“These are super-duper.” They lay side by side on their stomachs, passing the lightly vibrating binoculars back and forth. The instrument seemed to have a mind of its own and resisted being passed, as if it longed to stay with the previous user.
“Way cool.”
Maeve wished they had brought up a blanket or some kind of padding. The roof of the carport was made of angular pebbles over tar. Some of the pebbles were bigger than others, and sharp edges poked uncomfortably through her light cotton blouse and her cutoff jeans at several points.
“Seen anybody yet?”
“Nope.” They could see over the compound wall straight into the rear of the ranch house that was almost all uncurtained glass. Inside, a slab floor was covered by dozens of reddish carpets. The only furniture was a folding card table pushed up against the wall, and there was a tall stack of identical cardboard cartons like the ones you’d see in a stereo store for the latest boom box. She could read the word “Sonovox” on each one. At the far right they could see the corner of a deep-blue tiled counter, upon which a box of Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookies rested, taunting them. Cookies that reminded them they hadn’t eaten any lunch.
“I’m drooling,” Eremy said.
“For sure, Miss E.”
“Let’s break in and grab them.”
“No,” Maeve objected. “I’m not committing a felony for a Famous Amos.”
Maeve now took her turn at the binoculars and eventually scanned to a stack of papers on the edge of the card table. The papers were fanned out a bit so she could tell they were all photocopies of the same thing, which looked like a hand-drawn map. An annoying reflection on the window blocked a clear view, but the 20-power binoculars brought the map near enough to make out a lot. There was a heavy black line, probably a main road, and a grid of smaller lines with a mix of Arabic and English for legends and labels. The most prominent word looked like Potrero. On one of the roads at the edge, someone had drawn a cartoon rendering of a house, like a kindergarten doodle with steep eaves and a centered door. A big arrow pointed to the house from an inscription in Arabic.
She rested her elbows firmly on the roof and tried to make a tripod by stiffening her neck to firm up the image completely. The road by the house read something like Chuckawalla, and the only crossroad looked like Hope Street. She handed the binoculars back to Eremy and sketched what she could of the map on the back of one of her Liffey & Liffey business cards.
“Maybe we best try again later, when somebody’s home,” Eremy suggested.
But just as Maeve tucked the card into her shirt pocket, there was a rumble, both noise and a vibration in the carport roof. A big lowered 1950s car gunned up the drive and came to a stop in the carport. It revved its engine once with that rough-sounding blat-blat-pop of a hot rod and then shut off. This was not going to be Grandmother home from bingo, Maeve thought.
Car doors opened and slammed, and then there was an ominous silence.
“Waaal, Cletis, was you seein’ what ah thunk ah saw?”
“Sho’ did, Bubba. Coupla young dollies, hunkered down like possums on the roof. Most excellent.”
Eremy and Maeve made frightened faces at one another. The accents didn’t sound real, as if the young men were just larding on the hillbilly for fun.
Two black T-shirts came into view, both saying To Hell and Back. But it was the hair that Maeve noticed first. Both young men—maybe eighteen or twenty—were shaven bald, except for a line of tall hair-spikes that were dyed, respectively, green and purple, Mohawked down the middle of their heads from front to back. Maeve had seen hairdos like that in movies but almost never in person. One of them had zigzags and barbed-wire tattoos all the way up and down his arms. These guys really and truly wanted to be called freaks.
“Didn’t the ol’ man say we get to do jes’ what we want with any strays that wander into the yard?”
“Uh-huh. Just whatever.”
Eremy sat up and dangled her bare legs brazenly. “Southern cracker boys,” she observed with disdain. “The lowest form of animate life except for pond algae.”
“Eremy,” Maeve tried to hush her.
“Don’ you go messin’ with us, girlie. You want to come down with us and rip it up some? Got us some beer and Mary-J.” He waggled a very long tongue obscenely up at them. It was a real shock. Outside of that guy in the band KISS, Maeve had never seen a tongue stick out so far.
