by Billie Letts
“What did I take? Today.”
“Doesn’t matter much. Probably OxyContin. Next time it might be white bitch or devil’s dandruff or ice. You might have to snort it, smoke it, or inject it. But you use it twice, use any of it twice, and you might never recover from it.
“Now this other stuff you do? Porno or prostitution or . . . worse, you might someday get over that. But dope? Chances are it’ll destroy your life.
“And that’s all I got to say about it ’cause you’ll do what you want to anyway. At least, that’s been my experience.”
When she left, she had all the documents she’d asked for, but this time T. walked with her a few blocks. Time, he said, for them to have a talk.
“You know, Lutie, I’m taking a big chance on you. I could go to jail for the favors I’m doing for you.”
With her high wearing off a bit, she said, “And I know you wouldn’t do that unless you made some money off me.”
“Pocket change. That’s what I make off you. Pocket change. Hardly enough to pay Philo. And his kind of photography doesn’t come cheap.”
“So what is it you want?”
“More. I want more from you. I expect more from you.”
“Like what?”
“Movies. Pictures. You’re sweet, young, natural. Hard to find a girl who hasn’t had a tit job yet. See, you look like the all-American girl. You say you’re fifteen, but Philo can make you look twelve. Or younger.”
“You’re talking porno movies, aren’t you? I saw that room with the naked man and woman on a bed, cameras set up, mikes. I know what goes on back there.”
“Now, that’s dangerous talk, Lutie. That kind of talk can get you in real trouble. Talk like that can get you hurt. Oh, yeah. That’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous? How?”
“Oh, if you talked about the movies we make at the studio, say something to the wrong party, well . . .”
“I’m not gonna tell anyone, T. I’m trying to stay out of trouble here myself. I’ve got a little brother to take care of and—”
“I know, honey. I know. And that’s why I’m offering you this opportunity. You can make a lot of money. And you can make it fast in this business.”
“I don’t want to do that, T. Besides, I’ve got a job if I decide to take it.”
“Yeah, I heard. Making beds and cleaning shit out of toilets at the MGM.”
Lutie looked stunned. “How’d you—”
“Not much goes on in Vegas that I don’t know about, darlin’. But let’s get back to you. Here’s the thing: Cleaning hotel rooms is never gonna let you put together enough money to get you and your brother into a decent place. See, you have to lay out a damage deposit, pay first and last months’ rent, put down utility deposits. You have any idea how much you’d need to do that?”
“Well, I guess I hadn’t thought of that.”
“No, ’course not, but T. is trying to take care of you, see? And if movies aren’t your thing, I can get you hooked up with something else.”
“Like what?”
“Well, even with those little bitty boobs, I can get you a job as a stripper . . . or a pro.”
“Pro? You mean a whore?”
“Now wait a minute, babe, you don’t need to be so harsh with me. I’m trying to look after you here.”
“Right.”
“Hey, when you finally realize this stupid plan of yours ain’t gonna work, when you finally see that you can’t make enough money to live anywhere besides your car, when you reach the point where you gotta go Dumpster diving to feed you and your brother, you’ll turn to some kind of business that’ll help you get where you wanna be. And that’s when you’re gonna need me, old T., looking out for your best interests. Keeping you safe, healthy, and whole. You get what I’m saying?”
“I gotta go now, T.”
“Okay, baby girl, but you’ll be back. You’ll be back to see me. And it won’t be long, not nearly as long as you think.”
Lutie went back to Denny’s with her food handler’s permit, which resulted in her first job offer, an eight-hour shift starting that night at eleven p.m. But she wasn’t sure leaving Fate alone all night in the car was a good idea, so she said she couldn’t start that soon.
She checked at a dozen casino restaurants, figuring that waitresses would make better tips there, but most had all the help they needed at the moment, and many already had a waiting list of potential employees. Even the two casinos that did have openings could offer her only night work, which, they explained, was the shift where all their new waitstaff had to start.
She filled out an application at a twenty-four-hour cleaners called Right Away when she saw a Help Wanted sign in the window, but the job was only part-time and the pay was pathetic. She tried for work at tourist spots; bars; flower shops; an import bazaar; a beauty salon where she was offered the job of janitor—shampoo and sweep-up girl, a position scheduled to open up in three weeks; upscale shops in the Fashion Mall and the Midway at Circus Circus.
When she passed a shop called Showgirl Costumes, she noticed a sign on the door, a sign that read, “25 sexy moves taught by a professional pole dancer. We help with costumes, jewelry, and job locations. All physical types considered.” But when she tried to go inside, she found the door was locked.
A short distance away, she went into Biomedics, a blood donation center that paid for plasma. She spoke to a receptionist who gave her an information sheet that listed the regulations and payment disclosure: thirty dollars for the first donation; thirty-five dollars for all that followed.
On her way back to the car, she passed a narrow brick building, the Glenmoor Arms. When she saw the Apartment Available sign in the yard, she went in. The manager, a disinterested woman who appeared to be a little drunk, showed her the apartment, a one-bedroom efficiency with torn shades at the window, a bed with a bare mattress covered with stains, a kitchen with an oven missing its door, and a sink where ants marched from beneath a broken faucet.
