THEY BURIED HER IN A dandelion patch at the bottom of the first foothill at the western edge of the subdivision, a shadeless spot, but pretty enough. In the early morning of the day after Soo passed, Valence gathered for its first funeral, the death of an old Korean lady who had turned up two days before, already in the late stages of terminal cancer. The men dug the hole six feet deep to keep coyotes off the smell, and lowered Soo in an old sleeping bag with photographs of her daughter and granddaughters as well as her own parents. They arranged her on her back, her eyes closed, and with a bouquet of yellow sunflowers atop her chest. Sargam brought Don, her widower, out to pay his last respects before the men had to leave for work and the kids were run down to the school Sargam had opened.
Vanessa watched the service from up the hill, seated in the dirt, and in particular she noticed one young man, Atticus, whom she had first seen at the campfire the night her family drove in and whose teeth-showing grin she found appealing. He had a short forehead and round eyes, an almost effeminate nose, and shapely lips chapped from too much sun. He was deeply tanned, as were they all, and it suited him, went with his dirty-blond hair.
She made sure to walk past him several times at the campfire, to get water from the jug, to get a second helping of beans and rice from the table, and she noticed him noticing her. How long had it been since she felt the excitement of realizing a boy liked her? It had been months, ever since leaving home. (She still thought of Riverside as that, though she knew she would never be going back.) As she watched Atticus help dig the hole and then lower the old Korean lady into her grave, all Vanessa could think about were Atticus’s muscles and the way his jeans rode low on his hips. As the mourners were readying to leave, Vanessa came down from her perch to where Atticus was walking with a shovel over his shoulder. She stepped in beside him, as if by coincidence.
“Oh, hey there,” Atticus said.
“Oh, hi.” She smiled and kept walking.
“Terrible about that old lady,” Atticus said.
“She was next door to us,” Vanessa said. “You should have heard her carrying on.”
Atticus shook his head. “Must have been something. Feel bad for him.” He gestured generally toward where Don had been during the brief service.
“Are you going to work up at the sites?”
Atticus smiled. “I am. I convinced them. I told them I’m strong enough and old enough. I’m eighteen.”
“Are not,” Vanessa said.
“Okay, but I’m sixteen, and I can swing a shovel better than most of these older guys. And you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Are not,” Atticus said.
“I’m fifteen, and if I could I would go up there with you. Anything to get out of here.”
“Aw, it’s not so bad. Better than being on the streets in L.A. Where you from?”
“Near L.A. Riverside.”
“Nine-oh-niner, huh? Tweakerville. I lived in Malibu.”
“Did not.”
“I did, for a while, when I was a kid. It was called Malibu Lake, about an hour from Malibu. Was more like the valley. We lost that place and then moved to an apartment downtown.”
“What happened to your dad?” Vanessa asked.
“Barely knew him. Last I heard he was in Colorado, I think, and I heard he had a new family. I don’t want to know him if he doesn’t want to know me.” Atticus had to stop himself from running down his father any more.
“Well, I’m bored. We’ve only been here a couple weeks, but I’ve never even left Valence.”
“It’s all right here. We have the dances.”
“All right for you. You’re going to work. You can stop at a store and buy a, I don’t know, Slurpee or something.”
They were almost to Vanessa’s house, and she could see her mom standing in the driveway, probably looking for her.
“My little brother, he can run around with his friends. They’re out playing all day.”
“And you’re too grown-up for playing?”
“That kind of playing.” Vanessa smiled.
“How about after I come back from the sites, we hang out?” Atticus said.
Vanessa shrugged. “This is where I live, for now.”
She walked up the driveway to where Bailey stood regarding Atticus with a smile that did not hide her suspicion.
“New friend?” Bailey asked.
