweather and I were going into the front office where cabin-dwellers had used to come to check in (with friendly Norman Bates, Dawkins had it). There was a multi-tiered rack still stocked with brochures for driving-distance restaurants and parks and preserved train cars and old-timey Gold Rush exhibits. There was a vending machine still partly stocked with candy bars.

          Adjoining the front office was a room you were meant to go into but that you’d have been unsure about the within-limits-ness of if you’d been there visiting as a kid. A sunroom, I guess you’d call it. It had bookshelves filled with paperbacks with cracked spines, from which selection visitors had used to pluck a thriller or mystery or spy novel to take with them to the riverside for a day or two, books about vampire towns in Maine and telepathic teen girls, books with swollen, wavy pages from times they’d been dropped in the water. There was no organizing principle to the shelves, which were all just partly filled, so that paperbacks leaned against paperbacks rather than standing upright. Faded red armchair, faded green armchair. Dust motes spinning through sunbeams. A room with a distinctive smell, a room on which laziness had left a spiritual impression.

          Fairweather went into a bathroom and started peeing without closing the door.

          There were two ways in and out of the sunroom – through the front office and through a white screen door that opened onto an outside space opposite the side of the building we had come in. Daniels and Dawkins went out that second door and over to a ping pong table, and started rallying. I followed them and stood against the wall, watching. The sun was getting higher. Past the table was scrub – mostly dead long grass – and then forest. Though you could feel the air warming up, the trees kept us out of the sun’s sightline. Fairweather came out the screen door and stood next to me. With jutting elbows, he leaned back against the wall. He laced his fingers together over his ribcage and turned his head towards me and leaned in and down conspiratorially.

          “The old sluiceways ’round here, man?” he said. “You would not believe how they got them preserved. Whoo boy!” He shook his head in appreciation. “You been to these old Gold Rush spots?”

          I shook my head. He again shook his. “It’s terrific, man, really is.” He touched my elbow. “Maybe later we can take a drive.”

          Fairweather grew up in Guelph, Ontario, and is enamored of Californian history.

          He clapped his hands and said, “Boys, we giving this man a tour or what?”

          We walked back around to the side of the building we’d entered from. Over there we were a straight shot from the sun, and we all took off our jackets and left them on the ground. There wasn’t that much more of the site to see. In the middle of the campground was a bonfire pit that the Your Exes had never yet used. We strolled past the remaining cabins to complete the circuit. Dawkins pointed out which cabins were Jones’ and Kylan Lambardi’s. From out of each came drifting coital sounds.

          Daniels muttered,  “Are those girls gonna ever fuckin’ leave?” Dawkins patted him on the shoulder.

*

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