I TOLD YOU THAT ARTHUR MACK was a dodgy fellow,” said Gemma’s mother, Doreen, as she salt-and-peppered a pot roast before setting it into a Dutch oven filled with onions, carrots, and potatoes.
“Okay, Mom,” Gemma said.
“Oh, he was easy on the eyes, and handsome enough in his kind of sleazy, car-salesman way, but I told you: Don’t trust him.”
Doreen took a drag on her Menthol 100 and set the pot in the preheated oven. It was an old GE range with four coiled electric burners on top, a broken analog clock set between the Bakelite knobs, and the enamel chipped off from so many years of gravy stains removed with steel wool. The bottle of J&B was already on the counter, the glass waiting by the sink. From a plastic tray in the freezer she removed a handful of half-moon ice slivers and tossed them into the glass. The whiskey pouring over it made a reassuring crackle, and then Doreen turned to her daughter.
“Goodness, that was rude of me. You want one, darling? Have a drink with me.”
“I’ll fix one myself.”
Gemma retraced her mother’s steps and soon the two were drinking in the tiny tiled kitchen, one window facing west, the other north over a two-basin sink—and no appliance dating from after Reagan’s second term.
“Here’s to your escape,” Doreen said, raising her glass.
“It’s not an escape, it’s a . . . break,” Gemma said. “Mom, I’ve been reluctant to ask, but, could you not smoke in the house when the girls are here?”
A clenched look came over Doreen’s face, her eyes narrowing behind her glasses, her lips pursing, but just as quickly it vanished and she nodded. “Okay, okay, for the girls.”
“But you can finish that one,” Gemma said.
“I intend to.”
GEMMA WAS BACK IN HER adolescent bedroom, the same narrow single bed, wheezy piano, and tall, dark oak hutch that Gemma always thought looked like it belonged in a kitchen rather than a bedroom. The carpet had been changed, thank heaven, and her old clothes had been thrown away or boxed up in the garage, but there were still a few vestiges of her teenage self. The bottom half of a Duran Duran sticker and the remains of a Tecate bumper sticker were still on the inside of the closet door, along with a taped-up school photo of her best friend, Holly Duba. The view out the window, through the upward-thrusting branches of a pomegranate tree, was reassuring. Even the feel of the mattress was right, the smell of the sheets and pillowcase familiar in the way that only home can be.
The girls were sleeping in her brother’s old bedroom, sharing his queen-size bed. They were excited by this change in routine, their leaving school in the middle of the term, the flight to L.A. to visit Gammer, but they were discomfited by undiscussed issues. Did their father know they were going to Santa Monica? And where exactly was Dad? And why were they renting out their beach house and moving to a smaller apartment?
“And why,” the girls asked one morning, “was Dad on a business trip when he was also in jail? And now he’s in Texas. Is that a business trip too?”
Gemma set down her coffee.
Doreen smiled and cocked her head at Gemma. “Yeah, Mom, explain that.”
“Who, why, um, where did you hear that?” Gemma managed to ask.
“Mom, we can read.”
“And watch TV,” Franny said. “Dad was trading something, and they weren’t real, so he got in trouble.”
“Your father may have broken some rules. Like in a game? So they need to figure out which rules exactly he broke, and then they’re going to have to punish him for that.”
“But he’s in Texas,” Ginny said.
“Yes, he is, for a while, but he has to go back to New York.” As soon as she said this she realized it was a mistake.
“But we’re not there!”
“Well, he’s not there now either. He’s on this . . . this business trip right now.”
She wondered if the girls had picked up any clue that he had been out on bail and was staying with his mistress’s family, and that he never even tried to contact them.
It was Doreen who had alerted her to the fact that her husband was now being portrayed as a capitalist hero for losing millions of dollars of his friends’ money. Even Doreen, an Arizonan with a libertarian streak, found that idea preposterous. “Maybe he’s too dumb to know what he was doing, but that doesn’t mean it’s not cheating. And to think I almost mortgaged the place to invest with him,” she told Gemma.
“We miss Daddy,” the girls said. “Don’t you?”
Gemma nodded. “Of course you miss him. Of course you do.”
WITHOUT UPDATING HER KIK-TOK STATUS or calling a soul, somehow her old high school friends knew that Gemma was back in town. Instead of being furious with her mother for letting out the news, she was grateful for the distraction of a few playdates for the girls. She agreed to meet up only with those of her old friends who had kids of similar age to her own, and who lived within a ten-mile radius of her mom’s house. They were lucky Gammer had held on to the place, a generous ranch house on a winding canyon road up from the ocean. So many of her friends’ parents had sold out, and she was shocked when she found her former high school pal Sharon living in a mobile home in one of the trailer parks at the base of a cliff above the Pacific Coast Highway.
Gemma drove her mom’s old Camry, inching along the PCH, past the oil platforms offshore that she would never get used to, turning off the road in surprise when the GPS ordered her into the old Palisades Bowl. She wound around until she came to Terrace Drive and then pulled up beside a tan-and-brown double-wide.
They sat on the porch, drinking canned iced tea, and Sharon told her how she ended up there, in a trailer, her son and daughter sharing a room the size of a refrigerator box.
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Sharon said. “Divorced, a run of bad luck, crapload of debt. My credit shot. But I’ve kept out of credit rehab, kept my kids. But, damn, school is short now. They go at ten, back by two thirty. The school year ends May first, Gemma. May first! Can you imagine the hell we would have raised with four-and-a-half-month-long summers? But the kids have to stay real close. Coyotes everywhere.”
Gemma hated feeling like a snob, but the surroundings, the urchin-like appearance of Sharon’s children, was a shock. The trailer had siding rusted through in patches, narrow slot windows with frayed curtains, wallpaper peeling in strips, shag carpet worn to the baseboards in places. The kitchen sink was piled with dishes, clothes stuffed into garbage bags, all evidence of too many people living in too little space. And the son and daughter, Damon and Dahlia, had something almost feral about them. They were restless, pent up there in a trailer park, their neighbors mostly retirees, their mother seeming defeated. The kids looked bored and angry, unlike the open, smiling, easy sociability of Franny and Ginny.
She knew she had been sheltered in New York, but she had never bothered to consider just how different their privileged lives were. There had been this understanding, unspoken, that life in Manhattan was a precursor to their eventual flight, to a sanctuary somewhere, where they would be even more buffered from the increasingly calamitous global ailings. She and her friends had occasionally exchanged plans about their futures and the sanctuaries many of them had already purchased in preparation for their eventual flight when Manhattan island actually sank and the entire country turned to desert. But Manhattan itself had also been a kind of sanctuary. True, the elements interfered occasionally—the erratic weather, the closing of the FDR and the West Side Highway, the regular suspension of certain subway lines because of flooding—but the city itself was a bubble of relative prosperity compared to the real America of constant brush fires and droughts and heat and desertification. And now, without Arthur, she had nothing with which to shelter her girls from the world.
Sharon asked about Gemma’s girls, who were in the next room, playing X3-Box with Sharon’s son and daughter. Gemma said they were bearing up okay. “They miss their father.”
“That was a hell of a thing,” Sharon said. “And I thought you’d found a way out of this mess. Rich guy. Hedge funds or whatever.”
“Maybe there is no way out of this mess.”
As they sipped from their iced tea, from the bedroom they could hear the exaggerated revving of a computer game–generated engine noise.
Franny and Ginny emerged. “Can we go outside?”
Damon and Dahlia followed.
Sharon looked at Gemma, who shrugged.
“Okay, but stay close. Don’t go up into the bluff or into the canyon. Have some water before you go. You’ll dehydrate. You have sunscreen on?”
“Yes,” all four lied.
Then Sharon turned to Gemma. “There’s four of them. Coyotes won’t mess with that many.”
When the kids were gone, Sharon looked at Gemma and smiled. “Aren’t we a sight? All grown up, with kids and no husbands.”
“And what a place we’ve grown up into.”
“But I always knew it was like this. Like in high school, it wasn’t, like, the prettiest girl would date the handsomest guy. And then the next-cutest, and so on, so that it was all shared equal. It was, the prettiest girl had every guy in the school after her, and the rest of us were left with scraps. And look who I married? John Lapalm.”
“It wasn’t like that, was it?”
“It was. Maybe you wouldn’t know, since you were the prettiest girl, or one of them, but then, throughout life, it just keeps going that way, the prettiest, or the richest, they get more of everything, more life, and the rest of us, even those who start out lucky, like me, born into a good town, parents with good jobs, we get left on the outside.”