THE FIRST THINGS JEB NOTICED every morning as they drove to the fracking site were the vast lakes of untreated waste water that had settled around the raised berms protecting the site, shimmery silver pools that bled to the horizon like a mirage. They didn’t have to be told the water was salty and poisonous; the lakes gave off the smell of methane and car exhaust that made the possibility of life seem about as likely as a goldfish surviving in a gas tank. After a few days on the site, Jeb realized that what they were doing was pumping water into the earth, poisoning it, and then dumping it on the surface.
They motored up the circular dirt driveway over the berm and down to the site, where sixty men worked every day. Jeb and his crew had built that berm, with shovels and backhoes, and now the waste water was almost as high as the top, which meant they would have to build the flood wall even higher.
Jeb had never seen this many big-rig trucks parked so close together. He counted sixty-four rigs, slotted in bed-to-bed, their trailer-mounted pumps emitting a deep rumbling sound as they shot the high-pressure boron, zirconium, and titanium fracking fluid down the mile-and-a-half well. They were pumping down 50,000 liters of the water-based fluid a day, splitting open the shale and earth to allow the precious oil to escape through the fissures. The shale oil was pumped back up to the surface with water and then separated from the water in a fracturing tank before it was stored in yet more truck-bed holding tanks. The waste water was pumped through the berm to the waste pools. Whatever had once lived out in that scrub land was gone or dead. In fact, Jeb was sure there weren’t any animals besides humans living for a few miles in any direction.
HG Extraction operated the site, which was leased from the town of Placer, a highway rest-stop town that in its prime had been home to twenty-six residents but was now down to zero. The lease paid the former residents of Placer $650 a month each, and they took that money and ran when the first semis hauling the drilling towers rolled up. There were six full-time employees of HG Extraction on the site, and the rest of the workers were subcontracted day laborers from who knew where. Their beat-up SUVs kept showing up every day, and as long as the men could drive trucks and swing shovels and haul trash and operate a sump pump and they didn’t complain if there weren’t enough hazardous-material masks or that the antitoxin showers that had been promised were never installed, the managers asked no questions. These men seemed happy enough for the six-dollar-an-hour work, and when one of them complained, the managers would tell him there were a hundred men who would take his place.
Jeb started by working with a crew to extend the berm, shoveling black graphite pellets into nylon sacks and then hauling those up to the lip. The graphite pellets were trucked in three times a day and dumped from huge spigots of tanker trucks, the pellets piling up in a massive black mound. They stacked the graphite bags, hundreds of them barely raising the berm. But the waste-water level kept rising every day, the more oil they pumped out, and no matter how hard they worked, they could barely keep pace with the rising waters. Behind him was $40 million worth of HG equipment, and the only thing keeping the flood of waste water from it were two dozen men from Valence hauling bags of pellets in the hot sun.
It was a long, brutal day of unrelenting lifting and tugging, as the men struggled to keep ahead of the pumps. Sixty-four 10,000-psi hydraulic pumps can shoot a whole lot of water down that borehole; twenty-four men had to work double-time just to have a chance at keeping up. By the time Jeb came down the berm for a half-hour lunch, he was aching and sore, his shoulder muscles twitching from the exertion. HG brought in its own food truck; Jeb stared at the cold rice and beans and tortillas he had brought before joining the rest of the men buying burgers and french fries and sodas, feeling guilty about spending $8 on food, but he was hungry from the work and knew he had a whole afternoon to get through. He ate with hands filthy and black from the rubbery pellets and dirt.
The afternoon sun bore down on them, the heat like an actual weight that seemed to be pressing on them so that their shoulders slumped and their knees buckled and their ankles became wobbly. When Jeb drank a liter of water, he knew he would sweat it out in fifteen minutes. The punishing sun seemed suspended in the western sky, never closing in on quitting time and heating them and everything it touched, so that by midafternoon the heat was coming up off the ground as well as down from the sky, and the head of a shovel left out for a short while would burn at the touch.
Finally, a voice shouted, “Time,” and the men set down their last sandbag and stumbled down the hill.
“Six an hour? I made more than that inside the Vernon walls,” Jeb said to the manager when he was counting his cash after the first day.
