I slid over, Kara opened the door, the deputies shoved her in. “Luke, this is Dusty. Dusty, that’s Luke. You can say hello now, but after that, no talking for the rest of the ride.”
I said hi, she mumbled something back, but in our mutual humiliation we could scarcely look at each other. An hour or so into the ride, however, I glanced over and saw tears running down Dusty’s cheeks. As a show of solidarity I gave Dr. O and Kara both the finger, down low where Dusty could see it but they couldn’t. She looked over at me, our eyes met for the first time, and then she flipped them the bird, too, but with an added feature I’d never seen before. She turned her left hand palm up on the seat between us, stuck her middle finger out, made an upward, jabbing motion, like she was sticking it right up their ass, and wiggled it obscenely. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing out loud.
We arrived at the Mountain Project headquarters in the dark. It was one of those fishing-hunting lodge deals, a two-story cabin built of logs, with a big open central room, a high balcony on three sides, and the bedrooms on the second floor ringing the balcony. And you know those old World War II movies where the Nazi commandant tells the new prisoners that escape isss impossible? Well, I took one look at this place and told myself that escape isss very possible. But not just yet. Still queasy from the long car ride, I was so exhausted all I wanted was a nice soft bed to lie down on. I’d also have killed for a joint, but that obviously wasn’t happening.
Neither was the bed, apparently, soft or otherwise. Instead, Dusty and I were led to a big storeroom filled with camping equipment, and they handed us checklists. Backpack, sleeping bag, thin foam pad, single-person shelter. Two pairs each trousers, hiking shorts, one pair boots. Three pairs thick socks, three T-shirts apiece, underwear. Sweatshirt, rain poncho. Saucepan, eating utensils, so many bags of trail mix, so many prepackaged freeze-dried meals, so many protein bars. Canteen, flashlight. Toothbrush, toothpaste, floss. Three packets biodegradable toilet tissue, female sanitary products if necessary, etc., etc.
“Get it all, get it right,” we were told. Anything we failed to pack, we would have to do without, and anything extra was more weight we’d have to carry, in addition to the thirty-some pounds we’d already be packing. And of course: “No talking.”
I had already figured out that the reason they were having us do this by ourselves was that they wanted us to fuck it up so they could give us a big lecture. So I made double sure to follow the checklist religiously. They also gave us a diagram of how to pack everything. That was complicated, but I managed pretty well. When I was finished I tried to give Dusty a hand, but Kara wouldn’t let me.
Afterward I kept expecting an inspection of some kind, followed by a lecture, but all they checked was our boots, to make sure we’d picked out ones that fit. Then it was back outside and into a van. In the front of the van were two more counselors, which was what we were supposed to call them, like it was fucking summer camp or something. Gary and Diane looked fit and tanned and disgustingly full of energy for that time of night.
In the back of the van were three more kids, two boys and a girl, dressed like me and Dusty in Mountain Project T-shirts and khaki hiking pants. From the way they glared at us, I guessed they’d probably been waiting for us a long time. The fat white boy was Brent, the tall black kid was Stephen, and the girl’s name was Cindra. Cindra’s head was shaved, and if her boobs had been any bigger she’d have had a hard time standing up.
The van took off down a dirt trail. After that first exchange of glares, nobody made much eye contact. Mostly we looked out the windows, not that there was anything to see in the darkness. After a few minutes the trail started climbing and climbing. Halfway up the mountain it petered out at a small campground with a couple port-a-potties and a water fountain. When Dr. O ordered us to unpack the van, I assumed we were going to set up camp for the night. Wrong again.
“Drain your bladders over there, fill your canteens over there, and get your packs on your backs,” called Gary. “For we have promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep.”
“It’s cold,” complained Brent.
“It’ll warm up once we get going,” Gary told him.
Brent sat down heavily on a log. “Fuck dat,” he mumbled, trying to talk like a black kid, or what he thought a black kid talked like. “I didn’t sign up to climb no fuckin’ mountain in da middle of no fuckin’ night.”
