The Tribes of Palos Verdes

by Joy Nicholson

  Our family portrait is back in its space over the fireplace, except someone is missing. In his place is the family pug dog, beautifully rendered. My brother and I, on either side of the dog, are separated by an unnatural gap, because Puggles isn’t quite big enough to fill the space between us.

  My father still hasn’t called.

  * * *

  Jim is sitting in the backyard when I come home from the store. He tells me he doesn’t want to go inside; he’s afraid of the bottomfeeders. He says the house is evil now, dark and hot, full of plastic and packing chemicals.

  “I hate all that new stuff,” he says. “It smells horrible.”

  I think for a while, then tell him I have an idea.

  “We can take the old tent out of the garage,” I say. “We’ll set it up right here, live in the backyard until Dad comes home.”

  “Dad won’t let me live with him.” I tell him he’s wrong, and I can prove it.

  “How?” he asks hopefully. Then I tell him I’ll bet my surfboard. Then he knows I’m telling the truth. He’s suddenly energetic, full of plans.

  “We don’t even have to go inside to use the bathroom, we’ll just rough it in the yard like we’re camping, tell ghost stories at night,” he says.

  But when we go to the garage, the tent is gone. The shelves are empty except for my sleeping bag and Jim’s old bike. Even the paddle machine has vanished. My mother has given all the old stuff to Goodwill.

  * * *

  “Card number 234-237-116-221 has been canceled,” a catalog operator tells my mother when she tries to order a color television for Jim.

  “What do you mean?” my mother says. “I’m Mrs. Phil Mason.”

  The operator says, “Your card is void. Until Mr. Phil Mason reinstates you, Visa cannot authorize your use of the card.”

  “But it’s important,” my mother insists. Then she tries again. “I also have a Mastercard.”

  When the operator comes back on the line, he tells my mother the Mastercard has been canceled, too.

  “Who’ll pay?” she cries, kicking the leg of the couch, cracking it.

  * * *

  Starfish can grow new legs. If you break four legs off, they might grow six back. Many have survived in the red tide pools until this week, but even they are beginning to wash up on the beach.

  The remaining members of the Palos Verdes Key Club mobilize, wearing gauze masks and full-body rain gear.

  They scoop the tenacious orange creatures off the rocks with garden shovels, sometimes breaking off a leg or two, and put them in Ziploc bags for transport to Laguna Beach. A battalion of Mercedes sedans and station wagons waits on Via Neve, back seats carefully coated with plastic sheeting against leaks.

  In the closest tide pool, a Fish and Game Department scientist demonstrates “proper relocation procedure.” Tennis ladies giggle as they practice, neatly applying starfish to wet granite, as if gluing on Halloween decorations.

  “Come on, stick, stick,” Harriet House says, mashing a starfish enthusiastically onto a tide pool rock, coaching it. “You gotta stick, little guy.”

  As the cars drive away in a line, Jim and I stand in the driveway, waving to the neighbors. My mother watches from the window, crouched back a bit. A police car slowly cruises toward us, then stops. My mother bangs on the window, motioning for us to come inside. She opens the screen, calling out our names, telling us to come to her immediately.

  “Is everything okay over here?” the cop says. Jim stands, frozen. I nod, confused. My mother is frantic now, she’s yelling for the cop to get off our driveway.

  “Do you have a search warrant?” she yells. “You can’t come on my property without a search warrant!”

  The policeman turns to Jim and me, then we hear a crash. My mother is throwing ashtrays and plates out the window, shouting at the cop, telling him she’ll call the FBI if he doesn’t get off our driveway immediately.

  The cop takes a breath, then lets it out slowly. Turning to leave, he shakes his head, tired.

  “Your father called us from France. He asked us to check on you, because he can’t get through on the phone.”

  “He’s lying,” my mother says. “There haven’t been any calls at all.”

  * * *

  The fire tonight is at Dapplegray Down. Someone sees a man run away from the flames. He is described as Tall. Mexican. Fast. A posse of citizens surrounds the peninsula each night. But the arsonist knows how to evade them.

  As Adrian and I watch the flames, I tell him Jim’s in big trouble; he isn’t eating anything and he’s taking lots of pills.