“Then why don’t you go back there, if you had it so good?” said the manager.
Jeb nodded and kept walking back to his Flex. “By the time we pay for gas, lunch, we’re bringing back maybe twenty dollars a day. That’s hardly enough to feed a family.”
“It’s steady,” said another man from Valence. “And he’s right. There’s plenty who’d take our place.”
THAT EVENING, VANESSA WAITED FOR Atticus, and then they sat together, beneath a camphor tree, the air cool but the ground still retaining heat.
He had washed after his day’s work, and she wore her one clean dress. Despite their eagerness to see each other, when they were alone they were both tongue-tied. Atticus asked if Vanessa had known the Korean lady they had put in the ground that morning.
She told him Soo and her husband, Don, had driven up to the house next door to theirs one afternoon, the lady already near death. She’d been diagnosed with first-stage lymphoma and used up all her health-care vouchers without ever getting cured. When they lost their home, rather than impose on their daughter, who herself had three kids and was barely getting by, they hit the road, figuring eventually to make it back to their daughter’s, but Soo had deteriorated fast.
“She looked old,” Vanessa said. “And if an Asian lady looks old, then you know she’s in bad shape.”
They had been run out of Vegas and turned up in Valence, desperate, and Sargam told them to stay, and called for Dr. Alfredo while Vanessa and her mom comforted the old lady and her husband. They were Presbyterians; lapsed, Don had said, but he found the words for a few prayers. Alfredo turned up, examined her quickly, and whispered to Sargam that there was nothing they could do for her. She had lumps everywhere, she was coughing blood. He had a few Opanas that they had taken from some tweakers they had run off, and he gave her those, but she couldn’t even get down a sip of water to swallow the pills.
“I never saw a person in so much pain,” Vanessa said.
After the sun had set and everything cooled down, Sargam told Bailey and Vanessa they could go home, that she would stay with Don and Soo. But Vanessa secretly sneaked back to watch through the back window. She had never seen anyone die before, not right in front of her, and she was curious.
Vanessa watched as Sargam lay down with the old lady, held her like she was spooning a lover and trying to comfort her. Don was distraught, leaning back against the wall, crying, mumbling in Korean. The old lady was shouting her daughter’s name, Eleanor, Eleanor.
“Then this weird thing happened,” Vanessa said.
“What?” Atticus asked.
Vanessa said that she saw Sargam lay her hands over Soo’s face, her fingers to the old lady’s forehead, caressing her hair. It was as if she were soothing the old lady, calming her.
“Sargam’s face went, like, all blank, like her eyes sort of, I don’t know, rolled into her head? Sort of zombie-like?” Vanessa said.
But whatever she was doing, she seemed to be making the old lady feel better, was alleviating the awful pain she had felt before.
“She was, like, curing the lady?” Atticus asked.
Vanessa shook her head. “No, because we know what happened to her. But, I swear, it was like, this touch she had.”
Soo murmured throughout the night, and she seemed to fall asleep, Don also drifting into sleep as well. Sargam watched Soo take her last breath, letting Soo’s husband sleep until first light.
“That’s creepy,” Atticus said.
Vanessa shrugged. She couldn’t explain what she had seen.
Atticus laughed and finally summoned the courage to take Vanessa’s hand, and then, emboldened by her squeezing his hand back, he leaned over and kissed her, lips grazing lips, warm soft flesh meeting in the cooling evening.
GEMMA HAS AGREED TO MEET me at the Little Red Bar, the Chinese restaurant and bar downstairs from my office. I change into a clean shirt and check my hair in the mirror in my office bathroom before I go.
I arrive before her and park myself at one of the tables near the bar. There is a flat-panel television tuned to sports, but one of the patrons at the bar asks that it be turned to news so he can see about the whales that washed up on the beach. Gray whales have been washing up on the beach in Santa Monica over the last few days. Their migratory pattern was right off the coast and was disrupted, or so an oceanographer is insisting, by the drilling and extraction platforms now lining the coastline.