“Suit yourself,” said Kara cheerfully, and a few minutes later, we set off in a column. Dr. O was in the lead, followed by Stephen and me. Then came Kara, Cindra, and Dusty, with Diane and Gary bringing up the rear. The Death March had begun. A few minutes later we heard Brent crashing through the underbrush bellowing “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck” as he blundered up the trail in the darkness. I have to admit, I thought that was so cold it was cool, leaving the fat slob behind like that, alone in the dark, to deal with the consequences of his stupidity. I didn’t learn from Dusty until later, after we’d finally stopped to set up camp for the night, that right after we’d started out, Gary had peeled off and doubled back to keep an eye on Brent.
By the end of that first night’s march, I had the game figured out. Bottom line: all this nature and survival crap aside, they meant to wear us down physically in order to break us down emotionally. So, exhausted as we were, once we had our tents set up (and what a drawn-out slapstick farce that was), they put us through a grueling group therapy session around the campfire.
Group whining session was more like it. Listening to my fellow campers bitching and moaning, I quickly lost what little sympathy I had for them. Their parents didn’t understand them. Boo fucking hoo. Society was phony, everything was bullshit, and everybody but them was a hypocrite. Big fucking news, Holden fucking Caulfield. You want parents who don’t understand you, I wanted to tell them, try asking Big Luke or Teddy for lunch money when they’re tweaking. You’ll get more than your feelings hurt.
I didn’t say anything, though. When it came my turn to talk, I told the group that as far as I was concerned, I was still in jail, even if it was a jail without walls. And in jail, my father had taught me, you don’t put your personal business out into the population, so I would pass on the soul baring.
“Passing is not an option,” said Dr. O.
“You can’t make me share,” I replied. Share was their word for whine.
“No,” he said. “But I can make sure nobody eats or sleeps until you do.”
I looked around the campfire. Everybody was giving me dirty looks. Peer pressure: when you’re a teenager they’re always telling you not to give in to it, but then they use it against you whenever it suits their purposes. But I didn’t give in because of the peer pressure, I gave in because I was hungry and tired. So hungry and tired that this time when I told the story, I left it all in, even Teddy’s titties.
“Your stepmother had implants?” asked Dusty.
“My stepmother,” I told her, “had a dick.”
CHAPTER FIVE
1
In the old days, FBI special agents were required to be on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, even when they were off duty, because, of course, special agents are never off duty. Until the advent of sky pagers, they were expected to leave one or more telephone numbers at which they could be reached, and/or call in their whereabouts at frequent intervals. You could always tell a G-man by the dimes jingling in his pocket, the in-joke ran, back when a phone call cost ten cents and there was a booth on every street corner.
Technically, then, Pender was already in violation of Bureau regulations when he left the motel Wednesday night without his newfangled sky pager. He only dug himself in deeper by not calling in Thursday morning, not to mention failing to report to work. But any residual guilt he might have experienced was more than trumped by the relief that came with realizing that he didn’t have to watch any more goddamn snuff videos.
Thursday afternoon Amy dropped him off at his motel so he could check out. Just seeing the Bu-car par
ked outside the motel room was a material reminder of all the stuff he’d been putting off thinking about. Little stuff like turning in his resignation and telling his wife that he wouldn’t be coming home. But he wasn’t ready to deal with any of that just yet. Maybe Monday, he told himself, and quickly went back to not thinking about the stuff he wasn’t thinking about.
A second night of free drinks, slow dancing, and vigorous sex, followed by a second day lazing around the farmhouse, left Pender feeling like a gigolo. So when one of the Nugget’s two bouncers called in sick late Friday afternoon, he gladly offered to fill in. By then he’d met most of the full-timers—Steve, the head bartender; Barry, the head bouncer; Nestor, the cook; the waitresses, Karen and Mindy. And if their reception was a tad grudging at first, he understood they were only being protective of Amy.
