by Peter Craig
She whispered his full name: Jonah Pincerna. The sound itself made her nostrils flare and fists clench, as if she were still under attack. Pacing in the dark, she fought against an imaginary version of him. How dare he put his hands on her like that. How dare he corner her and manipulate her in this squalid little house, putting her away in a cage, his pretty teenage pet. She stalked along the dark backyard, littered with bottles and cans, patches of dead lawn, the smell of a kennel, and she reenacted the fight with Jonah outside in the dark, hissing to herself, answering his barrage of insults now to herself: Take your fucking hands off me. You’re trash. She was shivering, but—as she turned back to the house—she saw silhouettes in clusters, gesturing with bottles and the flaring tips of cigarettes, and she realized that this was her crowd now. This scene was dead, and she was going to wake up the party.
In a festive rage, Lydia wandered back into the crowd, waving her fist in the air, and said, “Let’s start breaking shit, y’all!”
A few bewildered young men watched as she took the new dishes from the cabinets and smashed them onto the kitchen floor. She dug her nails into the wall, prying loose old tile, the color of dirty teeth, exposing the chalky plaster underneath. Her fingers bled. She no longer seemed enraged, but systematic, as if piece by piece disassembling a puzzle.
“How this bitch goin’ tear apart her own house?” someone asked.
But as she persisted in destroying the kitchen tile, then kicking each cabinet door off its hinges, many of the other guests began to join the demolition. In the bathroom, someone shattered a mirror and tore off the toilet seat, throwing it through a window. Several boys began laughing and puncturing the walls, making karate noises with each running kick. Each broken bottle, collapsing shelf, or severed towel rack increased the energy in the house, until Lydia felt herself at the center of a surging riot. At last, it truly exploded when someone threw a trash can through the sliding glass door. Swarms of kids took the house in rapid, SWAT-team formations, beating on the walls, peeling up the carpet, uprooting plants and hurling dirty roots across the floor. The young men had insensate eyes, like sharks, and they beat on themselves and punched their arms at the open air and shouted at Lydia in passing: “Let’s go! Let’s do this!”
Every ounce of her initial frustration was overrun, and she stood paralyzed in a house full of screaming, kicking, gouging, marauding teenage boys. They smashed windows and cut their hands; they overturned the refrigerator as she stumbled backward; they pissed in the corners; they were seething with a rote destructiveness, joining a crowd, losing themselves—and soon there were several boys groping her as they moved through the kitchen, splintering the remainders of cabinet doors.
She could think of nothing now but getting out of the tornado she’d created.
She moved through the kitchen, past swells of kids—some of them looking so young, pillaging little boys armed with curtain rods. On the driveway she stood face-to-face with the only calm figure in the chaos. He wore a sweatshirt hood over his shaved head; he was so pale that he seemed to glow faintly under the timed streetlight. It was the awkward man she had seen in her bathroom, who seemed to hover around the edges of her catastrophic parties.
“Fleeing the scene, huh?” he said, looking away at the house. The way he smiled reminded her of the phosphorescent teeth in her childhood. Beyond him, there were neighbors gathered on their porches and lawns in the dark.
Lydia didn’t respond to the man, but ran toward the boulevard. Under the motion-sensitive security lights of another house, she noticed that she was bleeding from her cracked fingernails, and that a sliver of broken glass had lodged into her shoulder. She sprinted to the corner, beside a fast-food restaurant, where she called Chloe and Danielle on her cell. Both hung up on her. She started crying in a way that seemed more like the wind had been knocked out of her, a hard strike that caved in her chest and stole her words.
She gave up trying. She wandered a few blocks farther into the residential streets until she came to a grade school penned in by high, chain-link fences. She climbed over and crossed the blacktop to where she found a playground, which looked to her in the passing headlights like a twisted apparatus of steel, strange torture devices on plains of asphalt and rubber mats. She sat on the swings for a while, rocking, then swung back and forth, feeling the rushing air and the plummeting in her stomach, until she dropped off and threw up in the sand. Then she curled up beneath the jungle gym, staring up through its bars, and lay there for hours in a sleepless delirium.