“Ugh.”
“We certainly don’t.”
The boys seemed to notice the binoculars. “Look there, Bubba. They got them a set of bye-noculars. Musta been spying on the camel jockeys over there doin’ they thing. This one looks like an Ayrab her-ownself.”
“I am not,” Eremy insisted. “I’m Armenian and one hundred percent Christian.”
“You got you an awful lot of one hundred percent leg, Armenia girl. Looks like it go all the way up.”
Eremy teased them by dangling her legs even farther, hiking her shirt to show some midriff. But Maeve grabbed her shoulder and tugged her back up roughly. Eremy seemed to be determined to get them into trouble.
“What do we do with these cuties, Cletis?” Cletis, if it was his name, was the one with the green hair.
“Let’s start by givin’ them a eyeful of real men workin’ they bodies, see some real washboard abs to get they little pussies aw’ wet.” He stripped off his T-shirt, and Maeve had to admit to herself his upper body was pretty buff. “Bet you ain’t seen nothing like this.”
Maeve noticed that down in the overgrown grass there were a lot of weights and a couple of workout benches. The purple-spiked one yanked a barbell out of the weeds and started doing speed presses, the big iron weights clanging at the top and bottom of each repetition. His companion now stripped off his shirt, too, and began curling a heavier-looking set of blue weights, up to his chest and back. His arm muscles looked huge, bulging tremendously as they stretched his barbed-wire tattoos.
“What are we going to do?” Maeve whispered.
“We just watch them be morons. This is fun.”
“It is not. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“They aren’t gonna hurt us. Don’t be a wussie.”
Between sets, the boys struck stylized muscleman poses for the girls, fists front and back, arms and legs crooked at angles. Purple-spikes could grunt and tense himself up all at once in a peculiar way that brought up the definition of every one of his upper body muscles. In that instant he seemed to morph into the carapace of a huge insect. Maeve wondered why anyone thought looking like that was attractive. But finally, tired of showing off, they positioned themselves directly under the roof, their hard-eyed faces craning upward.
“Come on down now. Come to Papa.”
“Party down now.”
“Huh-uh,” Maeve said. “I don’t think so.”
Then Green-spikes got the idea to spray them down with a hose. He hooked up a brass nozzle. First a fine spray bloomed overhead, sprinkling down on them and driving them to the trellis where they’d climbed up, and then Eremy squealed as a hard gush hit her straight on as she was climbing down. Maeve hoped the binoculars she was carrying were waterproof, and then she was gasping herself as cold water smashed into her. She heard Eremy coughing, and cleared the water out of her eyes to see Purple-spikes holding Eremy tight and kissing her. Maeve was mortified to see that both of their cotton shirts were soaked through and nearly transparent. Eremy wore a blue bra.
“I’ll scream rape if you touch me,” Maeve threatened.
“Act cool, girlie. We just got to punish you for being bad, trespass and all, then you can run home to Mama.”
Eremy ripped herself away from the boy grabbing her. “Do what to punish us?”
“Come on, have we raped you?” Purple-spikes complained.
He pointed at a Ping-Pong table next to the house. “You bend over and take a swat, that’s it. That’s pretty lenientatious I’d say, for trespassers.”
“Promise only one?”
“Scout’s honor.” Maeve noticed that the boy’s accent had completely disappeared. She didn’t think they were hillbillies at all, and she doubted they were named Cletis and Bubba, either.
Eremy made a disgusted noise, but she gave an elaborate shrug and bent forward over the edge of the table. “Get it over with, dorko.”
“Bare bottom. It’s gotta be, tweak.”
Eremy snorted again, but quickly tugged the back of her jeans down several inches. Blue panties clung to the denim and bared her buttocks. Purple-spikes hauled back with a Ping-Pong paddle and took a wide swipe at her, but stopped a few inches short. “Just a warm-up. Nice little butt buds there, girlie. Gets the ol’ juices flowing.”
