"That's why I put in that nude scene," Kenner interrupted lamely, not meeting my eyes.
"You're not even gonna recover costs," said Daniel, relentlessly.
Kenner's posture broke a little, and he struggled to retain his composure. "It's just so difficult, when you care so much about something."
There was that affecting side of him again.
He looked from beneath his eyebrows like a pleading puppy. "Please think about it, OK? Could you at least promise me you'll think about it? When this film comes out, all of L.A. will be at our feet!"
Daniel looked at me, and I looked at him. I forced myself to say what I had to say. "Kenner, we can't."
——
That night Daniel phoned. "What a joy that was," he said. "Is Gina mad that we told Kenner no?"
"Hell no, she's in love; she hasn't been mad in weeks. Not that she doesn't have a temper, believe me."
"Her temper could never be a match for yours, though."
"Why, thank you."
He laughed.
I said, "I'm just happy our ordeal in the north woods is over."
"Yeah, and we never had to go deeper into the forest than Griffith Park."
A quick darkness passed over my heart just then, like the shadow of a falcon that momentarily startles the primal shit out of you. I paced the apartment, checking the windows.
Chapter 2 – Who Would You Save?
"Mom, you know what Cole did at Lemuel's birthday party? He stole Kimber's cupcake. I told Mrs. Adjemian, I told on him!"
"Oh?"
"Yeah!" said Petey.
"What did Mrs. Adjemian do about it?"
"Nothing!" Puzzlement.
I watched the thoughts and emotions flow across his little face beneath his brown bowl haircut—the righteous outrage about the cupcake, the slyness when he boasted of tattling, his baffled reaction to the unsatisfying denouement.
"Were you hoping to get Cole in trouble?" I set my paper cup of iced tea on a bench and shaded my eyes to see him better. It was brightly sunny in San Diego today.
"Well—" He stopped, then flared. "But he stole her cupcake!"
"I know. I bet Kimber could have handled the situation by herself, though."
"But—"
"Honey, it's bad to be a thief; you're right about that. But it's kind of lousy to be a tattletale."
A baboon screamed nearby, and Petey took off toward Monkey Trails.
George and I followed at a brisk pace, barely keeping him in sight.
"You see the fine line a parent must tread," I said.
"Yeah, you don't want a bully for a kid," he commented, "but neither do you want a whiny little snitch."
"Exactly."
The sounds of the zoo wrapped around us as we flowed along with the Sunday afternoon crowds—the metal-on-metal cries of the monkeys, the guttural murmur of the warthogs, the dead silence of the sloths. All overlaid by human chatter and the flapping of the pigeons and gulls, the scavenging species that plague, or enhance, every coastal city.
We did Monkey Trails, then George said, "Let's stop here for a minute."
"Look, there's Tiger River!" said Petey. "Tiger River!"
"Yes, just a second," said George. "I have something for you."
Standing there unbuttoning his breast pocket, smiling faintly as he drew something from it, he looked thrillingly like—well, like no one else. You couldn't categorize George Rowe, except to say that he was what Rudyard Kipling must have had in mind when writing "If—": He kept his head while those about him were losing theirs and blaming it on him. He filled the unforgiving minutes with action and sincerity. He didn't look too pretty, and he didn't act too big. Sloping shoulders. Cinnamon crew cut.
He was unashamed to value physical strength in men and beauty in women. He judged men, women, and children alike by the straightness of their bearing. He held chairs for women. Nothing about him ever seemed too quick, yet he could move in a flash. We shared a fondness for blended whiskey and smoked salmon ever since an angelic bartender in San Francisco put some in front of us after a particularly grueling day of museum going.
He wanted to marry me.
I knew I ought to marry him.
Petey strained over the railing to see the tigers.
"Here, Petey," said George, "try this."
He handed him a small telescope. "It'll help you see the animals better. It's yours."