She was brought back to some clarity when children began arriving for school, playing tag and climbing on the rungs above her. Some were laughing at her, most were wary, as she rose up with tangled, sandy hair, wiping her mouth. She crossed the playground to escape the teachers who’d seen her, and she trotted back toward the boulevard, throwing up again on the curb, then searching her pockets for a cigarette while resting on a bus stop bench.
She was almost too hungover to speak. Her mouth was pasted together, her stomach quivered at each deep breath. She called Shannon, who answered the phone in a groggy voice, then cut Lydia off midway through her explanation.
“Whatever he did to you,” said Shannon, “I’ll kill him. Yeah, girl, get your ass over here. What you’re feeling right now—I know everything there is to know about it.”
So Lydia rode in the sun-heated buses to Shannon’s apartment. It was an unseasonably hot day, and the streets had a torpid, sunstruck quality. Shannon buzzed her in at the ugly pink building. By the time Lydia had dragged herself across the carpet of a long, grim hallway, Shannon had read the expression on her face and put out her arms. “I know, sweetie.”
She ushered Lydia inside and the two women didn’t leave the apartment for four days. They lived as if under siege, blotting out the sun with woolen blankets, living in their pajamas in sweltering heat, foraging for ice cream and microwave pizza. They watched TV, listened to MPGs on her computer, smoked her glass pipe, and carried on long, involved conversations while shouting between rooms—Lydia in a lukewarm bath, Shannon on the couch with an ice pack. They conspired to hide Lydia forever. Shannon seemed even more eagerly conspiratorial because of the fact that her moralistic younger sister had at last shunned Lydia. Shannon had friends in Portland, Oregon. In her hoarse voice, always sounding like she had just come back from a smoky concert, she said, “They’ll never find you up there: It’s like a safe house. There’s literally thousands of kids exactly like you up there.” Lydia fantasized about joining the forest defenders, finding a glamorous new life of tree sits, anticorporate protests, and sensitive vegan roommates.
“How twisted is that?” Lydia asked. “I had a relationship so bad that I have to go hide in a tree.”
nine
After a week at the apartment in Hollywood, Shannon landed a commercial in Las Vegas. Lydia waited alone, avoiding every other call but Shannon’s on her cell phone. One morning, she went outside for a walk, heading toward Sunset to buy cigarettes. She had been holed up for so long, living so badly, that she found herself out of breath and needed to sit down for a rest on a bus stop bench.
She didn’t notice for a long time when the Chevy Impala pulled up beside her, idling. Her phone rang and it was Jonah on the caller ID display. She looked up and saw that he was calling her from the open window of the car, a few feet away.
He waved the phone at her and yelled, “Get in.”
She considered running, but she felt too listless. She rose, shielding her eyes from the sun, and said, “Jonah. I was going to call you—I’m so—I just needed to get my head back together. I take total responsibility, okay? And I promise—I’m going to raise the money to fix everything—and I’m never going to drink or—”
“Get in the car.”
She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. The streets were bare and bright, lined with the shady alcoves of stores, none of which could hide her for long. She looked down at the cracks along the sidewalk and the shallow fi
lm of grime running in the gutter and imagined that she could shrink down and shelter herself in an old can or a milk carton. But she paced and climbed down into the backseat of the car, covering her face and praying.
Choop was driving, and Iván sat in the backseat beside a greasy white kid she had never seen before—introduced as Chase. They all talked excitedly over each other, like a bunch of unruly kids off to an amusement park, and Lydia wondered if they were driving her out into the desert to get rid of her. “I’m serious, Jonah,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
He said, “You’re hard to find, Lydia.”
“I’m going to pay for everything that got broken.”
“I had to search around the house, find lost cell phones, numbers. Finally found your little friend, Chloe. She thinks you’ve been irresponsible, Lydia. She’s talking about an intervention.”
Lydia stared ahead, shaken by the wide grin on his face.
