by Alan Drew
“What am I thinking, Miss ESP?”
She leaned back onto her elbows, splayed her fingers in the clump grass. She had painted her nails a neon red. He remembered, for a moment, the dead boy in the field this morning. It just burst out of his memory, an image imposed upon this lovely picture of his daughter.
“Graffiti, airbrush, something lame like that.”
He laughed. Her face was in profile to him, her sun-freckled nose, her long dark eyelashes. Her mother’s jaw.
“Comics,” she said.
“What? Like Superman?”
“Superman’s lame,” she said. “More like a novel with pictures. He’s working on this one where the hero rides a tidal wave as it crushes Los Angeles. It’s like this updated Armageddon story.”
“Well, I don’t like him.”
“Bro-ken rec-ord,” she said.
Ben glanced at his watch: 5:03, and it’d take fifteen minutes to get back. “Let’s get you to your mother,” Ben said.
On the ride back, they passed the old cowboy camp in Bommer Canyon. A decade ago, if you were running a winter herd, you could escape a rainstorm here or put in for the night. Now a yellow front-loader sat idle beneath the oak tree. The Santa Elena Historical Society had petitioned to save the place, but it was Rancho Santa Elena Corporation’s property, and as soon as the ink dried on the few hundred signatures, one of which was his, the heavy equipment had moved in. Up until a few years ago, he had thought the hills would be safe from development, but he had been naïve. The toll road would run through here, and the Rancho had a vested stake in the expressway being built. Inside, he knew, the camp stank of piss and animal shit; there were broken beer bottles in the corners, graffiti scrawled across the walls. When the ranch was a working endeavor—clean cots pushed up against the walls, a small stove in the corner to make coffee—he’d spent the night out here once with his father, the hills outside a moonless inky black. Ben lay awake that night listening to the whoops and screeches, his father whispering to him in his cigarette voice, “There’s nothing out there’ll hurt you; there’s nothing out there…” until his father fell to snoring and Ben stared at the shapeless sky outside the window, nodding off when dawn outlined the twists of oak-tree branches.
“They’re going to knock the camp down,” he said to Emma as they passed.
“It’s falling down anyway,” she said.
—
“YOU SAID FIVE,” Rachel called from the front steps of his house when she saw them coming up the drive. It’s where she used to sit when they were still married, face turned to the sun, watching the hills and road as though perpetually waiting for something. Her knees were pushed together, and she was grading a paper on her lap. She wore acid-washed jeans that fell just above her ankles. Her socks, he noticed, mismatched blue to black. She was always the geek who didn’t give a damn about fashion, but a beautiful geek, a geek who turned heads.
Emma walked Gus to the barn and poured out a bucket of oats for the horse. Ben rode Tin Man over to Rachel, looking down at her from the saddle while she squinted into the sun.
“How’s the professor?”
“He’s in computers,” Rachel said. “Software.”
“Floppy-disk guy? Sits at a desk all day?”
“A lab.” She huffed a bitter laugh. “What, you haven’t investigated this?”
He gritted his teeth.
“You’re growing up, Ben.” She smiled, rubbing the pencil lead from the edge of her hand onto the thigh of her jeans. “Did she do her homework?”
Rachel knew the answer, just wanted to make it official. He shook his head.
She let out an exasperated breath. “I spend all day making kids do their schoolwork. I don’t have horses to entertain her with.”
“You gave that up.”
“They’ve always been your horses.” She stuffed the paper into a manila folder and stood up. “I just got to rent them in exchange for good behavior.”
Emma was out of the barn, walking toward them. “Hi, honey,” Rachel said, giving Emma a kiss on the part in her hair. It softened him, her lips on their daughter’s hair. It was all he could hope for, to witness that every day. “Go get your stuff and let’s eat,” she said.
Emma went into the house and Rachel stared up at him, leaning on her left hip in a pose he knew well. He swung himself off Tin Man and stood holding the reins.
“When were you going to tell me about this kid she’s seeing?” he said.
“Isn’t that hers to tell?” Rachel said, raising an eyebrow.