Just in case he hadn’t understood, Barry took him aside to let him know that he was one lucky son of a bitch and to warn him that if he mistreated Amy in any way, he’d find himself in a world of hurt.
“Now that that’s behind us—Amy says you have some experience as a bouncer?” Barry was around Pender’s size, but looked taller in his cowboy boots and high-crowned Stetson hat.
“It was a long time ago, but yeah.” Like most of his colleagues in the Cortland County Sheriff’s Department in the late sixties, he’d done his share of moonlighting in bars and at shows.
“’Cause no offense, hoss, but you look a little out of shape to me.”
“Maybe, but I reckon I can still eighty-six a drunk with the best of ’em—hoss.”
The first few hours, there wasn’t much work for the bouncers. Pender helped Barry break up a fight, took the car keys from a falling-down drunk, and called a cab for him. By the end of the band’s second set, when he did have to run a bottle-throwing customer, the come-along hold he’d learned as a young deputy sheriff in Cortland came in handier than anything he’d been taught in the FBI Academy. What you want to do, Sheriff Hartung used to tell his men, is leverage the subject’s wrist up past his shoulder blade, so he’s too busy treading air to put up a fight.
When things heated up during the third set, Pender earned even Barry’s respect by smoothly disarming a drunken patron. “You’ll make a bouncer yet, hoss,” he told Pender later, after closing, when the crew and the band were unwinding with a few drinks, swapping songs and shooting the bull. And with a few slugs of Jim Beam under his belt, Pender discovered, it was almost possible, if not to actually forget the stuff he was trying not to remember, then to pretend to forget, at least for a little while longer.
2
Although I’d figured out the game the first night, it wasn’t until the next morning that Dr. O explained to us what the stakes were. If you played it right, you got to go home (graduate, they called it) and finish your treatment in the bosom of your familial unit. If you played it wrong, you went from there into a residential program. And in case that sounds like bull sessions and pajama pizza parties to you, you should know that in rehab language, residential generally means “locked.”
On the second day’s hike, when we were finally allowed to talk to each other (the counselors sandwiched us in on the trail, two ahead and two behind), I learned that my revelations the night before had earned me some respect from my so-called peers. Brent was practically creaming. “Your own pad, your own gun, all da dope you cou’ smoke, no muhfuggin’ school. Muhfuh, dat musta been sweeeet!”
“Save your breath, wiggah,” I told him, having just caught a glimpse of the next rise in the trail. “You’re gonna need it.”
It wasn’t all work, though. After an especially hairy canyon descent, we broke for lunch at a secret swimming hole Gary claimed to have discovered—Lake Gary, he called it. Everybody changed into bathing suits, even the counselors, and we swam and splashed and frolicked around, happy as a bunch of otters for a couple hours.
The campfire group therapy that night was mostly about Dusty. Her deal was rough sex with older guys, we learned. It had started with her stepfather abusing her, of course, but by the time she was fifteen she had worked her way through a neighbor, two teachers, a minister, and the shrink who was supposed to be helping her with her problem in the first place.
Dr. O kept trying to get her to cop to having low self-esteem. He said that was why she liked it rough, and let the men use her. She made what I thought were a couple of very good arguments, such as that everything he was saying was based on the assumption that sex was bad. And even if that were true, she added, she was using the men as much as they were using her.
But after a while it appeared to me that she was starting to give in to him, to go along with all his bullshit. Dr. O would make some lame observation, and she would give him this wet-lipped, deer-eyed look, and say something like “You know, I never thought of it that way before.”
I was probably the only one who noticed what was going on. “You planning to let Dr. O screw you?” I asked her that night. We’d set up our tents with the back walls touching so we could talk to each other through them.
“If I have to in order to graduate,” she said. “I just can’t face being locked up again.”
