by Hart Hanson
Avila plumped himself down in the backseat and said, “Home.”
He reclined there in silence, not answering his phone, not staring out the window, not listening to music.
As we approached the gate to the mansion, a guy I’d never seen before, dressed in khaki pants and a green polo shirt, waved us through.
“Security?” I asked.
“My managers and lawyers set it up. Said I wouldn’t even notice.”
“Yeah? My podiatrist told me the same thing about my orthotics. You know what? I notice them every time I take a step.”
“But they fix your feet, though, right?”
“It’s a metaphor,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with my feet.”
“It’s a lie, you mean. Just say you lied, brah.”
The pirate ship was docked on the driveway side and Nina was nowhere to be seen. Even though it was only midafternoon, Avila said he didn’t need me anymore and sent me home.
Avila’s new security umbrella was aiming to impress. Guard at the front door, another couple visible patrolling the perimeter, gym fit and moving like military or paramilitary, all of them wearing the same hunter-green polo shirt, dark khakis, and soft, black, tactical-team-type boots.
I stopped on the way out to roll down my window and talk to the guy at the gate.
“Hey, crew cut. What service were you in?” I asked.
“Have a good afternoon,” he said.
“Not blue-water Navy; that’s for sure.”
“Good afternoon.”
“I’m guessing Marines.”
“Drive carefully.”
“You’re slouching. Marines tend to slouch. Probably from trying to present a smaller target.”
He sighed, realizing that I wasn’t going to drive away and leave him in peace.
“You look like you’re gonna duck and cover any second,” he said. “So, what . . . Army?”
“That’s right. You allowed to say what security company you work for?”
“Mr. Skellig,” he said (in a tone meant to convey that even though he possessed bottomless reserves of patience, he preferred not to draw upon them), “our instructions are to meld. You aren’t supposed to notice us.”
“Tell your boss that if he doesn’t want you to be noticed, he shouldn’t deck you out in such an eye-catching wardrobe.”
“I’ll tell him. Have a good afternoon, Mr. Skellig.”
“I get it. You know my name. But what am I supposed to call you?”
“You don’t call me anything.”
“Because you don’t exist?”
“Because we’re invisible.”
“That comes across as aloof.”
“It’s an unfriendly world, sir. Thank Christ; otherwise, I wouldn’t have a job.”
He said this without attitude or condescension, and the sir indicated that he’d subconsciously registered that I outranked him.
“If you don’t tell me what to call you, I’ll have to make something up.”
“Have a good afternoon, Mr. Skellig.”
“You have a good evening too, Nestor.”
“Nestor?”
“Google it.”
Nestor laughed, but not much and not very loudly.
“Semper fi,” I said and drove home.
When I pulled into bay three at Oasis, Tinkertoy was standing directly in front of me, wiping her hands with a rag. She wanted me to ask what was wrong.
“What’s wrong?”
“Ripple ain’t. Doing so. Good.”
I entered Dispatch. Ripple’s wheelchair was at the desk but Ripple wasn’t in it. He was lying supine on the floor, pinching his temples with his left hand, his right hand balling up the fabric of his shorts. That’s what pain looks like.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Fuck,” he said, which was Ripple-speak for okay.
He let me help him into the backseat of the Caddie; then I stowed his wheelchair in the trunk.
“I hope you brought your medical marijuana card,” I said, “because the lab is most definitely going to find traces of THC in your blood.”
“More like they’re gonna find blood in my THC.”
At the emergency room I asked if Dr. Quan was on duty. The nurse said he’d try but reminded me that the Emergency Department wasn’t a hairdressing salon where you requested your favorite stylist.
“Wait, who’s Dr. Quan?” Ripple asked.
I explained that she’d taken care of me when I got smacked on the head and I got attached.
“A girl is going to check out my nards?”
I couldn’t tell if Ripple relished the idea or hated it, because his voice was strained through waves of pain, his skin clammy and pale, his freckles and moles standing out like crimson stars on a bone-white sky.
The nurse showed us into a curtained cubicle right at the very end. I helped Ripple out of his wheelchair and up onto the bed. He kept shutting his eyes and going to some other place (this from a kid who’d been through wounds as bad as they come).
Dr. Quan came in, still chewing on her energy bar.
“Nice to see you again, Mr. Skellig, but you don’t really get to request whatever doctor you want in Emergency.”
“Dr. Quan, this is Darren Monning—”
“Ripple.”
“He hurt himself the other day.”
“Hello, Darren.”
“Ripple.”
“How did you hurt yourself, Ripple?”
“You want me to tell her?” I asked, because I’d come up with a credible lie featuring Ripple, a pair of crutches, and a cat.
Ripple said, “I was hoisting from my wheelchair to the toilet and I slipped and squared myself on the rim of the toilet.”
That must’ve been something that actually happened to Ripple, it came out so easy.
“When did the accident occur?” Dr. Quan asked.
“Couple days,” Ripple said.
Dr. Quan suggested that I go out to the waiting room and she’d speak to me after she examined Ripple. I said I’d like to stay. She asked if I was a relative or Ripple’s significant other.