  “I need money,” I say. “I want you to get the money out of the fake cantaloupe in my father’s refrigerator.”

  “You’re acting like he killed someone,” Adrian says, serious.

  On the way home, we pass a guy hiding in the bushes near my house. He’s sitting on a backpack, eyes glinting red in the headlights.

  I don’t tell Adrian it’s my brother.

  * * *

  My mother locked all the doors again tonight. Even my sliding glass door. I throw pebbles at Jim’s window, but he’s gone. I wait outside, face pressed to the glass, breathing in swirls, writing him a message in a fog of breath.

  I have to talk to you.

  I go to sleep in the garden inside my tan Big Five sleeping bag from the garage, watching silvery snails circle the wet ferns and the leaves of the eucalyptus tree flash in the moonlight. The air is blowing from the south, mixing the smell of red tide with salt and ash. I crawl into the bottom part of the bag, hoping the snails can’t reach me.

  * * *

  In the middle of the night, Jim wakes me up by sitting on my head.

  “Where were you?” I say, pushing him off. “Gross.”

  “Shhhh. Come to the pool.”

  Jim is dirty, red-eyed, lighting matches and throwing the lit ones toward the deep end.

  “I saw you in the bushes,” I say. “Were you waiting for me?”

  “You’ve been right about Mom,” he says in a deep, strange voice. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

  For the next half hour he stays silent, smoking, paddling from end to end of the dirty, heated water on a surfboard. I swim next to him with a diver’s flashlight, guiding his way. He takes the flashlight, gets out of the water and throws it at the moon.

  When he finally speaks again, his voice cracks, he says he can’t believe she’s been lying all this time. He wants to kill her. “I can’t stop thinking about killing her.

  “Are you afraid of me now?” he asks, shivering, not looking at me.

  “No,” I say, kissing him. “And I know you’re the arsonist.”

  I say this casually, as if speaking about the temperature of water.

  * * *

  “Get up,” Jim whispers just before sunrise, gently splashing me awake from a nervous sleep. The tortoises are asleep on the deck, burrowed in their box.

  My mother struggles down the steps, yawning. She has her hand on her hip, looking past me to Jim in the deep end.

  “What are you doing out here?” she calls out.

  “Looking at the stars,” I say, quickly.

  “Counting them,” Jim yells, “one, two, three, four.” He laughs bitterly. “There are so many stars, it takes all night to count them.”

  “What? What?” my mother says, coming to the edge of the pool.

  “Don’t come any further, or you might drown,” Jim yells, splashing her lightly until she squeals.

  “She’s meeellllting,” he cries out, splashing her again, imitating the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz.

  His eyes glitter dangerously. His cigarette smolders. The first slice of sun glimmers through the blackness.

  * * *

  There are only a few sentences about pyromaniacs in the book I borrowed from the library, Abnormal Psychology. All of them fit.

  “Pyromaniacs are secretive and evasive. Even those closest to them are often strangers to their secrets. Pyromani
a, like any of the mania-class disorders, is a serious illness—it is always difficult to stop the patient’s obsessive thought patterns from reoccurring. In some cases impossible…”

  * * *

  I write him a letter, shove it under his door.

  Jim,

  We better stick together now.

  Please take me with you when you go out at night.

  We’re a tribe, no matter what.

  Love, me.

  While I wait for him to come back, I concentrate on cutting out pictures from Surfer magazine, making a collage of all the lush, beautiful places beyond Palos Verdes: Hawaii, Bali, Java, Australia. I’m going to give the collage to Jim for our birthday, so he’ll imagine the places we can run to.

  There’s a picture of Frieda Zane on a wave in Eccles, Australia. She’s crouched low on the board for balance, her arms barely raised off the water, skimming. Even though the wave is as big as an apartment building, she’s riding through it, smiling, navigating its power with calm, graceful finesse.

  “It’s not impossible,” I say out loud, rehearsing what I’m going to tell Jim. “We’ll get out of here, no matter how hard it looks.”

  I know my brother will forget about fire, once he remembers about water.