They broke us up the third day. The girls hiked with Kara and Diane, the boys with Gary and Dr. O, and we had separate campfires that night. If anything, there was even more bullshit involved in the boys only therapy sessions, with everybody trying to outdo each other in acting tough.
Day four we marched in silence again, and instead of a campfire we had individual sessions, one of us at a time versus all four counselors. Versus is my word, of course, but it definitely describes my session. They started off by asking me to tell them in my own words why I was here, but without blaming anybody else. I said in that case it wouldn’t be my own words, would it? Things went downhill from there.
The fifth day was the hardest climb of all, up a steep mountain trail in the broiling sun. By the time we set up camp in a boulder-strewn meadow with a view of forever, even my blisters had blisters. My feet hurt so bad I finally consented to let Dr. O (who was our medic despite the fact that he wasn’t a real doctor) treat them. By then I hated him with a passion, having had all that time to obsess about him and Dusty having sex. It hadn’t happened yet, but if it did, it would be soon. Tomorrow morning, we were told at campfire, our individual vision quests would begin.
These were to be like our final exams. We would be picking out our own campsites, isolated from each other, and making our own shelters, where we were supposed to spend twenty-four hours without eating or sleeping, and thereby obtain Wisdom with a capital Wiz.
There was more to it than that, of course. Among other things, we were supposed to find out what our so-called totem animal was. There was also this deal where we were each given what Dr. O called a MacGuffin, a single candy bar that was supposed to represent our own particular addiction or barrier, sex in Dusty’s case and drugs in my own. (But what if your addiction was candy bars? I joked to Dusty.) And although nobody came right out and said it, if you had half a brain, it was kind of obvious that you weren’t supposed to actually eat the MacGuffin.
I wasn’t buying any of it. All I could think about, that night before the vision quest, was Dr. O sneaking up to Dusty’s campsite tomorrow night, and the two of them getting it on. Oh, god, how I hated that man. If he hadn’t already been on it, I’d have added him to my fantasy revenge list. Instead I had to settle for mentally underlining his name.
Sleep was impossible. My tent was getting smaller and stuffier by the second. I opened the flap and stuck my head out to look at the stars. On the far side of the meadow, I could see all four counselors sitting around the campfire, having one of their endless gabfests, which meant nobody was watching us.
Figuring this might be my last chance to be alone with Dusty, I crawled around to her tent. She wasn’t there. My first assumption was that she was off screwing somebody. But just before I went ballistic, I saw a small darting figure zigzagging across the meadow from more or less the di
rection of the campfire. I dove into Dusty’s tent, and a second later she dove in on top of me. We exchanged oofs.
“What are you doing here?” she asked me.
“I was looking for you. Where were you?”
“Eavesdropping on the counselors. And guess what: it’s all bullshit.”
“Congratulations,” I told her. “You just won the Academy Award for Duh!”
“No, I mean the whole graduation, no graduation thing.” She grabbed my hand so tightly it hurt. “They already know who’s going home and who’s not.”
I can’t say I was surprised. “I’m guessing we’re among the nots.”
“We are the nots. Dr. O said I was ‘continually displaying age-inappropriate seductive behavior’ toward him. They’re sending me to a residential in Orange County.”
“What about me?”
“Military school in Arizona. They had a good laugh about that. Voted you most likely to make the Ten Most Wanted someday.”
“Ten Most Unwanted, more likely.”
She grabbed my hand in both of hers and pressed it flat against her chest. “Let’s go, Luke. Let’s run away, just you and me.”
I could feel her heart thumping like a scared rabbit’s through the thin fabric of her T-shirt and was acutely aware of the nearness of her little breasts on either side of my hand. At least she won’t be fucking Dr. O now, I told myself. “Dusty, we’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“That’s what you think!” Turns out we’d been hiking in a circle all this time. According to what Dusty had overheard, we were only a few miles from the little campground where we’d started out. “C’mon, what have we got to lose? At least let’s make the assholes look for us.”
The Boys from Santa Cruz Page 5