Under the Bridge

by Rebecca Godfrey

  When the movie was over, Reena went down to the basement where Raj was living. Raj was her uncle, and he was young and handsome, at loose ends, having graduated from college and gone into real estate development. But real estate was tricky. You could never predict the desires of newcomers. Reena woke him up and begged him for a ride.

  “Come on,” he said, though he had this sudden pain in his left leg. He wasn’t sure why. It shot through his knee and up to his hip. He drove a yellow Karmann Ghia, one of a kind. Reena asked him if he would mind driving through View Royal, because she was hoping Josephine Bell would see her in this amazing sports car. There was no one in View Royal with a Karmann Ghia. The little car was like a rare bird, and they moved from a suburb high on the green hills. They drove past the highway and the hospital and the railroad tracks and then drove down. There is a noticeable and sudden descent on entering the community of View Royal. The town, built around the Gorge, is on a lower level. They drove past the Fort Victoria trailer park, past Syreeta’s house, past the home of Colin Jones.

  “That’s where Colin Jones lives,” Reena said. “He’s friends with Josephine.”

  Raj noticed Reena’s blue nails and asked her why she had painted them that color. She waved her fingers; she said, “I like blue,” and as he often did since her brief stay in Kiwanis, he worried about her. So much, he thought his worry might be causing the tremor in his leg.

  “Reena,” he said, but she did not hear him because she had unrolled her window and her head was turned, hopefully, to the streets.

  “Why do you listen to Bryan Adams?” Reena said, laughing. “He’s so lame.”

  “You used to like it.”

  “No, I didn’t! I never did!”

  He’d bought the CDs she had asked for. Puff Daddy and the Notorious B.I.G. He just bought them last week, and the purchase was one he regretted. The Notorious B.I.G. CD was called Life After Death. On the cover, an obese man posed beside a hearse. Gunshots were interspersed with the obscene chants.

  Reena leaned forward, pressed Eject, inserted the Puff Daddy CD. She found a song, and began singing along, as she had sung earlier to the Bollywood film.

  Raj recognized the song, as one Sting used to sing, only now sung by some low-voiced guy mumbling unintelligibly.

  “Do you like this song?” Reena said. “It’s my favorite.” She sang along with the sweet-voiced girl, who was now singing a new chorus that wasn’t in the Sting song. She was singing, “Come back, baby, come back.”

  Reena explained to Raj how the girl singing was Biggie’s wife, and she sounded so sad because she missed Biggie so much. Biggie had been murdered! “Someone capped his ass,” Reena said.

  “Sting sang this better,” Raj said, and he laughed, because he did not want her to think he was critical of her. He knew Reena had run away because her mother, Raj’s sister, wouldn’t let her smoke or wear makeup or tight clothes. Even worse, Reena had announced that she did not want to be a Jehovah’s Witness any longer. “I’m tired of this JW shit,” Reena said. She wanted a birthday party. She wanted to celebrate, and JWs believed celebrations should be subdued, if not obliterated. There’d been some talk of excommunication. Raj himself was not a JW, and he tried to be a kind of haven for his niece.

  “Sting’s version is not better!” Reena said. She leaned forward to turn up the volume. They drove past Shoreline School and over a bridge that crossed the Gorge. There was the white schoolhouse called the Craig-flower Colonial school, which was now a museum. Raj wondered what the schools were like in Canada in colonial times, in the year the schoolhouse was built: 1845. Surely the kids did not walk around talking of guns and murder. Even when he was a kid, he didn’t hear about such nihilistic things, though high school was far from idyllic for him. He was skinny and quiet, and almost every day some athlete would bump into him and say, “Get the fuck out of my way, Paki.” He felt the tremor through his leg again. He wanted to ask Reena how Colquitz was because he hoped she’d returned to the unfriendly classrooms. The tremor moved to his heart, he could feel it, so tangible now, there was no doubt: something was wrong with his body.

  “Reena,” he said, “can we listen to some other song? How about a compromise? R. Kelly.”

  She had put on some song called “Return of the Mack.” This too was nihilistic, he thought, listening to the lyrics. “You lied to me.” A fourteen-year-old girl should not know of these things.