“Just my boss,” Ripple said. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
Which is how I ended up watching TV in the Emergency waiting room.
Twenty minutes later, Dr. Quan came out to find me, distress written all over her fine, intelligent face.
“Darren authorized me to keep you in the loop regarding his condition,” she said, “so I’m here to tell you this did not happen because he slipped on a toilet.”
“How can you tell?”
“There’s not enough bruising or abrasion on the scrotum to explain the damage to the testicle.”
“No damage? It looks like a grapefruit.”
“All the damage is inside. Darren’s left testicle appears to have been crushed, Mr. Skellig. In addition, there’s a nasty bruise above his pubic bone that leads me to believe he was struck.”
“Struck? By what?”
(The butt of Willeniec’s pistol.)
“I don’t know. Perhaps a hammer? But the point is his wounds show at least two separate incidents and that doesn’t include the fact that his wrists are chafed.”
“Ripple was tied up?”
“I don’t know, but what I can say is that this damage doesn’t correspond with his explanation.”
“What’s your theory?” I asked.
“Assault. Or a psychological problem in which he did damage to himself. Maybe a sex game that went wrong.”
“What?”
“S and M can go wrong. I’ve seen the results before.”
(Excellent!)
“You get a pretty warped point of view on the world working in this place.”
“It’s an emergency ro
om,” she said. “In Los Angeles.”
The kinky one-night-stand story sounded perfect to me if I could plant it in Ripple’s ear, especially including the chafing to his wrists. Ripple could say he never got the girl’s name, that he’d found her on Craigslist or on some dominatrix website.
“Mr. Skellig. I can see you are thinking about this and that you’re concerned. Do you have any idea what really happened to Darren?”
“The kid’s been through hell,” I said. “He has PTSD, anger and impulse issues. But I’ve never known him to lie.”
“People lie all the time in here, especially about sexual injuries.”
“What happens now?”
“The hospital social worker and a psychiatrist will take a look at the file and decide whether to interview Darren, try to ascertain if he’s being victimized or doing damage to himself. If they decide that someone else did this to him, then a police report will be filed.”
A man with a blood-soaked tea towel wrapped around his hand groaned. A mother with a glassy-eyed sick child looked hopefully at Dr. Quan, wondering if we were finished yet.
“Can I take him home?”
“What’s his living situation?”
“I own a duplex on Euclid. I rent it out to him and another employee.”
“There’s no chance this other employee abused him?”
“No chance.”
“Does he have a girlfriend?”
“Not since he was wounded. I dunno, maybe . . . some kind of Internet hookup? Maybe if I took him home, I could have a serious talk? Get to the truth?”
“Darren’s too badly hurt for that. We’ve admitted him. We’re trying to bring the swelling down with steroids and compresses. We’ll sedate him and do a couple more ultrasounds, after which it’s possible we’ll be obliged to go in and remove damaged tissue or blood clots. Without immediate improvement, we’ll be forced to perform an orchiectomy.”
“Tell me that has something to do with orchids.”
“We’ll have to remove the damaged testicle.”
“He’s nineteen!”
“He’s got two of them.”
“I wouldn’t use that argument on him.”
“Because . . . ?”
“Because that’s what they told him about his legs.”
Dr. Quan blinked at me like I’d slapped her.
She took me back to see Ripple, but he was out cold. He looked about twelve and I didn’t have the heart to wake him up to plant a kinky S and M cover story.
I treated Lucky and Tinkertoy to dinner at Callahan’s. Lucky was worried that Ripple might reveal Certain Truths under the effects of anesthesia.
“Good point,” I said. “I’ll call the hospital and tell them to forget anesthesia. Just make him bite down on a twig like they do in your hometown.”
“Ripple might. Calm down if they. Take one away,” Tinkertoy said.
“Like fixing a dog?”
“An Apt Metaphor.”
I counted to ten so that I wouldn’t stand up and toss the table like a Real Housewife. What was wrong with me?
Lucky, seeing I was biting back on my temper, grabbed my hand and kissed it.
“You really gotta try harder to join the melting pot of America,” I told him.
Tinkertoy pointed at the television.
There, on the local news, was the official departmental photo of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Willeniec, A., looking noble in his dress uniform. The caption beneath him read Local Sheriff’s Deputy Reported Missing next to an animated logo in which Homer Simpson strangled Bart, which I suspect had nothing to do with the story.
The sheriff’s department had no comment and the graphic beside the newsreader changed to a puppy who’d been rescued from an overpass along the LA River.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said.
“For that puppy?”
“For Ripple. For us.”
Tinkertoy pushed her ice cream away.
“Why don’t you kiss Tinkertoy’s hand?” I asked Lucky. “Looks like she could use an emotional boost.”
“No. Thanks,” Tinkertoy said. “Things are. Bad. Enough.”
AYN RAND IS BULLSHIT
While we are all spending a fitful night sleeping badly and wondering if Ripple will have to undergo yet another humiliating mutilation in order to save his life, I’d like to tell you about my mother.