“I wasn’t the prettiest girl,” Gemma insisted.
“Okay, but top three,” Sharon said and laughed. “And look, you had your shot, you are rich, or were, and you got away from all this, so, my theory holds up. You want a beer?”
“Sure,” Gemma said.
They cracked open their beers and drank in silence. “You know, with Kik-Tok, or Facebook before, we see our old photos all the time. Someone is always posting a picture of me from high school, and I look at myself and think, Damn, I was pretty hot. And look at my life back then. I’m at the beach. I’m hanging out with these cute guys at State or by the pier. I’m wearing a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt the day after the concert, standing there, posing with Michelle Alpert. It looks like paradise, like we are having the best time ever, and at the time I didn’t even know it, so I wonder, in twenty years: Are we going to look at photos of now, of me with my kids living in a trailer, and think, Damn, that looks like the best time ever? ‘Girl, you were really living it up then!’ And imagine how shitty my life would have to be then, in the future, to look at my life now and think, Hot damn, I want some of that.”
Gemma shook her head. “Past performance isn’t any indication of future returns.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s something finance guys use, a disclaimer. There are no guarantees.”
They heard a scream from down the street. “Mom!”
Both women lunged from their chairs and were down the porch steps in seconds.
They saw three figures down the street, their shadows cast long and inland in the afternoon sun, the light making it hard to see which three of the four children were standing there. Running toward them, the women were already silently wishing their two kids were among the three. Please, let my children be safe.
But Gemma soon saw that Ginny was missing.
“Where is she?” she shouted.
The children pointed between the trailers, up toward the hill.
“Coyotes,” the boy said. “W-w-we were up the hill, in the bushes, and I heard yipping, so I ran down, told the girls to follow. Didn’t see Ginny.”
“I told you don’t go up the bluffs!” Sharon shouted.
Gemma ran between the trailers and up the hill, climbing the loose-packed and clodded earth in her flats, scratching her shins against the scrub. “Ginny!” she shouted.
“Call someone!” she shouted down toward Sharon.
She ran up a drainage ditch half-filled with dirt and empty, flattened plastic bottles.
“Ginny!”
She stopped and surveyed the bluffs. There was no sign of her. The hill stretched up for a hundred yards and then the angle flattened and she could not see what was beyond. The brush that looked so gentle from the highway was here shoulder high and dense. Her daughter could be anywhere.
How had she let this happen? A child wandering off while her mother drank beer. Why had the rest of the children not kept better track of Ginny? Where was her fucking husband? Where was her pepper spray? Where, where?
She cursed herself for ever leaving New York, for returning to California, and told herself that if she found Ginny, she would never, ever let her out of her sight again.
A trail cut off up the hill and she followed it, through a trash-strewn clearing that looked like a spot where teenagers drank beer, and then up a steeper path over crystalline yellow rocks. She had broken a sweat now, and was bleeding from her cuts, but she still had the energy to climb and then survey the bluff from this higher altitude, the trailer park spreading out below her. Sharon and the kids were no longer on the street where she had left them. Perhaps Sharon had taken the kids back to her trailer and taken up the search herself.
She regretted not having her phone.
The expanse of the area, which from the highway had seemed a deserted strip, now appeared vast and frightening. So many places for so many nasty things to hide. Where should she begin looking? She walked along the trail to a jutting ridge, seeking a clear vantage point around the bluffs that cut north into a canyon. But on the other side was just more brush broken by the occasional copse of oak or bunches of grotesquely twisted cacti. There were acres and acres tucked in here, the land undulating and folding over ridges and points and into pocket valleys and shoebox canyons. The land was divided occasionally by drainage ditches and traversed by animal trails, but despite its proximity to civilization it seemed to Gemma cruelly inhospitable. And Ginny had gone missing in this huge coyote den?
“Ginny!”
She climbed down a narrow track between green licorice-plant spears and followed a ditch, sliding on the rocky scarp, bruising herself as she fell. At one point, there was a concrete platform with a huge pipe protruding out of it and a gauge and metal wheel attached to its side. She paused there before descending, pushing into thicker and thicker brush until she burst through wiry acacia bushes and saw the remains of a camp: abandoned sleeping bags, a tarp shelter hung up between trees, empty cans and water bottles, the remains of a fire, clothes scattered where they had been left, and old sneakers, magazines, and books. She assumed she had stumbled upon an abandoned Ryanville. The sight of this squalor panicked her again. She imagined her daughter abducted by subprimes.
“Ginny! Ginny!”
She followed a trail out of the Ryanville and up another steep path.
“Mom!” She heard Ginny’s voice, faint but clear.
“Ginny! I’m coming. Keep shouting.”
“Mom, they’re all around me.”
“I’m coming.”
“I can see them, Mom. I can hear them.”
Gemma kept climbing. Her own breathing was so labored she could barely hear her daughter’s shouts.
“Mom!”
She cut through a thick patch of acacia and a stand of California poppies so woven with spiderwebs that it felt like she was pushing through a closet of silk dresses. Then she heard growling, a snapping noise.
“Mom! They’re dogs!”
Gemma was struggling to free herself from the strands and the thick branches, the barbs of acacia leaves and the thistles of sage and broom bushes. She lost a shoe somewhere, and was scraped raw by the flora, but she kept on pushing through to her daughter, finally emerging in a clearing where she saw Ginny, sitting down, blood running down her arm, her face badly scraped.
“Mom!”
There was scurrying in the brush, the scissoring of thin legs and brown and gray fur as coyotes were circling, flashes of silver irises sizing up the little girl, and now Gemma. Gemma could hear the animals breathing, their yips and barks. Where was her pepper spray when she needed it? Ah, wasted on the strange man who had surprised her a few days ago, warning her about coyotes.
Two humans instead of one. What would the coyotes make of that? More daunting, or just more meat?
Gemma grabbed her daughter, hugged her, and winced at the gash ripped into her arm.
“Ouch!” Ginny cried.
“They bit you!”
Ginny looked down at her arm. She had not yet realized she’d been bitten.
Gemma could actually see bone white through the bloody flesh. The scent of the blood had stirred the pack, who were now circling in anticipation of finishing the job. Gemma was too angry to be frightened. If the dogs wanted her little girl, they were going to have to go through her. She didn’t formulate this thought, but it was a fact of her current state. Her fear, anger, rage, confusion, all of it coalesced into her being willing to face a charging coyote without hesitation.
The alpha dog leaped up at Ginny. The coyote was going after the weakest, youngest, most vulnerable. The teeth were gray and dry, the mouth angled open and the eyes surprisingly beautiful for an animal trying to kill. Gemma swung a hard overhand right that landed flush on the bridge of the coyote’s nose, smashing the canine head downward and changing its trajectory so that it landed on its side on Ginny’s legs. The hind legs were scratching into Ginny’s flesh as the bitch tried to gain purchase. Gemma struck again, another blow to the head. The dog twisted its head to try to bite Gemma’s arm, then backed away.
The rest of the pack was watching with interest, and Gemma heard another dog charging. Again she turned and swung and caught that dog flush on its open mouth, cutting her hand on its teeth but dealing the surprised dog a sharp blow that caused it to turn off into the bushes.
The alpha dog somehow recognized in Gemma an alpha female like herself who would not let her pup be taken.
“Back off, bitch.” Gemma lunged, her hands up again, going for the neck, but the animal scurried away into the bush.
Ginny had gone faint, most likely from shock. Gemma put her arms around her, their blood running together. She heard, barely, distant voices, the crackling sound of a radio. She tried to shout but was suddenly so tired she could not raise much voice. The fight had drained her, the adrenaline was no longer surging, and she suddenly felt exhausted, found appealing the notion of a short nap. Just a few minutes’ sleep . . .
She roused herself. If they slept, her daughter would lose more blood, the dogs would come back. She pulled off her blouse, ripped the sleeve off, and tied it around Ginny’s arm above the wound as tightly as she could. The claw marks on their legs were also bleeding. Her own hand was badly cut and scraped and she could barely bend her fingers.
“Ginny, honey, get up, get up. We have to move.”
“Are they gone?”
“Yes, dear, they’re gone. Get up.”
Ginny rose unsteadily to her feet. Gemma took the girl on her back, piggyback style, and, bent over, marched down the hill. She had no idea she was this strong.
THEY EMERGED FROM THE BRUSH a bloody mess. Their clothes torn, their hair streaked with leaves, twigs, and ticks, and blood everywhere, from scrapes and gashes they did not even know they had.