“Get it over with or forget it.”
This time he swiped around with a full swing and let the paddle hit. There was a resounding slap, and Eremy flinched but refused to cry out. She tugged her jeans back up and pulled away from the table, with a flush spreading across her face.
All eyes went to Maeve. “No way, just no way at all.”
“You gotta, girl. It’s the deal. Then you’re out of here. Else we turn you over to the Ay-rabs.”
That was an alternative she hadn’t thought of. The sheik would probably tell her dad, and he’d go through the roof and send her home. She glared for a moment, wondering how she’d gotten into this predicament in the first place. After all, she told herself, it would only be a single sharp pain, and then it would be over. She’d been paddled once in a hazing ritual for a school club and it hadn’t been that bad. Maeve took two steps and flung her chest down on the Ping-Pong table. “Primitives.”
“Pants.”
“You can do it right through the cloth.”
“Huh-uh. This is the real deal here, girl, bare cheeks.”
Maeve gritted her teeth and felt the breeze as she tugged her jeans down, just past the curve of her buttocks. There were so many emotions roaring through her that she felt like fainting. There was fear and shame and, to her horror, even a little of what seemed like sexual excitement.
“Panties, too.”
She hoped they were clean. She worked the elastic down just below her bottom and waited. Maeve closed her eyes tight, hearing the footsteps of one of the boys slide toward her on the concrete patio. There was the testing swish of the paddle in the air, and a crow nearby added its derisive caw. Thanks, crow, she thought, and then she yelped as a hand jammed down hard between her shoulder blades to hold her down on the table and the other hand snaked up between her thighs and fondled her, a single insistent finger trying hard to poke inside.
“Stop it! Stop!”
“You just a bitty wet, ain’t it so?” The accent was back.
She wriggled away and wrenched her panties up. Maeve could feel her vision narrow to a small cone and go bright red. “You bastard, you liar!”
Green-spikes, the one covered with tattoos, stood there grinning at her, his eyebrows raised, and then he brought his finger up ostentatiously and licked it. She tried to slap him but he caught the blow, and then she ran toward the Triumph, tears streaming down her face. Eremy was ahead of her, and the car coughed to life. Her face burned. All she could feel was humiliation and hatred. If she’d had a weapon, she would have killed both boys, she knew it.
“Don’t you dare tell Trevor, or anyone,” Maeve said between gasps and coughs.
“Let’s go take a bath for about a week.”
Hassan had shown them what do with the boom box, repeatedly and annoyingly, as if they were utter dummies. The brand name on the black plastic was Sonovox, basically a no-name cheapo. The top of the case had been neatly removed and the works of the radio, only a small circuit card, had been moved to the side, behind one of the stereo speakers. The CD and tape sections had been gutted to leave the whole center of the unit empty. Then a rectangular packet about the size and shape of a pound of butter went into the bottom, a little wired spindle was inserted gently through the waxed paper into the pliable substance in the package, and then a five-pound bag of Globe flour went on top before the case was sealed up again.
They knelt out on the scrubby desert, far out some unknown two-track road, and Pejman took his turn and went through the steps while Fariborz observed, and they made doubly sure it was done the way they’d been told. Hassan waited at the crest of a hillock fifty yards away. Fariborz felt a chill. The whole scene was far too much like the afternoon they had left their pipe bomb in the Santa Clarita hills, the second of those fateful moments that, taken together, had changed their lives forever.
“Praise belongs to God.”
“The lord of all being, the all-merciful.”
They surveyed the work and then sealed the top of the plastic case with superglue as they’d been shown. Their eyes met for a moment. The only reason Fariborz wasn’t more worried was because the device was so small. This couldn’t have been meant to do much damage, though he had no idea what the bag of flour was for. Maybe a stand-in for paint, like their own paint bombs.