“I thought we had joint custody for a reason.”
A military jet flew high above them and they both glanced at it, a silver spark in the sky.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have filled you in. Been a lot on my plate at school. This thing with the boy is new.”
“She says six weeks.”
“Get used to it, Ben,” Rachel said, shooting him an annoyed glance. “She’s going to have boyfriends.”
“What if he’s a jerk?” he said. “What if she’s getting into trouble?”
“We don’t need to make trouble where there’s none yet.”
“I’d like to avoid the other side of ‘yet.’ ”
“So would I.”
“Dad,” Emma called from the kitchen window. “Where’s the sweatshirt I was wearing?”
“Look in the hall closet,” he said. “So the professor?”
“Programmer.”
“You like him?” Shut your mouth, Ben. Just shut up. “Play Ms. Pac-Man together and stuff like that?”
“Jesus, Ben,” she said. “He’s a friend, and I don’t have to explain myself to you. Not that you’d listen.”
She hoisted her school bag to her shoulder, disorganized edges of lined paper poking out.
“Besides, how’s Natasha?” Rachel said. “That’s her name, right?”
She and Emma had been talking. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s her name. Just work friends.”
“Work friends.” Rachel smiled wryly. “Emma Eunice,” she yelled at the house. “Let’s go!”
“I need the sweatshirt.”
“If I find it,” Ben called to the window, where he saw his daughter tossing throw pillows into the air, “I’ll bring it to you in the morning.”
Emma stomped out of the house, full of teenage fury.
“What, do we have a train to catch?”
“Don’t talk to me like that,” Rachel said. Ben simultaneously echoed the sentiment, and Emma stared at the two of them as though they were a team conspiring against her. For a moment, Ben was tricked into feeling married again.
“Geez.”
Rachel tugged Emma toward her Buick.
Oh,” she said, pulling a thin box from her bag. “Here.” See’s Candies. “For Margaret when you see her.”
Margaret, Ben’s mother, had been diagnosed with early-onset dementia soon after his stepfather died six years ago. Sixty-four years old and her memory was slowly being erased. She was at Leisure World—Seizure World, as the EMTs called it—a home down in Laguna Niguel.
“Nice of you. Thanks.”
A quick smile.
“He pushes your buttons, then?” Ben said, unable to leave it alone. “The professor?”
“Cute,” Rachel said, walking away from him.
He watched them go, a cloud of dust following them down the road. Alone. He was alone, and no doubt he deserved it.
—
HE BRUSHED OUT the horses, a little too roughly, and put them in for the night. In the house, he straightened the decorative carnage wrought by Emma and called in to the station to check his messages: missing elderly found telling jokes in the produce section of Safeway; Rafferty thanking him for the tip on the killer’s small hands; a problem with his articulation on an affidavit for a search warrant on a suspected burglar of hi-fi stereos. Pain in the ass. Nothing from ballistics, nothing from Natasha.
In his bedroom, he opened the sock drawer of his dre
sser and yanked out the boy’s sweatshirt. No chance Emma would check there. Inside the hoodie he found the boy’s last name scrawled in Sharpie on the tag: Arnold. The fabric stank of sweat and the faint sticky-sweet of weed. He checked the pockets for any plastic bags or shake, any papers. Nothing. According to the white pages, there were two Arnolds in the El Camino Real area: a J. M. Arnold, living in the Bonita Casitas condominiums; the other, a husband and wife, David and Michelle Arnold, 19832 Los Pueblos.
He tossed the sweatshirt on the passenger seat and gunned the cruiser down the dirt road until he hit the light at Junipero. The last of the sun cast saturated light against the shining cars, the street wet-black and ruler-straight, everyone speeding—he could tell by the way they zipped through the intersection to his one-two counts instead of threes or fours. When he turned the cruiser onto the road, everyone throttled down to speed limit—three rows of brake lights, nervous glances at intersections. His car was unmarked, but the silver spotlight above the sideview gave him away.