The compact brass instrument in Petey's hands was tarnished and pitted with wear, as if from a thousand sea voyages.
He looked up at George. "For keeps really?"
"Yes."
"Petey, honey," I prompted, "what do you say?"
"Thank you!" he piped, quite taken aback by the heft and beauty of the spyglass.
George showed him how to use it. "The lenses work together to make your eyes stronger when you look through it. If you keep track of it and take care of it, it'll serve you forever, just like your magnifying glass."
"Did you find it in a pirate's cove?"
This year Petey was a pirate maniac.
"No, I came across it when I was clearing out some things." George was always honest with the boy, the result being that Petey trusted him completely.
Petey began to use the spyglass as we walked into Tiger River, adjusting the tubes in and out. He quickly got the hang of it. He pointed it down the pathway, then at me.
"Up close, it's only blurry," he observed. He trained the glass on a tiger resting on a ledge, then jumped slightly when the animal yawned. "Wow!"
He scampered ahead.
"You know the way to his heart," I commented as we walked along.
George looked crestfallen. "You mean giving him things?"
"Oh, no! His father gives him things all the time. If it were that easy, Petey'd want to live with Jeff and his girlfriend. Ugh," I added routinely at the thought of Jeff's girlfriend, some little biscotto he picked up in his relentless quest to find a totally subservient woman.
"No," I said, "it's that you treat him like an adult. You expect him to understand things."
A bigger kid stared enviously at Petey's telescope, and he quickly slipped the red cord, which George had thoughtfully added, around his neck and glared at the kid, who backed off.
George told him, "Private investigators use telescopes and binoculars to do surveillance. You can get into a quiet place and peek out. You can watch somebody from a long way away, but they can't see you, if you're hidden away."
"Plus you have to be quiet," Petey asserted.
George had been training my boy in the folkways of private investigation for the better part of a year now.
"Do you ever get nervous," George asked as we walked along, "that he'll turn his new techniques on you?"
"My life is an open book," I responded. "Actually it's a dog-eared copy of Reader's Digest. I can't afford to have secrets."
He laughed.
"Though I can't say I've always been comfortable about it."
"I know."
Petey had to follow his own star, I felt.
I said, "He's coming to love you."
"That's a plus." George sighed, and I knew what he was thinking.
I wanted Petey to develop in his own way, and his way to deal with my on-again, off-again relationship with George was to keep his own relationship with the man constant.
Petey loved the wonderfully talented Daniel and used to urge me to marry him, but he'd finally accepted the fact that Daniel likes guys as much as I do, and while this made us compatible in one important way, it excluded marriage.
George was a wonderful man, plus he had good chest hair—not too gorilla—and he dressed like grown men used to dress in olden times: short-sleeved sport shirts and plain pants, leather belt and shoes, Twist-O-Flex watchband. But that, God help me, that's what bugged me. "He's too good to be true," I'd muttered to Gina on more than one occasion.
"Just because the once-and-forever-flawless Jeff turned out to be an alcoholic batterer," she'd
remind me, "doesn't mean—"
"I know, I know." Jeff and I had married out of high school, terribly in love. He was the handsomest boy I'd ever met—those lake-blue eyes—and smart, and ambitious. He courted me, which my family appreciated. He brought little gifts and didn't pressure me too much for sex until we were engaged. By which point no pressure was needed.
My ever-practical Gramma Gladys made sure I got birth control, and Jeff and I had a great time being two healthy young humans on the threshold of the world.
He'd always been a drinker, but I'd had no experience with alcohol and what it could do to people. I forgave and forgave and forgave, but after Petey was born and Jeff didn't quit drinking I ended the marriage.
Could I love a man unconditionally again?
Somehow, just as things would get going swimmingly between George and me, something would happen. I'd lose my temper, usually, over nothing, and declare we were finished.
I craned my neck to keep Petey in sight.