There was an ambulance waiting for them. And a fire truck had snaked up the hill and was idling, its lights flashing. The firemen were still up the hill searching for them. A police drone buzzed overhead and then was apparently called off, since it banked and headed south along the ocean.
Sharon had taken the kids inside. Franny was hysterical when she saw her mother and sister through the screen door. She charged over but stopped when she was close enough to see all the blood.
“They bit you!”
Gemma shook her head. “Ginny.”
The paramedics came over with a stretcher and carefully moved Ginny onto the metal-framed gurney and then slid her into the back of the red-and-white van.
“Ma’am, you’re injured as well—”
“I’m fine,” Gemma said.
“We have another ambulance—”
“I’ll ride with her. Franny? Sharon, can you drive Franny to the hospital? Which hospital?”
“Ma’am,” said one of the paramedics, a tall bald man wearing shorts and a blue polo shirt, “we need a valid credit card. And can we ask what kind of insurance you are carrying?”
“I’m . . . I don’t know,” Gemma said. “My credit card is—it’s in my purse.” She turned to Sharon. “Can you get it?”
“Can we just go?” she said to the paramedic.
“That depends on your insurance.”
Gemma had a vague awareness of insurance payments being one among many matters that she had let slide since Arthur’s arrest. Now she felt irresponsible, her daughter bleeding from a coyote bite, and she had to admit to the paramedic she was uninsured.
“Look, lady, we don’t want to spend the night driving from hospital to hospital, looking for one that’ll take you. If you don’t have insurance, we’ll take you to State Services.”
“Where’s that?”
“Norwalk. We could get you patched up in outpatient at St. Johns. How’s your credit?”
“I can’t believe we are having this conversation. She needs medical attention.”
“As soon as your friend gives me the card, we’ll be on our way.”
A fireman in helmet and heavy jacket came down the trail, his boots crunching.
“Did you see them?” Gemma asked.
The fireman shook his head. “But they’re up there. Nothing we can do about it. We go out on a half-dozen coyote calls a day.”
“Mom!” Ginny shouted.
“A sec, Ginny.” She glared at the paramedic.
The fireman nodded. “Is that her? She sounds okay.”
“She’s a fighter.”
Sharon came out with her purse. Gemma took it, found her wallet, and handed the paramedic her one good card. He took it, swiped it on a handheld meter, and nodded.
“Hey, 710! We’re good to go.”
GINNY SCREAMED AS THE WOUND was cleaned, wrapped, and bandaged ($1,875). The rabies test ($450) was negative. She needed a pint of blood ($1,590). An X-ray ($700) showed no damage to the deltoid, and a range of motion test ($330) was inconclusive. Her bruises were assessed and determined not to be indicative of hemorrhagic distress ($100). Her legs were swiped and lightly dressed ($420). The doctor ($1,950) determined it unlikely she would have long-term nerve damage from the bite, and a nurse ($450) showed Gemma how to change the dressing on the wounds and provided her with bandages, antiseptic ointment, and wraps ($300). Gemma’s own hand required six butterfly stitches ($600) on the index and middle fingers. Her own scrapes and bruises were cleaned and dressed ($320).
Franny was in the emergency room with Doreen, who had brought a change of clothes for them as soon as Gemma called. By the time Ginny and Gemma emerged from the emergency ward, Franny was lying with her head in Doreen’s lap. Ginny was asleep in an emergency ward bed, the television tuned to a muted Disney channel. Gemma came out to see them, and at the sight of her, in bandages and with her bruises, Franny began to cry again.
“Mom, are you okay?” she asked.
“I think I am. Ginny is resting up. They want to watch her a few more hours, but I think we’re over the worst. They said they treat fifteen coyote bites a day.”
“Your momma is a strong woman,” Doreen said, turning to Franny. “Now, sit here a bit with Franny, I’m going to sneak outside.” Doreen needed a cigarette.
“Were you frightened, Mom?” Franny asked.
“I wasn’t feeling anything. Just these, dogs, circling, and then jumping, and I wasn’t going to let them get to Ginny.”
“You were fighting them.”
“With my bare hands.” Gemma held up her right hand, stitched up and wrapped.
“Can coyotes get us at Gammer’s?” Franny asked.
“Nope.”
Franny’s eyes welled up with tears. She was sobbing again. “I’m s-so sad,” she said.
“It’s okay. Ginny is gonna be fine. I’m fine.”
“N-n-no, not you guys. The whales!”
Gemma turned to see on a wall-mounted television Fox News showing footage of the beached whales and a graphic reporting that eight of the dozen whales were believed to be dead.
When Doreen returned, Gemma led them back to where Ginny was resting. They gathered around, smiling, and Ginny said, “This never would have happened if Dad was here.”
Gemma stood at the foot of the bed, forcing a smile, silently cursing the world.
WHEN SHE RETURNED HOME, MANY thousands of dollars in debt to MasterCard, and with a daughter who might never want to stray from a paved road again, she found an e-mail from a reporter asking if she would talk for just a few minutes. He said they had actually met, in fact she had pepper-sprayed him just a few days ago. So he was the prophet who had surprised her during her morning run with strange ramblings about coyotes.
You know what, she thought. Fuck Arthur. I’m out here, fighting coyotes, trying to keep my kids alive, and what is he doing? He’s hanging around in Texas with über-con assholes who are calling him some kind of capitalist hero? She’d show the world what kind of hero Arthur was. Yes, she wrote to the reporter, yes, I’ll meet with you. When? Where?
She slid Ginny and Franny into bed and gave Ginny a slug of the hydrocodone-laced cough syrup ($225). She would have a scar for life. Her shoulder would be sore for weeks. The poor girl. She did not remember the coyote sinking its teeth into her arm, or how she had broken free. When going after larger prey, like a human child, coyotes tended to stalk and strike, and repeat, until the weakened animal could be taken down. Ginny must have fought hard to have survived until Gemma could find her. The pack had been lurking, and one more bite could have pulled her little girl to the ground, where they would have gone for her kidney, liver, heart—Gemma didn’t like to think about it.
Nor did she feel ready for social engagements of any kind. She did not want to consider her dating prospects post-Arthur. Her mother was a cautionary tale. In the thirty-five years since she had left her husband—a homosexual violinist who lived in an air-conditioned compound in New Mexico with a dozen stray dogs—Doreen had not had a lover. Gemma shuddered at the thought of that kind of parched spell.
Gemma knew she was not fooling anyone, not after what she had been going through these last few months: she looked her age. But her auburn hair retained its luster, her eyes were still green and bright, her lips full, the skin around her jaw taut, even if there were wrinkles—more every day—radiating from the corners of her eyes and along her forehead. True worry lines, as she weighed in silence the prospects of a single motherhood with a deadbeat con-man husband. Gemma was a handsome woman, retaining her appeal even as her features betrayed the beginnings of the muting and fraying of age, and while men no longer might elbow each other as she passed in front of a bar, every man would be secretly thinking to himself, Hmm, not bad, not bad at all.
She, of course, was too well aware of what she had once been: steadily, dependably pretty. And while she knew she had not lost that completely, she also knew that she was no longer a woman who could compel men to launch proverbial fleets.
Facing the mirror, she cursed herself for her vanity at a time like this, her hand bandaged and now aching (she had Tualaton tablets for that), scrapes and bruises up and down her legs. She’d fought off a goddamn pack of coyotes! Maybe it was being back in her adolescent bedroom, geography reawakening teen worries like Am I pretty? Do they like me?
Never, she thought, never again would she be driven by self-doubt and insecurity and teen-girl self-loathing. She would loathe Arthur. She would love herself.
SARGAM HAD QUICKLY EMERGED AS one of the leaders of Valence, in part because of her value as chief mechanic, keeping alive a fleet of battered SUVs that could shuttle the men—and a few women—to work in Placer or Drum. A Pepper Industries subsidiary, HG Extraction, was fracking natural gas from the shale beneath the former agricultural communities sixty miles up the road. They occasionally could hear the convoys of hydraulic rigs rolling by on the highway. There was steady work on the fracking sites, doing the dangerous grunt jobs of cementing, building the casings, and mixing the proppants, and for those who could operate a backhoe or a steamroller, there was work running heavy equipment. The men and women returned weary, but with more money than they would have made day-laboring. They were all eating better. There was a doctor who had turned up in Valence, as well as a nurse. And just a few days ago a former farmer arrived who knew how to maximize crop yields.