Hippocrates would define Mom as an invigorating combination of blood, yellow bile, and black bile, meaning that she resists categorization but is ruled by a fractious tribunal made up of her spleen, liver, and heart. At the risk of describing my mother as something you might order as a Szechuan lunch special, she is dry and fiery, ambitious, restless and courageous, and so dedicated to being useful in the world that she can come off as distressingly utilitarian.
My brother, Brendan, and I were still students at Carmel High when Mom sprang from school board to the Republican state senator representing the Seventeenth District. You might have heard of Mom because she once tripped Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger when he made the mistake of turning his back on her and walking away before she’d finished what she was saying to him.
Yes, California state senator Dolores “Dolly” Shipton is my mother.
Most people assume prickly Dolly Shipton is divorced. Mom encourages that misapprehension because Dad values his privacy and she enjoys Dad as much as any wife enjoys her husband, except that enjoyment occurs exclusively on the weekends. Mom drives the same sea-salt-rusted ’89 Jeep Comanche she used to commute from Rancho Pico Blanco into Monterey when she worked as principal of a high school catering to at-risk youth.
Picture Mom’s swearing in.
Mom in her conservative skirt and pearls, Dad in his best jeans, cowboy boots, and corduroy suit jacket, shaking his head in amiable disagreement with Mom’s conservative views, fifteen-year-old Brendan, combative, out and proud and here and queer in eyeliner and a TAKE YOUR MAMA OUT TONIGHT! Scissor Sisters T-shirt, and me, sixteen, a high school wrestler sporting a black eye, gung ho in my JROTC uniform, all of us squabbling as they took our family photo, backed by the American flag.
You’re thinking that the Skelligs must be a hellish dysfunctional family (but you’re wrong). Brendan saw Mom’s election leaflet for the first time when the whole family was out door-to-dooring the ootsy backstreets of Carmel-by-the-Sea. Brendan got huffy and pointed out that, according to her brochure, I was Mom’s only political asset.
“You boys aren’t assets or debits. You’re my sons and I love you.”
“That’s true,” Dad said. “She even says so behind your backs.”
“Apparently, not enough to include me and Dad in your brochure,” Brendan insisted.
“I begged not to be in the brochure,” Dad said.
“I only see Michael there, wearing his soldier costume.”
“It’s called a uniform, Froot Loop.”
“News flash, you’re not an actual, real soldier, Mikey. Ergo, that’s a costume.”
“They did a great job Photoshopping out your black eye,” Dad said.
“Mom left me out of her brochure because they can’t Photoshop out queer.”
“Bullshit,” Mom said.
“I don’t think you should be shouting bullshit in the street while campaigning,” I said. “You’re a Republican.”
“Your mother’s calling bullshit because it is bullshit,” Dad said.
Mom took Brendan’s hands in hers, like they were about to play slap hands. “Look at you. Pretty little charismatic homosexual.”
(The fact is, Brendan was never pretty—he looks more like a boxer than a dancer—but apparently, Mom and Brendan think otherwise.)
“If I put you on that brochure, what happens? You get me votes from people who would not otherwise support the Republican Party,
and excuse me for thinking a dope-smoking, environmentally inclined queer like you wants to throw any influence to the Republican Party.”
Brendan looked at me.
“At least she said queer,” I told him.
“Is Mom telling me the truth?” he asked me.
“I’d pretty much count on that,” I answered.
“While we’re on the subject of dope smoking, Brendan,” Dad said, “I wish you would cut it out until you’re at least twenty-five. Your brain is still developing.”
“We have to accept that ship has sailed, Abel,” Mom said, releasing Brendan’s hands. “Brendan’s a total stoner, a tendency he inherited from your father the hippie.”
That was true too. Mom has an unerring nose for bullshit.
One time, when I picked Mom up at the Salinas train station to drive her back out to the ranch for the weekend, I complained that Dad was dismissive of my interest in the writings and philosophies of the author Ayn Rand.
“If you want to have a conversation with your father about Ayn Rand, then you have it with him, not with me.”
“Mom, her name is not Ann. It’s Ayn. Rhymes with cane.”
“Bullshit on that, Mikey. People can’t just decide how they want their names pronounced. It undermines civilization.”
“Dad is wrong to write Ayn Rand off, is all I’m saying.”
“We don’t drive wedges in this family, Mikey. We slug it out and hug it out at the kitchen table.”
“Only problem is Dad won’t listen.”
“What did I just tell you about wedges?”
I turned the car radio on. Mom turned it off.
“Your dad does too listen. In fact, he listens too much, if you ask me. What it is, he disagrees with you and you assume he isn’t listening because your adolescent logic is unassailable.”
I turned the car radio on. Mom turned it off.
“You’re seventeen so it’s understandable you like Ayn Rand. Adolescent boys respond to her simplistic ranting because Ayn Rand herself was basically an angry adolescent boy who had all the answers but felt like nobody listened to her.”
“You’re a Republican. How can you not like Ayn Rand?”
“She’s bullshit you grow out of, like costume parties or thinking farts are hilarious. I mean, go ahead and like her now, Mikey, but have the grace to look back in a few years and be embarrassed.”