The rent, the manager announced, was four hundred dollars, first and last month due upon occupancy, but that included water and trash pickup; a damage deposit of two hundred dollars, nonrefundable if the renter owned a pet; no dopers and no noise after midnight.
When she reached the car, she was surprised to find that Fate hadn’t arrived ahead of her, so she took the time to count the money left from the “donation” made yesterday by the gray-haired ladies. Almost three dollars, an amount that assured her that she and Fate would be going back to the Salvation Army shelter for a free meal that evening.
Lutie decided they would go to a Catholic church—not, she said, because of the denomination, but because the building was only two blocks from the library.
They arrived just after nine, found the front doors unlocked, the vestibule empty and silent. The nave was dark, lit only by gauzy diffused light coming through stained-glass windows and some candles glowing near the door.
One elderly woman was sitting in the back pew, her eyes closed as she ran the beads of a rosary through her fingers, her lips moving without sound as she prayed. Another woman, a young Latina, sat near the statue of the Virgin Mary at the side of the nave. Neither woman acknowledged in any way that Fate and Lutie had entered and seated themselves close to the front.
Fate sat still and stiff, his face registering nothing but discomfort that may have come from the unfamiliar surroundings. Or perhaps he was feeling the pain of his reason for being there—to remember good times with his father as a way of saying good-bye. A funeral of sorts, as Lutie had called it that morning.
The thought of death and funerals made him remember something he’d read in one of his fact books about the strange deaths of some popes. He recalled that John X was imprisoned and suffocated and John XIV was left to die of starvation in prison. He reasoned that prison had been no kinder to his father than to those unfortunate popes.
Just then he realized that Lutie was wiping tears from her face, making him wonder not why she was
crying, but why he wasn’t, so he willed himself back to thoughts of his father, searching for memories.
A ball game. His father had taken him to a semipro ball game in Rapid City, but what he remembered most about that outing was his dad getting drunk on beer and falling from a row of bleachers.
He quickly ran through the books of the Bible and the Ten Commandments, which he’d memorized at the Sunday school Floy took them to in Spearfish, then he backed up and went through the commandments again to count the number he’d broken.
A party. A surprise birthday party. They’d been living with a woman named Beverly, a woman his father had taken up with for a while. He recalled a cake with candles, a pretty woman giving him his first sip of whiskey, everyone yelling, “Surprise!” when his daddy walked in. But again, the memory dissolved with a picture of his father drunk, passed out in a recliner, vomit on his undershirt.
To quiet the films playing behind his eyes, he concentrated on the life-size crucifix attached to the front wall. Fate studied the figure with such fixed attention that he curled his fingers so that his nails cut into his palms, trying to imagine the pain Christ must have felt, hoping that his own pain would bring tears. But that didn’t work, either.
Beside him, he felt Lutie’s body shudder with weeping, saw her hand covering her mouth to silence the sounds of her sobs. He shifted then, put his arm around his sister, and pulled her close so she could cry into his shoulder.
But still he remained dry-eyed.
Though he couldn’t remember his mother, her death, or her funeral, he tried to reach that empty spot deep within him that would forever remain a void, a feeling that sometimes made him sad enough to cry.
But he couldn’t get there now.
He remembered reading somewhere that the number of Catholics in the United States was 66,407,105.
Finally, he tried to make his mind go blank, something he’d read about in a book on meditation. Concentrate on his breathing, focus on a pleasant scene, and when his mind wandered, bring the scene back and breathe.
And that’s when he saw the image of his father, alone in a prison hospital as he suffered the throes of death—his mouth agape in agony, crying out for help but without the aid of sound, his belly bloated as his lungs filled with blood, the last gasp for air.
And with the vision of his father’s swollen hand reaching out for comfort, the comfort of another’s hand, the tears that Fate had tried to shed came. Not because he’d willed them, but they came. Streaming down his face and falling onto Lutie’s hair.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FATE HAD KNOWN from the moment he opened his eyes this morning that he was going back to Paradise to see what he could learn about the school. He hadn’t mentioned it to Lutie, knowing that she wanted to be left alone when she woke up. Besides, he knew she had something on her mind, something she hadn’t been able to share with him.
She was grieving for their father, no doubt about that. She’d always been a daddy’s girl, and learning about his death had, in some ways, been harder for her than for Fate.
When Jim McFee had run off and left his boy and girl with Floy, he had broken Lutie’s heart. And though she hadn’t talked much about it, Fate knew she believed her daddy would come back for them soon. Fate, on the other hand, had come to believe as the months dragged on that his father cared so little for them that he would likely never show up again.
So now that Lutie knew she wouldn’t see her daddy again, she was lost. And Fate knew that having a little brother to take care of wasn’t making her life any easier.
That’s why he was sorry he’d gone on and on about Paradise. She didn’t need any more pressure right now.
He waited until she took off before he went into the library to brush his teeth and take his whore’s bath, but he didn’t stick around there long.