Two families a day were now rolling into Valence. They had somehow skirted the border credit checks or found a back road into Nevada, bypassing the gilded tourist mecca of a previous age, Las Vegas, still strobe-lit and neon-suffused but now haunted only by European tourists and those who really did not have much to lose. The serious gamblers, the one-percenters looking to try their luck, avoided Vegas, preferring the legalized gambling meccas now spread across deregulated America.
Sargam noticed that each new family came warily, as if expecting to be turned away, asking humbly for a night’s lodging, a place to light a fire and open a can of chili, heat a tortilla. She saw them nod with surprise, their eyes widening, when they were told to pick an empty house and make it their own, offered a seat around a campfire, a cold beer or a mason jar of lemonade thrust into their hands. And she saw hope and confidence restored as the men and women listened to what was offered here: some fracking work if they were lucky; plenty of fieldwork if they weren’t. There were green beans, spinach, carrots, and onions to bring in. If they had a few dollars to put into the community fund for lentils, rice, and beans, the community would take it. If not, all they had to give was their backs for an honest day’s work.
It made sense in a way that nothing had in a long time. There was no anxiety over credit scores or being hauled in on a collection notice and sent to credit rehab. Nobody had Internet access, and for the first time they did not miss it. Nobody had a working cell phone, but neither did anyone whom they might have wanted to call.
Sargam watched new families settle into abandoned structures and gradually transform them into homes. She saw smiles return to children’s faces, the weight lifted from their young shoulders. And she saw the fathers come back from a day’s work with some folding money and their wives, those who weren’t also working, returning from the marketing with detergent.
Old couples showed up, senior citizens driving beat-up jalopies, asking for water, a place to sleep. There were murmurs in the community about letting in the old and the infirm. Darren was among those who argued that they needed workers and could not support freeloaders. Sargam insisted they take in all who wanted to come, even if they were in need.
“If we reject folks for being old or sick, we’re no better than a bank or a credit agency. We need to do the right thing, that’s got to be our guiding principle. People helping people.”
“Or people dragging people down,” Darren said.
“Or all we’ve found is a smaller version of that shitty world we’re leaving behind.”
DARREN AND SARGAM HAD THEIR first argument over whether or not there should be any governing structure in Valence. They were sitting on her sleeping bag in her house, both freshly washed after trips to the pump. Darren was pointing out how, for example, the pump was getting so crowded in the early evenings that perhaps they should assign different time slots to different streets. Sargam urged against it. And while Darren had initially been opposed, he said he had begun to see the need for some organization. Despite his own status pre-Sargam, he now said he believed that the number of single, unattached men should be kept to a minimum. There had to be strict prohibitions against fighting. And each family had to contribute four days, or nights, a week to farming the parcels. The Commons, as Darren had taken to calling the land, required steady maintenance and work. The leafy greens attracted all kinds of scavenging herbivores. The erection of a fence, Darren said, was essential to the community’s survival, a project the scale of which required community-wide cooperation. And there had to be designated latrines.
“We have fifty families here, a few hundred folks, we need some way to keep tabs, to encourage participation, to keep the focus on the community,” Darren said.
“No, let it evolve. Trial and error.”
“We’ll be buried in shit.”
His night-soil program was his first attempt at community-wide organization. He had five bathtubs broken out of bathrooms, removed to a high point, and then covered with planks. Ripping the drains out of the houses was more difficult, requiring a week of digging in the hot sun and stripping the pipes from the earth, but once he had assembled a few hundred meters, he ran pipe from the bathtub drains into the fields. “You shit in a bucket, you slop the bucket out in the baths,” he said. “It’s easier than digging a hole.” He also wanted the chicken shit scraped up and tossed in, along with any other organic waste.
He had the kids spend the better part of a week looking for earthworms, which he poured into the covered tubs. The worms made a meal of the feces, turning that into soil, while the runoff—worm urine—was a potent and highly effective fertilizer.
He pointed out to Sargam the success of this program, that it proved the community was capable of following a few rules.
“But these are folks who were beaten by rules,” Sargam said, “who ran from the rules, who’ve been told all their lives that they were breaking rules.”
“How can we keep growing if folks won’t do their part?” Darren asked.
“They will, you have to talk to them. Don’t tell them they have to do this or that, but include them.”
Darren thought this over. “You mean explain?”
“Yeah, explain what needs to be done, and tell them we have to work together to get it done. Don’t become a rule maker, that’s like a boss. These folks have had enough of all that.”
Darren nodded. “Can’t hurt to try.”
He took Sargam in his arms, kissing her behind the ear and down the neck.
She pulled away. “Hmm, we gotta go eat.”
“You’re in such a hurry to get some beans you would leave me all hot and bothered?”
“Trust me, I’m a much sweeter girl on a full stomach.”
But Sargam did notice a change coming over her. She was still fond of Darren, found him attractive, but lately she had felt a lessening of desire, a withdrawal from the need for rutting and rubbing. At first she wondered if she was with child, but her period had arrived a few days later. The more involved she was becoming in the community, the more time she spent with the men and women of Valence, talking to them, advising them, listening to them, the less she wanted to be with any one man. If Darren was aware of her decreasing ardor, he kept it to himself. There was so much about Sargam that he didn’t understand.
While it was Darren who worried over the technical and engineering issues of their small community, it was Sargam who was emerging as the spiritual leader. The women enjoyed her company, and enjoyed sharing their confidences with her. An Ecuadorean woman, Milla, told her she suspected her husband had eyes for the lady from Hemmet who squatted next door. That bad neighbor had been flirting with her husband at night around the campfire and complimenting him on his appearance, even how he fit his jeans. Milla told Sargam she had not stuck with him through two thousand miles of bad road only to lose him to a pale gordita. Sargam assured her that she would talk to the woman and urged her to be patient, to be kind to her husband and give him no reason to stray.
Sargam sidled up to the woman in question the next day while they were on their knees, plucking green beans from the vine, and asked her if she liked Valence.
“It’s not a matter of like, is it?” the woman, Maureen, said. “It’s a matter of we can stay here. Live here without fear of being run off.”
“It is, but we have to work at it,” Sargam said.
“I’m working.” Maureen showed her apron full of beans.
“Yes, but we also have to work spiritually. To let go of a little bit of ourselves, our ego, so that we can live this way.”
Maureen sat up and wiped her forehead. “What are you getting at?”
“What we are doing, making a community, takes great personal strength and character. We have to love our neighbors, to respect our fellow men and women, and perhaps be very sensitive to the feelings of those around us. This isn’t just another Ryanville, this is a home. So respect your neighbor.”
Maureen squinted, not sure if Sargam was being specific or general, but she nodded. Maureen could see that Sargam was a pretty woman, even beautiful, but somehow she posed no threat and offered no competition. And she now understood that Sargam knew she had flirted with her neighbor.
“I got you,” Maureen said. “It’s just old habits.”
“That’s what we need to lose, those old habits. That old world. What we’re doing here is for us, people helping people, and if we can make this work, then we’ll have done something we can be proud of, without knowing anyone’s damn credit score. Let the coasts sink into the ocean. We’re learning how to get by on our own.”
Maureen nodded, suddenly proud of her little part in this community.
For Sargam, this was one of a dozen visits she would make during the day, bringing peace to squabbling children, calming a woman who was panicky at not being able to call or text her sister, reconciling a feuding husband and wife. She was a soothing presence, and the community waited anxiously for her to turn up at campfire every night, where she would sit down wherever there was space, seemingly unaware of the role she was increasingly coming to play.
When she told Darren that what they needed more than any rules was a proper school, he thought of a few dozen projects he considered more urgent, but then he saw the look in her eyes and nodded, yes, she was right.
SARGAM WATCHED THEM ROLL OFF the ramp and onto Bienvenida, the main street, the Flex listing on an undersized spare, the hood tied down with rope. Jeb at the wheel, and Bailey beside him, Vanessa, looking even more grown in the backseat and beside her the boy, looking about. When he saw Sargam stepping into the street he opened his mouth in surprise.
They had kept this street clear, the house fronts unmodified, the brown lawns unwatered, so that the first impression anyone had on exiting the highway was of an abandoned subdivision, no different from a hundred thousand such wastelands across the country. Sargam was walking across Valence to see a woman worried her son was going too wild. As she approached the curb, the Flex halted and all four jumped out simultaneously, their voices swirling together.
They looked even more bedraggled than when she had last seen them: Jeb in a greasy T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of work boots; Bailey in a blouse and shorts; Vanessa wearing an old sundress she’d found somewhere, one shoulder strap hanging down over her arm; and the boy in too-short jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of sneakers three sizes too big. They were bonier than Sargam remembered, hunger and exhaustion wafting off them. It was a miracle they had made it this far.