  * * *

  At 5:00 A.M. that morning I find Jim on the floor, hidden from view, burrowed under blankets and books. The tortoises are loose, under the sheets with him. I pound on his shoulder softly, afraid when he won’t move. He emerges after a while rubbing his eyes, looking at me as if I were very far away. His hair is tangled, unwashed, crumpled in snaky coils.

  “Room service?”

  “Jim, don’t make jokes, because I’m serious. I think we should do what Jody Ferguson did.”

  Jody Ferguson, age thirteen, hit herself with a paperweight and scraped her knees and face on the sidewalk. Then she went to the school counselor, showed him the welts, the bruises, the scrapes. She told him it was her dad that hit her. She never told them what her father really did, but she wrote a letter to Janie Tricot, explaining everything.

  Her dad used to touch her at night, when her mother went to sleep. He touched her in places fathers should never touch.

  After Jody went to the counselor, the police moved very quickly.

  Within twenty-four hours she was living in another state in a group home. A place beyond the reach of her parents.

  “We could do that,” I whisper matter-of-factly. “You can do the same thing, then I’ll run away, too. No one would ever know about the fires.”

  “No,” Jim says after a while, shaking his head. He sighs, hoisting a tortoise onto his chest, running his hand over its smooth shell. It pokes its head out and then pulls back quickly.

  “Why not?” I ask, still whispering.

  “I’m finished with lying.”

  I hear a noise in the bush, so I dive low. When an opossum crawls past, I relax again. “There’s another way. We could stay together if we do it.”

  I tell him there’s money hidden at our father’s house. I say I’ll steal it and we can run away to Hawaii. “We can always repay it later.” I give him the collage, and he looks at it, tears in his eyes.

  “But what about the thing you said about tribes?” he asks.

  “Which thing?”

  “If you leave, you die. Period.”

  “We’re our own tribe,” I say. “Just me and you.”

  Jim thinks. He says he’ll never escape this place. But he says he’s in anyway. We do the secret handshake, then I crawl under his blanket and fall back into an exhausted sleep, smiling.

  “Don’t smile when you sleep, it’s bad luck,” Jim warns, shaking me.

  * * *

  The Dixons are the only family on Via Neve. They don’t go to Mexico or Hawaii because their son is on a dialysis machine for his kidneys.

  Tonight, Mrs. Dixon sits on the porch fanning herself with a Chinese screened fan, wearing a scarf over her nose, toasting the air. She holds the glass up to us as I walk past.

  “Here’s to the tide turning!” she says, jubilant.

  * * *

  My mother is baking cookies. The smell of red tide is almost overpowered by the scent of melting chocolate and butter. Jim is staring at my mother as she bustles around.

  “They’ll be ready in a minute,” she tells Jim. “They’re special for your birthday.”

  “They’re burning, Mom, can’t you smell it?” Jim says.

  “Sweetie, they aren’t burning at all, they are almost ready.”

  She is shoveling out crisp, golden brown Toll House cookies onto the countertop with a spatula when Jim douses them with a full bottle of beer.

  “Why do you burn everything?” Jim asks.

  * * *

  He’s in his room now, sitting on his bed, listening to soft music in the dark. When I knock on his door, he sticks his head out, saying, “Shhh. I’m packing.”

  I see his wet suit in the trash can, and his favorite board-shorts, too.

  “You better take your wet suit,” I say. “I’m sure you’ll need it.”

  He shakes his head, no. Then he hugs me and pushes me out the door.

  * * *

  At the end of the driveway, Jim is uncoiling a length of rope. His backpack is open. The tortoises are in the inner pocket, each wrapped in a towel. In the outer pouch is lighter fluid and a bottle of Bacardi 151.

  “You know what Mom gave me as a gift?” Jim asks.

  I don’t answer, because I’m looking at the rope, scared.

  “Look at this.”

  He takes out a perfect square-cut diamond; it flashes in the dark. Then he looks out at the ocean. “See ya,” he says calmly, throwing the diamond far over the cliff. When he picks up the lighter fluid, I grab his hand.

  “We don’t have to burn anything. Let’s just run for it like we planned.”