“Now we have some business to clean up today,” Jonah continued. “You’re going to tag along, and then we’re going to talk about this mess you’re in.”
As they turned up Highland and merged onto the freeway, Jonah told a story.
As a boy, he was interested in mythology—particularly Toltec mythology. He lectured everyone in the car from the 101 to the 405, while Lydia hung her face in the air from the open window, green and panting. From what she gathered during his lecture, the main deity was Quetzalcoatl, who represented purity; but there was another god just beneath him in the pantheon, named Tezcatlipoca, “a crafty motherfucker” who gave mankind wine, music, pride, culture, drugs—everything colorful and dangerous. Toltec myths weren’t like the black-and-white morality of Christianity, Jonah said, because Tezcatlipoca was both good and evil simultaneously. He bestowed gifts in irresistible amounts; he made addicts; he destroyed the same people he meant to help. Jonah said, “And you see, it’s complicated, because even though Quetzalcoatl was all good and all moral, he could still be controlled—because he didn’t understand his own greed and lust. Tezcatlipoca could destroy anybody he wanted.”
“What kind of religion is that, Jonah?” said Lydia. “Evil wins.”
“No,” he said, smiling. “There is no good and evil—there’s just light and dark, order and chaos. But there’s one kind of person he can’t touch. And that’s whoever can stay rational in a mess, whoever can use reason to control emotions. The only people safe from him are the people who can control their hunger. And fear. Get off up here.”
They pulled off into Panorama City, where they turned onto a ragged residential street, stopping beside a house of unpainted stucco. A small mutt was leashed in the front yard, running in a circle and rising up onto its hind legs. As they approached the front step, Chase kicked it and the dog swung in a half circle like a tetherball. Jonah pounded on the security grate, and someone spoke to him from the shadows with the accent of a recent Mexican immigrant. “I ask everybody, sir. I do what you say. I don’t know what happen.”
Jonah nodded at Lydia and asked, “Sound familiar?”
The gate opened and they filed into a hot room with a revolving fan, a single lopsided couch, and a coffee table carved full of names.
“Everybody sit down,” said Jonah. “We’re going to resolve this today. We’re going to figure out what went wrong here. Bennie? We’re going to get the books in order. This is my friend, Lydia—she’s going to be observing today.”
Bennie was a middle-aged man, standing in the middle of his narrow room in just an undershirt and boxers. He had sweaty black hair stuck to his forehead, gray in the sideburns, and a mustache that hung over his top lip. He talked for a long time in clipped English about how hard he was working to solve this problem, assuring Jonah that he had done nothing wrong.
Jonah restated the dilemma, and Lydia worried that he was performing for her sake. He said, “We knew every dollar that went into this house, Bennie. Listen to this, Lydia: When the money goes south, down to get washed, we got the girls counting in the back room of the bank—because you can’t trust the machines to count it if it’s wet or it’s been buried. These chicks can steal ten thousand dollars down their sleeves if you cough or look away. So we have three people watching every girl—and they count for days, Lydia—sometimes three days straight. The end gets closer, and everybody gets nervous—but most of the time, everything you thought was there, it’s there. Everybody’s relieved. What happened this time, Bennie? Explain it to my lady friend here.”
He continued saying that he didn’t know what had happened. Jonah interrupted him to say, “This time there was sixty thousand dollars missing. Sixty g’s. Now, that may not seem like a lot compared to what there was—but let me tell you something. Sixty g’s is a lot of money, Bennie. What do you think I would find if I headed down to see your family? Where are they? Irapuato? Little side trip from Guadalajara, right? You think they got some new shit? A fucking guesthouse, maybe? Maybe they have room to put us up for the weekend.”
Despite seeming not to understand everything in his speech, Bennie vehemently shook his head. Lydia retreated into a corner, where she perched on the windowsill.
Jonah said, “I want you to understand something. You’re here right now, with a chance to explain yourself, because of me. Do you understand that? If you were dealing with anybody else, you’d be dead by now. But to me—that’s not a fair trade. Your life isn’t worth anywhere near sixty grand. I can’t go losing this kind of money on every asshole like you. But please understand, Bennie, I’ve given you chance after chance. When you fuck with me, then it’s my neck on the line. So game’s over: Where’s the money?”