“You take off and I’ll hit the switch,” Fariborz said.
“No, you.”
Fariborz gave him a push and the smaller boy started to run back toward the hill. When he was safely away, Fariborz reached out gingerly and flicked up the ON switch. The radio started to play some top-forty number, a guitar, drum and horn, yet another derivative eight-bar blues-based wail. Some lyric about regret and spurned love. He longed to do it better, put a little backbeat into it, words with more edge. He could almost feel the strings bowing tight against the frets under the fingers of his right hand. He was left-handed, and he had taught himself to play the guitar upside down, just like Hendrix, following Jimi’s invented fingerings that he watched over and over on video. Then he felt the regret washing over him again: that music was his distant past.
They had been told the radio would play for exactly five minutes, wired to a timer, and then blow. Or until somebody hit the OFF switch. But it wouldn’t switch off. If he were to switch off, it would blow instantly. That thought gave him another chill. Something about the accessibility of that tiny chrome switch; the force it contained seemed to dare his hand to reach over and flick it down. It was like standing at the edge of a precipice—that terrible vacuum that tugged you toward the edge.
The teen lament wailed on. Fariborz wondered if Allah could really be leading him down this profoundly distressing course. A month or so back things had seemed so much clearer, his decisions God-directed, each step leading forward and upward to soothe some wounded place in him. There had been a real satisfaction in the tight group of them buckling down to studies and serious reading, Arabic and the Koran and their own Persian history. He’d had a sense of his murky and unhappy life clarifying before his eyes, of newfound purpose and deep satisfying moral activity. The four of them had come together as a cell, led more or less by him and Iman together, brain and brawn, as Pejman had joked, but that was not the real distinction between them.
“We have to get past our softness,” Iman had insisted. “That’s the West in us. It’s sentimentality. If you’re always afraid of breaking eggs, you can’t ever cook.”
But that’s stupid—you can always cook without eggs if you want, Fariborz had thought. There was always another way to do something. Still, at the time, he had talked himself into the necessity of hardening themselves for action. They were the forerunners and had to get people’s attention by making a little noise, risking a little material destruction. Not hurt people, though. They were all firm on that. That was wrong, definitely against Islam, and it would be counterproductive, too. It would make everyone hate them.
All they had to do was find some conspicuous and newsworthy ways to thumb their noses at pornography, prostitution, usury, and hate-mongering. Stink bombs. Paint bombs. Clever posters. It would win people over to see what they were doing. People would watch the six-o’clock news and secretly delight as the new moral Batman swooped down unexpectedly, once again discomfiting the foul and sinful.
In the best of all possible worlds, they might even get national publicity and begin to wake the moral conscience of the West. And even if their tactics turned out to be a bit too strong, or poorly chosen, or ineffective, they knew they were ultimately in the right. They were on the positive side of History, moving things toward the good. That was what he and Iman had felt at the time, with great certainty, and only now did Fariborz fear that some of that certainty had been manufactured within himself, pumped up out of loyalty to Iman, or maybe responding to something else within himself, something he dared not even think too closely about.
Suddenly Fariborz noticed that Pejman up the hill was crying out in a panicky voice, and then Hassan bellowed. But he wasn’t worried. There was still plenty of time. He left the boom box and ran away from it through the creosote and bitterbrush. He had got only about twenty paces away when something knocked him off his feet. The noise was stupendous, and he found himself flat on his face, spitting out dirt. His arm stung and he glanced over to see a sliver of black plastic poking into his forearm. Then he was engulfed in a white cloud, breathing in the choking aridity of flour.
After a moment of coughing and spitting he heard footsteps. “You’re such a daydreamer, Fari,” Pejman reproached him. “You gotta stop being like that.”
“I’m okay.” He sat up and brushed at himself, stirring clouds of white dust as Hassan looked down at him with a crooked smile and shook his head. Again he wondered about the bag of flour and what it represented.
