by April Smith
The “not a neighborhood without character” they had driven through in the Bentley has been meticulously dismantled block by block, barbershops and fleabag hotels gone, the defiant graffiti superhero deconstructed to a crumble of brick. With the streets ripped open there aren’t even any homeless, only the gloss of the hindquarters of a rat humping it along a broken curb.
Cassidy plows through a running stream of mud past a scrap-metal yard dominated by a crane. Down Eleventh Street a new order starts to dominate the jumble of demolition: a mural painted by children; thirty trailers crammed together in a provisional city. Temporary parking lots bend around the last property-owner holdouts—disintegrating cottages that have suddenly become gold mines.
She parks in a red zone. The engine goes off and the headlights die. She climbs out of the car. The industrial street is deserted. From the near distance comes the thud of heavy pounding like a pile driver. A helicopter passes overhead.
The five-story ovoid structure, almost complete, rises out of the murk like a space station with its guts exposed—a matrix of ductwork and scaffolding twinkling with interior lights. A guard at the gate waves Cassidy through when she says she’s going to the Omega office in one of the on-site trailers. She chugs up the metal steps and yanks the flimsy door. Inside, cold fluorescent lights create a bright manic imitation of day. It is not morning. Supervisors are not hustling through in hard hats. No scent of coffee nor the hot grease of breakfast burritos off a catering truck. Only artificial spaces and dead refrigerated air.
Nora, switching her hips back and forth in a receptionist’s chair, says melodramatically, “We meet again.”
Alberto looks up from bending over a watercooler. He is wearing a blue nylon track suit that says MISSIONS, the minor league Texas team. Cassidy wants to hug him, feel the strength and comfort in those young satiny arms.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Sure. I fine.” He gulps water and crushes the cup, leaning back against the trailer wall. Keeping his distance.
“Nice rags,” says Cassidy.
He tries to set his face in neutral but he’s blushing. “Thanks.”
“He doesn’t want to be here,” Nora observes, still half-rotating the chair; she can’t sit still. “He wants to be dancing merengue, right?”
A bushy ponytail is sticking out from under Nora’s red baseball cap. Her large dark eyes look like graphic images that have been warped by computer.
“Where is Joe?”
His daughter nods toward the arena. “Inside. He can’t be seen by anyone.”
“How is he?”
“For a brilliant man, I have to say he has not been thinking clearly.”
“I mean, how did Monroe—”
“Oh, they beat the shit out of him.”
“Jesus.”
“He’s basically okay. You’ll see. Let’s go.”
She lifts a set of keys off a row of hooks on the wall.
“What does he want to tell us?”
Alberto answers, “He going to make it okay.” Of Nora, “That what she say.”
“It was an accident. The best thing for my dad to do is admit it and go on.”
She is skipping sideways toward the door and gesturing with her hands with a self-conscious smile, as if the spotlight had just gone on and she forgot her routine.
“I finally convinced him to be smart. He’s sorry for all the damage he’s caused. He wants to make peace with you guys.”
“He owe me a lot.” Alberto raps his chest.
“He knows. He’ll take care of it,” she promises, throwing the door open so hard it hits the exterior wall. “Oops.”
Cassidy: “How will he take care of it?”
“Let’s let him explain.”
They follow Nora outside and down the steps, over planks of wood that cover a trickle of raw black oil, then stop at twelve-foot chain link where she uses the key, and continue toward the looming structure, leaving the glistening city and its promise on the other side of the gate.
They walk along in awkward silence. Cassidy aches to touch the boy.
“How’s it going, Alberto?”
He seems grateful to find some common ground.
“I playing well, beside this.”
“Someone took the spirit off?”
“Oh no,” he grins, “I get a new spirit.”
“Really? What’s her name?”
They pass through the gates to the lobby area beneath the thrusting lip of the roof. The superstructure has become more densely complicated since Cassidy was here with Joe—more escalators, Sheetrock, insulation, orange lifts. The girts are in place and some of the metal panels that form the building’s skin, kissed by dabs of light from strings of high white carnival bulbs.