Already there was furious bidding under way for the media rights to the whales. The state wants to make a deal, but there is the wrinkle of the Santa Monica Bay Beach Club, which has leased the sand on which much of the show would have to be shot. It seems everyone is enthusiastic about the potential of another Whale Watch show, now that the East Hampton whales were all dead. A media expert said that if a dozen whales beached themselves, as happened on the East Coast, a network might pay $20 million for the show.
I see Gemma coming in. She’s bandaged, her hands and arms wrapped and bruised. She has a dime-size welt on her forehead, and her neck is red and scratched.
“I thought I saved you from the coyotes,” I say.
She shakes her head—“I’m so sorry”—and gestures toward herself, the sling, the bandages. “I should have listened to you about the coyotes.”
“You do seem to attract them. I was actually warning you the other day—they were following you,” I say. “What happened?”
“We were down in the Bowl,” she says. “They went after Ginny. I got in between them. My hand was, at one point, apparently, inside a coyote’s mouth.”
“You’re a hero,” I say. “Who fights off a coyote?”
“Like I had a choice? She was going after my girl.”
“Strange, because you usually seem so quick on the draw with the pepper spray,” I say.
“Again, I’m sorry, oh my God,” she says. “And, of course, because of that, I didn’t have any with me when I really needed it.”
She recounts the story: visiting her old high school friend, the kids going outside to play, finding Ginny, fighting the dogs, and then the nightmare of the hospital and the bills.
I am strangely inspired by Gemma and her ability to fight off these wild animals. She’s a warrior momma, like Grendel’s mother, or Joan of Arc, or Jessica Lynch (the first, made-up, heroic version, not the real story that emerged later). I imagine her taking coyotes by the neck and smashing their heads together.
“The fucking coyote killer,” I say. “You’re so cool. You’re, like, I don’t know. Forget Tiger Mom. Coyote-killer mom.”
I sound like a fucking idiot. Like a ten-year-old.
“Let’s get a drink.”
“I thought we were having coffee,” she says.
“Come on, we’re celebrating your successful vanquishing of the beasts.”
“Then I’ll have a Beefeater martini, up.”
“I’ll join you.”
When the drinks arrive, I ask how she likes being back.
“It’s not that different from being back east. I’m a single mom . . . there are whales on the beach.”
“Have you heard from Arthur?”
“That asshole? What do you want to know?”
“Um, where is he?”
“He made bail, went down to Texas. He’s got some high-roller ultra-cons funding his defense.”
“They’re talking him up like he’s a hero,” I say.
“My philandering husband, the hero.”
I can’t tell if Gemma is wearing makeup around the bruise and the red marks on her chin, the deep, pink racing stripes that run up her neck. She looks, I realize, like a battered woman, a survivor of some sort of awful, abusive marriage, which she is, in a way. Her light dusting of freckles shows a beautiful sort of russet in the afternoon light streaming in through the horizontal window above the bottles behind the bar. I have to stop myself from staring at her.
“How are your girls?”
“Besides being attacked by coyotes?” Gemma smiles. “They’re with my mom.” She puts down her drink. “Jesus, what is happening?”
“What? Now? Nothing, we’re just having a drink—”
“I mean, in the world, coyotes attacking people, and everyone’s, like, ‘it’s normal.’ Whales? Whales killing themselves? The West Side Highway is underwater. The prairie is on fire. Rome is burning.”
That is true, literally. The Seven Hills are actually on fire. Millions of Italians are fleeing the capital.
“But they’re building a seawall in New York,” I say.
“We spent so much time thinking about sanctuary, about escape, that I never really thought what all this meant. It’s that we’re screwed. I mean, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, but it will take some time.”
“Just enough so that when our kids grow up, they’ll die of cancer or starve or drown or get eaten by wild dogs?”
She’s pissed off, and I like it. I can see she must spend much of her time around her kids holding it together, and now, with me, she is unloading. I take some pleasure in her seeing me as a confidant.
“We just need to do the best we can,” I say.