He reached the elementary school soon after nine, found the front door unlocked, and went inside as quietly as he could. He inhaled the odor of floor wax and chalk, the smells that always signaled fall to him, the time the new school year began. His favorite time of year.
He’d been upstairs, downstairs, and in the basement before he met someone on the main floor, not far from where he’d come in.
“Good morning, young man.”
The man who spoke appeared to be in his midforties. He was dressed informally—cotton slacks, short-sleeved shirt, boat shoes with no laces. He came out of an office marked Principal and seemed surprised to find a visitor in the hall.
“Hello,” Fate said.
“Mind if I ask how you got in here?”
“Through the front door.”
“Ah, still the most popular entrance, I suppose, though we do have the occasional student who prefers to bust through a locked window or crawl up the fire escape, but that’s usually a late night visit. And you don’t strike me as that sort.”
“No, sir.”
“I thought that the front door would be locked, but a number of our teachers are here today getting ready for the new semester.”
“Yes, I saw some of them in classrooms shelving books and decorating bulletin boards and—”
“So you’ve been touring Paradise.”
Smiling, Fate said, “I saw the amphitheater, the swimming pool, the computer lab and chemistry department and the band room and—”
“Do you play an instrument?”
“No, but I’d like to learn the saxophone.”
“Excellent. Our music professor, Dr. Wintle, would—no doubt—like to teach you. He’s the best.”
“And you offer Latin and drama, and you have a chess club, and you teach geology.”
“We lucked out this summer. We had a visiting lecturer from Austria who taught a two-week seminar in crystals.”
“Wow,” Fate said, then remembered Lutie told him only dweebs used the words gosh and keen, making him wonder if wow fell into the same category. “I went into the language lab and the library and I found the . . .” Suddenly his smile faded, and worry lines creased his forehead. “Was that okay? Going in and out of your classrooms, just wandering around without permission?”
“Absolutely.”
“Are you the principal?”
“No, I’m her assistant. Excuse me for not introducing myself sooner. I’m Mr. Grove. And you are . . . ?”
“Fate McFee.”
“Nice to make your acquaintance, Mr. McFee,” he said, offering his hand. “Now, tell me. Did you like what you saw here today?”
“Oh, this is a wonderful school. The one I went to last year didn’t offer much more than math, language arts, social studies, and gym. But here . . . well, I’d give anything to study here.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“I figure this is a private school with tuition and all.”
“Nope. Public. No tuition, no fees, no uniforms.”
“Then . . .”
“All you have to do to come to Paradise is to live within our zone.”
“Oh.”
“Where do you live now?”
“Well, my family isn’t settled yet. Not really. I mean, we’re not in a permanent place right now.”
“I see.” Mr. Grove had worked with kids long enough to know he was getting too close to that private place in troubled youngsters. “Well, when you’re ready, we can have your school records faxed here, usually within minutes.”
“Sure.” Fate nodded. “The fax.”
“I’m curious, Mr. McFee, about your grades. I’m guessing they’re pretty good. Am I right?”
“They’re good.” Uncomfortable with talk that bordered on bragging, Fate looked at his shoes. “I make straight A’s. And I’m in accelerated classes.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. Not at all.”
Fate blushed but managed a timid smile.
“If you’ll wait here, I’ll get you a map of our zones.”
“Okay.”
Within moments, Mr. Grove returned and handed Fate a brochure called “Everything You N
eed to Know About Paradise.”
“The map’s in there as well as answers to some of the questions you’ll think of later.”
“Thank you.”
“I look forward to seeing you at enrollment. And welcome to Paradise, Mr. McFee.”
When Fate left the campus, he walked north on Swenson, an unfamiliar street, but he had no destination, had no reason to want one. He was content to let his mind take him back to Paradise, where he saw himself as a student, spending his days in classes learning Latin, studying art and music history, using a real telescope; asking questions about astronomy, mythology, the measure of force—the kinds of questions he’d longed to ask.
He would, in all probability, have teachers with PhD’s. Not some coach who had to teach social studies and drive a school bus.
Fate knew, too, that he would explore the university campus every day after school, sneaking into classes of calculus, British literature, geology, Chinese, philosophy, world religions. He’d meet students from Bhutan, Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Andorra, and Nauru—places he’d only read about; he’d listen to professors designated as university scholars, those who held endowed chairs, maybe even Nobel Prize winners, as they explained why the dugong, the babirusa, and the goliath frog were disappearing from the world.
But he was abruptly pulled out of the fictional world where he’d been living for the past several minutes by a golf ball that came sailing over a chain-link fence several feet away, bounced three times, then rolled to a stop just at the toe of his right foot.
When he looked to see where it had come from, he saw a golf cart speeding across the grounds inside the fence, the cart coming in his direction.
The driver, a man nearing sixty, stopped the cart, got out, and, using his golf club, started searching for the ball by parting tall grass and smacking at low bushes.
“You looking for this?” Fate called, holding up the ball for the man to see.
“Imagine so,” the golfer said, then walked to the fence and accepted the ball as Fate dropped it into his outstretched hand.