“The concrete work in here is beautiful,” Nora’s saying in a rush. “Sculptural. Almost like clay.” All Cassidy can see are dank ramps and unconnected arcing walls. “Straight ahead of you. Keep going.”
They pass through an open doorway and find themselves walking across the dim expanse of the event floor.
“This is awesome,” grins Alberto, charging in for an imaginary layup shot.
“Welcome to the center of the universe!” Nora shouts grandly, her voice absorbed by the huge space. She laughs. “Say anything! Nobody can hear!”
You can look up and see the wood paneling set into the executive suites. A level of molded plastic seats are in. Exit signs and section numbers. Where cranes and scaffold towers cluttered the arena, now there is a smooth dirt surface waiting for the ice-making equipment, and the basketball floor that will go over it. The roof isn’t in but the completed supertruss flies across the dark upper reaches, the scoreboard suspended from cables halfway down from the center like a huge black spider.
Cassidy bends her neck to look up; against the blackness of the night sky she can make out the octagonal framework where Joe had told her the scoreboard would go.
“State of the art,” Nora says. “They move it up and down while they’re working on it, is that cool? Right now they’re putting on the video boards.”
The thing is fifty feet across, still lit. You can see corporate logos and scrambled numbers where the digital displays have frozen. You think about the history that will be recorded there. How lives will change because of those numbers.
“So where’s Joe?”
“Where do you think?” Nora teases.
“I don’t know. He’s always late.”
Nora laughs. “That is really funny.”
“Look,” says Cassidy, provoked enough, to the very edge, “what is going on?”
Nora mocks her, “What is going on?”
Something unpleasant turns in Cassidy’s gut.
“You’re using,” she says evenly. “Does your father know?”
“Please don’t tell him!” Nora whines with scorn. “He’ll be so upset!”
Cassidy takes Alberto’s sleeve. “We’re out of here.”
Her boots sink into the newly turned earth. Her ankle twists. Even in the semidark the shape of what will be is undeniable, as certain as the knowledge, in the dark steamy heat of the sugar mill, that it had been a place of violence where people had died. In this pit also there have been deaths, ancient deaths, layered in the buried ruins of the pueblo, indiscernible as fragments of Indian pottery. That is not what Cassidy smells. The stink is excremental, raw. The wet-dug clay of a young grave.
Alberto doesn’t want to go. “We got to get this straight—”
“We will. Not now—”
From behind them Nora says quietly, “Screw you!”
They whip around to see the girl bring up her arm and aim the Beretta.
Alberto flinches, big. Cassidy clamps a tight fist on his arm.
“You don’t need that,” she says. “What’s the big deal?”
Nora holds the weapon steady in both hands.
“No big deal.”
“Slow it down, Nora—”
Nora is a shap
e against the ambient light.
“Turn around and walk to the east wall. I’m right behind you.”
Cassidy can feel Alberto’s breath as if it were her own, quickening in the damp air.
“Go!”
They walk across the arena single file, Alberto first and Nora last. Some huge tread has left zigzag ruts deep enough to trip over and Cassidy stumbles as if she had no coordination in her limbs. Trust your body, someone is saying, but her body is absent.
She could duck, roll into the darkness and run. Or execute an elbow jab and knock the gun away. Either one would be a wild, sloppy move and expose Alberto. Nora has the advantage.
“Be cool,” she whispers to his back. “Do what she says.” Then, “Hey, kid. Friends don’t pull guns on friends.”
No answer.
“We’re doing what you want!” cries Cassidy in exasperation.
Sneering, “Good girl,” Nora yanks Cassidy’s braid so viciously her teeth go snap! and tears sting her eyes.
“If you love your father, don’t let him do this.”
“My father doesn’t have a clue and never has.”
“Where is he?”
“Safe.”