He had learned an unsettling lot about surveillance—"the oldest form of the profession," George had called it, winking at me over his head—and fingerprints and ways of hiding things, and ways people have of lying.
He was learning what fraud was, and chiseling, and confidence rackets.
Today, as we paused to buy popcorn, Petey remembered a question for George. "What's money laundering?"
George folded a paper napkin into his pocket. "Let's say a little boy named Gus steals a dollar from his sister's purse. Let's say his mother sees he has a dollar today that he didn't have yesterday, and she says, 'Gus, where did you get that dollar?' And Gus says, 'Tommy and I made a lemonade stand at his house, and this is my share of the profits.' That's money laundering: stealing money, and then pretending you came by it fairly."
Petey asked, "What's a lemonade stand?"
George laughed.
I wish I could laugh, but it really is sad kids don't spontaneously do those sorts of things these days. I blame it on computer games and stranger-paranoia.
At first I instructed Petey to call George Mr. Rowe. After a while George told him to call him George, but Petey stuck with "Mr. Rowe." More comfortable with it somehow.
It was a good day at the zoo.
On the way home, Petey seemed to sense an improved dynamic between George and me.
From the backseat of George's yellow VW Bug—a good innocuous car for a PI, I'd learned—Petey said, "Mr. Rowe, if Mom and Miss America got attacked by tigers, which one would you save?"
"I'd save your mom, Petey."
"Mom, if Mr. Rowe and me got attacked by tigers, which one would you save?"
"Uh, I'd save both of you."
"No, if you could only save one!"
"Uh—"
"What if me and Aunt Gina got attacked by tigers, which one would you—"
"That's enough!"
Back home, I glanced around the apartment as we trooped in. Gina saw the purposefulness of my gaze and headed me off. "Don't bother getting your white glove out, I didn't clean."
"But you promised you'd at least sweep the patio and get to the grout in the bathroom. I've let those jobs go because you've been promising you'd do them."
"I didn't promise, OK? I basically said I'd do them, but it's not the same as making a promise."
"Dammit, Gina, that grout is ready to spawn the next Ebola! I'm—"
"Making a promise is when you really seriously say something, like 'I do' when you're getting married."
I threw down my purse in defeat and went into the kitchen. Petey crashed for a nap, George accepted a beer, and Gina helped me put out some fruit and hummus. She didn't want to eat because she was meeting Lance later.
I asked her, "Well, what did you do all day?"
"I read The Treasure Among Us, Carson Plover's latest book; I couldn't put it down until I finished it." She described it, and like the first Carson Plover book—I forget the title—this one put out some good ideas along with genuinely wacky ones. One of Plover's good ideas, I thought, was for rich countries to help poor countries learn to get richer, because rich countries eventually clean up their environmental acts. The most admirable but least workable one, it seemed to me, was to dismantle all the earth's armies and use the collective savings to construct a gigantic membrane over certain carbon-spewing areas of the globe, which would let out the carbon buildup but intensify certain sun wavelengths that would power portable energy turbines. The turbines could be used in even the poorest of developing countries. The lack of armies would be a boon.
Gina said, "I'm going to start a petition to make a new law requiring your tombstone to say whether you died with carbon credit or carbon debt. Then, like, Petey's grandchildren can look and know who did this!"
"What about people who get cremated?" George asked. I cut him a look.
"Cremation's iffy in the first place." She checked her watch. "Lance is taking me to the Slamming Clam for dinner; we're going to plan our Washington trip."
I hadn't heard about any Washington trip. "You going to lobby for the environment or something?" I asked, devouring hummus on a wedge of pita. I'd resisted the junk food George and Petey inhaled at the zoo.
"No, Washington state. We're going to scout locations for Night for Dark! It's such a fantastic project. Kenner's so wonderful, and Lance is cute as a BUG, isn't he?"
"I hadn't heard about this trip before," I noted casually. "Is the record store giving you time off work?"