“Thank you for the platitude.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not the best person at figuring out how to save the world. I’m mostly good at fucking it up. But, hey, you know, I bring my own bags to the grocery store.”
She frowns.
“Okay, not funny,” I say. “What I mean is, it’s hard enough just keeping my own shit together.”
We order two more, and when they arrive, we clink glasses.
“To what?” Gemma says. “Saving the world?”
“We’ll see.”
We sip.
“How is it living back with your mom?”
“Ha.” She smiles. “You know what it’s like, to see, like, an old Duran Duran sticker in your bedroom, and at the same time hear your daughters in the next room, and think, How did I end up back in my teenage bedroom, only with kids? I’m a single mom, living at home with her parent. It’s like a KIK-TV reality show, only it’s so much sadder than any of those Sixteen and Pregnant shows. I’m forty and—”
“Don’t be hard on yourself. I mean, I’d watch a show where a lady fights coyotes with her bare hands.”
“So would I, I guess.” She smiles. “So, do you want the goods on my dirtbag of an ex-husband?”
I shrug. “Sure.”
“First, I have to ask you: Do you really care?” Gemma says.
“About what?”
“About the world, about what’s happening.”
“It’s already happened.” I hold out my hands. “We’re not going to go back and stuff all this crap back into the box. I’m not political. Maybe that’s my problem.”
“But you should write about what’s happening. About how fucked we all are.”
I tell her that I was looking at one of my old books—my best book, I add—and realize that I miss that guy, the writer who cared, who was invested.
“I want to read What You Wish For.”
“I’m flattered. I have it in my office. Upstairs.”
I pay the check and we go up to my office. When I hand her my first book I have to resist the urge to touch her neck where it is bruised. Instead, I stand there, sort of nodding.
“Hey, do you happen to have a joint?”
“I’ve stopped.”
“When?”
“Last week.”
“Why?”
I tell her about the football game, the police arriving, the accusation of inappropriate interaction with a minor, my impending court date.
“So you’re, like, a child molester?”
“That’s not funny. My ex-wife sees the whole thing as my fault. My son won’t speak to me anymore. So I thought I should see about cleaning up my act a little.”
She weighs the book in her hand. “That’s a good idea.”
“Before I get put away for life.”
Her phone rings. She ignores it.
Then she receives a text, which she reads.
“My husband is here,” she says.
“Here? Like downstairs?”
“No, here, in L.A. He’s coming to my mom’s house. He’s terrible at texting, but look.”
She holds her phone out to me so I can read it: “Hney, les get bik together? Pliz!”
A good journalist, a real journalist, would have seized on this opportunity to write a great story about a famous financial villain. Instead, I just stand there, and I’m jealous that Arthur Mack has had this woman, while she remains for me a receding fantasy.
She has to go. “I’m going to tell the kids the truth. And tell Arthur it’s over. Again.”
I walk her out into the hall and down the stairs to where she is parked.
“So, um, meet again?” I ask.
She climbs into an old Camry. She answers, but I don’t quite make it out. And then she is gone.
THE NEXT MORNING IS MY court appointment, downtown on Temple Street. My Über Justice attorney, who according to my Kik map was ten minutes away, turned out to be twenty minutes late, which is not bad considering how difficult it is to move around Los Angeles. What is more worrying to me is that she looks like she is about twenty.
“You’re my attorney?” I ask.
“Paralegal,” she says. “Almost the same thing.”
She is an immense black woman who wears a vast blue jacket over a pink shirt and blue slacks that must take up an entire eight-man tent’s worth of fabric. She has a pretty face, long braided hair, and a cheerful smile that fades as I ask my question.
“I’m Miss Glenda Solay, and yes, if you are Richie Schwab, then I am the Über Justice consultant here to represent you regarding your nuisance summons for . . .” She scrolls through her tablet screen. “Misdemeanor Endangerment of a Minor.”
Upstairs, the arched hallway is crowded with defendants. Glenda and I have a quick conference, standing inside the recessed area formerly used as a pay phone bank.