Cassidy shouts, “Joe?”
Her voice evaporates in the cavernous pit. In another minute Joe will come trotting down those concrete steps and the things that passed between them—the gentle pulse of life, their fingers entwined in love-making, breathing into each other’s breath—will be meaningless. Joe has set her up, using Alberto as the bait, so he can eliminate them both; a master at manipulating pieces to the end.
Alberto: “What you want? We give it to you, no problem.”
“God, are you stupid.”
Cassidy pretends her heel gets caught again, stumbling, trying to hide the reach into the backpack, but Nora sees it, screaming, “Drop it!” and she does, hard, so everything spills out into the dirt. Pens. Schedules. Swiss Army knife. Tissues. Brush. Wallet. Advil. Dayrunner. Key ring holding the tracking device—the case splits open the moment it hits the ground, battery and circuit board popping out.
“This damn thing. Car alarm,” grunts Cassidy, squatting down. “Always breaks.”
Nora kicks it out of reach.
“I don’t think you want my car going off on the street.”
Nora kicks it back.
“Pick up that shit.”
Cassidy had seen Detective Allen do it only once, but the kinetic memory has gone into her fingers as surely as if they’d practiced a piano sonata a thousand times. Clean the battery. Reattach the wires. Reposition the circuit board. Program the LED display with the correct sequence of commands. Click the case shut. Toggle switch back on.
Nora sweeps the Beretta across the arena, the entertainment zone, the city.
“This is what you wanted my father to give up.”
Cassidy watches the gun, remembering what Detective Allen said, that it kicks shells out to the right.
“You shot Monroe. Why?”
“Oh, well, fuck him. He’s a little pissant, way out of line.”
“What was the deal? They give you coke, you give them your dad?”
“Not my dad!” growls Nora, and Cassidy inhales sharply, takes a step back. “I told Luis at the beginning, Okay, run your money through the Gran Caribe, I’ll do this little thing for you, but it doesn’t come back to my dad. Nobody messes with him. Then the arrogant pricks decide to blackmail him anyway.”
Nora’s eyes are dark, equine, the pupils huge.
“But when they kidnap him, and beat him up”—her voice is shaking—“I say, Forget it, assholes. Game over.”
“Nothing’s over. We can work this out—”
“This is the problem.” She sniffs, a crooked smile. “You had your chance to work it out. We went to your house and begged, but you wouldn’t change your Goody Two-shoes story. You could have helped my father and me. Keep walking. That way.”
They reach the opposite side. A banister-less staircase takes them up to the third level.
The concourse is lit by strings of cage lights and littered with piles of steel rods. Sandbags. Small concrete mixers. Wheelbarrows and coils of wire. Nora makes them walk a quarter way around. “Down there.”
“That curtain?” asks Cassidy with trepidation as they descend through a cove that leads past the seats to a black sheath of plastic like the one Joe had proudly drawn to reveal the mammoth work in progress. They had stood at the unguarded rim, looking down a couple hundred empty feet.
Nora says, “Pull it back.”
Alberto rips the plastic to one side. Where there had been drop-dead open space, now there are temporary wooden barricades along the edge. Where there had been a skeleton, now they look into the almost-realized entertainment palace.
“The big picture.”
“Shut up.”
Cassidy stares at the empty seating, the complex crossbeams above; it is easy to imagine a silent invisible crowd filling the arena, like ghosts at the playing field in that Mayan city, come to witness a blood sport of arcane origin and mystic rules; to worship what lay at the inner core of their pyramid: a golden lion whose jaws were set in a rictus snarl of revenge.
“Three steps back. To the edge.”
They do it, buying time.
“This is crazy, Nora. The police already know. They’re on their way.”
“I don’t care. When they get here there won’t be any witnesses who are alive. That should fuck their case against my dad.”
Cassidy can feel the airiness behind them. She steals a look below, to an open trench at least forty feet wide. You couldn’t miss it.