Sargam hugged each of them, and listened to where they had been and what they had been doing: back to Los Angeles, back to Riverside, stops at a half-dozen Ryanvilles, some part-time work building one of the new elevated expressways along the coastal corridor, taking a southern route out of California they had heard about, through Arizona and then up into Nevada. They had heard about Valence, a few folks had, as a place where you could find a little house, maybe some work, and live in peace. No one running you off every three days. And they heard there were dances and good food.
Sargam nodded. “We’re trying.”
“You’re famous,” the boy said. “We heard talk about you in the last Ryanville. That you were teaching folks a new way of living.”
Sargam laughed. “Not a new way, an old way, a basic way.”
“And we never said a word that you were the lady who conked that guy on the head, brained him.”
“Quiet, boy,” said Jeb. “Don’t mind him.” He turned back to Sargam. “But we did hear about you.”
“About this pretty lady running a community out in the desert,” Bailey added.
“They were here before me,” Sargam said. “Come on, I’ll show you around. There’s still a few houses up on Las Lomas, that’s four blocks up and to the right.”
“My kids are hungry,” Bailey said in a small voice.
“Of course.” Sargam told them to pull the Flex up to the next corner and turn right. There was a kitchen up there and lunch was almost ready.
They were handed plastic plates with beans, rice, green beans, cooked spinach, and scrambled eggs. The family took seats on long, split logs and ate while other members of the community coming in from the fields joined them. New families came in every day, and sating their hunger set them at ease. There were more Californians turning up, even a couple of families from Riverside. Jeb and Bailey sighed deeply and talked for the first time in months about matters other than who might be hiring or whether there was a water tap or who might have made off with their last good cooking pot. Vanessa sat quietly apart from her parents, but she perked up when a handsome young man, perhaps a year older than she was, dirty blond hair and a gap in his teeth, appeared with a soccer ball and started a little kick-around. Soon, more boys and girls were playing soccer on the scrubby patch between the campfire flat and the fields.
The food was good and filling, and after cleaning his plate and drinking a mug full of water, the boy, Tom, could not resist and ran to join the other children playing soccer. Bailey was about to shout at him not to run on a full stomach, but watching him stalk the ball with his serious, consumed expression, she decided to let him play, for once, just let him play.
SARGAM TOOK THEM TO THE house on Las Lomas. It was not much, three bedrooms that needed a long and hard scrubbing, a living room with filthy carpeting, and a kitchen long ago stripped of appliances and copper piping. But it was a roof and four walls, a front door, the water main down the long, curving street.
They would be sleeping on the floor. Washing in cold water. And Sargam could promise nothing but hard work for little money. They would get what everybody else got, no more, no less. But nobody was going to run their credit or treat them like dirt because they were in debt.
“And,” Sargam said, “you are going to help me start a school.”
Bailey smiled. “You think we can do that?”
“I think we can do anything. That’s what this is all about.”
Bailey looked around her tattered little house. “I got a lot of work to do. Vanessa, go out to the Flex and bring in all the bedding. I’ve got some twine rolled up beneath the backseat. See about making a clothesline. Jeb, get that crowbar and rip up this filthy carpet. I’d rather sleep on wood.”
She looked for the boy, but he was gone, back to playing soccer with the other boys.
She shook her head, walked over, and hugged Sargam. “Thank you.”
FOR THE CHILDREN OF VALENCE, the days were spent shirking work and running wild in the scrubby grassland around the subdivision. The roads had been built on spurs from main thoroughfares, ending in cul-de-sacs, so that when viewed from above, the community might look like the splayed stalks of a fern, stripped of leaves. Within days the boy joined with a gang who ranged through the hills around the subdivision, returning hourly because of the fierce thirst the sun and heat worked up in them. The heat was so intense the boy could actually feel the thirst starting, first as an extra swallow, then as a stickiness in the mouth, and finally a thick, gel-like texture at the back of his throat. In the final stages, he could develop a slight headache, but by then he was back at the pump, guzzling water from one of the plastic bottles that littered the area and were rinsed by the boys and refilled. They ran and they drank, that was the cycle of their days. They played war, capture the flag, ditch, cowboys and Indians, GIs and Vietcong, Navy SEALs and Al Qaeda. They played soccer and football and even a version of baseball with a bat and a tennis ball, which they fielded barehanded. There was always another game, always boys and girls willing to play. A whole desert stretched around them, dry as the inside of a sealed car, but all theirs, every sandy foot of it.
Few of the kids still had bikes, and even fewer skateboards—Tom was one of the lucky few who had managed to hold on to his old deck—and they shared those, playing a game they made up called sweeper, sort of like kickball with bikes and skateboards. They spied on women getting dressed, stole corn from the community stores, caught lizards and garter snakes, and ran from rattlers. Within a week of arriving, the boy had a tarantula in a coffee can that he kept until his mother found it and had him release it far from the house.
He had friends within a day, and knew their names within two. Ted, Juaquin, Emmett, Yuri, Vito, Yoshi, and Juan were the boys; Emma, Nathalie, and Maya the girls, and soon it seemed he knew them better than he had ever known anyone. After a few weeks he even stopped worrying that his family would be moving on and that he would lose his new friends, because nobody was leaving, and in fact more kids kept coming.
He came home filthy every night, his mother ordering him to the pump with a bucket, and not to return until he had scrubbed himself, which he did in the encroaching darkness and the first chill of night air, shivering and not getting himself clean in the cracks and hard-to-reach spots and drying himself too fast and then running home because he did not want to miss supper or the campfire or the DJ parties on Friday nights.
Vanessa, now above these childish games, was only too aware of what she was missing. She had seen enough movies and read enough books to know that teenage life in America was supposed to involve cars and kik-toks from cute boys and dates and a prom. She should be shopping in malls and flirting with boys, but here she was, in this desert, with, like, nothing to do. She helped her mom, cleaning the bedding, airing out sleeping bags, and hauling water in buckets from the pump. Jeb had nailed the bottoms of coffee cans over the gaps in the floor, boarded up the windows, and duct-taped a seal where gaps had opened between the sill and the wall. The house was dark, but Jeb found a clear plastic tarp that he laid over one window to let in some light. The nights were cold, but more comfortable than sleeping outside. Though the boy slept soundly, issuing occasional soft murmurs that sounded as if he were playing even in his dreams, Vanessa would lie awake, recalling boys she knew when she was last in school, and wistful for missed opportunities, such as a date with Manny Bramford, who had told her friend Tobin that he liked her, but then she and her family had moved away before they had even had a conversation.
Her mother showed her how to soak up her monthly blood with a rag when they ran out of tampons in Arizona. When they arrived in Valence, Sargam gave her mom a box of tampons for which Vanessa was grateful. But here she was, a woman in a place surrounded by wild boys and old men. What was there for her?
Part of her wanted to be running the hills with her brother and his friends, and another part wanted something brighter and more exciting. She had an idea in her head of sitting in a car, a boy in the backseat next to her, the weight of his body in motion. She remembered hiding beneath a mattress as a little girl, and the feeling of evenly applied pressure that left her with a novel wetness between her legs.
I DON’T LIKE TO REREAD my old work, especially my first book, my only book that received some acclaim and notice, which, at that time anyway, made me feel as if I were making a difference. But I’m stoned and feeling nostalgic, so I take an old hardcover edition of What You Wish For from the bookcase in my office and I begin reading and I am taken by the energy, the anger, of the prose. This writer—was it really me?—is caring so deeply about the fate of the world, rooting so hard for our better natures that he—I—told the story so that it reads like an instructional manual about how to live virtuously: We must care, it makes clear, about our neighbors. For our fates are inseparable.
But who was I to stand in the way of regress? I was just one man. What could I do? I still care, I really do, but my concerns are more parochial. I’m trying to hold my family together, or the rump version of if that remains, raise my kids to ride bikes, swim, read, all that old-fashioned stuff nobody does anymore. I see what we’ve become—I wish I could say I was blinkered—but I just don’t know what to do about it. There’s no one really standing up and saying, “What the fuck are we doing?” Give me something or someone to believe in, and, well, I don’t know if I would actually believe, but I might write a hell of a story about it.
There is a knock on my office door. I put out my joint and wave an old tablet computer around to try to air out my office.
There’s Ronin, on his way home from school and stopping by, presumably to get money for a snack.