It took him ten minutes, mostly spent idling at timed stoplights, to reach the house, a ranch with a half-pipe in the driveway. The kid was blasting punk music, and his eyes bugged out when he saw Ben. He jumped to the boom box in the empty garage and flipped it off.
“Dude, what’d I do?” he said, his cool lost now.
“Nothing yet, I hope.”
“What? No, man,” he said, shaking his head. “Nothing. I mean, we’ve kissed, but that’s all.”
It was nearly 7:00, and there were no cars in the garage. The front door was wide open, the house dark and quiet inside.
“Where’re your parents?”
“Mom’s working,” the kid said. “My dad?” He looked at his feet. “You got me.”
He saw this all the time, kids alone at home for hours after school, cooking their meals, drinking their parents’ whiskey, creating trouble where there didn’t need to be any while parents worked their tails off to pay inflated mortgages.
“This is yours,” Ben said, tossing the kid the sweatshirt.
“Yeah, man,” he said. “I let Em wear—”
“Emma.”
“—Emma wear it because she said she was cold.”
“Chivalrous of you.”
He shrugged. “I guess.”
Ben turned to go back to his car.
“How’d you know where I lived?”
“I know a lot of things, kid. I got eyes and ears.”
A BIRD WITH A HOOD OVER ITS HEAD
What he had wanted to ask the nice lady in the yellow shirt was: Why didn’t anyone come to get me?
His eleven-year-old self had gotten sick—this was a long time before social services and the nice lady in the yellow shirt—his insides turning to water, the basement floor wet with it, and his father had taken him to the doctor. The ladies in the candy-colored clothes had weighed him. They had stood him on a silver pedestal and marked the notch where the top of his head ended. They had stabbed a tube into his arm, and the blue vein sucked the warm liquid into his body. They had stared at him, shaken their heads, and whispered. They had given his father a slip of paper and let the two of them walk back out into the spotlight-sunny day. And they didn’t come for him, not yet.
But later, after they did come for him, when the nice lady in the yellow shirt asked him why he didn’t call out, asked him why he didn’t tell the nurses and the doctor-man at the clinic, his twelve-year-old self had still been a bird with a hood over his head. And the twelve-year-old-self words in his brain didn’t sound like the words coming out of her mouth, and a bubble of silence expanded between them. He wanted to tell her that the sun had been too bright that day, that his father’s car, hurtling down the road, had felt like the world exploding, that the office noises—the rings and beeps and child cries, the TV box with the people locked inside—pounded like fists against his skull. And he had wanted to get out of there—to rest his eyes, to let the noises crawl out of his ears.
If he could see that nice lady in the yellow shirt now, he would tell her that he didn’t know he could free himself. He didn’t know that the words in his head could be arranged to say, “There’s a deadbolt on a door that is always locked.”
But after his father was locked behind a deadbolt in a prison, with a barbed-wire fence cutting the sky, he had sat at a dinner table with a foster family and learned to speak like them; he had gone to school and learned to think like them; he had ridden bikes and made forts and taken pictures that people put in scrapbooks; but he was never really there with them: In his mind he was still in a room with a deadbolt that was always locked. He played tag and dangled from monkey bars, but the old self watched this new self and whispered things in that other language that made him itch inside.
In foster care he discovered that doors could remain unlocked. Once he found them unlocked, the doors, he couldn’t stop walking through them—their handles turning so easily, sweeping open as though he was invited inside. He walked through neighbors’ unlocked doors—when they were gone away at the office or off at the shopping center, when they were praying at their church. Once a boy came home from school when he was inside, and his thirteen-year-old self had to hide in a closet until the boy turned on the hi-fi in his bedroom. The door to the boy’s room was cracked, and for a few moments he stood at the top of the stairs, just two feet from the open door, and listened to the music. It was the first time he’d heard the song. It was loud and angry, the singer’s voice like an animal growl, and he felt the electricity for the first time, too. He could see the boy’s bare feet on his bed, crossed at the ankles, his toes keeping beat with the drums. He felt the electricity first in his fingertips, then up his arms. (Like now, like it was moving in his body now.) Then it went supernova in his chest, and his hands felt like metal clamps. Standing at the top of those steps, he felt his body grow, felt his spine elongate, the bones of his legs lengthen, the sinew of his muscles bulge to superhuman size. But then, through the open window, he heard his foster mother call him for dinner. He was thirteen and he had been hungry.