She recalls that parachute jump and knows exactly what it will feel like to free-fall three quick stories, and how long it will take.
“They’ll arrest your dad. They’ll know he set us up—”
“My dad is far away. Like I said, he doesn’t have a clue about my life.”
“You mean he isn’t here?”
“She trick us,” Alberto says.
Crazily, Cassidy almost cries out with joy.
A helicopter passes overhead. You can see the letters through the unfinished roof: LAPD.
“Oh, he’s all remorseful, ‘I can’t live with what I did to that poor woman!’ and blah blah blah. He doesn’t understand. It’s naive to tell the truth in this world. One thing he did do. He taught me to drive a bulldozer.”
She starts to back away. She is still holding the gun steadily.
“What the public doesn’t know, there are accidents on construction sites all the time. Mostly they get covered up.”
Alberto dives for the Beretta. It goes off at close range, the force of the discharge like a needleful of epinephrine to the heart. He twists away, Nora sprawls, gets to her knees, and comes up firing.
Cassidy finds herself on top of Alberto who is inert in the dust, cap gone, hair filled with white granules. She’s trying to rouse him but her voice is just a vibration in her throat. They’d grabbed each other and rolled across the aisle like spinning river logs, protecting each other with their backs.
He gets up slowly then drops like a rock as, incredibly, another bullet explodes nearby.
She is trying to say, “Are you hurt?” because his face is streaked with blood. He is mouthing something in reply and struggling to his feet and there are two more helicopters which she can only see, not hear, because her hearing doesn’t work.
Then she is gone, after Nora, exhaling on the effort of vaulting over a wheelbarrow. Put it in your quads, someone says, and she angles around the corner where she thought she saw a bobbing red hat. She runs, ducking around hoses, piles of bolts, acetylene tanks, Dumpsters and waste cans, scattering shells of sunflower seeds workers dropped on the floor, one hundred percent effort, legs laced with pain as lactic acid seizes up her calves.
Outside the open unwalled concourse, horizontal views of night-lit downtown Los Angeles speed by like film strips zipped through a projector. Cassidy keeps her eyes tow
ard the center of the arena to avoid the feeling of being sucked right out.
She rounds a curve and there is Nora just ahead, raggedly jogging directly toward a wooden barricade set in the middle of the concourse floor.
Cassidy screams her name.
A helicopter circles the rim, spotlight searching until it finds the two of them and stabilizes.
Nora turns and faces Cassidy. Her face is dirty, tear-stained.
“I have to help my dad, because if I don’t, who will?”
She gasps for breath. The gun hangs from two fingers at her side.
“Don’t lean on that!” cries Cassidy, as Nora rests against the barricade.
She reaches toward her rival with a compassion that she cannot speak because the violent whipping of the blades is obliterating every tender thing; even the vacant hollow where a father’s love should be. Lost, as well, in the turbulence, is the sound of the collapse of the wooden railing, so that it seems to break apart in silence.
Nora totters and slips helplessly into the open shaft.
SEPTEMBER
33
At the end of every rainbow there is an agent.
It is such an ugly fact of life that Cassidy tries to forget about it so as not to spoil the ride, but the forgetting makes it worse because inevitably, when she gets to the end of the rainbow, there will be a guy talking on a cellular phone, and whatever joy she was feeling, whatever wonder, will quickly turn to outrage and she will want to kick herself around the block for continuing to believe that it is possible, as a grown-up in late twentieth-century America, to live in hope.
Hope—lustful and hotheaded—is the only reason any human being would drive out to Perris in the first place, but now that hope will pay off. She has made that god-awful drive for the very last time, here to make the sign on Brad Parker and present his mother with a basket of lemon bars and miniature chocolate chip muffins. In failure, such an overtly feminine ploy would be the source of endless ragging in the scouting department. In success, however, it will be undeniable proof of female cunning and superiority. Now it is clear the mini-muffins are about to go the way of flannel knickers.