  “Please,” Reena said, “If we bump into my friends, I’ll be embarrassed if we’re listening to R. Kelly.”

  He thought then that he was too hard on her. He knew what it was like being fourteen, and caring so much about what your friends thought. He knew that when you were that age, acceptance was everything. And how could a girl like Reena be accepted? She could try to be like the others, paint her nails blue, listen to the same songs as her friends, stop with the “JW shit,” and after a few years, she’d move on and fall in love and find her own family.

  He reached over to put his arm around her, and as he did so, he noticed the word on her skin.

  Crip.

  “Reena,” he said suddenly, though he tried to be gentle and never criticize her, as so many did, constantly.

  “Reena, what is that on your hand?”

  She smiled. “It’s a gang,” she said.

  “I know what it is,” he said. “Why are you even writing that word down?”

  “I think they want me to be in the gang,” she said. “My new friends …”

  “Look,” he said sternly. “You get involved with that, you’re either going to end up dead or in jail.”

  She didn’t seem to hear him, for she was staring so intently at the homes of View Royal. They drove past the homes where the killers still slept, their plan for murder neither conceived nor yet acted on, and Josephine was not anywhere to be seen, though Reena wished she could see her because Josephine was her new friend now. Josephine Bell, a girl so slim and mercurial, so blonde and white and heartless, though of the last quality, Reena was not yet fully apprised.

  She’s Like My Sister

  JOSEPHINE’S NAILS were blue as well, but unlike Reena, she drove herself through View Royal in a brand-new white Neon.

  Josephine may have lacked empathy and a pure heart, but she was possessed of a certain drive and ambition. She had so many goals. She was listening to a song called “Somebody’s Gotta Die.” She sang along, then switched to the Seattle hip-hop station where they would soon play the song about how “mothafuckin’ power” meant “mothafuckin’ respect.”

  And as she drove in her new car, she reflected on her progress. Truth be told, and she would tell it, immodestly yet constantly: she was becoming legendary! Colin Jones may have thought of her as a “twisted little troublemaker,” but who was he? A white guy with long hair (very uncool) in a ponytail (even uncooler) in straight jeans (uncoolest) and a dull suburban life (uncool, obviously). By the time she was in New York and working for John Gotti, Colin Jones would merely be a mechanic or a sales clerk. If he was lucky, he’d become floor manager at Wal-Mart.

  As she drove by the field behind Shoreline School, Josephine recalled a recent event of which she was most proud. The conversation went like this:

  Warren, a curly-haired boy, with eyes rapt and wet: “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  Josephine Bell: “Yeah, what did you hear?”

  Warren: “All the guys said you were good looking. It’s so cool that I finally get to meet you.”

  Josephine Bell: “Yeah, whatever. That’s nice.”

  She’d taken a cigarette some girl handed to her. She tilted her dimpled chin. Everybody was talking to her.

  Everybody: “I can’t believe you’re back! It’s so cool! Where have you been?”

  And she’d smiled mysteriously, not revealing the grim fact that she’d been on a tour of foster homes, dull, stupid homes with dull, stupid people, who asked her to leave after they found new children, better children, their own children. Warren asked he
r if she’d like to go to a party with him. He said something about his girlfriend, Syreeta. She sunned in the words of praise. Oh my God, that’s Josephine Bell! Josephine Bell!!! I can’t believe I finally get to meet you.

  “I felt like a celebrity,” she would later recall. “I thought somebody was gonna ask me for my autograph.”

  • • •

  Had Josephine known Reena was hoping to find her, she would not have cared. She would not have driven in search of the besotted girl in the Karmann Ghia. Josephine would not have been impressed by the cars subtle elegance. The loving uncle would have seemed too protective and his concerns about nihilism in contemporary culture not worthy of a debate. She had no desire to meet Reena’s father, for his knowledge of Chaucerian motifs was, to her, utterly irrelevant.