“The coffee is pretty good here, but we might have a little trouble getting served.”
“Really?” Jack Liffey perked up, as if sensing a challenge.
They sat at one of the little outside tables at Nu-Age, a cafe across the street from the Braille Institute in Los Feliz. L.A. City College was just up the street, and what they could see of staff and clientele both favored black turtlenecks and nose rings and other piercings, though there seemed a general exodus inside just as the he and Aneliese sat down.
Jack Liffey got back up and poked his head inside the door. Little knots of the black-clad folk chatted away languidly here and there. “Two coffees, outside, black,” he called, loud enough to wake a few vampires.
One girl who stood bent over a table looked up at him and waved in an ambiguous way, so he rejoined Aneliese de Villiers. He had phoned and asked her to have coffee with him because he had an intuition it might be a good idea to talk to her away from the boy. And it seemed to him a pretty good idea to talk to her under any circumstances, since his imagination was already working overtime on her body. She looked a lot different in her business suit. Formal, younger for some reason, more confident. Her hair was pulled back severely, and her big eyes, one of her best features, bulged as if a warm soul inside were trying hard to burst out to get at those outside her to comfort, soothe, tend, love. Wishes working overtime, he thought.
“‘I didn’t like the ugly way the whites talked about the blacks,’ ” he quoted her words from memory. “That got my attention.”
“I honestly don’t know where that feeling came from. My parents were racists—it was just natural there—and all my friends, too. I’d like to say it was because I had a wonderful black friend, but I didn’t have. I might have, had I been raised in the city, in Lusaka, but the social gulf was just too wide out in the dorps. Do you say ‘boondocks’?”
“It’s a bit old hat.”
“The countryside, then. The African kids my age were all children of peasant farmers, and only a few ever went to school past standard six. Plus there was a war of independence on, and we all had to insulate ourselves from blacks a bit. Oh, too much is coming back.” She shook her head as if to shake off the oppressive memories. “That horrible butcher’s fridge in the market. Northern Rhodesia had stamped out rinderpest and tsetse, so we had beef coming out our ears. There were white packets of chops, minced beef, frying steak, stewing steak, and then over at the side of the cooler there were always two more rows of packages—dogsmeat and boysmeat. I can still see those horrible handwritten labels. Can you guess what boysmeat was?”
“I’m afraid I can.”
“Our ‘boy’ was about sixty and lived in a little concrete hovel called a kia out back when he wasn’t cooking and cleaning for us. It didn’t even have a door, just walls that wrapped around like a public toilet. One cold-water tap, stuck on the outside, and no electricity. That’s why I had to get out. How could anybody not see that was all wrong? I left for England by myself when I was fifteen. I say by myself, but my future husband left at about the same time and we ended up at the same school in Birmingham.”
A couple of retro hippies in sandals and tie-dye strolled out the door and past, agreeing intensely about Herman Hesse. Three or four blocks of Vermont Avenue here in the lee of the Hollywood Hills had been trying to upscale for years, centered on the Los Feliz Theater, one of the oldest art houses in the city. Jack Liffey remembered that there had once been a terrific independent bookstore next door, Chatterton’s, but it had died under the onslaught of the giant chains and later come back as the Skylight, but still had a ways to go.
“I think I’d like some coffee,” Jack Liffey mused, since it was becoming clear no one was going to show up. He went inside and no one had stirred, so he went behind the counter to the brewer, fetched two cups from a wire tray and poured from the pot. “Two cups, black,” he announced and carried them out.
“I guess they don’t serve old geezers,” he said, when he delivered the coffee to Aneliese de Villiers.
“If we got nose rings, we could probably come here more often,” she said.
He smiled. He liked the “we” part. “I don’t really understand all this self-mutilation. I don’t like sounding like some old coot, but a lot of those spots they use are tender.” He couldn’t help remembering the aging movie star he’d known who had had nipple rings, a tongue stud, and another piercing off center on her vagina. She’d been old enough to know better, too.