I worry that my office reeks.
“Hey.” He tries to brush past me.
“Wait, wait.” I won’t budge. “You hungry? Let’s go eat.”
“With you?”
”Why not?”
He weighs the idea. How embarrassing is it to be seen with your father in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday?
“How about you just give me some money and I’ll go to Panda and get some food and eat it here.”
I give him a twenty. This buys me time.
When he returns with his food, glutinous heaps of sugary, corn-starch-coated chicken and greasy noodles and a huge waxed cup of pink drink, he sits on my office sofa and begins chewing with his mouth open, chicken and noodle and pink drink sloshing around behind retainered teeth.
“How is school?”
“Sucks.”
“You dealing with Freaks?”
“Sucks.”
“Math?”
“Sucks.”
Ronin has cycled through various expensive tutoring programs in an attempt to boost his math scores, which persist in the range typical of underperforming Caucasians. Mathematics instruction, bewildering in the best of times for me, is the educational Mordor of my son’s life. What his middle school is teaching, and how they are teaching it, does not resemble what went on in the classrooms of my youth. What stops me from outright rejecting these new methods is my own feckless academic record. Who am I to have deeply held opinions about what works or doesn’t work in the classroom?
Still, what’s happening in my son’s middle school is a microcosm of our era’s preferred method of fucking up. Three years ago, after a bitter court fight in which the teachers’ union was stripped of collective bargaining rights, every math teacher in California was fired and public school math instruction throughout the state was privatized. Enhanced Quantitatives, or EQ, a division of a private equity firm that has contracts with numerous state boards of education, claimed to have cracked the code of Asian math dominance. EQ’s software-based learning system was supposed to bring American seventh- and eighth-graders up to the level of their peers in Singapore and Shanghai. What this meant was hours of watching instructional videos and PowerPoint presentations by EQ specialists who were themselves barely numerically literate—and would have been earning minimum wage had that not been abolished. The students were ordered to memorize a host of materials that I had never learned: perfect squares to 1,600, times tables to 40 x 40, pi to ten places. I had trouble seeing what purpose all this rote memory served, and for Ronin, who seemed to have not yet developed the part of his frontal cortex that dealt with retaining data beyond social network passwords and Call of Duty cheats, these strings of numbers might as well have been distant planets for all the likelihood he ever had of reaching the required goals. Even with EQ now designing the state exams, the students’ scores had dropped, which the EQ specialists had blamed on our children failing to memorize what their peers in Singapore and Shanghai memorize by the time they are seven years old. The solution: sign our kids up for expensive EQ extra sessions, which are proving as fruitless as the actual classes themselves.
I went to school to meet one of these EQ specialists—Barry, who wore a microphone headset the whole time we spoke because every conversation he has with a parent is recorded by EQ.
I asked about Ronin, and why, after all these extra EQ sessions, he was still struggling in math. Barry answered, “The EQ learning experience has been assembled from thirty-six semantic differentials and cross-referenced with best-practices standards from the top-five-performing academic systems in the world. The EQ learning experience has been proven to increase test scores in simulated test takers by eleven percent per year of implementation.”
I realized he was repeating words that were being spoken into his earpiece.
“What about Ronin?”
“Of course, the performance of each individual EQ subclient may vary.”
“But Ronin—”
“The subclient, even after purchase of additional EQ products, may still deviate from the statistical norms—”
“Can we just talk about Ronin?”
He held up a finger to silence me.
“—may still deviate from the statistical norms and simulated test-taker results for a variety of non-EQ-related causes—”
“Stop talking.”
“—for a variety of non-EQ-related causes, including but not limited to non-EQ-controlled events. If, for example, the EQ subclient fails to process EQ-designed and -assigned units in the required time, then that subclient falls out of the EQ Learning Experience statistical normatives and cannot be included in any EQ Learning Experience assessments.”
“This is supposed to be a parent-teacher conference.”
“A parent-specialist conference,” he corrected me.
“About why Ronin is screwing up in math.”
“And I’ve explained, that if the subclient fails to process EQ-designed—”
“Could you just talk like a normal person?”
He listened to the voice in his earpiece. “As an EQ specialist, I am free to discuss the EQ Learning Experience and related products, and to direct you to our website, or smartphone app, or Kik-Tok, or, if you prefer, to provide you with a hard copy catalog, and there you will see the various EQ Learning Experience options that are available to you.”
“So the solution is to buy more crap from your company?”
And that was when I decided that if Ronin was ever going to learn basic algebra, I would have to teach him myself.
I’m an awful teacher. Yet I’ve always believed every father has three responsibilities: to teach his children to swim, ride a bicycle, and master the multiplication tables. (Though my own father failed at all three.) But somehow, through teary afternoons during which any witness would have called Child Protective Services for how I shouted at my children, they learned to ride and swim. And Ronin, miraculously, had committed his multiplication tables to memory, up to 12 x 12. Maybe there was hope.
I look at Ronin. So fragile in his skinny jeans and high-top Converse and hoodie with a broken zipper. I want to give him a big hug and tell him, Fuck those people and their fucking lame math. He seems so vulnerable, a little kid, trying to act big and unafraid, and failing at both. He chomps his Chinese food and grins vacantly, confused by the awful education he is receiving and further embarrassed at being labeled a youthful sexual predator. I want to drive with him to a cabin somewhere—in one of the few national parks not yet ruined by shale oil extraction rigs—and just let him be a kid and screw up in all the ways that kids are supposed to screw up.
I get up and lumber toward him.
“Dad, what are you doing?”
“I just want to give you a hug.”
“Um, weird,” he says. But he lets me engulf him.
Later, as we’re walking up Bashford toward our house, the sidewalks empty and Ronin stomping alongside me in his impatient lope, he asks, “Why don’t you drive, like normal people?”
It’s not a question that merits answering, so I ignore it and we continue our trudge up the street.
We round the corner onto Iliff, and we can hear coyotes howling—the sun is nowhere near setting—but instead of frightening, it is somehow beautiful and we feel safe even if it’s just the two of us against the dogs of the world.
ABOUT A BLOCK UP ILIFF, we come upon something remarkable: a half-dozen boys between the ages of eight and puberty, playing a game of football over two stretches of lawn bisected by a driveway. They are playing three-on-three, a self-hiking quarterback and two receivers versus a rusher, who is counting—and I love this—in Mississippis, and two pass defenders. The game bears no resemblance to the football played on television or the Gruden NFL computer game. This is padless, helmetless, in flat-soled sneakers on patchy grass, and it is beautiful. They are tackling each other on the hard earth, wrapping each other and collapsing to the ground in piles of boys. How many hours had I spent playing like this? One end zone a driveway, the other a flower bed. This feels like time travel. I look at Ronin. He seems fascinated by the game, by kids playing a game in their own front yard. It is something he has not seen before, not in our neighborhood, where children are driven to and from games and practices in armored vehicles.
“What are they doing?” he asks.
“They’re playing football.”
“Where are the uniforms? The, you know, helmets and stuff?”
I tell him that you can play football in whatever you are wearing. You just need a ball.
One of the boys, tall with black hair that falls to his eyes, completes a long pass to a teammate, who runs through the driveway for a touchdown and then is tackled by his opponent anyway.
“Let’s play,” I say.
Ronin shakes his head. “That would be weird.”
“Come on,” I say. “There’s two of us. It’ll be even.”
“Dad, come on, don’t—”
Maybe it’s because I’m still stoned, but I step out onto the lawn and ask if we can join. “One and one?”
The boys look at each other and shrug. How weird is this? I’m having trouble figuring that out, but I realize I’m going to have to ignore my perceptions of any reactions to my weirdness and just have fun. As soon as I pick up the football, I feel better. I toss it to Ronin, who drops it.
“Hey, Ronin,” says the dark-haired boy who threw the touchdown pass.
“You two know each other?” I ask.
Ronin nods.
Two of the other boys whisper something to each other, and I believe I hear the word “Freaks” hissed in their exchange, but I choose to ignore it.
“Okay, Ronin, you play with them”—I point to the dark-haired player’s team—“and I’ll play with these guys.”
I receive the punt to start the game, and I hand it to one of the boys on our team and he runs alongside some ice plants before being shoved into the patch of dirt around a lemon tree. We huddle up. The biggest boy on my team is named Martin, and he is the quarterback. The other two, the two who were whispering about Ronin, are named Brian and something that sounds like Fizz. Martin gives us each a pattern. Brian and Fizz are going to run a crossing pattern, I’m to go deep. We break and I look over at Ronin, standing with his hands in his pockets at the line of scrimmage, looking down at the grass. I want him to be more engaged, to be in an aggressive-looking crouch like the other defenders, or with a knee-forward, legs-bent stance like the pass rusher, but his body language is of total indifference.