Bennie swallowed and said, “Okay. I tell you. Honest now.”
“Good,” said Jonah.
“I never take one dollar. Maybe someone. Maybe someone steals from the house, go down and find it.”
Jonah smiled, leaned back, and clapped his hands. He tilted his head and looked at the man with sympathy. “I see. Poor Bennie. You’re a victim—in this terrible neighborhood. Anyone could have taken it in a place like this, right? That explains everything. I’m so sorry we scared you, Bennie. Let me ask you one little thing, though. How did you know the money was under the house?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said ‘go down and find it.’ How would you know it was under the house unless you went under there and looked?”
Bennie began to wave his hands rapidly at Jonah, as if he were a car about to run him down. He said, “No, no, no! No puedo explicar en Inglés.”
“Explique en Español,” said Choop—and it was the first time Lydia heard his hard, gravelly voice.
Bennie broke into Spanish and it was too fast and frantic for Lydia to translate in her head. As if awakened by the feeling of impending violence, Choop translated in staggers: “He says—that was a’ example. He don’t know . . . don’t know it was under the house . . . just somewhere . . . just saying that was a’ example.”
Iván said, “This dude is lying.”
When Bennie stopped speaking, there was a long silence in the house, broken by the yapping dog outside. Jonah finally looked over at Lydia and said, “Do you understand now? Nobody ever steps up.” He clicked his tongue, shook his head, and asked, “How many chances am I supposed to give this fucking guy?”
“Shut that rat-dog up,” said Chase.
“Okay,” said Jonah, sighing. “We got a lot of powerful people waiting for us to deal with this. Choop—let’s get him into the kitchen. Iván, you bring the car around. Chase—are you with us for this?”
“It’s why I’m here, boss,” said the white kid.
Jonah said, “You watch the door for a minute. Lydia—come with me.”
Bennie was surprisingly docile as Choop guided him forward and sat him down on a chair in the kitchenette.
Jonah said to Lydia, “Start looking through the drawers—you’re good at things like that.”
She searched for a while, through phone books and lighters and silve
rware, and asked, “What am I looking for?”
“Here. Hand me that Saran Wrap.”
She gave him the roll and he tossed it over to Choop. “And let’s find some duct tape or something. Is there anything in there?”
“No,” said Lydia, throwing her hands up.
Jonah said, “Wait, wait. Go back to that drawer. Yeah, those extension cords.”
She held up the bundle and Jonah told her to untangle them, which seemed to her an impossible job the way her hands were shaking. He yelled at her that she was taking too long, and then he pulled a few cords loose from the bundle. He and Choop tied them around the man’s wrists and the legs of the chair, trying to loop them around his ankles. The cords weren’t long enough, so Choop and Jonah had a brief argument about how best to tie the man down. Choop seemed to think that they could simply plug one cord into the next, but Jonah told him that was stupid—he would pull right out of it. During this entire discussion, Bennie pleaded with Lydia, telling her he was innocent, and asking, “Will you esplain to him? Please?”
Lydia cupped her hands over her mouth and began bending and straightening her knees.
Eventually they had immobilized Bennie by cinching his wrists together behind his back and winding the cords around the chair. Bennie kept his eyes on Lydia, but she couldn’t look up from the sink.
“Lydia—relax. This was a contract.”
Chase called from the door, “That fucking dog, I’m going to blow its brains out.”
Jonah nodded to Choop, who fingered the Saran Wrap but couldn’t find where the sheet began. Jonah peeled up an edge, unrolled a streak, and began stretching it across Bennie’s face. Choop took over and continued wrapping the clear plastic over the smudging nose and bulging eyes, until Bennie’s arms tensed and he began pulling loose from the cords, his legs jolting and the chair sliding backward across the linoleum. Jonah said, “We didn’t tie him right. Let’s just go thirty seconds this time, see if he remembers anything. How much is that?”