But the itch inside grew, like animal nails clawing the cavity of his chest, like teeth gnawing the ridges of his skull; it grew until he felt raw inside and the itch made him smash a lamp against his foster mother’s head. Then they sent him to another place with deadbolts on the doors. Not like the basement, but with beds and painted walls and time in a courtyard with cooing doves in the trees. Here he learned to act like them, learned the right answers to the right questions, learned to smile and say things like “It’s nice to see you” and “I feel fine” and “Please don’t do that,” and on the outside he seemed like them, but he wasn’t. You are me, but I’m not you. He said this in his mind when talking to them. You are me, but I’m not you. There’s a black hole in me; he could feel it, gravity turned inside out, an ever-expanding implosion.
Now he swerved into the sky, a huge cement half circle sweeping above the low-slung houses. The on-ramp slipped the Toyota into the stream of cars riding the Santa Ana Freeway, the red taillights like rushing capillaries of blood. For a quarter of a mile, the freeway was raised on cement columns, the basin twinkling below him, the sky so clear the L.A. high-rises shimmered in the distance. Sometimes he drove all night, listening to the music on the cassette player—“Find a little strip, find a little stranger”—the Santa Ana Freeway looping into the 110, the downtown skyscrapers like things earthquaked into the air. The 110 carving a tunnel through the broken-glass sparkle of the Carson refineries, the highway system like the arteries of a huge heart, the whole basin falling toward the ocean, gridded with streetlights and back-porch spotlights, millions of people sitting in their little homes, watching television. From here you could feel their insignificance, parasites on a larger organism.
He had slept in the car yesterday morning, curled up like a rabbit in the back of the Toyota, the car parked on the edge of a construction site, the skeletons of half-framed houses casting shadows across the ground. Someone had rapped his kn
uckles against his window. He had jumped and his heart beat like grenade explosions, his eleven-year-old-self heart again, curled in a corner, his chest thumping with fear. But it was a plainclothes policeman, his hand gesturing for him to roll down the window.
Girlfriend kicked him out, he’d told the cop.
He was a broad-shouldered Rancho Santa Elena detective with nothing to do, a coffee in his hand as though meeting a friend for breakfast.
“Well, you can’t sleep here,” the cop said. And then he gave him the coffee, fresh and warm in his hands, and let him go. “YMCA in Tustin,” the cop said. “They’ll take you in for a night or two if you’ve got nowhere to go.”
He liked the cop. His niceness made him stupid, and his stupidity made him blind to the thing in front of him.
Then he had driven down Laguna Canyon and stood on the side of the road with the Mexicans and Hondurans and El Salvadorans, begging rich white men for daywork. He didn’t need much, just enough money for gas and the boxes of latex gloves, just enough for donuts or a drive-through hamburger. He wasn’t Mexican, but he was olive-skinned and small, like the half-starved illegals. And no one asked questions, no one wanted to know, especially the rich white men who were afraid of the fines for hiring illegals. A few hours’ work, a palm full of cash, goodbye. Move on to the next corner in another town.
This morning he jumped into a Chevy pickup bed with a Nicaraguan and they huddled in the back together, clutching their chests as the truck hurtled down the freeway. The truck took the Magnolia exit, swung right, and drove into a gated community with a little fountain of reclaimed water and streets lined with palm trees. The man pushed the silver buttons and the gate slid open and the truck drove through, and he watched the gate lock behind them, a little castle wall to keep the world out. The houses had columns and cathedral windows and a greenbelt that snaked between the yards—kids dangling from monkey bars, a woman touching her toes before a jog. At the house, the rich man handed them shovels and he and the Nicaraguan dug a kidney-shaped hole in the ground, where they would pour cement for a pool. It was a hot day, and the earth was dry and pebbly until it gave way to hard-packed mud, tangled palm roots, knots of worms.