“You paid for our Total Innocence and Exoneration package, and at Über Justice there is nothing more important to us than your freedom from unjust prosecution,” Glenda reads from her screen. “Now, can you describe in forty words your exculpatory circumstances.”
“What?”
“Why you’re not guilty. Speak into the tablet.”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t speak into the tablet?”
“I can’t do it.”
“Mr. Schwab, you paid for the Total Innocence and Exoneration package,” says Glenda. “If you wish to change your plea, we cannot refund the difference.”
“No, not that, it’s forty words or less that’s hard.”
“It’s not exactly forty words. It can be forty-three or forty-four.”
I try. “I was walking up the street and saw some children playing football and we stopped to join them. Oh, and I was with my son, Ronin. We played tackle football for a while and then—how many is that?”
“Thirty-nine.”
“Including ‘how many is that’?”
“Now you’re at forty-four.”
“The important thing is that what we were doing was playing football. Nobody was hurt.”
Glenda sighs and switches off the recording. “I can’t do my job if you can’t explain the exonerating circumstances. The complainant who called the police reported hearing squealing, and then reported seeing you, Richie Schwab, tackling young boys and rolling on the lawn with them.”
“We were playing football. That’s what football looks like.”
“Were you wearing pads? Helmets? Was there a stadium? Because that’s what football looks like.”
“No, we were playing football in the front yard, for fun, without helmets or uniforms because who uses those things?”
“Every time I’ve watched football, there are helmets and uniforms and, for that matter, commercials and announcers.”
“That’s professional football, or maybe college, but this was kids—”
“Ah, Mr. Schwab,” she interrupts and points to something on her screen. “I have to relay to you a plea being offered by the district attorney’s office. If you plead no-contest right now, your fine will decrease to $350.”
“What do you mean, right now?”
“You have forty seconds to accept this offer, after that, the fine will increase.”
“Wait, what?”
“How do you plead?”
“Not guilty.”
“As your Über Justice adviser, I recommend you take the state’s plea. The next offer will be higher.”
My phone rings. I recognize the number: Ronin’s school. I answer.
“Mr. Schwab, this is Vice Principal Nakamura at the Subway Fresh Take Paul Revere Middle School.”
Oh no. Not now. “Yes?”
“I’m calling to inform you that the police have been called to the school because a weapon was found in Ronin’s possession after he threatened to stab a fellow student. School policy dictates that a law enforcement officer be present when a weapon is found.”
“He had a knife?”
“No, it was a comb.”
“What do you mean?”
“A comb, but it was a comb in the shape of a flick knife.”
“What are you talking about? One of those switchblade combs? Those aren’t weapons.”
“Mr. Schwab, can you come and pick up your son?”
“Um, I’m a little tied up. Can I talk to Ronin?”
“He’s in police custody.”
“For a comb?”
“For a knife-shaped comb.”
“Jesus, I’m—” I almost tell him where I am but catch myself. “I’m kind of tied up. Let me see what I can do.”
I look around the crowded hallway, the attorneys in their suits, the bailiffs standing in a cluster near the window, and the defendants and jurists and families. Next to me is a young tattooed woman handcuffed to a wooden bench, an older, uniformed black woman next to her.
The young woman looks up at me. She’s overheard my attorney-client conversation. “Hey, if I had the money, I would take the first plea. After that, they run it up like a goddamn taxi meter.”
I turn to Glenda. “I don’t want a record as—what is it? Child endangerer?”
Glenda is looking at her tablet. “Mr. Schwab, the latest plea is for $400. As your adviser, I recommend you accept this offer.”
“But am I admitting guilt?”
“You are pleading guilty to a misdemeanor of endangerment of a minor.”
I think about Ronin. “If I agree to do this, can I go right now?”
“Just sign here.” She holds out her tablet.
I look at the e-doc. The plea has gone up to $425. I click on the signature box.
“You’re free to go,” Glenda says.