“Come on, Rone. Ready?” I say.
He shrugs.
“Hut, hut, hike!” Martin fades back, the two boys run their crossing pattern, and I begin to lope downfield, looking back for the ball, which is on me surprisingly quickly. The kid has a good arm. I catch it, and take a few slow steps, not wanting to take too much advantage of my size, when I am gang-tackled by three defenders—they are fast little fuckers—and the collective weight of them collapses me and I feel for a moment like I am going to vomit. For good measure, Ronin jogs over and jumps on the pile as well, and I feel a sharp cramp running down my side. I should have stretched.
I shake it off and get up.
“Yeah!” I lateral the ball back to the center of the field.
We line up and complete another pass.
Every time I catch the ball, I am gang-tackled, at first by the defense but eventually by everybody. The biggest of these kids must weigh over 120 pounds, and they have heads, elbows, and knees sharp as spikes. I’m sore and bruised, my legs ache, and I feel cramps in places I didn’t even know I had. But I keep bouncing up. The kids are giggling and laughing.
“Throw it to him again!” the defense is shouting.
“No, no, no,” I beg.
And sure enough, Martin tosses me another one and they gang-tackle me again. It is play that is right on the verge of pure and simple violence, just the way boys like it, and it is infectious enough that even though I am getting brutalized, I keep playing.
More important, Ronin has lost himself in our game, chasing me down and jumping on me along with the other boys with a ferocity and thoughtlessness that I find beautiful and reassuring.
When I am tackled again, I stand up, panting, my jeans and sweatshirt grass- and mud-stained. I’m sweating, and my jaw is throbbing and seems to have lost some mobility.
“Again!” the boys shout.
“No, no, no, someone else,” I gasp.
The sky beyond the gray shingled roofs has turned barbecue orange, a cowlick swirl of pinkish clouds rising up into the darkening sky. The receding light leaves behind darker grass, green going blue in the shadows, and the cars driving by beam cones of white light up the narrow, cracked street.
Oh, how I loved playing in the twilight, those last moments of a street football or driveway basketball game before my mother would call me in for the night. And when it was finally so dark we could barely see, then it was “next touchdown wins” or “first to five,” this fleeting game suddenly taking on the timed intensity of more organized sports.
We line up again. Now I am defending. The tall boy completes a pass to Ronin. I chase him down, tackle him, and the rest of the boys predictably pile on again. We rouse, dust ourselves off, and then repeat the sequence—vicious tackling, shouts of anguish, screams and giggles, and then another play.
We score hundreds of touchdowns. We gain thousands of yards. We break every passing record.
Finally, when it is so dark we can barely see and house lights have come on up and down Iliff, I call out, “Next touchdown wins.”
We are defending. The tall boy completes another pass. I tackle the receiver. We are swarmed with boys. I manage to wriggle free from the pile, then launch myself back into it, driving the crown of my head into another boy’s butt and squirming between the boys.
And then the scene is bathed in blue and red light, and I hear an echoed, amplified voice through a loudspeaker, ordering, “Stand up and move away from the children.”
The kids are still wriggling, not understanding that we are no longer having fun, and even after I extricate myself from the pile, two of the smaller kids keep charging at me and grabbing my legs.
“No, no,” I say and shoo them away.
Through the glare of lights, I can see that a squad car is parked diagonally in the street, blocking traffic. Both the passenger’s-and driver’s-side doors swing open and two officers walk toward the lawn.
“Are those lights really necessary?” I ask, and I turn to Ronin. “Come here.”
“Sir!” shouts one of the officers. “No contact with the children!”
“What’s going on?”
The garish flickering of the lights strobes the whole neighborhood, so that trees and bushes and other cars turn shades of pink and blue.
“We’ve received reports of inappropriate adult-child interaction,” one officer says. “Several calls.”
“Adult-child interaction? We’re playing football.”
“Sir, NO CONTACT WITH THE CHILDREN.”
By now I can see men and women, and a few kids, standing on front porches, or through opened front doors, watching us.
“The Two-Adult Rule,” the officer says, “is that you are to avoid situations where you are alone with a child, or children.”
“It’s football,” I say. “Tackle football? With my son?”
“Football?” the officer says. “Without safety equipment? Helmets? Pads?”
“What the fuck? Nobody’s hurt.”
I turn to the boys, who are now standing, the ball at their feet, unsure of what exactly is going on. I can tell they are suddenly wondering if they have been playing football with a criminal. “Guys,” I say, “tell them what we were doing.”
The officer steps forward. I can finally see him fully in the glare of the backlight. He is Hispanic, with a mustache that stops at the lip line and acne scars up both cheeks. “Sir, one more attempt to make contact with the minors and we will detain you. Any additional use of profanity, and we will detain you.”
I read the officer’s shield, Hidalgo, and below that the gold Los Angeles City Hall logo set amid silver rays with the City of Los Angeles seal centered. On his shoulders are his chevrons, and below that, advertisement patches for Über Justice, Dodge Ram Trucks, and Discover Card Bail Bonds Inc., with phone numbers highly visible. The other officer, Voshkov, comes around. He is clean shaven and wears a policeman’s cap. Both men wear radio headsets—like Ronin’s teachers wear. “Let’s see some ID.”
I remove my wallet and hand him my driver’s license. He studies it.
“We were walking home and saw some kids playing and we joined in. Nothing strange about that.”
“You were walking home? Who walks? Do you walk, Officer Voshkov?”
Officer Voshkov smirks. “Negative.”
“So you were walking, and you joined in?” says Officer Hidalgo.
“Yeah, we started playing football.”
“Why would you join a kids’ football game?” He turns to Voshkov. “Would you join a kids’ football game, Officer Voshkov?”
“No, I would not.”
“Would you stop and inappropriately interact with minors without the presence of another adult, potentially endangering them?”
“That would be a huge blinking red light saying ‘Negative!’”
“I agree, Officer Voshkov. Yet that’s precisely what Mr.”—he takes my license from Officer Voshkov—“Mr. Schwab here decided to do.”
“Bad call.” Voshkov nods.
Some of the boys’ parents have come to collect their children. I cannot see clearly because of the glare, but I imagine I see suspicion, fear, concern. There will be careful, measured talks, asking about any unusual touching, about whose idea it was to play tackle, about whether the adult seemed in any way overly enthusiastic about the game.
And I can see the boys gazing back at me, and I hear one of them shout, “It was only a game!” before he is shushed by a parent.
Officer Voshkov takes down the contact information of the parents.
A line of four cars has already formed behind the diagonally parked police cruiser.
The officers either do not notice or do not care about blocking the street.
“Mr. Schwab, please step over to the vehicle.”
“This is ridiculous. Nobody saw anything wrong. Or weird.”
“We are responding to a complaint,” Officer Hidalgo says. “Now, if you’ll step over to the car, we can run your license.”
“Complaint about what?”
“Child endangerment. Inappropriate interaction with minors. This is—”
“I was playing football!”
“So you have said, repeatedly. But complainant mentioned a middle-aged man rolling on the ground with minors. Complainant reported grabbing and fondling. Complainant reported crying and screaming.”
“Didn’t you ever play football?”
“Not with children. Not without proper safety equipment. Just come over to the vehicle,” Officer Hidalgo urges.
I follow him to the car. Ronin is now standing by himself; the boys we were playing football with have left with their parents. He looks small and confused, his pale flesh alternately glowing red and then blue.
“This is just going to take a minute,” I shout to him.
I’ve managed yet again to embarrass my son.
Hidalgo sits down in the cruiser and swipes my license.
“Okay, no outstandings. And your credit score is very good. We don’t get many 750-pluses. You are preapproved for an LAPD-branded credit/debit card. You can earn points that can be redeemed to remove traffic violations from your record.”
I shake my head.
“No?” Officer Hidalgo says. “You sure? Okay, Mr. Schwab. I’m writing a summons. It’s a nuisance citation for reckless endangerment of a minor.” He reaches over and switches off the flashers.
He is writing out the ticket.
There is a website I am to go to to find my court date. The range of possible fines starts at $750.
“Are you kidding? Seven hundred and fifty dollars? For playing with kids?”
“Don’t play with kids.”
“Ronin, come on.”