  She drove toward the home of Kelly Ellard. She wasn’t sure if Kelly would be able to hang out tonight, for Kelly was “actually a pretty good girl.” (“Like if I go and hang out with her, and stuff, she’d say, ‘Oh shit. I’ve got to call my parents.’ She’d always be worried about that, whereas, me, I don’t care. I’d say, ‘Let’s skip our curfew. Let’s be badasses.’ But Kelly would say, ‘Oh no, I’ll be grounded.’”) Josephine thought it was “kind of funny” the way Kelly would “actually listen to her parents and stuff.”

  Nevada was grounded, so Josephine drove down the street to see if Colin Jones was home.

  She thought of Kelly some more, wishing she could see her and go for a drive in the new car. She and Kelly had always been best friends, ever since they were both eleven. When she’d been living in those stupid homes far away from View Royal, she’d kept Kelly’s picture on her wall. She hadn’t written her letters. That would have been too much. But she’d missed Kelly, and she realized as she drove that Kelly was her “loyalest” friend. She’s like a sister to me, she thought.

  Some girls would be jealous of Josephine Bell, but not Kelly. Some girls would think Josephine Bell was a slut just because she was gorgeous. (“That always pissed me off when girls would say, ‘Maybe she’s a slut,’ just because some girl is pretty. I’m not a slut. I’m not at all.”)

  Kelly wasn’t like that, Josephine thought to herself. Kelly never got jealous of anybody.

  • • •

  Ping. Ping. She was back, the twisted little troublemaker. Colin Jones looked out on the street and saw Josephine leaning imperially against a shiny white car. He went outside and stared at the white Neon, brand new, with smooth white doors and a curved roof and windows without streaks of rain.

  “Nice car,” he said, feeling a slight longing for the immaculate vehicle.

  “I’ve got it for a few days,” she said, staring him right in the eyes.

  He nodded. He was on to her.

  After he’d ditched her, she’d started hanging out with Donovan and Khalil, two brothers who lived over by View Royal Video. Their mother was away a lot and so they had basement parties. Donovan and Khalil were minor celebrities in View Royal, and in the neighboring towns of Langford and Esquimalt. For one thing, they were both black, and therefore of the highest and most elite pedigree. To be black in Victoria was to be infused with an aura of indescribable glamor. It meant, regardless of your real personality, that you were just like, you had to be, must be, just like the glamorous and dangerous black men on TV. Tupac and Biggie and Too $hort and Ice Cube, and those black men from America who had guns and big cars and mansions and champagne and diamonds and Jeeps and low-riders and their own clothing lines and names of secret solidarity like Ruff Ryders and Eastsiders and big cars and mansions and champagne and ghettoes and pit bulls and sexy women in stilettos and anthems like, “Fuck with me, you fucking die, motherfucker.”

  Donovan and Khalil, Colin thought, probably taught Josephine how to steal her new car. They did it with hairdressers’ scissors, sticking the long shears into the lock and then into the ignition.

  “I have it for a few days,” Josephine said, and she lit a cigarette, ran her hand through her blonde hair, and she seemed to him to be waiting for an invitation or a compliment.

  He went inside his house and called 911.

  “There’s a car on 14 Marton Place,” he said to the dispatcher. “A white Neon. I’m not going to say who. I’m not going to say how. But it’s stolen and you might want to come and get it.”

  But by the time the police arrived, Josephine was gone. It would not be the last time she would know when to leave, know how to avoid the cops. But not knowing of her future misdeeds, Colin Jones found himself both admiring and greatly irritated by her smooth escape.

  Later, on the phone, Josephine and Kelly discussed the stolen car.

  Kelly promised her, “If you get caught, I’ll take some of the blame. If the cops come and take you in, just tell them I stole the car.”

  “Kel, I would never do that!”

  “But you could.”

  And Josephine thought: yes, I could, because Kelly is a true friend, like a sister, and Kelly, she thought, Kelly would do anything for me.

  “A Very Dangerous Young Lady”

  ONCE THERE WAS a woman named Dinah who had six daughters: Diamond, Donna, Deanna, Dahlia, and Destiny. Dusty was the youngest daughter, a girl in View Royal, who was, she would later say, “totally out of control.”