“Is it self-mutilation? Or just a stab at being more interesting? No pun intended.”
“I can’t imagine getting that bored,” Jack Liffey said.
They both sipped. The coffee was strong and good, though it might have been fresher.
“I think sometimes the kids just need a little attention,” she offered. “You know why Billy got so upset last night?”
“I guess that’s what I came to talk about.”
“He admitted that he’d been in love with Becky. He asked me why we’re always so attracted to things that are bad for us.”
She waited, and her eyes sought him out as if it had been a real question. “If I could answer that,” he said, “they’d make me king.”
She smiled ruefully. “And if I knew, I’d never have fallen for Billy’s father. Anyway, according to Billy, she played the two of them against each other, Billy and Fariborz, until she worked out which of them had money. Then the best she’d offer Billy was a sort of brother-sister friendship.”
“That can be rough.”
“I knew her, Jack. Though it is hard for any adult to know a teenager very well. I don’t think she’s quite as bad as—” she tilted her head as she considered—“as one might be led to think from some of the given facts. Though maybe that’s my forgiving nature. She’s going to grow up a strong woman. Did you ever read Stegner’s Crossing to Safety? I just finished it.”
He nodded.
“She’ll probably end up like Charity Lang. Willful and domineering, but that’s not the very worst measure of a person. Nobody’s all one thing. She’ll have a kindhearted side—she might just apply herself to something positive and use all that power in her to get things done. If she’d been born a man, I think people would just say she’s determined and ambitious.”
“Like Stalin.”
She smiled. “Or Churchill.”
They both looked up in surprise as a big black stretch limo came up the street backward. It was a Lincoln Town Car, moving fast, and if you looked closely you could see that the body had actually been reversed on its chassis so the driver sat at what should have been the rear window as he drove. A magnetic plaque on the door said: s’omiL s’treboR.
“There’s something you won’t see in Northern Rhodesia,” Jack Liffey said. “Or just about anywhere else.”
“It’s called Zambia now.”
“Second apostrophe is wrong, too, or the first one, I guess,” he corrected.
They watched the omil out of sight. “There was something Billy wanted to pass along to you,” she said softly.
“I’m all ears.”
“Just before Becky disappeared something was up. The Iranian boys were abuzz with it and very secretive, and so was she. Maybe in a different way for her. Nobody was sharing anything with Billy by then, but Becky did tell him that she intended to teach them a lesson.”
“Nothing else?”
“No. But it all centered somehow on Fariborz, not the other boys.”
“Yes, I think so, too.”
“I have to get back now, Jack. There’s a staff meeting in my department.”
He liked the way she said his name. “I don’t think we’re going to get the check, somehow.” He went inside as the staff seemed to be gathered around a table, debating semiotics.
A rail-thin girl said something, fiercely, about postwar structuralism being nothing but a lot of fetishizing of linguistics.
“But reality always invades with a bigger army,” a boy countered.
Jack Liffey thought of saying something nasty but he was feeling too good about himself and instead he found a wall menu that listed coffee at $1.50 and he waved three dollar bills overhead before setting them on the shelf of the cash register. “Two coffees!” he announced. “I tipped myself generously.”
Outside, he walked with Aneliese de Villiers down the block, past a dress store with long dark Lady Dracula gowns, a shop that sold artifacts of the ’60s like kidney-shaped coffee tables, and a reptiles-and-amphibians-only pet store, and then they crossed Vermont in a loudly chirping crosswalk for the blind toward the blank fortress of the Braille Institute. Not much point in windows there, he thought, but he didn’t say it. Obviously they had some sighted employees. She seemed to be brooding on something as they walked, then she touched his shoulder softly once.
“Would you like to come to dinner sometime, Jack?”
He thought of a lot of snappy answers, but, with his heart, he said instead: “Oh, yes. Soon.”