Ronin is silent. He trails a little behind and to the right of me on the sidewalk as we climb Iliff. His hands are stuffed in his hoodie pockets, he looks down at his feet as he walks.
“Wow, that was crazy,” I say.
Ronin says nothing.
“I mean, have you ever seen that?”
I hear Ronin stop behind me. I turn.
He is crying. “DO YOU KNOW H-H-H-HOW EMB-B-B-BARRASSING THAT WAS?” He screams through his tears. “WHY DID WE HAVE T-T-TO STOP? WHY?”
I reach out to him. He backs away.
“TO PLAY FOOTBALL? EVEN THAT WAS WEIRD. NOBODY’S DAD JUST WALKS AROUND AND PLAYS FOOTBALL WITH, LIKE, JUST KIDS HE SEES IN THE STREET.”
I shake my head.
“WHY ARE YOU SUCH A LAME DAD?” he says. “I WISH YOU WEREN’T MY FATHER.”
“Come on, Rone,” I say. “I thought it would be fun. And it was, right? For a while?”
“DO YOU KNOW WHAT EVERYONE IS GOING TO SAY? MY DAD IS A CHILD MOLESTER. MY DAD IS A FREAK. JUST LIKE ME.”
“What?” I shake my head. “No, this, this wasn’t, like, your thing, this was just playing football, and then they saw it the wrong way. This isn’t, like, your—”
“WHAT? LIKE WHAT? LIKE MY THING IS REAL?”
I hold my hands out, urging him to keep quiet. “No, it’s not real. None of this is real.”
His upper lip and cheeks are smeared with tears and snot so that they shine in the streetlight glare.
He wipes his face with the sleeve of his hoodie. He shakes his head. “It’sjustthatIgotoFreaksandeverybodythinksI’mafreakandnowyoudothisanditwillallstartagainandthoseguyswilltelleverybodyandI’lljustbethatfreakpervertkidwiththefreakpervertdadlikewe’rethepervfamilywholikejustgrabsandmolestseverybody.”
“Ronin,” I say, “you did not do anything wrong. Well, okay, maybe you did, by pinching that girl, but that was, like, a small mistake, and you learned. And I did not do anything wrong. We stopped to play football, and that’s fine. That’s just an okay thing to do.” I take him by the shoulders. “And you’re okay, Rone, you’re okay. This is all . . . It’s all bullshit.”
“I’LL PRAY FOR YOU, DAD,” Jinx is telling me. “I’ll ask the Lord’s forgiveness for your sins.”
“No, Jinx,” I say. “I don’t need you to pray for me. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“‘Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger,’” says Jinx. “The Bible says to bring them up in discipline and instruction of the Lord.”
Our daughter, Jinx, has always been less worrisome than her older brother. Forceful and self-motivated, as well as a pain in the ass, she enjoys long and complicated conversations, which she pursues with Talmudic persistence and a lawyerly appreciation for precedents. She brings up conversations from months prior in an argument about a Halloween costume or whether or not she can have a sleepover, reminding my ex-wife, for example, that she told Jinx she would always support her creative projects and therefore Anya should satisfy her demand to construct a giant mustache out of foam and wire for her.
Jinx usually focused her attentions on making life miserable for her fellow fourth-graders and, periodically, her older brother. But her latest incarnation, as devout Christian, had caught all of us by surprise.
Over a period of ten days, Jinx had turned into a Bible-thumping ten-year-old Baptist after joining an after-school program at the local outpost of Pastor Roger’s Freedom Prairie Church called the Captain’s Club. Jinx was eager for the high-fructose-corn-syrup candies that CC gave out to students who memorized Bible verses. (Anya forbade anything in her house that had corn syrup, which ruled out virtually every recognizable consumer brand.) Jinx, whose memory has always been elephantine, was picking up four Bible verses a day, spitting them out at the end of CC, and returning home with a sack full of Warheads and Sour Patch Kids. There were other activities at CC, she told us: they could run in the yard—no unsupervised sports, of course—play religious board games, do their homework. But it was the Bible studies that Jinx enjoyed.
“Jinx, please, don’t hit me with Bible verses now,” I say. “We stopped and played football with some kids. Football, okay? I’m sure Pastor Roger loves football.”
Jinx is unsure of Pastor Roger’s views on football and returns to eating her mashed potatoes and breaded chicken. Anya is seated at the table opposite me, her purse in front of her, waiting for the kids to finish dinner so she can take them back to her place for the night. She is also unsure about what exactly I have done wrong but has evidently decided to also come down on me for it.
“The police can’t just arrest you for playing soccer,” she says.
“Not soccer,” I correct her. “Football.”
“But they can’t arrest you—”
“They didn’t arrest us, they gave me a summons,” I say. “I have to appear in court. Pay a fine.”
“But even in this country, they can’t do that, not just for playing football. You must have done something.”
“THEY DID IT BECAUSE THEY THINK DAD’S A PERV. SOMEONE CALLED UP AND SAID THERE WAS THIS OLD PERV PLAYING WITH KIDS,” Ronin shouts.
“What’s a perv?” Jinx asks.
“You were playing with children?” Anya asks.
“It’s a person who touches other people inappropriately,” I tell Jinx.
“Like a molester?” Jinx asks.
“Yes.”
“Pastor Roger says child molesters are homosexuals. Because they commit unspeakable acts with others of their same gender, they know no boundaries when it comes to relations,” Jinx says and attempts to cut her chicken.
“That’s . . . that’s ridiculous, Jinx. Child molesters can be all types, gay, straight, anyone. Everyone can be crappy.” I reach over, take her knife, and slice for her.
“Like you, Dad,” Jinx says.
“I may be crappy, but don’t lump me in with the child molesters.”
Ronin is surveying the table. I can see how from his perspective our family may have found a new level of embarrassing weirdness.
I turn to Anya. “This was a simple game. We stopped to play a game with some kids. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. It was fun, Rone, you have to admit.”
He nods.
“It was a game of football. We were tackling each other. It’s something we used to do as kids all the time. So when I saw the kids playing, I thought, why not?”
Anya is studying my expression. I can see she is wondering if I am stoned but is reluctant to ask in front of the children.
“This doesn’t happen to normal people,” she says.
“Normal people?” I point around the table. “That doesn’t apply.”
Anya excuses herself and says she will wait in the living room.
Ronin, who has somehow built up enough appetite for a second dinner just a few hours after his after-school Chinese food snack, sits, chews, and nods. I don’t have much appetite, but I sit with Ronin and Jinx until they retreat to their rooms to gather their backpacks.
Anya is in the living room, playing solitaire on her phone.
“This isn’t my fault,” I tell her.
She keeps moving digital cards on her screen with her thumb.
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
She puts down her phone. “You were stoned on marijuana.”
“So?”
“So that’s why you make strange decisions. Like to play football with children. To tackle them. Nobody else, no other fathers, do things like that. You know? That’s why Ronin is the way he is. Confused. Having to go to this sex class. Because you are so messed up and you don’t have any boundaries and you—”
“You’re blaming me for Ronin? There’s nothing wrong with the kid. You yourself said that the school is overreacting. Rone needs to play football, to tackle, to hit someone.”
“You were high. That’s why you decided to play. You want to be some kind of bullshit hip dad. Like with your ripped T-shirts and jeans and sneakers. Your hair, the way you walk around. And telling Ronin everything is okay, that it is okay to be crap at school. To fail things. And you are always stoned, typical hip dad shit. I never should have agreed to joint custody.”
“Don’t reopen old bullshit. Smoking had nothing to do with this,” I say.
“Of course it did. It’s never your fault. You can’t take any blame.”
“BUT THIS ISN’T MY FAULT.”
“See, now you are shouting.”
“OH, FUCK YOU,” I say and storm out. “I’m sure Florian is a much better father figure.”
Florian is Anya’s boyfriend.
“Maybe he is,” I hear her say quietly.
Jinx is kneeling in her bedroom. I can see her lips moving. I am sure she is praying for us. But when I get closer, I hear her ask the Lord to save the whales on the TV show.
Anya rounds up the kids and they depart, both a blessing and a curse as I immediately miss them and cannot stand staying in the house all alone.
I go out to the Prius—that relic of the hybrid era—and start it up and drive down to my office. I park behind the Chinese restaurant and go upstairs. When I open my computer I see a kik-tok from Gemma Mack.
how are you doing? Boy were you right about the coyotes.
And I’m sorry I maced you. But you took me by surprise. . . .
I’m in santa monica with kids visiting family.
we should meet in person to discuss.