  Dinah, her mother, was first to kick her out. (“Dusty’s trouble. I couldn’t handle her.”) For a few difficult months, she’d lived with Destiny, but then Destiny kicked her out. So she went to Kiwanis. Then she got in some trouble, and so Kiwanis kicked her out, and in the fall, she went to live in Alberta with her oldest sister, Dahlia.

  Destiny warned Dahlia, “Dusty will cause nothing but trouble.” Yet Dahlia believed she could be the one to help Dusty. “I love my little sister. She has a good heart.”

  • • •

  Dusty moved like a boxer, with a kind of gait both ungainly and purposeful. She wore her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her lips and eyes were broad and brash. Dusty’s most unusual, and unnerving, feature was her voice, which contrasted so greatly with her physique. Her voice was full of melody and quite charming, and if you heard her speak, you would think, as Dahlia insisted, that Dusty had “a good heart.”

  Dusty had met a boy just before she left Victoria. The boy’s name was Jack Batley. She wrote it five hundred times on the piece of paper her probation officer had handed her. (“Change is possible. Change is up to YOU!”) Jack might have been described by others in View Royal as “rat-faced,” but Dusty liked his rough eyes, and she liked the way he looked in his black and white Adidas jacket.

  Perhaps her separation from Jack was the reason Dusty made such a disastrous au pair. Dahlia had several young children, and a full-time job as a truck driver, so when she invited Dusty to live with her, the invitation was not wholly one of charity. When Dahlia went away on her four-day drives to Yellowknife, Dusty would be in charge of babysitting, cooking meals, cleaning the house, picking the kids up from school, and putting the children to bed.

  Yet Dusty played music very loud and slept in and once wrote “Niggers rule” on the wall with strawberry jam.

  “Living with Dusty was a living hell,” Dahlia’s daughter would later recall. “She would make crank phone calls telling people to lick her cunt and threatening to kill them.”

  While in Alberta, Dusty received some very distressing news. Jack Batley had a new girlfriend, and the new girlfriend was Reena Virk.

  “It’s true. I saw her wearing his jacket,” Dusty was told.

  “His Adidas jacket!”

  Dusty flung herself across the carpeted floor and then thought of Reena. Reena!

  The little kids were on the couch watching Saved by the Bell. Dusty picked up the phone and called a number in Victoria. In her sweet voice, she threatened. “The Crips are coming to your house to cap your ass!”

  She then asked a boy on the couch, a boy of twelve, a friend of her niece, to help her. After Dusty gave orders to the young boy, she dialed the number and handed
the phone to him.

  “I’m coming down there tonight to KILL YOU!” the boy said, though his voice was not deep or menacing, and he was far away from View Royal and only twelve years old.

  • • •

  Dusty became reckless in her days as an au pair, and she wondered if she would ever see Josephine again. She knew that Josephine, like her, was shuttled about to homes all over the place. She wanted so to tell Josephine of Reena’s betrayal. Josephine would understand, for when they were all together at Kiwanis, Josephine was always saying that Reena was the jealous type and Reena was jealous of her beauty.

  The way he’d strolled around the trail by the Tillicum Mall. … His arm around her. … His name, Jack, just like the boy in Titanic who had no money and was a noble thief and died for the love of the girl named Rose. …

  Dusty crashed her sister’s car into the curb. Dahlia was evicted, for the landlord did not appreciate the loud music or the “Niggers rule” graffiti. “Dusty was totally destroying my life,” Dahlia later said to police. “But I just couldn’t send her back to View Royal. I kept threatening to, but I didn’t have the heart to do it. I thought she just needed a little direction. I didn’t want to give up on her like everyone else did. I gave her chance after chance. I bought Dusty clothes, makeup, jackets, shoes, smokes, whatever she needed.”

  But then one day her son took her aside and said, “Mommy, Dusty swears at me! She’s mean. Please don’t go back to work. I hate her!”

  And her daughter said, “If Dusty stays here any longer, I’m going to run away.”

  Rather than sending Dusty away, Dahlia arranged for her friend Marlene, also a single mother, to move in and replace Dusty as babysitter.