  “Did you ever think that I had a plan, all by my stupid, slow, idiot self? Or do you think only you can come up with plans?”

  * * *

  Water and fire sound the same when they hiss. The coil of rope curls and cracks when Jim strikes the pack of matches and lights the end, as if he’s going to light a cigarette. It bursts into flame, and he throws it toward the dry festuca grass, a snake on fire. The grass goes up in flame as he laughs and beats his stomach with the small of his hand.

  “It’s over, it’s really over,” he whispers, lighting a match, burning another piece of snaky rope.

  As the fire begins, Jim breathes deeply, closing his eyes.

  I crouch low, ready to run, watching a bush burn. Coils of orange rope are wrapped around my brother’s neck like African beads.

  “You promise we’ll stick together,” I say, the hair rising on my neck.

  “Sorry, Medina, I’m not going to promise anyone anything ever again.” He throws the bottle of Bacardi high into the air, until it breaks on the grass and ignites; then he giggles into his hand.

  “Run, run, run, as fast as you can, genius, get fucking out of here.” He kisses me quickly on the mouth, and takes off down the trail to the beach. The eucalyptus begins to bend, the fuchsias melt in orange streaks. The flames rise and snap.

  I sprint down the trail, through wind, fire, and water, the smell of fish in my nose, following my brother, slipping on seaweed. Lodged in the rocks are silvery bonito, dead but still shining. Stars fall, a flicker, smoke, blackness, then another flicker.

  I crash through muddy tide pools, calling my brother’s name, ducking from a frenzy of seagulls flapping past to circle the fire.

  “Faster,” Jim calls. “I’ll race you.” He leads by twenty feet. I fall and get up again. Jim stops, watching me get up, then throws a pebble, giggling, looking up into the sky.

  He yells, cupping his mouth like a megaphone, “Hey, see that star? That’s my present to you. Happy birthday.”

  I hear his feet running on the sand, then he stops to shake the tortoises out of his backpack gently. He runs again.

  “Wait,”
I shout, running into the dark, and falling over another rock.

  But Jim is beyond my reach.

  * * *

  They use special machines to clean the sands of Palos Verdes, yellow tractors that thresh, mix, and spit out the crystals into fine, white powder. It is one of these machines that finds Jim, facedown, at Helsa Cove, five miles beyond Angel Point. Naked, stripped bare, wet, with a faint red welt on his back and kidney area.

  The driver of the Sand Machine grabs a stick from the front cab, a stick usually used for fighting off stray dogs. Today he uses the stick to turn Jim over. Jim grumbles and then screams at the man.

  The man uses his radio to call base, and they send backup, another yellow Sand Machine, with another bewildered driver with a dog stick.

  Jim tries to rise, but falls back into the sand, mumbling incoherently about sunsets and motherfuckers and fire. His eyes are freshly sown with Pratt Point acid. His arms scratch at the sky, trying to turn it off as it lightens to daylight.

  “My God! It’s Jim Mason, that kid from Via Neve…”

  The backup driver, a surfer from Lunada Point, moves fast, panicking.

  “Call the police. I’ll stay here with him.”

  Jim is picked up by the police and placed carefully in a white van, whisked away to Palos Verdes Mental Health Clinic, which isn’t in Palos Verdes at all. Later they take him to Camarillo State Hospital for the criminally insane. He gives the television camera a hang-loose sign as he leaves. “See ya,” he says.

  “Suspected Palos Verdes Arsonist Nabbed,” the papers say.

  In the hospital, my mother corners a nervous young nurse, telling him to call all the best hotels in Europe, certain that he can find Phil Mason.

  Instead, the nurse asks questions. He asks if Jim has been smoking cocaine regularly, and how often he’s been taking methamphetamines. My mother is silent for a moment, rocking back and forth in her chair.

  “You better let me see him,” my mother finally says. “He needs me.”

  Soon after, the Palos Verdes police come to ask questions, badges glittering, mouths moving slowly.

  “Did you ever see him start a fire?” they ask us.

  “Never,” my mother cuts in quickly.

  “Did he have a chronic cocaine problem, or an addiction of any kind?” the police probe kindly.