"Oh yes," she said, equally casually but with a certain evasive coldness. "Lance knows all about how to find good locations for movies. You know he's knocked around Hollywood a bit."
"He has?"
"Yes, he scouted locations for two of Drew Wong's kung fu movies, plus he did camera work for Fusion of Fact and Earth. That documentary on the Earth Puppets."
"Yeah, you made us watch that."
"Well, he's not as much of an Earth Puppet as I am. Anyway, I'll be his assistant, and tonight we're going to plan our route. He's already got a list of what Kenner needs."
George asked, "Where in Washington are you going?"
Gina scarfed a melon chunk. "This'll take the edge off until we actually eat. Lance said something about his family's land, some town that starts with an H. Like Hackett or something? It's like the Sauvenards own their own whole river. Harkett, that's it."
"You going to tent camp?" George asked.
I laughed, but Gina shocked me by saying that's exactly what they were going to do.
"My God," I said, "you don't even know how to put on bug repellant. You quit Girl Scouts when you found out there wasn't a Barbie badge, and—"
"Shut up. Lance'll handle everything, don't worry about it. We're going up to Seattle first; he wants me to meet his mom. I hear she's quite the character."
After she left, George said, "I don't know how to ask this tactfully, because she's your sister and I know you love her, but—"
"Why do I put up with her?"
He sipped his beer. "I mean, she's still crashing here on your pullout, and it's been over a year since she came to L.A., and she hasn't made good on her dream to become a professional torch singer. And it seems she just quit her job."
"And she screws up the laundry and doesn't clean and is careless and gets these sudden crazes about God knows what?"
"Yeah."
"Well, she's a great cook, and she takes care of Petey when I ask her to."
"That's true. What else?"
"George, she's my sister!"
He smiled. "Being your sister ought to get her only six months of crashing on your pullout, not a year."
"You don't know sisters," I muttered.
He watched me steadily. "There's something else, I can feel it."
The old emotion was like an animal awakening, and I braced myself.
He said, "It happens to you when you're thinking about her, like a deep feeling that comes up. It's—dark."
"Yes."
At first it was only shame and pa
in, but when I was still quite young I found that when I mixed in resolve, that hardened it up and made it bearable.
"Rita, are you all right?"
"Yes, yes. It's just that there's this—this chamber inside me, where if I open it, I remember again."
"From a long time ago? I'm sorry—you don't have to—"
"Yes. Yes, I do, now." I took a long breath.
He sat openhanded, listening.
"One day when Gina was nine and I was six," I began, and I had to do this, I had to remember it because it was the only way I could get the chamber closed again, "we went to the playground together. Gina didn't want me along, she wanted to go with her friends, but our mom made her take me. It wasn't any fun because she refused to play with me. She took off from the playground, and I followed her through a fence where they were building some new apartments. There was a pit for the foundation. She called me stupid and threatened to throw me in. I got mad and shoved her as hard as I could."
I could tell it without crying because I'd cried for years and that part was finished.
"The sound of her hitting that dirt—I'll never forget it." After a minute I went on. "Her injuries were terrible; I can't even go into it."
Gently, George said, "But you didn't mean to hurt her like that."
"I know, but I meant to hurt her; I remember that distinctly. I was in a rage. I meant to push her over, but I thought she'd sort of roll down and get a skinned knee, not—plummet."
"Still, you were only six years old. How could—"
"I know, I know. It didn't make any difference, though. I knew what I'd done. I tried to kill myself. I banged my head against the wall in our room until I saw stars. My dad came in and stopped me; he told me the whole house was shaking. He said, 'You've got to be stronger than this.'"
George took my hand.
I went on, "As she hung on in the hospital, I promised God I'd do anything as long as He spared my sister. Anything. I promised Him I'd never let her get hurt again. I'd do whatever it takes."
He said, "I see now."
"In most families the older sibling looks after the younger one, but in our case it's the opposite. I know we argue and fight sometimes, but none of that matters."
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